Monday, January 04, 2010

Are You Now Or Have You Ever Fudged The Data?

Climate researchers at Penn State are in for a nasty shock this morning.

As I said yesterday, one of our jobs this year is to wipe the complacent smiles off the smug faces of the lobbyists, “experts”, “scientists”, politicians and activists pushing AGW.

This is why I am so glad to report that Michael Mann – creator of the incredible Hockey Stick curve and one of the scientists most heavily implicated in the Climategate scandal – is about to get a very nasty shock. When he turns up to work on Monday, he’ll find that all 27 of his colleagues at the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University have received a rather tempting email inviting them to blow the whistle on anyone they know who may have been fraudulently misusing federal grant funds for climate research.
You can read the e-mail at the link.

Michael Mann has only been at Penn State for three years so most of his fiddles were done before he arrived. It may be that Penn State has no jurisdiction over the worst of Mann's "adjustments".

It may also be a stretch to prove fraud when most of what the "Team" did was to prevent publication of adverse papers.

Take this example of the "Team" attempting to keep criticism of Siberian data out of the record:
...Russia is back in the spotlight. Research released through Moscow’s Institute of Economic Analysis suggests the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK was selective and forgetful with data from Russian weather stations, and exaggerated the scale of global warming in Russia.

The allegation is supported by one of the leaked UAE emails, dated March 2004, from its former boss Phil Jones to Michael Mann, to wit:
"Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both (peer) reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL. Cheers, Phil."
The only way to get to the bottom of all this is to do a full Audit of the data starting with the raw station data. Then a verification of the models. What is amazing is that no official verification of the models was ever done. That would never be allowed for a medical device or equipment that goes on aircraft (even the entertainment systems that are part of an aircraft have to be verified). So why hasn't the software and data that may determine the spending of trillions of dollars a year world wide been verified? From algorithms to results.

I suspect it is a case of Lysenko Science. Politicians are paying for results they want to hear. It wouldn't be the first time. In illegal drug science Dr. Heath at Tulane used to half asphyxiate monkeys with marijuana smoke and then claim the marijuana killed brain cells. And the truth? Marijuana like most anti-depressants probably grows brain cells.

Fortunately we are no longer torturing monkeys in the name of anti-drug "science". Now if we could just get the politicians to stop paying for the torturing of climate data with adjustments, deletions, suppression of criticism, and ginned up models we might actually learn something useful about what is actually going on planet wise.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

2 comments:

linearthinker said...

Two days and counting.

No appearance by 99% or our new friend Dewey Dow.

I love his name, btw. So tempting to sew up a little sock puppet and name it dewey.

Maybe 99% found a sale on Legos and is busy down in the basement building his own Tokamak.

C'mon fellers. Let's hear some rousing support for Michael Mann.

M. Simon said...

Dewey is afraid to show himself in public. He still pesters me with e-mails. Which I no longer respond to.