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BY SETH BORENSTEIN, RAPHAEL SATTER and MALCOLM RITTER, Associated Press Writers Seth Borenstein, Raphael Satter And Malcolm Ritter, Associated Press Writers – 1 hr 51 mins ago
LONDON – E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.
The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don’t undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
The scientists were keenly aware of how their work would be viewed and used, and, just like politicians, went to great pains to shape their message. Sometimes, they sounded more like schoolyard taunts than scientific tenets.
The scientists were so convinced by their own science and so driven by a cause “that unless you’re with them, you’re against them,” said Mark Frankel, director of scientific freedom, responsibility and law at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also reviewed the communications.
Frankel saw “no evidence of falsification or fabrication of data, although concerns could be raised about some instances of very ‘generous interpretations.’”
Some e-mails expressed doubts about the quality of individual temperature records or why models and data didn’t quite match. Part of this is the normal give-and-take of research, but skeptics challenged how reliable certain data was.
The e-mails were stolen from the computer network server of the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia in southeast England, an influential source of climate science, and were posted online last month. The university shut down the server and contacted the police.
The AP studied all the e-mails for context, with five reporters reading and rereading them — about 1 million words in total.
One of the most disturbing elements suggests an effort to avoid sharing scientific data with critics skeptical of global warming. It is not clear if any data was destroyed; two U.S. researchers denied it.
The e-mails show that several mainstream scientists repeatedly suggested keeping their research materials away from opponents who sought it under American and British public records law. It raises a science ethics question because free access to data is important so others can repeat experiments as part of the scientific method. The University of East Anglia is investigating the blocking of information requests.
“I believe none of us should submit to these ‘requests,’” declared the university’s Keith Briffa. The center’s chief, Phil Jones, wrote: “Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them.”
When one skeptic kept filing FOI requests, Jones, who didn’t return AP requests for comment, told another scientist, Michael Mann: “You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting FOI requests for all e-mails Keith (Briffa) and Tim (Osborn) have written.”
Mann, a researcher at Penn State University, told The Associated Press: “I didn’t delete any e-mails as Phil asked me to. I don’t believe anybody else did.”
The e-mails also show how professional attacks turned very personal. When former London financial trader Douglas J. Keenan combed through the data used in a 1990 research paper Jones had co-authored, Keenan claimed to have found evidence of fakery by Jones’ co-author. Keenan threatened to have the FBI arrest University at Albany scientist Wei-Chyung Wang for fraud. (A university investigation later cleared him of any wrongdoing.)
“I do now wish I’d never sent them the data after their FOIA request!” Jones wrote in June 2007.
In another case after initially balking on releasing data to a skeptic because it was already public, Lawrence Livermore National Lab scientist Ben Santer wrote that he then opted to release everything the skeptic wanted — and more. Santer said in a telephone interview that he and others are inundated by frivolous requests from skeptics that are designed to “tie-up government-funded scientists.”
The e-mails also showed a stunning disdain for global warming skeptics.
One scientist practically celebrates the news of the death of one critic, saying, “In an odd way this is cheering news!” Another bemoans that the only way to deal with skeptics is “continuing to publish quality work in quality journals (or calling in a Mafia hit.)” And a third scientist said the next time he sees a certain skeptic at a scientific meeting, “I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.”
And they compared contrarians to communist-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Somali pirates. They also called them out-and-out frauds.
Santer, who received death threats after his work on climate change in 1996, said Thursday: “I’m not surprised that things are said in the heat of the moment between professional colleagues. These things are taken out of context.”
When the journal, Climate Research, published a skeptical study, Penn State scientist Mann discussed retribution this way: “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.”
That skeptical study turned out to be partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute.
The most provocative e-mails are usually about one aspect of climate science: research from a decade ago that studied how warm or cold it was centuries ago through analysis of tree rings, ice cores and glacial melt. And most of those e-mails, which stretch from 1996 to last month, are from about a handful of scientists in dozens of e-mails.
Still, such research has been a key element in measuring climate change over long periods.
As part of the AP review, summaries of the e-mails that raised issues from the potential manipulation of data to intensely personal attacks were sent to seven experts in research ethics, climate science and science policy.
“This is normal science politics, but on the extreme end, though still within bounds,” said Dan Sarewitz, a science policy professor at Arizona State University. “We talk about science as this pure ideal and the scientific method as if it is something out of a cookbook, but research is a social and human activity full of all the failings of society and humans, and this reality gets totally magnified by the high political stakes here.”
In the past three weeks since the e-mails were posted, longtime opponents of mainstream climate science have repeatedly quoted excerpts of about a dozen e-mails. Republican congressmen and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin have called for either independent investigations, a delay in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gases or outright boycotts of the Copenhagen international climate talks. They cited a “culture of corruption” that the e-mails appeared to show.
That is not what the AP found. There were signs of trying to present the data as convincingly as possible.
One e-mail that skeptics have been citing often since the messages were posted online is from Jones. He says: “I’ve just completed Mike’s (Mann) trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (from 1981 onward) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
Jones was referring to tree ring data that indicated temperatures after the 1950s weren’t as warm as scientists had determined.
The “trick” that Jones said he was borrowing from Mann was to add the real temperatures, not what the tree rings showed. And the decline he talked of hiding was not in real temperatures, but in the tree ring data which was misleading, Mann explained.
Sometimes the data didn’t line up as perfectly as scientists wanted.
David Rind told colleagues about inconsistent figures in the work for a giant international report: “As this continuing exchange has clarified, what’s in Chapter 6 is inconsistent with what is in Chapter 2 (and Chapter 9 is caught in the middle!). Worse yet, we’ve managed to make global warming go away! (Maybe it really is that easy…:).”
But in the end, global warming didn’t go away, according to the vast body of research over the years.
None of the e-mails flagged by the AP and sent to three climate scientists viewed as moderates in the field changed their view that global warming is man-made and a threat. Nor did it alter their support of the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which some of the scientists helped write.
“My overall interpretation of the scientific basis for (man-made) global warming is unaltered by the contents of these e-mails,” said Gabriel Vecchi, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist.
Gerald North, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, headed a National Academy of Sciences study that looked at — and upheld as valid — Mann’s earlier studies that found the 1990s were the hottest years in centuries.
“In my opinion the meaning is much more innocent than might be perceived by others taken out of context. Much of this is overblown,” North said.
Mann contends he always has been upfront about uncertainties, pointing to the title of his 1999 study: “Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties and Limitations.”
Several scientists found themselves tailoring their figures or retooling their arguments to answer online arguments — even as they claimed not to care what was being posted to the Internet
“I don’t read the blogs that regularly,” Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona wrote in 2005. “But I guess the skeptics are making hay of their (sic) being a global warm (sic) event around 1450AD.”
One person singled out for criticism in the e-mails is Steve McIntyre, who maintains Climate Audit. The blog focuses on statistical issues with scientists’ attempts to recreate the climate in ancient times.
“We find that the authors are overreaching in the conclusions that they’re trying to draw from the data that they have,” McIntyre said in a telephone interview.
McIntyre, 62, of Toronto, was trained in math and economics and says he is “substantially retired” from the mineral exploration industry, which produces greenhouse gases.
Some e-mails said McIntyre’s attempts to get original data from scientists are frivolous and meant more for harassment than doing good science. There are allegations that he would distort and misuse data given to him.
McIntyre disagreed with how he is portrayed. “Everything that I’ve done in this, I’ve done in good faith,” he said.
He also said he has avoided editorializing on the leaked e-mails. “Anything I say,” he said, “is liable to be piling on.”
The skeptics started the name-calling said Mann, who called McIntyre a “bozo,” a “fraud” and a “moron” in various e-mails.
“We’re human,” Mann said. “We’ve been under attack unfairly by these people who have been attempting to dismiss us as frauds as liars.”
The AP is mentioned several times in the e-mails, usually in reference to a published story. One scientist says his remarks were reported with “a bit of journalistic license” and “I would have rephrased or re-expressed some of what was written if I had seen it before it was released.” The archive also includes a request from an AP reporter, one of the writers of this story, for reaction to a study, a standard step for journalists seeking quotes for their stories.
___
Associated Press writers Jeff Donn in Boston, Justin Pritchard in Los Angeles contributed to this report. Troy Thibodeaux in Washington provided technical assistance. Satter reported from London, Borenstein from Washington and Ritter from New York.
___
EDITOR’S NOTE — Find behind-the-scenes information, blog posts and discussion about the Copenhagen climate conference at http://www.facebook.com/theclimatepool, a Facebook page run by AP and an array of international news agencies. Follow coverage and blogging of the event on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/AP_ClimatePool.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091212/ap_on_sc/climate_e_mails
Byron King may be correct in saying that what is being called “Climategate” has smacked down “… the last semblance of unblinking, unthinking willingness to submit to draconian, Procrustean “cap and trade” legislation against fossil fuels.” Unfortunately, it has done exactly zero damage to the willingness to IMPOSE them. Willingness to submit is irrelevant when the imposers have the force of guns and government behind them.
As Byron points out, it’s not and never has been about climate. Rather, it is a naked power grab by a global statist elite whose true goal is control over our lives. Meanwhile, the dime store Hitlers at the head of a cabal of 3rd-world kleptocracies salivate at the prospect of “climate reparations” to fatten their Swiss bank accounts.
With 100% justification does Byron offer the oldest, soundest advice ever spoken on this planet: “Follow the money.”
Cheers from the frozen depths of Wisconsin, where we could do with a little global warming today.
“That poor frozen bastard still waiting for his barstool number…”
Thanks for the note.
Now for a letter that made it just in time for today’s send…
Dear Gary,
Please see the article located at the below location:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4338343.html
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4338343.html
The article seems to me to be unbiased about the climate issue. If you are seeking the truth about climate change and wish to respond to the skeptics, this may help.
For my part, I see that there is a hard resistance to change that is necessary. People simply do not wish to change. It is stressful. It costs a lot of money. It is uncomfortable.
Change will happen. The entire world must change…and soon.
There are too many people and they are changing the world environment. Negatively.
The planet will reduce human numbers dramatically if humans fail to change. We who have so much and tell the poor and starving of the world to eat cake will also be suffering along with them.
Countries that have ocean coastlines will suffer greatly. Great swaths of farm land are going to be inundated. Water from melting glaciers will be profuse at first and then there will be no fresh water from them. Billions of people will starve. This will happen. Because the rich and powerful will not change at all or not in time. The poor countries know what is coming and screaming about it now. It will not be enough. Or in time.
There is a significant chance that as the oceans rise and deserts expand that disease will so decimate the world’s population that modern civilization, as we know it, will come to an end altogether. Disease and famine work well together.
And, of course, there will be wars over the remaining resources and FOOD AND WATER. The thoughts of this environmental disaster are so unsettling that most people can not think them. They simply can not envision them. It is much like primitive people first seeing someone on horseback or seeing an airplane for the first time. It is too much of a stretch. For even the most educated, the idea of ecological and population collapse is just too much to accept. It is a failure of intellect and imagination.
I would suggest that there are a few who see the wave of death and extinction coming. They are not making noise or arguing the points of reason. They are simply moving to places that they hope will survive, if not in a high tech way, at least survive.
Since you are in the media and are kind of forced to take sides you can have a profound influence on the folk who have not got the facts or who have not a way to see the truth. It is sort of incumbent on you to serve up something as close to the truth as you can. The more one looks into this climate change the more it is far far worse than one wants to ever believe.
It scares me. It scares the shit out of me. I have been reading a lot of books about it in the passed few years. I can tell you, Gary, that it is not BS. If anything, the problem is so vast and encompassing that most humans can not deal with it. The solution, if there indeed is one, must be a global response. No cheaters. No abstainers.
Personally, Gary, I think, from my reading that any ’solution’ will come too little and too late. Enjoy your current life as if the fall is not coming at all. Knowing it will come will help you enjoy the remainder even more. Just say, F*ck It, and live it up. Knowing what is coming is a burden and a sort of freedom.
I live in Hawaii. It is often consider paradise by many. It never has been and never will be. But it is far from the horrors that are coming. Hopefully, I will survive here. If not, well, so be it.
Aloha
“Let not your heart be troubled.”
You all may remember I mentioned a Whiskey Shooter by the name of Doug who met up with us in Phoenix at the Freedom Summit. Doug rode out with our tiny band through the desert and into the mountains. He sent me this picture he’d taken:
It reminds me that there are bigger things than the fleeting nonsense of men. Life is dazzlingly complex, awfully unlikely and impossibly rare on a cosmic scale…but the universe would spin on beautifully if life had never been. It will spin on with the same unconscious grandeur after all life on the surface of our little rock is gone.
Regards,
Gary Gibson
Managing Editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder
Associated Press
12.10.09, 06:25 AM EST
LONDON — Over 1,700 scientists in Britain have signed a statement defending the evidence for human-made climate change in the wake of hacked e-mails that emboldened climate skeptics. E-mails stolen from an English university appeared to show scientists discussing ways to shield data from public scrutiny and suppress others’ work. Climate skeptics – those who deny that human activity is responsible for global warming – have seized on the correspondence as evidence that scientists have conspired to hide the facts.
Most scientists say the e-mails do nothing to undermine the evidence for climate change.
More than 1,700 signed a statement released Thursday, saying they had confidence in the evidence for global warming “and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities.”
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed
December 9, 2009 – 7:39am
Paper can now be used to serve as a battery for electrical devices. Using nanotechnologies researchers at Stanford University have invented lightweight and even bendable batteries out of paper.
According to Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, at Stanford those batteries can be folded, crumpled or even soaked in an acidic solution and still work. The battery was created out of paper coated with ink made of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires.
“The most important part of this… is how a simple thing in daily life, paper, can be used as a substrate to make functional conductive electrodes by a simple process,” said Peidong Yang, professor of chemistry at the University of California-Berkeley, in a statement. “It’s nanotechnology related to daily life, essentially.”
The nanotubes used in the paper batteries and supercapacitors are one-dimensional structures with a small diameter, which enables the ink made from them to stick tightly to the paper. The university noted that the paper supercapacitors may be able to handle 40,000 charge/discharge cycles, which is an order of magnitude more than lithium batteries can take.
Cui pointed out that the nanomaterials make better conductors than traditional materials because they can move electricity more efficiently.
Source: http://www.ecommerce-journal.com/node/25827
Associated Press
By CHARLES J. HANLEY
COPENHAGEN — This decade is on track to become the warmest since records began in 1850, and 2009 could rank among the top-five warmest years, the U.N. weather agency reported Tuesday on the second day of a pivotal 192-nation climate conference.In some areas – central Africa and southern Asia – this will probably be the warmest year, but overall 2009 will “be about the fifth-warmest year on record,” said Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization.
Only the United States and Canada experienced cooler conditions than average, it said, although Alaska had the second-warmest July on record.
The U.N. agency noted an extreme heat wave in India in May and a heat wave in northern China in June. It said parts of China experienced their warmest year on record, and that Australia so far has had its third-warmest year. Extremely hot weather was also more frequent and intense in southern South America.
The decade 2000-2009 “is very likely to be the warmest on record, warmer than the 1990s, than the 1980s and so on,” Jarraud told a news conference, holding a chart with a temperature curve pointing upward.
The data were released as negotiators at the two-week talks in Copenhagen worked Tuesday to craft a global deal to step up efforts to stem climate change, digging into the dense technicalities of “metrics” and “gas inventories.”
Governments, meanwhile, jockeyed for position leading up to the finale late next week, when more than 100 national leaders, including President Barack Obama, will converge on Copenhagen for the final days of bargaining.
Scientists say without an agreement to wean the world away from fossil fuels and other pollutants to greener sources of energy, the Earth will face the consequences of ever-rising temperatures: The extinction of plant and animals, the flooding of coastal cities, more extreme weather, more drought and the spread of diseases.
If 2009 ends as the fifth-warmest year, it would replace the year 2003. According to the U.S. space agency NASA, the other warmest years since 1850 have been 2005, 1998, 2007 and 2006. NASA says the differences in readings among these years are so small as to be statistically insignificant.
The U.N. climate agency said the global combined sea and land surface temperatures for January-October 2009 was estimated at 0.44 degrees C (0.79 degrees F) above the 1961-1990 annual average of 14.00 degrees C (57.2 degrees F). The report had a margin of error of plus or minus 0.11 degrees C, and final data will be released early in 2010.
On Monday, when the conference opened, the Obama administration gave the talks a boost by announcing steps that could lead to new U.S. emissions controls that don’t require the approval of the U.S. Congress.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said scientific evidence clearly shows that greenhouse gases “threaten the public health and welfare of the American people” and that the pollutants – mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels – should be reduced, if not by Congress then by the agency responsible for enforcing air pollution.
As Congress considers the first U.S. legislation to cap carbon emissions, the EPA finding will enable the Obama administration to act on greenhouse gases without congressional action, potentially imposing federal limits on climate-changing pollution from cars, power plants and factories.
The announcement gave Obama a new card in what is expected to be tough bargaining next week at the climate conference. In preparation, Obama met with former Vice President Al Gore, who won a Nobel for his climate change efforts, at the White House on Monday.
European climate change officials welcomed the U.S. move.
“This is meaningful because it is yet a sign that the Americans have more to offer. My evaluation is that the U.S. can offer much more,” EU environment spokesman Andreas Carlgren told reporters Tuesday in Stockholm.
Yvo de Boer, U.N. climate chief, said the EPA finding gives Obama “something to fall back on.”
“I think that will boost people’s confidence” at the Copenhagen talks in the Americans’ ability to offer more, he said.
The European Union has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020, compared with 1990, and is considering raising that to 30 percent if other governments also aim high. Climate change will be high on the agenda at an EU summit this Thursday and Friday in Brussels.
The European Union had called for a stronger bid by the Americans, who thus far have pledged emissions cuts much less ambitious than Europe’s. The U.S. has offered a 17 percent reduction in emissions from their 2005 level – comparable to a 3-4 percent cut from 1990 levels.
Whether the prospect of EPA action will satisfy such demands – and what China may now add to its earlier offer – remains to be seen. And success in the long-running climate talks hinges on more than emissions reductions. Most important, it requires commitments of financial support by rich countries for poor nations to help them cope with the impact of a changing climate.
In Britain on Tuesday, Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged fellow Europeans to raise their bid on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to pressure the U.S. and others to offer more at the Copenhagen negotiations.
“We’ve got to make countries recognize that they have to be as ambitious as they say they want to be. It’s not enough to say ‘I may do this, I might do this, possibly I’ll do this.’ I want to create a situation in which the European Union is persuaded to go to 30 percent,” Brown was quoted as saying by Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed
Source: http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2009/12/08/science-climate_7190491.html?partner=alerts
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