Jim's Blog

Bishop Hill has a list of Hadley CRU files he finds particularly interesting.  They are mostly good stuff but have zero overlap with the files I find particularly interesting.  It is going to take a while to digest sixty two megabytes.  It will be some time before we realize what of this revelation truly matters.

To me, the relevant question is not whether global warming true, but whether alarmists been practicing science or religion.  These files answer that question decisively, for when challenged, the focus of their thoughts, what is uppermost in their minds, is not so much “what do these facts imply”, but rather, “how do we defeat the heretic”.

An unknown person posted a large amount of internal files from allegedly from CRU, which huge collection has become known as
The Hadley CRU file set To understand all this stuff, you need to know lots of climate science. I have only just started to go through this huge pile.

The original ftp server dropped the file (being stolen material and so on and so forth) and all those old links no longer work, but now the file is in bittorrent. The bittorrent link works with if you have installed a bittorrent client that support magnet links – magnet links being a highly decentralized way of publishing large files that does not expose any one server, router, or domain name to political pressure or possible reprisal, and prevents the illicit substitution of a changed file for the intended file.  The file you get, will be the file I intend, which is not always the case with ftp or http links to politically sensitive data.  The file is also available by http at such places as Megaupload, but pardon my paranoia, I don’t trust what they might do under pressure.

There is much preliminary analysis and discussion of this great pile of data

• Watts up with that
• The air vent
• Climate Audit

We can be pretty sure these files are genuine, since they explain the “science” behind some otherwise inexplicable published graphs that supposedly show the world warming up. These graphs are constructed pseudo scientifically. Rather than simply being pulled out of someone’s @%$#, they are constructed of numbers that reflect actual observations, but not observations of the quantity on the title bar of the graph.

Everyone is having lots of fun with this remark by Phil Jones:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

The decline to which Phil Jones refers is not the recent global temperature decline, which may well result from more accurate and more global methods of measuring temperature, which are therefore increasingly difficult to plausibly “correct”, but rather the failure of supposed temperature proxies to correspond to data supposedly derived from weather stations – the proxies are declining, so Phil Jones replaces the last few decades of the proxy, with the result that the last few decades of the graph for global temperature supposedly derived from the proxy agrees perfectly with the graph for global temperatures supposedly derived from weather stations, concealing the fact that there is no evidence that the proxy is in fact a proxy for temperature – indeed no evidence that either graph corresponds to global temperatures.  Thus what is being fraudulently manufactured is not warming, but rather fraudulent agreement between various measures that supposedly measure warming.

The material seems psychologically genuine – they show conscious fraud that still retains much of the characteristics of self deception and unconscious cherry picking of data that it originated in.

There are just too many of these emails to be easily forged – you try writing many megabytes of text in the style of several well known people. Phil Jones has admitted them to be real, and is trying to spin some of his more embarrassing remarks, thereby drawing even more attention to them.

For the last ten years or so, every year or so a study has been issued which supposedly confirms the infamous Hockey Stick graph, which supposedly shows the world’s temperature has been pretty constant over the last thousand years or so and then has suddenly started rising in recent decades.  Global Warming!  Time to Panic!

And each of the these charts supposedly replicates each of the other charts.

For a long time, the data on which these graphs were based was kept secret, but the Royal Society finally found its missing testicles, after what I considered unreasonable delay, and demanded that the data be released.

It turns out that they all replicate each other, because they each rely on the same ten trees, the evidence of twentieth century warming being that one of these ten  grew unusually rapidly during the twentieth century as compared to fossil trees of the same type from the same area.  These trees were selected by Bricca from a much larger population of trees in the same area.

The larger population of trees, taken as a whole, shows  much the same growth pattern as the fossil trees.

Take out one tree from those ten, Yamal06, and most of the evidence for climate change vanishes.  Restore the much larger set of trees from which the ten trees were selected, and all of the evidence for climate change vanishes.

Take out one tree from half a dozen graphs of global warming in near a dozen papers, and suddenly they do not show global warming any more.

Bricca has, at this time, not yet explained why those ten trees, and not others from the same survey and same area.  And whatever his explanation, ten trees is not enough.

Dr. Richard Lindzen on “corrected” climate data.

it has become standard in climate science that data in contradiction to alarmism is inevitably ‘corrected’ to bring it closer to alarming models. None of us would argue that this data is perfect, and the corrections are often plausible. What is implausible is that the ‘corrections’ should always bring the data closer to models.