Climate Change news

A few pieces that you might have missed:

1. A report in THe Times that

"UN officials have likened the theft of e-mails from university climate researchers to the Watergate scandal, after claiming computer hackers were probably paid by people intent on undermining the Copenhagen summit.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that the theft from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was not the work of amateur climate sceptics, but was a sophisticated and well-funded attempt to destroy public confidence in the science of man-made climate change. He said the fact that the e-mails were first uploaded to a sceptic website from a computer in Russia was an indication that the culprit was paid."

Ignore the facts & fiddles discovered and concentrate on the alleged illegality that surrounded the "theft" of data.


2. Megan McArdle in The Atlantic writes:

"that is the actual worrying question about CRU, and GISS, and the other scientists working on paleoclimate reconstruction: that they may all be calibrating their findings to each other. That when you get a number that looks like CRU, you don't look so hard to figure out whether it's incorrect as you do when you get a number that doesn't look like CRU--and maybe you adjust the numbers you have to look more like the other "known" datasets. There is always a way to find what you're expecting to find if you look hard enough.

There are other issues: selection bias in the grant process, papers with large results being much more likely to be published than papers with equivocal results, professors preferring students who agree with them, and so forth. I doubt that could amount to faking the entire thing. But it could amplify the magnitude."

An interesting article that is kinder to most of the climate change scientists that I would be.


3. Watts Up With That put the hockey stick into context... This is a must read and is well worth passing on to any warmists that you know.