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climate research unit

CRU Scientists Cleared, Still Bupkis

April 14, 2010 by Michael Tobis
with 301 views
0

Of course, the scientific investigation of CRU turned up, what do you know, nothing but scientists doing science. Here are the things worth thinking about from the report. 2. We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close... [read more]

Shaken Consensus?

February 16, 2010 by Geoffrey Styles
with 191 views
15

Since the publication of the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) last November, we've been inundated with news reports and opinion pieces questioning the scientific consensus behind climate change. An editorial in today's Wall St. Journal on "The Continuing Climate Meltdown" is just the latest... [read more]

Of Shifting Baselines and Non-linear Threshold Behavior

January 16, 2010 by Jonathan Smith
with 109 views
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The World Meteorological Organization and NOAA have reported that 2000-2009 is the hottest decade on record. 4 NASA scientists now want the public to know that 2005 was the hottest year on record, rather than 1998. Such an assertion by James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato, and Ken Lo is based upon a belief their dataset is better than... [read more]

Relative Importance of CRU

December 31, 2009 by Michael Tobis
with 88 views
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Dr. Ken Green claims that "CRU, as I understand it, was the dominant source for information entering the IPCC reports". I found this assertion astonishing and implausible. I decided to come up with a quick test for this. So I limit myself to chapter 3 of the AR4 WGI report, the one for which Jones is co-coordinating lead author,... [read more]

Climategate: Mountain or Molehill?

December 18, 2009 by Geoffrey Styles
with 129 views
11

While the Copenhagen delegates, which now include many heads of state, wrangle about transparency and the size and funding of the pot of money that will be required to assist the developing world in mitigating its emissions and adapting to further climate change, another debate over transparency is brewing. Its range of potential... [read more]

Tempest, Meet Teapot (Climategate)

December 6, 2009 by Michael Tobis
with 138 views
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Tempest: Richard North's idea is to take the ratio of Google web hits to Google News hits; he gets 22.5 million web hits vs. 46,025 news hits for Tiger Woods (a ratio of 489), and compares some other topics (some of them a bit UK-centric): 1. Climategate: 28,400,000 – 2,930 = 96932. Afghanistan: 143,000,000 – 154,145 = 9283. Obama: 202,... [read more]

Nature editorial: “Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause.”

December 2, 2009 by Joseph Romm
with 184 views
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Stolen e-mails have revealed no scientific conspiracy, but do highlight ways in which climate researchers could be better supported in the face of public scrutiny. The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist... [read more]

Mulling Over ClimateGate

December 1, 2009 by Scott Edward Anderson
with 201 views
1

"It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity. ..." That quote comes from the log of a computer expert known as HARRY_READ_ME, which documents his struggle to make sense of a... [read more]

Those leaked emails, and the politicization of climate science

November 30, 2009 by Lynne Kiesling
with 451 views
1

If you have not been following the story of leaked emails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit after their computers were hacked, Maggie Koerth-Baker’s Boing Boing post provides an overview with lots of supporting links. A couple of good overview stories are from the Economist’s most recent issue and... [read more]