JLT
Posts: 740
Joined: Jan. 2008
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BTW there's a good editorial in this week's Nature. The first couple of paragraphs:
| Quote | The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists' scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial 'smoking gun': proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.
This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country's much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails. |
ETA: Science does have something about it, too.
| Quote | Four e-mail exchanges have received most of the media attention. The first regards a research finding considered by most scientists as a canonical fact: that the globe warmed by roughly 0.7°C in the 20th century. That fact derives in large part from global temperature data recorded by stations on land and sea, as analyzed independently by groups at East Anglia, NASA, and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Referring to requests for climate data from critics, CRU Director Phil Jones wrote in 2005 that "I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone." In May 2009, Jones told Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, to "delete any emails" to a colleague about their work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report and to ask a third colleague to do the same. (Mann says he conveyed the message but deleted no messages himself.) Through a spokesperson, Jones declined an interview request. But in a statement he said that "no record" has been deleted amid a bombardment of "Freedom of Information requests." CRU acknowledged in August that it deleted old data on digital tapes to make space for a move.
A second message relates to a chapter in the 2007 IPCC report that Jones edited. In 2004, he suggested that two recent papers on temperature trends didn't deserve to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," he wrote Mann. "Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is." But Trenberth, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, says the papers were indeed considered. Thomas Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina, an official reviewer for the chapter, says the IPCC's peer-review procedures "were sacrosanct." Both papers wound up being cited.
A third message is viewed by critics as an acknowledgement that global warming has ceased. "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," wrote Trenberth in October. Contrarians have noted the lack of record new highs in global temperature since 1998 (Science, 2 October, p. 28). But Trenberth was actually bemoaning something else. "The observing system we have is inadequate for tracking energy flow through the climate system," he observed, affecting the forecasting of year-to-year climate changes.
A fourth message, about assembling a diagram for a 1999 World Meteorological Organization report, has been misinterpreted, says Trenberth (see graphic). Scientists believe proxy data such as tree rings are valuable for reconstructing past climates, but certain tree-ring data became unreliable midway through the century. So scientists used proxy data for all but the final 40 years of the millennium before switching to instrumental data in 1961. "Reasonable people," writes Stephen McIntyre, a retired industry consultant and prominent blogger, might conclude that the decision not to show the divergence of the two data sets was "simply a trick" to avoid giving fuel to skeptics. |
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"Random mutations, if they are truly random, will affect, and potentially damage, any aspect of the organism, [...]
Thus, a realistic [computer] simulation [of evolution] would allow the program, OS, and hardware to be affected in a random fashion." GilDodgen, Frilly shirt owner
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