Climate Change Files Hacked

I take a day off to go fishing and the biggest news in the climate change world breaks while I am chasing fish. Not that I mind, the whole climate change debate is kind of like watching kids or politicians slinging mud pies. But since potential trillions of dollars and what is left of our way of life is at stake, it is something that I follow.

The latest is that the Hadley CRU computers were hacked and over 3000 confidential documents and emails were published on a Russian server. The Hadley Climate Research Unit (CRU) if memory serves me is the British equivalent of NASA's Godard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) which collects current climate data, predicts future climate and tries to determine past climate. Some of these documents and emails may prove to be a bit embarrassing for the climate scientists predicting the doom of global warming. The documents posted on the Russian server were promptly deleted but not before being copied to various locations in the cyber sphere. That story can be followed in great detail at the Air Vent, Climate Audit, What's Up With That and Lucia's Black Board among others. So just click the links if you have a bit of insomnia.

To me there has been something fishy about the whole settled science of climate change, the phenomenon formally known as global warming. As a fisherman and charter captain I have to watch the weather for obvious reasons. Knowing that the national weather service is wrong about as often as they are right in short term forecasts, the idea of forecasting a hundred years in the future caused me to chuckle. That was until the cap and trade talk started. Then the humor disappeared.

While I am not expert by any means, the whole "climate science" thing appeared to be more like alchemy or astrology than a real science. Shame on me for ranking it so high when it now appears that climate science is more akin to political science than metaphysics. So why would I, a person with an intelligence quotient roughly the same as Al Gore's, meaning I am not the sharpest tack in the box, doubt qualified "climate scientists"? Because the "climate scientists" keep making silly ass mistakes.

First they think trees are thermometers. Trees grow based on a variety of conditions and temperature is one of the most complex of the conditions. At optimum temperature trees can obtain optimum growth rates if all the other factors are favorable. If the temperature is lower or higher than optimum, growth rates can be reduced. So forgetting precipitation, competition, lightning strikes, insect damage, avalanches, wild fire and several other factors trees are poor thermometers because they don't respond linearly with temperature. They make fair drought indicators though. Ever considered that many drought years are also the hottest years?

Second the "climate scientists" disregard work done by just regular old scientists that attempt to determine past temperatures by other means. A study Dr Lloyd Keigwin of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in 1996 of the Sargasso Sea off Bermuda was designed to determine past temperatures based on the growth rate of small crustacean that exhibited varied growth rates base mainly on temperature. His study is no longer in vogue with the "climate scientists" since it is a low frequency study. The climate scientists prefer to take high frequency noise, er data and smooth it over fifty years or so than use a natural smoothed data source such as the Sargasso Sea temperature reconstruction. The Sargasso Sea study did indicate that there was a medieval warm period and little ice age at least in the general area of the study. Somewhat problematic for climate scientists that determined they needed to get rid of the medieval warm period or the current temperatures could not be the warmest in thousands of years. "We've got to get rid of the medieval warm period", is part of another embarrassing email by a climate scientist by the way.

Third their, climate scientists, math skills are not that impressive. They have to use a lot of statistics which means there should be determination of uncertainty. They tend to be pretty certain of their results even though they have trouble determining the uncertainty of their results. A humorously odd conundrum except for the gravity of policy decisions to be made on results of uncertain uncertainty. I do have to hand it to the climate scientists though. They are doggedly determined to defend their results against all comers even if they have to resort to ad hominem rhetoric.

Hopefully, this is an obviously editorial article intended to get people to read and determine for themselves the seriousness of climate change. The intent was not to dissuade reduction in dependence on foreign oil, alternate fuels and green technologies. Just to persuade rational debate on the issue.

Update: A response by the climate scientists at realclimate. Note that the hacked system was at the University of East Anglia not the Hadley Centre as reported.

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