The other day, this post about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change generated a lot of traffic to this site. It is apparent that there is a growing climate of anger that is heating up about the insidious infiltration of politics into science.The combination of "Climategate" at East Anglia University and "Glaciergate" at the IPCC has created a fierce sense of distrust about these organizations within the scientific community and general population. It is the egregious nature of data manipulation and outright lying that has many wanting to throw out the bath water, the baby, and the bath tub... maybe even the bathroom.
Part of the problem may be the sheer magnitude of the effort to understand climate. It has been seen as an almost chaotic system that defies real modelling. Certainly, many aspects of climate phenomena can be quantified, but it is the old blind men describing an elephant situation with which we are faced.For the past few weeks, I have been communicating with some of the people at NOAA/NCDC who are responsible for providing the historical data used by many, myself included, for analyzing aspects of this climate elephant.
When I noticed that data appeared to be missing for the first quarter of 2009, I contacted NOAA and eventually was connected to the person in charge of the data. He responded very quickly by re-running the data which did bring the number of data records in line with expectation. Still, this was almost a year after the fact and that data could have been used without the knowledge that it was incomplete.While some might argue this is another case of trying to manipulate or hide information, I'm inclined to believe that it is a matter of an organization flooded with so much information and providing so many views of that data that it is overwhelming at times... at s*** happens.
Yet Joe D'Aleo at Icecap thinks something may be rotten there... and I have a lot of respect for Joe's knowledge.
Climate-gate Redux
By Jane JamisonClimate-gate part I occurred in early December when a still-unknown person posted thousands of e-mails and documents on a scientific website. The e-mails showed that scientists at the leading “global warming” research institute in the world, East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) had “changed” weather data to prove their climate-warming theories, and squelched dissenting opinions from skeptical scientists to maintain credibility for their fraud.
Climate-gate part II begins now: The scientists with Icecap.us website announced findings late last week that not only was the CRU involved in producing fraudulent weather data, but two United States agencies, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have also been falsifying climate reports for years. NOAA, the report concludes, is actually “ground-zero” for the fraud of global warming, not the East Anglia Institute.
Climate researchers have discovered that government researchers improperly manipulated data in order to claim 2009 as “THE SECOND WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD.”
Meanwhile, there are a number of American Meteorological Society members who are upset about their voices being ignored in a recent survey about climate change. The explanation was basically: email problems. That may or may not be the case, but things may be heating up there as well.Politics and science are bad bedfellows.