Some links to follow for more information on the purloined CRU files and their significance. by Phil Manger
(libertarian)
Friday, December 4, 2009
So much about the Climategate scandal — i.e., the leaking (or hacking) of emails and other files from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia — has been published on the internet in the past two weeks that one risks information overload by trying to read everything. For about a week and a half, now, practically all of my web surfing has been in pursuit of information about the scandal. I found so many sites with information that, instead of including links to them in the other article I have on Nolan Chart today, I have decided to include them in this skeptical layman's guide to Climategate and save people from having to search through thousands of Google listings.
If you're into primary research, you'll probably want to download the raw data file that was posted on the internet. This was originally posted on the RealClimate.org website, but was quickly taken down. It subsequently turned up on a Russian server. You can go to the file dropper website and download a zipped version of the files. Unzipped, they take up about 168 MB on your hard drive. The zipped file is about 62 MB.
A website called eastangliaemails.com has been set up to help people research the emails. This site allows you to enter search terms in a text box and produces a list of emails containing those terms.
Bishop Hill is the blogging name of the British libertarian writer A. W. Montford. He has been following this scandal from the beginning, and has some good links to other sources, too. Links to the most damning quotes from the emails can be found here, and links to code analyses can be found here.
Another British writer, Christopher Booker, discusses the scandal in the Daily Telegraph, calling it the "worst scientific scandal of our generation". I've included this link, not only because it's a good summary of the scandal, but because Google has seen fit not to include it in its list of hits when you type the search terms "global warming".
Marc Sheppard at American Thinker has dug into some of the computer code from the CRU files and shows how they have cooked the data. AT has had more and better coverage of Climategate than just about any other American website. Their home page is here.
Climate Audit (mirror site is here if you have trouble getting into the main site — it's had a lot of traffic since the scandal broke) is the website of Steve McIntyre, the Canadian who has spent the last seven years exposing the shoddy research work of the Hockey Team.
Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph and McIntyre's collaborator, has his home page here. For his summary (somewhat technical) of the "hockey stick" controversy, see: What is the 'Hockey Stick' Debate About?.
The Wegman Report, a sort of half-time assessment of the hockey stick wars, is posted on Prof. McKitrick's university website and on Climate Audit.
World Climate Report published a brief history of the Hockey Stick in 2005, but was a tad premature in announcing its death.
British newspapers have been more willing to cover this scandal than their American counterparts, and have also been fairer and more objective than those American newspapers which have covered it. Here is an article by the environmental editor of the London Times.
Many of the sites listed above have links to still more sites, so, if you're interested in digging deeper, you'll have plenty to keep you busy.
I add this one for completeness (and to generate some more hits for my articles). In July I published an article on this site comparing the anthropogenic global warming orthodoxy with the Keynesian orthodoxy in economics a couple generations ago. One of the issues I discussed in the article is the use of the peer-review process to enforce orthodoxy. Sad to say, the situation was far worse than what I described. To read the article, go here.
Finally, in the interest of fairness, here is a link to RealClimate.org, the official unofficial site of the Hockey Team.
If I have left out any sites, I apologize.
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