Pachauri on CRU Hack
December 9, 2009Here are his statements from yesterday:
“One can only surmise that those who have carried out this act have done it with the very clear intention as to influence the process in Copenhagen – but, barring a few isolated voices, people over here are totally convinced of the solidity of the findings of the IPCC report.”
No kidding… both that the objective was to influence Copenhagen and that the parties at Copenhagen are univocal on the science.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon concurs: “Nothing that has come out in the public as a result of the recent email hackings has cast doubt on the basic scientific message on climate change and that message is quite clear – that climate is changing much, much faster than we realized and we human beings are the primary cause,” Ban Ki-moon states, according to Reuters.
UPDATE: Jason Delborne, Assistant Professor at Colorado School of Mines, offers this nice analysis.
Cruel Mistress 
Ben,
After having seen some of the emails, I think the two statements above are ostrich head in the sand statements. But then again, the emails could be argued. Less debatable is the code used to process the data, the comments by the programmers, and the arbitrary nature of some of the adjustments. Add to that poor siting of thermometers and the adjustments of temperature records for those sites and much is in doubt.
As others have said, maybe the most damning email from the CRU circle is this July 2005 message from Phil Jones to climatologist John Christy of the University of Alabama: “As you know, I’m not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.”
In other words, he — like a lot of other climate scientists around the world — has a vested interest in the issue.
We need more sober, dispassionate analyses of the data by experts outside the field — statisticians and economists especially.
Hadn’t seen that one before. I wouldn’t say that makes him selfish, I’d say that makes him stupid. There’s nothing I’d like more than to be wrong about climate change, even though I’ve put a fair bit of time into understanding it as an issue.
If you found out you investment advisors were doing this behind the scenes in regards to the reporting of their results with your money, you would raise all sorts of hell.
The people exposed in the this e-mail, code and data leak, are doing everything that is common to con-artists: hiding data, distracting and dissembling, suppressing competing ideas, manipulating the reporting of their work.
Not really very different from Madoff, except that the money involved in global warming is much, much larger.
Hunter: people are saying that, to be sure; but where…where…where is the evidence? I don’t see any of that going on in the e-mails.
In my assessment, you’re being sold (and buying) a bill of goods. There’s nothing there to indicate that they were doing anything terribly serious. There is no smoking gun, much as you might want there to be one.
Ben’s in denial.