Climate Skeptic

Useful Flashback: Threats to Jail or Execute Skeptics

admin — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 07:02:35 +0000

Marc Morano, probably first up against the wall, had this post a while back with a number of public threats, from TPM, Joe Romm, Joe Kennedy, Grist Magazine, David Suzuki, and James Hansen, among others.

More on the Climate Pentagon Papers

admin — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 05:00:05 +0000

The Bishop Hill Blog has a summary of a lot of the more interesting emails.

A search engine of the content is here.

John Hinderaker here.

FOIA for Me But Not For Thee

admin — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:50:20 +0000

I thought this was one of the more interesting quotes unearthed so far from the Hadley CRU emails:

“When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA [Climate Audit] was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school – the head of school and a few others) became very supportive. I’ve got to know the FOI person quite well and the Chief Librarian – who deals with appeals.”

I am not familiar with the ins and outs of the British FOI request process, but in the US such requests must be honored based on the content of the information requested, and NOT based on the views of the requester or the intended us of the information. Basically, what the FOI officer has determined here is that this was a perfectly legitimate request that had to be honored UNTIL it was learned that it came from a person or group who disagreed with the center’s scientific conclusions and wished to use the data to try to replicate and/or criticize their work — then it could be ignored. In the US, this would be a gross violation of FOIA rules. I am willing to be that it is not too kosher under British law either.

The Real Hockey Stick

admin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:29:52 +0000

From PHD Comics via Flowing Data, check out the lower left.

Climate Pentagon Papers

admin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:43:58 +0000

An interesting development you have probably seen at other climate sites already (I am pretty conservative about posting this stuff), apparently someone may have hacked the servers at the Hadley Center in the UK and copied a bunch of data and emails and dropped it into the public realm (via links in a number of site’s comment sections). I downloaded the file but have not checked it out. It is unclear if this is real or a skeptic spoof or even an alarmist-set trap, though initial reactions from the Hadley Center seem to point to it being real. The ethics of the folks who grabbed this material are also seriously in question, though if it turns out to be real I have no problem using the material as it is public / government material that should have been in the public domain anyway (which is why I use the Pentagon Papers analogy).

Andrew Bolt has some background and excerpts from the material. The very first email he has from Phil Jones seems to confirm my suspicions about splicing thermometer data onto proxy series I expressed here. (Update: much more from Steve McIntyre here).

A lot of the stuff in Bolt’s post is really stuff we in the skeptic community already know. RealClimate ruthlessly purges comments of any dissenting or critical voices? Who’d have thunk it.

Climate Presentation Slides

admin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:31:12 +0000

These are the Powerpoint slides for my Nov. 10 presentation in Phoenix.

The slides are available for download at this link (9.9MB): Download ppt

A pdf file of the presentation is here (2.7MB): Download pdf

You can also view a Google docs version of the presentation below, though a bit of the formatting gets screwed up in the translation: Climate Presentation, online viewer

Bummer. I Didn’t Make the List

admin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:07:07 +0000

From Grist:

James Inhofe.
Marc Morano.
Richard Lindzen.
Bjørn Lomborg.
George W. Bush.

Names of shame, ignominy, criminals against humanity, against planet Earth itself. Agents of the lethal delays in our response to escalating, accelerating, catastrophic global warming.

Thanks

admin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:12:53 +0000

We had a really good crowd out last night for my lecture. I am currently working on publishing the video and the slides. I am going to destroy the email list for this lecture, but before I do so I am going to send everyone a link to the slides and video when I get them posted. If you would like to be notified when these are up, you may join the email list here.

Posting Drought Over Soon

admin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:03:12 +0000

There is a lot going on that I should be posting about, but I am preparing for a new round of public presentations, of which I give the first tomorrow night in Phoenix. Once that is done, and I can get the video posted, I will be back to normal operations.

By the way, if you like the video, I am available for talks to groups for no speaking fee, if I can get to where you are. My business (totally unrelated to climate) takes me all over the country so I may be near you some time soon. Just drop me an email at the link above.

On the Radio Tonight

admin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:21:11 +0000

For those in Arizona, I will be on the Terry Gilberg show on 550 KFYI talking climate starting at 6:30 or 7:00 to about 8:00.