What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?

1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.

3. It is important to recognise that there are two completely different categories of data set that are involved in the CRU e-mail exchanges:

· those compiled from direct instrumental measurements of land and ocean surface temperatures such as the CRU, GISS and NOAA data sets; and

· historic temperature reconstructions from measurements of ‘proxies’, for example, tree-rings.

4. The second category relating to proxy reconstructions are the basis for the conclusion that 20th century warming is unprecedented. Published reconstructions may represent only a part of the raw data available and may be sensitive to the choices made and the statistical techniques used. Different choices, omissions or statistical processes may lead to different conclusions. This possibility was evidently the reason behind some of the (rejected) requests for further information.

5. The e-mails reveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented; for example, the apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements.

6. There is also reason for concern at the intolerance to challenge displayed in the e-mails. This impedes the process of scientific ’self correction’, which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process as a whole, and not just to the research itself. In that context, those CRU e-mails relating to the peer-review process suggest a need for a review of its adequacy and objectivity as practised in this field and its potential vulnerability to bias or manipulation.

7. Fundamentally, we consider it should be inappropriate for the verification of the integrity of the scientific process to depend on appeals to Freedom of Information legislation. Nevertheless, the right to such appeals has been shown to be necessary. The e-mails illustrate the possibility of networks of like-minded researchers effectively excluding newcomers. Requiring data to be electronically accessible to all, at the time of publication, would remove this possibility.

8. As a step towards restoring confidence in the scientific process and to provide greater transparency in future, the editorial boards of scientific journals should work towards setting down requirements for open electronic data archiving by authors, to coincide with publication. Expert input (from journal boards) would be needed to determine the category of data that would be archived. Much ‘raw’ data requires calibration and processing through interpretive codes at various levels.

9. Where the nature of the study precludes direct replication by experiment, as in the case of time-dependent field measurements, it is important that the requirements include access to all the original raw data and its provenance, together with the criteria used for, and effects of, any subsequent selections, omissions or adjustments. The details of any statistical procedures, necessary for the independent testing and replication, should also be included. In parallel, consideration should be given to the requirements for minimum disclosure in relation to computer modelling.

Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA adequate?

10. The scope of the UEA review is, not inappropriately, restricted to the allegations of scientific malpractice and evasion of the Freedom of Information Act at the CRU. However, most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other leading institutions involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change. In so far as those scientists were complicit in the alleged scientific malpractices, there is need for a wider inquiry into the integrity of the scientific process in this field.

11. The first of the review’s terms of reference is limited to: “…manipulation or suppression of data which is at odds with acceptable scientific practice…” The term ‘acceptable’ is not defined and might better be replaced with ‘objective’.

12. The second of the review’s terms of reference should extend beyond reviewing the CRU’s policies and practices to whether these have been breached by individuals, particularly in respect of other kinds of departure from objective scientific practice, for example, manipulation of the publication and peer review system or allowing pre-formed conclusions to override scientific objectivity.

How independent are the other two international data sets?

13. Published data sets are compiled from a range of sources and are subject to processing and adjustments of various kinds. Differences in judgements and methodologies used in such processing may result in different final data sets even if they are based on the same raw data. Apart from any communality of sources, account must be taken of differences in processing between the published data sets and any data sets on which they draw.

Participants in the unprecedented meeting – held at the annual assembly of the Governing Council of the United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) Governing Council in Bali – were sworn to secrecy over the decision and it is only expected to be announced after its detaled scope and composition have been worked out by UNEP and the World Meteorological Organisation, the two UN agencies that oversee the IPCC's work.

Corus’ steelworks at Redcar, near Middlesbrough, “Teesside Cast Products”, is to be closed (”mothballed” is the euphemism). It is Britain’s last great steelworks and an essential national resource. Without it, we are at the world’s mercy.

Corus is owned by Tata Steel of India.   Recently, Tata received “EU-carbon-credits” worth up to £1bn, ostensibly so that steel-production at Redcar would not be crippled by the EU’s “carbon-emissions-trading-scheme”. By closing the plant at Redcar – and not making any “carbon-emissions” – Tata walks off with £1bn of taxpayers’ money, which it will invest in its steel-factories in India, where there is no “carbon-emissions-trading-scheme”.

"

So, Tata walk off with one billion pound of carbon credits, that they can trade freely on the carbon market. Happily paid for by the British taxpayer.

A new steelworks is opened in India, with no net change in emissions whatsoever

My dear old NZ government is apparently committed to an emissions trading scheme, which will open up all sorts of similar irregularities. Meanwhile, the average NZ householder lives in a poorly insulated, inefficient house; we export our coal to China, so they can build us windmills that will never supply our energy needs. Major polluters get subsidised by the NZ taxpayer.

Damned right -  it's time to get angry.

"Leading scientists say that the recent controversies surrounding climate research have damaged the image of science as a whole.

President of the US National Academy of Sciences, Ralph Cicerone, said scandals including the "climategate" e-mail row had eroded public trust in scientists. "

Sad but true. The "Post-normal" science of climate change has done huge damage to the image of science as a whole.

From the BBC here

It's good to see the NZ mainstream media finally picking up on Climategate, though sometimes it seems like "dark matter"
That is, we talk about it on the radio and in print (TV, I don't think so), yet the media assume that we know what it is , via what is commonly known as the Blogosphere. (aka The Thing That Made Mainstream Media Irrelevent in 2010) (tm)
Anyway, a Listener article this week asked David Wratt, NZ lead contributer to the IPCC (WG1) report. (and I paraphrase)

"What is the evidence for man-made global warming?"

There seems to be a lot going on at the Guardian right now

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/15/phil-jones-lost-weather-data

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/series/climate-wars-hacked-emails

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/weather-stations-china

Some of these links have an annotation feature "The annotations - and the real name of the commenter - will be added to the manuscript, initially in private. The most insightful comments will then be added to a public version of the manuscript. We hope the process will be a form of peer review. If you have a contribution to make, please email climate.emails@guardian.co.uk. "

OK, where do we start?
(1) They play shots of storms and melting ice over the interview as if to imply "man-made global warming is happening, this guy is obviously a crackpot". There is no published data that shows links between storms and man-made global warming.
(2) They make fun of his eyes, which is from a medical condition known as "Graves Disease"
(3) They dismiss his credentials by referring to his having been once an editor of a catholic newspaper, even though he was actually a policy advisor in Margaret Thatchers government.
(4) They state that he is "not a scientist, unlike James Hansen" Lord Monckton has scientific papers published in peer reviewed science journals.

Lord Monckton is correct in his statement about Hansen's extreme views on those who disagree with him.
See this Facebook page which gives some idea how extreme Hanson's views are.
He famously describes coal trains as Death Trains and uses many other extremist tactics to get his view across.
This is all very well, we are entitled to free speech, but Hanson is a lead contributer to IPCC reports and a major driver in the so-called science of Climate Change.
I say "so-called" because any true science is constantly challenged in its theories. The fact that this has not happened is quite clear from reading the CRU "Climategate "emails. The scientists at the centre of the AGW theory have created their own world of self-peer-reviewed literature and completely locked out all dissent.
The public are waking up to this and media companies like TVNZ are accomplices to this crime.
Given that we have extremists like Hansen driving multi-trillion dollar carbon schemes that will tax many out of existence, it seems reasonable that Lord Monckton should get a fairer hearing.

From the Times Online
www.surfacestations.org gets a mention, which brought the low quality of temperature stations to the world's attention.
It's always the "skeptics" that seem to be doing all the Quality Control in climate science. What's wrong with this picture?

From the BBC

Within hours of the launch of an independent panel to investigate claims that climate scientists covered up flawed data on temperature rises, one member has been forced to resign after sceptics questioned his impartiality [Ed - still seems weird this use of the word "sceptic - do they not understand the concept of scientific impartiality?]

The Age of Stupid

Prof Jerome Ravetz of Oxford University has written a very well written piece over here which discusses Climategate with particular reference to his concept of Post Normal Science.
I enjoyed the read, but these are my comments that I posted on WUWT:

Speaking as someone educated in Maths at the windy and cold cloisters of Cambridge University, some 30 years ago, I was long ago educated in the concept of the word "axiomatic" This in English means "self-evident" or "obvious", but in Mathematical terms means an assertion that is assumed to be true upon which we can base all our other assumptions or theorems. It seems to me that we need to determine what are the axioms of climate science. From my relatively short time delving into this topic (h/t to WUWT) with all its emotional and political baggage, we desperately need to return to first principles and determine "what are the axioms of climate science?" (Specifically with respect to climate change or global warming) Is it axiomatic that the earth is currently warming? Is it axiomatic that CO2 is a greenhouse gas? Is it axiomatic that mankind is emitting CO2? These are some of my questions and I have learnt to completely throw out all my pre-conceived ideas and start from scratch. Any ideas?

Sorry, but it is so hard to take these Tyndall guys seriously.
pdf here
Some little tidbits from this pearler.
Carbon Sequestration Viability
On the whole, both groups were in agreement that global warming was a problem and that it was at least partly due to the industrial activities of humankind over the last century and a half. Only one member of the first focus group was not convinced by these claims, contending that the earth was currently in an interglacial period and that the changes in temperature were therefore predominantly a natural phenomenon.
[Ed: Denier! Burn the heretic!]
On the subject of whether carbon sequestration and storage should be considered as a potential solution to the problem, or whether it was merely an unacceptable proposed technical fix to a problem, there was reasonable agreement that the proposals would, in principle, attract little public opposition:
Researcher Is it an acceptable solution, not merely a technical fix?
Paul It is a technical fix though. Researcher Would it be rejected by the public on the grounds that it was a technical fix?
5 Alan On the grounds that the public can keep running their cars and get their electricity cheap it will be accepted.
Paul It’s not a contentious issue, like, to take another scientific example, GM foods; there’s not the same type of animosity towards it.
Tim Is it pure CO2 or does it contain pollutants. Is it safe to put those underground?
[Ed - according to the EPA, CO2 is a pollutant]
Paul What percentage of the CO2 will be captured in the power stations?

Yet more of the overwhelming evidence of human evil on the planet as referenced in IPCC AR4:
Allianz and World Wildlife Fund, 2006: Climate change and the financial sector: an agenda for action
PDF here

Climate change poses a major risk to the global economy: It affects the wealth of societies, the availability of resources, the price of energy and the value of companies. [ed - Yeah we know that, we've duped the public already haven't we?]
At the same time, the need to revolutionize the way we use energy opens up a new universe of options for economic development and social benefits. [ Ed - enough of the perfunctory intro spiel, let's get down to the real agenda]

Here's a fairly random choice of an email from the Climategate email archive taken from East Anglia University (source www.eastangliaemails.com)
Roger Harribin, BBC's chief warming correspondent, is on the cc list.
Naturally, we can't take chances with the planet's future, but do you really want these guys in charge?

Dear Friends, A few remarks before the meeting of tonight and tomorrow, I am sure that our meeting will make clearer the different objectives of ECF, in particular regarding the articulation between the scientific agenda and activities in direction to stakeholders and policy-makers. I would like to stress that I will attend the ECF meeting not only in the name of the Cired, but also in view of preparing the involvment of the Institut Laplace in ECF, namely the community of climate modellers, with which we develop a long term research program. I would like to explain hereafter in a few words what should be, in my view the priorities of ECF, in terms of scientific agenda: Given recent Ipcc experience, the first priority would be to progress in direction to integrated models. Indeed the lessons of the Ipcc are twofold: - first the Sress scenarios confirm the possibility of generating very different emissions growth scenarios over the long run, but the consistency between the Storylines and the numerical scenarios remain uncertain; this uncertainty and vagueness reveals a more fundamental limitation of the state of the art of economic modelling over the long run, in particular to provide an explicit picture of linkages between structural changes (infrastructure transportation, urban forms that govern the energy content of final consumption, industrial structure and the so-called dematerialisation), innovation and both macro and micro economic drivers (productivity, growth and price-signals). This makes very difficult to detect where are the real bifurcations, the real policy-parameters and to make much progress in the understanding of the timing of policy responses, - second the sections on 'damages ' have make some progress but remain weak in terms of the social and economic implications. More precisely they deal mostly with impacts on physical parameters (sea-level rise), in a few cases adress impacts on humans (tropical diseases), but all this does not give a comprehensive picture of social and economic damages (once discounted the effect of adapatation), One of the scientific objective of ECF should be to be prepared to provide in a few years for a convincing contribution in future exercises like the SRES and in the future Ipcc rounds. This passes first through two parallel efforts: - on long term economic modelling where the limitations of existing tools are obvious depiste real progress; this relates basically to three challenges: - a macroeconomic framework insuring the consistency between prices and quantities at any point in time without necessarily resorting to the modelling tricks relying on the conventional neo-classical growth theory; these 'tricks' assume indeed perfect foresight, efficient markets and the absence of strategic or routine behaviours; New conceptual frameworks about endogenous growth theory allow for such a move, but there is a gap between advances in pure theory and empirical modelling, - the endogeneisation of technical change and more precisely to develop this endogeneisation in such a way that the information coming from sectoral models in energy, transportation or agriculture is not lost (this comes back to the bottom-up/top-down controversy); note that one key challenge here is to progress in direction to transportation and agriculture - an explicit treatment of expectations and uncertainty; one key issue indeed is that the stabilisation of expectations over the long run is the main driver of technical change, consumption patterns and structural adaptation. - on 'coupling' economic and climate models: here there are two routes, either to develop coupling methods between large-scale models or to develop interface compact modules, reduced forms of large scale models. Both routes are valid, however, in the following years, to develop integrated models made up with reduced forms of larger models seems more promising; thanks to tractable and numerically controlable models, in will be easier to reveal the key mechanisms at work and to introduce uncertainties. This will pass through progress in the representation of carbon cycle (including sequestration) in such models and, more importantly in the representation of damages and adaptation, which rises rather fundamental conceptual issues that explain what seems to be the second priority in my view. The second prority relates to the joint question of damages and precautionary principle: - part of the agenda is covered by Mike Hulme's paper and I will not elaborate here on other dimensions I would link to include and how to assess a cost. I will simply insist of the fact that we need to set up a taxonomy of damages in economic terms, this means as resulting not of the climate transformation per se but from the joint effect of inertia and uncertainty (to pass to Riviera to the beaches of Normandy in not a cost in itself in a world restabilized around a new climate equilibrium; what matter are the transition costs and the generated variability of climate). Moreover I would insist for adopting deliberately a worldview because, fundamentally, climate change will generate a new human geography, and not to be restricted to the European subcontinent, - this should lead to develop in parallel stochastic decision modelling tools to disentangle the many dimensions and views about the precautionary principle and, I take some risks in saying that, in a symmetric treatment of climate damages and nuclear risks (we cannot avoid to try and put some rationale in this discussion which is one of the reason for the failure of the EU tax in 1992 and of COP6, and which will be an 'hidden' division line within the EU) The third priority should be the topic 1 made by Klaus. For me the two first modelling efforts I described briefly are outmostly important to bring new insights for responding the question of the instruments. However, we have, before waiting for the acheivement of a new generation of models (which will respond to point 2 and 3 of Klaus's paper), it matters to develop in parallel a specific programm on international coordination architecture given the failure of COP6 and the lack of understanding of economic and social implications of the selection of this architecture (coordination through prices or quantities, full agreement or partial expanding coalition, issue linkages, perceived equity etc ....). This workprogramm should build on advances on the role of economic and non economic instruments in fostering innovation, and on the distributive static and dynamic implications of such instruments. These are very brief remarks, simply to give you some ideas about my current perspectives.

“Western populations would accept serfdom if it was packaged as saving the earth"
Bertrand Russell

This is an absolute must read for any self respecting scientist, or anyone else interested in how science has been perverted to meet the needs of its political masters

A dystopia (from the Greek δυσ- and τόπος, alternatively, cacotopia,[1] kakotopia, cackotopia, or anti-utopia) is the often futuristic vision of a society in which conditions of life are miserable and characterized by poverty, oppression, war, violence and/or terror, resulting in widespread unhappiness, suffering, and other kinds of pain

In the wake of the fact that the Guardian is now actually reporting Climate gate, this seems remarkably incongruous:
George Monbiot’s Climate Denier cards: “Monbiot’s royal flush: Cut out and keep climate change denier cards ”
Stocking fillers for all Guardian readers’ kids next Christmas?
Too creepy for words.
Click here