CRU Funded By British Petroleum

Click the image for a larger picture.

I came across this while doing the "Who's Who References" video. It seems that in addition to working deals with Shell Oil, Mick Kelly's work is also funded by British Petroleum.

It seems I can't glance sideways at these guys without coming across something questionable.

Reference:
Mick Kelly's Bio At CSERGE

ClimateGate: A Who's Who

Here's a video indicating the sources of each claim in the main video.

LATE EDIT: Both videos are hereby placed in the public domain. They can be used without concern of copyright or IP issues.
=====

I've put together a primer on the ClimateGate scandal. Enjoy. :)

The information presented in the video is supported by the the information I've already presented in this blog, with the following additions:

Claim:
Arctic Sea Ice was under-reported by 193,000 square miles and was actualy at the same level as sea ice in 1979.
Source:
http://www.examiner.com/x-1586-Baltimore-Weather-Examiner%7Ey2009m2d22-Arctic-sea-ice-underestimated-by-193000-square-miles

Claim:
CRU mission Statement
Source:
CRU strategic review agenda 1.doc of the hacked files

Claim:
Phil Jones has made more than £2,275,000.00 in grants from 1990.
Source:
pdj_grant_since1990.xls of the hacked files

Setting The Research Agenda

It seems like there's trouble at every turn with the activities taking place at the Climate Research Unit [CRU], University of East Anglia. Here we see evidence of what seems to be CRU considering taking funding dollars from Shell Oil in return for allowing Shell to partially drive the research agenda.



Source: uea-tyndall-shell-memo.doc

Mick Kelly and Aeree Kim (CRU, ENV) met with Robert Kleiburg (Shell International’s climate change team) on July 4th primarily to discuss access to Shell information as part of Aeree’s PhD study (our initiative) and broader collaboration through postgrad. student project placements (their initiative), but Robert was also interested in plans for the Tyndall Centre (TC). What ensued was necessarily a rather speculative discussion with the following points emerging.

Shell International would give serious consideration to what I referred to in the meeting as a ‘strategic partnership’ with the TC, broadly equivalent to a ‘flagship alliance’ in the TC proposal. A strategic partnership would involve not only the provision of funding but some (limited but genuine) role in setting the research agenda etc.

Shell’s interest is not in basic science. Any work they support must have a clear and immediate relevance to ‘real-world’ activities. They are particularly interested in emissions trading and CDM.[Clean Development Mechanism]

And here we see a letter from Greenpeace to CRU indicating that the IPCC reports (which CRU plays a major role in developing) and climate negotiations are driven by the agenda of the World Trade Organization.

Source: greenpeace.txt

From: "paul horsman"
To: m.kelly@uea.ac.uk (Mike Kelly)

It was good to see you again yesterday - if briefly. One particular thing you said - and we agreed - was about the IPCC reports and the broader climate negotiations were working to the globalisation [sic] agenda driven by organisations like the WTO. So my first question is do you have anything written or published, or know of anything particularly on this subject, which talks about this in more detail?

References
Zip File of Data Taken By Hacker

Fixing Climate Science

A lot of the talk in the blogosphere regarding the hacked files from Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia has centered around which newspapers are covering the story and which are glossing it over, as well as who should be fired for what happened.

I think it may be a good idea for folks to come up with ideas on how this process can be fixed. Venting frustration against persons X, Y, and Z, or publications A, B, and C may feel satisfying, but does little to correct the underlying problems in the science.

As I see it, the biggest problems to come to light from all of this are:

* Withholding of information / data

* Modifying data

* Computer models that are coded specifically to produced desired results

* Political pressure on individuals who publish papers that doesn’t please a small group of scientists and similar pressure on the journals that publish those papers

I’d suggest that in order to solve these problems, the following steps are needed at a minimum:



* All data and computer codes needed to reproduce the conclusion of a paper must be submitted with the paper before it can be published, along with any special steps needed to reproduce the conclusions.
* All such data and computer codes be placed in the public domain and be made available to anyone in the world via the internet for free.
* Pass laws making it illegal to hide any related data or computer codes behind “Intellectual Property” agreements.

I'll be writing various skeptic bloggers and scientists to see if I can get any sort of momentum behind these reforms. I'll update this blog with any progress or lack of progress that I make.

CO2ers Begin To Realize This Is Real

It looks like it may be starting to sink in that the hacked files from Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia are real. Here's a blog entry from The Guardian's George Monbiot, who has been a very vocal proponent of man-made CO2 Global Warming:

It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging(1). I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released(2,3), and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request(4).

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics(5,6), or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(7). I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.

Personally, I'm very impressed with Mr. Monbiot's admission of the damage these files have caused to the case of CO2 Global Warming. It must have been very difficult for him to come to that conclusion.

Here's another quote from the e-mails, from file 1255550975.txt, written by Kevin Trenberth at UCAR:

How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!
Kevin

So when you hear CO2 climate scientists saying in press releases there's no way that clouds can be driving the climate, you now know the truth is they have no idea if they are or not. Their models can't answer that question.

And it appears that even their climate models have been coded to artificially produce the desired results. From Mann's climate model in the file maps12.pro:

; Plots 24 yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD reconstructions
; of growing season temperatures. Uses "corrected" MXD - but shouldn't usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.
;

So it seems the CO2 models can't even reproduce the temperatures we already know, let alone make valid predictions about what we don't know.

References
George Monbiot's Personal Blog
Zip File of Data Taken By Hacker

Some Pretty Damning Evidence Global Warming Info Has Been Manipuated

You may have heard that the Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia, has suffered a break in and hundreds of electronic files and e-mails were posted to the internet. The information contained in these files seems to show a clear cut, repeated pattern of data manipulation, withholding data from those not "onboard" with CO2 Global Warming, and coming up with tricks to explain away the cooling that was taking place when warming was predicted.

You can download these files from here. Some interesting excerpts from them are below. The names of the scientists involved are literally a "who's who" in the CO2 Global Warming community.

From Michael E. Mann (witholding of information / data):

Dear Phil and Gabi,
I’ve attached a cleaned-up and commented version of the matlab code that I wrote for doing the Mann and Jones (2003) composites. I did this knowing that Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future, so best to clean up the code and provide to some of my close colleagues in case they want to test it, etc. Please feel free to use this code for your own internal purposes, but don’t pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people.

From Nick McKay (modifying data):

The Korttajarvi record was oriented in the reconstruction in the way that McIntyre said. I took a look at the original reference – the temperature proxy we looked at is x-ray density, which the author interprets to be inversely related to temperature. We had higher values as warmer in the reconstruction, so it looks to me like we got it wrong, unless we decided to reinterpret the record which I don’t remember. Darrell, does this sound right to you?

From Tom Wigley (acknowleding the urban effect):

We probably need to say more about this. Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.

From Phil Jones (modification of data to hide unwanted results):

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

From Kevin Trenberth (failure of computer models):

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.

From Michael Mann (truth doesn't matter):

Perhaps we'll do a simple update to the Yamal post, e.g. linking Keith/s new page--Gavin t? As to the issues of robustness, particularly w.r.t. inclusion of the Yamal series, we actually emphasized that (including the Osborn and Briffa '06 sensitivity test) in our original post! As we all know, this isn't about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations.

From Phil Jones (witholding of data):

The skeptics seem to be building up a head of steam here! ... The IPCC comes in for a lot of stick. Leave it to you to delete as appropriate! Cheers Phil
PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !

From Michael E. Mann (using a website to control the message, hide dissent):

Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC [RealClimate.org - A supposed neutral climate change website] Rein any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to answer any questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include.

From Phil Jones (witholding of data):

If FOIA [Freedom Of Information Act] does ever get used by anyone, there is also IPR [Intellectual Property Rights] to consider as well. Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them.

From Phil Jones (destroying of emails / evidence):

Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

From Tom Wigley (data modification):

Phil, Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we’d still have to explain the land blip. I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips — higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from. Removing ENSO does not affect this. It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with “why the blip”. Let me go further. If you look at NH vs SH and the aerosol effect (qualitatively or with MAGICC) then with a reduced ocean blip we get continuous warming in the SH, and a cooling in the NH — just as one would expect with mainly NH aerosols. The other interesting thing is (as Foukal et al. note — from MAGICC) that the 1910-40 warming cannot be solar. The Sun can get at most 10% of this with Wang et al solar, less with Foukal solar. So this may well be NADW, as Sarah and I noted in 1987 (and also Schlesinger later). A reduced SST blip in the 1940s makes the 1910-40 warming larger than the SH (which it currently is not) — but not really enough. So … why was the SH so cold around 1910? Another SST problem? (SH/NH data also attached.) This stuff is in a report I am writing for EPRI, so I’d appreciate any comments you (and Ben) might have. Tom.

From Thomas R Karl (witholding data) :

We should be able to conduct our scientific research without constant fear of an "audit" by Steven McIntyre; without having to weigh every word we write in every email we send to our scientific colleagues. In my opinion, Steven McIntyre is the self-appointed Joe McCarthy of climate science. I am unwilling to submit to this McCarthy-style investigation of my scientific research. As you know, I have refused to send McIntyre the "derived" model data he requests, since all of the primary model data necessary to replicate our results are freely available to him. I will continue to refuse such data requests in the future. Nor will I provide McIntyre with computer programs, email correspondence, etc. I feel very strongly about these issues. We should not be coerced by the scientific equivalent of a playground bully. I will be consulting LLNL's Legal Affairs Office in order to determine how the DOE and LLNL should respond to any FOI requests that we receive from McIntyre.

From Tom Wigley (ousting of a skeptic from a professional organization):

Proving bad behavior here is very difficult. If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.

From Phil Jones (forging of dates):

Gene/Caspar, Good to see these two out. Wahl/Ammann doesn't appear to be in CC's online first, but comes up if you search. You likely know that McIntyre will check this one to make sure it hasn't changed since the IPCC close-off date July 2006! Hard copies of the WG1 report from CUP have arrived here today. Ammann/Wahl - try and change the Received date! Don't give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with.

From a document titled "jones-foiathoughts.doc" (witholding of data):

Options appear to be:
1. Send them the data
2. Send them a subset removing station data from some of the countries who made us pay in the normals papers of Hulme et al. (1990s) and also any number that David can remember. This should also omit some other countries like (Australia, NZ, Canada, Antarctica). Also could extract some of the sources that Anders added in (31-38 source codes in J&M 2003). Also should remove many of the early stations that we coded up in the 1980s.
3. Send them the raw data as is, by reconstructing it from GHCN. How could this be done? Replace all stations where the WMO ID agrees with what is in GHCN. This would be the raw data, but it would annoy them.

From Mick Kelly (modifying data to hide cooling):

Yeah, it wasn’t so much 1998 and all that that I was concerned about, used to dealing with that, but the possibility that we might be going through a longer – 10 year – period of relatively stable temperatures beyond what you might expect from La Nina etc. Speculation, but if I see this as a possibility then others might also. Anyway, I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as that’s trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent cold-ish years.

References:
Zip File of Data Taken By Hacker
The Blackboard Blog On This Issue
Philadelphia Examiner Article