Call it ClimateGate! AGW Data Fudged to Fit “Consensus”

Consider this post a followup to Don’s great post on the subject from early this morning.

This story has expanded and Hot Air has entered the fray.

From: Tom Wigley [...]
To: Phil Jones [...]
Subject: 1940s
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:25:38 -0600
Cc: Ben Santer [...]
Phil,
Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If you look at the attached plot you will see that theland also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know).
So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean – but we’d still have to explain the land blip. I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips—higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from.
Removing ENSO does not affect this.
It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with “why the blip”.
Let me go further. If you look at NH vs SH and the aerosol effect (qualitatively or with MAGICC) then with a reduced ocean blip we get continuous warming in the SH, and a cooling in the NH—just as one would expect with mainly NH aerosols.
The other interesting thing is (as Foukal et al. note – from MAGICC) that the 1910-40 warming cannot be solar. The Sun can get at most 10% of this with Wang et al solar, less with Foukal solar. So this may well be NADW, as Sarah and I noted in 1987 (and also Schlesinger later). A reduced SST blip in the 1940s makes the 1910-40 warming larger than the SH (which it currently is not)—but not really enough.
So … why was the SH so cold around 1910? Another SST problem? (SH/NH data also attached.)
This stuff is in a report I am writing for EPRI, so I’d appreciate any comments you (and Ben) might have.

So, they were altering data to fit their theory!

And how did they d eal with folks who didn’t agree with them?

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.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

Now, we see efforts to “punish” publications and professionals that publish information contrary to their point of view.

Also, the University has confirmed that the hacked information is real.

In the most serious admission yet in the developing story of the hacking of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, its director now admits that the content of the hacked files is in fact genuine and did indeed come from his organization.

Dr. Phil Jones stated in an interview with Ian Wishart of Investigate magazine that he had known about the hack for the past three or four days. He had not called the police because he had not known which files were compromised.

He further confirmed to Wishart that his organization had changed all e-mail and file-sharing passwords, and had acted so hastily that Jones himself was briefly unable to access his own e-mail account.

When asked to explain the most damaging statement attributed to him thus far, about “using Mike’s nature trick…to hide the decline,” Jones said this:

No, that’s completely wrong. In the sense that they’re talking about two different things here. They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered – but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years.

You can read his email, and this response, and judge for yourself.

BTW, the source files are available here.

At this point in time, people are still sorting through the information hacked from the The University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climatic Research Centre.  I’ll be following this situation, and will post updates as they become available.

Update# 1: Atlas Shrugs has the following…

From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.

This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

>Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)
***

>The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.***

More as I find it.

Update #2: Snarky Basterd from Feed Your ADHD just forwarded this link from the New York Times.  I gave it a quick read, and am thinking that they’re actiing somewhat balanced, but at the same time  attempting to cast some doubt as to the meanings of the emails.  I think if the reader gives the content a look, they’ll come to the conclusion that most of us have.

BTW, a massive h/t goes to cbullitt from Soylent Green.  I first heard of this from his blog.  He’s continuing to cover this as well, so give his post a look.

Other Links:

American Spectator

Climate Progress:  Moonbats try to debunk the whole situation without actually discussing the content of the emails!  Graphs and data abound, but were they completed with falsified data?

Michelle Malkin

National Review/Planet Gore

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