It seems that while scientists who accept funding from oil companies are branded as bought-and-paid-for shills, those financed by renewable energy interests remain unchallenged authorities in their fields. Words can’t adequately express my astonishment

How much has the earth warmed again? Should the climate always stay the same?

East Antarctica's ice started to melt faster from 2006, which could cause sea levels to rise sooner than anticipated, according to a study by scientists at the University of Texas.

In the study published in Nature's Geoscience journal, scientists estimated that East Antarctica has been losing ice mass at an average rate of 5 to 109 gigatonnes per year from April 2002 to January 2009, but the rate speeded up from 2006.

The melt rate after 2006 could be even higher, the scientists said.

"The key result is that [we] appear to start seeing a large amount of ice loss in East Antarctica, mostly in the long coastal regions (in Wilkes Land and Victoria Land), since 2006," Jianli Chen at the university's centre for space research and one of the study's authors, told Reuters.

"This, if confirmed, could indicate a state change of East Antarctica, which could pose a large impact on global sea levels in the future," Chen said.

Previous estimates for East Antarctica projected anywhere between a 4 gigatonne per year loss and a 22 gigatonne per year gain, according to the report.

The full study is available at www.nature.com/ngeo.

Climate change is turning Antarctica's ice into the one of the biggest risks for coming centuries. Even slight melting could drive up sea levels and could affect world's cities.

Rising temperatures are thought to be the main cause of melting ice, and world leaders are under pressure to agree on a new climate treaty at an upcoming U.N. summit in Copenhagen to curb global warming.



MELTDOWN

The scientists used satellite observations of gravity change over the period April 2002 to January 2009 to calculate the rate of the ice loss in East Antarctica's coastal regions.

The ice sheet's mass has long been difficult to estimate.

"At various times, estimates have disagreed on the sign of the mass balance, as well as its magnitude," the report said.

The whole Antarctic region could be losing ice at a rate of 113-267 gigatonnes a year, with 106-158 gigatonnes coming from West Antarctica, the scientists estimate.

A separate study on Thursday found that melting ice from Greenland and Antarctica will lead to a much sharper rise in sea levels than previously thought. [ID:nN19173377]

Climate change will cause a rise of at least 1 meter in sea levels by the end of this century, according to a review of scientific data by environmental group Clean Air-Cool Planet.

The projection is in sharp contrast to a 2007 study by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said world sea levels could increase 18-59 centimeters by 2100.

Please do read all the way into this instead of just reading RealClimates response and then running with the talking points.

And good job AGAIN dodging the part where to you its ok for climate 'scientists' to jump to conclusions but not their critics.

Originally posted by Curious and Concerned

Originally posted by john124
It's pretty obvious that a lot of comments have been added to the hacked emails. The hacker doesn't exactly have credibility or ethics, as to resort to hacking, so it seems obvious to me that sceptics are the one's with an agenda that ain't science.

How is it obvious that they have been "added to"? Does simply going against what you believe automatically make it false? Because that's what you seem to be implying. I haven't seen anyone saying that any files have been conclusively proven to be altered, yet some have have been confirmed as genuine. So I don't know how it's so obvious to you that they've been altered. Care to elaborate?

And you can hardly use the fact that they were hacked, as justification to dismiss them. If these emails are in fact genuine, which there is no reason to doubt at this stage, there are potentially damaging conversations that go right to the core of AGW "science". If that's the case, then IMO, this hacker has done the people a favor, no matter how much you cry about ethics. Laws are meant to protect the people, not crooked or corrupt interests who are intentionally deceiving us.

Originally posted by TrainDispatcher
From The Wall Street Journal website

In another, Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to American climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University that skeptics' research was unwelcome: We "will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Neither man could be reached for comment Sunday.

[edit on 22-11-2009 by TrainDispatcher]

Originally posted by TrainDispatcher
From The Wall Street Journal website

Under Top Stories in US


Climate Emails Stoke Debate - Scientists' Leaked Correspondence Illustrates Bitter Feud over Global Warming

Snips

"This is horrible," said Pat Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute in Washington who is mentioned negatively in the emails. "This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn't questionable practice, this is unethical."

John Christy, a scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville who was attacked in the emails, said, "It's disconcerting to realize that legislative actions this nation is preparing to take, and which will cost trillions of dollars, are based upon a view of climate that has not been completely scientifically tested -- but rather orchestrated."

In one email, Benjamin Santer from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., wrote to the director of the climate-study center that he was "very tempted" to beat up Mr. Michaels. Mr. Santer couldn't be reached for comment Sunday.

In another, Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to American climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University that skeptics' research was unwelcome: We "will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Neither man could be reached for comment Sunday.






[edit on 22-11-2009 by TrainDispatcher]

Climate change skeptics use hacked emails as propaganda

November 22, 5:35 PMPortland Progressive ExaminerMichael Stone


Climate change skeptics are using hacked emails as propaganda in their campaign to suppress and deny knowledge of anthropogenic climate change. The emails were stolen from a climate research institute in Great Britain. The utilization of hacked emails is just the latest ploy of right wing nuts and other outliers who refuse the reality of anthropogenic (human caused) climate change.

The emails were hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. It is one of the United Kingdom’s leading climate research centers and has been a strong proponent of the position that global warming is real and has human causes.

More than 169 megabytes worth of global-warming emails and related files were hacked. Climate change deniers are at this very moment pouring through the data, pulling quotes and numbers out of context and cherry picking facts and statements in order to make their case against climate change, a case that stands not on science, but on propaganda and denial.

Most U.S. politicians, most citizens, do not question whether humans are changing the world's climate. It is simply accepted as a truth, a truth that is at once both intuitive and unavoidable given the activity of humanity in the last 500 years.

It is sad, and a curious fact of human nature, that a minority of humans, given the opportunity, wind up wearing the proverbial "tin foil hat", and deny what science gives as fact. Public debate will persist. The theft of the emails will simply fuel the delusions and confusions, and perhaps even postpone action that is required now in order to minimize the damage we are doing to our planet.

“these will be artificially adjusted”

2009 November 22
by stevemcintyre


The emails are only the start of this. The zip includes data and code. Reader Neal writes as follows (SM Note: Anthony reports below that he has verified these comments in the following location /documents/osborn-tree6/mann/oldprog
in the files maps12.pro maps15.pro maps24.pro):

People are talking about the emails being smoking guns but I find the remarks in the code and the code more of a smoking gun. The code is so hacked around to give predetermined results that it shows the bias of the coder. In other words make the code ignore inconvenient data to show what I want it to show. The code after a quick scan is quite a mess. Anyone with any pride would be to ashamed of to let it out public viewing. As examples bias take a look at the following remarks from the MANN code files:

function mkp2correlation,indts,depts,remts,t,filter=filter,refperiod=refperiod,$
datathresh=datathresh
;
; THIS WORKS WITH REMTS BEING A 2D ARRAY (nseries,ntime) OF MULTIPLE TIMESERIES
; WHOSE INFLUENCE IS TO BE REMOVED. UNFORTUNATELY THE IDL5.4 p_correlate
; FAILS WITH >1 SERIES TO HOLD CONSTANT, SO I HAVE TO REMOVE THEIR INFLUENCE
; FROM BOTH INDTS AND DEPTS USING MULTIPLE LINEAR REGRESSION AND THEN USE THE
; USUAL correlate FUNCTION ON THE RESIDUALS.
;

pro maps12,yrstart,doinfill=doinfill
;
; Plots 24 yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD reconstructions
; of growing season temperatures. Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.
;

;
; Plots (1 at a time) yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD
; reconstructions
; of growing season temperatures. Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.

CRU Emails “may” be open to interpretation, but commented code by the programmer tells the real story

When the CRU emails first made it into news stories, there was immediate reaction from the head of CRU, Dr. Phil Jones over this passage in an email:

From a yahoo.com news story:

In one leaked e-mail, the research center’s director, Phil Jones, writes to colleagues about graphs showing climate statistics over the last millennium. He alludes to a technique used by a fellow scientist to “hide the decline” in recent global temperatures. Some evidence appears to show a halt in a rise of global temperatures from about 1960, but is contradicted by other evidence which appears to show a rise in temperatures is continuing.

Jones wrote that, in compiling new data, he had “just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline,” according to a leaked e-mail, which the author confirmed was genuine.

Dr. Jones responded.

However, Jones denied manipulating evidence and insisted his comment had been taken out of context. “The word ‘trick’ was used here colloquially, as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward,” he said in a statement Saturday.

Ok fine, but how Dr. Jones, do you explain this?

There’s a file of code also in the collection of emails and documents from CRU. A commenter named Neal on climate audit writes:

People are talking about the emails being smoking guns but I find the remarks in the code and the code more of a smoking gun. The code is so hacked around to give predetermined results that it shows the bias of the coder. In other words make the code ignore inconvenient data to show what I want it to show. The code after a quick scan is quite a mess. Anyone with any pride would be to ashamed of to let it out public viewing. As examples [of] bias take a look at the following remarks from the MANN code files:

Here’s the code with the comments left by the programmer:

[Follow the link to the original article for the code]

You can claim an email you wrote years ago isn’t accurate saying it was “taken out of context”, but a programmer making notes in the code does so that he/she can document what the code is actually doing at that stage, so that anyone who looks at it later can figure out why this function doesn’t plot past 1960. In this case, it is not allowing all of the temperature data to be plotted. Growing season data (summer months when the new tree rings are formed) past 1960 is thrown out because “these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures”, which implies some post processing routine.

Spin that, spin it to the moon if you want. I’ll believe programmer notes over the word of somebody who stands to gain from suggesting there’s nothing “untowards” about it.

Either the data tells the story of nature or it does not. Data that has been “artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures” is false data, yielding a false result.[...]