Physicists’ memo to Parliament blasts AGW “science”

Hot Air ^ | February 27, 2010 10:40 am | Ed Morrissey

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The British Parliament has begun an investigation into the meaning of the East Anglia CRU e-mails, and part of that process is a form of peer review, in a sense.  Their Science and Technology committee has welcomed commentary from the scientific community, and among those members is the non-profit charity, the Institute of Physics.  In their submission, the IoP says that the UEA CRU e-mails don’t just indict East Anglia, but the entire AGW industry — and that “science” wasn’t what they were doing at all (via Watts Up With That and Mike Ross, emphases mine):

What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?

1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.

And as far as the science being settled, or even “science” as understood by the public as conclusory data, the IoP has issues with that characterization as well:

4. The second category relating to proxy reconstructions are the basis for the conclusion that 20th century warming is unprecedented. Published reconstructions may represent only a part of the raw data available and may be sensitive to the choices made and the statistical techniques used. Different choices, omissions or statistical processes may lead to different conclusions. This possibility was evidently the reason behind some of the (rejected) requests for further information.

5. The e-mails reveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented; for example, the apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements.

In other words, the claims made by AGW advocates didn’t match the data available elsewhere.  When challenged on this, the AGW advocates refused to release the data to other scientists, and finally refused to release it under a Freedom of Information demand.  When it looked as though the government would get their hands on the data anyway, the CRU conspired to destroy the data, along with other AGW advocates around the world.

The IoP doesn’t trust East Anglia to restore confidence in the AGW movement’s claim to science, either, because the fraud went well beyond the boundaries of the University of East Anglia:

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

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[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Related thread:

Memorandum submitted by Stephen McIntyre

[HiTech RedNeck]

Oh man, we are getting a full furred cat fight here.

It is high time for impartial parties to figure out just how much of these AGW sky falling predictions can be traced to phonied data.

[TexGuy]

“But REAL Scientists all agree about Global Warming destroying the Earth! The ‘Institute of Physics’ can’t be made up of REAL Scientists! ... Well, I mean ... Oh, the Institute is ... Ya know ... Nevermind.”

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I want to link to the JoNova Website which always is very readable and has some great graphics...specifically on the Tree Ring issues and the Hockey Stick:

Breaking news: Cherry Picking of Historic Proportions

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Posted on September 29th, 2009 under Global Warming • Tags: Alarmist Behaviour, Grassroots Skeptics, Hockey Stick Graph, Little Ice Age, Science.

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A big news day. It appears Steve McIntyre (volunteer unpaid auditor of Big-Government-Science) has killed the Hockey Stick a second time…

The details are on the last three days of Steve McIntyre’s site Climate Audit, and summed up beautifully on Watts Up.

The sheer effrontery and gall appears to be breathtaking.

The Briffa temperature graphs have been widely cited as evidence by the IPCC, yet it appears they were based on a very carefully selected set of data, so select, that the shape of the graph would have been totally transformed if the rest of the data had been included.

Kieth Briffa used 12 samples to arrive at his version of the hockey stick and refused to provide his data for years. When McIntyre finally got hold of it, and looked at the 34 samples that Briffa left out of his graphs, a stark message was displayed.  McIntyre describes it today as one of the most disquieting images he’s ever presented.

Background

Since 1995 Kieth Briffa has been publishing graphs about temperature of the last thousand years. Like Michael Manns’ famous (and discredited) Hockey Stick graph, Briffa’s graphs were based on tree rings and appeared to show dramatic evidence that the current climate was extraordinarily warm compared to previous years. They were used in the infamous spagetti plots, and the IPCC 3rd Assessment Report, and recycled in other publications giving the impression they had been replicated. His work has even made it into school resources (Cimate Discovery, p4). His publications since 2000 are listed here.

Unaudited science

Suspiciously Briffa refused repeated requests to provide the Yamal data that his analysis was based on (something about the data belonging to the Russians). As Steve McIntyre points out, this kind of data should be archived and freely available after any peer reviewed paper is published.

Last year  Briffa published a paper in a journal (Philosophical Transactions of Biology, the Royal Society) that did maintain basic standards (after being prodded) and a few days ago McIntyre noticed the data was finally up. This data had been used in papers going back as far as 2000. (And no one thought to politely inform McIntyre that the information he’d requested for years was now available?)

Hiding data in science is equivalent to a company issuing it’s annual report and telling the auditors that the receipts are commercial in confidence and they would just have to trust them. No court of law would accept that, yet at the “top” levels of science, papers have been allowed to sit as show-pieces for years without any chance that anyone could seriously verify their findings. In science, getting the stamp of Peer Review has become like a free pass to “credibility”.

…

Science is broken

So much for the repeat claims that peer review is a “rigorous process”. Those who keep telling us we have to “listen to the experts” and who put so much stock in a peer reviewed paper have been left hanging out to dry. Even if Briffa has a reason to exclude 2/3rds of the samples and somehow it’s just a coincidence that the ignored data were from slower growing trees, nothing changes the fact that he didn’t mention that in the paper, and nor, damningly, did he provide the data. It only takes a sentence to say (for example) “ABC tree chronologies excluded due to artificial herbicide damage” and it only takes a few minutes to email a data file.

…

Now we know why he might not have been so forthcoming with the data…

If all the tree rings are combined, the graph looks like this below. (I’ve added the black thick line to the original to make the merged data stand out). Obviously today is not as warm as things were 1000 years ago (at least not in far north Russia), and it’s also clear things have been warming since 1800 in Yamal.

Here’s a map to help put places to the names. These are the four sites mentioned as sources of the tree ring data. Yamal and Taymir are roughly 400 km apart.

[Dr. Bogus Pachysandra]

“But REAL Scientists all agree about Global Warming”

I do think that a lot of scientists took these guys on their word alone. Trusting that they were doing everything correctly, by the book. I look for a lot of other researchers to jump the AGW ship soon!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

See #5 for phonied data....

[HiTech RedNeck]

Until peers can poke into the original data at will, “peer review” will be a sham.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Then we have the Darwin Station Data from the Darwin Airport in Australia,...but who did it is unknown.

There is a thread on it.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Darwin Zero Before and After

*********************************EXCERPT INTRO*****************************

Recapping the story begun at WUWT here and continued at WUWT here, data from the temperature station Darwin Zero in northern Australia was found to be radically adjusted and showing huge warming (red line, adjusted temperature) compared to the unadjusted data (blue line). The unadjusted data showed that Darwin Zero was actually cooling over the period of the record. Here is the adjustment to Darwin Zero:

(Excerpt) Read more at wattsupwiththat.com ...

[AdmSmith]

As Tom Nelson aptly wrote, “Al Gore lied and people died.” Sadly, this comment is now literally true. Global warming alarmed parents murdered their whole family: daughter survives
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/03/global-warming-alarmed-parents-murdered.html

[steelyourfaith]

Thanx !

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[AdmSmith]

http://pajamasmedia.com/zombie/2010/02/25/new-global-warming-data-reveals-accurate-hockey-stick-graph/

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

LOL....!!

EXCELLENT!

[Gene Eric]

>> “But REAL Scientists all agree about Global Warming destroying the Earth!”

REAL scientists - imprecise and error prone.

[ricks_place]

Darwin Zero has been on a slow boil at WUWT but seems to hotting up recently! Thanks.

[tubebender]

Ernest...Buddy...FRiend, I hate to break this to you but Calif is about to get slammed by three more days of Global Wetting starting on the north coast soon...

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

What...Accuweather is failing me...

I don’t see any warning on my status Bar....Guess I better do some checking...

[Wonder Warthog]

"REAL scientists - imprecise and error prone."

Yes, but we REAL scientists state up front what our imprecision and errors are likely to be, and base that on ALL the data, not a cherry-picked subset.

[steelyourfaith]

Perfect. LOL. Thanx !