[Vision2020] FBI Investigates Death Threats Against Climate Scientists: Was: Benjamin D. Santer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Re: CRU E-mail Hack: "CRU (Climatic Research Unit) colleagues deserve great credit."

Sat Dec 19 12:36:03 PST 2009

Paul Rumelhart wrote:

"Simply making up motives for climate skeptics out of whole cloth does not
make them true."

You might be suppressing, hiding or manipulating data.  The evidence that
Anthropogenic climate change "skeptics" (a description that is misleading,
given all good scientists are skeptics who question their theories and will
alter them if new data reveals this is necessary) are intent to "find dirt,
" "skew meaning" "destroy reputations" and so forth is more than ample.

The manner and extent to which the hacked private alleged e-mails from the
UK East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit are being taken out of
context and presented in a scientifically distorted fashion intent on
creating doubt about anthropogenic warming on many blogs and websites and
other media, is extreme.  Read the article from the Union of Concerned
Scientists on this subject posted to Vision2020:

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/global_warming_contrarians/debunking-misinformation-stolen-emails-climategate.html
------------------

Of course there are "skeptics" who are not unethical, but only attempt
reasoned factual scientific disagreement with anthropogenic global
warming.  Did Santer make the broad claim that all "skeptics" are
unethical?  If so, I must have misread his letter, which I just read again,
because I cannot find such a broad claim.

I previously posted to Vision2020 threatening e-mails that NASA climate
scientist James Hansen, who is arguably the most publicly well known and
most frequently attacked climate scientist, has received(
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2008/20080804_TripReport.pdf   page
18).  How would you describe the following statements? "...I will destroy
you, Jimmy,,, no doubt about it..." and "...I will do all within my power to
destroy you professionally and personally..."

Whoever is engaging in the alleged conduct described in the Guardian article
below, is evidence of "skeptics" who are using death threats etc. to disrupt
the work of climate scientists.  A short excerpt from the Guardian article
below:

Tom Wigley, previous Director of CRU and now at the National Center for
Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, US, has been horrified by the e-mails
he and other colleagues have received. "They are truly stomach-turning and
show what sort of venomous monsters we are up against,"...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/08/hacked-climate-emails-death-threats

Hacked email climate scientists receive death threats

CRU scientists receive torrents of abusive and threatening e-mails since
leaks that began in mid-November 2009.

   - Kate Ravilious for
*environmentalresearchweb*<http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/home>,
   part of the *Guardian Environment
Network*<http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/network>
   - guardian.co.uk <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>, Tuesday 8 December 2009
   09.28 GMT
   - Article history<http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/08/hacked-climate-emails-death-threats#history-byline>

 Two of the scientists involved in "Climategate" – the e-mail hacking
incident at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East
Anglia, UK<http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/hacked-climate-science-emails>–
have been emailed death threats since the contents of their private
e-mails were leaked to the world. No further information can be revealed
about these particular threats at present because they are currently under
investigation with the FBI in the United States.

Many other CRU scientists and their colleagues have received torrents of
abusive and threatening e-mails since the leaks first began in mid-November
2009. Tom Wigley, previous Director of CRU and now at the National Center
for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, US, has been horrified by the
e-mails he and other colleagues have received. "They are truly
stomach-turning and show what sort of venomous monsters we are up against,"
he told environmentalresearchweb.

The scandal, dubbed "Climategate", broke on 19 November this year when
hundreds of messages between scientists from CRU and their colleagues around
the world were posted onto websites. Since then, segments of the messages
have been used by climate-change sceptics to undermine the scientific case
for climate change
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/climate-change>being caused by
humanity's greenhouse-gas emissions.

In the UK a police investigation is underway to uncover how the material was
hacked or leaked. Meanwhile, the University of East Anglia has ordered an
independent review into the allegations against CRU and Phil Jones has
temporarily stepped down as director of CRU, until the investigations are
completed.

Many of the accusations being made by climate-change sceptics are based on
fragments and selected phrases from e-mails sent by eminent climate
scientists, dating back to 1996. The scientists involved are confident that
they can counter all of the claims against them. "None of it affects the
science one iota," said Wigley. "Accusations of data distortion or faking
are baseless. I can rebut and explain all of the apparently incriminating
e-mails that I have looked at, but it is going to be very time consuming to
do so."

In particular Wigley vigorously denies that any data was ever destroyed. "We
did not destroy any primary records," he said. "All these data came from
National Meteorological Services, and the originals are still there for
anyone to access. Indeed other groups such as GISS and NOAA have
independently accessed these data and independently reproduced our results."

Climate scientists not caught up in the scandal agree that the independent
investigation is necessary, but don't believe that the CRU science will be
discredited or any misdoings uncovered. "CRU is just one of many
climate-research institutes that provide the underlying scientific basis for
climate policy at national and international levels," said Dave Reay, a
climate scientist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. "The conspiracy
theorists may be having a field day, but if they really knew academia they
would also know that every published paper and data set is continually put
through the wringer by other independent research groups. The information
that makes it into the IPCC reports is some of the most rigorously tested
and debated in any area of science."

And some scientists express little surprise at the tactics being used to try
and undermine the science. "We have always had a very vocal minority of
people who have long since decided to ignore the science and the data and
take a deliberately and completely contrarian view, and who have always and
constantly accused (all) climate scientists of falsehood and being in it for
the money," said Andy Ridgwell, a climate scientist at the University of
Bristol. "They have been playing Chicken Little and claiming the sky is
falling in on climate science for a decade. There is nothing left that is
new or different that they can (falsely) claim or accuse us of."

Nonetheless there are now concerns that the e-mail leaks could derail some
of the objectives due to be set at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen,
Denmark, next week. On Friday 4 December Saudi Arabia's lead climate
negotiator, Mohammad Al-Sabban, told BBC news that the hacked e-mails
suggest climate change does not have a human cause, and that he thought it
could have a huge impact on agreeing limitations of greenhouse gases at the
summit. Meanwhile, Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), was reported by the BBC as saying that the claims
were serious and needed to be investigated.

For now the scientists involved in the scandal are anxious to get back to
doing their research. "We must continue to do the science," said Wigley. "As
time goes by the evidence mounts – it is already overwhelming – and we must
continue to report this through normal channels in peer-reviewed scientific
journals. We must continue to strive to understand the complexities of the
climate system better and to improve climate models so that we better know
how to respond to future climate changes."

But Wigley fears that time may be running out. "As time goes by, however, we
are approaching the point where any actions we might take will be inadequate
to protect humanity and the planet from dangerous climate change," he said.
"Those people – the hackers, the sceptics, the luddite bloggers – who are
hindering and slowing down the process of response will, I hope, eventually
be held accountable. They already have much to answer for."

------------------------------------------

Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett

On 12/18/09, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Simply making up motives for climate skeptics out of whole cloth does not
> make them true.  Among other things, he has claimed that skeptics are trying
> to "find dirt", "skew meaning", "distort", "misrepresent", "take out of
> context", "destroy reputations", and "destroy scientific careers".  This
> indicates a failure of understanding that I've seen in many places on the
> web - skeptics are not attacking climate scientists just because they've run
> out of puppies to torture.  They simply question what is almost always
> stated as an undeniable truth.  These scientists need to work towards
> understanding the motives of the skeptics.  They might find that they have
> more in common than they realize.

Ted Moffett wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>
>> http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/index.php/csw/details/ben_santer_open_letter/
>>
>>
>>    Ben Santer: Open letter to the climate science community
>>
>> /Posted on Tuesday, December 01, 2009 /
>>
>> Climate scientists are being subjected to slanderous attacks by demagogues
>> in high office and the global warming disinformation campaign.  Climate
>> Science Watch is posting here an “Open letter to the climate science
>> community” by Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  Santer
>> says: “We are now faced with powerful ‘forces of unreason’—forces that (at
>> least to date) have been unsuccessful in challenging scientific findings of
>> a warming Earth, and a ‘discernible human influence’ on global climate.
>>  These forces of unreason are now shifting the focus of their attention to
>> the scientists themselves.  They seek to discredit, to skew the truth, to
>> misrepresent.  They seek to destroy scientific careers rather than to
>> improve our understanding of the nature and causes of climate change.”
>> *Open letter to the climate science community*
>>
>> Dear colleagues and friends,
>>
>> I am sure that by now, all of you are aware of the hacking incident which
>> recently took place at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research
>> Unit (CRU). This was a criminal act. Over 3,000 emails and documents were
>> stolen. The identity of the hacker or hackers is still unknown.
>>
>> The emails represented private correspondence between CRU scientists and
>> scientists at climate research centers around the world. Dozens of the
>> stolen emails are from over a decade of my own personal correspondence with
>> Professor Phil Jones, the Director of CRU.
>>
>> I obtained my Ph.D. at the Climatic Research Unit. I went to CRU in 1983
>> because it was - and remains - one of the world’s premier institutions for
>> studying the nature and causes of climate change. During the course of my
>> Ph.D., I was privileged to work together with exceptional scientists - with
>> people like Tom Wigley, Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, and Sarah Raper.
>>
>> After completing my Ph.D. at CRU in 1987, I devoted much of my scientific
>> career to what is now called “climate fingerprinting”, which seeks to
>> understand the causes of recent climate change. At its core, fingerprinting
>> is a form of what people now call “data mining” - an attempt to extract
>> information and meaning from very large, complex climate datasets. The
>> emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit are now being subjected to a
>> very different form of “data mining”. This mining is taking place in the
>> blogosphere, in the editorial pages of various newspapers, and in radio and
>> television programs. This form of mining has little to do with extracting
>> meaning from personal email correspondence on complex scientific issues.
>> This form of mining seeks to find dirt - to skew true meaning, to distort,
>> to misrepresent, to take out of context. It seeks to destroy the reputations
>> of exceptional scientists - scientists like Professor Phil Jones.
>>
>> I have known Phil for over 25 years. He is the antithesis of the
>> secretive, “data destroying” character being portrayed to the outside world
>> by the miners of dirt and disinformation. Phil Jones and Tom Wigley (the
>> second Director of the Climatic Research Unit) devoted significant portions
>> of their scientific careers to the construction of the land component of the
>> so-called “HadCRUT” dataset of land and ocean surface temperatures. The U.K.
>> Meteorological Office Hadley Centre (MOHC) took the lead in developing the
>> ocean surface temperature component of HadCRUT.
>>
>> The CRU and Hadley Centre efforts to construct the HadCRUT dataset have
>> been open and transparent, and are documented in dozens of peer-reviewed
>> scientific papers. This work has been tremendously influential. In my
>> personal opinion, it is some of the most important scientific research ever
>> published. It has provided hard scientific evidence for the warming of our
>> planet over the past 150 years.
>>
>> Phil, Tom, and their CRU and MOHC colleagues conducted this research in a
>> very open and transparent manner. Like good scientists, they examined the
>> sensitivity of their results to many different subjective choices made
>> during the construction of the HadCRUT dataset. These choices relate to such
>> issues as how to account for changes over time in the type of thermometer
>> used to make temperature measurements, the thermometer location, and the
>> immediate physical surroundings of the thermometer. They found that, no
>> matter what choices they made in dataset construction, their bottom-line
>> finding - that the surface of our planet is warming - was rock solid. This
>> finding was supported by many other independent lines of evidence, such as
>> the retreat of snow and sea-ice cover, the widespread melting and retreat of
>> glaciers, the rise in sea-level, and the increase in the amount of water
>> vapor in the atmosphere. All of these independent observations are
>> physically consistent with a warming planet.
>>
>> Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. The claim that our Earth
>> had warmed markedly during the 20th century was extraordinary, and was
>> subjected to extraordinary scrutiny. Groups at the National Climatic Data
>> Center in North Carolina (NCDC) and at the Goddard Institute for Space
>> Studies in New York (GISS) independently attempted to reproduce the results
>> of the Climatic Research Unit and the U.K. Meteorological Office Hadley
>> Centre. While the NCDC and GISS groups largely relied on the same primary
>> temperature measurements that had been used in the development of the
>> HadCRUT dataset, they made very different choices in the treatment of the
>> raw measurements. Although there were differences in the details of the
>> three groups’ results, the NCDC and GISS analyses broadly confirmed the
>> “warming Earth” findings of the CRU and MOHC scientists.
>>
>> Other extraordinary claims - such as a claim by scientists at the
>> University of Alabama that Earth’s lower atmosphere cooled since 1979, and
>> that such cooling contradicts “warming Earth” findings - have not withstood
>> rigorous scientific examination.
>>
>> In summary, Phil Jones and his colleagues have done a tremendous service
>> to the scientific community - and to the planet - by making surface
>> temperature datasets publicly available for scientific research. These
>> datasets have facilitated climate research around the world, and have led to
>> the publication of literally hundreds of important scientific papers.
>>
>> Phil Jones is one of the gentlemen of our field. He has given decades of
>> his life not only to cutting-edge scientific research on the nature and
>> causes of climate change, but also to a variety of difficult and
>> time-consuming community service activities - such as his dedicated (and
>> repeated) service as a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on
>> Climate Change (IPCC).
>>
>> Since the theft of the CRU emails and their public dissemination, Phil has
>> been subjected to the vilest personal attacks. These attacks are without
>> justification. They are deeply disturbing. They should be of concern to all
>> of you. We are now faced with powerful “forces of unreason” - forces that
>> (at least to date) have been unsuccessful in challenging scientific findings
>> of a warming Earth, and a “discernible human influence” on global climate.
>> These forces of unreason are now shifting the focus of their attention to
>> the scientists themselves. They seek to discredit, to skew the truth, to
>> misrepresent. They seek to destroy scientific careers rather than to improve
>> our understanding of the nature and causes of climate change.
>>
>> Yesterday, Phil temporarily stepped down as Director of the Climatic
>> Research Unit. Yesterday was a very sad day for climate science. When the
>> forces of unreason win, and force exceptional scientists like Professor Phil
>> Jones to leave their positions, we all lose. Climate science loses. Our
>> community loses. The world loses.
>>
>> Now, more than at any other time in human history, we need sound
>> scientific information on the nature and causes of climate change. Phil
>> Jones and his colleagues at CRU have helped to provide such information. I
>> hope that all of you will join me in thanking Phil for everything he has
>> done - and will do in the future - for our scientific community. He and his
>> CRU colleagues deserve great credit.
>>
>> With best regards,
>>
>> Ben Santer
>> ——————————————————————————————————————
>> Benjamin D. Santer
>> Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison
>> Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
>> Livermore, CA U.S.A.
>> ------------------------------------------
>> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
>>
>
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