National Science Foundation Clears 'Climate-Gate' Scientist Of Any Misconduct

[luckytxn 2,264]

Pretty much. Depending on the context, Lucky's favorite word to refer to those he disagrees with are one of 'sheep', 'moron', or 'socialist'. Sometimes all three. But he means well, and has good taste in music, so we indulge him.

Just call them as I see them. It was OK for all the years during Bush's year in office to have no discussion and use all the horrible vitriol but of course since your messiah is now in it is no longer OK. Don't work like that and get used to it. I said that this would happen but no one cared back then.

Yes I do have good taste.

[bigdog 376]

The National Science Foundation has cleared climatologist and Penn State professor Michael Mann of any misconduct in the "Climate-Gate" controversy, which became a lightning rod for climate change skeptics in 2009.

In a memo Tuesday, the NSF's Inspector General's office said that "the research in question was originally completed over 10 years ago. Although the subject's data is still available and still the focus of significant critical examination, no direct evidence has been presented that indicates the subject fabricated the raw data he used for his research or falsified his results."

"Lacking any direct evidence of research misconduct," the review concludes, "as defined under the NSF Research Misconduct Regulation, we are closing this investigation with no further action."

The investigation centered around thousands of e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit in Great Britain, that showed scientists discussing how to keep research skeptical of climate change out of peer-review journals, among other things. Conservatives and climate skeptics latched onto the e-mails, using them as evidence that the idea of man-made climate change is not true. The e-mails did not, in fact, undermine the broad consensus that climate change is occurring.

Mann himself was accused of committing fraud when obtaining government funds for research into human-caused climate change while he was at the University of Virginia, and then manipulating the data.

Three major UK investigations previously exonerated the "Climate-Gate" scientists of any wrongdoing. Penn State conducted its own investigation that did not find Mann had done anything wrong.

http://tpmmuckraker...._sc.php?ref=fpb

Lots of misconduct, i see this in all fields (medical) where there is no active administration for wrong doing.

[Zero Sum 305]

Lots of science in this post, I congratulate lucky once again for hitting the scientific nail in the GW coffin.

Here is Michael Mann and his part in the emails. Don't worry I have more.

IPCC Researchers Admit Global Warming Fraud| Print | WRITTEN BY REBECCA TERRELL AND ED HISERODT MONDAY, 23 NOVEMBER 2009 00:00

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Global warming alarmists are scrambling to save face after hackers stole hundreds of incriminating e-mails from a British university and published them on the Internet.

The messages were pirated from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) and reveal correspondence between British and American researchers engaged in fraudulent reporting of data to favor their own climate change agenda. UEA officials confirmed one of their servers was hacked, and several of the scientists involved admitted the authenticity of the messages, according to the New York Times. The article opined, "The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument."

Climatologist Patrick J. Michaels challenged that position. "This is not a smoking gun, this is a mushroom cloud." The e-mails implicate scores of researchers, most of whom are associated with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization many skeptics believe was created exclusively to provide evidence of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

Among the IPCC elite embarrassingly, if not criminally, compromised is Phillip D. Jones, a Ph.D. climatologist at the University of East Anglia whose work figured prominently in the IPCC Third Assessment Report of 2001. Jones also contributed significantly to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 (AR4), but he failed to follow through when skeptical investigators asked to review raw data associated with that report. They announced intent to use UK Freedom of Information laws to obtain the data, so Jones sent the following e-mail to one of his collaborators: "Mike, Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise.... Can you also e-mail Gene and get him to do the same?... Will be getting Caspar to do likewise." The Mike in this message is Michael Mann, professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University, whose influential "hockey stick" graph warning of pending global warming eco-catastrophe was found by a congressional investigation to be fraudulent. In another correspondence about AR4 labeled HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL, Jones contacted Mann regarding research critical of their global warming platform. "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," wrote Jones. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

Mann received another incriminating e-mail from Dr. Kevin Trenberth, a New Zealander now with the University of Colorado and Head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "The fact is we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." An incredulous Trenberth simply blamed "our [inadequate] observing system." Yet he and his colleagues are now dodging the "Climategate" bullet, indignant that global warming skeptics are supposedly taking their comments out of context. One wonders if they might be referring to a messagefrom Jones who wrote about a statistical "trick" he used to "hide" data. Or perhaps they mean Mann'sreference to climate change skeptics as "idiots."

Now that AGW is revealed as a farce, will big-spending politicians in the U.S. Senate halt efforts to impose a cap-and-trade system to ostensibly combat greenhouse gases and global warming? Of course not. Cap and trade is about raising taxes and increasing government control over our entire economy. Our socialist politicians in Washington will never stop pushing this issue, even if global-warming alarmism is disproven to the point that Hell really does freeze over.

Will widespread and irrefutable knowledge of scientific fraud silence the socialist promoters of a new United Nations Climate Change protocol? Nonsense. In the name of saving the planet, the UN Copenhagen Treaty they intend to impose on the world would help to shackle it. Specifically, their "green" agenda would impose international controls, diminish the industrial might and living standards of developed nations, and transfer wealth from rich countries to poorer ones in an emerging world government. Internationalists and socialists will not back away from their long-sought-after global designs simply because the "science" supporting runaway global warming is shown to be flawed. No doubt they will continue to demand retributions for climate debt from the United States and the largely agreeable EU, despite Trenberth's observed "lack of warming."

The good thing is that even more than in the past, these false scientists and their alarmism will be countered with their own words. Even now reliable researchers are compiling the information in apublication that should shake our nation — and maybe even a few Democratic politicians.

He's got more science. Indeed, lucky hits another homer.

This is Mann the one just said to have done nothing wrong. Have more to post.

In the trenches on climate change, hostility among foes

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ResizePrintE-mailReprints By Juliet EilperinWashington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Electronic files that were stolen from a prominent climate research center and made public last week provide a rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes battle to shape the public perception of global warming.

THIS STORY

• In the trenches on climate change, hostility among foes
• Hackers steal electronic data from top climate research center
• Do the hacked e-mails expose scientists or skeptics?

View All Items in This StoryWhile few U.S. politicians bother to question whether humans are changing the world's climate -- nearly three years ago the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded the evidence was unequivocal -- public debate persists. And the newly disclosed private exchanges among climate scientists at Britain's Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia reveal an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack, and eager to punish its enemies.

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," Jones writes. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"In one e-mail, the center's director, Phil Jones, writes Pennsylvania State University's Michael E. Mann and questions whether the work of academics that question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the prestigious IPCC report, which represents the global consensus view on climate science.

In another, Jones and Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they disagree. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," Mann writes.

"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," Jones replies.

Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute who comes under fire in the e-mails, said these same academics repeatedly criticized him for not having published more peer-reviewed papers.

"There's an egregious problem here, their intimidation of journal editors," he said. "They're saying, 'If you print anything by this group, we won't send you any papers.' "

Mann, who directs Penn State's Earth System Science Center, said the e-mails reflected the sort of "vigorous debate" researchers engage in before reaching scientific conclusions. "We shouldn't expect the sort of refined statements that scientists make when they're speaking in public," he said.

Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute who has questioned whether climate change is human-caused, blogged that the e-mails have "the makings of a very big" scandal. "Imagine this sort of news coming in the field of AIDS research," he added.

The story of the hacking has ranked among the most popular on Web sites ranging from The Washington Post's to that of London's Daily Telegraph. And it has spurred a flood of e-mails from climate skeptics to U.S. news organizations, some likening the disclosure to the release of the Pentagon Papers during Vietnam.

Kevin Trenberth, who heads the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and wrote some of the pirated e-mails, said it is the implications rather than the content of climate research that make some people uncomfortable.

"It is incontrovertible" that the world is warming as a result of human actions, Trenberth said. "The question to me is what to do."

"It's certainly a legitimate question," he added. "Unfortunately one of the side effects of this is the messengers get attacked."

In his new book, "Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save the Earth's Climate," Stanford University climate scientist Stephen H. Schneider details the intense debate over warming, arguing that it has helped slow the nation's public policy response.

"I've been here on the ground, in the trenches, for my entire career," writes Schneider, who was copied on one of the controversial e-mails. "I'm still at it, and the battle, while looking more winnable these days, is still not a done deal."

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[Zero Sum 305]

So we have to take the word of a reverse-engineering process that doesn't follow the same variable analysis from the PCA data sets? I know most readers won't actually catch that incongruous logic, but that's like checking apple juice for the taste of oranges.

And again, as usual, we are not let down that the scientific expertise of lucky would of course take command in bringing forward this excellent analysis. I am beginning to believe that lucky is a real scientist.

Michael Mann also was the Main Author of the famous Hockey stick graph that all GW sheep jumped on. Unfortunately it was proven either faked or just bad math.

It's hard to nail down exactly when the sky started falling, but certainly the work of

Michael Mann provided its first global exposure. Michael Mann, a paleoclimatologist ( one who attempts to interpret the past climate through certain Paleolithic records, such as ice core samples, sea bed sediments, coral heads, and tree ring growth ), submitted a paper to Nature magazine in 1998 which, unfortunately, was not subjected to peer review before publication. In it, he offered what has now become known as the famous "hockey stick" chart, showing the earth's temperature having been relatively constant for the past thousand years before suddenly skyrocketing upward at the dawn of the 20th century. His interpretation was that man's production of CO₂ in the modern age was obviously responsible for the sudden increase. It turned out to be one of the biggest scientific blunders of all time.

Look carefully at the chart above, which is the famous "hockey stick" chart. Note the horizontal scale is in years, stretching from the year 1000 to the near present time. The vertical scale is in degrees Centigrade, and note carefully that it is graded in increments of 1/10 of a degree. That means the wiggly blue section in the middle is actually only varying up and down by about a half of a degree. The baseline, as noted, is set at the average of the recorded temperatures from 1961 to 1990. Also note that only the red portion represents actual measured temperatures - the rest is based on the assumption that one can interpret past temperatures from examining ancient tree rings or ice core samples from centuries-old ice locked in glaciers. This is, at best, a marriage of apples and oranges - the handle being somewhat of an educated guess, and the blade being based on actual measurements using thermometric recording devices. Sort of like pairing the skull of a human with the jawbone of an orangutan. And finally, note that the chart is for the northern hemisphere only. This chart, unfortunately, became the foundation for the first report of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ), which in turn provided the summary information and recommendations to the world's governments. The Anthropogenic Global Warming panic was off to a rocketing start.

However, some folks noticed a couple of significant and fairly well accepted climatological history facts to be conspicuously missing. The first was the well-documented "Medieval Warm Period" where temperatures, at least in Europe as mentioned in our introduction, were significantly higher. The second was the "Little Ice Age", a period in which the temperatures dropped so low the Thames River in London froze over.

How could this be an accurate record of the last millennium?

Let's pause and mention that the data above is not "raw" data. Dr. Mann actually used about 70-80 data sets, and in each set he applied a mathematical analysis known as a principle component analysis ( PCA ) which seeks to extract principal, or significant component information from a widely varying set of raw data.

Along comes

Steve McIntyre, a Canadian analyst, who spends two years of his own personal time reverse-engineering Dr. Mann's PCA program. McIntyre subjects Mann's PCA program to a "Monte Carlo" analysis - which inserts random data sets into the function - and discovered that no matter what data he fed it, the result was always the same. The arm of the "hockey stick" ( paleo-record ) always came out straight. In Dr. Mann's case, the rising temperature of the Medieval Warm Period and the expected trough of the Little Ice Age had been completely erased. The hockey stick was broken. Fini. Kaput. We may never know whether Mann's work was deliberately contrived to fit some personal environmental agenda, or just a colossal mathematical blunder.

McIntyre submitted his work to Nature Magazine - since they were responsible for publishing Mann's flawed research without peer review in the first place, but they reportedly rejected it, saying it was "too long". He then shortened it to 500 words, and re-submitted it, but again it was rejected, this time saying it was "too mathematical" or words to that effect. Heaven forbid any publication calling itself an "International Weekly Journal of Science" from actually publishing any science that hinged on mathematics. Let's all push a yard stick into the snow, measure the snow depth, call ourselves "climate scientists", and get published in Nature. In the end, McIntyre turned to the internet and its true freedom of the press, and today he is known to every serious climate scientist on the planet as the man who broke the hockey stick.

The National Academy of Sciences has found Mann's graph to have “a validation skill not significantly different from zero” – i.e., the graph was useless. Note the corrected version, below, in which neither today's temperatures nor the rate of warming are particularly unusual compared to the historical record. Thus, even the "global warming" of the 20th century was not even remotely a cause for the slightest alarm. It was all "much to do about nothing".

The Medieval Warm Period, of which the proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warming don't want you to be aware, was a period in which agriculture flourished, helping Europe emerge from the Dark Ages.The Little Ice Age produced crop failures from too-short growing seasons leading to widespread hunger and even starvation in some more northern locales.

Since our emergence from the Little Ice Age, agriculture has again flourished, and most of us hope it lasts quite a while longer. This is certainly no cause for panic, and a few of us think being comfortably warm and having plenty to eat is actually good.

And Tom Nelson has a few more graphs the AGW folks don't want you to see posted HERE.

We also know why that Al Gore and most scientists persist in this hoax.

So what has Al Gore gained from his Big Green escapades?

According to public disclosure information, Gore was worth somewhere between $1 million and $2 million in 2000. Not quite eight years later, Gore is estimated to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million. While I ordinarily would applaud such financial gains from such a short period of time, I can’t help but to question just how it happened. When you look out at what Al Gore has done, it’s evident that he figured out on a way to capitalize on the creation of Big Green while becoming the official doomsday prophet that has helped to build Big Green into the monetary powerhouse that it has become.

In any other industry this would be considered a severe conflict of interest. In essence, Al Gore has helped to create a fictitious catastrophe, then told everybody what the solutions have to be, and then put himself in a position to capitalize on the hype. It’s not only seriously dishonest, but many people and industries are going to suffer in the wake of this hype while Gore and Big Green bring in millions (and in some cases, billions) of dollars in green money.

[Zero Sum 305]

Pretty much. Depending on the context, Lucky's favorite word to refer to those he disagrees with are one of 'sheep', 'moron', or 'socialist'. Sometimes all three. But he means well, and has good taste in music, so we indulge him.

I wonder what's worse, calling others that actually explain things in their own words the things he does, or parroting news articles that paraphrase a context incorrectly. If that isn't a classical example of being two of those of his favorite words... I wouldn't know what they could be. But indeed, we should always encourage him to continue.