Tkman117
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Phydeaux
Michael mann.
Cf climate gate.
Where he has repeatedly refused to answer
The equivalent of foia requests and in fact
Would destroy the data before he would release it.
Or see the emails where he "adjusted"the data and kept no record of the adjustments or the original values.
Ie. Made it up
Another, already refuted, pointless denier argument.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/Climategate-CRU-emails-hacked-advanced.htm
"February 2010. the Pennsylvania State University released an Inquiry Report that investigated any 'Climategate' emails involving Dr Michael Mann, a Professor of Penn State's Department of Meteorology. They found that "there exists no credible evidence that Dr. Mann had or has ever engaged in, or participated in, directly or indirectly, any actions with an intent to suppress or to falsify data". On "Mike's Nature trick", they concluded "The so-called “trick”1 was nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field."
March 2010. UK government's House of Commons Science and Technology Committee published a report finding that the criticisms of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) were misplaced and that CRU’s "Professor Jones’s actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community".
April 2010. University of East Anglia set up an international Scientific Assessment Panel, in consultation with the Royal Society and chaired by Professor Ron Oxburgh. The Report of the International Panel assessed the integrity of the research published by the CRU and found "no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit".
June 2010. Pennsylvania State University published their Final Investigation Report, determining "there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E. Mann".
July 2010. University of East Anglia published the Independent Climate Change Email Review report. They examined the emails to assess whether manipulation or suppression of data occurred and concluded that "The scientists’ rigor and honesty are not in doubt".
September 2010. UK Government responded to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report, chaired by Sir Muir Russell. On the issue of releasing data, they found "In the instance of the CRU, the scientists were not legally allowed to give out the data". On the issue of attempting to corrupt the peer-review process, they found "The evidence that we have seen does not suggest that Professor Jones was trying to subvert the peer review process. Academics should not be criticised for making informal comments on academic papers"."
FOI
https://www.skepticalscience.com/Freedom-of-Information-FOI-requests-climate-scientists.htm
"Exhibit No. 1 of the climate conspiracy theory is a collection of emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA), which appeared on the internet in November 2009. Though some of these "Climategate" emails can sound damning when quoted out of context, several inquiries have cleared the scientists. The most comprehensive inquiry was the Independent Climate Change Email Review.
One allegation arising from the emails (and arguably the only instance where there is actually a case to be answered) is that Freedom of Information requests received by CRU were wrongly denied. Meanwhile, defenders of CRU “have suggested that a number of these FoIA requests were inappropriate or frivolous.” [10.2]
Below I have reproduced some of the emails often quoted in support of these allegations (all were written by Phil Jones):
7/5/2004: Many of us in the paleo field get requests from skeptics (mainly a guy called Steve McIntyre in Canada) asking us for series. Mike and I are not sending anything, partly because we don’t have some of the series he wants, also partly as we’ve got the data through contacts like you, but mostly because he’ll distort and misuse them. Despite this, Mike and I would like to make as many of the series we’ve used in the [Reviews of Geophysics] plots available from the CRU web page.
2/2/2005: [D]on’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites — you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does! […] Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it—thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that.
21/2/2005: I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!
27/4/2005: I got this email from McIntyre a few days ago. As far as I’m concerned he has the data — sent ages ago. I’ll tell him this, but that’s all — no code. If I can find it, it is likely to be hundreds of lines of uncommented fortran ! I recall the program did a lot more than just average the series. I know why he can’t replicate the results early on — it is because there was a variance correction for fewer series.
29/5/2008: Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. […] Can you email Gene and get him to do the same? […] We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
3/12/2008: When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions — one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA […] became very supportive. […] The inadvertent email I sent last month has led to a Data Protection Act request sent by a certain Canadian, saying that the email maligned his scientific credibility with his peers! If he pays 10 pounds (which he hasn’t yet) I am supposed to go through my emails and he can get anything I’ve written about him. About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little — if anything at all.
10/12/2008: Haven’t got a reply from the FOI person here at UEA. So I’m not entirely confident the numbers are correct. One way of checking would be to look on CA, but I’m not doing that. I did get an email from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails — unless this was ‘normal’ deleting to keep emails manageable! […] According to the FOI Commissioner’s Office, IPCC is an international organisation, so is above any national FOI. Even if UEA holds anything about IPCC, we are not obliged to pass it on, unless it has anything to do with our core business — and it doesn’t. I’m sounding like Sir Humphrey here! McIntyre often gets others to do the requesting, but requests and responses all get posted up on CA regardless of who sends them.
The general allegation is that CRU incorrectly denied FoI requests. In particular, the Review focused on the question of whether UEA’s formal processes for dealing with FoI requests were “fair and impartial”.
The Review Team interviewed the relevant UEA and CRU staff, as well as representatives of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). UEA’s FoI process is centred around their Information Policy & Compliance Manager (IPCM). In the two years after current laws came into effect at the start of 2005, no requests for information were logged with the IPCM, though we know from the emails that there were such requests. We know from the IPCM log that CRU received four requests in 2007, two in 2008, and one in the first half of 2009 (four were fully granted and three rejected).
Then came the storm. Between 24 July and 28 July, CRU received no less than 60 FoI requests, and 10 more between 31 July and 14 August. The requesters demanded access to both raw temperature station data and any related confidentiality agreements. The Review found evidence that this was an organized campaign (one request asked for information “involving the following countries: [insert 5 or so countries that are different from ones already requested]”). The Review says “such orchestrated campaigns [have] literally overwhelming impacts on small research units.”
The Review found there was “insufficient priority given from the UEA centre to motivating staff and to prompting continuing education” about their legal requirements under FoI law. Similarly, they found “a lack of engagement by core CRU team”, as well as “a tendency to assume that no action was required until precedents had been set”. Some of the emails suggest a “lack of sympathy with the requesters” and “a tendency to answer the wrong question or to give a partial answer.” [10.5]
“There seems clear incitement to delete e-mails, although we have seen no evidence of any attempt to delete information in respect of a request already made.” (The former is legal but not the latter.) The email dated 3/12/2008 included “a clear statement that e-mails had been deleted […] It seems likely that many of these ‘deleted’ e-mails subsequently became public following the unauthorized release from the backup server.” [10.5]
The Review found that the IPCM “may have lacked […] the authority to challenge the assertions of senior professors” and “the UEA senior staff need to take more explicit responsibility for these processes”. He told the Review he felt “very much the bull’s eye at the centre of the target”. He explicitly denied that he “became very supportive” as suggested by Jones. The 10/12/2008 email provides “evidence that the IPCM did try to warn Prof. Jones about deliberate deletion of information”. [10.5]
In general, “[t]he Review found an ethos of minimal compliance (and at times non-compliance) by the CRU with both the letter and the spirit of the FoIA and EIR. We believe that this must change”. The Review also made it clear that CRU did not receive enough support from UEA management, and made recommendations to the university on how it should handle future information requests. It also recommended to the ICO that it engage more with universities and clarify how FoI law applies to research.
However, as Steve Easterbrook commented, the Review “never really acknowledges the problems a small research unit (varying between 3.5 to 5 FTE staff over the last decade) would have in finding the resources and funding to be an early adopter in open data and public communication, while somehow managing to do cutting edge research in its area of expertise too.” The Review does point out that in the years since CRU was founded climate science has developed from “a relatively obscure area of science […] into an area of great political and public concern.”
The Review concluded:
[W]e find that a fundamental lack of engagement by the CRU team with their obligations under FoIA/EIR, both prior to 2005 and subsequently, led to an overly defensive approach that set the stage for the subsequent mass of FoIA/EIR requests in July and August 2009. We recognize that there was deep suspicion within CRU, as to the motives of those making detailed requests. Nevertheless, the requirements of the legislation for release of information are clear and early action would likely have prevented much subsequent grief. [10.6]
As Phil Jones has admitted, CRU did the wrong thing with regard to Freedom of Information requests. However, they clearly perceived that the requests were not being made in good faith. The Review apparently made no attempt to investigate the motivations of the requesters.
But all this must be considered in the context of the Review's general findings (summarised here): although the scientists failed to display the proper degree of openness, their rigour and honesty are not in doubt, and their behaviour did not prejudice the advice given to policymakers. Despite being heralded as “the final nail in the coffin of anthropogenic global warming”, Climategate has not even invalidated CRU's results, let alone the conclusions of the climate science community. In any case, the entire work of CRU comprises only a small part of the large body of evidence for anthropogenic global warming. That mountain of evidence cannot be explained away by the behaviour of a few individuals."
Tampering with data:
https://www.skepticalscience.com/CRU-tampered-temperature-data.htm
"Exhibit No. 1 of the climate conspiracy theory is a collection of emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA), which appeared on the internet in November 2009. Though some of these "Climategate" emails can sound damning when quoted out of context, several inquiries have cleared the scientists. The most comprehensive inquiry, the Independent Climate Change Email Review, did something the media completely failed to do: it put the emails into context by investigating the main allegations. Its general findings (summarised here) were that the scientists' rigour and honesty are not in doubt, and their behaviour did not prejudice the advice given to policymakers, though they did fail to display the proper degree of openness.
One set of allegations against CRU concern its main area of research, the instrumental temperature record CRUTEM. The CRUTEM analysis is very similar to those produced by independent groups such as NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). Nevertheless, the contrarians allege that CRU manipulated data to fabricate a global warming trend; that CRU prevented critics from accessing the raw data and other information required to check its conclusions; and that CRU director Phil Jones failed to admit having cited fraudulent data twenty years ago. Thus they claim CRUTEM cannot be trusted.
To create the CRUTEM surface temperature analysis, CRU scientists take temperature data from 4,138 stations, and for each station they calculate the mean temperature for 1961-1990 and temperature anomalies relative to that period. They then arrange all this data into a 5x5 degree grid. This process requires that adjustments be made to account for sources of error such as changing station locations or urban heat island effect.
Following Climategate, several amateur climate bloggers have attempted their own analyses of global temperature trends, and arrived at very similar results to CRU, GISS, and NCDC. The Review took a similar approach, going back to primary sources and obtaining raw station data to see if it was possible for critics to replicate CRU’s results. They were able to acquire as much data as necessary from both the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) and the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). They proceeded to write the computer code needed to analyse the data in the space of two days, without requiring any information from CRU.
Thus the Review demonstrated that CRU was not hiding anything: sufficient data was available to replicate CRU’s results, and any competent researcher would be able to analyse it. Furthermore, they had nothing to hide: both adjusted and unadjusted data yielded very similar results to CRUTEM, and CRU’s homogenisation adjustments make no significant difference to the global average. Although the Review stopped short of drawing scientific conclusions, it appears that CRU’s conclusions are robust.
Based on this, the Review concluded (its emphasis):
CRU was not in a position to withhold access to [temperature] data or tamper with it. We demonstrated that any independent researcher can download station data directly from primary sources and undertake their own temperature trend analysis.
On the allegation of biased station selection and analysis, we find no evidence of bias. Our work indicates that analysis of global land temperature trends is robust to a range of station selections and to the use of adjusted or unadjusted data. The level of agreement between independent analyses is such that it is highly unlikely that CRU could have acted improperly to reach a predetermined outcome. [1.3.1]
This is stated more explicitly in Chapter 6:
It is impossible for a third party to tamper improperly with the data unless they have also been able to corrupt the GHCN and NCAR sources. We do not consider this to be a credible possibility, and in any case this would be easily detectable by comparison to the original NMO records [6.4]
The Review also considered the availability of metadata; that is, whether there was enough information available to identically replicate CRUTEM. As noted above, the computer code was no problem. Getting an exact list of temperature stations included in CRUTEM was more of an issue. Such a list was provided with the first version of CRUTEM in 1986, but CRU neglected to update it in the latest version, CRUTEM3, published in 2006.
An up-to-date list was not released until October 2007, in response to an FoI request. Even then, the Review Team found it was not straightforward to identify all the stations, due to a lack of standardisation. However, 90% could be matched with stations in the GHCN database, and CRU informed them that the remaining 10% could be obtained from other sources such as the relevant National Meteorological Office. As a “test case”, the Review did obtain data directly from the Japanese NMO.
The Review makes the following criticism of CRU:
CRU should have made available an unambiguous list of the stations used in each of the versions of [CRUTEM] at the time of publication. We find that CRU’s responses to reasonable requests for information were unhelpful and defensive. [1.3.1]
The inquiry also briefly dealt with the allegation “that Jones was complicit in malpractice in failing to respond appropriately to allegations of fraud made against […] Professor Wei-Chyung Wang”, whose data Jones cited in a 1990 paper on the urban heat island effect. The allegedly “fabricated” claim was that few if any of a certain selection of Chinese weather stations had moved over time. Wang’s university investigated and rejected the accusation of fraud. Meanwhile, Jones responded within one year with a peer-reviewed analysis confirming the original conclusions. In any case, this was only one paper and does not change anything we know about the urban heat island effect.
The overall implication of the allegations was to cast doubt on the extent to which CRU’s work in this area could be trusted and should be relied upon and we find no evidence to support that implication. [1.3.1]
Despite being heralded as “the final nail in the coffin of anthropogenic global warming”, Climategate has not even invalidated CRU's results, let alone the conclusions of the climate science community. In any case, the entire work of CRU comprises only a small part of the large body of evidence for anthropogenic global warming. That mountain of evidence cannot be explained away by the behaviour of a few individuals."
If you have any actual information which refutes these, please post them.
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RE: A few facts about global warming/climate change. - 
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