We have to offer up scary scenarios (about global warming) ... ...each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. Stephen Schneider, Stanford University environmentalist
http://climatesight.org/2009/04/12/the-schneider-quote/
An egregious quote-mine that completely removes the context of what he was saying and changes its meaning completely.
There is no reason to give them any data, in my opinion, and I think we do so at our own peril! Michael Mann, Director Earth System Science Center, Pennsylvania State University
This was referring to, essentially, a witch hunt by Steve McIntyre. Mann was completely right, of course - there was no honest discourse here, just an attempt to smear the science.
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. Kevin Trenberth, National Center For Atmospheric Research, USA
Another quote mine. Trenberth is complaining that his models do not account for the entire heat budget of the earth. When asked about the quote later on, Trenberth had this to say:
"Global warming is still happening - our planet is still accumulating heat. But our observation systems aren't able to comprehensively keep track of where all the energy is going. Consequently, we can't definitively explain why surface temperatures have gone down in the last few years. That's a travesty!"
The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guide what's included and what is left out [of the IPCC Reports]. Jonathan Overpeck, Director, Institute for the Study of Planet Earth, University of Arizona
http://www.southwestclimatechange.org/blog/13516
Another quote taken completely out of context.
The context for the email is as follows: material in the IPCC report needs to be focused on an assessment of what is relevant to policy-makers, not a more general review of the science for other scientists. This was what I meant by “main message” – in Ricardo’s case, boiling the assessment down to the science related to modes of climate variability that is relevant to policy-makers. I was asking Ricardo to figure out what this message was (i.e., what the science says), and also help us meet our very tight page limits.
[...]
Of course, what we’re talking about is typical of all quality science writing: the need to focus on your audience, base what you are writing on solid science, and meet page limits. The IPCC is no different, and there is a reason the IPCC process includes many drafts and review steps – the goal is to be as focused and accurate as possible.
Weighting the solar irradiance more strongly in the models, then much of the 19th to mid 20th century warming can be explained from the sun alone. Rob Wilson, School of Geography & Geosciences, University of St Andrews
This one is, for the most part, in context. What's missing is that this is a part of a discussion between scientists, criticizing the existing models, and that we
know the sun had a lot to do with much of the 20th-century warming.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?n=1148
Dear friends,
I am concerned about the the stressed tone of some of the words being
circulated lately. Such difficulties not only hamper collegiality
(which I value greatly) but also the actual progress in our field.
I think you are all fine fellows and very good scientists and that it
is time to smoke the peace pipe on all this and put a temporary
moratorium on more email messages until tempers cool down a bit.
After this maybe we can discuss things somewhere where each party
comes to the meeting beforehand with a commitment to even-handed
discussion and give and take.
I hope I have not offended anyone in this message -- it is of course
a personal opinion. Maybe it is an illusion or prejudice on my part,
but somehow I am not convinced that the "truth" is always worth
reaching if it is at the cost of damaged personal relationships....
Best wishes, Tom
Full email in quote; the part
you quoted out of context in red.
It is interesting to see the lower tropospheric warming minimum in the tropics in all three plots, which I cannot explain. ...it is remarkably robust against my adjustment efforts.
Leopold Haimberger, Department of Meteorology and Geophysics, University of Vienna
Again, you're taking standard science correspondance and making it out to be something suspicious or bad. I encourage everyone - go to the actual emails,
read the full exchange. There's nothing suspicious about it.
It will not be models or theory, but observation that will provide the answer to the question of how the climate will change in many decades time. Andrew Watson, School of Environmental Sciences, UEA, UK
This one doesn't even sound iffy
out of context, but
in context it's even less suspicious. He's talking about advances in meteorology that may be decades away,
not claiming that climate models cannot predict climate change.
There is no individual model that does well in all of the SST [sea surface temperature] and water vapor tests we've applied. Ben Santer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA
More of the same.
Read the whole email, not just the out-of-context quote.
I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this [tuning] much longer Tim Barnett, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA
And again:
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=0850.txt
I've been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process Phil Jones, Director of Climate Research Unit, UEA, UK.
Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get - and has to be well hidden. Phil Jones, Director of Climate Research Unit, UEA, UK.
Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it? Phil Jones, Director of Climate Research Unit, UEA, UK
So, just to be clear, you think that after so many people spent so much time turning out-of-context snippets of private email conversations into a huge conspiracy, Phil Jones is
wrong to be wary and demand that this doesn't happen again? Your post is a
perfect justification for his actions here. The fact is that after climategate, the CRU faced a
massive witch hunt in the public eye, with people taking their statements out of context and using them to smear the entire profession of climate science. If you're interested in actually
learning about that last quote, and the context it was in, here's an article by Nature:
http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2009/08/mcintyre_versus_jones_climate_1.html
Notable quote:
Jones says that he tried to help when he first received data requests from McIntyre back in 2002, but says that he soon became inundated with requests that he could not fulfill, or that he did not have the time to respond to. He says that, in some cases, he simply couldn’t hand over entire data sets because of long-standing confidentiality agreements with other nations that restrict their use.
Although Jones agrees that the data should be made publicly available, he says that “it needs to be done in a systematic way”. He is now working to make the data publicly available online and will post a statement on the CRU website tomorrow to that effect, with any existing confidentiality agreements. “We’re trying to make them all available. We’re consulting with all the meteorological services – about 150 members of WMO – and will ask them if they are happy to release the data”, says Jones. But getting the all-clear from other nations could take several months and there may be objections. “Some countries don’t even have their own data available as they haven’t digitized it. We have done a lot of that ourselves”, he says.
Slightly different story. Of course, it doesn't reflect well on Phil Jones, I will freely admit that, but the context makes it far less damning than one might think.
Very little research has ever been funded to search for natural mechanisms of warming... it has simply been assumed that global warming is manmade. Roy W. Spencer, University of Alabama in Huntsville
...But of course, Roy W. Spencer
is completely wrong. It's not merely assumed; we've demonstrated it beyond any reasonable doubt.
Not only do journalists not have a responsibility to report what skeptical scientists have to say about global warming, they have a responsibility not to report what these scientists say. Ross Gelbspan, former editor of The Boston Globe
Yeah, see, this is one of those quotes that make perfect sense if you're up to date on the consensus. Journalists have a responsibility to understand when an issue is a manufactroversy - that is, when a scientific issue
doesn't have two equally viable sides. John Oliver put it best, but I probably shouldn't link that video here. There isn't really an "other side". The vast,
vast majority of publishing climatologists accept global warming. The overwhelming majority of published papers (even from people who, in private, claim otherwise, like Judith Curry) accept climate change as real and man-made. So why should a crank like Spencer or Lindzen, people who have
consistently and constantly been proven wrong, get more air-time? Should we be giving Dr. Peter Duesburg time in our articles on HIV and AIDS? After all, he's a "skeptical scientist", and he disagrees with the mainstream views.
I would freely admit that on global warming we have crossed the boundary from news reporting to advocacy. Charles Alexander, Time magazine science editor
But is this a bad thing? Climate change is happening. There is overwhelming scientific consensus, and yet a lot of people still don't accept it. So why
shouldn't advocacy be the order of the day?