http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=490
Mike,
I presume congratulations are in order - so congrats etc !
Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.
We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere to it !
Thanks Phil,
Yes, we’ve learned out lesson about FTP. We’re going to be very careful in the future what gets put there. Scott really screwed up big time when he established that directory so that Tim could access the data.
Yeah, there is a freedom of information act in the U.S., and the contrarians are going to try to use it for all its worth. But there are also intellectual property rights issues, so it isn’t clear how these sorts of things will play out ultimately in the U.S.
I saw the paleo draft (actually I saw an early version, and sent Keith some minor comments). It looks very good at present—will be interesting to see how they deal w/ the contrarian criticisms—there will be many. I’m hoping they’ll stand firm (I believe they will—I think the chapter has the right sort of personalities for that)...
Will keep you updated on stuff...
talk to you later,
mike
Hiding data from other skeptical researchers....that might threaten the Funding.
:
The Great Global Warming Swindle
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One central problem for those who promote the idea of man made global warming is the earth’s temperature record – on almost all time scales.
In the last decade, there has been no clear warming trend (as the UK Met Office and IPCC’s own figures demonstrate). In the last century, much of the warming occurred prior to 1940, when human emissions of CO2 were relatively small compared to today. During the post-war economic boom (when one would have expected the temperature to rise) the world cooled, from the 1940s till the mid-70s (again, this is evident from accepted data used by the IPCC).
But it’s important to look back further in time 1,000 years. The climate record which used to be accepted as the standard account of this period was published in the first IPCC report. But this account posed a problem. A thousand years ago there was time a warm period – apparently warmer than today (known to climatologists as the Medieval Warm Period). This was followed by a relatively cold period (known as the Little Ice Age), from which, over the past two to three hundred years, seem to have made a slow, welcome recovery.
This was all rather undermined the idea that current temperatures were either unusual or alarming.
In subsequent IPCC reports the original graph was replaced by another – the famous ‘Hockey Stick’ (so-called because it looks like one). The Hockey Stick was a lot more dramatic, and was featured proudly on the top of the front page of the new IPCC reports. But was it true? The Hockey Stick debate is very telling, and we urge readers to review the links below.
Further back in time, still within our current ‘interglacial period, we find more warm spells – notably what geologists call the ‘Holocene Maximum’ when, for a few thousand years, the earth was significantly warmer than we find it today.
Over longer time periods of course, the earth has been far, far hotter than it is today (with tropical forests covering much of the earth) and also far, far colder, with much of the earth buried under miles of ice. The Earth’s climate has always changed, and changed without any help from us.
But there is another problem, a very major problem, for those who promote the idea of CO2-led global warming. According to global warming theory, if an enhanced greenhouse effect is responsible for warming the earth, then the rate of temperature rise should be greatest in that part of the earth’s atmosphere known as the troposphere, specifically in the tropics. And yet the observations, from weather balloons and satellites have consistently shown that not to be the case. I urge readers to look at the Christy et al papers below. The latest one was recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research (2007).