The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) just sent out an email that had an article from The Wall Street Journal promoting about what has been comically dubbed as “Climategate.” “Climategate” should be filed under the same category as Birthers and the Tea Partiers: Trash.
I am going to look at this in two ways. First, how it is preposterous to say that this incident disproves all the good science that points to climate change. And second why are Republicans -- especially Jewish Republicans -- claiming that “The science behind global warming is in doubt after the release of emails” catching on to this rhetoric.
“Climategate” surfaced just over two weeks ago a hacker broke into the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit servers. The hacker stole data stored on the server that included documents and emails between top climate researchers. The hacker then released the confidential files, including emails in which scientists casually talk about manipulating data to “hide the decline.” I am not writing this to focus on the emails – Jeff Masters of at the Weatherunderground.com began to analyze the content of those emails – what I am saying is that these emails do not disprove the strong scientific foundation of climate change. Numerous institutions, from universities to NGOS to international organizations, are focused on the science behind climate change. There may be questions surrounding how to solve the issues at hand, or to what extent the humans are affecting climate change and how severe the consequences are, but there is a consensus on climate change in the scientific community and it is happening.
By picking the piece in The Wall Street Journal as its top article in their December 3rd email newsletter RJC is siding with the likes of science deniers such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. I do not understand why the RJC insists on doing this. They are further isolating themselves from a people – the Jewish people -- who understand the importance of science. Promoting Dark Age science does not bode well with the Jewish community. Furthermore, by denying climate change they are siding against progressing in green technology. The RJC can stand with the Limbaughs and Becks of the world while the Democratic Party and I will stand with Israel and her prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu understands the importance of combating climate change and that “dependence on oil endangers the world. It is a threat to our security, our economy and the environment.”
Addressing climate change and lessening our dependence on foreign oil is not only in the long-term security interests of the United State, but also it is also imperative to the long-term security of the State of Israel.
Follow Joshua Keyak on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jnkeyak
From the National Academy of Sciences, Here is the crux of climategate and the paid-for exxon studies(assuming the reader is familiar with the FOIA and the "lost" source data aspects of the issue as well as the industry-funded propaganda):
Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and
Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age
http://www.nap.edu/html/12615/12615_EXS.pdf
Data Access and Sharing Principle: Research data, methods, and other information integral to publicly reported results should be publicly accessible.
Recommendation 5: All researchers should make research data, methods, and other information integral to their publicly reported results publicly accessible in a timely manner to allow verification of published findings and to enable other researchers to build on published results.
Data Stewardship Principle: Research data should be retained to serve future uses.
Data that may have long-term value should be documented, referenced, and indexed so that others can find and use them accurately and appropriately. Curating and indexing the data so that they can be used accurately and appropriately in the future.
Recommendation 9: Researchers should establish data management plans at the beginning of each research project that include appropriate provisions for the stewardship of research data.
At minimum, all sides have failed to a varying but significant degree on the Access Principal and the Stewardship principle.
This begs the question of public ownership of publicly-funded studies.
Either way, it is an unforgivable act for a major study to lose or delete the work product or raw materials leading thereto, be it public or private.
The question of release to the public domain under the Access or Sharing principle is one for intellectual property laws.
Regardless, deleting or losing the data is either an incompetent or nefarious act. I lean toward it being an incompetent one, as one should never attribute to conspiracy waht is more easily attributed to incompetence.
Despite what you like to say, the science behind the theory of AGW is not strong and getting stronger. It is a hypothesis that believers cling to, but it has never been proven (which is actually difficult to do in science).
It depends upon two central points. First it explains the warming we experienced in the late 1970s to the year 2000. This according to believers is the only explanation for this warming.
Second, for it to be the crisis believers say it is, it must be shown this is unprecedented in history.
If either of these foundations is found to be wrong, the entire theory falls apart and the drastic action proposed by believers becomes foolhardy.
1. The temperature is increasing
2. CO2 is increasing
3. CO2 is a greenhouse gas
4. We can’t find any other factor that would cause the warming'''
Is the human release of CO2 tipping the atmosphere and causing the warming we saw in the late 20th Century? For twenty five years we saw CO2 go up every year and the temperature go up every year as well. It was striking. But for the last 10 years CO2 has continued to go up while the temperatures have remained flat and recently fallen off. On these boards we see numerous believers deny that the temperatures haven’t continued to rise. We hear such things as 10 of the last 13 years are the warmest in recorded history. (true but not really relevant to CO2 causing INCREASED warming)
The emails give us a look into the beliefs, actions and the concerns of a number of well know AGW believer scientists. As Kevin Trenberth wrote to Michael Mann, “Here are some of the issues as I see them: Saying it is natural variability is not an explanation. What are the physical processes?
Where did the heat go? “
In fact, although CO2 has been increasing significantly for the past 65 years, the temperature only increased for 25 years in that period. This represents only 38% of the time—not a good fit.
The second critical part of their theory is that this warming is unprecedented in history. Here we find the release of Programming Code to be something that may be more damning that the emails we’ve read.
I found two to be important and/or representative. The first
“; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
(...)”
It was the hockey stick graph which showed that the rise in temperatures experienced in the 20 Century was the highest in history. It relegated the Medieval Warm Period as much lower than we were experiencing today if you use these “fudge factors.”
You might also note that there are some negative numbers. These take place in the 1930s when temperatures were among the highest in history.
Not only do you want it to be wrong, you want it to be wrong in a way that runs counter to your preconceived conclusion.
The fudge factor are not the "hide the decline" factors. Secondly, you cannot take "higher quality data" and add it to proxy data and keep the integrity of your study. It totally invalidates what you were trying to find out. Leaving or changing the temperatures invalidate the study so they added it . The hide the decline was an attempt to fraduently use this study as another version of the hockey stick.
The computer code was yet another step where the numbers you got from the hide the decline would then be multiplied by 2.6 The smaller numbers and negative numbers in the 1930 data would make this warming look even more impressive.
“With huge reluctance, I have dived into 'anomdtb' - and already I have
that familiar Twilight Zone sensation.”
So if the sudden increase in the 20th Century has been fabricated what you have is a theory of warming that can’t explain why the temperature hasn’t increased in the past 10 years even while these current temperatures are not the highest in the past 1000 years.
Is this significant? Of course it is. Does it disprove AGW? Not entirely but it certainly calls into question the basic dogma of the AGW movement