Jim's Blog

The climategate letters, programs, and datafiles show a systematic and repetitious pattern of hiding and falsifying inconvenient data, cherry picking, self deception, and replacing peer review with theological review of the holy synod.  It is worth examining particular incidents from this sorry story in detail.

When considering one particular such incident, you should keep in mind that each such incident is not an isolated bad apple.  Rather, the climate gate emails and data reveal that it is all like this, every paper, every publication, every claim.  Every single climate warming paper, every single piece of climate warming evidence, every graph.  Official science is not science, but theology, theology concocted to impose on us a theocratic state, which state will deny us the ability to make our living in an ‘unsustainable’ way, ‘unsustainable’, being code for impious, just as ‘legitimate peer review’ (scare quotes in original email) is code for illegitimate peer review, and ‘corrected’ data (scare quotes in original source code) is code for falsified data.

Constantinople has summarized the debate for me in private email. People in authority are reading the blogs, and acting on them, but we are seeing the warming alarmists making the “just one sexed up graph” argument – similar to the argument that Uri Keller only bent some spoons with his hands, but all the other spoons he bent with is mind shows he really is magical, and Chomsky only made up some citations, but hey, what about all his other citations.  After all, everyone knows that the ice is melting, the polar bears are drowning, that the North West passage never opened before, that we are seeing unprecedented hurricanes, the seas are rising, and so on and so forth.  What does one sexed up graph matter?

In its more sophisticated and rational form, this argument is the argument that even if peer review fails now and again and allows the occasional sexed up graph through, it still mostly works, which argument we see coming from Hansen and Tyler Cowen, and will soon see from government officials around the world.  “OK,” they will say, “even if the peer review process is imperfect, nonetheless, the scientific consensus …”

My impression is that my paper ended the debate on Chomsky, not because many people read it, though many people did, but because a few people that mattered read it.  I went through Chomsky’s most egregious publication line by line and examined every single citation, and every single citation was at best misleading, at worst a lie. Until someone did that fisking, it remained possible to argue that people were unfairly jumping on Chomsky for a few innocent mistakes and exaggerations here and there, similar to the mistakes and exaggerations that all of us make from time to time.  After I fisked him, then and only then did that argument finally go away, after hanging around for forty years and surviving numberless rebuttals.

The equivalent for warmist alarmism will be to go through every single warmist article published in one particular high prestige journal such as Nature in one particular subject area such climate of the last millennium and show that each and every one of them was sexed up, that none of them provided the data that it is a scientists job to provide, that for lack of that observational and algorithmic data none of them should have passed peer review, and that the  journal ignored all legitimate criticisms of these egregious papers over the relevant period.

Steve McIntyre has done the necessary work, and lots more goodies are coming out of the Hadley CRU readme file, confirming from inside what Steve proved from outside, but it needs to be organized and structured into a single cohesive hyperlinked document.

The killer argument is that

1. Freedom of information inquiries were stonewalled.
2. That they were stonewalled because the graphs of doom were all pulled out of someone’s @%$#, and freedom of information inquiries would have revealed this, would have revealed the readme file of the Hadley CRU files.
3. That peer review is a lie, for real peer review would have demanded the data supposedly underlying the graphs of doom, and the method of calculation, which the readme file reveals to have been pulled out of someone’s @%$#.
4. That because peer review is a lie, everything is a lie – that peer reviewers did not slip up once in a while, but systematically gave a free pass to theologically correct papers, and systematically rejected theologically incorrect papers

To prove that peer review is a lie, we have to not merely produce a few particular failures of peer review, not “just one sexed up graph”, but rather we have to do a complete cover of all papers on one topic in one maximally prestigious journal in one period – which fisking very few people will read in its entirety, but the fisking has to be written, which is a lot of work.

The point of the fisking has to be not that the elimination of the medieval climatic optimum was fraudulent, but that a maximally prestigious journal was complicit in the fraud.  We have to take down, not just one powerful academic like Chomsky, but one powerful journal that helped empower them, one journal prestigious enough to stand for all journals, one topic important enough to stand for all topics.  We have to utterly discredit the core institutions of science, because these institutions have been corrupted and used as a lever with which to destroy science, technological society, capitalism, and western civilization.

To address the argument that even though peer review slips up every now and then, it basically works for the most part, we have to provide a clear example of it not working, have to show not just that it passed one sexed up graph, but that for one journal and one topic, peer review passed only sexed up graphs and rejected all desexed graphs, that it was synod review for theological conformity with the holy doctrine of the synod, not genuine peer review.

It was a lot of work to do the fisking of Chomsky.  It will be a lot more work to do the fisking of a high prestige journal, though most of the hard work has been done by Steve McIntyre, but the needed information is dispersed over a vast blog, and has to properly converted into one hypertext document with one argument, one conclusion, and links to all supporting information – that conclusion being that science was destroyed in a political and religious effort to remake western civilization into a scientifically, economically and technologically stagnant greenie theocracy that would only be capable of supporting a “sustainable” human population far smaller than our present population.  If we push for any less grandiose conclusion, we lose the argument.

Bishop Hill has a list of Hadley CRU files he finds particularly interesting.  They are mostly good stuff but have zero overlap with the files I find particularly interesting.  It is going to take a while to digest sixty two megabytes.  It will be some time before we realize what of this revelation truly matters.

To me, the relevant question is not whether global warming true, but whether alarmists been practicing science or religion.  These files answer that question decisively, for when challenged, the focus of their thoughts, what is uppermost in their minds, is not so much “what do these facts imply”, but rather, “how do we defeat the heretic”.

An unknown person posted a large amount of internal files from allegedly from CRU, which huge collection has become known as
The Hadley CRU file set To understand all this stuff, you need to know lots of climate science. I have only just started to go through this huge pile.

The original ftp server dropped the file (being stolen material and so on and so forth) and all those old links no longer work, but now the file is in bittorrent. The bittorrent link works with if you have installed a bittorrent client that support magnet links – magnet links being a highly decentralized way of publishing large files that does not expose any one server, router, or domain name to political pressure or possible reprisal, and prevents the illicit substitution of a changed file for the intended file.  The file you get, will be the file I intend, which is not always the case with ftp or http links to politically sensitive data.  The file is also available by http at such places as Megaupload, but pardon my paranoia, I don’t trust what they might do under pressure.

There is much preliminary analysis and discussion of this great pile of data

• Watts up with that
• The air vent
• Climate Audit

We can be pretty sure these files are genuine, since they explain the “science” behind some otherwise inexplicable published graphs that supposedly show the world warming up. These graphs are constructed pseudo scientifically. Rather than simply being pulled out of someone’s @%$#, they are constructed of numbers that reflect actual observations, but not observations of the quantity on the title bar of the graph.

Everyone is having lots of fun with this remark by Phil Jones:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

The decline to which Phil Jones refers is not the recent global temperature decline, which may well result from more accurate and more global methods of measuring temperature, which are therefore increasingly difficult to plausibly “correct”, but rather the failure of supposed temperature proxies to correspond to data supposedly derived from weather stations – the proxies are declining, so Phil Jones replaces the last few decades of the proxy, with the result that the last few decades of the graph for global temperature supposedly derived from the proxy agrees perfectly with the graph for global temperatures supposedly derived from weather stations, concealing the fact that there is no evidence that the proxy is in fact a proxy for temperature – indeed no evidence that either graph corresponds to global temperatures.  Thus what is being fraudulently manufactured is not warming, but rather fraudulent agreement between various measures that supposedly measure warming.

The material seems psychologically genuine – they show conscious fraud that still retains much of the characteristics of self deception and unconscious cherry picking of data that it originated in.

There are just too many of these emails to be easily forged – you try writing many megabytes of text in the style of several well known people. Phil Jones has admitted them to be real, and is trying to spin some of his more embarrassing remarks, thereby drawing even more attention to them.