There are several people who want to claim that these emails and data have no meaning, there are others who feel they spell complete doom for the global warming movement. We all have our own opinions on the matter and while this blog is not dedicated to moderate views, it is dedicated to real views. What the scientists need to understand is that their work affects everyone, and thus we have a right to know.
Since there are many readers from the NYT which are visiting here. The Air Vent is described as dedicated to skeptical views. This is not accurate. The Air Vent is a site which accepts all views in a basically unmoderated form, however this blog started by me getting mad at Real Climate for a paper which from over a thousand proxies, throws away 60 percent of non hockey stick (inconvenient) data to make a hockey stick. – see the hockey stick posts link above. After that I got my official non-compliance label and was a ‘denialist’. At least the NYT has me in the middle somewhere. I don’t disagree with global warming but I do disagree that we know the magnitude of it. I also disagree that we know what temperatures were 1000 years or even 100 years ago in relation to today. These issues are not well addressed in the science as open minded technical people can see.
If you are new and have a technical background (of any sort) and you read the links (hockey stick posts) above you’ll be asking yourself why the insanity of this can get through peer review and why it’s not a front page story on the New York Times. In my opinion it makes the emails look like child’s play. What’s more is that the hockey stick creators make one method after another which provide similar distortions of the data and FALSE temperature curves. In my opinion, ANY, statistician would say the same thing. — Several have.
These new emails do not provide any huge revelation of collusion, we already knew about that. They don’t provide any smoking gun proving intentional corruption of data for a conclusion (although the Jones quote was good enough for me). They don’t have any proof of making a conclusion in exchange for money or proof of changing a conclusion for personal benefit. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t expect any of that. The mechanism of reward for certain results is exactly what some of us expected it to be.
What the emails show is that there is some good science going on. There are some quality open discussions in them for sure. What they also show however, is a pattern of elimination of dissenting views. They show an advocacy by some ‘scientists’ which belies scientific credibility. These few names are universally limited to the top people in the field — think about what that means. These are the ones who actively work to make sure that dissent is unpublished and are often the loudest in public to discredit others. Mann (creator of the bogus Al Gore hockey stick) seems to be the worst offender along these lines but he clearly has a circle of trusted friends. Finally, these files show a lot of money involved in the industry. Big dollars are in play with big travel budgets, prestige and a lot of power for those who follow the main player’s lead.
What is probably the number one legal issue is the FOIA obstruction and the conspiring with government officials to block legal and properly worded requests. Of that we have proof. Again, we outsiders (non team members) are not surprised. It’s been pretty obvious that something was happening but what we have is complicity of the government in blocking legal Freedom of Information Act requests.
For those who would sweep this under the rug — not so fast. There are serious issues brought to the foreront by the emails which need to be addressed. Global warming affects everyone. Whether it’s through massive taxation and regulation or more storms. We do have a right to know where the conclusions come from and how they are arrived at.
For instance:
- I want to know what they mean when Mann says – “don’t think that the entire AGU hierarchy has yet been compromised!”
- I want to know why it’s ok to ignore “certain” FOIA requests but not others.
- I want to know why it’s ok to cover up alleged temperature data extracted from trees when the data doesn’t agree with temperature.
- How did Saiers get removed from the GRL?
There are a thousand questions which remain unanswered. These emails have at least taken a step toward verifying a complaint by outsiders about why some papers which seem quite accurate don’t get published. Now we know.
Perhaps Energy and Environment isn’t the discredited journal after all.
The emails are a step forward in understanding of both positives and negatives in this highly politicized science.
Baby steps.