Blog Traffic – Lucia

It looks like the Air Vent has grown up.  Currently it’s about 10,000 views per day.  Thanks to the readers, commenters and contributors of course.

Climategate Blog Traffic Impact

13 January, 2010 (11:55) | politics Written by: lucia

Climate Audit on Climategate

The amazingly simple and accurate backstory of Climategate is told here by Steve McIntyre. If any of you have questions about what anyone knows about how the files came to be, Steve did a nice job of describing every key detail. Including the key to the CD that Mosher received as described in Patrick Courrielche’s work on the outing of the Climategate emails here, here, here. and one of the key points Steve makes is that of course if the link was placed on CA, tAV and Roman’s blog, why would the boys miss the superbowl of blogs across the world, Watts Up With That. . . which of course they didn’t.

Check it out.

Time to vote – 2009 Most Extreme Predictions!!

Well we made it another year and I for one currently have half a foot of global warming in the drive. Despite these minor hardships, it’s time to choose which scientist, editor or politician deserves the newly invented yet widely coveted – Air Vent “MOST EXTREME PREDICTIONS FOR 2009!!”

Who had the right stuff, which luminary put their money and mouth on the line, who knew the future and was brave enough to tell all.

Due to the extremely competitive entries in this event, we may need to narrow these down. If someone doesn’t take 50% we’ll choose the top three and then we’ll finish it up with a “for all the marbles” poll.

Open Thread #1

Ok, tAV is probably long overdue for an open thread. Open means open for climate related discussion. Not that I clip anything, but intelligent people need space to have discussion.

Keep it civil and I’m looking forward to what we might learn.

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An interesting topic is Diatribe Guy’s request for some help with a problem put forth far too often by the advocate crowd.

What are they thinking?

Bishop Hill has an interesting article on the progress of the investigation into climategate.  In the comment thread Paul Dennis of the UEA left this comment.

January 9, 2010 | mg

I have been interviewed and had a formal statement taken by the police with regard to this matter. The officer was attached to counter terrorism unit in Norfolk. They thought I might have some information on the basis that I had sent Jeff id a copy of a paper I had published on isotopes and climate at the southern end of the Antarctic Peninsula, and I had exchanged emails with Steve McIntyre over the leak/hack.

Clearly they’ve trawled through the UEA mail server and checked for key words (Jeffid Steve McIntyre and so on). The police left me very much with the impression that they were working on the theory that this was an outside hack and was done deliberately to disrupt Copenhagen.

January 9, 2010 | Paul Dennis

In my opinion the police are way off base here and have probably been talking to the scientists too much.  Just which international conpiracy would hack into computers, take over RC and place a link on CA saying ‘then a miracle occurred’.  I think that is a pretty strong hint at the age range and mindset of the individual.  IMO, they should be looking for a pissed off college student with some moderate computer skills and keys to the building. There are other clues too which others can point out I’m sure.

Big Journalism III

The exciting conclusion to Patrick Courrielche’s writeup of climate gate.

Peer-to-Peer Review (Part III): How ‘Climategate’ Marks the Maturing of a New Science Movement

Suffice it to say the Mosh might want to move to another, more friendly country, perhaps North Korea.  I enjoyed Patricks story, he did a good job being accurate, tAV didn’t get noticed as the blog which has discussed the emails as much as any other and he keeps pointing out how tiny it is.  It doesn’t really matter, climategate is public knowledge to some degree.

Big Journalism Part II

Patrick Courrielche of Big Journalism posted part II of climategate. Patrick, in a startlingly brash move, took the now unusual journalistic step of actually asking people what happened rather than just making it up. It probably took twice as much time as making it up would have. In addition, it’s probably more boring than fiction, but you actually get to hear a reasonably accurate account of the events which broke climategate. Call it a trade off.

Peer-to-Peer Review (Part II): How ‘Climategate’ Marks the Maturing of a New Science Movement

I think you’ll find the article interesting.

On a related point, Dr. Gavin Shmidt left a comment in the middle of the article which deserves a shot in the nuts. Gavin has a serious personality disorder – in case you didn’t know . The main difference between Gavin and God is that God doesn’t think he’s Gavin. It seems to be a contagious problem amongst the RC crowd.

Climategate Emails Search Count Drops

Please be careful with this post, it seems that only the search estimate may have changed. It may also be that the preferred articles have changed but we can’t tell without study. I’ve changed the title from past experience so people who don’t read the article don’t get the wrong idea.

At this point, there is no evidence that google mislaid anything.

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Can anyone find any example of a site Bing finds that Google doesn’t? If not, I may just delete this post because the estimated number is not the same as the actual search. So far, I’ve had no luck.

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When I first heard about this, I didn’t think much of it. Dr. Leonard Weinstein formerly of NASA pointed out that Google seemed to be loosing links to climategate at a tremendous rate. He wrote early this morning to point out that Googles tens of millions of links were shrinking rapidly. Of course websites on climategate may go off line over time which would explain some of the change, but we’ve lost a minimum of 2o million sites in the last few days and it’s more likely to have been 50 million.

This morning Leonard Weinstein said the total number of found sites for the term “climategate” had dropped below 3 million. When I searched Google on climategate myself – hours later – I got only 2.2 million hits compared with 50 million from Bing and 30 million from Yahoo. What’s more, about 1 in 5 times I got 2.22 millon or 20,000 more sites – a rounding error – Figure 1.

Figure 1 2.2 million views - click to view

Later this afternoon, Google dropped again to 2.19 million links for climategate.

Guh….Yup.

“The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.” – Winston Churchill

Smart enough to talk reasonably, dumb enough to not care that she has no idea what she’s saying. Links to the answers to her questions:

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/sea-ice-copenhagen-update/

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/no-warming-for-fifteen-years/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/29/al-gore-still-addicted-to-nonexistent-hurricane-climate-link-in-new-book/

Google Brain Drain

Updated again, despite the low search count, Google doesn’t seem to be missing any links.

UPDATED AGAIN, ANOTHER 10,000 WEBSITES LOST – SEE BOTTOM – Google really does seem to be deleting links to climategate!!!

UPDATED AT THE BOTTOM OF THE ARTICLE

Dr, Weinstein pointed out something interesting by email . It appears google is linking to less and less websites specific to climategate. Early this morning he sent an email saying google was below 3 million hits where it once peaked at around 50 million. Currently the number has dropped even further to 2.2 million,

Our Galileo, Will we do better this time?

Guest post from Dr. Ismail Bhat, Professor & Head of Department of Geology & Geophysics at University of Kashmir. Dr. Bhat is yet another professional scientist with the understanding and credentials to challenge the consensus. This time on sea level rise, he rightly compares how the current political situation has handled prominent and reasoned disagreement to the inquisition of Galileo by the Romans. How far have we really come since Galileo’s time?

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Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner: the Galileo of our “scientific age”
M. I. Bhat
E-mail: bhatmi@hotmail.com

Science has taken a leap four centuries back to dark age when science lost to theology. Then the butt of condemnation and punishment were just two souls – Bruno and, the better remembered, Galileo. Now it is a huge horde of scientists from across the planet, who dare challenge the mainstream belief in CO2-induced global warming or anthropogenically-induced global warming (AGW), that are being condemned with calls for punishment of these “traitors” for committing “high crimes against humanity,” “deserving Nuremberg-style trials,” ……… Reviling and calls for punishment are unending. If theology was settled then for a particular cosmological view, now it is “science is settled’ for AGW. Then it was cosmological data gathered through telescope versus theological view; now it is clean, hard core science versus manipulated science backed by political interests. Then it was Cardinal Bellarmine backed by Pope Clement VIII/Pope Paul V; now it is Dr. R. K. Pachauri backed by our political Pope, Mr. Banki Moon.

More than any of the “skeptics” it is the Swedish scientist, Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner who, I believe, has been condemned the most by not just IPCC but by the Nobel Committee as well. As the President of International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA) who could possibly have been better placed to talk of sea level change than him. Under his charge, when INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, after deliberations and discussions at several international meetings, declared a possible sea level change of +5 cm ±15cm by the year 2100, it was based on a huge amount of world-wide data gathered by scientists from different parts of the globe. No politics, business or no activist interests were involved; just hard-core science.

Some Thoughts on Blog Moderation

Today(as pointed out by several readers), a blog called fragilecologies put up a post titled SKEPTICS, SHOW US YOUR EMAILS: ‘turn-about’ is fair play.” Mickey Glantz, DAY 4 at COP 15. The post wasn’t that exciting for me, it went on about how climategate is no big deal because “skeptics do it too” basically. So why not just release all the ‘skeptic’ emails and make the advocates happy? Unfortunately for the advocates, my emails include every single comment at tAV, they include some business with Tiawan, some personal emails and a few other things unrelated to climate. The CRU whistleblowers took time to filter these sorts of things out. In the past year and a half, tAV has received 14,783 comments mixed in with all these emails. The correspondance with other bloggers is a very very small fraction of those, and the vast majority is right here in public. I actually considered it still but it wouldn’t have the same impact when you consider that the lack of ‘hide the rise’, would only mean my implied evil doings were sanitized before release. If you want the true impact, hack away.

It doesn’t matter though because this is an open blog, people trash bad work here faster than you could make it. Steve McIntyre once wrote that he appreciates disagreement, my reply on his thread was something like ‘screw up more, we’ll help you out’. The long time readers here know that unfortunately, I screw up fairly often. My saving grace is to finish with a respectable job of admitting it, even though like the rest of you, I don’t want to. The point isn’t to be perfect right out of the box, but rather to come to the right conclusion. Hell, I’ve got a CRU post from only a week ago which we still haven’t figured out what’s wrong.

So what’s the point of all this long winded self gratifying rubbish…

I CAN’T TRICK PEOPLE EVEN IF I WANTED TO.

…..It’s NOT possible because everything is in the open!!

Big Journalism on Climategate

An article describing some of the happenings from climategate. Patrick Courrielche was one of the journalists who was thorough enough to ask questions from everyone as to what happened and how things got started. He’s got a 3 part series running on the issue with answers from several of us ‘skeptic’ bloggers. It’s funny using the term skeptic when to my knowledge all the skeptic bloggers believe CO2 captures heat retards heat flow. He did a good job, maybe tAV got a little too much credit, but no problem there right . Check it out.

Peer-to-Peer Review: How ‘Climategate’ Marks the Maturing of a New Science Movement, Part I

Posted by Patrick Courrielche Jan 8th 2010 at 7:06 am.

John Hirst – Models Predicted Temperatures Would Stop Rising!

I received this link from L. Gardy LaRoche by email. A reporter from the BBC takes offense with John Hirst getting a bonus for predicting global warming and a mild winter right before the huge cold snap we’re having. The Met office is actually famous for predicting every year will be the warmest on record with hot summers and mild winters, it’s so bad that the only prediction which holds any water is the prediction that the Met office will predict warm weather next year as well.

So this reporter, armed with a few inconvenient facts, goes after John Hurst until at the end John states flat out that Met models predicted that temperatures would flatten in recent years. That’s all great, except that they keep predicting warmest year ever and keep missing the mark. If the models predicted flattening of temperatures, why would they keep predicting warming?

Bah Humbug!

Tony Brown has taken the time to put together another well researched post on the history of climate. This time Tony’s he’s written English climate history in the context of the great Charles Dickens, how cool is that! enjoy…

I struggled a bit with the formatting so use CTRL + to make it larger if needed and let me know if there are any big problems.

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Guest writer – Tony Brown

Has Charles Dickens shaped our perception of climate change?

Charles Dickens. Victorian winters. A Christmas Carol. Ice fairs on the Frozen Thames. Cold Cold Cold Cold Cold. Dickens has irrevocably moulded the climate views of generations of Anglo Saxon peoples as TV, Films and plays all promote his image of icy winters in that era. Is this view of Dickens winters correct? We take a look at his life through the prism of climate.

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth England on Feb 7^th 1812.

1812 overall was a very cold year in the UK -the early part of the winter was especially bitter over Europe, marked by Napoleons retreat from Moscow, as illustrated in this painting by Adolph Northen.