Normally I’d ignore this, but “Ace” has posted something so moronically misguided and false it calls for a response: Charles Johnson Now Deleting Posts for Mentioning Hacked Global Warming Fraud Emails.

“Ace” says I deleted this comment by LGF reader ‘bosforus’ with “no explanation,” and that I’m “suppressing the data.” That’s just how evil I am.

But in the real world where people aren’t on hair trigger outrage watch, I deleted the comment not because it mentioned the Hadley emails, but because it linked to downloads of illegally obtained data.

“Ace” may have no problem with that, but I don’t want LGF to be used to circulate files that were acquired by breaking into a private email server. That’s the reason it was deleted.

I also condemned the hacking of Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account. Unlike “Ace,” I’m trying to be responsible and consistent.

For the record, ‘bosforus’ himself told me about his comment, in the thread I put up specifically to discuss (not “suppress”) the Hadley email data, and asked me to delete it. I thanked him and explained why I didn’t want the links at LGF, right here.

And that thread about the Hadley emails, by the way, has more than 400 comments, with plenty of debate and argument from both sides. Seems like an odd way to “suppress” something.

If the clown shoe fits, “Ace.”

After Sarah Palin ended a book-signing event in Noblesville, Indiana, without signing more than 300 books for people who waited more than 6 hours to see her, the crowd turned on her outside her tour bus, booing and yelling “Quitting on the job!”

Here’s a story on the embarrassing incident at Indychannel.com: Palin Greets Hundreds, But Not Everyone Leaves Happy.

Right wing bloggers and climate “skeptics” are ranting and fuming about “the global warming scandal of the century,” after the email server of one of the UK’s leading climate research centers was hacked, and thousands of emails were stolen and promptly posted all over the web. (Which is, of course, completely illegal.)

However, reading the summaries that these folks have posted, such as the one in this almost comically exaggerated article by Telegraph writer James Delingpole, one thing stands out — there’s no there there. There’s no evidence of a conspiracy to commit massive fraud. There are no admissions of faking data. The worst thing they’ve dug up out of thousands of emails is this one referring to a “trick” used to adjust warming data, which Delingpole dramatically labels “Manipulation of evidence:”

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

“Trick,” of course, can also mean “an effective technique,” but if you were desperately hunting for anything smear-worthy, I suppose the word would stand out.

RealClimate has responded to this stolen email nontroversy here: The CRU hack.

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

Read the whole thing; they make more excellent points about the absurdly exaggerated denialists’ claims.

Here’s their response to the “trick” comment:

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

Here’s some good news if you live in Canada and you’ve been waiting for Amazon to release their terrific Kindle e-book reader in a Canadian version: your wait is over. In addition to having full access to more than 300,000 titles in the Amazon store, Amazon announced that Canadian newspapers The Globe and Mail and The National Post will be available in Kindle editions, with the newspapers in the Canwest chain following soon.

Here’s the Amazon news release: Amazon Kindle and More than 300,000 Books in the Kindle Store Now Available to Customers in Canada.

(Note: if you buy a Kindle by clicking the picture or by following one of the links in this post, we get a small cut of the purchase price through Amazon’s associates program.)

White supremacist blogger Robert Stacy McCain continues to be welcomed in Republican circles; here he is posing at the American Spectator dinner with the two videographers who filmed the ACORN sting tapes: An O’Keefe/Giles Victory Lap.

Also see:
Sarah Palin’s Book Ghostwritten by Associate of White Supremacist McCain
Robert Stacy McCain and the Fall of the Conservative Movement
Meet Robert Stacy McCain, Neo-Confederate Wacko Extraordinaire
Audio: Robert Stacy McCain on Alan Colmes Radio Show
The Other ‘Other McCain’
Robert Stacy McCain’s Angry Departure From the Washington Times