Thank you, Professor Curry, for staling the Climate Change Bandwagon until Senator Inhofe could identify the “Hollywood scientist” behind this movement.

http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/12/03/streisand-v-inhofe-hollywood-outraged-that-inhofe-singled-out-singers-role-in-promoting-global-warming-but-streisand-admits-i-and-others-have-spent-countless-millions-on-this-issue/

Other than the Norfolk police having said so, is there any evidence that any law was broken in the release of the CG emails?

Under English law,the Computer Misuse Act applies to unauthorised access to a computer. So far as I can tell, anybody given root access by their employer has implicitly been authorised to access anything on the machine (unless instructed otherwise). So, if such a person accessed data on the machine, even via external access, no offence would have been committed.

English universities are “Public Authorities” under English law and therefor information generated and received by their academic staff in the course of their work is subject to FOI. I have never heard of the release of information subject to FOI being illegal. (It might be a disciplinary issue but that is not the same thing.) So the release of the information, if legal obtained, would not have been an offence, so far as I can see.

The smear campaign is not working.

That’s was some funny stuff. No less so than Mann dancing around and chopping trees down. It general, WUWT should carry the disclaimer:

When thinking about the legacy of “Climategate”, this comic seems to add a bit a dark and witty humor to Judith’s journey, for those who missed it:

http://www.bishop-hill.net/storage/heretic_scr.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1297502386297

These are interesting points in regard to CG in general Steve. The historiography in itself isn’t the issue here but the general weight of importance placed on by the host and followed up in so many weak skeptical quarters;

“The net effect of all this is that my ‘academic career advancement’ in terms of professional recognition, climbing the administrative ladder, etc. has been pretty much halted. I’ve exchanged academic advancement that now seems to be of dubious advantage to me for a much more interesting and influential existence that that feels right in terms of my personal and scientific integrity.

Bottom line: Climategate was career changing for me; I’ll let history decide if this was for better or worse (if history even cares).”

I can just imagine Joshua and Michael hawking politically correct history books in their later years. Regardless of all that there has been 40+ years global central planning agenda long before CG was ever coined that seems to go to the discount rack with such yodeling over CG personal significance which is far more a symptom of what is wrong with partisan motivated “science” than the disease itself. If Dr. Curry is to fess up to “science integrity” she might try to recall the entire theatrical exercise of the green movement in academia at least from 1970 on. She was there for much of it and from all that I’ve read a willing member. CG is just one revealing event with many facets but rather trivial to the broader, authoritarian in nature history of the climate movement.

This is the Rudolf Hess syndrome, he flew the plane out of Germany and thought he was to be a hero at least to where he was flying. Instead he spent about 50 years in solitary confinement until he died. While the blog tends to always praise our host (many imagined skeptics at least) or be hated by warming extremists that isn’t the final judgement. It starts with looking at the whole climate agenda story and all the dots connected. The idea that CG is the defining event of the climate culture war is foolish at best. The stakes for the world in the would-be Climate Soviet were/are a good deal higher then discussed by our host and certainly per-dated CG by at least 40+ years. Harping on CG as so many skeptics, technical skeptics in particular, do deserves some retrospect.

I’m glad for the CG synopsis but it’s largely a digression in how the host weights the event and is reinforced by many of the comments on the board (I’m considering many “skeptics” here). Spare me if CG was either “shocking” or life changing, that’s beyond naive.

Climate Etc’s many students of thermodynamical climate-science are well-advised to heed the sage advice of the great Lev Landau:

Preface to Statistical Physics

Statistical physics and thermodynamics together form a unit.

All the concepts and quantities of thermodynamics follow most naturally, simply, and rigorously from the concepts of statistical physics.

Although the general statements of thermodynamics can be formulated non-statistically, their application to specific cases always requires the use of statistical physics.

Conclusion  Nowadays, young researchers (especially) are well-advised to study thermodynamics the modern way … in the language of geometric dynamics … with particular care that every macroscopic thermodynamical assertion is solidly and explicitly grounded in statistical mechanics and (microscopic) Hamiltonian flows.

This unified program afford WONDERFUL levels of thermodynamical understanding!

Best wishes are extended to all Climate Etc readers, for continued enjoyment and success in appreciating thermodynamics and statistical mechanics and geometric dynamics in the modern style … as one unified subject!

Well said by Victor Davis Hanson,
“Take also global warming — for Secretary of State John Kerry, the world’s greatest challenge. Once the planet did not heat up in the last 18 years, and once the ice of the polar caps did not melt away, global warming begat climate change. The new nomenclature was a clever effort to link all occasional weather extremities to some underlying and fundamental climate disruption. Brilliant though the strategy was — the opposites of cold/hot, drought/deluges, and calm/storms could now all be used as proof of permanent climate change — global warming finally was hoist on its own petard: If it caused everything, then it caused nothing.

So, in the end, what was global warming? It seems to have grown up largely as a late-20th-century critique of global-market capitalism by elites who had done so well by it that they had won the luxury of caricaturing the very source of their privilege. Global warming proved a near secular religion that filled a deep psychological longing for some sort of transcendent meaning among mostly secular Western grandees. In reality, the global-warming creed had scant effect on the lifestyles of the high priests who promulgated it. Al Gore did not cut back on his jet-fueled and lucrative proselytizing. Obama did not become the first president who, on principle, traveled with a reduced and green entourage. Solyndra did not run a model transparent company as proof of the nobility of the cause. As in the case of illegal immigration, the losers from the global-warming fad are the working and middle classes, who do not have the capital to be unharmed by the restrictions on cheap, carbon-based fuels.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/393713/liberalism-ruins-victor-davis-hanson

Actually, the Loschmidt Paradox aka gravito-thermal effect is a bit of a statistical anomaly. The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution assumes perfect chaos believe it or not, which is not really correct. Seems even chaos is not allowed to be perfect.

So while your centrifugal star equivalent heat generation is amusing, Gibbs entropy which allows for a more reasonable number of degrees of freedom and more likely phase space is the more accurate of the Gibbs versus Boltzmann entropies, at least according to Jaynes. But then entropy is an Anthropomorphic concept, not a property of a physical system which would make “equilibrium” a useful concept, but a property of an experiment, thought or otherwise, not a physical reality.

There is no second law violation using the Gibbs concept, but there can appear to be a second law violation using the Boltzmann concept. Since you are an absolute physics whiz I would have expected you resolve this little paradox quickly.

http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/gibbs.vs.boltzmann.pdf

I don’t think Joshua gets it so an example might be in order.

In climategate, for example, people had a choice of what to focus on.
Instead they threw up every conceivable issue.

1. Jones, mail to warwick hughes about not sharing data
2. mr santer Meet me in the alley
3. Bad practices: harry read me.
4. FOIA and Ar4

faced with those 4, any good defender will focus on the least important and defend that. Say #3. A really good defense against one of the weakest points. In the mean time issue 4 gets ignored or short shrift.

In the end you write a report saying ‘we found no issue with #3′ and you just never address the other issues. Client is exonerated.

Thats a cartoon version of what happens when you try to over charge a case rather than build a focused case.

Its also the reason why on nov 19th two days over getting all the mails
I told Andrew Revkin to follow the FOIA. because in my opinion after reading all the mails, the strongest case could be made by focusing on that. Everything else is a distraction. Of course in the first two weeks all manner of crap got spewed, especially by Palin.

on one side you had skeptics trying to coatrack every issue onto climategate. you had them screaming murder when the crime was more like a serious misdemeanor. On the other side, it was all jay walking.

Looking at it practically I merely note that the skeptics did themselves no favours by throwing a spaggetti bowl full of charges against the wall in the hopes that it all would stick. Quite logically the other side picked some of the weakest cases to counter attack.

CD,

A couple of my comments starting from this one

http://judithcurry.com/2014/11/27/open-thread-thanksgiving-edition/#comment-651077

seem to be directly related to the difference of Gibbs and Boltzmann H functions. I agree with Gibbs and Jaynes.

Pekka, “I agree with Gibbs and Jaynes.”

I am glad, sorry I missed your other comments

missed it by this much, Sorry I missed your other comments.

The other comments are a little further in the same thread, but what they add is related to the comments they respond to.

I tend to switch immediately to QM when I consider issues like interaction between molecules. Many concepts of statistical mechanics seem easier for me that way, but that cannot be true to everybody. Having lectured several courses of QM before lecturing thermodynamics for the first time must have something to do with my preference.

This may also be an issue that’s more obvious in Quantum Statistical Mechanics.

The type of people who like to giggle at creationists had their own flat-earth moment when they looked at the original hockey-stick and did NOT fall down laughing…or ROFL, as the type of people who giggle at creationists would express it.

The fact that the hockey-stick was taken seriously by those best in a position to appreciate its absurdity indicated that climate alarmism was indeed just the old collectivist urge looking for a new home.

The “solutions” we have seen implemented since do more than indicate. Hard to miss a herd of white elephants rampaging through your economy, no matter how selective your vision.

This is where the Big Tobacco comparisons really fall apart. While it would be rare to see an anti-smoking activist smoking, our Green Betters think nothing of extracting substantial personal benefits from the industrial culture they condemn or of advocating for stupendous up-front waste to produce their tiny and dubious green gains. Membership of the klimatariat has privileges.

We may no longer have Borgia popes or commissars with weekend dachas…but we’ve got something awfully like it.

‘Atmospheric and oceanic forcings are strongest at global equilibrium scales of 107 m and seasons to millennia. Fluid mixing and dissipation occur at microscales of 10^−3m and 10^−3s, and cloud particulate transformations happen at 10^−6m or smaller. Observed intrinsic variability is spectrally broad band across all intermediate scales. A full representation for all dynamical degrees of freedom in different quantities and scales is uncomputable even with optimistically foreseeable computer technology. No fundamentally reliable reduction of the size of the AOS dynamical system (i.e., a statistical mechanics analogous to the transition between molecular kinetics and fluid dynamics) is yet envisioned.

This reality in nature and computers has given rise to two pervasive AOS practices: (i) AOS solution fields are nonsmooth near the space–time discretization scales (i.e., the “resolution” of the model) imposed on the known governing principles expressed mostly as partial differential equations. (ii) AOS models contain essential parameterizations for unresolved or highly simplified processes whose specifications are not at a fundamental level of known governing principles.

Both practices are coping strategies to span as large a subrange as feasible for the uncomputably broad scale in the most fundamentally grounded fluid dynamical problem.’ James C. McWilliams – Louis B. Slichter Professor of Earth Sciences – UCLA Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences

There are statistical mechanical principles to do with pressure, temperature, energy states, etc. But we have a a large, dynamic and complex system that is not reducible by any equivalent statistical method and is more generally represented by set of hydrodynamic equations in which physical properties – mass and momentum – are conserved across grid boundaries. More or less smoothly.

There is a hierarchy of models – http://weather.unl.edu/RCM/IDB_Mexico/PDF/modelprelim.pdf – in which a Hamiltonian is one approach to low order models – http://www.nonlin-processes-geophys.net/13/125/2006/npg-13-125-2006.pdf

Each of these approaches has intrinsic limitations. There are emerging methods that may be of more fundamental interest at the systems level.

‘Considering index networks rather than raw three-dimensional climate fields is a relatively novel approach, with advantages of increased dynamical interpretability, increased signal-to-noise ratio, and enhanced statistical significance, albeit at the expense of phenomenological completeness. Climate indices represent distinct subsets of dynamical processes. One could consider these indices – the nodes of our network – to be climate oscillators, each node, by itself, an intrinsic, self-sustaining system. When coupled with other self-sustaining oscillators of the network, the collective choreography of interlinked nodes generates a hemispherically spanning, propagating teleconnection signal – our “stadium wave” – an atmospheric and lagged oceanic teleconnection sequence that communicates an Atlantic-born climate signal of multidecadal warming and cooling (superimposed upon longer-time-scale temperature trends) across the Northern Hemisphere. Significantly, a warm North Atlantic generates a decadal-scale lagged cooling hemispheric response; a cool Atlantic generates a warming one.’ Marcia Wyatt

The white dots cascading down the screen at this site – btw – seem to be real and not a visual hallucination. Let me know if they aren’t and I will make an appointment with a neurologist.

Although the warming and cooling signal is global originating at the both poles with a see-saw of atmospheric pressure driving ocean circulation.

Multi-decadal variability in the Pacific is defined as the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (e.g. Folland et al,2002, Meinke et al, 2005, Parker et al, 2007, Power et al, 1999) – a proliferation of oscillations it seems. The latest Pacific Ocean climate shift in 1998/2001 is linked to increased flow in the north (Di Lorenzo et al, 2008) and the south (Roemmich et al, 2007, Qiu, Bo et al 2006) Pacific Ocean gyres. Roemmich et al (2007) suggest that mid-latitude gyres in all of the oceans are influenced by decadal variability in the Southern and Northern Annular Modes (SAM and NAM respectively) as wind driven currents in baroclinic oceans (Sverdrup, 1947).

The systems approach to climate as suggested by complexity theory reveals a fundamentally different view of climate variability that cannot be approached by the reductionist methods of the Hamiltonian or any other technique.

‘Climate is ultimately complex. Complexity begs for reductionism. With reductionism, a puzzle is studied by way of its pieces. While this approach illuminates the climate system’s components, climate’s full picture remains elusive. Understanding the pieces does not ensure understanding the collection of pieces.’ Marcia Wyatt

You hit the nail on the head!

Bob, you are right, of course, about the hipocricy of the elite left. Unfortunately, the people will forgive a hero everything and a scoundrel nothing. The definition of a hero being, in this case, someone who reflects your own values. Thus, the cycle will never end.

Mosh,
I just read the FOIA requests from CRU as described on wiki and I have some questions.

It seems that the original requests were made by Steve McIntyre and at first Jones complied but later refused. Later David Holland made requests for Ar4 and IPCC stuff from Briffa and the university refused. After some convoluted legal stuff it was found the statue of limitations had run out.

In both cases what would have happened legally? Anyone going to jail? Most importantly what was so damming about this information that release was refused. In other words was this a tempest in a teapot or was the release of this information really going to mess with Mann and the IPCC?