Eric S. Raymond on the East Anglia CRU's Global Warming Fraud (Who is he u ask?)

http://esr.ibiblio.org/ ^ | November 28 2009 | E.S.Raymond

[Para-Ord.45]

First, who is E.S.Raymond:

Eric S. Raymond ("esr") is an open source luminary partly because of his industry changing book The Cathedral & the Bazaar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S_Raymond

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On 11/24, esr examined the hockey stick graph in Hiding the Decline: Part 1 – The Adventure Begins:

This, people, is blatant data-cooking, with no pretense otherwise. It flattens a period of warm temperatures in the 1940s 1930s — see those negative coefficients? Then, later on, it applies a positive multiplier so you get a nice dramatic hockey stick at the end of the century.

All you apologists weakly protesting that this is research business as usual and there are plausible explanations for everything in the emails? Sackcloth and ashes time for you. This isn’t just a smoking gun, it’s a siege cannon with the barrel still hot.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447

Hiding the Decline: Part 1 – The Adventure Begins:

There was a brief note about it in a comment on someone else’s blog, enough to clue me that I should grep -r for ARTIFICAL. I dusted off my Fortran and read the file. Whoever wrote the note had caught the significance of the negative coefficients but, oddly, didn’t notice (or didn’t mention) the much more blatant J-shaping near the end of the series.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447

On 11/21, esr, set the tenor for his upcoming posts in Hiding the Decline: Prologue:

For those of you who have been stigmatizing AGW skeptics as “deniers” and dismissing their charges that the whole enterprise is fraudulent? Hope you like the taste of crow, because I do believe there’s a buttload of it coming at you. Piping hot.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1431

Comments on Hiding the Decline: Prologue:

Those who claim “scientific consensus” as a justification for any position are attempting to perpetrate a fraud, and have only themselves to blame when it blows back on them. The proper justification of any theory is not “consensus”, it is predictive power.

The most data could tell you is that average temperature is rising and CO2 is too. Well, except that average temperature isn’t rising – it was flat between 1998 and 2008, plunged sharply in 2008, and has not resumed the previous trendline. This is embarassing to AGW alarmists, since CO2 has kept rising and their theories require anthropogenic CO2 forcing to swamp anything that mere nature might be doing – and that’s manifestly not happening.

-- My point is that the data fails to meet the criteria the alarmists themselves have set. That is, they’ve been quite willing to interpret a short-period temperature rise between 1975 and 1998 as indication that we’re on a long-term trend with that slope, but when we get a decade of flatness after that they ignore it. It’s not responsive and not honest to point out that a decade is too short to mean anything unless you’re also willing to dismiss the previous 23 years.

Over longer timeframes, I don’t think there’s any statistically significant evidence that we’ve deviated off the very shallow warming trend following the last Ice Age. If you scrutinize the alleged data claiming otherwise, you keep finding noise and fraud.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1436

On 11/23, he called for Open-Sourcing the Global Warming Debate, a call I readily agree with:

There is only one way to cut through all of the conflicting claims and agendas about the CRU’s research: open-source it all. Publish the primary data sets, publish the programs used to interpret them and create graphs like the well-known global-temperature “hockey stick”, publish everything. Let the code and the data speak for itself; let the facts trump speculation and interpretation.

We know, from experience with software, that secrecy is the enemy of quality — that software bugs, like cockroaches, shun light and flourish in darkness. So, too. with mistakes in the interpretation of scientific data; neither deliberate fraud nor inadvertent error can long survive the skeptical scrutiny of millions. The same remedy we have found in the open-source community applies – unsurprisingly, since we learned it from science in the first place. Abolish the secrecy, let in the sunlight.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1436

Comments on Open-Sourcing the Global Warming Debate:

If it doesn’t happen, we’ll know they were scamming all along. Useful outcome either way.

--

And now, I think, those people are going to pay. Because it could still be that full disclosure will vindicate the AGW crowd, but having read the CRU material…I don’t think so. In all of the scenarios that are now plausible, those who bayed the loudest about “consensus” and howled for the persecution of “denialists” are now set up for a hard fall.

-- One of the reasons AGW flimflam angers me is that it crowds out sane, constructive environmentalism. An environmental lobby that really cared about saving the planet would be agitating for crash programs to replace the burning of fossil fuels with nuclear energy; buying up rainforest acreage to stem loss of biodiversity; funding research into better battery- and supercap-based storage technology so low-density renewable power sources could be aggregated into baseload power. But the envorinmentalists we have won’t do these things, because they’re fixated on the wrong problems and the wrong means of solving even those.

--

If the historical temperature data were generally known to be garbage (which I was pretty sure was true even before the leak), it couldn’t be used to justify public policy that is both bad and expensive – like the U.S.’s “cap-and-trade” bill in progress, which has so many giveaways and exemptions that it subverts its own ostensible purposes.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1436

I have a closely related heuristic: any eco-related scare for which the prescription would result in a massive transfer of power to the political class is bogus.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/

http://rebootcongress.blogspot.com/2009/11/eric-s-raymond-on-east-anglia-crus.html

[pyx]

This isn’t just a smoking gun, it’s a siege cannon with the barrel still hot. -- Eric S. Raymond

Ooo ... that's gotta leave a mark.

[antiRepublicrat]

Political background: Raymond is a hard-core libertarian.

And he speaks the truth.

[MHGinTN]

The bigger picture is that this was not about saving the planet from AGW, it was about power to control the world of humans and the scam was merely a way to enrich thugs like Al Goron and other multinational corps while establishing an ironclad way to dictate terms for the lives of people.

[steelyourfaith]

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[sodpoodle]

**esr examined the hockey stick graph in Hiding the Decline*

Waiting for the headline:

“NASA’s Chief Climate Scientist James Hansen asks CRU-UEA to Return His Hockey Stick and Let Him Get The Puck Outta Here”

[Seven plus One]

Read the Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto for an introduction to ESR. A friend for sure.

[sodpoodle]

Another good update! 10 mins ago.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html

[Lancey Howard]

An environmental lobby that really cared about saving the planet would be agitating for crash programs to replace the burning of fossil fuels with nuclear energy; buying up rainforest acreage to stem loss of biodiversity; funding research into better battery- and supercap-based storage technology so low-density renewable power sources could be aggregated into baseload power. But the envorinmentalists we have won’t do these things, because they’re fixated on the wrong problems and the wrong means of solving even those.

But... how would any of this stuff accomplish the socialist global redistribution of America's wealth?
The environment? These "global warming" scammers don't care about the stinking environment.

[wannabegeek]

I guess now my ex crticial thinkin’ class prof Ph.D. guy who turn hermit living up in the mountain high may now agree AGW is all BS. We were at ESR’s anti-M$ crusade at CalTech and USC.

[Dick Bachert]

Former Senator and Vice President Al Gore seen here en-route back to prison after a federal appeals court refused to review his 20 year sentence for his lead role as spokesperson in the “Climategate” fraud conspiracy. The same court recently rejected the appeals of the lengthy sentences of the 137 alleged UN “scientists” – Gore’s co-conspirators – for falsifying data supporting so-called Cap and Trade legislation that trial testimony disclosed would have virtually destroyed what remained of the U.S. economy while enriching Gore and a cabal of insiders.

[Seven plus One]

And a reply, six hours later! (this hit & run commenting has to stop) The telegraph is a real paper, and in English to boot. This news is out, and it’s circulating over here. We as Americans still have the power to put a stop to all the hope&change based on this fraud, if we have the gumption to do it.

[sodpoodle]

**But... how would any of this stuff accomplish the socialist global redistribution of America’s wealth?**

Plan B. Figure out a way to capture all the oxygen in the atmosphere and charge US Citizens for bottled air!!!!!

All other nations would get it for free.