Fox boss ordered staff to cast doubt on climate science

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If you have ever written an academic paper, you would know how this could affect everyone's research. People often site sources in research papers, they use other people's work as sources to corroborate their research. If the set of research is considered valid then scientists will often use it as a baseline to make further experiments using that research as the groundwork. The fact we are talking about people tampering with numbers and the research being groundwork for other research by other scientists (whom weren't even involved) could arguably invalidate those people's research too (to be fair those scientists whom took the information in good faith shouldn't have their personal credibility questioned cause they are victims in this too).

You are arguing right at least this is how I'm interpreting it, that Fox News shouldn't have even reported about the e-mails, or treated the people whom released them as a bunch of liars, etc. From my perspective you are saying that Fox News should have committed journalistic malpractice to support the global warming cult.

The data that you rejected by bringing up climategate were not based on their research. It was a separate, independent dataset that has never been called into question. Your objection requires at least two separate logical fallacies.


No, I am not saying that. I am saying that if they were responsible, they would have done a little bit of background research to see if the accusations were well-founded rather than uncritically accepting anything that would put climate researchers in a bad light, because doing so furthers their agenda. By all means, report the e-mails. But if they insist on treating any warming data with "skepticism," shouldn't they also treat accusations of fraud with skepticism?

You are employing a journalistic double standard.


And your perspective is incorrect. I am saying that Fox News should have practiced actual journalism rather than simply reprinting tabloid accusations to further a specific political agenda.

part of journalism is reporting what someone said or wrote. You might be correct in complaining that Fox did not vet its sources thoroughly.

ruveyn

Maybe, maybe not they haven't offered any legitimate proof to counter what Fox News said.

Shoving a site on me with thousands of e-mails and telling me to search through it to find the context is not my job, I'm not getting paid by the liberals on this forum.

@ number5

You are using a site created by the people whom are being accused of wrongdoing.



Prove it, seriously you accuse Fox News of something when it looks to me you are the one reprinting tabloid accusations to further a political agenda. Prove that they took the e-mails out of context, I'm not doing your job for you.

It is not up to a news organization to prove or disprove anything. That is for courts or for professional associations of scholars and scientists. What we can expect of a news organization is that it vets its sources to make sure the person making a claim (be it true or false) has some standing with respect to the claim.

For example if Scientist A disagrees with the popular assumption that global warming is due to human activity, he might be right or he might be wrong, but he may have some theoretical or empirical basis for his claim. So if Fox reports what Scientist A had to say and summarized his reasons, they would be doing righteous journalism. That is just an elementary act of checking out the source.

ruveyn

What cult? Do you mean people who look at recorded data and note trends, aka scientists?

Fox news has a painfully obvious agenda, not the scientists.

Difference here is they were reporting based on a bunch of emails that got leaked, I'm saying that if Orwell, number5, etc. want to accuse Fox News, Drudge Report, or any conservative blog site of taking things out of context, they need to prove it. I'm telling them to go find the emails that show that those places are taking things out of context.

Of course I am. It is their own rebuttal, from the horse's mouth. That was sort of the point.

Did you bother to read the rest of my post regarding actual research and data points prior to "climategate?" Have you personally spoken to an actual climate scientist (outside of this forum), or has Fox?

There are competent scientists who look at the same data and come to different conclusions.

When the hypothesis of plate tectonics was first proposed, the majority of scientist scoffed at it, but later it was show by evidence and measurement that the hypothesis is true. The continents do move. Just because a large number of scientists share a viewpoint does not necessarily mean they are right.

ruveyn

Which they didn't bother to source anything that I could see just from a quick glance.



Is there a climate scientist on this forum?

For the past three years, a group of zealous laymen has visited and photographed nearly every one of the weather stations to determine whether they have been placed properly. And what they found is a stunning disregard for the government's own rules: 90 percent of the sensors are too close to potential sources of heat to pass muster, including some very odd sources indeed:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/ ... t-sources/

So parking a thermometer next to an air conditioner exhaust is going to supply accurater readings...

Michael Smith, a California-based software engineer, who was instrumental, along with D'Aleo, in crunching the NOAA/NASA data and exposing the temperature tampering, says the historical climate data used by both agencies is obsolete by 20 years and is a mess.

“The ongoing maintenance of the data has been botched. The result is a structural deficit that makes it wholly unsuited to use in climate analysis,” he says. “The warming isn’t global and isn’t from CO2. It’s because we’re using thermometers at airports and in the tropics. An extraordinary hatred of mountains and other cold locations shows up in the data.”

Smith, who conducts his own research and receives no outside funding, says he is interested only in determining the accuracy of the official data -- before and after it has been adjusted and "homogenized."

“I don’t bring my own fantasies to the table . . . I’m not trying to tease something out of the data.”

The same unbiased, scientific approach appears to be AWOL at NASA and NOAA, where both agencies clearly seem intent on fiddling temperature data to make it support pre-ordained conclusions. What could be the motivating impulse behind such sleight of hand?

“Bright people have an amazing capacity to deceive themselves,” answers Smith. “Maybe it’s not done out of malice. Maybe these people actually believe their own B.S.”
http://www.examiner.com/seminole-county ... ooked-data

The other three all show a flattening out after 2001 and a marked downward plunge of 0.6 degrees Celsius in 2007/8, equivalent to almost all the net warming recorded in the 20th century. (For comparisons see "Is the Earth getting warmer, or colder?" by Steven Goddard on The Register website.)

Even more searching questions have been raised over Hansen's figures by two expert blogs. One is Climate Audit, run by Steve McIntyre, the computer analyst who earlier exposed the notorious "hockeystick" graph that was shamelessly exploited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore. (This used a flawed computer model to suppress evidence that the world was hotter in the Middle Ages than today.) The other site is Watts Up With That, run by the meteorologist Anthony Watts.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/colu ... rming.html

Again, this incident was not about differing opinions about a hypothesis. It was about casting doubt on existing, verified data. The fact that the earth is in a recent and remarkable warming trend is proven. There is much room for debate about what that means and what the future will bring, but there is no scientific debate on the actual observations. There is only a fabricated debate brought about by those with non-scientific agendas.

There is no proof of wrongdoing, just a bunch of random quotes from private emails taken out of context. Both me and number5 have worked for NOAA, have degrees in atmospheric science, and can assure you that there are many independent sources showing the same trend. Your theory that multitudes of independent data sources collected and compiled by different scientists from all over the world have all been deliberately altered to show a warming trend where there is none is just ridiculously improbable. Climate data is not even classified or withheld from the public. Scientists from all over the world have had access to raw data for decades. If there was a conspiracy to alter data it would have been uncovered decades ago.


Why don't you post a particular email quote and explain how it's damning evidence on its own without any context? The fact is all your sources trying to prove something against these scientists have not provided access to their primary source of information. All I can find are selected snippets and quotes without enough context to even know what the email authors were talking about. That is BS.

Why do I bother if you're only willing to do a quick glance? And yes, there are at least 2 climate scientists on this form, although admittedly, I'm a bit rusty.

I bolded the important important term to emphasize that the problem that we have here is laymen making judgements and assertions about a topic in which they have no formal training or education. Do you really think that scientists having considered all of the pitfalls and problems concerning data acquisition, really?!

In my own undergraduate study, I removed all of the urban stations, then looked at only ocean data, compared it with upper air charts, looked at precipitation data, el nino/la nina patterns, etc., etc., etc., and still came up with the same warming trend - and this was just at the undergraduate level. My professors with PhD's just sort of laughed at me because they already knew what I was about to discover, but I just had to see it for myself.

This age of letting the laypeople's concerns overshadow actual scientific research is thoroughly disturbing, and has potential to be quite dangerous.

I have a Masters degree in atmospheric science. While none of my areas of study were directly related to anthropogenic climate change, it was impossible not to notice the trend in the data I used. I actually did some work with sea surface temperature data in order to study natural cycles, including El Nino / La Nina events. When I worked with the data I noticed it was necessary to remove the warming trend in order to even study the shorter term natural modes of variability that I was more interested in. There is no urban heat island effect over the oceans, yet the warming trend was so strong that I had to remove it because it overwhelmed everything else in the data.

Go to any major university, in any country and take a poll of leading scientists, physicists, geologists, etc. There isn't that much debate, in my opinion. It's still possible that these scientists are all wrong, though. Some scientists even think that the models may be under-estimating potential climate change problems because of non-linear climate change, etc. I really don't care anymore. I'm going to die in the next 50 years or so and I want to go out with a bang.

Here's some stats on this debate:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/global- ... ediate.htm

"Approximately 5% of the respondents were climate scientists, and 8.5% of the respondents indicated that more than 50% of their peer-reviewed publications in the past 5 years have been on the subject of climate change. While respondents’ names are kept private, the authors noted that the survey included participants with well-documented dissenting opinions on global warming theory. Results show that overall, 90% of participants answered “risen” to question 1 and 82% answered yes to question 2.

In general, as the level of active research and specialization in climate science increases, so does agreement with the two primary questions (Figure 1). In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change (79 individuals in total). Of these specialists, 96.2% (76 of 79) answered “risen” to question 1 and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question 2. This is in contrast to results of a recent Gallup poll (see http://www.gallup.com/poll/1615/Environment.aspx) that suggests that only 58% of the general public would answer yes to our question 2. The two areas of expertise in the survey with the smallest percentage of participants answering yes to question 2 were economic geology with 47% (48 of 103) and meteorology with 64% (23 of 36).

It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes. The challenge, rather, appears to be how to effectively communicate this fact to policy makers and to a public that continues to mistakenly perceive debate among scientists."

http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf

@ marshall

The data itself being challenged as being not credible.


Anyways, there is no consensus, though I have heard of people being denied publication because they are reporting stuff contrary to global warming doctrine.

Anyways I found something of interest.

“In essence, the jig is up. The whole thing is a fraud. And even the fraudsters that fudged data are admitting to temperature history that they used to say didn’t happen…Perhaps what has doomed the Climategate fraudsters the most was their brazenness in fudging the data” — Dr. Christopher J. Kobus, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Oakland University, specializes in alternative energy, thermal transport phenomena, two-phase flow and fluid and thermal energy systems.

“The energy mankind generates is so small compared to that overall energy budget that it simply cannot affect the climate…The planet’s climate is doing its own thing, but we cannot pinpoint significant trends in changes to it because it dates back millions of years while the study of it began only recently. We are children of the Sun; we simply lack data to draw the proper conclusions.” — Russian Scientist Dr. Anatoly Levitin, the head of geomagnetic variations laboratory at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radiowave Propagation of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

“Hundreds of billion dollars have been wasted with the attempt of imposing a Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory that is not supported by physical world evidences…AGW has been forcefully imposed by means of a barrage of scare stories and indoctrination that begins in the elementary school textbooks.” — Brazilian Geologist Geraldo Luís Lino, who authored the 2009 book “The Global Warming Fraud: How a Natural Phenomenon Was Converted into a False World Emergency.”

“I am an environmentalist,” but “I must disagree with Mr. Gore” — Chemistry Professor Dr. Mary Mumper, the chair of the Chemistry Department at Frostburg State University in Maryland, during her presentation titled “Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide and Global Warming, the Skeptic’s View.”

“I am ashamed of what climate science has become today,” The science “community is relying on an inadequate model to blame CO2 and innocent citizens for global warming in order to generate funding and to gain attention. If this is what ‘science’ has become today, I, as a scientist, am ashamed…Science is too important for our society to be misused in the way it has been done within the Climate Science Community.” Swedish Climatologist Dr. Hans Jelbring,

“Those who call themselves ‘Green planet advocates’ should be arguing for a CO2- fertilized atmosphere, not a CO2-starved atmosphere…Diversity increases when the planet was warm AND had high CO2 atmospheric content…Al Gore’s personal behavior supports a green planet – his enormous energy use with his 4 homes and his bizjet, does indeed help make the planet greener. Kudos, Al for doing your part to save the planet.” — Renowned engineer and aviation/space pioneer Burt Rutan, who was named “100 most influential people in the world, 2004″ by Time Magazine and Newsweek called him “the man responsible for more innovations in modern aviation than any living engineer.”

“Global warming is the central tenet of this new belief system in much the same way that the Resurrection is the central tenet of Christianity. Al Gore has taken a role corresponding to that of St Paul in proselytizing the new faith…My skepticism about AGW arises from the fact that as a physicist who has worked in closely related areas, I know how poor the underlying science is. In effect the scientific method has been abandoned in this field.” — Atmospheric Physicist Dr. John Reid, who worked with Australia’s CSIRO’s (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) Division of Oceanography and worked in surface gravity waves (ocean waves) research.

“We maintain there is no reason whatsoever to worry about man-made climate change, because there is no evidence whatsoever that such a thing is happening.” — Greek Earth scientists Antonis Christofides and Nikos Mamassis of the National Technical University of Athens’ Department of Water Resources and Environmental Engineering.

“There are clear cycles during which both temperature and salinity rise and fall. These cycles are related to solar activity…In my opinion and that of our institute, the problems connected to the current stage of warming are being exaggerated. What we are dealing with is not a global warming of the atmosphere or of the oceans.” — Biologist Pavel Makarevich of the Biological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences


http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/08/s ... ipcc-gore/