The NYT has a follow-up story on the continuing controversy triggered by the leak of e-mails and internal documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. The story provides a quick summary of the central issues in the controversy.
The most serious criticisms leveled at the authors of the e-mail messages revolve around three issues.
One is whether the correspondence reveals efforts by scientists to shield raw data, gleaned from tree rings and other indirect indicators of climate conditions, preventing it from being examined by independent researchers. Among those who say it does is Stephen McIntyre, a retired Canadian mining consultant who has a popular skeptics’ blog, climateaudit.org. A second issue is whether disclosed documents, said to be from the stolen cache, prove that the data underlying climate scientists’ conclusions about warming are murkier than the scientists have said. The documents include files of raw computer code and a computer programmer’s years-long log documenting his frustrations over data gathered from countries in the Northern Hemisphere.
Finally, questions have been raised about whether the e-mail messages indicated that climate scientists tried to prevent the publication of papers written by climate skeptics, which were described by the scientists in the e-mail messages as “garbage” and “fraud.”
The story also notes that one consequence of the controversy could be increased transparency of data and methods in policy-relevant scientific research.
“This whole concept of, ‘We’re the experts, trust us,’ has clearly gone by the wayside with these e-mails,” said Judith Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology.
She and other scientists are seeking more transparency in the way climate data is handled and in the methods used to analyze it. And they argue that scientists should re-evaluate the selection procedures used by some scientific journals and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the panel that in 2007 concluded that humans were the dominant force driving warming and whose findings underpin international discussions over a new climate treaty. . . .
Mike Hulme, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia and author of “Why We Disagree About Climate Change,” said the disclosures could offer a chance to finally bring the practices of climate researchers and the intergovernmental panel into the modern era, where transparency — enforced legally or illegally — is inevitable and appropriate.
“The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production,” he said in an e-mail message, “just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.”
Dr. Curry and others said that if nothing else, the e-mail correspondence suggested that climate scientists needed to show more temperance in dealing with their critics.
“We won the war — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, and climate and energy legislation is near the top of the U.S. agenda,” Dr. Curry said. “Why keep fighting all these silly battles and putting ourselves in this position?”
As I’ve noted before, I don’t believe these revelations “disprove” global warming. The weight of existing scientific evidence still firmly supports the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to climatic warming. The releases do, however, demonstrate that many climate researchers have sought to stifle debate, downplay uncertainties, and exaggerate the risks posed by climate change.
Hulme’s point above about the effect of the IPCC process is particularly important. The effort to compile an “official” scientific “consensus” into a single document, approved by governments, has exacerbated the pressures to politicize policy-relevant science. So too has been the tendency to pretend as if resolving the scientific questions will resolve policy disputes. This is a dangerous pretense. Science can — indeed must — inform policy judgments, but it does not determine such judgments. It can tell us what is, and perhaps what will be, but it cannot tell us what should be. A more honest climate policy debate would acknowledge that there are uncertainties, acknowledge that there are risks of action and inaction alike, and focus on the relative merits of different ways to address the real, albeit necessarily uncerain, risks of climate change.
UPDATE: More from the Telegraph.
FURTHER UPDATE: Roger Pielke Jr. comments on the CRU’s moves “towards greater responsiveness and transparency.”
THIRD UPDATE: The claim that without the CRU datasets there are no reliable temperature records is, as far as I am aware, untrue. Many (most?) of the historical reconstrucitons may be compromised, but that’s hardly the lynchpin of climate science. As noted on Dot Earth this morning (thanks to , Michael Schlesinger, a climatologist at the University of Illinois), there are four 20th century near-surface global average temperature data sets that track each other fairly closely. (UPDATE: Although there is substantial overlap in the raw data upon which these data sets are based.) Moreover, the satellite measurements, which date to 1979, show modest warming — just under 0.2 degrees C per decade.
As I’ve written before, I’d like to believe climate change is a hoax — it would be very ideologically convenient — but I’m not convinced. Interestingly enough, nor are most so-called “skeptics.” Patrick Michaels and Robert Balling, for instance, in their book The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming (Cato Institute, 2000) predicted a 0.65–0.75 degrees C increase by 2100 along with a warming-induced 5 to 11 inch rise in sea level. John Christy, in his contribution to the 2002 CEI book Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths (to which I contributed a chapter on the precuationary principle) likewise accepted that human activity is contributing to a modest warming. What separates these “skeptics” from other climate scientists is not a disbelief in a human contribution to climate change, but a rejection of apocalyptic scenarios and the notion that climate change is catastrophic. Finally, given my substantial work criticizing proposed climate policies (see, e.g., here and here), I’m amused that some think I’m a sucker for squishy climate science.
Nobody At All says:
To provide additional context to the issue of data access, Real Climate has compiled a page of internet-accessible data sources.
(Apologies for cross-posting from a prior thread.)
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November 28, 2009, 12:13 pmHarry Eagar says:
Of course, the hack doesn’t ” ‘disprove’ global warming.” But it does disprove the idea that we know it is proved.
That’s a meaningful distinction.
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November 28, 2009, 12:51 pmravenshrike says:
What weight of scientific evidence? Pretty much the vast majority of primary data came from these guys or from Hansen at NASA, who was also found to have been cooking some of his books. That incident was quickly swept under the rug and ignored at the time, but still. What this means is that every single goddamned experiment that used either data or conclusions published by either group, must be redone from scratch because it’s now tainted. There IS no existing evidence anymore. If I were a climate scientist not involved in this little car wreck the amount of incandescent rage I would be feeling would be astronomical.
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November 28, 2009, 12:52 pmJohnF says:
“The weight of existing scientific evidence still firmly supports the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to climatic warming.”
Really? If you strip out the papers of the Jones/Mann entente, and others that depend on those papers for their validity, what exactly is left that shows that any man-made contribution to global warming is at all worrisome?
Perhaps there is something left; I’d be interested to know what that is. The news accounts don’t tell us.
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November 28, 2009, 12:57 pmPeriodically says:
... where transparency — enforced legally or illegally — is inevitable and appropriate.
Transparency inevitable..? Where appropriate? Is there really a valid question or doubt about this?
Without access to the original raw data, the maths and the methods can “Peer Review” exist..? The concept demands replication and confirmation of results. Without any one of those three, Peer Review cannot exist...
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November 28, 2009, 12:59 pmzuch says:
Piltdown is a fraud! The whole edifice of evolution is crumbling on its rotten foundations!! All daemonic, ungodly lies, I tellya!!!
That aside from the fact that claims of the fraudulent tampering of actual data are greatly exaggerated....
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 1:13 pmSG says:
Of course, the hack doesn’t ” ‘disprove’ global warming.” But it does disprove the idea that we know it is proved.
That’s a meaningful distinction.
I agree. AGW still seems fairly plausible. The basic physics behind CO2 being a greenhouse gas is unchallenged, and people have released a tremendous amount of CO2 from the industrial revolution on. It seems likely (but not proved) that the planet is sonewhat warmer than it would have been in the absence of human activity. But plausible is not the same as proven.
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November 28, 2009, 1:15 pmtamerlane says:
First: The programmer whose log is cited here deserves a medal for trying against insuperable odds to deal with a congeries of poorly documented data sets.
Second: There is strong internal evidence in the FORTRAN code that has become available to suggest that without unjustifiable doctoring the data these folks had shows no global trend in temperature over the last century or the last several decades.
Third: As other commenters have noted, there are just as serious problems with Hanson’s NASA temperature data which were glossed over but now need to be revisited, e.g. the measurement errors in Siberia.
Fourth: Absent these data on global trends there is no strong evidence of a centuries-long or even decades-long trend in average global temperatures that cannot readily be explained by variations in solar radiation, e.g., the apparent relation between the Maunder Minimum and the “little Ice Age”.
Fifth: If there is no evidence of any long-term trends in average global temperatures it is extremely premature to theorize about whether human activities have had an affect on these putative and as yet unproven trends.
Professor Curry is a bit premature to argue that the war has been won. In my opinion, the first real battle has yet to occur.
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November 28, 2009, 1:20 pmfsfsfsfsfsfsfs says:
New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin’s mischaracterizes the IPCC statement as a “rebuttal”.
Recall that Revkin wrote that Dr. Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, had “issued a statement rebutting claims” that the email messages indicated that the IPCC’s reports were biased.
To “rebut” something is to offer up evidence or arguments against that thing. The clear implication of Revkin’s characterization is that Pachauri actually did offer evidence “rebutting” the claims of bias.
But Pachauri’s statement did not offer up any evidence that “rebuts” the claim of bias.
Pachauri makes two main claims about the IPCC process, each without evidence:
First, Pachauri claimed that the IPCC process “follows impartial, open and objective assessment of every aspect of climate change carried out with complete transparency.”
This claim does not “rebut” anything, it just essentially says that IPCC is unbiased because it is impartial. There is no evidence offered that would show a disinterested observer that the IPCC process really was “impartial” or was “carried out with complete transparency”. Indeed, it was the emails surrounding the IPCC process that were specifically instructed to be destroyed by Jones. The fact that an institution accused of bias claims it is impartial, open, and objective does not rebut, or ever bear on, an accusation of bias against it.
Pachauri’s second claim has to do with review: the “entire report writing process of the IPCC is subjected to extensive and repeated review by experts as well as governments”. The details of this review are not specified, the experts are not named, the process is not described, and the reader is given no way to check this claim. But even if it is true, the claim is not related to bias, since the experts themselves could be biased.
So neither of Pachauri’s claims “rebuts” the charge of bias. One of the claims is conclusory, that the process is “impartial” and “completely transparent”. The second claim does not speak to bias, only to review.
It seems to me that Andrew Revkin’s reporting itself here is biased. I am not sure why the Times is allowing a participant in the emails, in the alleged fraud, to report on it, especially given that reporter’s track record of clearly biased comments. (Most notably, Revkin’s refusal to link to the emails because they were “illegally obtained”). But the fact that Revkin takes the IPCC chairman’s disclaimer of bias as being a credible “rebuttal” of bias further shows that he is not objectively evaluating the claims by the IPCC.
On another note, does anyone else find it kind of surreal that everyone seems to take seriously the notion of relying on a U.N. committee to deliver scientific assessment? I can hardly conceive of a body less suited for scientific analysis, I do not recall U.N. pronouncements having a record of being taken seriously or even noticed as to scientific issues prior to the IPCC, yet somehow the IPCC seems to have boostrapped itself into credibility.
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November 28, 2009, 1:20 pmKen Mitchell says:
“The weight of existing scientific evidence still firmly supports the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to climatic warming.”
Not so fast; this WAS the “existing scientific evidence”. Between the stuff they’ve forged and the contrary evidence that has been ignored or stifled, there IS NO “existing scientific evidence”. And there never was! EVERYTHING that they had to say was in that fraudulent “hockey stick” graph.
Perhaps now we can go back and examine some of the other evidence, such as the effects of water vapor (which is a bigger contributor to the “greenhouse effect” than CO2, but cannot be measured from satellites) or the decreasing insolation which may be related to the vanishing sunspots, both of which have been utterly ignored.
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November 28, 2009, 1:25 pms says:
I couldn’t agree more with commenter “tamerlane” on the mettle of this CRU programmer, reading through the log gave me nightmares. I’ve hacked my way through what seemed like poorly designed and maintained data sets, but what this guy had to work through looks a thousand times worse.
Personally, in terms of the “Climategate” angle, it really seems to me that the code is the programmer doing the best he can with the garbage in the data. As far as scientific discovery goes, I feel nothing but admiration for his efforts to combine and analyze this data. It seems almost inconceivable that this guy would endorse policy proposals that were based on believing this model was true. Look at his comments throughout the thing, basically “this is buggy”, “this is completely undocumented”, “we can’t verify the output here”, “these results seems strange”. If we are going to make decisions that move trillions of dollars around our economies, where are the teams of data investigators? The teams of statisticians, programmers, debuggers, independent testers? Toss a couple billion dollars into a few independent institutes and have them work out everything with all the data and results completely in the public domain.
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November 28, 2009, 1:48 pmlonetown says:
“The weight of existing scientific evidence still firmly supports the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to climatic warming. ”
Nonsense, where is your data?
According to Lord Monkton, no significant warming in 15 yrs, abaove average cooling for the last 9.
It doesn’t help to repeat your ignorance, just show the data. see thats how science works.
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November 28, 2009, 1:49 pmfsfsfsfsfsfsfs says:
Ken Mitchell writes:
My own sense from reading the emails and the code is perhaps not so much that there was active fraud but rather that there was just a strong pressure to conform results to the desired output combined with a poor understanding of statistical and software methodology.
People will invariably fool themselves if they can. Actually most of the scientific method arguably is designed to prevent people from fooling themselves — from seeing spurious patterns in noisy data. People inexpert in modeling large systems or in the dangers of statistical modeling not only will always find spurious patterns, but will actually believe the patterns exist.
Here, once a certain fairly small critical mass of scientists citing one another’s papers and voting one another grant money is reached, it’s not realistic to expect them to see the problems with their data. Their computer code shows they are desperately trying to get answers they want and need, but they just don’t have the software skills, or statistics skills, or knowledge of large-scale data modeling to do it reliably. And they don’t really want to know either.
Was there some fraud involved? I’m not so sure this is fraud in the classical sense. I think it is more a set of institutional incentives that force researchers to publish or perish, to win grant money or leave academia: the researchers remaining have a certain mercurial stance, combined with a love of the topic but poor statistical analysis and software skills. It’s very easy to understand how they could come to believe they are seeing patterns that are not there.
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November 28, 2009, 1:59 pmHide the decline! says:
Did somebody just say that Piltdown:evolution = CRU shenaningans:AGW?
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November 28, 2009, 2:04 pmsureyoubet says:
Data and models can’t be disclosed because those pesky and disingenous skeptics might use it to twist it, cast false doubt, and prevent what we all know what needs to be done.
Bills in DC need to be drafted and passed without review or debate because the pesky and evil opposition will twist it and take things out of context to prevent what we all know needs to be done.
What’s next? Maybe purge our libraries. We can tell the people what they need to know. Free access to knowledge only leads to possible dissent that can prevent what we all know needs to be done.
“We’re the experts. Trust us,” is in no danger of going away. Have we ever had a set of “experts” in charge with less doubt about how right they are?
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November 28, 2009, 2:10 pmRogervzv says:
The Shibboleth that the “weight of science” shows that man-made global warming is real, is not science at all. It is speculation. Basically climate researchers (all of whom have a professional and monetary stake in such a finding) plug in data to computer models and call this “science.” It is not science, and the notion that these computer models have any relationship to reality is sheer faith and not science.
The Little Ice Age ended circa 1875–1900. Of course the Earth is warming up. The notion that you can take a few decades of warming data and attribute it to human activities is mind-bogglingly stupid. We are nowhere near the warm temperatures of the Medieval Climate Optimum, which was a period of bountiful harvests, prosperity, and plenty.
Fact is that there has never been a time in human history when warmer temperatures were not associated with prosperity and greater human happiness. Cooling has been mankind’s enemy throughout history.
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November 28, 2009, 2:19 pmChrisIowa says:
The e-mails confirm to me my thought that AGW and creationism are together in a class that can be called Tinker Bell Science. If you believe really really hard it will be there.
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November 28, 2009, 2:22 pmef says:
Has anyone spotted a discussion on the amount of research conducted over the last decade or so that is a derivative of the CRU work? If the findings that the AGW proponents are relying on to show how little this climategate really means are based on the questionable work, that hardly seems to support there case. I’ve seen one or two mentions of this fact, but little in the way of examination.
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November 28, 2009, 2:25 pmwlpeak says:
Hmmm, Climationists?
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November 28, 2009, 2:26 pmPintler says:
If you want to personally check the facts, find some old and new pictures of glaciated peaks. I have been hiking and climbing the glaciated peaks of the American west for 35 years, and the decline is striking.
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November 28, 2009, 2:43 pmAllan Walstad says:
ef has hit the nail on the head: It is extremely important to find out how much of the AGW thesis hangs on the work of folks who have discredited themselves. It is also important, as someone else mentioned earlier, to have truly independent teams examine and evaluate their work. The AGW alarmists are the ones who have demanded an apocalyptic status for the AGW issue. If we are to take that seriously, then in light of the recent revelations, their work and conclusions now require immediate and decisive re-evaluation.
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November 28, 2009, 2:51 pmzuch says:
No. Piltdown was an intentional hoax. There’s no evidence that there was intentional planting of false data in the CRU data sets (despite many claims to the contrary in these threads using terms such as “fraud”, etc.).
My point was that even if the tree data were “fudged” as alleged (as opposed to merely being a explicable correction to one raw data set with known temporally related inaccuracies), the bulk of the data not involving this one data set still show the warming trends. Just as the challenged and debunked Piltdown evidence did nothing to invalidate the mountains of other evidence for evolution.
The cries of “Aha! The whole thing is a shambles!” is reminiscent of the creationists’ cries in the aftermath of Piltdown (and with the forged Paluxy prints too). The response of the deniers — if their claims of “fraud” are true — to small issues is to claim extravagantly that the whole edifice is irretrievably damaged, which far overstates the case.
I do wonder, BTW: Has anyone checked the kerning on the fonts used for the computer code listings?
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 2:52 pmJones' Cell Mate says:
Hmmm, Climationists?
How abut alchclimists?
I know, I’ll work on it.
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November 28, 2009, 2:56 pmfda says:
“The weight of existing scientific evidence still firmly supports the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to climatic warming.”
Not so fast. There are many climate scientists that dissent from the IPCC conclusions. Dr. Fred Singer has been prominent among them. I am not sure that these scientists believe that human activity contributes meaningfully to climate change and most of these scientists would tell you that AGW is either hokum or unproven. Given that most of the studies finding AGW are based on the suspect data, don’t you need to re-visit the conclusions? Singer’s group, Science and Environmental Policy Project, has issued some pretty damning papers on this. They are at http://www.sepp.org.
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November 28, 2009, 2:58 pmrc says:
zuch says: “There’s no evidence that there was intentional planting of false data in the CRU data sets...”
What about details concerning the ‘trick’ of adding current temp data to the tail of the raw data in order to ‘hide the decline’?
I doubt that’s strong enough proof to be actionable, but let’s look at the context. People are talking about the consensus, established science, and the need to divert billions and billions in the economy as a result of these conclusions.
Maybe it’s not sufficient evidence of a crime, but there has to be some kind of threshold that’s weighted according to circumstance: ‘before I spend a trillion dollars, I oughta be damn sure.’ This sort of monkey business does not inspire confidence.
zuch says: “I do wonder, BTW: Has anyone checked the kerning on the fonts used for the computer code listings?”
Yeah, go ahead and mock people who brought down a journalist dynasty. What? Are you going to mock the Pentagon Papers and Watergate next? I thought not. Partisan much?
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November 28, 2009, 3:19 pmEric Rasmusen says:
The Piltdown comparison doesn’t quite work. As the commentor says, Piltdown Man was a forgery, but that didn’t disprove evolution, or even that other prehistoric ape-men existed. (It did, by the way, eliminate the one “missing link” between ape-men and men, and no other has been discovered since.)
But it didn’t disprove the existence of ape-men because lots of other bones had been and have been found. For global warming, we rely on world temperature data. There are two sources, as far as I know, for an “average world temperature” (as opposed to thousands of weather stations). One is East Anglia. The other is NASA. Both are now seen to be secretive and tainted. This is as if there were two scientific groups working on prehistoric man, and both had been shown to be run by militant atheists. Work would have to start over.
That’s the biggest bombshell here. It’s not that the Mann hockey stick was bogus— that’s been known for years. It’s that we can’t trust the temperature data. Somebody with a good reputation has to start from scratch to reconstruct it. That would only take one year and ten million dollars and an honest boss, but it has to be done.
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November 28, 2009, 3:43 pmzuch says:
As I understand it, this correction’s been disclosed and discussed (and AFAIK, even published). And it affects only one data set. What evidence have you that this was done to “intentional[ly] plant[] false data”?
Maybe before we refuse to take efforts to prevent reduction of the Maldives to an recreational SCUBA park and the displacement/dispossession of hundreds of millions of people from the Ganges delta, we ought to be damn sure that such ‘benign’ neglect is warranted. Or maybe not. Hell, they can swim, can’t they? As long as I can drive a 12mpg Hummer....
Rather had nothing to do with the vetting of the papers. And the whole brouhaha there succeeded in making the story about the few false documents, and divert questions from what actually became of Mr. “Pull me up from under the end barstool at closing” Dubya during those days (much the same tactic as here, where the attempt to discredit one small data set is then being used to say the whole thing’s a crock). In fact, the gist of the story is true: Dubya was AWOL and suspended from flight status within a “Champagne unit” while you folks on the right were busting Kerry’s stones and sliming his good name about his five combat medals (including a Silver Star and Bronze Star). All thoroughly documented ... but that never stopped Michelle Malkin from claiming that Kerry shot himself to get a Purple Heart. And then there were the vicious attacks on Max Cleland (“he was drunk”, etc). Now that’s sleaze.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 3:54 pmHuh? says:
The weight of existing scientific evidence still firmly supports the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to climatic warming.
Huh? I thought the emails show that the main batch of data that the main theory is based on has manipulated numbers to match the theory, and the computer program is set to change numbers to match the theory. Is that not the case?
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November 28, 2009, 4:02 pmOutlander says:
What’s shocking to me is the “so what?” attitude from climate scientists to this. CRU appears to be a globally significant player in the climate science community. The IPCC report appears to have served as the basis for EPA’s carbon regulatory policy and the Copenhagen GW treaty proposal. Yet the response of most climate change folks is to defend the CRU guys and to otherwise say it’s no big deal and/or it’s the work of right wing loons.
But these aren’t frivolous allegations. These materials appear accurate and raise serious ethical concerns on many levels. Surely well-meaning scientists accept that. If these revelations don’t significantly affect the body of climate change research, why don’t other climate change scientists come out and distance themselves from these guys? Very, very troubling.
I think we need a wide-ranging investigation to see, in the words of Morpheus in the Matrix, “how far the rabbit hole really goes.” How reliable and valid is the CRU data? How much research is tainted by these revelations? Who else is involved? I don’t advocate for a witch hunt, don’t get me wrong, but we have trillions of dollars riding on the line here and we have to make sure we get this right.
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November 28, 2009, 4:09 pmzuch says:
Here’s the Real Climate comment on the data “fudge”:
Here’s the Nature paper in question: “Reduced sensitivity of recent tree-growth to temperature at high northern latitudes”. If this finding is correct, then in fact there is need of a “fudge” when obtaining temperature data from tree ring proxies.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 4:12 pmSenatorX says:
Why are people still linking Real Climate? They have been shown to be part of the fraud.
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November 28, 2009, 4:16 pmrc says:
zuch: “What evidence have you that this was done to “intentionaly plant false data”?”
None. But the burden of proof is not on me.
zuch: “Maybe before we refuse to take efforts to prevent... the displacement/dispossession of hundreds of millions of people from the Ganges delta,”
It was tech advance, not a crippling of the economy, that allowed those millions to be fed in the first place. It’s innovations like GM wheat that feed the world forward, not ‘AGW-like’ exhortations to cripple our economy. We can relocate the people of Maldives and the Ganges for cheaper than the proposed AGW regulations.
zuch: “Rather had nothing to do with the vetting of the papers...”
But he had everything to do with implying that he was above reproach. Just like AGW’ers. And he got burned for it. Just like AWG’ers?
BTW– I don’t dispute that the globe is warming due to human influences. What I object to is those who say, ‘you must detonate your economy like I say, or else the world shall burn.’
Prove it.
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November 28, 2009, 4:23 pmNobody At All says:
Because it might be helpful to understand the explanations?
Or you can ignore it. Who cares, right?
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November 28, 2009, 4:25 pmDennis N says:
The frightening thing is that we don’t know how much fraudulent “science” has been performed. And the politicos that tout massive economic and social measures, want to commit trillions of dollars in a crisis mode, when we have no answers.
The fact that the science gang are closing ranks to thwart review and accountability, indicates that the level of fraud is massive. Without an aggressive and adversarial data checking and review process, all the results are suspect.
Right now, there is no such thing as climate science. There is erudite noise and politics.
If the data is not made public, the results must be ignored. If the algorithms are not made public, the results must be ignored. If the work has not been rigorously and adversarially checked, the results cannot be used until that has been accomplished.
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November 28, 2009, 4:36 pmE pluribus money says:
“The weight of existing scientific evidence still firmly supports the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to climatic warming.”
Adler, can you cite any evidence not related to these frauds or are you just making sure you are still invited to all the right parties?
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November 28, 2009, 4:42 pmMR says:
I like it when links are left, even when its to sites that I don’t care for, as it helps give me an idea where the author is coming from in the argument.
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November 28, 2009, 4:42 pmzuch says:
[Attempted] argumentum ad hominem.
Care to comment on the substance?
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 4:53 pmJohn Moore says:
Anecdotal. Perhaps you should got hike Antarctica, where the ice has been accumulating and almost exactly the same amount the northern hemisphere ice has been vanishing.
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November 28, 2009, 4:53 pmJohn Moore says:
BTW, since the warmists constantly use funding attacks against the skeptics, it is appropriate to note that realclimate.org is funded by green organizations, and that the site is reported to routinely delete the comments of skeptics, in keeping with the spirit of CR.
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November 28, 2009, 4:55 pmSG says:
This decline was written up in Nature in 1998 where the authors suggested not using the post 1960 data. Their actual programs (in IDL script), unsurprisingly warn against using post 1960 data.
I wish someone could explain this better. As I understand it, the problem is that post-1960 where we have both temperature and tree ring data, the tree ring data does not match the theory. The “solution” is to not include the tree ring data post-1960.
I must not be understanding the defense correctly, because this is frankly insane. When the data does not conform to the theory, the theory has to be revised or discarded. But apparently in climatology you discard the controlled data — and this is what people are defending.
I must not be understanding correctly because if my understanding is correct, climatology is literally no longer science — the underlying theory has become unfalsifiable.
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November 28, 2009, 4:58 pmzuch says:
Well, you didn’t say it, but the charge of “fraud” and “plant[ing] false data” have been bandied about by a number of commenters on these threads. It would be best if we stuck to known facts and left unsupported [and inflammatory] allegations by the wayside.
Oh, the ingrates. Don’t appreciate that we fed them a last meal before we drowned them....
Kind of like the Oklahoma Strip and the “Trail of Tears”, eh? I asked on a prior thread whether the Kelo enemies were all happy with us deciding for other people whether their land is worth condemnation when it’s our economy and lifestyle that is [allegedy] at stake....
And are you anti-immigration? A third of a billion Indians and Bangladeshis in your backyard, ya think?
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 5:03 pmArthurKirkland says:
List of situations in which “We’re the experts, so trust us (without verifying evidence and reasoning)” has been good advice:
–
invasion of Iraq–
occupation of Iraq–
operations in Afghanistan–
innumerable prescription drugs–
every religious leader in history–
Bernard Madoff–
Yoo torture memoranda–
state dinner (India) security–
Enron business model–
BCS system–
Fred’s car in Animal House–
Souter nomination–
new Coke–
Vietnam–
McRib–
climate change researchI see a pattern. It suggests we passed the wayside some time ago.
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November 28, 2009, 5:07 pmzuch says:
This has been done for those that are interested, for a lot of the work. See here and elsewhere on RealClimate.
The incessant demand for ever more data and such is reminiscent of the creationist cries, for every transitional fossil found, for the two new transitional fossils between the one found and their close relatives....
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 5:13 pmLiz Borden says:
You can’t look at a few decades to examine a dynamic climate that has been functioning for millions of years. The amount of change is subsumed by noise that exceeds your precision — like trying to determine the weight of a man, by weighing a battleship empty, and then with the man on board.... except you are estimating the weight of the battleship.
For example, look at the history of CO2 from the ice cores at the Vostok, Antarctica research station: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
We’ve had higher levels of CO2 several times before man ever contributed significantly to it. What will be said when (not if) the next ice age comes? Indeed, knowing that perturbations and eccentricities of our solar system’s elements will create and then remove mile-thick ice-sheets covering much of Europe and North America, how can we hope to model our infinitely complex climate to a few hundredths of a degree of temperature?
But there is a silver lining — more openness and hopefully less politicization of science.
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November 28, 2009, 5:16 pmFred 2 says:
The CRU computer model was the basis of an unknown but large fraction of all the AGW articles and papers written. And what was the quality of their model? This from their “Harry Read Me” file:
“It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.”
And
“Here, the expected 1990–2003 period is MISSING – so the correlations aren’t so hot! Yet the WMO codes and station names /locations are identical (or close). What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah – there is no ’supposed’, I can make it up. So I have :-)”
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November 28, 2009, 5:18 pmSam Hall says:
“The weight of existing scientific evidence still firmly supports the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to climatic warming.”
The very basics of AGW-Greenhouse Warming is not even accepted science.
Falsi cation Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse E ects Within The Frame Of Physics
Version 4.0 (January 6, 2009)
replaces Version 1.0 (July 7, 2007) and later
Gerhard Gerlich
Institut fur Mathematische Physik
Technische Universitat Carolo-Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig
Mendelssohnstrae 3
D-38106 Braunschweig
Federal Republic of Germany
g.gerlich@tu-bs.de
Ralf D. Tscheuschner
Postfach 60 27 62
D-22237 Hamburg
Federal Republic of Germany
ralfd@na-net.ornl.gov
Abstract
The atmospheric greenhouse e ect, an idea that many authors trace back to the
traditional works of Fourier (1824), Tyndall (1861), and Arrhenius (1896), and which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a ctitious mechanism, in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist.
Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a rm scienti c foundation. In this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are clari ed. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the ctitious atmospheric greenhouse e ects,
(b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature
of a planet,
(c) the frequently mentioned di erence of 33 C is a meaningless number
calculated wrongly,
(d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately,
(e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical,
(f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsi ed.
Electronic version of an article published as International Journal of Modern Physics B, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2009) 275{364 , DOI No: 10.1142/S021797920904984X,
c World Scienti c Publishing Company, http://www.worldscinet.com/ijmpb.
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf
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November 28, 2009, 5:20 pmzuch says:
RealClimate is not the IPCC or its scientists (any more than TalkOrigins is the corpus of evolutionary biologists). It is a resource for information (and educated, sometimes) discussion. It may delete some comments, but that’s hardly an unusual procedure for such a forum (see, e.g., VC). Nonetheless, it allows “dissident” posts (and actually responds to them too).
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 5:20 pmElliot says:
The leaked emails and files prove nothing. But they do provide reasonable grounds to dismiss the conclusion that global warmimg 1) exists, 2) is a danger to humanity, and 3) must be countered by restructuring our economies.
The burden of proof now falls on the proponents of global warming, and every step they take will be analyzed and critiqued by a cast of thousands. They loaded the gun, aimed, pulled the trigger, and shot themselves in the foot.
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November 28, 2009, 5:22 pmzuch says:
No. We have both sets of data from earlier and later. The problem is that the earlier correlations are much better and less divergent. Why this is true is not known, AFAIK, but the effect is noted (and in some data processing, possibly corrected for, which seems to be why the “fudge” is in those files whose names start with “BRIFFA...”).
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 5:25 pmzuch says:
And what were the temperatures then? And where were we?
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 5:28 pmzuch says:
Your source for this information?
And you know this stuff made it into the published results exactly how? And how it affected the results exactly how?
Yes, it would be a terrible thing to make up evidence ... or to act on the basis of poor or manufactured evidence....
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 5:33 pmRichard Aubrey says:
I keep hearing CO2 levels lag temperature increases.
Any cites to this?
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November 28, 2009, 5:33 pmSG says:
We have [tree ring and temperature] from earlier and later. The problem is that the earlier correlations are much better and less divergent. Why this is true is not known, AFAIK, but the effect is noted
That makes me feel somewhat (but not completely) better. A correlation that sometimes diverges for unknown reasons doesn’t make for the greatest proxy. I hope any temp data that gets reconstructed from tree ring data has large error bars.
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November 28, 2009, 5:48 pmgeokstr says:
Well, OK, so how about we invest that trillion after you and the other warmists stop ignoring the medieval warming period, when the temperatures were much higher than they are projected to go if we do nothing. Tell us why there is no evidence that the Maldives or Manhattan Island were under water or that there was any other massive flooding during that period, and no huge areas turned to desert either. Tell us why every warm period in the geologic record going back hundreds of millions of years, with temperatures much higher than the MWP and CO2 concentrations hundreds of times higher than today, were all periods lush with life of all kinds (the dinosaurs ruled for 100 million years in such a climate.)
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November 28, 2009, 5:49 pmSam Hall says:
Really? Then please explain this email from Mike Mann
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=622&filename=1139521913.txt
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November 28, 2009, 5:52 pmHummer Time! says:
The thing is, even if the globe was cooling, the lefties would still want a stiff energy tax, smaller cars, more bikes and trains, regulation of our shower heads, etc. They’re just that way.
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November 28, 2009, 5:53 pmKen Mitchell says:
I think that the point of all this is not that AGW is NOT happening, or that AGW _IS_ happening — the problem is that the data EITHER WAY is insufficient to demonstrate the point. Science & SF writer Jerry Pournelle points out that before we tax ourselves into penury, we ought to have a REALISTIC IDEA of what’s going in — and we DON’T HAVE ONE. The proponents of AGW have been saying all along that the problem is too severe to wait for actual FACTS, that we need ACTION — and NOW.
I disagree. The AGW “warmies” have proved that they CAN’T PROVE it — and they’ve proven their “lack of proof” by forging the evidence. (I am less forgiving and tolerant of academic fraud than some commenters here appear to be.) The tree-ring data. The non-existent Siberian warming data, where Michael Mann just plugged in September’s data instead of October’s, and hoped we wouldn’t notice. The bogus weather station “warming” that hasn’t adjusted their numbers for the urban heat island effects. They refuse to release the data and the algorithms. Their predictions of today based on conditions in the past don’t agree. At some point, you have to stop allowing for their incompetence and accept that it’s criminal.
ArthurKirkland; You forgot one. Michael Bellesiles and his fraudulent “Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture” that has been so ENTIRELY discredited by, among others, Don Kopel from this site.
Let’s take a step back from the economic abyss and take time to figure out what the REAL truth is. It’ll be a whole lot harder for the AGW supporters to demonstrate their case; after all, “once burned, twice shy”.
Yes, the world is warming, and has been since the 1500s. There are millennia-long cycles of climate, and there always have been. Is it our fault? Possibly, but probably not. Is CO2 the problem? I strongly doubt it; CO2 is a LAGGING indicator, not a leading one.
But if the world IS warming, and if this IS a long-term problem, and if we DO need to do something about it, a rich industrial economy will be far better able to do something RATIONAL about it than a subsistence-level agricultural society.
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November 28, 2009, 5:54 pmrc says:
zuch: “It would be best if we stuck to known facts...”
Which evidently does not include CRU’s findings... unless you count the ‘known fact’ of CRU scientists saying ‘trust us.’
zuch: “Oh, the ingrates. Don’t appreciate that we fed them a last meal before we drowned them....”
I think we all can appreciate that the scientific progress that feeds people will also save them from drowning. As opposed to crippling the economy, which will accomplish... what, exactly?
zuch: “And are you anti-immigration?”
I’m pro-progress. The ‘population bomb’ and ‘peak oil 2004′ seem as credible as AGW disaster hysteria. Amazingly, these past hysterias were averted through scientific progress... and not through wringing our hands and crippling our economy.
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November 28, 2009, 5:55 pmravenshrike says:
*sighs* Their own programmer admits to making up data. So we know for a fact that they have invented data to support their theory. Moreover, the temp. sets from post-1960 were much more accurate than those pre-1960. Oddly enough, that’s because 1960 is when the US government got much more involved in standardized temperature measurement and weather prediction. In April of that year, the first weather satellite was launched. However, they are fudging data because they continually use data sets from sensors which are placed out of accordance with their own fucking guidelines, and then saying they can correct for that. How you are supposed to correct for a variable like an AC exhaust vent when you don’t know whether it’s on or off at the time of temperature recording is beyond me. Not to mention if it is on, you have no clue how hard the AC is working(Multiple variables, like indoor temp set, cleanliness of filters, and leakage rate from the building all affect this) and therefore can’t say it’s increasing a measured temp by X degrees.
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November 28, 2009, 5:55 pmJohn A says:
As I’ve noted before, I don’t believe these revelations “disprove” global warming.
No, they do not. But that is not the point being raised, and which has been raised over the past few decades, about the attribution of ALL warming — or, for that matter, any change at all exclusively to human activity.
This has been the claim since even before the formation of the IPCC. We have been told for at least two decades, perhaps longer, that ocean currents only effect localities but not the globe, that the Sun‘s fluctuations are never enough to effect a noticeable change, etc etc. Only Mankind could affect temp for the century 1990–2090, and temp would increase unless we drastically cut production of such gases as CO2.
That is, until earlier this year when it was finally admitted that after the warmth of 1998, ie 1999–2009, global temp has either stabilised or declined — despite rising CO2 output. And that this will continue for anything from ten to forty years, with thirty years most often postulated as the period of non-warming. And the reasons given? Ocean currents, Solar activity, and all those other things we had been told could not possibly have an effect.
If a betting shop had a thirty per-cent admitted error in its calculation of odds, it would either go broke or be prosecuted for fraud.
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November 28, 2009, 5:57 pmLending Library says:
Temperatures were about what we have now. We were hunter-gatherers.... and then CO2 started to decline, temperatures declined, and led to an ice age (glaciation period). It has happened many times, and did so without any help from man. There have been at least four major ice ages in the Earth’s past. Outside these periods, the Earth seems to have been ice-free even in high latitudes.
If the Earth had a thermostat that we could set, what setting should we set it to? Is the Sun’s variability and Earth’s tilt engaging in discrimination? We must stop them!
Given that without man doing anything, the Earth has extensive swings from tropical paradise to ice age in regular intervals, isn’t the idea that we could monkey with that (pun intended) a large load of hubris?
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November 28, 2009, 6:09 pmcirby says:
zuch:
RealClimate is not the IPCC or its scientists
...except that the people running it are, in part, some of the same scientists who had such a major impact on the IPCC, and some of them are the same guys cited in so many of the more-damning leaked emails from the CRU. Some of the leaked emails even mention how Real Climate editors are prepared to bend over backwards for AGW-friendly posts (and prevent contrary posts from being seen).
Nonetheless, it allows “dissident” posts (and actually responds to them too).
From reading the leaked emails, what really happens at Real Climate is that they delete the hard questions and leave in the ones that are easily slammed down with a simple answer. I know from personal experience that if you ask ANYTHING that’s hard to answer, it goes down the memory hole. If you’d ever spent much time at Climate Audit, you’d see dozens of examples of things that Real Climate found to embarrassing to confront.
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November 28, 2009, 6:10 pmNobody At All says:
Just in case anyone is curious, here are posts from Real Climate regarding:
— Tree-ring data;
— CO2 lag;
— surface temperature data and urban heat islands;
— (again) a data source page with links to raw and processed data, and model code.
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November 28, 2009, 6:13 pmA. Zarkov says:
Adler writes:
“The weight of existing scientific evidence still firmly supports the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to climatic warming.”
How is that? What evidence? Even before the Climategate emails, documents and codes were exposed, the evidence for AWG was weak. The GCM models don’t properly and can’t properly model the cloud physics. That’s why the uncertainty range for the climate sensitivity factor is so large and has not shrunk over the last 30 years. The GCMs don’t include cosmic ray influences on cloud cover. The pro-AGW attack dogs have tried to discredit Shaviv’s work, but he has answered all their objections. Our direct measurements of surface temperature are sparse in both time and space. Heat island effects on station temperatures have not been properly accounted for. I worked with world temperature data in the early 1990s. My job was to interpolate the irregularly spaced station data to the whole globe. As such I became familiar with just how limited and unreliable this data is. I was also witness to how the GCM modelers, adjust their codes to get the “right answer.”
Finally there are serious problems with the temperature proxy data analysis apart from the compromising material revealed in the Climategate documents. William Briggs provides list of the sources of reproduction uncertainty. Do we really want to change the world’s economy on such flimsy evidence?
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November 28, 2009, 6:16 pm~FR says:
The weight of existing scientific evidence still firmly supports the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to climatic warming.
Science is not settled by 5–4 decisions. There is significant work that suggests no/negligible *A*GW. (The sun getting hotter is another matter.) There is strong reason to believe that such work may have been actively suppressed.
The cards they are trying to hide in this deal is the stacking of peer-reviewers and the hounding of scientists who presented conflicting results.
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November 28, 2009, 6:17 pmJohnny Longtorso says:
Does anyone consider it a coincidence that Mann, et al, got everyone looking at our ‘warming’ temps a decade ago, and the last decade has experienced an unexplainable ‘pause’ in warming?
Clearly once we weren’t depending on Mann for raw data on global warming, it disappeared. Ergo fraud.
The WSJ explains “peer review”:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115283824428306460.html
...Mr. Wegman brings to bear a technique called social-network analysis to examine the community of climate researchers. His conclusion is that the coterie of most frequently published climatologists is so insular and close-knit that no effective independent review of the work of Mr. Mann is likely. “As analyzed in our social network,” Mr. Wegman writes, “there is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis.” He continues: “However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.”...
BTW, if the left had gotten their anti-AGW legislation a decade ago under President Gore, who doubts they would be claiming credit for ‘stopping’ AGW because the lack of warming in the past 10 years was due solely to their left wing political actions and they Saved Us All? Imagine how hot they’d claim 2009 would have been if not for them saving us.
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November 28, 2009, 6:25 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
Well, AGW may not be physically real but it’s still politically real. I note our leaders sailing placidly on towards Copenhagen and wonder if the score this time isn’t going to be Titanic 1, Iceberg 0.
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November 28, 2009, 6:26 pmA. Zarkov says:
Another thought. Where is the software Q/A for the all the codes used to “prove” AGW? Normally important projects require Q/A. For example The Yucca Mountain Project (now canceled by Obama) required extensive software Q/A submissions to back up calculations. This project is nothing compared to the scope and cost of the carbon emissions taxes and credits being proposed. How can we change the world’s economy with unverified software? As the Climategate documents show, their coding is a tangled mess.
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November 28, 2009, 6:26 pmfda says:
R Aubrey,
try http://www.sepp.org. re the CO2 lag analysis. The site is hard to navigate but under publications — The NIPPC Report 2008 is very good on this topic. I saw Singer present and defend his thesis, and it is very convincing.
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November 28, 2009, 6:31 pmRichard Aubrey says:
Porlock.
I understand our new climate czar, Carol Browner, sits on the board of a major carbon-trading firm. She’s not the only one to be picking up change falling from the table.
Too much money on this thing to let science derail it.
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November 28, 2009, 6:34 pmElliot says:
Well, so what? Does human activity account for all warming or .000000001% of all warming?
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November 28, 2009, 6:35 pmSG says:
Nobody at All:
Thanks for the link to RealClimate’s explanation of the tree ring data, which also has a link to ClimateAudit’s allegations.
If time allows, I may try to climb a bit deeper into it but at first glance I find ClimateAudit to be on the whole more persuasive. Even leaving aside the RealClimate snark, they don’t really defend Briffa’s cherry picking of the tree ring data. They mostly just point to peer review, which we now know to be of questionable value. ClimateAudit actually puts forth an argument (with data and code).
If nothing else, ClimateAudit’s argument can be evaluated on its own merits. RealClimate’s argument pretty much begins and ends with “Trust Me”. Given what we now know, why should anyone accept that argument?
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November 28, 2009, 6:39 pmAvisaMe says:
This is not a very meaningful statement. I think Lindzen, Spencer, Christy, McIntyre and probably most scientists generally classified as “skeptics” would agree with you. Most disagreement centers on magnitude of probable effect and extent to which catastrophic AGW theses have been proved.
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November 28, 2009, 6:45 pmRPT says:
Would that there had been this much scrutiny of the “experts” before we incurred $1T in debt on a frolic and detour in search of WMD in Iraq, which all the knowledgeable parties knew didn’t exist. Different issue, different time, and certainly different beneficiaries. But I would say that one was worse.
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November 28, 2009, 6:50 pmNobody At All says:
SG:
The RealClimate snark can be thick and ugly, it certainly is in that post.
I intended for the two Briffa links (within the post) to work; apparently, CRU’s server remains down. If you don’t find the post persuasive, fair enough.
I do quibble with the “trust me/peer review” point — the graphs at the end of the post are intended, I believe, to be illustrative as to how robust the data is in the absence of Yamal. I found it effective.
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November 28, 2009, 6:56 pmjccamp says:
Zuch —
“No. We have both sets of data from earlier and later. The problem is that the earlier correlations are much better and less divergent. Why this is true is not known...”
Actually, that now appears to be inaccurate. Links everywhere if you but Google but here’s a representative link.
I’ll quote an appropriate passage:
“...for instance, in the subfolder “osborn-tree6\mann\oldprog,” there’s a program (Calibrate_mxd.pro) that calibrates the MXD {tree ring density/JC} data against available local instrumental summer (growing season) temperatures between 1911–1990, then merges that data into a new file. That file is then digested and further modified by another program (Pl_calibmxd1.pro), which creates calibration statistics for the MXD against the stored temperature and “estimates” (infills) figures where such temperature readings were not available. The file created by that program is modified once again by Pl_Decline.pro, which “corrects it” – as described by the author — by “identifying” and “artificially” removing “the decline.”
But oddly enough, the series doesn’t begin its “decline adjustment” in 1960 — the supposed year of the enigmatic “divergence.” In fact, all data between 1930 and 1994 are subject to “correction.”
In other words, the tree ring growth figures were adjusted (a decline in density removed) to reflect a temperature rise, when the actual density seemed to indicate the opposite. This after tree ring growth was compared to available temp recordings, and the missing temp recordings created from scratch. Finally, the density figures are artificially altered to create the desired results.
This refers to the CRU data v3.0, specifically the tree ring growth data. As noted, the programmer simply made up the post 1960 figures (“because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures.”)
I would only add that if the data 1850 through 1960 seems to plot correctly, but fails post-1960, then perhaps the premise itself of tree ring growth absolutely tracking temps is subject to unidentified variables and is unreliable.
BTW, from the NOAA Paleoclimatology site, hardly a bastion of AGW skeptics:
“Using smoothed data from multiple source regions, it is all too easy to calibrate large– scale (NH) temperature trends, perhaps by chance alone.”
Too much of the theory of AGW is based on assumptions, and unproven or unverified scientific reasoning, predicated on additional assumption, bolstered with such as tree ring growth — but of course, only when, say, the concept of tree ring growth overlaps recorded temperatures in a way complementary to AGW. When the same theory, tree ring growth, fails to accurately predict recorded temps, then it’s called “divergence” and can be safely ignored, but only for those times when the growth fails to confirm AGW. Otherwise, tree ring growth is golden.
This does not disprove AGW. It does prove that much (most? some? all? Who knows now?) of the science behind AGW is faulty. It does seem to indicate that at least some within the AGW community have lost their objectivity — to the degree they ever had such — and can no longer be trusted to honestly report their findings.
This is not a courtroom, where the best advocate wins. Invective and smart-ass remarks add nothing to the discussion.
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November 28, 2009, 7:09 pmGaryC says:
Which means that for the past 50 years, these tree rings have not been good thermometers for reasons that are not understood.
So how many other periods in history have the same problem, without our ability to detect it?
And given this problem, and this question, why would any scientist continue to use these tree rings as temperature proxies?
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November 28, 2009, 7:13 pmA. Dude says:
Mr. Adler: Why do you repeat _the_ mantra? We now know that a lot of key proponents of AGW have been cooking the data and manhandling the scientific peer review process (among other sins) for a long time. How are we to know that “[t]he weight of existing scientific evidence still firmly supports the [AGW] hypothesis”? I can’t any longer assume that, and you should admit that neither can you. I believe we need to now back off and give the remaining not-yet-tarnished climate scientists a chance to review all the data, revisit the analysis of it, re-do the models, and do it all in the open along with an open debate on what the meager data that we do have means. The U.N. (via the IPCC) and the Kyoto/Copenhagen crowd should back off too, and let this happen. We’re being asked to make enormous sacrifices, sacrifices which will include more poverty, more malnutrition, more early deaths in various parts of the world; that’s too much to ask given suspect science by suspect scientists.
Stop repeating the mantra and start demanding an open re-do. Or if you yourself are so attached to the AGW hypothesis that you can’t yet bring yourself to suspend belief, then say so, don’t be a coward.
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November 28, 2009, 7:15 pmThe Truth Is Out There HAHA says:
I would be sad to hear that the client scientists in the the humans-are-causing-global-warming camp were wrong. (I know, this incident doesn’t prove they were wrong, but it certainly undermines their position.)
I would be sad because I want us to get off of oil, whether C02 causes global warming or not.
I’m all for having strong and healthy relationships with other nations, but I don’t like the idea that we _depend_ on other nations for anything. I still hope that we can get off oil, and become energy self-sufficient (or something much closer to it than where we are now.) (Note respective positions of closing paren and period in that last sentence.)
I felt like the global warming camp was pushing us towards energy self-sufficiency, and I would be sad if this incident slows that progress down.
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November 28, 2009, 7:24 pmMDr says:
If you’re curious about using “available” temp data, take at look at this hobbyist’s experience.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-the-travails-of-a-global-warming-hobbyist/
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November 28, 2009, 7:33 pmDavid Schwartz says:
I disagree. The later we do this, the better.
Right now, oil is cheap and plentiful. The later we stop using it, the better the alternative scheme we are likely to choose.
Electric vehicles are almost here. Hydrogen is almost ready. New designs for inherently-safer nuclear reactors are on the drawing boards.
But if we are artificially forced to pick a winner now, odds are we won’t make a very good choice. We’ll invest a ton of money in mediocre technology, and we might wind up with a planet covered in toxic batteries or god knows what and a second round of pain.
And, of course, I should point out that if not for the same people and organizations pushing us to get off fossil fuels now, we might already be off them. It’s in part because of them that research and deployment of nuclear power has been so slow.
The more we know when we make this choice, the better.
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November 28, 2009, 7:41 pmTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » “‘We’re the Experts, Trust Us,’ Has Clearly Gone by the Wayside” -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by PostRank – Law, Bill Giltner and Daniel Iggers, Eugene Volokh. Eugene Volokh said: “‘We’re the Experts, Trust Us,’ Has Clearly Gone by the Wayside”: The NYT has a follow-up story on the continui.. http://bit.ly/5fbjmZ [...]
JJ says:
I think the phrase “disprove global warming” is exactly backwards. Scientists who believe in AGW have the burden of proof. Anthropogenic Global Warming hasn’t been proven. Without data and methods (even though many of the journals’ policies require data and methods be provided, and haven’t enforced that policy) it isn’t possible to repeat results. If results cannot be repeated, then the theory or hypothesis is mere speculation.
Even if the earth has warmed in the recent past, no one has proven that this warming is attributable to human activity. The situation at UEA/Cru hasn’t “disproven” AGW because AGW hasn’t been proven. It has just made the standing of any evidence they may have purported to have more tenuous.
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November 28, 2009, 7:46 pmHarry Eagar says:
pintler sez: ‘I have been hiking and climbing the glaciated peaks of the American west for 35 years, and the decline is striking.’
And if you had been hiking them for 150 years, the decline would be striking, but you would not suspect carbon dioxide as a cause. And if you had been hiking them for 1,500 years, the increase would be striking.
Here is a graphic illustration (from Alaska, not the Rockies but relevant) of the striking decline you would have noticed had you been hiking Exit glacier since around 1850.
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November 28, 2009, 7:51 pmLB says:
This whole controversy furthers my belief that Wikipedia has gone so far downhill (i.e. captured by certain editors) that I will no longer donate. Note, I actually do believe that humans have some effect on the climate, but have long been skeptical about the magnitude.
In response to a suggestion that a line or two be added under “Debate and Skepticism” of the Global Warming article, the editors deleted any reference and responded with the following...
“This article is about the established science. The existence and causes of current global warming are beyond doubt, not a ‘theory’ that can be shaken by a few e-mails whatever their content, even though some non-scientific bloggers and unscientific journalists would like to believe otherwise. If we see some scientific bodies of national standing publishing alterations to their existing very clear positions in the light of these e-mails, then those changes will be covered here.”
“I don’t think so. It has had no influence on the position of any scientist or scientific organization, i.e. its irrelevant for the state of the science.”
The editors also refer people to their Global Warming FAQ. The answers pretty much bar any change to the article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Global_warming/FAQ
Sample...
Is there really a scientific consensus on global warming?
The IPCC findings of recent warming as a result of human influence are explicitly recognized as the “consensus” scientific view by the science academies of all the major industrialized countries. No scientific body of national or international standing presently rejects the basic findings of human influence on recent climate.
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November 28, 2009, 8:03 pmKen Mitchell says:
So do I, but the Greenies don’t want to substitute some other power source for oil and coal; they want to undermine the industrial economy of the world COMPLETELY. See, for example, the “Cape Wind” windpower proposal scuttled by Teddy Kennedy because the windmills might have been visible from his Martha’s Vinyard summer cottage, or Barbie Boxer’s opposition to solar plants in Death Valley because it might cause some inconvenience to a desert tortoise species. No THOUGHT of nuclear power, which eliminates “greenhouse gasses” without eliminating the industrial economy. And the San Francisco loonies who want to tear down the Hetch Hetchie reservoir and dam in California, so that the valley could be restored to be an equal with Yosemite. “What will replace the power produced by the dam?” we ask, and the answer is “Conservation and green power!”
So yes, I want to stop burning fossil fuels for heat, because they are too valuable as feedstocks for industrial processes. But I don’t propose to give up my computers and my lights and my heat just to make the greens feel good about themselves.
You don’t need to root for AGW just because you like the side effects; aim for what you actually want; clean cheap power, and LOTS of it.
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November 28, 2009, 8:07 pmJim Miller says:
Pintler passes on anecdotes about glaciers:
I don’t have data on all of the mountains in the West. (Does anyone?) But I can say that, in recent years, the glaciers have been growing on both Mt. Shasta and Mt. St Helens.
And, on Mt. Rainier, the snowfall post WW II has averaged higher than it did in the 1920s and 1930s. Here’s a graph showing the snowfall at Paradise on Mt. Rainier. (To the best of my knowledge, the graph shows all of the data available for that location.) During the post WW II period, Rainier’s glaciers have advanced and retreated, sometimes in sync, sometimes not. (During the 1920s and 1930s, they were all, or almost all, in retreat.)
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November 28, 2009, 8:13 pmzuch says:
True. Until the divergence is better understood, it may make for a case of tossing these proxy temperature data points out. I suspect that such won’t change the results. There are [and have been] public temperature datasets available to all that want to play with them (as “Nobody At All” points out on the first comment here). People are free to run their own analyses and models and show there’s no warmi... — oooohhh. Right....
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 8:18 pmzuch says:
The medieval warming period may have been auspicious for propping up my ancestors’ housing bubble and advertising campaigns, but this is the first I’ve heard that medieval periods were something to aspire to.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 8:24 pmMark Buehner says:
Interesting but beside the point. What Jones did was refuse to release his metadata regarding which weather stations he used, how he adjusted the data, and why. Instead he pointed to the raw data dump at NASA that is useless in that regard, because no-one has any idea which data Jones used and how he tweaked it for the IPCC reports.
As far as i know that HADCRUT3 methodology hasn’t been released to this day– and a lot of other studies have been based off those datasets which those them into doubt as well.
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November 28, 2009, 8:30 pmzuch says:
Ummm ... what’s your problem here? Would it help if I pointed out that prominent biologists have contributed material to TalkOrigins as well? Do you think Mann is the IPCC, perchance?
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 8:31 pmrc says:
Zuch: “True. Until the divergence is better understood, it may make for a case of tossing these proxy temperature data points out. I suspect that such won’t change the results.”
Yeah. Key words: until, and suspect.
In the meantime, stop trying to justify a billions-wrecking economy-sabotage.
‘We’re the experts, trust us,’ has truly gone by the wayside.
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November 28, 2009, 8:33 pmzuch says:
The thing is, even if the globe was warming, the righties would still want no energy tax, bigger cars, less bikes and trains (and no money for such), deregulation of our shower heads, etc. They’re just that way.
See, that’s easy.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 8:34 pmBeldar says:
Professor Adler, you write: “The weight of existing scientific evidence still firmly supports the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to climatic warming.”
First, that’s a pretty weak formulation, perhaps one you carefully mostly emasculated. My exhalations may “contribute” to a hurricane, but during Ike last year I didn’t notice much actual difference.
But you and I both know that if you tried to give that statement as sworn testimony in federal court (and in most state courts), the testimony would prompt an immediate objection and it would end up being stricken. You don’t have the expertise to make it. And you haven’t done the work necessary to actually address the totality of the “existing scientific evidence,” either.
I don’t claim to have that expertise or to have done that work either, although ironically, you and I share the training and skills and licensure that could permit either of us to successfully object to the other’s attempt to give incompetent testimony.
And you’ve spent enough time out of the classroom and instead in the courtroom to have a proper appreciation for the techniques and lines of attack that any competent trial lawyer could employ to very effectively impeach the credibility of any qualified expert who’d been part of this international conspiracy to suppress and/or distort both the scientific conclusions and the underlying data of the global warming radicals.
Like Prof. Somin, and like most non-climate scientists, I have to pick who to believe. But my training and experience as a courtroom lawyer — consistently with my common sense as an adult human — are more than adequate to persuade me not to trust the gang who are already on record as trying to defraud us all.
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November 28, 2009, 8:35 pmjccamp says:
By the way, although I’m sure we all know this discussion does not occur in a vacuum, some random comments from the Copenhagen Climate Conference:
From the incoming COP15 President “They must show – prove – to the developing world, we know that we are going to pay, or there will be no agreement. And the sooner the developed countries deliver on finance, the better.” This refers to proposals from developing countries (i.e. China, India) that industrial nations (the U. S.) pay 1% of our GDP to the developing countries to aid in mitigating carbon emissions. This $140 or $150 billion a year paid to, say, China, would be in addition to money spent on cap and trade, etc.
“Brazil: ‘Gringos’ must pay to stop Amazon razing”
Never mind deforestation occurring now from domestic farmers. Brazil is demanding that we Gringos need to pay for what we did last century to the Brazilian rain-forests. I don’t remember us being the villains in any Brazilian deforestation, this century or last.
“Proposal to exclude Canada from the Commonwealth”
More: “The World Development Movement, the Polaris Institute in Canada and Greenpeace have called for Canada to be suspended from the Commonwealth over its climate change policies...Countries that fail to help (tackle global warming) should be suspended from membership, as are those that breach human rights,”
“But while facing the challenges of global warming we must also see that countries at the bridge of industrial development find room to meet the needs and aspirations of their populations bringing them at level with people in the industrialised countries.”
Prime Minister of Greenland. No need for me to comment.
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November 28, 2009, 8:36 pmzuch says:
Did it occur to you that you might be worried about your taxes and your gas bills if the science is wrong one way, millions of others might be worried about the very land they and their descendants live on and farm if the science is wrong the other way? Hmmmm ... who shall we listen to? Who do you think? Type I and Type II errors can sometimes be in the eyes of the beholder, eh?
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 8:40 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
The implications of the “Climategate” emails are, unsurprisingly, being heavily exaggerated. For instance, here’s a piece on pajamasmedia entitled “Three things you absolutely must know about Climategate” by Iain Murray. The first of the three is:
“Mann later (2003) announced that “it would be nice to try to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP,’ even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back”. The MWP is the Medieval Warm Period, when temperatures may have been higher than today. Mann’s desire to “contain” this phenomenon even in the absence of any data suggesting that this is possible is a clear indication of a desire to manipulate the science. ”
Bad scientist, bad! (slap slap slap), right?
Well let’s read the line IN CONTEXT. He’s asking a colleague to draw up a figure for him, a plot of temperature vs time.
“A plot of various of the most reliable (in terms of strength of temperature signal and reliability of millennial-scale variability) regional proxy temperature reconstructions around the Northern Hemisphere that are available over the past 1–2 thousand years to convey the important point that warm and cold periods where highly regionally variable. ... Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back [Phil and I have one in
review–not sure it is kosher to show that yet though–I’ve put in an inquiry to Judy
Jacobs at AGU about this].”
So he’s not trying to include something, as the Murray says, “in the absence of any data”. He’s trying to include it in the absence of “hemispheric mean reconstruction”, but in the PRESENCE of other data such as regional data from various places, and he is conscientiously making inquiries whether or not the community would consider this acceptable. What’s the problem?
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November 28, 2009, 8:40 pmzuch says:
An interesting comment for a law blog. Any other people have thoughts on this?
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 8:44 pmMark Buehner says:
Confirmation bias. Think about all the thousands of these kinds of decisions that were made by a handful of people to finally produce these studies. At every turn Mann and his fellows have a very firm idea of what the data should be saying. On the other hand if data emerges that doesn’t line up, it stick out like a nail just looking for a hammer.
All of which isn’t so terrible if it weren’t for the secrecy and lack of skeptical eyes involved in the process. When everybody involved expects the same conclusions, how hard is anyone in the clique going to push if they see sketchy assumptions being made? Particularly given the vitriol these emails demonstrate. Can’t be good for your career to point out questionable methodology in such a tribal atmoshphere. Surprise surprise somebody finally just leaked everything so the world could judge.
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November 28, 2009, 8:48 pmJohnny Longtorso says:
There will never be any accountability; the goal is to survive the holiday season, when everyone is distracted, then dismiss this as “old news” come 2010. If Jones or Mann is fired, then the takeaway for those who don’t obsessively read blogs is that people got fired for lying about AGW. If IPCC is shut down, then the takeaway is that the organization pushing AGW was shut down for lying.
The left will never allow this, f-ck honesty, ethics, and integrity, because that wouldn’t be politically expedient.
Mann and Jones and their clique will hold their jobs and influence forever.
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November 28, 2009, 8:51 pmgeokstr says:
Well, I guess you told me, with one of the most non-responsive nitwit-like statements I’ve heard in a while.
Typical leftist response. Avoid the issue and launch non-sequiter.
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November 28, 2009, 8:52 pmKen Mitchell says:
Even the IPCC doesn’t predict widespread flooding of coastal areas at a worst-case scenario, and only the loonie nutjob lefties try to claim that it does. (The Executive Summary’s claims are a bit more outre than the actual text...) And if you are worried about the peasant farmers of India or Africa, don’t you agree that they’ll be even worse off than I would be in my California suburb by the collapse of the industrial economy of the entire freaking WORLD? Zuch, your biases are obvious; how about interjecting a few actual FACTS rather than just talking points, huh?
How about the FACT that the Vikings had dairy farms in Greenland, or that Leif Erickson’s “Vinland” was in northern Nova Scotia? How’s THAT for “containing” your Medieval Warm Period?
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November 28, 2009, 8:55 pmNobody At All says:
Re: methodology. I believe that they have published literature on homogenization adjustments (e.g. surface temperatures — warning: pdf). The argument, I believe, for not releasing the code is that doing so would distribute the raw temperature readings. These are (in some cases) the proprietary information of NWSs, and their IP permissions do not extend to this distribution.
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November 28, 2009, 8:57 pmzuch says:
Cite for this quote, please? But FWIW, CRU’s findings are facts (of a sort). They’re known; they’re published. You just have to show the findings are incorrect (and how and why).
I guess you missed the “Trail of Tears” reference. Too bad. No helping those that do not wish to see. Yes, why should we bother to cripple our economy because our actions may submerge the entire country of people on the other side of the planet? Hell, it ain’t our problem, and our kids don’t need to go to school in schools built on the Love Canal.... You folks are sometimes just too damn transparent. Tell you what: Make an offer in Denmark; you’ll pay for the relocation of anyone removed from the Ganges delta by flooding, no questions, no strings attached. And IF the representative of these countries accept that offer, you’re off the hook (except for the relocation fees for a third of a billion people, of course, if necessary).... If they say “no thanks”, are you still intent on pursuing what you want to do even if it harms them?!?!? What would a Kelo opponent say?
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 8:58 pmKen Mitchell says:
Oh, I’m not a lawyer; I’m just an engineer with a degree in physics. And I’m not an expert in climate science — but I can tell a “snow job” when I see one!
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November 28, 2009, 8:59 pmzuch says:
Who told you that? I suspect you need to stop listening to Limbaugh, and listen up to what others are saying.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 9:02 pmMark Buehner says:
But they haven’t published which stations they used. In other words, its impossible to reproduce the HADCRUT3 datasets. According to Jones less than 2% of the data came from NWSs, thats not the issue.
Here is the timeline of the data requests and some of the emails that went back and forth. The bottom line is we have these datasets that nobody can decipher.
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November 28, 2009, 9:04 pmAbdul Abulbul Amir says:
Well of course. I think that is completely noncontroversial. If I were to walk down to the sea shore and spit into the ocean, it would be noncontroversial that my action had just raised the sea level (just an ultra tiny weensie bit).
But global warming alarmism is claiming that human generated CO2 is the primary driver of climatic warming. This is why the lack of warming since 1998 is so devastating as seen in the climategate emails. CO2 has increased but temperatures decreased slightly. The alarmist theory is at a loss to explain. It also explains the use of unreliable temperature proxies like tree rings to attempt to hide the Medieval Warming Period.
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November 28, 2009, 9:09 pmzuch says:
No. I think the previous commenter was talking about millions of years ago.
If you have data for CO2 levels above current levels during the Pliocene epoch or Cenozoic era, out with it.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 9:11 pmjccamp says:
operation counterstrike —
Actually, although much of what you say is correct — that Mann claimed to have new data not yet reviewed and possibly not OK to use solely for that reason — some of what you say is not accurate, What Mann was also trying to do was increase the time horizon from 1,000 years to 2,000 years, to “contain”, you know, smooth, remove, de-emphasize the so-called “MWP.” He was massaging the data-set to make the warmer temps less important. BTW, he also uses the now discredited Briffa tree data for the same reason.
“I would also like to try to extend the scope of the plotback to nearly 2K...the Briffa et al Eurasian tree-ring composite...”
Your larger point was correct. Mann was not trying to remove or delete data. He was however, without a doubt, trying to reduce the impact of inconvenient data (MWP) by doubling the x axis and by using suspect tree ring data-sets which confirmed his position. I don’t think this is unethical or even unusual when the debate is on-going, but to resort to such when the science is supposedly settled is, well, unsettling.
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November 28, 2009, 9:15 pmzuch says:
“Ask a stoopid question ... [repeatedly]” comes to mind ... but if you’re annoying and obtuse, that might also raise some hackles. Do you have any examples we can examine?
But where in the “leaked emails” do you see support for your claim that they “delete the hard questions”?
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 9:17 pmHarry Eagar says:
Here.
That was too easy.
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November 28, 2009, 9:24 pmzuch says:
Joe Webb-esque “Not the facts, ma’am. Not the facts.”
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 9:24 pmFury says:
Oh, come now. Let’s consider what a reasonable person would think after reading the e-mail included in Sam Hall’s 5:52 Pm post. Michael Mann e-mailed Tim Osborn and Keith Briffa and noted:
“Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC in any way
you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about
what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to answer any
questions that come up to any extent we can.”
and:
“On the other hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We (Gavin Schmidt and Mann) can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include.”
Is this how climate scientists conduct themselves? To “hold up” comments by posters who may have concerns about research by Tim Osborn and Keith Briffa, so that Osborn and Briffa have the option to determine if the comments should be “screened through or not”?
Mann and Schmidt are clearly within their right to moderate comments — it’s clearly stated — see http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/about/. But a reasonable person is going to conclude from the 2006 e-mail that Mann and Schmidt have at times used RealClimate as a vehicle to advance viewpoints supportive of AGW, while offering to hold up and not screen through comments that may be questioning of AGW research conducted by their colleagues.
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November 28, 2009, 9:27 pmNobody At All says:
The FOIA evasiveness is unconscionable.
A few other points:
1) My recollection could be wrong (please correct me if I am), but I was under the impression that CRU released the station list years ago.
(edit — station list here: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/landstations/crustnsused.txt)
2) The data from these stations are publicly available on the internet.
3) The methodology is published.
4) They do not have IP permissions to release the remaining data, which includes the code.
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November 28, 2009, 9:29 pmzuch says:
Well, out with it. Ought to be good for an undergraduate dissertation, at the very least. Maybe even a Nature letter (which will allow quite an audience to examine and critique your “work”).
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 9:29 pmJohnny Longtorso says:
Anyone got a link for this?
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November 28, 2009, 9:32 pmDavid Schwartz says:
That’s fine. But under those circumstances, the only argument they can make that the output of the code should be given any credibility is “trust us, we know what we’re doing”. The problem is that without outsiders reviewing your code and using it to replicate results, small mistakes will never be found and corrected. When you’re looking for a small signal in a lot of noise, one small mistake is all it takes to get the wrong results.
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November 28, 2009, 9:35 pmMark Buehner says:
A few other points:
Seems unlikely considering the FOIA that was finally just denied last month was regarding it. Check out the link.
Without the methodology and metadata its useless unless you want to build your own dataset.
Not sure about that, but certainly which station data was not.
Which again is less than 2% of the data, and wasn’t the issue as far as Willis Eschenbach and his FOIA was concerned.
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November 28, 2009, 9:42 pmJohnny Longtorso says:
Is this the Hansen/NASA data thing?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/3563532/The-world-has-never-seen-such-freezing-heat.html
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November 28, 2009, 9:42 pmNobody At All says:
To the extent that the argument is solely “trust us,” then it is perfectly reasonable to discount the reliability of undisclosed data. As I understand it, this is not the argument that the scientists are making, however.
The argument is that there are multiple, independent sources of data, and that these sources independently confirm the same reported trend as the CRU data. For example, it is argued that “GISTEMP only uses publicly available data and correlates to 0.97 (or so) with the CRU global mean data.”
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November 28, 2009, 9:46 pmMark Buehner says:
Isn’t CRUTEM3 a different dataset?
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November 28, 2009, 9:49 pmSG says:
the graphs at the end of the post are intended, I believe, to be illustrative as to how robust the data is in the absence of Yamal. I found it effective.
But 1) that’s assuming the conclusion (the question is how reliable is this particular data, not AGW in general) and 2) it is exactly what you’d expect if the tree ring data was cherry picked to match existing theory.
Here’s a question for you: what data makes you clear your throat and try and change the subject? There’s got to be some. One of the interesting things is how there seems to be no outliers, nothing that requires further research. Everything confirms everything else to a high degree (.97 correlation someone has posted). This seems...improbable. Especially over the historical record given that we can’t get that high of a correlation over the last 50 years. There seems to be a dog that isn’t barking....
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November 28, 2009, 9:49 pmrc says:
zuch: “our kids don’t need to go to school in schools built on the Love Canal”
from the web: “In 1996, 725 deaths from 1979–1996 were identified in this cohort” from Love Canal.
I lead my post with millions fed through GM crops, and you counter with 725 deaths from love canal? Weak sauce.
zuch: “Tell you what... you’ll pay for the relocation of anyone removed from the Ganges delta by flooding...”
Fine with me! It’s a lot cheaper than the sacrifices demanded by the Al Gore High Priest Elite.
What, you want to make things hard? You want to make me bleed? You’ll have to do better than that in order to surpass the demands of the First Church of Global Warming.
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November 28, 2009, 9:52 pmNobody At All says:
Yes, you are right. Incorrect link.
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November 28, 2009, 9:52 pmElliot says:
Who wrote the code? Who denies permission to release it?
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November 28, 2009, 9:52 pmNobody At All says:
Perhaps I misunderstand. There are objections to the use of a particular dataset. That dataset is then excluded from the results from multiple independent sources. I find this persuasive with respect to result, because it is shown to be robust in the absence of the criticized dataset. How does this assume the conclusion?
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November 28, 2009, 9:54 pmzuch says:
I’m referring to the Briffa Nature paper that actually described the observed differences.
Yeah. That’s why there was the friggin’ array of “fudge factors” which were used to interpolate from the closest five-year periods on either side, going for a hundred years.... No one said that some step function kicked in in 1960.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 9:55 pmLiz Borden says:
No, I was talking about 125K to 150K years ago. Lending Library is correct.
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November 28, 2009, 9:56 pmNobody At All says:
I’ve checked out the link. He states that he received the station list:
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November 28, 2009, 9:58 pmNobody At All says:
I was not clear. Releasing the homogenization code would (I understand) distribute the underlying raw data. Their IP permissions to some of that raw data, they say, do not extend to distribution.
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November 28, 2009, 10:05 pmzuch says:
No. Perhaps subject to tweaking, and less precise, but not necessarily “not [] good thermometers”. But the tree ring proxies are a small part of the data, nonetheless. And removing them doesn’t seem to make much difference.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 10:05 pmjmaie says:
The thing is, even if the globe was warming, the righties would still want no energy tax, bigger cars, less bikes and trains (and no money for such), deregulation of our shower heads, etc. They’re just that way.
See, that’s easy.
The salient difference being that this approach will not reduce my standard of living. In my humble opinion, provision of compelling evidence should be up to those proposing to cause me economic pain.
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November 28, 2009, 10:05 pmMark Buehner says:
Good catch, I didn’t see that. Without the code I assume its still impossible to see how the data was normalized for that dataset.
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November 28, 2009, 10:05 pmzuch says:
Just as those revanchist eeevilutionists must every day reprove Darwin right....
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 10:08 pmzuch says:
You know, this is one of the prime complaints that those godly Creationists have leveled against the heathen eeevilutionists: Evolution can’t be “repeated” (and certainly not shown in a lab with proper controls). What the hell kind of science is that?!?!?
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 10:11 pmDavid Schwartz says:
The data sources are certainly not completely independent. When, for example, CRU diverges from GISTEMP, the CRU folks suspect their data and justifiably and reasonably adjust it to match. When it does match, they have no reason to investigate and assume their corrections are appropriate.
The justifiable range of corrections for urban heat islands alone is enough to flip the AGW signal in the land surface temperature measurements for the past 60 years. This is due to the unique problems of looking for a very small signal in a very large noise.
The extent to which the data sets are truly independent is unknown.
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November 28, 2009, 10:13 pmzuch says:
That doesn’t prevent anyone from running their own analysis ... and publishing their own data, procedures and results ... ohhhh, nevermind ....
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 10:18 pmzuch says:
Here.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 10:22 pmSG says:
Perhaps I misunderstand. There are objections to the use of a particular dataset. That dataset is then excluded from the results from multiple independent sources. I find this persuasive with respect to result, because it is shown to be robust in the absence of the criticized dataset. How does this assume the conclusion?
It assumes the conclusion of the larger question: Is the AGW hypothesis valid given that it is constructed from data of questionable (or at least questioned) validity? If you accept the AGW hypothesis, then the fact that it’s consistent with other data is confirming. If you are skeptical, then it carries little weight. It doesn’t speak at all to the validity of the tree ring data standing on its own. We now know that this field is OK with fudge factors to make data conform to expectations — how much confidence can we have that all of this independent data hasn’t been wrestled into conformity? As I said, I find it suspicious that all of this nominally independent data conforms so closely given that the core data is irreproducible and peer review is being subverted. Groupthink is seeming a better explanation than true independent confirmation.
As I’ve said, I haven’t followed this debate closely but the AGW hypothesis has always struck me as plausible (although not some of the more apocalyptic scenarios), but the more I look at this the less I find. In a legal setting (and just in common sense), if someone destroys evidence you’re allowed to infer that it would have been damaging to their case. I don’t see any reason why that doesn’t apply here, and apply in spades.
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November 28, 2009, 10:24 pmj.l. says:
Who or what decided that this temperature, right here and now, is what temp. the earth “should” be? And how? How do you know warmer isn‘t better? Early man survived the ice age, but we with all our technology are doomed by a few degrees? (no warming now) Sure. How does professor Al Gore know that humans can‘t “adapt” to warmer (or cooler) temps? He doesn‘t. It‘s been warmer before, and yet were‘re all still here. How did the Ordovician Period 440 million yrs ago have co2 levels about 16 times higher than today, with no man? The IPCC admitted in 2001 that its modeled senario can‘t accurately predict cloud impacts on temperatures. We could go on and on. Sorry, but before you spend trillions, you have to be sure. Cheers!
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November 28, 2009, 10:25 pmNobody At All says:
A dataset needs to be subject to validation statistics. Agreed.
My point was that the argument isn’t “trust us.”
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November 28, 2009, 10:26 pmMark Buehner says:
Be careful what you wish for...
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November 28, 2009, 10:26 pmElliot says:
“I was not clear. Releasing the homogenization code would (I understand) distribute the underlying raw data. Their IP permissions to some of that raw data, they say, do not extend to distribution.”
That needs a bit more elaboration. The program code stands independent of the data files. The program would read in data files and output its results. Unless there was a one to one mapping of input data item to output data item, one could not backtrack the code to generate input from output.
Have any national weather services come forward to validate the claim that they denied permission to release their data? Has CRU told us exactly which countries are refusing permission to release their NWS data?
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November 28, 2009, 10:28 pmNobody At All says:
This particular conclusion has very little to do with AGW, it has to do with GW. It doesn’t discuss how e.g. CO2 or CH4 operates as a GHG. It doesn’t discuss CO2 concentrations. It doesn’t what the climate forcing impact of a given CO2 concentration might be.
It concerns a single, factual question: Is the climate (for whatever reason) becoming measurably warmer?
I thought that the graphs presented illustrate the point that the answer given to this question (yes) is robust to the exclusion of the disputed dataset.
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November 28, 2009, 10:31 pmDavid Schwartz says:
But it is, “trust us”. Your argument that it’s not “trust us” is based on the data sets being independent. But we only have their claim that the data sets are independent. So it’s still “trust us”.
And, in any event, it’s bootstrapping to argue that the CRU data is valid because it’s consistent with other data, and that other data is valid because it agrees with the CRU data. The CRU data was specifically tuned to be consistent with other data sets, as other data sets have been tuned to match it.
Again, this is a very special situation that is not like other things. There is a huge range of reasonable corrections for various effects (urban heat island being the most obvious). The only way to find the “correct” value for this effect is to find the one that produces the “correct” result — direct estimation and measurement still has error bars as large as the effect of AGW.
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November 28, 2009, 10:33 pmzuch says:
No. The take-away lesson for those attuned to what’s going on would be would be that they didn’t float. Perhaps that for the folks that read one-liners on blogs, watch FauxSnooze, or listen to RW ‘talking points’ might be: “They’re crooks and frauds!!! Toss them in the pokey ... or just hang’em....” [see here]
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 10:34 pmNobody At All says:
My understanding (and again, correct me if I’m wrong) is that entire reason that this particular code is wanted is so that people may independently assess how this particular raw data was adjusted. No?
To serve this purpose, it would seem that the raw data would either need to be provided, or would need to be able to be easily reverse-engineered. It is argued that the IP permissions which accompany such data do not allow distribution.
(Tangentially, there are other, publicly available sources of raw and adjusted data.)
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November 28, 2009, 10:38 pmMark Buehner says:
That’s certainly true but the political reality is that what is really being studied is whether the warming is both unprecedented and potentially cataclysmic, otherwise the warming is basically trivia.
The problem here is that its a lot easier to ‘goose’ the data to make the current era warmer and the past a bit cooler via smoothing and any number of data tricks along the way. The aggregate could well be a much more startling rise in temperature than actually exists.
Its not enough that there is warming, it has to be cataclysmic warming, and its disturbing that the clique seem to be so strongly lined up to promote that. Ideally the results should speak for themselves, and if everything is open source critics can argue til their blue in the face but nothing is hidden. If the critics are right and there has been a systematic goosing of the data due to some level of groupthink, confirmation bias, and peer pressure, it would be addressed on a timely basis and become a known problem.
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November 28, 2009, 10:39 pmzuch says:
So where are you getting the info that CO2 was higher then?!?!?
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 10:41 pmjccamp says:
Zuch -
“The problem is that the earlier correlations are much better and less divergent.” referring to tree ring growth.
We now know that is simply untrue. The earlier data was subject to multiple conversions, some of which are no longer available or repeatable. We also know that the earlier station reporting data was similarly altered, to optimize the convergence of tree ring and reporting data. This is important because it calls into question the entire process of using tree ring growth as a basis for estimating past temperature. There are too many variables, for instance, created in the collection of samples, or in the selection of which tree to core, and too many unknown factors which might influence tree ring growth other than temperature. Remember, the IPCC claims that mean global temperature has risen 0.74 degrees C since 1906. Given all the inconsistencies, variables, theories, assumptions and whatnot, can we really claim with any certainty that temperatures are higher globally by less than one degree?
I guess we could go to station reporting and forget tree rings completely, right? Well, back to that “Harry Read Me’ file...the programmer had trouble matching weather stations, even though each station has a discrete WMO code. He had the WMO codes, but discovered that the latitude and longitudes often failed to match. Some stations certainly had moved. But did the move affect temp readings at that particular station? Who knows? The move data was never captured. Or he had a match by WMO code, but the reported temps failed to match. So he just made up bogus WMO codes and kept going. Then any temperatures that deviated from a mean were deleted and an estimated number entered instead. He did have a problem. Quoting: “...the expected 1990–2003 period is MISSING — so the correlations aren’t so hot! Yet
the WMO codes and station names /locations are identical (or close). What the hell is
supposed to happen here? Oh yeah — there is no ‘supposed’, I can make it up. So I have :-)”
Etc, etc.
“That’s why there was the friggin’ array of “fudge factors” which were used to interpolate from the closest five-year periods on either side, going for a hundred years.... No one said that some step function kicked in in 1960.”
Oh, I thought that was exactly that you said. The data from 1960 onward was “divergent” and could not be used.
However, I agree with your characterization of “a friggin’ array of fudge factors” as descriptive of much of the essential argument pointing to AGW. What validity remains has been tainted beyond rehabilitation. Maybe we need to start this over again.
I’m reminded of this cartoon.
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November 28, 2009, 10:43 pmrc says:
zuch, so you believe in the hockey stick, eh? So when, in the end 2010, it’s not 535 degrees in the wintertime, you’ll admit you were an alarmist rube?
It’s ok, I’ll wait.
In the meantime, you try to scare me with the prospect of relocating a few coast-dwellers, when in fact that’s a lot cheaper than obeying the Al Gore High Priest Elite. When we’re faced with the prospect of economic destruction, you can’t scare me with the prospect of relocating a few refugees. Technology’ll figure its way out of this hysteria, just like it found its way out of the population bomb and peak oil 2004.
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November 28, 2009, 10:44 pmzuch says:
I know there’s data from way back. My point was that it wasn’t necessarily all that great for man, or more specifically, for where mankind had been decamped at the time.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 10:45 pmNobody At All says:
No, it’s not “trust us.” It’s: “Here, take a look at these multiple, independently sourced data sets, and you may yourself find the best fit between data from GHCN, USHCN, artic weather stations, european weather stations, and satellite data. We think that the best fit shows the same warming trend from these multiple, independent sources of data.”
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November 28, 2009, 10:49 pmzuch says:
Have you looked at how big, how low, and how populated the Ganges delta is?!?!? It makes New Orleans look like child’s play (but then again, various people of a certain persuasion said of N’Oleans, “why don’t dey just move somewhere else/i>???”)
But no matter. It’s not like it’s ‘Murkans that will be dispossessed (well, except for N’Oleans....)
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 10:52 pmSG says:
It concerns a single, factual question: Is the climate (for whatever reason) becoming measurably warmer?
I thought that the graphs presented illustrate the point that the answer given to this question (yes) is robust to the exclusion of the disputed dataset.
Saying that the answer to this question is robust to the exclusion of the disputed dataset does not provide any evidence that the disputed dataset is valid. If the disputed dataset was cherry-picked, then that’s exactly what you’d expect — the disputed data wouldn’t add any new information because it was intentionally chosen to confirm the conventional wisdom.
That said, I misspoke about AGW. You’re right that it’s not AGW at issue here, only GW (something few dispute). And I also didn’t look closely enough at the X-axis on the graphs — I thought the correlation was limited to the post 1960 data, but some went back before that. But still, given my understanding that they have two regimes of data-correction (pre/post-1960), it’s not surprising that they align well.
There doesn’t seem to be a robust argument for the tree ring data having predictive value.
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November 28, 2009, 10:54 pmjccamp says:
Elliott @ 10:28
To be fair, I do believe that at least one or two (Russia, a Scandinavian country too?) have refused to allow the release of their data without payment. It has been suggested that the protected data represents something like 2% of the total.
Nobody at All -
“It concerns a single, factual question: Is the climate (for whatever reason) becoming measurably warmer? ”
Actually, I think it is more like your suggestion linked to whether such climate changes have occurred historically. No one disputes that the earth is (was?) in a warming cycle. There is dispute about whether the warming is indeed cyclic or is without precedent. Thus, the cat-fight about wild-ass guesses as to temperatures during the Middle Ages, back 1K, 2K, like that.
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November 28, 2009, 10:56 pmMark Buehner says:
But all that data has been manipulated in various ways, ways that require some level of subjective decision making. As somebody mentioned, the fact that all these things match up so precisely is troublesome– you’d think something ought to jump out as an outlier.
Remember the satellite data didn’t use to match up with everything else, and then magically NASA did some hand waving (which i’m sure they felt they was totally justified) and magically it all matched up. The point is if that particular decision hadn’t ‘fixed’ the data to what they expected it quite likely wouldn’t have been used. Its confirmation bias.
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November 28, 2009, 10:57 pmzuch says:
The whole point is that it’s your (and maybe China’s and Europe’s) consumption of fossil products for your/their own benefit and lifestyle that would be responsible. Do you really think it’s OK to sh*t on your neighbour’s yard because you really “needed to go”? Do you really think that such might be OK if you said you might give your neighbours a job (without actually negotiating a contract first)? You’re kind of missing out on the fundamentals of property ownership here ... rather strange for a libertarian-leaning blog.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 11:02 pmjccamp says:
Zuch —
One of your less endearing traits is that when you wish to accentuate the American rural sub-culture’s ignorance, you revert to some Tom Sawyer-esque vernacular. I suppose it’s meant to demonstrate the cultural superiority of...where?
Why not make your arguments without the implied insult?
JC
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November 28, 2009, 11:03 pmNobody At All says:
The link was in response to comments about tree-ring data; unfortunately, Briff’s responses (within the linked post) appear to be unavailable because CRU’s servers are not yet back online. SG did not find the post itself compelling (which is fine, especially as the Briffa links are not working), but also noted that he thought that the argument came down to “trust us.” My response was that the trend result was robust to the exclusion of the tree ring data. So, we were discussing the robustness of data, not the scale of the result.
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November 28, 2009, 11:03 pmNobody At All says:
All of the links are to raw data.
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November 28, 2009, 11:05 pmElliot says:
There are lots of reasons to look at the code, and you have identified one. Additionally, one may examine it for programming errors, or run other sets of data through it to see how it handles them.
It’s hard to see why source code files are being held back. They can be very meaningful even without specific input data files.
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November 28, 2009, 11:05 pmNobody At All says:
Again, I wish that I could point you to the Briffa response, but the server remains down and I am tired enough to not look for other responses. And if you wish, I’m sure that you would be able to find the same. So, for the moment, fair enough.
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November 28, 2009, 11:08 pmMark Buehner says:
But nobody uses raw data in their studies.
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November 28, 2009, 11:09 pmzuch says:
and:
Is this how climate scientists conduct themselves?
Are you critiquing blog etiquette here?!?!? What’s wrong with the above?
It’s not like there’s any censorship going on. It takes half a minute to start your own blog ... and as the VC proprietors point out, that’s your option if someone else doesn’t appreciate your comments on their blog.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 11:10 pmzuch says:
So who cares if it floods a third of a billion people out of the Ganges delta.... They’re dark-skinned, dontcha know? They got it coming to support me in my holy pursuit of the White Man’s Burden (see comments of Mitchel et al. above).
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 11:19 pmNobody At All says:
Let’s orient ourselves. In reponse to the tree data link, SG objected the RealClimate post essentially argued “trust us.” My point was that “trust us” wasn’t the scientist’s argument: they posted graphs using multiple, independent sources of data to demonstrate the robustness of the warming trend to the exclusion of the disputed tree data set.
You argue (as I see it) that the adjusted data is not truly independent, because data sets are used as cross-verification data. Because data is cross-verified, the scientists are, you say, essentially telling us to trust them.
I linked to multiple sets of raw data from independent data sources. If you wish, you can find what you believe to be the best fit between these data sources. Because this data is publicly available, you don’t need to trust the scientists — you can find your own best fit. No need to trust.
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November 28, 2009, 11:21 pmzuch says:
<*nudge* *nudge* *wink* *wink*> [Pythonesque] “Say no more, say no more!”....
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 11:22 pmzuch says:
Huh?!?!? Maybe you need to ask the docs to titrate the Haldol up a notch. You’re seeing things that others can’t see. Just a friendly reminder.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 11:27 pmMDr says:
Here’s an example of a scientist that had to create his own dataset, starting in the 20th century. His result was a little different from CRU’s. Worth checking out the graph comparison.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/11/26/skewed-science.aspx
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November 28, 2009, 11:31 pmzuch says:
Do you really want me to get into your “less endearing traits”? If not, perhaps you’d better grow some skin and let it slide.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 11:31 pmjmaie says:
So who cares if it floods a third of a billion people out of the Ganges delta.... They’re dark-skinned, dontcha know? They got it coming to support me in my holy pursuit of the White Man’s Burden (see comments of Mitchel et al. above).
How about responding to my point instead of impugning my motives?
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November 28, 2009, 11:37 pmMark Buehner says:
Thats not quite what i’m saying. Raw data isn’t used because for various reasons, it doesn’t tell the correct story and everybody agrees on that (weather stations move or their environment changes, droughts affect trees, satellites drift etc). So the data has to be normalized, and assumptions have to be made. Our current problem is that in the CRU case, what these assumptions are has been hidden.
Now of course in theory i could create whatever kind of dataset i want (which is sort of the problem), but i dont have a year to do it nor enough money to pay myself to. Neither do i have the expertise to make those decisions in a logical way. Whatever I did would rightly be torn apart for making assumptions that for various reasons aren’t good assumptions– and thats the way things SHOULD work.
What we do have is a number of studies based on a small number of dataset based on a still smaller number of raw data collections, all worked on by a small number of scientists working closely together. Its much easier to look at their current work which has already entered the public record via the IPCC etc and see if what they have done seems reasonable and fair. Right now all these studies are self-referential. They are assumed to be correct because they are assumed to be correct. Each one can point to all the others as proof that it is accurate, but if none of them is independently rock solid, none of them are.
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November 28, 2009, 11:38 pmDavid Schwartz says:
That’s precisely correct. And what we consistently find are that the error bars are so large that any AGW signal, if it’s in there, is lost in the error bars. You can get their conclusions if you apply their corrections and conclusions that don’t support AGW if you apply other equally-sensible corrections. We refuse to trust their corrections. So we are left skeptics.
You can only reach the “AGW has been proven” conclusion if you trust them.
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November 28, 2009, 11:40 pmzuch says:
Did he actually “create” it or just “cherry-pick” it (see, e.g., “U.S” and “Europe”)? Perhaps neither, maybe.... So then he can try and publish in something more refereed than an op/ed in the RW National Post rag, eh?
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 11:41 pmzuch says:
How about responding to my [repeated] point: That what you do to the property of others through your behaviour is not something left to you and you alone to decide. That’s a basic point of law and morals. Is that clear?
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 11:43 pmMark Buehner says:
Heh. Not if Jones and Mann have anything to say about it.
And they demonstrably do. Have you read the emails? To me the most disturbing parts of all were their conspiring to intimidate or ostracize the journals and peer review process.
That peer review rejoinder doesn’t fly any more.
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November 28, 2009, 11:45 pmNobody At All says:
Can you please point me to the raw and reconstructed data sets, homogenization/normalization data, programming code, model code, published methodology,
resulting trend lines (with said confidence intervals) as well as the comments of those who have reviewed the above?
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November 28, 2009, 11:45 pmzuch says:
Even if you take the e-mails in the worst possible light, Mann and Jones aren’t on the editorial boards of Science or Nature, or any number of other potential journals. And such a ground-breaking piece would be right up the alley of a general-interest publication such as Science (or Nature), not to mention their far greater readership.
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 12:01 amjccamp says:
Zuch —
Why not? Compared to what we’re expected to let slide in GW calculations, it is rather insignificant.
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November 29, 2009, 12:03 amHummer Time! says:
I’m starting to think that trolls like zuch really work for Linbaugh or Coulter and just make these comments to make the left look bad.
G’night. Cheers!
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November 29, 2009, 12:04 ammockmook says:
zuch (and Mr Adler),
Since you are so confident that the science is still sound regarding AGW, surely you can cite a persuasive paper (untainted by this scandal) that “proves” AGW.
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November 29, 2009, 12:08 amkidneystones says:
I’m sorry but this is just pathetic. One week ago I, like millions of other reality-based observers, accepted that peer-reviewed data, tested and checked by skeptical parties, underpinned climate science. No longer.
The onus is clearly on those who had access to the original data sets and methodology to do whatever they can to provide all their data to the most skeptical of skeptical scientists and to co-operate fully with a thorough investigation.
There’s simply no excuse whatsoever for their actions, especially given the cataclysmic scope of the crisis climate scientists claim we face.
And let’s be clear, climate scientists have already lost the ‘debate’ as far as I’m concerned. They did the moment I read of the efforts to deny critics access to their data.
Funding for climate science should be reviewed, as should efforts to restrict industrial and economic development that are based on ‘preventing global warming’.
There are a host of environmental challenges facing us, not the least of which is the gigantic mass of plastic floating in the Pacific and growing larger by the day. We are all going to be asked, rightly, to make adjustments. These adjustments should be based on science, not politically or philosophically-skewed conjecture.
Fix the arguments or be prepared to face an increasingly hostile and skeptical public that is in no mood for prevarication or excuses.
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November 29, 2009, 12:15 amjmaie says:
From a legal and moral perspective, you need to prove that my actions are actually causing damage before initiating punishment. Evidence of the human contribution to GW was tenuous before and has been further damaged in the last couple of weeks.
You are arguing that we need to cause economic damage just to be on the safe side. I’m saying the evidence is insufficient to justify doing so, especially given the dearth of evidence that even huge reductions in CO2 emissions would cause temps to drop in any meaningful way.
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November 29, 2009, 12:16 amSalamantis says:
When one gets to peek in the usually-covered window of the climate science sausage factory and spies the sausage makers defecating in the data grinding machine, one would have to be an imbecile, an ideologue or insane to allocate a crippling chunk of one’s future global finances towards the purchase of their product.
Which is perhaps why they have assiduously kept their windows covered until now, even in the face of legitimate FOIA requests — but the nasty cat’s outta tha bag now that they have been cyberstripped of their concealment.
They’d have been vastly better off keeping the shielding offa their windows, and simply not defecating in their data in the first place. They should try to walk the cat back to that position now and try for a reset. Otherwise, the credibility damage will grow much worse much faster that it undoubtedly already will.
Of course, when such a course results in stronger and more centralized authoritarian control, any excuse — even a patently tainted one — will be sufficient to prompt power-hungry politicians to forge ahead regardless.
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November 29, 2009, 12:21 amMark Buehner says:
So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a
legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate
research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also
need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently
sit on the editorial board
Michael Mann
think we could get a large group of highly credentialed scientists to
sign such a letter — 50+ people.
Note that I am copying this view only to Mike Hulme and Phil Jones.
Mike’s idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not
work — must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually
fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer,
etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so
the above approach might remove that hurdle too.
Tom Wigley
Proving bad behavior here is very difficult. If you think that
» > Saiers
» >
» > is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find
» > documentary
» >
» > evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get
» >
» > him ousted.
Michael Mann
Sure... this crew had no way to obstruct of intimidate the peer review process and journals.
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November 29, 2009, 12:25 amDavid Schwartz says:
Yes, I certainly can. It’s the very same literature, code, published methodology, and resulting trend lines everyone else is using. As just the first example I could find in thirty seconds of looking, take a look at this link. The average predicted warming from today to 2100 is about 3.2 degrees. The error bar in the data set is 2.7 degrees. This doesn’t even take into account the error bars in each individual data set, which certainly cannot be zero and are likely larger than the error bars on the combined data.
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November 29, 2009, 12:26 amMDr says:
zuch says:
Did he actually “create” it or just “cherry-pick” it (see, e.g., “U.S” and “Europe”)? Perhaps neither, maybe.... So then he can try and publish in something more refereed than an op/ed in the RW National Post rag, eh?
Guess you haven’t paid attention to who’s been controlling peer reviewed articles. Actually your dimissive answer sounds like you just might be part of the CRU cabal. Besides, this is a statistician who’s commenting on another’s published paper. Feel free to look up the original paper, and judge for yourself.
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November 29, 2009, 12:31 amjccamp says:
Nobody at All -
For what it’s worth, the data listed at Real Climate as “raw data’ is in fact seriously massaged by the collection agency in many/most cases. The satellite data uses weighting and algorithms.
The Antarctic observations are varied in manner of collection and reporting, cannot be replicated, and in some cases, fail to have sufficient observations to be accurate. In addition, the Antarctic observations do seem to generally fail to conform to GW trends, especially post 1998.
The European weather station data is subject to the same “Homogeneity testing” which rejects numbers which differ from nearby stations beyond some set range. Values are not changed in the testing, but entire ranges are rejected and others accepted based on the testing. Missing data from stations is extrapolated and “blended.” Resulting graphs are then “smoothed” via formulae. And so forth. BTW, the European collection system is part of an effort to “Develop an ensemble prediction system for climate change...”
The point being that what Real Climate calls “raw data” is not just numbers, or raw data in the sense it has not been manipulated and affected by calculation. It is “raw” in the sense that climatologists have not yet taken the data as reported and then subjected it to additional manipulation based on factors beyond those involved in collection, but instead, intended to make it viable as indicative of climate change (or lack of presumably). However, as we have seen, at least some of the collection points are deeply involved in the AGW debate, and at least the CRU v2.1 and v3.0 station data is highly suspect.
Some of the data is apparently not available to the casual browser. This isn’t meant to be definitive.
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November 29, 2009, 12:39 amNobody At All says:
Are you reading the linked trend as stating that that it is just as likely that 2100 will be 1.35 degrees *cooler* than today as it is that 2100 will be 1.35 degrees warmer than today? Because the error bar is not centered at zero.
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November 29, 2009, 12:43 amstrcpy says:
To me the saddest part of this whole mess is how people defend what went on. It should have *never* gotten to this point at all.
In the last couple of decades the scientific process and the learning of it has broken down to the point that we could not see this coming and defend even once it did. Their peer review process was clearly broken from the beginning, their reliance on circular models is complete garbage, and their leaps from what they actually know to what they predict (they have always been able to get the model to work with known data, always been terribly wrong in 5–10 year forecasts but tell us “this year we got it right!”) should have been enough to relegate it to obscurity and charlatanry.
It’s not a matter of cooking data (though that obviously occurred), nor is it a matter of making the model fit the theory (that also obviously occurred — for both cases simply read the programmers log). Lets assume for a moment that their data was 100% correct — you still applied a garbage methodology to it so you get garbage out. The only thing these e-mail show is that they took advantage of some of the fraudulent opportunities this process allows (even if they had good intentions when doing it).
One of the “defenses” is that climate skeptics could take the data and show AGW didn’t occur (or even global cooling is going on) is inherent in that system and is *exactly* why we have a scientific method. It is why openness, repeatability, and accountability are supposed to be a large part of the process (indeed, that is the *main* thing the process is seeking).
A nuclear physicists can release everything and when other follow it they get the same results or others can immediately point to the flaw. Not so in Climatology — as even the supporters point out you *can show the opposite with their data*. But then, sadly, the level of education (or rather our edumacational system as I prefer to call it) has dropped so much of the hard core rigorous teaching of science that even nuclear physicists are not doing good science any more, nor can many spot bad when they see it (in thier own field or out).
Sadly it is mostly due to funding — the old timers who were strict on it are mostly dtying off. The middle agers who just accepted it and worked within the system do not teach it, and the younger ones have never seen it or even know it. It has become a simple check list that if you fill something in that slot you have followed the method. I was lucky enough to both have a professor that harped on it and my stint as a researcher was in a group that was a stickler for following it. We pretty much had to train every new researcher we got (including myself when I started) on proper research methods. We were even one of the “soft sciences” (Computer Science), in some sense similar to their problem of not being able to have a control group or much of an experimental phase (that is what made us “soft sciences”). Mostly just gather data and interpret it — however there are time honored variants of the standard method for those instances. There is too much money involved with getting the results your funding agency wants, easier to fudge it.
They should have been attacked and discredited for nothing other than their processes ages ago (and indeed they were in the early days before the really bad decline in education occurred).
Of all the coming crisis I see this one as the single most severe So much of our newer understanding of the world is based on garbage and once it gets out of whack enough with reality we are going to have to step back and redo a great deal of basic science (in fact the irony here is that it is quite possible that AGW is even *more* extreme than thought — we simply just do not know). It is going to be *difficult* to separate out the good from the bad as it is here too — there is some good science in Climatology too. Further I also think this decline in teaching critical thinking is a large part of our other social issues.
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November 29, 2009, 12:45 amNobody At All says:
“Raw” data is unadjusted to be homogenized and cross-verified against other data sets, etc. This is what is meant by “raw data,” and what has been posted.
Handwritten notes from the 1950s, the 1s and 0s of a digital data stream, are clearly not. Nor is it especially surprising that data collection must itself adjust for observational bias.
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November 29, 2009, 12:51 amJef says:
Congressman Tim Wirth (from PBS interview)about 1988 hearings:
The famous Stephen Schneider quote from 1989:
I know there are many who want to believe. But the Hockey Stick has been debunked...the claim that Mann made in 1998 that this has been the warmest in 1000 years has been withdrawn.
Al Gore can’t even admit that the number of polar bears have increased.
The key element (what is the impact of a doubling of CO2) is not known.
Climate is very complex. Please, do due diligence. Don’t just accept the “conventional wisdom”
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November 29, 2009, 12:53 amA. Zarkov says:
IPCC expert reviewer Gray claims that proof of fraud with respect to the heat island effect has been public for years. He says:
Grays allegations seem easy enough to check. Get those papers and check his claims that authors used the same data to prove both an assertion and its negative. But that’s not all. He goes on:
It’s funny that this stuff is coming out over the Internet and not the the literature. These are very serious allegations, which if true means the the integrity of peer review process has been seriously compromised.
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November 29, 2009, 12:53 amNobody At All says:
I’m going to bed. Goodnight, everyone.
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November 29, 2009, 12:57 amDavid Schwartz says:
Umm, no. I’m supporting the claim that I made, which you disputed. Here’s the claim again:
That data showed 3.2 degrees average with a spread of 2.7 degrees. And that was before the uncertainty in the individual data sets was even taken into account — that was assuming each prediction had an error bar of zero. It’s nearly certain that the error bar on any individual data set is greater than the error bar on the cumulative data. In fact, it’s almost certainly much greater.
And this is just for any warming at all. This is not even addressing the question that only some fraction of that warming is likely due to AGW.
But I’m not sure where the goalposts are here. Would you dispute that the forecast for AGW measurable to date is within the error bars of the corrections needed to make the measurements meaningful for comparison?
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November 29, 2009, 1:10 amMichael Chaney says:
You have Al Gore’s word on it. He’s an honest man. What more do you need? Some fancy scientific numbers or something?
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November 29, 2009, 1:14 amGregW says:
I wonder what caused it to not rain in the midwest for the entire decade of the 1930s. But of course that isn’t important because we know very well it couldn’t have been AGW.
I do know that if it doesn’t rain for the next 10 years and one of those years is the hottest ever recorded it will certainly be attributed to AGW by the AGW scientists. (1934 [not 1998] was the hottest year ever recorded according to NASA.)
By the way, what was the year of the optimal worldwide climate when everything was just peachy and the temperature everywhere was perfect for every species on the planet? 10,000BC? 50AD? 1000AD? 1500? 1850? 1929? Oh yeah, I forgot. It was 1980.
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November 29, 2009, 1:15 amPat says:
Since CRU have lost their data (apparently some fifteen years ago) and no-one else owns up to having any, the evidence for global warming is zero. Try submitting a tax return on the basis that you’ve lost the all the receipts and bank statements and see if the taxman regards your word as proof. Or maybe court cases should be decided on the basis of the claimant’s assumed honesty– I claim you owe me a million dollars, but I’ve lost the paperwork– that should keep me in caviar for ever.
Further, if the data was indeed lost that long ago– then since it was compiled from the records of others (national met. services, the military, etc. it would be a relatively simple operation, albeit one taking a year or so, to find it again. There has to be a reason why this has not been done in the last fifteen years.
We do have raw data on line for France and New Zealand– and the raw data for both countries show no warming. So we also need a very god reason for systematically adjusting temperatures upward in an age of rapid urban development which should require downward corrections to account for the Urban Heat Island effect.
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November 29, 2009, 1:21 amRobbins Mitchell says:
Well,if nothing else this entire episode does prove one thing to a moral certainty....that every time anAL GOREtentive opens his mouth and prattles on about how “the debate is over” and “the science is settled”, he is lying his fat ass off.
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November 29, 2009, 1:24 amJoe says:
The weight of existing scientific evidence still firmly supports the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to climatic warming.
The weight of the scientific evidence is that there is no GLOBAL warming at all. Raw data out of New Zealand points to the temperatures there being steady from 1910 to 1990. There was a spike and then a drop.
There is very strong evidence that modern thermometers used for this type of record keeping were miscalibrated and had a huge (5–7 degree) error that got worse the hotter it got. Moreover, many of these stations were installed incorrectly, including next to heat generating sources like sewage plants and air conditioning units.
Fact: Measured atmospheric CO2 in 1820 and 1872 were comparable to today. Man made measurements were discarded in favor of high dubious proxy data.
This isn’t to say some places haven’t seen warming; that is how the world works, but many places have seen cooling for decades, a fact oft ignored in all the hype.
John Coleman, founder of The Weather Channel, was right when he wrote “It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM.”
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November 29, 2009, 1:27 amLeo Marvin says:
I wonder how much everyone here thinks their own opinions about this stuff are determined by their biases. That’s not a snarky rhetorical question. I’m really curious.
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November 29, 2009, 1:33 amRicardo Rodriguez says:
I may be biased, but the cold hard fact remains that the world has cooled in the last decade.
That fact alone should give everybody pause, as one of the researchers in the leaked emails himself notes that “it is a travesty that the models can’t explain this fact”.
The AGW’s crowd reaction seems to be “OK, it’s not warming, but there’s all this other horrible data showing that were it not for this or that (El niño? La niña?), it WOULD be getting warmer” Uh-huh, now you tell me.
All that other data may be suggestive and wonderful and solid and voluminous, but what it is MOST DEFINITELY NOT is predictive. When the data is clear, you don’t need to massage it.
You’d think with all the hot air emanating from Gore, the IPCC, CRU, and Ed Begley’s mouths, no to speak of all the jet fuel being burnt by travelling bureaucrats that the world would have warmed, but alas, it hasn’t.
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November 29, 2009, 1:33 amjenny2 says:
Zuch sounds a lot like Phil Jones. Maybe they’re related?
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November 29, 2009, 1:35 amDavid Schwartz says:
Unfortunately, the data we have is so poor (because nobody knows how to correct it so that old readings are comparable to new ones) that I’d say our best guess is that it’s at least somewhat more likely that the planet is warming overall than cooling overall over the past 50 years or so. About a decade ago, I was fairly convinced that there was a definite short-term (100 year) warming trend. Now, I still think the preponderance of the evidence supports it.
One thing is sure, the global climate will change unless we do something truly radical to stabilize it. It always has in the past. And whatever change there is, it will be bad for humans at least in the short to medium term because we have adjusted our behavior in hard to change ways. (Where we build dams, ski resorts, farms, cities, and so on.)
We do not know enough to engineer favorable climate changes and we are unlikely to know enough for at least 30 years.
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November 29, 2009, 1:46 amJerry56 says:
“The weight of existing scientific evidence still firmly supports the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to climatic warming.”
WTF? The climate priests doctored their own results, suppressed data and attacked critics. Despite all of this, there was already a growing body of solid evidence to debunk AGW, especially the correlation of temperature with solar activity, the amount of CO2 that man emits (3% of total), and, the best of all, the FACT that global temperatures have been in decline the last several years.
Climate “science” is no science at all, just a political tool to push everyone towards a one world government. Isn’t it obvious by now?
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November 29, 2009, 1:49 amTC says:
As bad as “Climategate” is it is simply proof that scientists are just as venal as any other humans.
I wonder where else the books are being cooked, what other established authorities are altering data and rewriting the peer review process to keep out challengers. Physicists? Oncologists? Engineers?
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November 29, 2009, 1:52 amGregW says:
Leo, we all have certain biases. But we should still try to determine the truth of a disputed issue. For example, not many in the West would now say imposing communism on people has been a good experiment, yet in the 60’s it was quite popular at the university I attended. (Sadly it’s again losing some of its stigma. Some people stubbornly won’t or can’t learn from history. No doubt bias plays a part in that. It can’t be reason.)
What do you make of what appears to me to be the fearmongering and hysterical guesswork of the AGW proponents? (witness the list someone has compiled of the hundreds of disasters supposedly already being caused by AGW.)
Again, if a 10 year drought like that of the 1930s were to happen now it would be used to confirm AGW and to bring in huge changes in world economic and political polices. Yet we know that temporary drought of the 30’s, and myriads of other more serious and longlasting climate changes were not caused by man at all.
So let’s not be so quick to blame human activity this time. Engineer socially in haste, repent at leisure.
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November 29, 2009, 2:04 amConsi says:
I would like to thank Mark Buehner and Nobody At All for their discussion. I have spent the last 3–4 days trying to get a handle on what the “data dump” and the explanations on both sides mean. I had accepted that the science behind AWG was sound.
Nobody At All, I appreciate your position, but I must say that I think Buehner has made clear that there is a problem with the fact that the data sets have been “fudged” and we don’t have a clue as to how the data sets are being “fudged.”
I do not believe that faith is the answer on this one. It appears that there is a whole lot of work that needs to be done to validate the conclusions. The men who are under fire, from my review of the e-mails, do not appear to be men of character that would warrant my trust.
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November 29, 2009, 2:05 amKen Hahn says:
Let’s face it. The central issue is that without AGW climate scientists get research grants of millions of dollars, and with it they get billions of dollars. Please do the math.
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November 29, 2009, 2:06 amBenjamin says:
You know, I’m persuadable about the AGW issue, but everywhere I look the people laying out arguments for AGW are douchebags. See zuch above or any of Gavin’s posts in the comment threads at RealClimate. You know, you guys have a lot of people re-examining their beliefs right now, maybe you should tone down the assholery, huh?
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November 29, 2009, 2:29 amGregW says:
Leo,
Here’s a good example of the type of fearmongering and hysteria I was talking about from the commenter, zuch:
Just where and when exactly is this supposed to happen?
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November 29, 2009, 2:36 amrrr says:
Oh, now I’m convinced in AGW. Before Zuch responded I just had no way of knowing. Now there’s simply no doubt that this is a minor issue, nothing to see here. Whew. I feel better. Thanks Zuch.
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November 29, 2009, 2:36 amFurious Diaper » Blog Archive » If they only had a brain says:
[...] J Adler sums it up for me: As I’ve noted before, I don’t believe these revelations “disprove” global warming. The weight of existing scientific evidence still firmly supports the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to climatic warming. The releases do, however, demonstrate that many climate researchers have sought to stifle debate, downplay uncertainties, and exaggerate the risks posed by climate change. [...]
Jim Treacher says:
No one is obligated to disprove it, as if it’s the default position. Its adherents are obligated to prove it. They have not done so, no matter how they’ve massaged the data and stifled their critics.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
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November 29, 2009, 2:45 amScott Gibson says:
Heh-did Zuch and Nobody At All disappear at the same time?
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November 29, 2009, 3:16 amJeff says:
The only way to actually convince the world that man caused the current recorded warming (last 100 years with actual thermometers) was to show 2 things
1) Temperatures have never been this hot before
2) CO2 has never been this high
to do #1 they needed to eliminate the Medieval Warm period ... which they tried and failed to do with Manns Hockey Stick ...
#2 they hope nobody asks too many questions ...
Global warming is not being questioned, its AGW that is and it is a fraud ...
There is more evidence of a God than there is of AGW ...
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November 29, 2009, 3:37 amA. Zarkov says:
Let’s not forget prostitution. From the Nation Magazine
Or from CNN: Women ‘bearing brunt’ of climate change
Reminds me of the headline: WORLD ENDS– WOMEN AND MINORITIES HARDEST HIT.
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November 29, 2009, 3:39 amA. Zarkov says:
Well that’s laying it on the line. The worst of them is Gavin Schmidt. This guy is so obnoxious, he actually turns liberals against AGW. His side lost the Oxford-style debate in New York City after he pretty much insulted everyone in the room.
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November 29, 2009, 3:44 amJones' Cell Mate says:
Actual sentence from a Telegraph article;
A spokesman for the Dept of Energy and Climate Change said: “This is a matter for UEA but the evidence for climate change is overwhelming.”
Good Times!
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November 29, 2009, 3:49 amwlpeak says:
Wow, now they admit that they just don’t have the raw data anymore.
I figured this admission was coming when I read through the programmers notes. He couldn’t find the source data to rerun the code. Basically, without the same original data, he couldn’t say if the code worked or not.
So we have no raw data. The computer program can’t be QA’ed to verify it even works. And yet the CRU crew are still arrogant about it.
Boy that’s some good science ya got there.
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November 29, 2009, 4:41 amlucklucky says:
“The weight of existing scientific evidence still firmly supports the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to climatic warming.”
Doesn’t prove anything. Maybe there isn’t any Global Warming, maybe there is, it is unknown.
How can anyone says that there is Global Warming when we have big problems with data and lack of Historical evidence for such small temperature diferences, it is bizarre, people are blind to the issue. For example is enough a cloud cover to make a drop of more than 5ºC and are people saying that 1–2ºC World increase/increase can be detected with a small thermometer number . It can’t.
What we can prove is that we don’t have enough knowledge, and even enough data. Why many people including the author of this text doesn’t even look at an Earth Globe and ask where are the thermometers in the Ocean? Only recently some thousand(between 2000–3000) of buys were released. Very few for 70% of earth. Did the author even checked the issues with temperature measurement and the land problems with thermometers in Africa, Pacific, Latin America-to not talk about US and Europe problems? Certainly not.
If people start research the foundations of science and forget about what media says and ask: where data came from, how, time span, data earth cover easily find there is no data to reach any conclusion for the precision required. We obviously can say we aren’t in a Glacial Age, the tools we have are probably enough to detect 5ºC differences today but besides that not much.
Even more complex finding Human influence, CO2, Methane etc. Only can be said it is a fraud if someone states that there is any conclusion.
We don’t know enough and we don’t have enough data and with quality.
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November 29, 2009, 5:02 amGuaman says:
This is an important matter. AGW is not proven. It is different than such things as evolution, creationism, and intelligent design because it is the justification for the governmental assault on my property and personal freedom. The number of angels on the head of a pin doesn’t matter until someone uses it as a reason to deprive me of mine. The thieves of government and academia need a moral imperative unlike the thug on the street. AGW was it until now.
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November 29, 2009, 6:04 amRichard Aubrey says:
Leo.
Ref bias:
I was interested in the subject several decades ago. It was ...interesting.
Then I started to see who was pushing it. Odd comments here and there. End capitalism. “the big corporations”
Some of the same folks who had been in SANE, otherwise trying to handicap the west during the Cold War.
Meant I couldn’t trust them.
Still, they could be right this time.
But it meant that they had to be questioned very closely. Anything which contradicted AGW had to be taken as correct until proven (hard proof) false.
The existence of the MWP and the Little Ice Age busted the A part of AGW, and the temp records being set in the last couple of decades were mostly low, not high.
Occasionally a weather broadcaster would say it hasn’t been this hot since 1933 or 1934. Nobody wanted to tell us what that said about GW, A or otherwise.
So, to a layman, it looked shaky and hearing about one or another bookcooking, Schneider justification for lying, it was obvious that AGW was a scam. Obvious for years.
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November 29, 2009, 6:12 amChemistry Degree says:
“The weight of existing scientific evidence still firmly supports the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to climatic warming. ”
No it does not at all — please lay out what “evidence” you are citing that does not have counter hypothesis that are every bit as valid. It’s this kind of thinking that led the thinking at the CRU and NASA.
First, collect valid and defensible data.
Second, use that data to prove the hypothesis.
Third, defend that proof in open scientific debate.
Then you can make that statement.
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November 29, 2009, 6:13 amzuch says:
Wow. I think I see what the problem is. ;-)
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 6:32 amzuch says:
Since you are so confident that the science is still sound regarding [ ], surely you can cite a persuasive paper that “proves” evolution/quantum mechanics/heliocentric theory/etc.
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 6:40 amzuch says:
True. But isn’t it beholden on you to find out whether your actions might be harming others? Punishment after the fact here simply makes two victims (and it’s rather hard to “set whole again” those that have been drowned, should that occur).
I’d note that some sceptics here seem to be saying, hey, NP if we flood ‘em out, we’ll just move them and it’ll be cheaper than changing our profligate ways now. This of course is the “policy argument”, not the scientific one, and seems to cede the scientific dispute even if just for purposes of argument. But this approach still suffers from the failing I pointed out: That — if true that some people will be flooded — we have the privilege to decide what to do about it to “make them whole” again and have no a priori obligation to prevent the damage. That’s arrogance.
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 6:50 amWarren Bonesteel says:
The question is, what will people do if/when Copenhagen results on even more international laws and regulations based upon Hansen, Mann and the IPCC Report?
What will the people do if/when Congress passes cap and trade or something much like it, in spite of the mounting evidence that all of the data from Hansen, Mann and the IPCC was forged and made out of whole cloth??
On top of a national and international economy that has been all but destroyed? Will that ‘Army of Davids’ become a real ‘army’?
see also:
“Army of Davids”
Social Singularity.
“Gin, Television and Social Surplus”
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November 29, 2009, 6:53 amzuch says:
Your data set has a very large error bar.
Guess the cabal let one slip through, eh? Horrors. I’ll have to talk to The Enforcer about this SNAFU.
Or it could mean that there’s actually just what I stated: Plenty of opportunity to gte your papers out there.
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 6:58 amzuch says:
Strangely enough, any digital thermometer’s data is “in fact seriously massaged by the collection [device]....” There’s actually “weighing”, “fudge factors”, and “algorithms” used inside.
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 7:00 amzuch says:
... Google, as opposed to, say, SCI. My, how times have changed. <*sigh*>
Yes. For one sense of the word “funny”.
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 7:11 amtherm says:
Please elaborate. How do digital thermometers “seriously massage” the data. Is the temperature recorded different from regular thermometers?
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November 29, 2009, 7:19 amkstills says:
As I understand it, this correction’s been disclosed and discussed (and AFAIK, even published). And it affects only one data set. What evidence have you that this was done to “intentional[ly] plant[] false data”?Maybe before we refuse to take efforts to prevent reduction of the Maldives to an recreational SCUBA park and the displacement/dispossession of hundreds of millions of people from the Ganges delta, we ought to be damn sure that such ‘benign’ neglect is warranted. Or maybe not. Hell, they can swim, can’t they? As long as I can drive a 12mpg Hummer....Rather had nothing to do with the vetting of the papers. And the whole brouhaha there succeeded in making the story about the few false documents, and divert questions from what actually became of Mr. “Pull me up from under the end barstool at closing” Dubya during those days (much the same tactic as here, where the attempt to discredit one small data set is then being used to say the whole thing’s a crock). In fact, the gist of the story is true: Dubya was AWOL and suspended from flight status within a “Champagne unit” while you folks on the right were busting Kerry’s stones and sliming his good name about his five combat medals (including a Silver Star and Bronze Star). All thoroughly documented ... but that never stopped Michelle Malkin from claiming that Kerry shot himself to get a Purple Heart. And then there were the vicious attacks on Max Cleland (“he was drunk”, etc). Now that’s sleaze.Cheers,
Oofa.
Are you seriously suggesting that actions by man can or have changed global climate enough to either cause or prevent massive changes in global temperatures?
That the presence or absence of ice ages can be laid at the feet of man? With or without a ‘hummer’?
CO2 is a trailing indicator, not a leading one. The earth is warming because, well, because it does. CO2 then rises. Then the earth cools. And stays cold for many thousands of years longer then it stays warm.
But those folks in the Ganges Delta and the Maldives?
Human history is one of migration from one area to another. There is a reason why that is.
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November 29, 2009, 7:23 amzuch says:
If I’m not mistaken, with standard P<.05 [appprox. 2 SDs], a two-tailed “spread” of 2.7 as the SEM would would give over a 98% chance of the rise being above 0 degrees. But what you refer to as a “spread” is not in fact a SEM or confidence interval (well, outside of the rough ordinal “confidence interval” of total range), so any more meaningful statistics based on this are rather inappropriate. Metastatistics could be used to give more meaningful confidence intervals based on the SEMs of the indivudual studies cited on your link. But such may not be appropriate because the different models (from the web link) seem to be based at least in part on different assumptions.
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 7:27 amzuch says:
“Tree ring proxies are ‘fudged’ [and for the reasons noted by myself and others], therefore all the data from everywhere disappeared.”
Actually, tax analysts do a fair amount of rationality testing before even asking for paper [in most cases]. If your expenses fit the model, likely you won’t get flagged. If not, you may have to come up with the documentation. But the amount of documentation required of most people is close to 0 nowadays [they may ask for W-2s and 1099s, but even this data they already have].
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 7:34 amzuch says:
If this were true, there would be a huge “signal” due to such. A 6 degree temperature shift is hard to ignore. Do you have any cites for this “fact”?
Cite for this “fact”?!?!?
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 7:47 amtherm says:
But isn’t Pat’s point that they don’t have the data? They’ve “lost” it. So your assuming that the CRU “already have” the data begs the question, evades the point he is trying to make, and is counterfactual.
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November 29, 2009, 7:52 amtom swift says:
The situation, as the e-mails clearly show us, is much worse than you realize. Those guys at East Anglia aren’t climatologists, or any other kind of scientist. They’re activists, preachers of a new Luddite gospel, priest-king wannabees.
Scientists, to be of any use at all, aren’t “true believers.” Proper, functional scientists are skeptics, not cheerleaders.
The data from East Anglia is useless. All of it. It’s a case of “one of these watermelons is poisoned.” There may or may not be some honest data buried in there, but if we can’t tell which data points are good and which are imaginary, the whole set is useless.
The other data sets which we’re told show the same thing are obviously also rubbish. I say obviously, because if one data set has been cooked to achieve a predetermined result, and a second, ostensibly independent, data set shows the same thing, we can’t piously hope that the second data set is honest; we can only conclude that the second set has been fudged as well. As support for this conclusion, realize that if the first data set had shown the desired result, nobody would have run the risk involved in cooking it. Ergo, we can conclude that the un-fudged data does not show any of the stuff we’re supposed to be in a panic about.
So, no need for undue excitement yet about AGW. The time for that is after the honest data is available, and not before — that’s the difference between science and wishful thinking.
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November 29, 2009, 8:03 amChemistry Degree says:
I am also curious about who — I mean names and positions in government — was responsible for overseeing all the NASA and NOAA money delivered to CRU and their allies. In addition to peer review of articles (which apparently was rigged), someone was responsible for handing out this money, and they too should have been examining the quality of the research they were funding with our tax dollars. Has anyone seen any reports on this issue?
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November 29, 2009, 8:22 amGuy says:
Actually, it’s that the tree ring data doesn’t match the directly measured temperature, the tree ring data is included because it can be a rough indication of what the temperature was before the temperature was being recorded by humans, but we know that it is less accurate than other measurement methods, and contradicts the measurements post 1960. I don’t really know the analytical processes involved, so I’m not going to express an opinion on whether/how much this is likely to bias the results, but I will say that it’s a far cry from intentional “fraud” even if it does bias them — scientists reject outliers and measurements known to be in error all the time.
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November 29, 2009, 9:04 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
Well, we have the word “clearly” here, ha ha.
I actually disagree with this. I disagree a lot. In the lab, suppose that I do an analysis on the sulfur analyzer. I enter the concentrations of my calibration standards, as well as the sample amounts and dilution volumes. It performs the calculations and prints out a report, and stores the data from the run. Suppose that I discover that I put the wrong calibration concentrations in, and on the printout I hand-write what the correct concentrations were and how I recalculated the results. I always initial and date these hand-written notes because those contemporaneous explanations, along with any comments or anything else that describe how I got to the number I reported, are in fact raw data. If I go back a year later and discover an error, recalculate and resubmit a report, I have to document how I did all that. There’s no way to validate what I reported if I don’t. If my notes went missing, and the stored data didn’t match what I reported, I had better be able to recreate what I did from some other contemporary documentation — standard prep, for instance. Otherwise, an auditor would eat me alive.
So the definition of “raw data” being only what the machines put out doesn’t hold water for me.
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November 29, 2009, 9:05 amFury says:
Are you critiquing blog etiquette here?!?!?What’s wrong with the above?It’s not like there’s any censorship going on.It takes half a minute to start your own blog ... and as the VC proprietors point out, that’s your option if someone else doesn’t appreciate your comments on their blog.
Really? Blog etiquette? Mann was offering his and Schmidt’s services to hold up comments to realclimate.org, and if necessary not “screen through” comments they anticipated, apparently in response to an article by Osborn and Briffa. The plain reading of Mann’s e-mail is that contributors who might not agree or have concerns with the article would have their comments held up and in fact, Mann offered to allow Osborn and Briffa to make the decision on which of these comments pertaining to their article would be allowed on realclimate.org.
You are correct — people can start their own blog. And if there is one good outcome here — it’s that realclimate.org will be seen by an increasing number of people as being an web-site for AGW advocacy. I mean, would it not be a whole lot easier if they just stated that up front?
I suppose this begs the question — where does AGW advocacy stop and science start? Yes, there is a disclaimer on realclimate.org that views of contributors are not those of the organizations for which they work, etc, etc — but it makes one wonder if the lines between advocacy and science have not become blurred at times. And of course, this is not something unique to the AGW issue.
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November 29, 2009, 9:05 am~FR says:
But isn’t it beholden on you to find out whether your actions might be harming others? –Zuch
Well, there is the seed of the Western guilt-trip in a nutshell...
Unfortunately:
Climate change data dumped
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
Zuch, if someone wants to ‘prove’ that we here in the West are ‘guilty’ of AGW, then they are going to HAVE to:
1) Show their work
2) Quit bullying other scientists who disagree
There appears to be a significant body of evidence AGAINST *A*GW.
Also, bandying the term ‘skeptic’ as an epithet is not helping the case.
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November 29, 2009, 9:12 amSG says:
I wonder how much everyone here thinks their own opinions about this stuff are determined by their biases. That’s not a snarky rhetorical question. I’m really curious.
I know mine are. I find AGW plausible but reject the more apocalyptic scenarios, not so much because I know they are wrong (I know from experience feedback can behave in strange ways), but because I wish them to be wrong. I wish them to be wrong because I believe the CO2 emissions that are said to be driving them to be unavoidable, at least at today’s level of technology. Look at the level of reduction necessary to reverse the (claimed) problem — it’s not simply a matter of conservation, it’s a reversion back to subsistence farming. That’s simply not going to happen on a global scale.
And despite all this latest flap, I still think AGW is quite plausible. I think it’s likely that the planet is somewhat warmer than it would have been in the absence of human-driven CO2 emissions. But I find this controversy to be good reason to reject the apocalyptic scenarios, however I’m quite aware that I may be doing exactly what Jones, Mann, etc appear to have done — accepting confirming evidence while rejecting the disconfirming evidence.
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November 29, 2009, 9:14 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
Guy, SG’s right. If the tree ring data aren’t valid, then they’re not valid, period. You can only throw out measurements and results if you have a reason to do it, and then you have to be consistent about what you disallow. Otherwise anyone will fall prey to confirmation bias.
This is a very basic concept in quality control. At my workplace, we have a motivation to move out railcars of material. If I run an analysis that shows that a lot is out of spec, I could run it again, and keep running it until I get a number I like, and then report that and move on. That’s clearly NOT what you do, so on one test that is both flaky and sometimes comes out right on the spec, I have an internal check in that I run it in duplicate and only report if the results agree within a certain percent. If they don’t, I discard that data and rerun. The thing is, once I set up that criterion I rerun if the duplicates don’t agree, whether it’s in spec or out.
You have to define what data you’re going to use, and not use, and apply that across the board.
And Leo, I started out on the fence about AGW but it’s stuff like that that has made me skeptical about what we’ve been told. This is basic QC. It’s like last year’s September data from Siberia being reported as October, and Hansen’s excuse when he was caught, that he didn’t have the personnel to catch that sort of thing. Well, if you don’t have the personnel to do a reasonableness check on your data and look for such an obvious mistake when you find what appears to be outliers (as opposed to making announcements about how hot that October was in Siberia) then you need to shut up and sit down b/c you shouldn’t be reporting at all.
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November 29, 2009, 9:15 amMR says:
There goes the argument that the CRU can’t release their data due to confidentiality agreements. They’ve just announced that they are going to “publish their figures in full”.
Hopefully they’ll make this happen soon.
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November 29, 2009, 9:20 amcinderellastory says:
Perhaps the glaciers on the mountain peaks were declining BEFORE your observations began 35 years ago!
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November 29, 2009, 9:39 amGeorge Dixon says:
The “climate scientists” are more anti-capitalist than pro-environment.
The ice of the last ice-age was 2 miles tall in northern Minnesota....it melted and there was not an suv in sight.
Global warming...like on the globe of Mars, where polar caps have diminished in recent years, is a cycle not a tax opportunity.
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November 29, 2009, 9:50 amPaul A'Barge says:
What a sad little man.
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November 29, 2009, 9:58 amPersonFromPorlock says:
My cynical take is that the data will be unintelligible as released, but AGW proponents will claim that it ‘proves’ the rectitude of the researchers and the whole AGW movement will sail grandly off to its next political victory.
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November 29, 2009, 10:41 amjccamp says:
I think what is upsetting about the collection of temperature readings from WMO stations is this kind of procedure: when a cluster of stations — within 25 km of each other by European standards, for instance — report readings within some specified range and at least one station is an “outlier”, a reading outside a pre-determined acceptable range, that reading is rejected and some mean of the other stations’ readings substituted. Now another station (or stations, plural) within the cluster fails to report — apparently, fairly common — so another value from the mean is extrapolated (created) and used for the missing data. However, there seems to be some variation in standardization in station siting and configuration, i.e. north slope, east slope, partially shaded, partial sun, sensors within the exhaust of an air conditioning system. So, if one station experienced shade in the morning, while another does not, the actual recorded variation is removed and replaced with a bias toward whichever influences a majority of stations within that arbitrary range. As for weather influence, like cloudiness, the numbers do get adjusted for precipitation, although in at least some datasets, precipitation is not recorded but simulated (?). So, if one station experiences rain and clouds all reporting period, while another enjoys full sun, one of the two station’ numbers are going out the window, to be replaced with some mean from an arbitrary cluster of stations which may be influenced by non-climate factors like tree shade and such. At each stage, some theoretical multiplier is introduced to remove error and artificial bias. Considering this set of weighting and averaging tools, and given an apparent lack of standardized station siting criteria, parsing the resultant dataset into a less-than-one-degree rise over nearly a century seems implausible at best.
I am sure the actual validation process is as best as can be done, and is far more accurate than this would seem to describe it. But this seems a lot like trying to measure microns with a wooden ruler. Is this really sufficiently definitive to create AGW?
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November 29, 2009, 10:54 amAndrew Lale says:
I love the constant fallback, ‘we don’t have the Intellectual Property rights, so we can’t give you the data/programs etc.’
Somebody somewhere has the intellectual property rights. Why don’t they release their data and code into the public domain? So it can be peer reviewed? Why so shy?
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November 29, 2009, 10:58 amIrwin Chusid says:
“This whole concept of, ‘We’re the experts, trust us,’ has clearly gone by the wayside with these e-mails,” said Judith Curry, a climate scientist.”
After which, Curry is quoted as saying:
“We won the war — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, and climate and energy legislation is near the top of the U.S. agenda. Why keep fighting all these silly battles and putting ourselves in this position.”
A “Nobel Peace Prize,” the “top of the U.S. agenda,” and “silly battles.” I think what she’s saying is, “Trust us, we’re experts. Now please shut up and pass us another slice of that underwriting pie.”
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November 29, 2009, 10:58 amJoe says:
I might need to rename myself if “Joe” is used to promote such stuff here.
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November 29, 2009, 11:18 amRichard Aubrey says:
Irwin. Sounds like, we won. You lose, chump. Nothing you can do now.
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November 29, 2009, 11:19 ammockmook says:
Really zuch, there is no creditable paper that synthesizes the evidence to make the case for AGW?
If all the “evidence” is just disparate papers with smidgens of evidence, then that is no better than anecdotes.
And, yet you believe in AGW.
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November 29, 2009, 11:31 amflyovertard says:
Lord, reading zuch gives me a headache.
Program Convince
n = perceived effort required
Do i = 1,n
circular_argument(whatever_topic)
Endo
Printscreen(“its all at realclimate”)
End
2007 IPCC report relies on CRU data. CRU cannot reproduce this data (see Harry_Readme) nor can anyone else — not possible. Without reproducible data its not science, only politics.
Peer reviewed literature can’t be trusted to accurately reflect what is known and unknown about past, present, and future climate.
The foundation of the entire AGW house of cards rests on the conjecture that recent global temps are unprecedented. There is abundant evidence this is not true.
Its all pretty flimsy evidence to base changing the world economy via mandate IMHO.
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November 29, 2009, 11:33 amrarango says:
late to the thread–I have absolutely no academic expertise in climatology and cannot comment on the merits of any arguments. I do know enough about research however to know that replication is the gold standard of science. It appears to me, at least as how I read purloined data from CRU, that models used to predict GW cannot be replicated without manipulating the underlying data. That suggests to me that either the data is suspect or the model is suspect. Neither of these conclusions suggests that nothing has been proven one way or the other. If this is the science that supports GW or AGW, then I suggest we might want to start over.
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November 29, 2009, 11:33 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
You forgot “Cheers,”.
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November 29, 2009, 11:48 amStarman says:
No. It. Doesn’t. What other “existing scientific evidence” is there?? Hummm? AGW is now and thankfully and finally a dead duck. It was actually teetering on 2 legs of a 3 legged stool as it was. You can set that tall glass of Kool-aid down now Jonathan....it’s over.
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November 29, 2009, 11:48 amanother_anon says:
I’m late here as well — I see Irwin beat me to at least part of it. It seems Curry is being, uh, curried for the ‘reasonable’ scientist role, yet she can come out with “We won the war”. War??? When did science become a war instead of a debate?
I also notice the NYT using ‘stolen’ to refer to the files. Since we don’t know (AFAIK) exactly how the files came to be put on the server, I assume they will continue to use that term for all future instances of leaks, whistleblowing and the like.
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November 29, 2009, 11:59 amTHP says:
The scandal here is not — or not primarily — that they massaged their data. It’s possible (though scepticism is warranted) that the massaging can be scientifically justified.
The scandal, rather, is that they massaged their data in secret, to the point that it took a hacker to “out” them. This sort of procedure, whatever they choose to call it, is not science. To quote Richard Feynmann:
From Cargo Cult Science: The 1974 Caltech Commencement Address in Feynmann, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.
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November 29, 2009, 12:03 pmJPG says:
Where were you when this whole nation was trumpeting how much we needed to invade Iraq?
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November 29, 2009, 12:08 pmflyovertard says:
Hint: Invasion of Iraq and climate science aren’t closely related. One is about a coalition of nations invading another nation. The other is about um, climate.
Timely book review in a recent Physics Today. The book is titled “Plastic Fantastic” and is an summary of the 1998 to 2002 case of fraud from Schon at Bell Labs. An interesting exerpt:
” Our reluctance to question the basic integrity of colleagues, the self interest of journals and institutions — Bell Labs in this instance — our own wishful thinking, our ambitions, and our failure to set standards for recording and storing data are all factors that enabled those fraudulent claims to go unrecognized for too long. ”
Sound familiar?
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November 29, 2009, 12:24 pmArthurKirkland says:
May the best science win.
It must overcome industry-funded “research” and results-oriented “research” and human failings and ideologically generated fog, but, nonetheless, may the best science win.
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November 29, 2009, 12:28 pmSG says:
Invasion of Iraq and climate science aren’t closely related. One is about a coalition of nations invading another nation. The other is about um, climate.
Actually, when you consider the public policy aspect, there is a lot of similarity between the two. In both cases there was consensus opinion that was based on data that had been primarily analyzed in secret and the public policy was sold to the public on the basis of apocalyptic scenarios.
A few differences — there were valid national security justifications for keeping the underlying Iraq data secret; no such justifications exist for the climate data. There was bi-partisan support for Iraq; no such bi-partisan policy response exists for climate change. And for better or worse, most people were unaffected by the invasion of Iraq; that’s is not true for any of the proposed policy responses for climate change.
In hindsight, the case for invading Iraq was much less compelling than originally thought. We (hopefully) are finding some of the flaws in the AGW case before having committed to action.
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November 29, 2009, 12:41 pmDavid McCourt says:
Zush says “Here’s the Nature paper in question: ‘Reduced sensitivity of recent tree-growth to temperature at high northern latitudes.’ If this finding is correct, then in fact there is need of a ‘fudge’ when obtaining temperature data from tree ring proxies.”
So let me see if I understand this.
It seems that those at CRU and elsewhere who study tree-ring growth patterns to estimate past temperatures have noticed that the temperatures for previous centuries predicted by their models and the actual observed temperatures in the last 50 years or so have diverged, tree-ring width-wise. That is, the tree-rings are not so wide now, even though the temperatures are warm, and the past tree rings are wide, even though we know it wasn’t — it couldn’t have been — warm back then.
What does a scientist do when observed reality diverges from his model, I hear you ask? Perhaps come to think that the model’s assessment of the past is, er, not so good? Or that perhaps it was warmer in the past, when those big thick tree rings were created. But, gulp, that would be like saying there was a Medieval Warm Period, and a Roman warm period, and lots of others besides, and where’s the old “hockey stick” of looming global catastrophe then? Unthinkable.
So, here the solution: there has been a change in the way trees grow when it is warm; they just don’t grow as fast since 1960 as they did before. Funny thing, botany; we’ve got these trees going along for thousands of years, doin’ one thing, and then they up one day and say, hey, let’s try something differ-ent.
So we’ll “adjust” all this tree-ring data, and use our “proxies” instead of the actual data we collected. There, all fixed.
When it comes time to vote on whether the world should bankrupt itself for a theory, these guys don’t get my proxy.
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November 29, 2009, 12:43 pmfda says:
Temperatures reconstructed from the so-called “tree ring data” does not show warming and cooling periods (the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age) that we know have occurred in the past. So, how reliable can that theory be?
See http://www.sepp.org/ –Publications — NIPPC Report 2008 (The document can be term-searched and contains much to refute AGW.)
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November 29, 2009, 12:44 pmMDr says:
zuch says:
Guess the cabal let one slip through, eh? Horrors. I’ll have to talk to The Enforcer about this SNAFU.
Just made my point, which you somehow missed. This got past the Enforcer because it wasn’t one of the “approved” AGW peer reviewed journals. You seem to miss the irony — you keep promoting the recently exposed AGW collusionists and their filtered journals as the only acceptable sources. You also seem to take the position that a climatologist is the only one that can comment on the validity of the statistical methods employed as well as how that data was collected, ID’d, and grouped. Telling.
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November 29, 2009, 12:44 pmFred 2 says:
For those of you still in denial about the importance of the CDU scandal see this from the CBSNEWS blog
by Declan McCullagh
“...In global warming circles, the CRU wields outsize influence: it claims the world’s largest temperature data set, and its work and mathematical models were incorporated into the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report. That report, in turn, is what the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged it “relies on most heavily” when concluding that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and should be regulated...”
So the data used by both the UN’s Ingovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the EPA was, to an unknown extent, corrupted and the orginal figures subsequently “lost” and that’s not a big deal?
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November 29, 2009, 1:32 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Want to say a word about “fudge” and “fudge factor”.
If you have a thermometer which you calibrate, and learn that you must apply a factor so that it gives you 0.0°C in an ice water bath, etc., that is not a fudge factor.
A factor that you apply to correct for the fact that one instrument is more sensitive than the other — a fact that you have carefully verified and documented — is not a fudge factor.
A fudge factor is a number that is necessary to apply to an equation so that you get the result you want. You “derive” this factor after the fact, when you do the calculation as it should be done and don’t get the result you want. It is not based on anything except the desire to get your calculation to end up with a certain number. This is the kind of thing that Harry’s “fudge factor” comments denote.
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November 29, 2009, 1:43 pmBruce Hayden says:
I know that there is something missing here. It can’t be this obvious, that CRU, et al. were using tree ring data as proxies for pre-1960 data because they didn’t have reliable actual temperature data for then, and then had to fudge the tree ring data after some point after that because the tree ring data didn’t correspond to the more accurate (?) temperature data that they were now seeing. I too would have questioned first whether or not the tree ring data were really that good of a proxy pre-1960, if they bad enough now that they have to be fudged to match reality.
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November 29, 2009, 2:08 pmfsfsfsfsfsfsfsfs says:
Mainstream media coverage of the CRU document leak has been interesting. It’s generally gotten very little coverage, and what coverage there is has been dismissive.
Scientific American ascribes Climategate to a “climate conspiracy” that is “launched by the fossil fuel industry to obscure the truth about climate change.”
The New York Times refused to link to the emails because they were allegedly “illegally obtained” and had not been intended for public reading.
Most of the other major news organizations appear to be simply ignoring the story or relegating it to single articles on their online websites.
I find this curious because even supposing for the sake of argument that the global warming advocates’ minimization of the documents’ significance were correct, the release itself still would seem far more newsworthy and interesting than the coverage suggests.
That is, suppose we accept the familiar talking points of the global warming groups. That is, suppose, in fact the data was made available, and where it was not, its hiding was due to proprietary restrictions; suppose that the CRU scientists were appropriately using peer review in trying to fire misbehaving editors, or, if they were not, their impatience in the face of incompetence was understandable; suppose that the underlying science is as settled as ever; suppose that deniers are simply quacks; suppose that the “trick” to “hide the decline” actually was merely a “clever way to present data”; suppose that instructions to delete emails were understandable in light of the harassment of CRU by McIntyre; suppose that the data adjusted by the CRU computer programs was either adjusted fairly, or not at all, or those adjustments did not affect the settled science.
Even if all this were true, wouldn’t the media normally still report on this? Isn’t the release still highly newsworthy? And should not the media actually publish why specifically it finds the various rationalizations for the statements in the released documents credible, rather than simply accepting their truth privately?
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November 29, 2009, 2:12 pmAbdul Abulbul Amir says:
So who cares if it locks a few billion people in grinding poverty and short life expectancy. They’re dark-skinned, dontcha know? They got it coming to support me in my holy pursuit of the Immaculate Power Source and bigger bank balances for Al Gore and friends.
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November 29, 2009, 2:15 pmOwen H. says:
Considering that the loss of the polar ice pack and opening of the Northwest Passage for the first time isn’t strong enough evidence, it is clear that the anti-science bias so prevalent in this country is going to turn us into a third-world backwater before climate change shows effects profound enough for the critics. It is part and parcel with the movement to teach “Intelligent Design” (placed in quotes because only an idiot would deliberately design us this way on purpose), and other pseudo-science disguising religious fundamentalism.
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November 29, 2009, 2:18 pmfsfsfsfsfsfsfsfs says:
tamerlane writes:
As I’ve said before, I think the advocates of the position that there is substantial anthropogenic global warming that must be ameliorated by a global reduction in carbon emissions have “won the war”. The interests of all of the decision-makers align with a belief in that policy: governments, investors, scientists, funding agencies, media. A few hundred, or a few thousand, irate blog messages won’t change that.
By the way the single characteristic of libertarian blogs I have read, like this one, or Reason, and the like, is their almost entirely uniform lack of understanding about how incentives shape human behavior. Whatever the libertarian bureaucratic cause-du-jour is — asset forfeiture, drug legalization, TARP, gun control, climate change legislation — the pattern is always the same. The intellectuals in the movement post deeply reasoned articles and books purporting to prove their position. But they never seem to grasp that the correctness of their position is absolutely irrelevant to the incentives that drive the bureaucracies to which they are adverse. You can argue until you’re blue in the face that “asset forfeiture” is improper, but since government stands to profit from it, it just won’t make any difference. Nobody will ever believe an argument that costs them money. The same is true of all their other bete noirs where they rail against some bureaucracy or other.
To make an impact on climate change bureaucracies, in my view, you have to set it up so that there is some kind of positive incentive for scientists and policy makers to seek out the actual facts of the situation. Without these incentives, you’re just arguing with the wind.
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November 29, 2009, 2:31 pmBruce Hayden says:
Also, any time that you hear about glaciers melting and the like, keep in mind that the issue is AGW, not GW. If the Medieval Warming Period and Little Ice Age existed (and there is a lot more evidence pro than con, esp. with the problems with tree rings discussed above), then the earth’s climate would naturally still be warming up from the later, which apparently ended in the 19th century. The issue is the extent that man has caused additional warming over what would have happened without man’s help, and not whether or not there has been warming, because there has, at least up until 1998 or so.
It appears to me that the CRU, et al., crew were using tree rings (up until 1960 when they apparently became unreliable) to try to disprove the existence of the Medieval Warming Period and Little Ice Age, in order to avoid the problem of temperatures rising as a result of the Earth coming out of the Little Ice Age as a better explanation of the GW that we have seen over the last century or so than AGW.
Or, another way of possibly saying this is that in order to prove AGW, you need to eliminate (or at least control for) natural GW, and one way of doing that is eliminate historical higher and lower climatic temperatures. Man didn’t have accurate thermometers until fairly recently, so proxies (such as tree rings) could be selected that were supposed to correspond to climatic temperature over time. Unfortunately, it looks like at least some of the proxies selected were cherry picked in order to force the desired result (i.e. that the Earth isn’t rebounding from the Little Ice Age).
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November 29, 2009, 2:38 pmBruce Hayden says:
Again, my point — you need to distinguish between natural GW and man caused GW, and you haven’t. You seem to be assuming that since the Earth may have warmed (to cause the ice melting), that man is the cause. He may be a notable part of it, or he may not.
Let me add that over the last couple of years, that Arctic ice seems to be thickening, not thinning. And, Antarctic ice appears to be thickening even more. Both of which may be indicia that, despite increases in man caused CO2, the Earth’s climate may be now cooling a little. (as possibly indicated by the CRU fudge factor of 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)
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November 29, 2009, 2:58 pmjccamp says:
Bruce —
The MXD stuff was also used to validate the recorded temps from 1850 through 1960. Especially in the beginning of that period, recording stations were few and far between, unreliable, and not easily prone to comparison. Some stations’ data were discarded, others replicated and/or extrapolated, and in effect, a few were weighted against the many. Tree ring data was used as a check to validate the massaged recorded temps (and vice versa actually). So the early weather observations and the tree ring data were used in a kind of mutual admiration society to link human industrial activity and dramatic rising temperatures. That also probably explains the initial efforts to cherry pick tree data which would continue to correlate GW and human activity. When that was a FAIL, AGW was used as (one) explanation for the post-1960 deviation. Actually, pretty clever...(“See? After 1960, the tree ring growth diverges. That proves it.”)
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November 29, 2009, 3:00 pmflyovertard says:
Owen H. says:
“Considering that the loss of the polar ice pack and opening of the Northwest Passage for the first time isn’t strong enough evidence, it is clear that the anti-science bias so prevalent in this country is going to turn us into a third-world backwater before climate change shows effects profound enough for the critics. ”
This is such hogwash — NW Passage was sailed first about 1908 (it took 3 years). Has never been sailed since without icebreakers — including this year.
I believe part of the problem arose when critical thinking was pushed over logic. Take some poor math skills, add some emotion, a healthy dose of social justice, and poof, you get critical thinking. Using critical thinking skills allows you to feel good about yourself and justify your cause — regardless of if it makes sense or not.
It seems many folks these days have never developed the skills of reasoned analysis based on logic.
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November 29, 2009, 3:09 pmnewscaper says:
The fudged hockey stick in and of themselves (or conversely the Medieval Warming Period and Little Ice Age they virtually erased) tell us several things:
1) The MWP shows that todays temps and warming (to the extent that some did happen pre 1998) are NOT at all ‘unprecedented’.
2) The more dynamic temperature variance over the last 1300 years or so, including pre-20th century — versus the artificially damped Mann/CRu version — destroys the claim by correlation that manmade CO2 is the key driver.
The steep part of the artificially induced hockey stick slope is the *only* basis they have, as, in terms of basic physics WATER VAPOR is a far greater GHG than CO2, and is poorly ‘modeled’ due to *its* dynamic nature.
To point to CO2-sensitive models and claim they are vindicated by reproducing matching the CRU temps with the CO2 correlation baked-in, should be the most obvious form of circular reasoning.
I repeat again, for all you ‘reasonable’ people troubled by Climategate but still allowing for the fundamental IR absorbing proprty of CO2: water vapor, H2O, is BOTH a much greater portion of the atmosphere AND absorbs a much wider band of the infrared spectrum than does CO2. The burdern is totally on the AGW’ers to prove why the added CO2 somehow swamps and overrides the variabiity due to the much more prevalent H2O.
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November 29, 2009, 3:32 pmGuy says:
Not to get off topic... but that’s not what I understand critical thinking to be. in fact, I would say that “reasoned analysis based on logic” is kind of the central component of critical thinking, they’re practically synonyms. I guess it’s kind of a semantic dispute over term definition, but I’m surprised that there is a perception out there that “critical thinking” is code for “fuzzy emotional responses”, since I understand the two to be opposites.
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November 29, 2009, 3:37 pmnewscaper says:
I’ll add that it’s not inconceivable that manmade CO2 could have a disproportionate impact (given dynamic and chatoic systems), but the emails and data make it clear that the AGW’ers have manifestly NOT proven that.
All the above said, would I want to do the experiment of another doubling or tripling of CO2? No — but there are far saner ways to shift our economy gradually than what this coaliton of the power hungry and western technology hating want to do.
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November 29, 2009, 3:41 pmnewscaper says:
I’ll add that it’s not inconceivable that manmade CO2 could have a disproportionate impact (given dynamic and chatoic systems), but the emails and data make it clear that the AGW’ers have manifestly NOT proven that.
All the above said, would I want to do the experiment of another doubling or tripling of CO2? No — but there are far saner ways to shift our economy gradually than what this coaliton of the power hungry and western technology hating want to do.
One more note — the thousands of papers out there doing ‘what-ifs’ predicting damage, or papers blaming local environmental changes on AGW, are *presuming* AGW exists, and do not in anyway constitute evidence *for* AGW. The cart is before the horse to cite them as ‘proof’ of AGW.
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November 29, 2009, 3:44 pmJohnMc says:
Mr. Adler,
You are still falling for it. The revelations do not prove or disprove anything. What the emails and code show however is a deliberate attempt to manufacture a problem.
You need to apply the ‘poison fruit’ standard of the legal profession. From the point that a published article has been proved wanting forward all subsequent fruit of the poison tree is suspect. That consequence also means that ‘settled science’ is not settled and there is no consensus on the matter. The climategate issue shows that there is a hell of a lot of poisoned fruit.
Bottom line. The whole effort, from about 1985 forward needs to be thrown out. Then the research needs to be redone from scratch, in the open, for all to see.
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November 29, 2009, 3:54 pmzuch says:
Yes. But that would be false.
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 3:56 pmzuch says:
Typically, sensors are used which provide a nonlinear electrical signal as a proxy for temperature. Some sensors have reference sensors too. The measured electrical signals are massaged [i.e., “fudging” applied] to give temperatures (and are calibrated as well as needed to known temperatures). Compensation is sometimes done for device supply voltages or other such perturbing effects. Of course, mechanical [liquid] thermometers also use a proxy (volumetric changes with temperature), but these are usually relatively linear in the ranges used, and usually relatively immune to other influences (such as ambient pressure or gravity) so that a linear proxy metric is sufficient for the accuracies used, and the “processing” needed is not that much (and we even “think” of the volumetric scale being essentially the actual temperature measurement rather than the proxy metric it is).
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 4:07 pmzuch says:
Do you want to know who I think you sound like you’re related to? Thought not. Apply that knowledge.
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 4:10 pmzuch says:
Intentional self-satire? Or just blissful lack of self-awareness? Just curious.
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 4:14 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
Obviously you’re not familiar with blobthink: ‘Everything is closely related to everything else and it’s all terribly important and we have to fix it NOW!’
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November 29, 2009, 4:19 pmzuch says:
You do realise that some island countries are barely above sea level now, right? And you do realise that the Ganges delta (which constitutes a good part of Bangladesh) has hundreds of millions of people, right? And that it’s at (more) risk for severe flooding if MSL rises substantially?
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 4:21 pmzuch says:
“[O]nly”? Isn’t that a little strong? And I should point out that correlation does not prove causation.
Huh? What does the “Manns Hockey Stick” brouhaha have to do with the MWP?
As for #2, ask questions (seems it wouldn’t hurt you). But do try and keep them relevant, intelligent, and non-repetitive.
Did God strike you dead, or just visit a lesser infirmity on you? We’re curious as to how you came to this conclusion.
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 4:33 pmGregW says:
No. That would be true.
From The Sunday Times November 29, 2009
Climate change data dumped
Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
Related Links
The great climate change science scandal
EU figurehead says climate change a myth
The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.
In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.
zuch,
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November 29, 2009, 4:34 pmzuch says:
Strangely enough, before some caliber of audiences, creationists win “debates” against defenders of evolution as well. What does that tell you?
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 4:36 pmzuch says:
An honest man. Outcome-based thinking. Give the chap a hand!
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 4:39 pmDavid Schwartz says:
Zuch: The difference is that all this thermometer fudging is calculated and locked in before the unknowns are measured. The sequence has to be:
1) Take reference readings under whatever circumstances you want.
2) Calculate the calibration factors.
3) Take the readings you plan to release/publish.
4) Apply the same calibration factors you calculated only from the known reference data.
5) Release these figures.
The problem is that they did the steps in the order 1, 3, 2, 4, 2, 4, 2, 4, 5. That’s not science because you can obtain any result you want that way. Your final results are guaranteed to confirm whatever you went in thinking they would be because the fudge factors are tested by how well they do exactly that.
Note that this is a methodological flaw and requires no dishonesty on the part of the researchers. Many of the calibration factors have large reasonable ranges — any choice inside that range is scientifically justifiable. An honest attempt to pick the “right” one will be colored by producing the “right” results because there are no other rational grounds by which to choose them. (What are the error bars on this data? Does anyone know?)
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November 29, 2009, 4:40 pmern says:
As was said earlier in the discussion, I think (or maybe I read it on a related thread elsewhere), extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. AGW is an extraordinary claim. The data has never been anything other than ordinary for me. I was always inclined to believe it’s a problem, but never so inclined to sink the world economy over it (I’ve always supported more modest attempts to mitigate warming). But now the data isn’t even ordinary. It’s a complete mess. It is now impossible to replicate: or, in short, it’s no longer science. I’m pissed about it.
But let’s make another thing clear: there are dozens of reasons for giving up on oil in the short– or mid-term. Cleaner urban air. Cheaper alternative power, like nuclear. Taking money out of the hands of asshats in Venezuela and Iran. So, even from an alt-fuels perspective, AGW was always a sideshow. It’s number thirty on a list of reasons to give up on carbon at some point in the future.
AGW was never much more than a scare tactic. Climate change as a whole (whether or not man is responsible) is simply a matter of fact for life on Earth. As such, I never did (and don’t now) understand why this is central to debates over the future of mankind. It was never very likely (even if the CRU data was more-or-less right) that AGW was going to be catastrophic.
Now the science needs to be done over, and better, and with a vast deal more transparency. And we’ll all be better off for it.
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November 29, 2009, 4:42 pmCareless says:
This is a nonsensical comparison. If evolutionary biologists had the fossils but were threatening to destroy them instead of letting, say, the Discovery Institute look at them, it would make some sense.
Just admit it: they’re convinced that global warming is going to be a catastrophe, so they felt justified to subvert science to try to save the world.
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November 29, 2009, 4:49 pmSG says:
But now the data isn’t even ordinary. It’s a complete mess. It is now impossible to replicate: or, in short, it’s no longer science. I’m pissed about it.
That’s one of things that I keep coming back to. As far as I can tell, CRU was a primary climate data repository and, even giving them every possible benefit of the doubt, they have lost the raw data and manipulated what they do have in so may ad hoc, untracked ways such that what they have is not reproducible. The CRU data is meaningless.
Yet other, notionally independent, datasets have a correlation coefficient of .97 with this garbage? There’s no way that other data is truly independent, and there can be no way to trust any data in this field. I think you really need to start over — not just with this data, but the whole discipline.
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November 29, 2009, 4:52 pmwlpeak says:
So to be clear, you are asserting that the raw data still exists even though CRU itself says they have lost most of it?
Bronx Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 4:56 pmwlpeak says:
Well I’ll hazard a possibility based on nothing in particular: They fudged up some new data to match their colleagues after they amateurishly lost their meal ticket raw data.
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November 29, 2009, 5:02 pmlucklucky says:
“Northwest Passage for the first time”
Northwest Passage was opened many times before.
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November 29, 2009, 5:06 pmSG says:
Well I’ll hazard a possibility based on nothing in particular: They fudged up some new data to match their colleagues after they amateurishly lost their meal ticket raw data.
My understanding (which may be mistaken) is that causality runs the other way. CRU had the primary dataset, and other datasets were validated against the CRU data.
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November 29, 2009, 5:09 pmGregW says:
Then perhaps we should do a proper study to find out whether anthropogenic global warming exists to any significant degree, even though it is unlikely.
To use your turn of phrase, you do realize the earth has not always remained at a constant temperature in the past, right? (Glaciers once covered the earth, and vineyards were grown in England and Greenland. If you think we could have altered those situations then I suppose we can also stop future flooding in Bangladesh)
And you do realize the scientists at CRU have thrown away much of the raw temperature data they based their predictions on, right?
You haven’t admitted your error about the loss of the CRU data. Why is that?
Cheers?
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November 29, 2009, 5:10 pmDennis N says:
For a lot of the work. For the rest, it should be denounced by all scientists until it has been published and adversarially reviewed.
There is too much at stake, here for bogus science and wishful thinking to govern public policy.
There was once scientific consensus that the earth was the center of the universe.
It’s all turtles, I tell you...
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November 29, 2009, 5:10 pmLeo Marvin says:
Thank you for that. It might not ultimately make a difference, but I wish more people on both sides would examine their own biases like that. For me it’s easy. I know I don’t know enough climate science to reach reliable conclusions on the merits, but that doesn’t stop me from arguing with facially bad logic by people I tend to disagree with, while passing it by in those usually on my side. I hope we can all agree I have a lot of company in that regard on both sides. But of course our “sides” are sides of a partisan/ideological/public policy debate, not a scientific one. That so many people would apparently take sides in a scientific debate according to our political priors ought to give us all pause about how useful that debate can be.
Many of us may think the policy consequences outweigh the need for perfect confidence in the science underlying our arguments, but how can that attitude lead to anything but the tail wagging the dog? I think the questions for all but the relative tiny few of us capable of reaching intelligent, informed conclusions about the climate science ought to be those raised by Ilya in his post a few days ago. How can we reach rational conclusions about matters on which we know we lack adequate information, and what should inform our policy decisions on such matters?
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November 29, 2009, 5:19 pm