Bishop Hill Science-free journal
Dec 17, 2009 Climate: CRU Climate: Jones Climate: Surface 
Fred Pearce has a shocking report in New Scientist. Two of the claims he makes are simply not true.
This is turning into a bad week for NS, what with the world and his wife now referring to the once august publication as "non-scientist".
Pearce is attempting to explain away the failure of the CRU to release its raw data - "move along, nothing to see here". The reason the data has been withheld, he says, is quite simple:
It is tied up in confidentiality agreements with the governments that provided it. The Met Office and the UK government say they are now seeking permission to publish it.
This is not true. When CRU was questioned about these alleged agreements there were found only to be a couple which prevented commercial reuse and that was it. The CRU page where this was shown has now been taken down, but that's what it was. The Climate Audit thread at the time is here. Even then, we know that the data was being merrily passed on to other favoured researchers, i.e. Peter Webster at Georgia Tech.
Pearce looks as though he is acting as a willing accomplice to a programme of disinformation.
Meanwhile Pearce also has this to say about Doug Keenan's work on the Wang papers on urban heat islands in China:
Keenan won his FOI request and said it showed the data was flawed, because some of the stations had been moved by the Chinese scientists who ran them. He said Jones's reluctance to share the data was evidence of fraud.
Keenan said nothing of the sort. This is what he actually said:
The two papers relied on data from 84 weather stations in China that were required to have very few significant moves. Of the stations, 42 were classified as rural and 42 as urban. For 40 of the rural stations, no histories exist (hence moves cannot be determined); the other 2 stations had substantial moves. For 9 of the urban stations, no histories exist; most of the other 33 had substantial moves.
In other words Keenan was saying that the researchers had made false representations of their data.
Reader Comments (11)
New Scientist has long been a font of New Age superstition and communist rant. Pearce's lies are well in line with its usual content.
Obfuscations concerning the temperature data is prima facie evidence that it has either been significantly adjusted and or FUBAR.
Mr Pearce is just arm waving. First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you and finally they lose. We are presently in stage 3 and it is clear for anyone with eyes to see that the wheels are coming off the bandwagon. Cognitive dissonance abounds!
Ultimately when people can check the facts for themselves then they can see through the propaganda and these magazines becomes dinosaurs or tabloids or both - already they like other institutions (UEA, NASA etc) as well as Nobel prize etc have all lost significant credibility.
As I read the morning on-line newspapers around the world as well as in the US, I wonder what the year 2010 will bring to us politically. First of all, the Treaty of Copenhagen, or what ever it is called, will make the Lisbon Treaty look like a "piece of cake" (remember only the Irish actually voted on it, and they had to be duck-walked into passing it on a second vote). Yes, I realize that most of the politicians in the EU will vote for ratification. But if the actual punter got to have a say, what would happen, given the amount of dirty laundry the AGW crowd has hanging out in the cold light of day?
While the Lisbon Treaty was ramrodded through in the EU, I expect a significant backlash in the US to the Copenhagen Treaty, given the way the Democrats have been spending money like drunken sailors. In fact, I would expect the whole global warming issue to become an important election issue in November 2010 election in the US.
And then there are the Chinese, who are playing a very clever game, indeed. It would appear that they are the only diplomats at Copenhagen. Yes, indeed, there is something to be said for the Mandarin School of Diplomacy. Going to be fun to watch them.
As a side issue, but the actual issue to all of this. The other day I had my annual physical. Asked my doctor if I would be seeing him next year, given the way Obamacare will screw him financially. His reply surprised me:
“You and everyone else are missing the point with healthcare, the environment, global warming, and just about every other issue affecting us. The problem is overpopulation. I don’t see anybody but the Chinese trying to control their population, and they are getting pilloried by all the liberals.”
The confidentiality agreement argument seems utterly absurd to me. I've seen many a confidentiality agreement and they all provide something along the lines of the following: "the foregoing obligation of confidentiality shall not apply to any portion of the Confidential Information which:
a) is or becomes public knowledge other than through the unauthorized disclosure of the Receiving Party;
b) was known to the Receiving Party, prior to receipt from the Disclosing Party as evidenced by the Receiving Party’s written records;
c) was independently conceived, discovered or developed by the Receiving Party or its Representatives who have not had access to, or knowledge of, the Confidential Information as evidenced by the Receiving Party’s written records;
d) is received legally without restriction on disclosure from a third party who has the lawful right to make such disclosure;
e) is approved for release by written authorization of the Disclosing Party; or
f) subject to paragraph 2 above, is required to be disclosed in order to comply with a judicial order or decree or with any law or regulation of any governmental authority."
Thus, in response to Anglia's argument that the data is confidential, how can that be if you've published an article on it? What level of confidentiality can remain in temperatures that have been released to the public. And I would assume that the disclosing party gave Anglia permission to publish the data. Why else would you give the data to a professor who writes articles for a living?
Second, the alleged confidentiality agreement concerns data that are inherently public (the weather!). What is confidential about the outside temperature. If I tell you the temperature is 60 degrees F today in San Francisco, can I compel you to keep this "confidential" with an agreement? Let's see the 60 degree temperature today was in the newspaper, on television, on the internet, on the radio, experienced by hundreds of thousands of people (I could go on!). But you see there is nothing confidential there.
Third, you are a UK university under UK law which provides for freedom of information. You are compelled by law to release this information.
What absolute nonsense!!!!
It has occurred to me that many journals and media outlets have been banging the global warming drum so loudly and for so long that it has become all but impossible for them to admit that they got it so wrong. As the whole thing unravels it will be interesting to see how long they can hold out before sticking to their AGW guns becomes completely untenable and they are forced to admit that they were duped.
reading the piece in New Scientist, I was expecting to see a really biased piece of work. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it gave the arguments for data release clearly, with significant quotations from Judith Curry and Steve McIntyre. It also provides the history of Keenan's investigation into the chinese land dataset, together with the information that the raw data led keenan to claim that the study was flawed.
There are bits of the story which aren't quite correct; but the overall tone of the piece is much better than hitherto.
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He says that Keenan said that the data withholding was evidence of fraud. This makes Keenan look an idiot. He isn't. The fraud allegation came out of the fact that the raw data couldn't have produced the published results.
I don't disagree that the tone is better than Fred Pearce has managed in the past, but it still looks like an attempt to misrepresent sceptics to me.
Amusing to see just how many comments get deleted on the NS blogs - oftentimes more than half the comments are deleted.
Not sure if NS has ever been a real science mag - and now its just a mixture of handwringing liberal guilt and leftist pessism all dressed in a lab coat.
Whoops that pessism is "worse than we thought". Should be pessimism.