Tag Archives: Out of context

Climategate 2.0 emails – They’re real and they’re spectacular!

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“Climategate 2.0 emails – They’re real and they’re spectacular!” (2011-11-22). Remember Climategate? The stolen climate scientist e-mails that denialists tried to cherry-pick and twist into… something? Happened just before the Copenhagen climate conference. Anthony Watts and his team remember and they’re still sullenly licking their wounds over that misfire (but putting on such a brave face…).

Now we have new stolen e-mails with “new revelations!” Coincidentally, just before the Durban climate conference.

Oh. It’s just a second batch of even tamer messages from the first theft. Still, plenty of opportunities to make a fuss, tut and titter, and infer darkly. That’ll do, right Anthony? Especially since the first thing Anthony seems to have done is search for his own name. (Could vanity be the motivation behind everything Anthony’s done?)

Here are a few links on Climategate 2.0, I doubt I’ll cover what will undoubtably be a flood of outraged irrelevant posts on Anthony’s blog:

Look for Fox News, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and similar news organizations to credulously report the new “revelations.”

Climate Craziness of the Week: NW Passage open “first time in history” and all that…

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Climate Craziness of the Week: NW Passage open “first time in history” and all that… Anthony Watts fires before aiming yet again. Apparently the archaeologists finding the British naval ship HMS Investigator proves that the Northwest Passage was navigable back in the 1850’s. Therefore, there has been no Global Warming. Or, it’s all natural. Both are good.

HMS Investigator sailing the open Northwest Passage? Source: Wikimedia

Years ago I visited the site where the ships the Griper and Hecla spent the winter of 1820 ice-bound off Melville Island, within sight of the western end of the Northwest Passage. Here are two reading comprehension pointers for Anthony’s.

  • The HMS Investigator was stuck in the ice for two years before the crew abandoned it.
  • The wreckage was easily discovered this year because the sea ice has melted away from the search area.

So how is this “Climate Craziness”? Oh, by the way, the claim that this “shows Arctic Sea Ice conditions similar to 1853″ is just another denialist blogger making things up.

If Sea Level Was Rising, Wouldn’t Someone Have Noticed?

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“If Sea Level Was Rising, Wouldn’t Someone Have Noticed?” Anthony Watts gives us a post by Steven Goddard, who asks a stupid question and provides a stupid answer.

Short smart answer: the scientists noticed. They’re the ones who measure things.

Somehow alleged-geologist Steven thinks that cherry-picked historical photos from the California coast, a region with notable geological faulting and oil extraction, are conclusive proof that the sea-level has not risen. Also, apparently tides don’t exist. Nor do any other causes of subsidence or uplift.

This is typical of Steven’s posts; a tiny actual fact turned 180°, taken out of context and then used to draw support unwarranted conclusions.

Climategate: The CRUtape Papers

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Here’s our first coverage of a Watts Up With That? post!

Yesterday Anthony Watt promoted a friend’s breathless self-published analysis of the CRU e-mails, Climategate: The CRUtape Letters. (Some of the unguarded personal correspondence to and from climatologists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit was illegally obtained and released by unknown parties in November of 2009.) From published excerpts the authors seem to have added a layer of self-congratulatory “context” to guide willing readers toward their conclusions while studiously ignoring any credible explanations.

The trumpeted revelations of collusion and fraud purportedly in these e-mails were presented as a fatal indictment of the evidence for global warming as well as the reputations of the climatologists in question. When the shouting died down the e-mails proved to show no evidence of data tampering or scientific obstruction. The accusations were fabricated from out of context phrases, presented in deliberately misleading ways, or ignored common scientific usage in favour of disingenuously naïve interpretations. Much was also made over remarks about out-dated programming code fragments that were never in fact used in published research. See The Associated Press’s analysis, Nature’s Dec. 3rd 2009 editorial. If the data sets these attacked climatologists use are excluded from global temperature trend plots there is effectively no difference in the result.

Anthony also quotes their praise of his own surfacestations.org project, an ill-conceived Scout Troop-style project that failed in its attempt to prove that “bad” urban weather station data was giving a false impression of warming. (See here and here.)

The curious book title is presumably an allusion to The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis’ fictional correspondence between two demons about their failed attempts to corrupt a devout Christian. Denialists often try to paint conventional understanding of climate change as inflexible religious or political dogma, but in this particular instance the allusion suggests that the climatologist’s purported deceits have not “shaken the faith” of denialists.

2012-07-19 Update: Norfolk police have called off their investigation for procedural reasons, but state:

“However, as a result of our inquiries, we can say that the data breach was the result of a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack on the CRU’s data files, carried out remotely via the internet. The offenders used methods common in unlawful internet activity to obstruct inquiries. There is no evidence to suggest that anyone working at or associated with the University of East Anglia was involved in the crime.”