Barrel Strength

I argued below that the critical thing in the hacked climategate emails was the fact that CO2 has gone up, while temperature has remained the same. Everything else is peripheral. The theory is bust.

Today in Wattsupwiththat, a more knowledgable person than I confirms the analysis.

“As for CO2, we have known for years that CO2 increases have never in the past 300,000 years caused temperature rise (CO2 rise trails temperature increase). IPCC scientists know this too (see their “Copenhagen Diagnosis”); we know that their mathematical fudges that dismiss the fact that CO2 has not been historically causative of temperature rise are incorrect as well. We have also known for years that the alleged one degree temperature rise from 1880 vanishes if sites exposed to urban heat islands are not considered.

“We have long known that Jones’s paper dismissing this explanation (Jones, et al. 1990. Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land, Nature 347 169- 172) is wrong and potentially fraudulent (see the same data used to confirm urban heat islands in Wang, W-C, Z. Zeng, T. R Karl, 1990. Urban Heat Islands in China. Geophys. Res. Lett. 17, 2377-2380). Everyone except Briffa knows that the Briffa conclusions are wrong, and why they are wrong; groups in Finland, Canada (lots of places actually) show cooling by this proxy, not warming; the IPCC even printed the Finn’s plot upside down to convert the fact (cooling) into the dogma (warming).

Read the rest…

The standard story so far has been that Russian hackers obtained the CRU documents, and it was then loaded up to an anonymous Russian FTP site which did not require any user-id to logon.  Is there any proof whatsoever for this assertion?  Isn’t it a monumental logical leap to assume that just because the data and emails were uploaded to a Russian FTP site, that the hackers must be Russian?  The assertions that this data might have been obtained by illegally hacking into the CRU computer has provided NYT with an excuse not to cover it.  On Nov 20th NYT stated the following.

The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.

CBC and Senator Boxer framed it as a hacker crime as well with focus on the illegality of the act.

As your correspondent noted on Nov 23rd, this is highly unlikely, i.e. it is more likely that the documents were leaked.  This view was further corroborated on Nov 26th when Daily Mail reported the following.

The controversy surrounding the global warming e-mail scandal has deepened after a BBC correspondent admitted he was sent the leaked messages more than a month before they were made public.

Paul Hudson, weather presenter and climate change expert, claims the documents allegedly sent between some of the world’s leading scientists are of a direct result of an article he wrote.

In his BBC blog three days ago, Hudson said: ‘I was forwarded the chain of emails on the 12th October, which are comments from some of the world’s leading climate scientists written as a direct result of my article “Whatever Happened To Global Warming”.’

Now there is speculation that James Hansen leaked the documents.  Will this prompt a change in the coverage?  Don’t bet on it.

I heard it on BBC news to America on Vermont Public radio this morning. Allegations of misdeeds! The shock! The horror!
This is like reporting Pearl Harbor (December 6th, 1941) on Christmas Day, 1941.

Let’s be clear. In CBC news and current affairs terms, Rex Murphy falls somewhere between court jester and Howard Beale.  In the same way Canwest uses David Warren and John Robson, and the Globe uses Margaret Wente, this is CBC’s way of admitting that something does indeed smell funny but really professional people, serious journalists and commentators, do not need to spend time finding out where that bad smell comes from.  At the end of Murphy’s commentary, freeze on Mansbridge’s face.  Sure, he always looks like an egg-sucking hound but there is an added, satisfied smirk that says, “Thanks, Rex, for wading through the muck the rest of us here are too genteel to notice. Now we never have to deal with Climategate again.”