Oops. The Emails Leaked (aka Global Warming Lipstick)

Interesting development in the continuing saga of the Church of Man Made Global Warming (CMMGW).

It seems that some of the most vocal proponents of the concept of man made global warming were adding quite a thick layer of lipstick on their statistics and numbers to make them fit what they would like to say about the climate.

While this has been long recognized by those who are rightfully critical of the claims made by global warming advocates, it is only now that some leaked emails provide detail into the process by which the lipstick was applied, and the number of layers that some thought were needed.

Funny thing happens when some people write emails. They actually expect privacy in these electronic communications, copies of which are sprinkled at the origin, the destination, and potentially at points in-between. For most people this misconception will never reveal itself as such. But for those who deal in sensitive information this can lead to embarrassment or worse.

Fast forward to CMMGW. A bunch of “hackers” have obtained megabytes of emails sent between some of the most ardent members of the CMMGW.¹ These emails detail some of the adjustments and omissions that the individuals made to fit reality to their models and theories.²

Blatantly absent from the discussion is scientific integrity, which dictates that all relevant information be shared, even when it doesn’t fit the model or theory presented. At least one of the emails also mocks the death of an outspoken critic of the CMMGW³, indicating that the individuals involved blurred the line between science that establishes fact, and advocating for what one believes in:

“It is with deep sadness that the Daly Family have to announce the sudden death of John Daly. Condolences may be sent to John’s email account (daly@john-daly.com)” Reported with great sadness⁴

When the individuals disagreed with something, or how something might be used by those who are not CMMGW members, the result would be complaints about poor peer review at the related scientific journals:

Ed, to be really honest, I don’t see how this was ever accepted for publication in Nature. It is a confusing paper that leaves me asking what actually have they done and what is the so-called testable Hypothesis of which they speak.⁵

Many of us are very concerned with how Science dropped the ball as far as the review process on this paper was concerned. This never should have been published in Science, for the reason’s I outlined before…⁶

The Soon & Baliunas paper couldn’t have cleared a ‘legitimate’ peer review process anywhere. That leaves only one possibility–that the peer-review process at Climate Research has been hijacked by a few skeptics on the editorial board.⁷

Its clear that “Energy and Environment” is being run by the baddies–only a shill for industry would have republished the original Soon and Baliunas paper as submitted to “Climate Research” without even editing it.⁸

I’m not sure that GRL can be seen as an honest broker in these debates anymore, and it is probably best to do an end run around GRL now where possible. They have published far too many deeply flawed contrarian papers in the past year or so. There is no possible excuse for them publishing all 3 Douglass papers and the Soon et al paper. These were all pure crap.⁹

Vindictiveness for publishing research that is counter to CMMGW:

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…¹⁰

Some individuals don’t even bother reading at least some papers because they feel so offended by them:

Your response is also why I chose not to read the published version of his letter. It would be too aggravating.¹¹

Tim Osborn has just come across this. Best to ignore probably, so don’t let it spoil your day.¹²

And when an apparent CMMGW member was given a paper to review for publication, it was not about reviewing the science behind the paper, but how to find a good reason to dismiss and reject it:

I got a paper to review [. cytotec dosage.snip..] that claims that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology (reverse regression) is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc. [..snip..] I would like to play with it in an effort to refute their claims. If published as is, this paper could really do some damage. It is also an ugly paper to review because it is rather mathematical, with a lot of Box-Jenkins stuff in it. It won’t be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically, but it suffers from the classic problem of pointing out theoretical deficiencies, without showing that their improved inverse regression method is actually better in a practical sense. So they do lots of monte carlo stuff that shows the superiority of their method and the deficiencies of our way of doing things, but NEVER actually show how their method would change the Tornetrask reconstruction from what you produced.¹³

And now that the actual observations for the past few years no longer support the models and theories pushed by the CMMGW, it’s not the models or theories that have faults, but rather the observations (i.e. temperature readings). The solution according to CMMGW is to fix the data:

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.¹⁴

Some of the egocentric ideology of these individuals can be gathered from the comment below, in which at least one looks forward to future proper credit given by history:

It really doesn’t have anything to do about who did what first, etc. I trust that history will give us all proper credit for what we’re doing here.¹⁵

We wholeheartedly agree. They should get proper credit for what they have done.

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