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The blogosphere pile-on over Climategate continues. Over the weekend, several folks noted that “Climategate” had already surpassed “global warming” on webpage hits on Google. As I mentioned yesterday, analyses of the leaked Climate Research Unit documents, such as coding notes, are proliferating so fast that it’s become impossible to keep up.

And now Eric Raymond has joined the fray. Raymond is a well-known and well-regarded computer programmer and open-source guru. He’s already written a half dozen short analyses with more on the way. Here’s a representative sample:

From the CRU code file osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro , used to prepare a graph purported to be of Northern Hemisphere temperatures and reconstructions.

;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)

This, people, is blatant data-cooking, with no pretense otherwise. It flattens a period of warm temperatures in the 1940s 1930s – see those negative coefficients? Then, later on, it applies a positive multiplier so you get a nice dramatic hockey stick at the end of the century.

All you apologists weakly protesting that this is research business as usual and there are plausible explanations for everything in the emails? Sackcloth and ashes time for you. This isn’t just a smoking gun, it’s a siege cannon with the barrel still hot.

Raymond is just the sort of person that ought to be focusing on Climategate—and he is. The alarmists following the story have to know that this thing has gotten away from them.

Read the rest of Raymond’s installments here.

Today’s fascinating Buffalo News column by Edward Cowle, CEO and president of U. S. Rare Earths, reveals the stunning fact that 84 percent of the $1.05 billion dollars in “green stimulus” money spent by the Obama administration has gone to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms.

One wind farm project that was planned using $450 million in stimulus money would have paid for the windmill construction in China, creating 2,000–3,000 jobs for the Chinese, but only 300 temporary and 30 permanent jobs here in the United States (Senator Charles Schumer is apparently trying to get this project axed.)

Such trends are likely to continue if we keep chasing the “green energy” bandwagon, because, as Cowle observes:

Rare earth elements are vital to green energy applications like wind generation and hybrid vehicles. Rare earth magnets are found in components in wind turbines and rechargeable batteries, in key national security systems that keep us safe at home and protect our war fighters in the field and in everyday consumer products like computers, cell phones and iPods.

Worldwide demand for these materials is escalating rapidly, and more than 95 percent of currently available rare earth mining occurs in China or is controlled by Chinese-led interests.

China, in turn, has used this lock to become the Saudi Arabia of rare earths globally. By enacting unfair export quotas and taxes on rare earths and related products, China has placed U. S. rare earth magnet manufacturing at a competitive disadvantage and forced producers overseas. This has led to an increase in Chinese green manufacturing jobs and driven Chinese firms up the value chain at the expense of American workers.

Today no significant production of rare earth metals takes place in North America or anywhere outside of China.

The United States and Canada have their own rare earth resources, but, as with America’s own oil and gas reserves, the United States doesn’t make it easy to develop them.

The rare earth issue raises another question that isn’t discussed in Cowle’s column. Advocates of wind and solar power always claim that costs will come down for renewable energy as more of it is deployed, but this makes little sense when the costs of the technology tilt heavily toward the input materials, especially if those materials are scarce. In that situation, one would expect costs for wind and solar power devices to go up with increased deployment, not down.

Accompanying the infamous Climate Research Unit (CRU) emails leaked last Thursday night, there are all sorts of documents, including detailed coding notes from programmers. These notes reveal the attitudes of programmers who had grappled with the data and computer programs supposedly establishing drastic warming patterns in the twentieth century. These program code segments are, if anything, more revealing than the emails.

Since these documents are more technical than the emails, however, analysis has been slower in coming. And, as in the case of the emails, there’s unmistakable evidence of fudging and book-cooking, all designed to give the impression that the warming in the twentieth century is unprecedented. The evidence is all the more damning because of the expletive-laced complaints of programmers tasked with altering code to corral unruly, unreliable, and sometimes cherry-picked data in a pre-determined direction. At one point, a poor, exasperated programmer, “Harry,” bemoans “the hopeless state of our databases.” (See telling examples and good analysis of these code notes here, here, here, and here.)

Hiding and manipulating data and code are especially serious in climate science because, as Willis Eschenbach has pointed out, “unlike all other physical sciences, [climate science] does not study things—instead it studies averages . . . This is because climate by definition is the average of weather over a suitably long period of time (typically taken as a minimum of 30 years).” So without the background information, it’s almost impossible for other scientists to verify—or falsify—your results.

Of course, most of the big broadcast media are still in full blackout mode on this story, choosing instead to report on breaking news about Pete the orphaned moose. They’re following the pattern of the Dan Rather Memogate controversy in 2004. With that history-making story, the legacy media mostly tried to ignore the story, and then, when it got too big, began to spin it. Rather and CBS issued increasingly bizarre denials. Even though the gig was up within a couple of days, they continued to defend the document in question, and the stories based on it, for two excruciating weeks. (Compare CRU’s Phil Jones offering similarly risible explanations.) Meanwhile, in the parallel universe called reality, unknown and often apolitical bloggers with specialized expertise in font styles, IBM Executive Series and Selectric typewriters, military protocol, and word-processing software dismantled the details for any curious person with an Internet connection. Other, politically oriented blogs consolidated, analyzed, and broadcast the findings.

MemoGate gave many of us our first taste of the swarm-intelligence of the blogosphere, and showed that it can beat the legacy media for getting to the bottom of a story via a networked, open-source form of peer review, with a highly refined division of labor.

We may just now be seeing the potential for this new way of transferring and analyzing information. In Memogate, remember, we were talking about a single one-page Word document. With Climategate, we’re dealing with thousands of detailed, often technical documents. They may even have been compiled internally at the CRU in response to a Freedom of Information request and were then leaked instead. So the revenge of the nerds could be especially brutal and prolonged. Already, insights and analyses are proliferating on the climate blogosphere so quickly that it’s becoming impossible for even the best consolidators to keep up.

Most of us who follow the climate change debate have spent the last 48-72 hours trolling the climate blogosphere to get the latest information on the thousands of emails of climate catastrophists released on the Internet on Thursday night (some 168 megabytes of information). The emails came from a database at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), which often collaborates with the Hadley Centre (also in the United Kingdom). The CRU controls, and has effectively hidden, a large amount of the data related to global climate.

The emails (already available online in word-searchable format) start in 1996 and continue to the present. They include detailed conversations with some of the key players on the alarmist side of the climate debate: Phil Jones, Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann, Keith Briffa, Kevin Trenberth, Tom Wigley, and many others. The leak of these files is already being aptly dubbed Climategate.

The authors are lamely complaining that the emails are being taken out of context, except that in most cases, the context is obvious—and damning. No open-minded person who takes the time to read the emails will fail to see a pattern—a pattern that is deeply disturbing. The emails confirm some of my worst suspicions: that for many climate alarmists, ideology and politics have trumped good science.

Let’s discount the fact that most people say things in private that they wouldn’t want broadcasted. These climate scientists are no different. That said, no one should buy the defense that this is just how all human beings/scientists talk amongst themselves. No, this is how conniving, colluding, ideologically self-deluded scientists talk amongst themselves.

Several troubling themes have emerged so far (h/t to “Jeff C” in comments at the Air Vent):

1. Data manipulation: Several times the scientists discuss ways to massage and cherry-pick data and spin presentations to give the strongest impression of warming, and to downplay contrary evidence—just as they have been suspected of doing.

2. Evading Freedom of Information inquiries: In many emails the scientists are clearly colluding to avoid releasing correspondence and data that they are legally obligated to release. They discuss deleting emails after being directed by officials not to do so.

3. Manipulating peer review: They discuss how to blackball scientists who don’t tow the orthodox line, get journal editors fired who allow “skeptical” papers to be published, how to destroy the reputation of journals that allow such papers to be published, and how to prevent “contrarian” research from being included in UN reports. Since the catastrophist crowd speaks so loudly and insistently about “peer-reviewed” research, it’s stunning to find out what this really means in the scandal of contemporary climate research.

Some have complained of the illegality of hacking into a server and releasing private emails. But the leak looks like the work of a scrupulous whistleblower on the inside, who would be legally protected in the UK.

This episode is going to add to the growing disrepute of the alarmist cause, and if other, more reasonable climate scientists fail to respond appropriately, it could tarnish the reputation of the entire field of climate science—at least in the mind of the public.

If you’re new to the story, here are a few helpful links to get up to speed. Here’s a list of the top 100 most-discussed emails (scroll to the bottom of the page). Here’s a timeline of events over the last few days, from the initial leak, to a confirmation that the documents are genuine. Climate Depot is keeping a good running update of articles on the controversy. Read Tom Fuller’s piece on what he calls “the Team” to understand the back story behind the key players in the leaked email correspondence.