An email from James H. Rust [jrust@bellsouth.net] to Benny Peiser
As a retired professor I was alarmed by your CCNET email exposing fraud in climate change research by Prof. Wang at the University of Albany. Anyone's misconduct on a campus reflects on all who teach and do research. No matter what one has for beliefs, truth can not be compromised.
Your article did not contain sufficient detail to understand the nature of the suspected fraud. By doing a Goggle search, I think the nature of the fraud was understating the Urban Heat Island effect in China from 1953-1994. This may have been used to imply that carbon dioxide was the main culprit for global warming during that period.
Fraud, mistruths are common practice by those promoting AGW. Two notable examples are doctoring global temperature data to arrive at the "Hockey Stick" that was used to claim recent atmospheric carbon dioxide increases caused global temperatures to rise and the recent attempt by NASA to prove October's global temperature rose by using September data from Russia.
It may behoove those who are trying to educate the public about AGW to publicize errors by all who speak or write about climate change. This letter was sent to the MIT Technology Review to ask them to correct a recent error.
I may add that those of us who are trying to promote sanity to the AGW controversy must never lie or exaggerate facts because our credibility will always be under the most stringent scrutiny.
From: James H. Rust
To: letters@technologyreview.com
Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 5:35 PM
Subject: Energy Research at MIT
Dear Editor:
As an advocate for a sound energy policy for the United States, I enjoy reading Technology Review because it contains so many great articles on promising energy research conducted at MIT. Many articles imply a need for this research is to develop energy resources that do not use fossil fuels that produce carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming(AGW). I realize a perceived threat from AGW has caused the annual release of billions of research dollars to find energy sources that do not produce carbon dioxide. Therefore, it is necessary to bow down to AGW in order to obtain research dollars.
However, I do take issue with telling untruths about global warming in order to get public support to reduce fossil fuel use. Examples of untruths are doctoring global temperature data in order to produce the "hockey stick" that suggested the past century rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide was responsible for a one degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature and the October 2008 increase in global temperature by using September data from Russia. A more recent example of doctoring temperature data is underestimating the urban heat island effect in China from poor research at the University of Albany.
I am sure it was unintentional, but MIT is contributing to the untruths by a statement in its publicized "The MIT Energy Index". One of the statements is as follows: "Of the 12 years from 1995 to 2006, number that are among the warmest years on record: 11." This is clearly wrong. 1934 was probably the hottest year and the hottest 15 years since 1880 have been spaced over seven decades. So it would be prudent to simply drop this statement from The MIT Energy Index.
Regards,
James H. Rust, SM60
Professor of Nuclear Engineering(ret)
