The Huffington Post and Climategate

The debate over the Climategate emails and documents hacked off the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) continues to amuse me and many others, though for different reasons I suspect. I find them amusing and the responses even more amusing. The Huffington Post has a short article with a 6 frame slideshow to defend that climate change is alive and well despite the leaked emails.

I find the ostrich head in the sand response by the Huffington Post very appropriate for that publication. Why bother dissecting the truth of the matter when you can arm wave with photos? So let us do some dissecting.

The most damning of the leaked emails deal with ways to avoid freedom of information act requests, using Mike's trick to hide the decline and programming "fudge factors".

Dr. Phil Jones of the CRU in a series of emails discussed avoidance of freedom of Information Act (FOIA)requests and stated that he would destroy the data before releasing it. That is a pretty meaty topic that HP could have expanded on a little. This issue does nothing to disprove climate change but an eminent climate scientist involved in the possible destruction of data to avoid FOIA laws? Dr. Phil is being investigated by the university and has temporarily stepped down from his position.

Dr. Phil was also the author of the Mike's trick to hide the decline email. The trick was to truncate the tree ring data in 1961 to avoid showing that the data after 1961 showed cooling instead of warming then cover the end of the plot with the temperature record to cover up the portion that declined. This also does not disprove climate change. It would have shown that trees suck at being thermometers though. This trick is poorly understood by many of the loyal HP followers and really would not be a big deal had not that trick been used to build the iconic hockey stick graphic. The graphic used by Al Gore and others the scare the bejesus out of the public.

The "Fudge Factor" is a program routine that basically makes up data instead of using inconvenient data that did not match the desired results. It created a hockey stick whether any data was used or not. Very creative programming! It was only supposed to make fudge after 1960. In the leaked emails it made more fudge than intended, but still does not disprove climate change.

All of these should cause some doubt about the ethics and credibility of the climate researchers. The Huffington Post just blindly defending the science of climate change without the least bit of a critical review of the issue is.. , well, the Huffington Post.

The leaked files with search engine can be found at eastangliaemails.com. For a fun read check out the Harry_readme.txt. See what a poor programmer and poorer statistician is up against in the climate change world.

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Update: The CRUtapes letter term is trademarked see What's Up With That. Don't want to get into any trouble with the coiner of the phrase.