Mike's "nature trick"

[T]he Team had a problem: actual reconstructions “diverge” from the instrumental series in the last part of 20th century. For instance, in the original hockey stick (ending 1980) the last 30-40 years of data points slightly downwards. In order to smooth those time series one needs to “pad” the series beyond the end time, and no matter what method one uses, this leads to a smoothed graph pointing downwards in the end whereas the smoothed instrumental series is pointing upwards — a divergence. So Mann’s solution was to use the instrumental record for padding, which changes the smoothed series to point upwards as clearly seen in UC’s figure (violet original, green without “Mike’s Nature trick”).

But read the whole thing.

Examiner.com

As embarrassing as the e-mails are, some of the documents are more embarrassing. They include a five-page PDF document titled The Rules of the Game, that appears to be a primer for propagating the AGW message to the average subject/resident of the United Kingdom. The document suggests that it is a precis of a longer document housed at the Web site of the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

]]> http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012688.html http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012688.html Reader Tips Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:01:02 -0500

....you might be from Saskatchewan.

October, 2009 - Under the Green Options Plan, SaskPower intends to procure up to 175MW of wind power from independent power producers.

November, 2009 - Wall Govt Scrambles To Cover Deficit

Previous: As goes Ontario...

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

Previous

From the comments;

I love the e-mails back and forth about the endpoint problem in the F77 models, where the interpolation algorithm tends to skew the graph way up near the endpoint regardless of the input data because of the way the algorithm works.

They weren't worried about the algorithm per se, but whether it would be noticed.

...

I'm a researcher, at least when I find the time. I have considerable experience writing and reviewing technical papers.

Presuming that these email excerpts collected by Delingpole are not taken out of context, this is amazing stuff. It indicates a clear debauchery and politicalization of the scientific method.

All researchers want their horse to win, but for most its tempered - at least at the conscious level - by a deep dedication to fair play and the truth. As a whole their integrity has always impressed me. If these emails by Phil Jones are as bad as they appear, he should spend the rest of his days as a Wall-Mart greeter, cause he doesn't deserve to be a scientist.

...

Last night I did a Google search for FOI2009.ZIP and got 19 results, tonight I get 1080.

Expect much more of this.

Update: The Hadley hack makes the NYT.

An unknown person put postings on some climate skeptic websites that advertsied an FTP file on a Russian FTP server, here is the message that was placed on the Air Vent today:

We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents

The file was large, about 61 megabytes, containing hundreds of files.

It contained data, code, and emails from Phil Jones at CRU to and from many people.

I’ve seen the file, it appears to be genuine and from CRU. Others who have seen it concur- it appears genuine. There are so many files it appears unlikely that it is a hoax. The effort would be too great.

Here is some of the emails just posted at Climate Audit on this thread: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7801#comments

Yowza.

Air Vent link here.

h/t ChrisinMB

Update

The director of Britain's leading Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, has told Investigate magazine's TGIF Edition tonight that his organization has been hacked, and the data flying all over the internet appears to be genuine.

In an exclusive interview, Jones told TGIF, "It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails."

"Have you alerted police"

"Not yet. We were not aware of what had been taken."

Jones says he was first tipped off to the security breach by colleagues at the website RealClimate.

"Real Climate were given information, but took it down off their site and told me they would send it across to me. They didn't do that. I only found out it had been released five minutes ago."

TGIF asked Jones about the controversial email discussing "hiding the decline", and Jones explained what he was trying to say….

James Delingpole of the Telegraph (UK) - "If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW."

These emails are damning stuff, suggesting collusion, conspiracy, and suppression and manipulation of data on the part of leading "climate" scientists. Read Andrew Bolt for some of the highlights.

Lots at Climate Depot, too.

Climate Audit is still being slammed, so you may have a lot of trouble getting in there.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

]]> http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012682.html http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012682.html Reader Tips Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:01:02 -0500 We finished up hunting today with a tally of one buck, two does, and three of the luckiest moose ever to cross a field of wheat stubble. I considered shooting one, then ramming the carcass with my brother's farm truck to plead "road kill", but thought better of it.

It's a quixotic place, this oil well riddled, environmentally decimated province. I can't recall ever hearing of moose in the southeast, and neither can my father, whose lived here his entire life. Now, moose aren't entirely uncommon - the unintended consequence of chem fallow and no-till. Thanks, Monsanto!

I'll post a photo of the featured carrion when I get home. Tomorrow is a travel day, after which normal blogging will resume.

Thanks for your patience.

The retired Canadian businessman, whose self-described "auditing" a few years ago prompted a Congressional review of climate science, has once again thrown EnviroLand into a tailspin. In September, he revealed that a famous graph using tree rings to show unprecedented 20th century warming relies on thin data. Since its publication in 2000, University of East Anglia professor Keith Briffa's much-celebrated image has made star appearances everywhere from U.N. policy papers to activists' posters. Like other so-called "hockey stick" temperature graphs, it's an easy sell—one look and it seems Gadzooks! We're burning ourselves up!

"It was the belle of the ball," Mr. McIntyre told me on a recent phone call from Ontario. "Its dance card was full."

At least until Mr. McIntyre reported that the modern portion of that graph, which shows temperatures appearing to skyrocket in the last 100 years, relies on just 12 tree cores in Russia's Yamal region. When Mr. McIntyre presented a second graph, adding data from 34 tree cores from a nearby site, the temperature spike disappears.

h/t Maz2

CNN, Jan. 22nd - Promising to return America to the "moral high ground" in the war on terrorism, President Obama issued three executive orders Thursday to demonstrate a clean break from the Bush administration, including one requiring that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility be closed within a year. During a signing ceremony at the White House, Obama reaffirmed his inauguration pledge that the United States does not have "to continue with a false choice between our safety and our ideals."

Washington Post, Nov.18th - President Obama directly acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay will not close by the January deadline he set, but he said he hoped to still achieve that goal sometime next year.

You know, for as politically inconseqential as our betters in media tell us Sarah Palin is, I can't help but notice how much coverage she generates.

It reminds me why I always correct those who describe me as a "citizen journalist". I don't consider myself a journalist, never have, and this post illustrates the distinction very well.

When mainstream media declares someone to be inconsequential, they write over 4,600 stories about them.

When I consider someone to be inconsequential, I don't write any at all.

(Related)

Tonight, under the aegis of SDA's ongoing Cultural Outreach Program, which was hopelessly designed to further awareness and understanding between disparate communities, we present a Queen's English translation of a volubly heated freestyle Rap Battle. The debate format is as follows: practitioner Hydrogen asserts his thesis, Boost is given the opportunity to provide his counterargument, and then the floor is opened to questions and comments.

Feel free to flamboast your crunkest Cronkites furilla in the comments.

McWilliams:

I've been writing about food and agriculture for more than a decade. Until that evening, however, I'd never actively thought about this most basic culinary question: Is eating personal?

We know more than we've ever known about the innards of the global food system. We understand that food can both nourish and kill. We know that its production can both destroy and enhance our environment. We know that farming touches every aspect of our lives -- the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil we need.

So it's hard to avoid concluding that eating cannot be personal. What I eat influences you. What you eat influences me. Our diets are deeply, intimately and necessarily political...

Watch out - he's making a move for your fork:

We know that something has to be done to save our food from corporate interests. But I wonder -- are we ready to do what must be done? Sure, we've been inundated with ideas: eat local, vote with your fork, buy organic, support fair trade, etc. But these proposals all lack something that every successful environmental movement has always placed at its core: genuine sacrifice.

Until we make that leap, until we create a culinary culture in which the meat-eaters must do the apologizing, the current proposals will be nothing more than gestures that turn the fork into an empty symbol rather than a real tool for environmental change.

(emph. mine)

"

h/t Gordon

Related...

(Update - comments should be working now. My apologies.)

A tale of two business models.