Hacked E-Mails Fuel Global Warming Debate
An online debate over global warming science has broken out
after an unknown hacker broke into the e-mail server at a prominent,
British climate-research center, stole more than a thousand e-mails
about global warming research and posted them online.
Global warming skeptics are seizing on portions of the messages as
evidence that scientists are colluding and warping data to fit the
theory of global warming, but researchers say the e-mails are being
taken out of context and just show scientists engaged in frank
discussion.
The Climate Research Unit at
the University of East Anglia is one of the United Kingdom’s leading
climate research centers and has been a strong proponent of the
position that global warming is real and has human causes. The center
confirmed the hack occurred in an e-mail statement to Threat Level.
"We are aware that information from a server in one area of the
university has been made available on public websites,” the statement
read. “We are extremely concerned that personal information about
individuals may have been compromised. Because of the volume of this
information we cannot currently confirm what proportion of this
material is genuine.”
The stolen cache includes more than 1,000 e-mails and more than
3,000 documents, some containing code. They were posted anonymously to
an FTP server in Russia. The hacker then posted a link to the 61-MB
file of data on the blog Air Vent.
The hacker’s message that accompanied the link read: “We feel that
climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept
under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence,
code and documents.”
The e-mails, which cover a decade of correspondence, are getting a
lot of attention among bloggers who point to statements in them that
they say suggest the scientists colluded and manipulated data
to support their global warming viewpoints. The bloggers highlight a
statement in one 1999 e-mail from Phil Jones, director of the research
center:
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the
real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981
onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
The comment refers to Michael Mann, director of the Earth System
Science Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Mann told Threat
Level the “Nature trick” refers to a solution for displaying data that
he and others used in a paper they published to get around a problem in
the way that temperature data is traditionally displayed. The solution
allows for better viewing and understanding of the data, Mann said, and
pointed to a post on the RealClimate
blog that his colleagues have made to explain the reference. That post
also indicates that the hacker first tried to post the trove of stolen
data to the RealClimate blog on Tuesday.
Another e-mail from Jones dated last year with the subject line
“IPCC and FOI” is a request to Michael Mann, asking him to delete
certain e-mails. Bloggers allege that Jones was trying to destroy data
that had been requested under the Freedom of Information Act.
Jones wasn’t available for comment. Mann told Threat Level that he
never deleted any e-mails and doesn’t know the context under which
Jones made the request.
Bloggers allege that an e-mail from Kevin Trenberth, head of the
Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric
Research in Boulder, Colorado, suggests that reality contradicts
scientific claims about global warming:
Well I have my own article on where the heck is global
warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken
records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4
inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal
is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The
low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record
low….
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the
moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in
the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more
warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is
inadequate.
But Trenberth, who acknowledged the e-mail is genuine, says bloggers
are missing the point he’s making in the e-mail by not reading the
article cited in it. That article – An Imperative for Climate Change Planning
(.pdf) — actually says that global warming is continuing, despite
random temperature variations that would seem to suggest otherwise.
“It says we don’t have an observing system adequate to track it, but
there are all other kinds of signs aside from global mean temperatures
— including melting of Arctic sea ice and rising sea levels and a lot
of other indicators — that global warming is continuing,” he says.
Gavin Schmidt, a research scientist with NASA’s Goddard Institute
for Space Studies, says the e-mails offer no damning indictment of
climate researchers, and that bloggers are reading information in them
out of context.
“There’s nothing in the e-mails that shows that global warming is a
hoax,” he told Threat Level. “There’s no funding by nefarious groups.
There’s no politics in any of these things; nobody from the [United
Nations] telling people what to do. There’s nothing hidden, no
manipulation.
“It’s just scientists talking about science, and they’re talking
relatively openly as people in private e-mails generally are freer with
their thoughts than they would be in a public forum. The few quotes
that are being pulled out [are out] of context. People are using
language used in science and interpreting it in a completely different
way.”
Trenberth agrees.
“If you read all of these e-mails, you will be surprised at the
integrity of these scientists,” he says. “The unfortunate thing about
this is that people can cherry pick and take things out of context.”
This post was updated with comments from the Climate Research Unit and Michael Mann.
Photo courtesy NASA
Categorie: Media
Gurdjieff | 23-11-2009 | 18:18 | Link |
Hesperophobia (fear or hatred of the West).
Reacties
Science: Another Ice Age?
Monday, Jun. 24, 1974
In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada's wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the mildest winters within anyone's recollection.
As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.
Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.
Scientists have found other indications of global cooling. For one thing there has been a noticeable expansion of the great belt of dry, high-altitude polar winds —the so-called circumpolar vortex—that sweep from west to east around the top and bottom of the world. Indeed it is the widening of this cap of cold air that is the immediate cause of Africa's drought. By blocking moisture-bearing equatorial winds and preventing them from bringing rainfall to the parched sub-Sahara region, as well as other drought-ridden areas stretching all the way from Central America to the Middle East and India, the polar winds have in effect caused the Sahara and other deserts to reach farther to the south. Paradoxically, the same vortex has created quite different weather quirks in the U.S. and other temperate zones. As the winds swirl around the globe, their southerly portions undulate like the bottom of a skirt. Cold air is pulled down across the Western U.S. and warm air is swept up to the Northeast. The collision of air masses of widely differing temperatures and humidity can create violent storms—the Midwest's recent rash of disastrous tornadoes, for example.
Sunspot Cycle. The changing weather is apparently connected with differences in the amount of energy that the earth's surface receives from the sun. Changes in the earth's tilt and distance from the sun could, for instance, significantly increase or decrease the amount of solar radiation falling on either hemisphere—thereby altering the earth's climate. Some observers have tried to connect the eleven-year sunspot cycle with climate patterns, but have so far been unable to provide a satisfactory explanation of how the cycle might be involved.
Man, too, may be somewhat responsible for the cooling trend. The University of Wisconsin's Reid A. Bryson and other climatologists suggest that dust and other particles released into the atmosphere as a result of farming and fuel burning may be blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the surface of the earth.
Climatic Balance. Some scientists like Donald Oilman, chief of the National Weather Service's long-range-prediction group, think that the cooling trend may be only temporary. But all agree that vastly more information is needed about the major influences on the earth's climate. Indeed, it is to gain such knowledge that 38 ships and 13 aircraft, carrying scientists from almost 70 nations, are now assembling in the Atlantic and elsewhere for a massive 100-day study of the effects of the tropical seas and atmosphere on worldwide weather. The study itself is only part of an international scientific effort known acronymically as GARP (for Global Atmospheric Research Program).
Whatever the cause of the cooling trend, its effects could be extremely serious, if not catastrophic. Scientists figure that only a 1% decrease in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth's surface could tip the climatic balance, and cool the planet enough to send it sliding down the road to another ice age within only a few hundred years.
The earth's current climate is something of an anomaly; in the past 700,000 years, there have been at least seven major episodes of glaciers spreading over much of the planet. Temperatures have been as high as they are now only about 5% of the time. But there is a peril more immediate than the prospect of another ice age. Even if temperature and rainfall patterns change only slightly in the near future in one or more of the three major grain-exporting countries—the U.S., Canada and Australia —global food stores would be sharply reduced. University of Toronto Climatologist Kenneth Hare, a former president of the Royal Meteorological Society, believes that the continuing drought and the recent failure of the Russian harvest gave the world a grim premonition of what might happen. Warns Hare: "I don't believe that the world's present population is sustainable if there are more than three years like 1972 in a row."
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914-2,00.html#ixzz0ccVPySSD
Gurdjieff 14-01-2010 @ 21:20
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