By S. T., on December 19th, 2009
 Hansen on MSNBC Dec. 18th As readers know, I’m on the mailing list of climate scientist James Hansen (along with thousands of others). His most recent article on temperature, science procedure, the basic science of climate change data, and how we know the temperature across the planet is going up, is like starting from scratch. It’s meant to counteract the infamous emails from the UK University that were illegally hacked into, and which ultimately expressed nothing that negated the climate science.
You can download the entire document here and an excerpt is printed below. You can also see a Hansen interview on MSNBC from December 18th here.
The Temperature of Science, is available here. (PDF) Here is an excerpt:
“Is it possible to totally eliminate data flaws and disinformation? Of course not. The fact
that the absence of incriminating statements in pirated e-mails is taken as evidence of wrongdoing provides a measure of what would be required to quell all criticism. I believe that the steps that we now take to assure data integrity are as much as is reasonable from the standpoint of the use of our time and resources.”
The summary is below.
Continue Reading → Hansen Explains Temperature
By S. T., on December 5th, 2009
 Repeated criminal attempts to break into universities and access scientific emails have happened several times, not just once. It’s becoming more clear that these are organized attempts to sabotage any action on climate change, especially before the Copenhagen summit.
Remember Nixon’s crime — Watergate. That was an illegal break-in from which all other “gates” are named. The illegal break-in was the crime, not to be confused with some effort to take correspondence out of context and fool the public into thinking something that is happening is not happening. Watergate was clearly a crime. Climate Hackergate is a serious crime. The fact that it is happening over and over again makes it a conspiracy. It’s a form of political terrorism too. Sabotaging the climate talks and ending attempts to mitigate climate change is tantamount to condemning millions of people to death. Below is a recent article on this from Raw Story:
“A series of repeated break-in and computer hacking attempts at a Canadian climate research institute are a sign of a “well-orchestrated campaign of harassment” against climate researchers ahead of the Copenhagen summit, several news sources report.
Employees at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, have revealed that the school’s Centre for Climate Modelling has experienced at least two break-ins in recent months, as well as several attempts at hacking into the center’s computer network.
The news comes a week after revelations that computer hackers stole thousands of emails from a climate research center at the University of East Anglia in the UK, some of which purportedly show attempts to cover up data that does not fit with claims about global warming.
Those leaked emails are at the center of a political push-back by climate skeptics, who are arguing that the “Climategate” emails show that global warming is a fraud, or at least has been exaggerated.
Canada’s National Post reports:
Continue Reading → Climate Hackergate: A Well-Orchestrated Campaign of Harassment
By S. T., on December 4th, 2009
 Not Minnesnowta so far this year It has finally snowed in Minnesota, about 1/8″, and it finally got cold — today. This state’s nickname used to be “Minnesnowta”, but not any more. Now it should be Minnedroughta. According to Yes! magazine, scientists think that by 2025, “Close to 70 Percent of the Earth’s Soil will be in Risk of Drought,” as reported by the United Nations, COP15 online coverage, UN’s COP15 News. It seems like it’s been increasingly dry for most of the last 8-9 winters here, (but I haven’t looked at the precipitation data.)
Check out Yes! magazine’s current issue. It is devoted to climate change and the summit in Copenhagen and contains some great content. I want to point them out because they are an often-overlooked progressive news source. The newest issue is fantastic.
Update on President Obama: He will be attending the climate summit in Copenhagen on December 18th, not December 9th, as reported here. Thanks to the commenter here who alerted us to that.
“The White House said Friday that President Obama was delaying his appearance in Copenhagen at the international summit on climate change by a week so he could be there at the same time as other world leaders.
“The president believes that continued U.S. leadership can be most productive through his participation at the end of the Copenhagen conference on December 18th rather than on December 9th,” said a statement from Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary. “There are still outstanding issues that must be negotiated for an agreement to be reached, but this decision reflects the president’s commitment to doing all that he can to pursue a positive outcome.”
I’ll just say this: it’s good he’s going. But does this mean he has to make another trip there on Air Force One, dragging his cars and everything else along on a giant C-130?
Continue Reading → Cloudly with News Flurries for the Weekend
By S. T., on December 1st, 2009
“The real scandal is that climate-change skepticism has brought us to this point,
where only a few years separate us from the likely onset of runaway climate change.”
Want to know a few more facts about the stolen emails? This is information you might need if you talk to people who have confusion or doubts about a story they heard about some emails and climate change and they are fuzzy on the details. It’s important that wrong information doesn’t spread about this story. (Why? See quote above.) Below are two more articles on Hackergate, the crime of the hacked climate change-related emails from some hapless scientists at the University of East Anglia. These articles are much more informative than anything you have probably read so far, which will help you fend off the deniers and their “arguments”. I noticed yesterday in particular on the Drudge Report that this is already being used as a way to definitively prove that global warming/climate change is not happening, which is really insanely untrue. Several other groups track temperature data, so one group of scientists at one university who acted unprofessionally cannot negate all the rest of the climate data. All these groups produce climate data that reach the same conclusion — global warming.
After this, there is no further reason to discuss this incident of illegal hacking, unless and until they catch the criminals who did it. It will be interesting to see what energy or lobby group they are connected with and whether someone might be in some serious trouble.
. . . . . And here, Michael Schlesinger, a climatologist at the University of Illinois, explains why he sees the disclosed e-mails as a complete distraction from the body of evidence pointing to a human hand on the planet’s thermostat:
I would like to make the following contribution to your blog regarding the recent desperate, the-end-justifies-the-means act of stealing e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, U.K.
1. CRU is not the only group in the world that is tracking the change in global-average near-surface temperature. There are at least three other groups, two in the U.S. (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA; and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA), and one in Japan (Japan Meteorological Agency, JMA).
2. As presented below, the temperature record of each of these groups (available at the URLs given at the bottom of this message) shows the same features: (i) a warming of about 0.9°C (1.6°F) over the past 150 years and (ii) natural variability with both short and long periods.
 Michael Schlesinger / University of Illinois -- Trends in global temperature estimated by four different research groups are very similar, both in charting pronounced warming and a lot of short-term variability. The groups are the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, Britain’s Hadley Center and Climatic Research Unit (Univ. of East Anglia) and Japan’s meteorological agency. 3. In our year-2000 published analysis of these data through 1997 ( Causes of Global Temperature Changes During the 19th and 20th Centuries, Geophysical Research Letters, 27:14, 2137-2140; Natalia Andronova & Michael Schlesinger), we showed that this warming was predominantly due to people. An update of that analysis, which includes the observations since 1997, shows that the observed warming is overwhelmingly due to people.”
Continue Reading → Climate Hackergate, Part II
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