Could this study on honesty and government service explain the EPA climateer fraud and âClimategateâ ?
Posted on January 8, 2014 by Anthony Watts
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/...-climateer-fraud-and-climategate/#more-100768
A new paper published the National Bureau of Economic Research has given an insight that may explain some of the personal decisions that led to the recent EPA corruption fiasco Massive fraud at the EPA from agencyâs top paid climate official (where a top climate specialist defrauded the taxpayers out of millions of dollars and made wild claims about being on CIA missions) and to Climategate, since I see some significant parallels between the two and this study. Links to a story about the paper and the paper itself follow.
As readers know, in a nutshell, Climategate was about the stonewalling of FOIA requests so that independent researchers (such as McIntyre) could not replicate the scientific work. That access for data to allow scientific replication was unreasonably blocked, and someone who was in a position to see what was going on behind the scenes decided that they would do something about it. Virtually every person involved in Climategate emails had some connection to government, either being directly employed by a government agency, or a government funded university.
On 17 November 2009 a large number of emails, together with other documents and pieces of code, from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were posted on a Russian web server, and announced anonymously at the Air Vent blog, Climate Audit, Real Climate, The Blackboard, and WUWT with the comment:
We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.
Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.
Of note, was the immediate deletion of the comment at Real Climate, and then a campaign by Dr. Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS to convince Lucia at the Blackboard that the release wasnât to be trusted.
In that release from the âFOIAâ leaker, we saw revelations like âMikeâs Nature Trickâ. Here is a list of some of the emails and their content.From this Google document page:
http://sites.google.com/site/globalwarmingquestions/climategate
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Massaging the presentation of data:
942777075.txt the infamous âtrickâ to âhide the declineâ in tree-ring data
939154709.txt âThey go from 1402 to 1995, although we usually stop the series in 1960″ (also referring to tree-ring data)
1225026120.txt âIâll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as thatâs trending downâ (referring to recent temperature data).
1254108338.txt âSo, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global meanâ ⦠âIt would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blipâ. This relates to the rapid warming before 1940 followed by cooling after 1940, which the âscientistsâ would like to remove because it does not fit with their theory.
Attempting to get papers with a sceptical view on global warming rejected from journals, and not referred to in the IPCC reports:
1089318616.txt âI canât see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow â even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !â
1054756929.txt Ed Cook discusses with Keith Briffa how to get a paper rejected even though the mathematics is correct
1054748574.txt where Briffa says âI am really sorry but I have to nag about that review â Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejectingâ
1080742144.txt where Jones âwent to townâ rejecting two papers that had criticised his work.
Refusing to provide data and supporting information when requested, and deleting emails (all quotes from Phil Jones):
1107454306.txt âThe two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think Iâll delete the file rather than send to anyoneâ.
1109021312.txt âIâm getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Donât any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !â
1182255717.txt âThink Iâve managed to persuade UEA to ignore all further FOIA requests if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit.â
1211924186.txt Tim Osborn informs Caspar Amman that an FOI request has been received from David Holland about papers included in the IPCC report (May 27 2008) â¦.
1212009215.txt Jones suggests what âKeith could sayâ and âKeith should sayâ (May 28 2008) â¦
1212073451.txt âCan you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? ⦠We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.â (May 29 2008). [Under paragraph 77 of the FOI Act it is an offence to delete information subject to an FOI request].
1228330629.txt âWhen the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions â one at a screen, to convince them otherwiseâ ⦠âAbout 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little â if anything at all.â
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This LA Times story from November 2013 suggests that there may be a connection between dishonesty and government employment.
Cheating students more likely to want government jobs, study finds
November 18, 2013|By Emily Alpert Reyes
College students who cheated on a simple task were more likely to want government jobs, researchers from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania found in a study of hundreds of students in Bangalore, India.
Their results, recently released as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, suggest that one of the contributing forces behind government corruption could be who gets into government work in the first place.
