Did you hear about the big scandal where private e-mail exchanges show climate scientists suppressing skepticism of global warming? Turns out the e-mails were actually a discussion of how to deal with a case of probable fraud. (Via Mike Haubrich’s Facebook feed.) This surprises me more than it should–perhaps because I’m less used to following the shenanigans of global warming denialists than I am evolution denialists.
Um.. actually no. There were 7.6 MB of emails as raw text. By an enormous margin, the vast majority are not about debunking the skeptic papers in question (“scientific fraud” is the accusation made by someone at CRU).
The hack/leak is payback for CRU deleting so much data that a third-party climate model couldn’t be constructed. This was reported in mid-09. (“Global Warming Ate My Data”). To prevent open access seems a little unscientific, no? Anyway… this is why the filename was FOIA2009.
More here. Looks like you need to do some more research:
http://catastrophist.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/hadley-cru-climate-research-unit-leaked-data-foi2009-zip-62-megs/
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See the addendum to the paper that the so called fraud was perpetrated.
http://tiny.cc/Jbe8M
Some exerpts:
1. The ROABCORE data: choice of ver1.2
Haimberger (2007) published a paper in which he discusses ver1.3 and the previous ver1.2 of the radiosonde data. He does not suggest a choice although he refers to ver1.2 as “best
estimate.”
2. Matching of trends of models and observations at the surface
We wish to expand on the importance of comparing “like” to “like”. Since our goal is to understand what models would project for upper air trends for 1979-2004, in order to perform a legitimate test we needed a robust estimate of what those projections are, given the critical condition that the model surface temperatures match the observations. That many models do not match the observations is clear. Some seem to have misunderstood this point. They put forth all model results, no matter what their surface trend is, to generate a huge spread of upper air trends that can be said to include the observations. Our experimental design specifically required model surface trends to match observed surface trends before the hypothesis test could proceed. That the model average surface trend was very close to the observed surface trend gave us the opportunity to test the hypothesis we set forth.
Seems reasonable to me.