Christopher Essex is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Western Ontario.
Governments leaders wanted something where they could absolve themselves of the responsibility for making informed decisions. They would have to read science stuff otherwise. They ordered up a kind of unnatural scientist that would tell them precisely what they wanted to hear.
But they gave the puppeteers clubs to deal with those of us who remained true. And the perps of Climategate are what they got. All of my colleagues have had to endure these bullies and criminals for a very long time.
You should understand that (real) scientists have had to pay the heaviest price for the creation of these monsters for decades. And they were not created by us.
Read the whole thing, and then send it to your MLA.
Related – 28 years with the BBC, then…. it’s how they build concensus!
Climate ‘scientists’ should have been fired as soon as they said the ‘science was settled’ – obviously there was no need for their services after that. It is a shame that real scientists had to suffer these fools.
Governments leaders wanted something where they could absolve themselves of the responsibility for making informed decisions.
Bullshit . Government leaders want an excuse to maximize revenue streams , for the taxationally impaired , that’s you and me .
“A milestone in this mess can be said to be when John Houghton of the IPCC said it was the IPCC’s job to “orchestrate” the views of science.”
And who was the enabler in this orchestration ?? The media.
Meanwhile, over at De Smog; Hogan, Littlemore and Suzuki are taking it on the chin. A relentless smack down – from their own readers, no less.
Very unsettling, Kate.
The next perjorative is going to be:
“Your ah ah…ah climate scientician”?
“Ah, um,…I have to be leaving now…”
Cheers
Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
I’ve been looking at a blog called “Musings from the Chiefio.” The fellow who runs it (seems to be a very serious person) seems to have discovered that most of the official thermometers around the world that measure temperatures have gradually, over the past 20 years or so, been basically moved down out of the mountains so they’re in the lowlands, often near airports. Does anyone know of a legitimate explanation for this?
LOL! Dr. Essex thought me Applied Math 026!!
Carol, you need to research the Urban Heat Island(UHI) effect.
The thermometers used to be rural, but advancing urban development has grown up around them and the thermometers now read not the temperature of the meadows that were originally there but heat reflected and generated by urbanization.
Additionally, the thermometers are contained in Stephens Screens which are all supposed to have a uniform white paint on the outside to give a standard reading of the temperature inside.
Due to maintenance issues many of them have not been repainted after the paint has flaked off from erosion and weathering and therefore the Stephens Screens themselves are a heat source compared to when the paint was whole and fresh.
A positive report on McIntyre and McKitrick from the Citizen:
http://tinyurl.com/yh7xjd9
RFC [….LOL! Dr. Essex thought me Applied Math 026!!]
If you passed, I have every confidence that you got some real education…..congradulations!!!!
“Posted by: sasquatch at December 6, 2009 1:29 AM”
A solid B. 🙂
Dr. Essex didn’t suffer fools well..and this was back in the late 80’s when you could still ridicule students to tears. 🙂
“And who was the enabler in this orchestration? The media.” – Ron in Kelowna
I think Ron hit upon a very important point. Science & Scientists are going to suffer through all of this. More than a few of the scientists should, for acting like herd animals and letting their political views get in the way of their objectivity.
But notice that there’s not a whiff of a hint of a possibility of ANYONE in the MSM getting hurt by this? The American networks & newspapers have been dreadful. Ditto most in Canada.
Remember the old adage, “Don’t shoot the messenger”? How about a few of them being fired?!? Why do Bill Good, Anna Maria Tremonte, Bob McDonald, and a host of others still have jobs?
Remember the old adage, “Don’t shoot the messenger”? How about a few of them being fired?
My thinking is that most news people just went along with what they’d been told (that sort of indicates either a willing ignorance or complete incompetence).
Lalalala – I’m not listening.
But the deeper point is that so-called journalists these days have no clue as to how to question “agendists”. They’ve been pre-co-opted.
Don’t forget that the media *also* swallowed the Obama Hope and Change mantra. Gullible er what!
You’d almost think that the MSM is in some sort of bi-polar mode.
Bushitler-bad
Anything else-good.
Oz, you are correct about the screens not being maintained but they are correctly called Stephenson Screens. I have worked at airports and observed weather for nearly 35years and have seen a change in the way observations have been made. Once upon a time weather observers were all over the country but have been replaced by machines known as AWOS (automated weather observing stations). Not known as the most accurate or efficient system. But waaaayyyy cheaper.
Goreacle Report: Corrects News:
Winter officially starts December, 21, 2009; not, December 05, 2009.
My official Footprint Advance here*.
…-
Rare Winter Storm Blankets South With Snow
NEW ORLEANS — Louisiana got its earliest snowflakes ever as people across the South awakened to a dusting of powder.
Snow started falling in the region late Friday and continued into Saturday morning.
Snow also caused a few cancellations Saturday at Washington’s Dulles International Airport. Up to 6 inches of snow was reported in the D.C. region.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2401337/posts
“*Weather Maps: North America”
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/weathermaps/?ref=canoe_en_p_text_weathermaps
Carol: “Does anyone know of a legitimate explanation for this?”
Kate has been posting photos of these thermometer sites for a long time. It appears that there is no uniformity and that too many of them are situated in places guaranteed to register high temps.
So, no legitimate explanation, just illegitimate locations to result in data supporting “global warming” (sic).
The climategate scientists are like Archie Bunker, telling everyone to stifle it when questioned.
Denmark ain’t Green.
“pig excrement contains methane,”.
Survey says, Oink good/better/best with “catchup”.
“but statistics can prove anything you like.”
Da proof quote: Surveyor says:
“”We certainly have our strong points,” says Peter Rørmose Jensen of the Danish statistics agency, “but statistics can prove anything you like.”
“So why does Denmark have such a ‘green’ reputation? Morten Møller of the Danish Energy Agency in Copenhagen has often asked himself the same question. He thinks it may have something to do with all the windmills dotting the Danish landscape.”
“It is true that the windmills have considerably reduced Denmark’s greenhouse gas emissions, but increased road traffic has already undone the difference. The number of pigs held in Denmark has also increased, and pig excrement contains methane, which is 20 times more damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide.
It is not what Denmark wants the participants to the 15th UN climate conference (COP15) to hear when they arrive in Copenhagen on Monday. The official pamphlets for the conference only mention Denmark’s success stories. It gets 20 percent of its electricity from wind energy – more than any other country. Its economy has seen constant growth over the past 40 years, and yet its greenhouse gas emissions have remained roughly the same.
“We certainly have our strong points,” says Peter Rørmose Jensen of the Danish statistics agency, “but statistics can prove anything you like.”
“Denmark: not as green as you thought
Denmark, which hosts the UN climate change conference next week, is often seen as one of the most environmentally friendly countries in the world. This reputation is mostly undeserved, but Denmark is doing its best to catch up.”
http://www.nrc.nl/international/article2430374.ece/Denmark_not_as_green_as_you_thought
There are two thermometer issues – one the quality of siting, and the second, their disappearance. I’ve been meaning to link to a post about this, but the flood of Climategate has been pushing mostly everything else aside for the moment. Will do it this week though.
Re siting of surface stations.
The go-to place for this is here
http://www.surfacestations.org/
This long and patient project has involved hundreds of volunteers going to stations in the USA and photographing them.
Many many of them are biassed towards hotter temps.
So this data is very questionable too.
So we have tree rings which show a cooling in recent years (calling into question the accuracy of them as proxies) being “corrected” with very questionable ground station measurements.
Science…bah….the only way to convince the carbonistas, and Al Gore, of the importance of Climategate is to put it in terms they would understand.
And the sky grew dark, the earth trembled and the veil was torn from top to bottom.
“The climategate scientists are like Archie Bunker, telling everyone to stifle it when questioned.
STFU, I prefer to *not* have coffee spewed on my keyboard.
Expect to read more letters and articles like this in coming weeks. And if the academic granting agencies in Canada are intellectually honest, they’ll do some soul-searching into their practices and decisions over the past 15 years.
I told a story on here a few months ago which didn’t seem to get a reaction but which I (naively, maybe) found stunning. A friend of mine is the head of one of the science departments at a medium-sized Canadian university. We were having an — ahem — discussion on the topic of global warming/climate change. I asked him, and another scienctist who was present, whether they found it disturbing to see how science was being politicized in this debate. They agreed on the reply: “Not when it’s good to do so, as in this case.” I suggested that it’s never good to politicize science.
But the real shocker came when I asked him this question: If a Canadian academic from a relevant field were applying to the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) — which has a very large budget and distributes grants in the 100K’s — and the premise of his project was a sceptical one in regard to climate change, or one which didn’t accept the conventional science in the field, or sought to disprove it, would that grant application be successful? The answer was that it probably wouldn’t, regardless of its strengths.
I was stunned by this reply, and stunned as well by the fact that the person replying — remember, the head of a science department at a Canadian university — wasn’t bothered by his reply.
Anyone who thinks that the culture evident in the CRUtape emails and documents is isolated to a relatively small circle of climate scientists is kidding himself. A huge number of professional scientists, the very people who should know better, have for a variety of reasons jumped into the tank and have used their positions and influence to skew decisions about the careers of scientists and the distribution of federal research grant money in order to advance a political cause.
I now await — and count on — some brave souls in the field to come forward and talk about this, telling the truth about what they know. I think it’s going to happen.
Now, now, MJ, surely *anyone* questioning AGW research is an evil SOB funded by big oil.
Haven’t you been programmed/compromised yet?
You mention “brave souls”, I think I got you covered there.
It is suppose to be one of the ways greenhouse gas is measured is by how low the night time tempertures are. The greenhouse gases are suppose to act as an insulating blanket and hold in the warmth. The warmer it is over night the more gas present. The recorded data from airports is NOT what is happening away from the urban heat island of concrete and asphalt and unless you are growing crops you would have no idea just much of a difference there is. An overnight temperture at Ottawa airport of plus 4 results in frost damage in low lying areas in field crops. Overnight plus 2 results in widespread frost damage (the killing frost) and overnight of 0 results in plants freezing right up to buildings (if not covered).
It is just as MJ is stating..there is another agenda at play here..and it doesn’t involve the truth or science. The reality of a 4 degree difference in actual temperatures (rural areas)as compared to the recorded ones (urban airport)would mean dramatically less CO2 in the atmosphere IMO.
Thanks for retelling this story MJ. It certainly is worth the effort in light of what is happening as this fraud is exposed. The anger and denial of scientitians and their supporters is getting louder as their well supported livelyhood is threatened.
I agree with your analysis that it is not just a few of these crooks at the centre but as the US alone has spent 78 billion on climate change the scope of this corruption is huge. An example of this growing distrust of science is the H1N1 vaccination. Now we are being told that it is because the public is washing its hands and avoiding those with the flu that its impact has been so tiny.
Agenda-driven statist politics taint the integrity of everyone and everything they touch.
Pretty much tells you all you need to understand about post modern politics.
Ooops, I just posted a link to this in an earlier post but see Kate’s beaten me to it.
http://www.ehow.com/how_2106261_be-climatologist.html
and they used to just read the weather on TV
“Governments leaders wanted something where they could absolve themselves of the responsibility for making informed decisions”.
Bullshit . Government leaders want an excuse to maximize revenue streams , for the taxationally impaired , that’s you and me .
Posted by: Bill D. Cat at December 6, 2009 12:13 AM
I think you nailed it ‘Bill D. Cat’
Governments agenda is for us to pay more tax.
MJ, I second Dave’s thanks. I’ve just shared your story with several people. It is both profound and more than a little disturbing.
Rick Rae at December 6, 2009 7:00 AM, thank you for the correction.
I haven’t been getting much sleep lately and have been making a number of errors in my posts here and at other sites.
I’m looking forward to Kate’s update/round-up on the surface temperature thermometer standards aspect of the issue.
Secret Wish: Someone confront Anna Maria Tremonti, Jeffrey Simpson, and Bill Good with this: “Do you realize that your belittling and defaming of AGW skeptics has directly lead to situations like what has happened to David Bellamy?”
If presented in a polite and respectful manner, I wonder how they’d respond?
Folks, I think you may like the way I treat the matter, stemming from this post.
I compare the fake “scientists” to “Dr.” Frankenstein and even to “Dr.” Mengele, due to their utter lack of credibility and integrity as “scientists”. And for the fact that they’re scary as hell.
Also included is a picture of a kit for blowing smoke up peoples’ a$$es as a “medical treatment”, from long, long ago.
http://thecanadiansentinel.blogspot.com/2009/12/climategate-monsters-terrorize-real.html
Anthony Watts, at the surfacestations.org site and his great “Watts Up With That” blog, has documented the failures of our temperature measurement system. Anyone who looks at his research with an open mind will realize that even honest use of the temperature data would be a disaster. There is just no standardization. Further, changes over time have corrupted the data. Cities have overgrown monitoring sites that used to be rural. Rural sites that would be away from the urban heat island effect have been dropped out of the system in great number. When sites were computerized, many of them were pulled in closer to offices (and concrete, asphalt, and other heat sources) to save on expensive cable and trenching. There is no way on Earth you could make enough “adjustments” to it to make such a shaky system do what is being asked of it. One of the least likely aspects of the present scandal is that reputable people would rely on such a terrible data base.
“My thinking is that most news people just went along with what they’d been told (that sort of indicates either a willing ignorance or complete incompetence).”
Vee ver just following orders.
Vee had no idea vhat vas going on in those camps.
There is a singular lesson here in all of this:
We need to get the government out of almost everything.
They are a monster.
Take anything from them and you lose your freedom; you lose your very soul.
Let’s get back to The Constitution.
Expel all current members of Congress. Vote out the Obama Tyrant.
Take our country back.
The funny thing is people like Mann have been unintentionally telling you how weak their science was all along:
FRUIT OF THE POISON TREE, TARTS FROM THE POISON FRUIT
http://naturalfake.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/fruit-of-the-poison-tree-tarts-from-the-poison-fruit/
All the “warming” can be attributed to the Urban Heat Island Effect. Rural sites are not getting warmer. Check out “Global Warming Urban Heat Effect” on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcsvaCPYgcI
So Simple A Sixth Grader Can Understand It!
“My thinking is that most news people just went along with what they’d been told”
Look at how many millions the media gave to AGW alarmism in free advertising to “raise awareness”.
I would still have given US Media the benefit of doubt, until I saw the way they’ve tried to stonewall and minimize the CRU scandal.
They’re part of the fraud.
What Fen said !
Google the RECENT articles on “ozone hole”, and “fluorocarbons.” You’ll see the model now being used to foist AGW upon the masses. Good science corrupted for political reasons at huge economic cost.
Fluorocarbon reductions “repaired” the Arctic ozone hole, but HAD A NEGATIVE EFFECT ON CLIMATE by COOLING the Antarctic. This is documented in a recent article [www.digitaljournal.com/article/283297].
This is known as unintended consequences. Effects of CO2 reduction are even more complex than CFC replacement. It needs studied for a much longer period IF AT ALL.
Masses, beware of liberals wearing sheep’s clothing!
Trust Marxists even less!
Almost every morning during the cool seasons, I hear on my clock radio that the temp is X, and when I look at my digital and analog thermometers, they pretty consistently read X minus 2 to 4 deg F. I live in the country and the temps are measured in the city. Could this whole “crisis” really be as simple as that?
As I have reported here at sda, quite a few times – the temperature in the Yukon can vary as much as 20 degrees, up or down, on any given day, between what it is and what is being reported on the weather channel. Just last week it was -1 C. but the weather channel said it was -18 C.
Science is agenda driven because of the funding issue. Whoever grants the $$ gets the results that that outfit wants. Vitamins vs pharmy drugs is a good example of this – big pharma funds Universities that train doctors sooo how many Drs recommend Zinc for colds? How many recommend brandy and lemon juice with honey for a cold? The two remedies I have mentioned work.
This has hit ‘science’ to the core – science should get out of social issues, IMO.
“The thermometers used to be rural, but advancing urban development has grown up around them and the thermometers now read not the temperature of the meadows that were originally there but heat reflected and generated by urbanization.”
Oz, advancing urban development has turned mountains into valleys?
What people have to get away from is the illusion that there is such a thing as an “official” temperature for a city. One of the neat toys that Anthony Watts has for sale on WUWT is a USB temperature monitor that can sample temperatures from once/second to once/hour for a total of 16383 readings. As soon as saw this ad I had to get some and so ordered 3. After doing calibration runs to ensure that they were reading properly I dropped them around my yard this summer to see what kind of temperature variations existed in the space of 1/3 acre in a suburban area.
The results surprised me with sites that I thought would be equivalent giving readings that differed by 5-10 degrees F. I could correlate the readings to some degree by determining how much sun exposure that patch of ground had during that day, how close it was to either the house or workshop and the type of vegetation in the area. Of course the readings from my yard differed substantially from the “official” airport temperatures most of the time. I tried multiple locations in my yard but at no point did I get temperatures which were close to one another even though the calibration test showed the units with within +/- 1 degree F of each other. Each spot in my yard had a unique thermal temporal signature.
Now if I can’t determine the temperature of my yard to within 5 degrees F, how much weight are we supposed to give to the airport thermometers that allegedly show the temperature of a whole metropolitan area? The only way one would be able to calculate the mean temperature of a city would be to have millions of tiny thermometers scattered throughout the city that communicated wirelessly through a self-organizing mesh network. Averaging those results would give us a much better average of the temperature than a single site but distributed computing still hasn’t gotten cheap enough to do this yet.
What I find curious is that there are very few error bars on the temperature data put out by the IPCC. There are for historical data, but recent data shows just the hockey stick blade that would appear to have a precision of better than 0.01 degrees C.
One easy way to check the variance of temperatures is to take a small city that has 5-10 weather stations scattered around it and take a look at the raw data. This would give an idea of the variance in temperature in a small geographic area but it appears that the position taken by CRU and the IPCC is to use fewer and fewer stations to compute a global average temperature. Also, there seems to be constant “adjustment” of temperatures which makes absolutely no physical sense.
I don’t care about temperature differences of 0.1 degrees. I want to know whether it is above freezing or below freezing. If the temperature drops below freezing during the night in the spring then it’s still too cold to plant my garden. If the temperature is consistently above freezing, then I know I have to set my irrigation system to 100% of the time for each zone when the maximum temperature is >40C and I can probably get away with 75% if it is just around 30 C. Also when it’s really hot I need to check my tomato plants daily to see if they need watering and ensure there is enough beer in my fridge. If the temperature is below freezing and there’s snow on the ground then I don’t do very much outside and know I have to give myself extra time to get to work since I have to scrape the ice and snow off my vehicle. It was very simple until the IPCC and statists got involved in this process.
We went from the Age of Romance to the Modern era. Now where supposed to be in the Post Modern era. Personally I think where past that into the Pre-Collapse. Soon the Fall.
JMO
Oz, advancing urban development has turned mountains into valleys?
~willis
Your words, not mine willis.
Is that what you think has happened, willis?
Seems to be an absurd idea.