Climategate II (second part)

Climategate 2

It is still early to tell what will come out of this second batch of emails. A quick scan suggests it confirms the impression given by the first emails. Taken from the list of quotes provided with the emails, and verified whether the quote indeed comes from one of the emails:

On the IPCC:

- Peter Thorner 

“I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.”

- Timothy Carter:

“It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group.”

- Phil Jones:

“Getting people we know and trust [into IPCC] is vital - hence my comment about the tornadoes group.”

On Public Relations (for those who wonder how “global warming” came to be “climate change”):

- Bo Kjellen:

“I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global
Warming”

On inconvenient data:

- Henry Pollack:

“it will be very difficult to make the MWP [Medieval Warm Period] go away in Greenland.”

- Rachel Warren:

“The results for 400 ppm stabilization look odd in many cases [...] As it stands
we'll have to delete the results from the paper if it is to be published."

On the Urban Heat Island effect:

- Rean Guoyo to Phil Jones:

“[...] we found the [urban warming] effect is pretty big in the areas we analyzed.
This is a little different from the result you obtained in 1990.[...] We have published a few of papers on this topic in Chinese. Unfortunately,
when we sent our comments to the IPCC AR4, they were mostly rejected.”

On models:

- Tim Barnett:

 “Right now we have some famous models that all agree surprisely well with 20th obs, but whose forcing is really different.  clearly, some tuning or very good luck involved.  I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer" 

- Phil Jones:

“Basic problem is that all models are wrong - not got enough middle and low level clouds.”“GKSS is just one model and it is a model, so there is no need for it to be correct.”

As we speak, many are looking into the newly released emails. Soon we’ll see if they only confirm what is already known, or if new scandals will arise.

Further Reading:

The whole climategate saga is not easily appreciated unless one spends many hours on several blogs. Fortunately, there are now a few books explaining the events. Of these I can fully recommend “The Hockey Stick Illusion” by Andrew Montford.

For McIntyre’s experiences, one can best go to his own blog; climateaudit.org. Then there are also wattsupwiththat.com, www.noconsensus.wordpress.com and www.bishop-hill.net, the last one being the blog by Andrew Montford.

For an active climate scientist who started supporting global warming, but has become more skeptical over the years, see Judith Curry’s blog.

There are also pro-global warming sites, one of them run by the very scientists whose emails have now been published a second time: www.realclimate.org. But be careful: In one of the newly released emails,  Michael Mann, one if its founders and main contributors says of it:

“the important thing is to make sure they're loosing the PR battle. That's what the site [Real Climate] is about.”