So reports the Sunday Times (London). The data apparently got “dumped to save space when the CRU [Climate Research Unit] moved to a new building,” “in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue.” Only the adjusted data, adjusted based on decisions by the CRU scientists, has been kept.
I have no knowledge about the underlying science of global warming, though scientists I know of generally seem quite convinced by the claims that human activity has caused global warming, and is likely to cause much more dangerous amounts in the future. I’m usually inclined to defer to such a consensus among serious scientists, precisely because they know vastly more about the subject than I do.
But it seems to me that the destruction of the raw data is a very serious problem, and a sign of a remarkably lackadaisical attitude — and that it doesn’t take a climate scientist to so conclude. Unless I’m mistaken, people were talking about the possibility of global warming and the need to take expensive action to combat global warming even in the 1980s; one would think that data relevant to such an important issue wouldn’t get thrown out. But even before it was obvious that calls for action with multi-trillion-dollar economic effects would be based on the data, how can a serious scientific research organization destroy the raw, unedited data on which its major research program rests?
Surely the value of the raw data should be obvious. Even if the adjustments seem sound at the time, scientists must recognize that even they themselves might later conclude that some of the adjustments are imperfect, and that better ones should be applied. And of course there’s the possibility that other scientists might challenge the adjustments as invalid, and would want to examine the raw data to see where it points using rival adjustment approaches. What’s going on in the scientific world if this sort of destruction of important raw scientific databases is happening? Plus, according to the Times, “The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation” — can it really be that only legal demands have caused this important fact to be revealed? Or is there something here that I’m missing?
I should acknowledge, by the way, that the lost data acknowledgment isn’t entirely new; I suspect that it’s the controversy about the released e-mails that is bringing it up again — and I know that I didn’t pay much attention to the lost data matter until the e-mails were released. Still, putting things together makes it look like far less care than one would expect is being taken with this obviously important subject.
Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer.
PatHMV says:
I’m afraid I’m not yet ready to accept their claim at face value. I think it is entirely possible that the raw data was destroyed, on purpose, more recently, by the researchers whose e-mail was recently disclosed.
Even if it is true that this data was destroyed back in the 90s, how is it that NO serious scientists have ever sought to review the raw data and the adjustments made in that time period? This is why I think you (and many others, of course) are wrong to accept at this point the idea that “scientists I know of generally seem quite convinced by the claims that human activity has caused global warming,” so it’s more likely to be true. How many of those scientists you know have ever actually looked very closely at all at the relevant literature? How many real scientists have ever actually sought the raw data before now? Scientists are just as at risk as the rest of us in accepting things because their peers accept them, rather than because they’ve conducted their own review.
At any rate, I think part of what you’re having trouble with is the idea that scientists could be as absolutely venal and unconcerned with real scientific methods and principles as the East Anglia crowd appears to be. I think they are that venal, and that they are so absolutely convinced about the need to ruin the economy by adopting draconian carbon restrictions that they have been able to rationalize and justify just about anything in their own minds. This could turn out to be one of the biggest examples of “groupthink” in all of human history.
I think the more direct answer to your question is that in fact a number of scientists have asked to see the raw data before now, and they’ve all been labeled as “skeptics” or “deniers,” and refused the data, whether it existed or not. My understanding (sorry, don’t have the link readily handy) is that the scientist or engineer who first made a FOI request for the information had been requesting the data for a long time, and been refused.
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November 30, 2009, 2:15 amPatHMV says:
To be a little shorter with the direct answer, I think that anybody who refused to accept the validity of the adjusted data was labeled an unserious scientist, a “skeptic” or “denier.” Thus, I suspect some people did request the data before now, but we have never heard much of them, except in the supposedly cranky circles of critics of AGW.
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November 30, 2009, 2:18 amErich Boldt says:
There is apparently some reason to doubt that the data was actually thrown away in the 1980s. This blog post explains why. The following comment on that post provides additional support:
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November 30, 2009, 2:27 amEdward A. Hoffman says:
In case it isn’t obvious, I want to point out that similar, consistent data has been collected by thousands of scientists at institutions around the world for many years. The loss of one institution’s raw data is important, but it does not undermine the scientific consensus that global warming is real and is largely being caused by human activity. Had UEA not collected this data in the first place, the consensus would almost certainly be the same. The loss of the data should not make the consensus any weaker than it would have been had the data not existed in the first place.
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November 30, 2009, 2:30 amBruce Hayden says:
Well, I guess this just means that everyone will just have to throw out any papers, conclusions, etc. even indirectly based on the missing data, including, but not limited to the IPCC report and the EPA finding that CO2 is a pollutant.
If it isn’t reproducible, it ain’t science. And right now, we know that the data was massaged quite a bit before being used in the models, and without the original data, we cannot know and verify what went into the massaging.
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November 30, 2009, 2:33 amEdward A. Hoffman says:
I guess it really wasn’t obvious, at least to some.
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November 30, 2009, 2:40 amOperationCounterstrike says:
No, Eugene, tossing the raw data is NOT a “very serious problem”, and the data have NOT been destroyed.
Do you have any idea how much raw data go into a typical figure in a science-journal? Suppose you do a LEED experiment–bouncing low-energy electrons of a regular metal surface, in a vacuum. Your raw data will include the pressure curves during the pump-down and bakeout of your vacuum chamber, the calibration curves for your detector, the tools used by the company which manufactured and polished your regular metal surface, in short, all kinds of govno you don’t need to publish. Or, suppose your figure describes the results of an experiment on a recombinantly-expressed protein. Then the raw data include the population counts of the cell cultures while you were growing up the organisms that MAKE your protein, the number of cells which successfully incorporated the gene vs the number that didn’t, the the amounts of stuff other than your protein which came out of the organism, the manufacturer of the incubators in which you grew the organism, again, all kinds of govno your readers don’t need.
And in this case, the raw data have NOT been destroyed. The weather stations from which the data were obtained haven’t gone anywhere. Those who wish to check the work can go re-gather the data their own selves. They should WANT to do that anyway–the scientists could have LIED about what the weather-stations reported to them. Gotta check that, right?
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November 30, 2009, 3:00 amPatHMV says:
Edward A. Hoffman... can you give some details about the “similar, consistent data”? In fact, I don’t entirely understand which specific raw data has been allegedly lost. Is it just weather station data from the past 40 or 50 years? Or is it weather station data going back to the pre-electronics age, but within the past 100 years or so? Or is it data from longer ago than that, but still based on regular, established weather stations? If so, then were the East Anglia only original records of weather stations in England, and the remaining data in other institutions are of non-English weather stations?
Or are we instead talking about raw data relating to tree ring measurements, ice cores, and similar records of ancient temperatures? If that’s the data that’s missing, then were there really that many entirely independent studies of such ancient trees and ice cores?
And no, it’s not at all obvious to anybody. You want to establish what you claim, then you’ve got to start from scratch, showing that all the other stuff is not actually infected by the East Anglia data. There are serious difficulties calculating things like the global mean temperature, the average surface sea temperature, etc. We’ve only had the capability of doing so in a serious way since we started launching satellites in the 1960s. Everything longer-term than that depends on either historical records taken by land stations and ships or proxy records such as ice cores and tree ring growth, which have their own issues of interpretation. Gathering thousands upon thousands of such records is no easy task, nor is adjusting them in order to be able to meaningfully relate them to the more recent satellite measurements and electronically collated data from widely dispersed weather stations. That very great task has surely NOT been done “thousands” of times, as you suggest.
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November 30, 2009, 3:03 amOperationCounterstrike says:
What we are seeing is a pattern: the problems revealed by the emails are being grossly exaggerated, and taken out of context, by energy-industry-owned gw-deniers. Maybe there IS something damaging in the emails, but if there is, we haven’t seen it yet. And, most of the exaggeration is expressed in terms which any scientifically-literate person can see are garbage.
It’s “death-panel” hysteria all over again. Eugene, you should know better than to participate.
The smart thing to do is: wait a few months, and THEN read what the scientific community says about this.
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November 30, 2009, 3:08 amBruce Hayden says:
Except that it isn’t that easy. Sure, someone could pick their own temperature sites, and go from there. But that has little to do with whether or not their results are reproducible. Do we even know which weather stations they used? And I think that we definitely do not know what they did to the raw data before it was used by their models. Are we supposed to blindly accept that they are honest, hard working, scientists who have no axe to grind, and so didn’t over-massage the raw data in order to come to the conclusions they did? I would suggest that, right now, the bulk of the evidence is to the contrary.
I will continue to suggest that absent public knowledge of which weather stations were utilized and what pre-processing and massaging of data was done, all we have here is GI-GO.
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November 30, 2009, 3:13 amJohn Skookum says:
James Hansen and some others at the leading edge of global warming alarmism have previously called for Stalinist show trials and imprisonment for people who denied the worst-case interpretation of the very data in question here. Now we’re told that the data no longer exist and we’ll have to take it on faith. This stuff becomes more like a religious cult every single day.
And how much longer can the mainstream media go on keeping the story of the greatest scientific and financial fraud in the history of the world off their front pages? Orwellian doesn’t do it justice.
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November 30, 2009, 3:16 amJohn Skookum says:
It’s not the emails, it’s the computer programs. If you can read IDL (and I can), then the facts are incontrovertible: This outfit cooked its statistics to support a political ideology.
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November 30, 2009, 3:19 amBruce Hayden says:
I guess I am one of those GW-deniers, but am waiting for my check from the energy industry.
Actually, I am an AGW agnostic. GW is really irrelevant here, since that includes naturual GW, and any GW that occurs absent man’s help, is irrelevant to the debate, since it isn’t our fault, and addressing it would be interfering with mother nature.
But note how this this poster lept from AGW to GW. Who can argue with the “facts” that up until maybe 1998 or so, the climate was warming. What he cleverly ignores is that the warming may have been primarily natural (such as being due to the end of the Little Ice Age).
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November 30, 2009, 3:20 amJohn Skookum says:
My understanding is that there are only four repositories of worldwide surface temperature archives, and the two most important and widely cited of them (HadCRU and GISS) are massaging the same underlying data set.
There are thousands of people analyzing Mann and Jones’s cooked data, and calibrating their own results to the witch-doctor tree ring findings they reported, but they are not doing any further collection of surface temperature data from primary sources.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of papers will have to be repudiated if the CRU data is falsified.
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November 30, 2009, 3:26 amPatHMV says:
Bruce... I wouldn’t waste a lot of time arguing with OC. Check his blog, and you’ll see why.
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November 30, 2009, 3:27 amOperationCounterstrike says:
John Skookum, sorry, but even though you can read IDL, your unsupported accusation of “data-cooking” is not quite enough to convince me.
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November 30, 2009, 3:31 amD.O. says:
I agree, in part, with OperationCounterstrike. There is a lot that scientists do that is not required to be published and even be kept. Think about calibration of a thermometer. Unless it is a novel and unusual instrument, nobody would ever record for posterity a basic check that it is working properly. However, a lot of data, which nobody ever expects to be published and even looked at twice, is being routinly recorded and saved exactly in case later analysis will show that something is fishy or unreproducible. The experimentalists are taught to save all that and much more. It is not very clear what counts for “raw data” in these discussions. It is highly unlikely that CRU at UEA was a monopolist on temperature data collection around the world.
On another note, reading threads on several climate change posts on VC, i got the impression that some commenters think that reproducibility is obtaining the same result by starting with the same data. Not at all! Reproducibility means that new experiments by independent groups of researches are done and give the same result. For the most part, you do not need to go to the original data, just compare published results. Only in the case that there is a substantial discrepancy somebody wants to look at the initial data. Moreover, the more nitty-gritty details of experiments (like different manufacturers of the thermometers or, more seriously, different protocols for data collection) are different, the more we can be sure that the scientific result is not an artifact of the method of measurement.
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November 30, 2009, 3:31 amBruce Hayden says:
I don’t think that you can ignore the emails. My contention is that both are relevant. For example, the gaming of the peer review process is evident from from the emails.
BTW, I don’t know IDL, but it looks interesting. Single name space looks problematic, but I have programmed in languages far worse in that regard. I am glad though that I looked it up, so that the next time I look at relevant code, I will have a better idea of its idiosyncrasies.
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November 30, 2009, 3:31 amEdward A. Hoffman says:
So, if you are diagnosed with a fatal but treatable disease that you contracted naturally, will you let it run its course in order to avoid interfering with mother nature?
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November 30, 2009, 3:33 amBruce Hayden says:
Actually, I suspect that nothing would convince you, as it appears that your goal here from your pseudonym is to try to rehabilitate the perps here.
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November 30, 2009, 3:34 amDavid Schwartz says:
A much better argument is that if human CO2 emissions are not significantly contributing to global warming, then reducing those emissions won’t do very much to slow it.
But, absolutely, if the climate is changing in ways that are unfavorable to human survival, we should most definitely do whatever we can to control it.
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November 30, 2009, 4:07 amOperationCounterstrike says:
Bruce, my screen name has nothing to do with global warming (anthropogenic or otherwise), nor with science, nor with Volokh.
Check out my blog and you will rapidly learn why I include the word “operation” in my screen name, and, against WHOM I propose to counterstrike.
(Hint: I wanna wage a war on terror my own self–a war on a CERTAIN KIND of terror.)
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November 30, 2009, 4:08 amPatHMV says:
D.O.... climate science is not an experimental science, generally. One cannot generally conduct a test of how the global climate will respond to, say, an increase or decrease in CO2 by X amount, and see if the outcome matches the hypothesis, other than by simply observing how it responds in real life, in real time. Most of the claims of catastrophic global damage from AGW is based on how computer models respond in various experiments. And the validity of those models, the validity of any computer model, is limited by the accuracy of the data which was used to create it and evaluate its predictive success.
Remember, we’re talking here about measurements as broad as global mean temperature. That itself necessarily depends on thousands upon thousand temperature readings from points scattered about the globe. You can’t, for example, conclude that global warming has occurred just by looking at historical temperature records in England; there may be conditions unique to England and its island nature which would cause that area to warm. There just aren’t that many historical datasets for that breadth.
And, as I’ve noted elsewhere upthread, when you’re talking about data going back more than a hundred years or so, you’re forced to look at proxy measurements, calculated through analyzing ice cores and tree growth rings. I’m not aware that there have been many independent experiments to verify the claimed correlation between growth rings, say, and temperature. There may be (and I don’t know if there are or not) lots of studies where folks have looked at ancient tree rings to determine whether they show the indications which Mann says are indicative of a particular temperature, but that does nothing to verify the validity of the original conclusion.
I’m curious how many people defending the AGW crowd have actually looked in detail to verify for themselves that the things they are claiming are true.
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November 30, 2009, 4:23 amdearieme says:
“though scientists I know of generally seem quite convinced by the claims that human activity has caused global warming”: I have asked a few scientist friends about Global Warming, and then followed up by trying to find out how much they knew about the evidence. Largely, it turns out, they have just assumed that it must be true. Their arguments have rarely gone much beyond “everybody knows it’s true”, plus a reference to the fact that it’s a long time since we’ve had a really harsh winter in Britain. In fact, it’s hard to see that they were speaking as scientists — they might just as well have been blokes in the pub.
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November 30, 2009, 4:25 amD.O. says:
I do not defend AGW or anti-AGW or agnostic-AGW crowd and did not look into the details. There is no way i could understand them on a level to formulate personal facts-based opinion without a prohibitively large effort. However, it should not work like this. There are lots of independent scientists working in the field. They are familiar with the situation and would not cover up for CRU and what not. Personally, they strive on the controversy. The more controversy there is the more attension, funding, positions etc. etc. they would have. In addition, those people just love to see others to be proved fools. When the dust a little bit settles, we might expect to see reports, seminars and publications in Nature explaining how GW and AGW knowledge is based on what facts. As for the scarcity of original data (tree rings, antarctic ice and so force) it is only the reason to look for more.
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November 30, 2009, 4:59 amOperationCounterstrike says:
Dearieme, what the scientists know is not so much the particular science involved, which may not be their field, but rather, how to recognise legitimate consensus within the scientific community. Anyone can allege rottenness and cover-up, but scientists know the earmarks of a real coverup because they have seen real coverups unfold, and fake cover-up scandals fizzle out. Sure, you can keep saying “we never really know about anything, we can still turn out to be wrong,” but scientific professionals know how to watch an idea be confirmed bit by bit, as new data measured by different techniques fall into line. How to watch the LIKELIHOOD of being wrong get lower and lower. HIV-AIDS-denialism was a reasonable minority position, at one time.
When skeptics say “There isn’t a consensus, see scientists A, B, and C disagree with the hypothesis!”, Eugene’s scientist friends know how to find out whether A, B, and C are real scientists or cranks. Whether or not they have reputations for honest neutrality. Whether they have significant achievements OTHER than being prominent skeptics of the hypothesis. You learn to recognise when the scientific community is really divided. When a scientist says “everybody knows [whatever]” it means something different from when a non-scientist says it. It means that deniers of whatever are few, and disproportunately disreputable in other ways.
There is one other thing scientifically literate people know: the fundamental idea behind agw is technically intuitive. Heat can only escape from the Earth in the form of infra-red light, radiated upwards from the earth’s surface. Anything which absorbs that light will trap heat. CO2 does. So if yer gonna say CO2 is NOT a problem, YOU have to explain why not.
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November 30, 2009, 5:14 amOperationCounterstrike says:
Two blokes in a bar isn’t necessarily so bad. If the blokes are REGULARS in the bar where everyone who knows anything about the subject goes for lunch, it’s ok!
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November 30, 2009, 5:53 amdearieme says:
“So if yer gonna say CO2 is NOT a problem, YOU have to explain why not.” But your points are entirely unquantitative. Of course, other things being equal, extra CO2 means extra heat retention. But how much: trivial or huge? And are other things equal anyway? And do human activities have much to do with the increase in CO2? And is a warmer world, if that is what we are to get, necessarily a bad thing? And if it is a bad thing, is it a more or a less bad thing than the cost of avoiding it? Most scientists have no useful intuition on most of these points. They end up, whether they know it or not, relying on the say-so of a core of about 50 people, who strike me as neither being of particularly high calibre, nor even middling honest. Hell, they won’t even let other people scrutinise their data or programs. This is a quite ludicrously unsound basis on which to spend trillions of dollars. Heavens, you wouldn’t jail a petty criminal on such shoddy evidence.
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November 30, 2009, 6:21 amwb says:
Non one doubts that statement, not even AGW skeptics. The fact that one has ten years of cooling in the global mean temperature is at least embarrassing. Of course, in models with several tens of free parameters, every year the parameters are adjusted to make recent data fit. Some respected modelers claim that 15 years of cooler temperatures won’t be accommodated very easily. We’ll soon see.
What troubles many scientists is not the hypothesis that CO2 traps solar energy as heat, but the predictions of the quantitative consequences. The selective handling of data in models is likewise troubling.
In claims of serious consequences, the burden of proof is on those making the claims, not the skeptics. Given that the AGW claims are asking for trillions of euro of governmental action, the standards of proof should be high.
Let me give an example of academic misconduct that is unfortunately becoming more coming. The selective adjustment of photographic data. Major bioscience journals have become very strict as to what is permitted: 1) no selective adjustment, 2) no photographic interpolation, 3) only uniform, overall adjustment of contrast, white balance, and luminosity. If the data is questioned, the authors must submit unprocessed raw images.
Could the modeling efforts meet such a test. I do not know, but my confidence is not raised by Climategate nor by chest-beating from AGW defenders.
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November 30, 2009, 6:53 amOperationCounterstrike says:
Dearieme, Yes yes yes I didn’t say agw was PROVEN, I just said it was intuitively plausible, and therefore the onus is on you to show why it’s wrong. The reasons you suggest are all good starting points.
Re: “the say-so core of 50 people or so”. The scientists know what it takes to become a member of the say-so core. You don’t get listened to for nothing. And contrary to popular belief, you can’t get recognised JUST by taking the right opinions. You have to slay a few dragons and bag a few snarks.
I mean, what do you do for a living? Don’t you have a list of people in your field whom you regard as reliable? Isn’t there a relatively small “say-so” core in whatever you do? Doesn’t your experience in whatever you do make you better qualified than others to spot a fake or low-quality example?
You write of the “say-so core”: “...who strike me as neither being of particularly high calibre, nor even middling honest.”
How would you know?
“Hell, they won’t even let other people scrutinise their data or programs.”
Anyone in science knows, which data and which programs and which intellectual property and so forth you share with whom, is a subject for lawyers. See that’s is the sort of thing Eugene’s scientist friends would know but which you don’t know. A fine example of why scientists’ opinions are more likely to be right, even if not their field. You read something about someone in a partisan-owned scandal-sheet, and you take it seriously.
I think I have already pointed out that there is an industry of abusers of Access Requirements, who are attempting to overwhelm scientific instutitions by the sheer volume of their requests. It’s already in progress against Lenski, the guy with the lab-evolved citrate-eating bacteria.
Can you understand that a busy person might resent being asked to send data to a clown like you?
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November 30, 2009, 7:00 amOperationCounterstrike says:
Wb, I’m SURE it’s just a mistype, a little brain-glitch, but you wrote: “What troubles many scientists is not the hypothesis that CO2 traps solar energy as heat, but the predictions of the quantitative consequences. ”
Ummmmm the hypothesis is that CO2 traps INFRA-RED ENERGY RADIATED FROM THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, not, as you say, “solar” energy. Terrestrial energy.
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November 30, 2009, 7:04 amOperationCounterstrike says:
Wb, I’m not sure what your point is about selective adjustment. It sounds like a possible problem is getting corrected by the journals restricting which adjustments are allowed! That’s good. What’s the problem? This is the kind of self-correction through competetion which makes science more likely to be right about things than more rigid institutions.
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November 30, 2009, 7:25 amArkady says:
CRU may have “tossed” the data, but the data are still around:
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November 30, 2009, 7:30 amShelbyC says:
Oh come on.
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November 30, 2009, 7:40 am» “ClimateGate fallout continues: CRU admits original data deleted” and related posts - 1007th Edition Www.composition4u.info says:
[...] “Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) Have Admitted Throwing Away Much of the Raw Tem... - The Volokh Conspiracy [...]
Soronel Haetir says:
There is plenty of evidence that trees make lousy thermometers. Craig Lowell even used that phrase as the title for one of his papers. There are simply a huge number of confounding variables, rain, soil nutrition, sunlight and on and on. Even the stationarity principal (that some trees respond the same now as they did in the past is in doubt).
That said, AFAIK the CRU product uses no proxies. That is why their anomaly series begins in the late 1800s, that is when they claim there were enough stations to get reasonable global coverage.
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November 30, 2009, 8:08 amRichard Aubrey says:
All energy eventually degrades to heat, as long as it impacts matter.
Supposedly, CO2 traps infra-red radiation.
So far, so good.
Problem is...we need to show warming. If we can’t show warming, all we have is...CO2 traps infra-red radiation. To what end, nobody knows.
The multitude of other factors involved may be positive feedback, negative feedbacak, both, both in equally opposing effects, both in unequally opposing effects.
So, however intuitively attractive CO2 forced global warming is, and no matter how it warms the cockles of the statist’s heart to think of it as being anthropogenic, we still need to show warming.
Against which we have the suddenly popular MWP, for what reason? The fun and games when the MWP was overcome by something (Black death reduced humanity’s CO2 production?) and we got a Little Ice Age is supposed to be the ideal to which we should return?
That CO2 lags temperature must mean something, but it’s counterintuitive, so it should go away, just...go away, dammit.
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November 30, 2009, 8:17 amcirby says:
Edward A. Hoffman:
No, but the first thing I’d do would be to get a second opinion. Except there aren’t second opinions, the laboratory lost the blood sample they ran the test on, and they won’t tell me what tests they ran...
Arkady:
Note, first, that the “dataset” from CRU is the MODIFIED dataset. If you want raw data to check their work, you have to go out and find it on your own.
The problem here is that we don’t know what subset of that was used by the CRU to get their results. We’re also not sure what they did with that data to get their outputs, and what metadata they used to coordinate their studies. What the CRU press release says is, basically, “go out and get the raw data from all around the world yourselves, and good luck trying to figure out what we did in our original studies. And, oh, by the way — when you do attempt to replicate or repudiate our work, we’ll sit back and complain that you’re using a different dataset.”
It doesn’t matter if the data is out there, sorta, theoretically. What DOES matter is that the largest known dataset of raw global temperature measurements — the one that ~95% of all global warming theory is based on — is gone, and the original experiment/simulation is now scientifically invalid...
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November 30, 2009, 8:25 amBill Dalasio says:
Let’s review the given knowns:
1. The e-mails have revealed a significant absence of intellectual goodwill on the part of climate researchers.
2. The programs have revealed significant shortcomings in the aggregation of source data into major climate metrics — in a manner suggesting a systematic bias in favor of the warming hypothesis.
3. The e-mails and programs have revealed suspicious practices in the statistical methods used to build the the data set for these metrics — again in a manner suggesting a systematic bias in favor of the warming hypothesis.
4. The underlying data used in this aggregation have been discarded, a fact suspiciously consistent with the expressed intent of the researchers to render the data unavailable.
Given these knowns, the logical assumption is that the CRU dataset, and any research based on this dataset, cannot be assumed to be legitimate. At this point a new, much more widely vetted, dataset needs to be developed to retest all of the subsequent research. Given the extent that much of this research has been publicly funded, claims for proprietary interest on the part of researchers ring hollow. It isn’t their research, it’s ours. The researchers in question are simply the hired help.
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November 30, 2009, 8:41 amwb says:
Counterstrike....
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All that energy radiated from the surface of the earth comes from the sun... it is solar energy. This used to be called the greenhouse effect. Without it the earth would be uninhabitable. The only terrestial energy is that generated in the earth’s core. If that is the problem, there is no AGW
Try to learn a little science before engaging in science politics or science ethics.
My point about selective adjustment of data is that it IS viewed as serious misconduct. It is grounds for firing tenured faculty. Whether journals catch it or not is besides the point. It is not a game of gotcha. Either one makes full disclosure of all data processing and especially selective processing. Either one shows all the data or explains exactly what is omitted and why it is unreliable OR one is not being scientifically honest. You ought to try to understand that not just blow it off.
It is precisely the seriousness of this issue that has the East Anglia folks upset. They have recognized publicly that they are being accused of a sackable offense.
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November 30, 2009, 8:54 amdearieme says:
@OperationCounterstrike
“I mean, what do you do for a living?” ...
“See that’s is the sort of thing Eugene’s scientist friends would know but which you don’t know.”
I’m baffled — if you don’t know what I do for a living, how do you know that I don’t know what Eugene’s chums know?
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November 30, 2009, 8:55 amFub says:
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to you that defendant looks like every criminal looks, nervous in the courtroom. You know what criminals look like. We all know intuitively what they look like.
We had evidence that defendant robbed this bank, or at least robbed some bank somewhere. Unfortunately we lost that evidence because our storage resources were limited. But our witnesses have assured you that they thought the evidence was definitive and unassailable. Besides, there is plenty of other evidence that he robbed a bank somewhere. But others have that evidence, not us.
Defense counsel has not brought any evidence that defendant did not rob this bank, or that he didn’t at least didn’t rob some bank somewhere.
Besides, if he didn’t rob that bank, or some bank somewhere, why would he be on trial in this courtroom? That should tell you everything you need to know, even if he didn’t look nervous.
All you have to do is trust us. Then follow your intuition and bring a conviction.
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November 30, 2009, 9:06 amPersonFromPorlock says:
But suppose the “fatal but treatable disease” is just a bad cold that an unscrupulous doctor’s misdiagnosed in order to get you to spend money on expensive treatments? And that, being a cold, there aren’t any primary treatments and it’ll go away anyway, given time? What we’re looking at here is evidence of just such a deliberate misdiagnosis.
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November 30, 2009, 9:15 amflyeyes says:
Actually, that’s wrong. I’m a physician involved in some basic research, and also have some involvement with industry. Every place I work or consult, The thermometers, refrigerators, autoclaves, and other instruments are regularly calibrated and the results logged and kept “for posterity.” These are basic requirements for the medical industry (by the FDA and to maintain ISO certification or a CE mark) for tissue banking, for certification of operating rooms and other facilities.
Science is, to a degree most lay people don’t appreciate, very insular and political. There are myriad examples of people, with real data, who are vilified and excluded by the establishment. Google Ignaz Semmelweiss or Harold Ridley for a couple of examples in medicine.
If they won’t produce their raw data, their results shouldn’t be used to make any important decisions.
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November 30, 2009, 9:17 amGov98 says:
Argh...
Imagine we’re in a court of law, and there is a defendant we’ll call him Hu Man Activity, and he’s on trial for a burglary of Ms. Hearth Planit’s home. The evidence is intially presented that Hu’s fingerprints are all over the house and a whole bunch of property is missing. Of course, the jury is all but ready to convict.
Then...some last minute e-mails are discovered between the Investigating Officer and the Fingerprint examiner, where the examiner details problems with the supposed “perfect match” fingerprints such as the fact that the fingerprints actually do not match Hu’s fingerprints. Come to find out as well, that after the “analysis” the fingerprints were destroyed in some supposedly bureaucratic move.
Would anyone in their right mind grant to the cop and examiner the same kind of goodwill as so many here have been? Let me run by you an argument that a defense attorney would give to observed past success.
“Here the global warming scientists had the data, they had the information, they had the ability to sort through the information. BUT they chose to destroy it before it could be subjected to cross-examination. The cost to keep that information available for cross-examination was but minimal to the government in this case. BUT the government chose to destroy it before you could examine it...Why? There is only one reasonable explanataion. That is, that the government knew, that it could not withstand scrutiny and so to forestall that opportunity they destroyed it, and denied Mr. Activity his 6th amendment right to confrontation and cross-examination. There is now no legitimate way to convict my client on the basis of this manufactured evidence. It is now your opportunity to do the right thing and acquit. Thank you.
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November 30, 2009, 9:18 amwb says:
To amplify what flyeyes has said...
When a group makes novel or crucial or controversial claims, it is expected that the routine calibration activities are also reported in the peer reviewed literature and kept. Instrumentation, calibration and data-processing methods are essential parts of scientific research requiring the same rigor are the measurements themselves.
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November 30, 2009, 9:26 amfsfsfsfsfsfsfsfs says:
Volokh writes:
Well, that depends on what the meaning of the word “science” is.
Perhaps it is true that you lack knowledge about the physics, chemistry, meteorology, paleontology, dendrology, dendroclimatology, climatology and biology underlying the claims of global warming. Frankly, I lack that knowledge as well.
But you do have knowledge of software engineering. From your experience in software engineering, you understand that complex software (or software generally) is complex. It’s brittle. It’s full of counterintuitive behavior. People who spend their lives developing software still make mistakes, and a lot of them, routinely.
And you understand that software practitioners have developed through decades of extremely painful and expensive experience numerous techniques to try to decrease the chance of errors. Detailed documentation. Assertions. Unit tests. Robustness testing. Sometimes, where appropriate, object or functional orientation. Appropriate programming languages. Change management systems. Version control. Source control. Backups. Skilled programmers. Source code review.
These techniques together give a person confidence in the results output by the software. Without these techniques, when software is written in a seat-of-the-pants, aleatory manner by untrained and unskilled people without proper techniques, bugs in the software are certain.
And you know that none of these techniques were used in the CRU software. You know that the CRU software was simply, well words fail me.
But wait! The software works, doesn’t it? Sure, maybe it’s not as clean or modern as one likes, but it works! It gives the right answer, doesn’t it?
There’s the nub of the problem. There’s no actual way to test that the software is doing what it is supposed to be doing. The software code generally lacks any kind of clear statement of what it’s supposed to be doing, it integrates huge numbers of data sets from many different sources, and there’s no way to test it.
Some say, you can test it against the results of other simulations. But this only works if the other simulations were developed independently, and they were not. They each seem to test against each other — rather, they each are situated in an environment in which agreement is rewarded with funding.
So, perhaps Mann and Jones know more about climatology than you do. But I guarantee you know a lot more about software than they. And you should be able to infer from about 10 minutes with the software that it just cannot be trusted. It cannot be trusted to balance a checkbook much less restructure the world.
(Personally, as I said, I am not an expert in the physical sciences involved. But I do have considerable research and commercial experience in (1) software; (2) modeling software; (3) statistical analysis. And just limited to those three areas, I am absolutely confident none of the work coming out of CRU, regardless of the merits of the physical science, is trustworthy.)
Another tack defenders of global warming will tak to defend their conclusions is that the CRU data and claims are separable: even if all their claims are excised from the debate, what’s remaining is trustworthy.
But this utterly misses the point about CRU. The point about the CRU case is not that various data points are missing or that the code is iffy or that CRU destroyed some emails.
The point is that the peer review or IPCC system did not catch any of this over a period of decades and hundreds of papers. That all these papers passed peer review show does not show us primarily the problem with CRU, it shows us that peer review is not a creditable marker of underlying scientific correctness for the data shown in this domain. It shows us more specifically that the IPCC “science by committee” approach failed in this domain and must be reevaluated.
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November 30, 2009, 9:32 amWayneJarvis says:
In any field of study, the alarmists will get a headstart. You do not get research grants to prove that “everything is okay.” (By the way, I’m *still* looking for funding for my study that there is no threat of a zombie attack occurring in the next 50 years.)
After the alarmists’ theories take root, *then* it becomes research worthy to disprove them. That is the way it is supposed to work.
But what we are now finding out is that the alarmists got their headstart then squeezed out all dissenting voices to create the false impression of a “consensus” by rigging the peer review process. By the way, did they do the same thing to grant review process? That will be interesting to find out.
At the end of the day, maybe the alarmists are right all along. Maybe they suffer from the Bill Belichick disease that causes them to cheat even if they don’t need to cheat.
But the new revelations cast a lot of doubt on the supposed consensus. I think everyone should just “cool off” and lets see if the conclusions can withstand legitimate scrutiny.
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November 30, 2009, 9:44 amPJens says:
If a criminal prosecutor destroys evidence and only presents the conclusions from said evidence, are they likely to win the argument?
This “lost” data is a very serious blow to the credibility of the statements based upon it.
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November 30, 2009, 9:54 amTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » “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” -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Maximus Rogue and bmqmen, Eugene Volokh. Eugene Volokh said: “Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) Have Admitted Throwing Away Much of the Raw Temperature Data.. http://bit.ly/4LWOAA [...]
geokstr says:
And the real killer here is — you’ll have to go to all those thousands of weather stations without one dime of assistance from any government, either directly or indirectly, or from any liberal think tank, or any of the many associations “representing” the various sciences or other professions, because they are all AGW true believers.
Moreover, if you accept one dime that we can trace back to any corporation, to any rightwing think tank, or to any wealthy individual who ever voted Republican, then we will denounce and refuse to accept your work, because we and our pet media will be smearing you for being in the pocket of the capitalist roaders, i.e., business as usual.
Therefore, good luck, Steve McIntyre and a few other intrepid souls, it should only take you a couple decades to visit all those weather stations, and accumulate the data that we have but won’t give you. It is too bad you will run out of your own personal funds in six months, while we’ve had unlimited funding from our believers, but, hey, c’est la vie.
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November 30, 2009, 10:07 amTamerlane says:
CounterStrike and other defenders of the AGW thugs claim that the raw data are out there and anyone who wants can collect and re-analyze them. This ignores the fact that the CRU and GISS and their unaffiliated buddies have worked assiduously to obtain tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding (your tax dollars) to do their data manipulations and have worked even more assiduously to deny similar funding to reputable (now more reputable) scientists outside their magic circle. The emails and other timelines suggest that the CRU thuigs destroyed data to keep other scientists from examining and either confirming or refuting their results.
At this point, the only way to return integrity to the process and to scientifically determine the truth is to fund an irreproachably unbiased group of researchers to reconstruct the data bases. This will probably mean diverting funding from the current IPCC cult but in my opinion scientific integrity, equity, and justice suggest that this is an appropriate solution.
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November 30, 2009, 10:22 amsitzpinkler says:
I love how the “taken out of context” response is widely used as though it requires no further support. They’re magical words. You utter them, and the dissent is supposed to dissolve.
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November 30, 2009, 10:30 amSoronel Haetir says:
What also bothers me about the refusals is how badly the grant agencies have failed. I’ve seen a couple of the grant documents, they specify that the work belongs to the public, not the researcher.
There is a grace period of a couple years for the researcher to do all they can with gathered data but after that it is supposed to be available to everyone, not even limited to other scientists, regardless of their field. Decades long delays are a complete failure of this model.
To me this is a more fundamental failure than even the journals failing to enforce their archiving requirements because the grants are using public money.
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November 30, 2009, 10:31 amgeokstr says:
Not only that, but the only time “context” means a rip to a leftwinger is when one of their guys is quoted.
I seem to recall just a couple weeks ago that context was totally unimportant when discussing what a prominent radio talk show host said. Hell, to some, it didn’t even make a difference that the “quotes” were totally fakes, because we all knew what a racist said host was, context be damned.
Now the shoe is on the other foot...
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November 30, 2009, 10:35 amsitzpinkler says:
Why? Why not adapt in other ways? I’m not convinced that “whatever” is justified.
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November 30, 2009, 10:35 amfsfsfsfsfsfsfsfs says:
Jones got $20 million according to the documents in the leak. Total funding for climate change research is in the billions.
It would be rather interesting to get a look at the emails and rejected grant proposals surrounding the agency funding. I don’t think FOI will help much here, as I believe proposals are generally submitted confidentially.
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November 30, 2009, 10:39 amLucid Fur says:
You can consider plausible whatever you like, in a free country, but AGW is not plausible in my mind. It has always seemed to me to be a extension of environmental / luddite beliefs, given the actions and shrillness from the proponents of AGW. The leaked documentation just confirms this.
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November 30, 2009, 10:39 amuh_clem says:
James Hansen and some others at the leading edge of global warming alarmism have previously called for Stalinist show trials and imprisonment for people who denied the worst-case interpretation of the very data in question here.(emphasis mine)
...rolls eyes...
This is why I don’t take you guys seriously. Neither should anybody else.
BTW, I did some physics research back in the early 80s that resulted in a published paper or two. I would seriously doubt that any of the raw data still exists. Or the Fortran code I wrote to crunch the numbers for that matter. This is not unusual.
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November 30, 2009, 10:40 amBlue says:
And you haven’t been updating that data set continuously as the basis for your research agenda, either clem.
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November 30, 2009, 11:02 amSG says:
BTW, I did some physics research back in the early 80s that resulted in a published paper or two. I would seriously doubt that any of the raw data still exists. Or the Fortran code I wrote to crunch the numbers for that matter. This is not unusual.
No, but we’re not proposing to reshape modern economies based on the outcome of that research either. If we were, I would either want to have your data and independently verify it, or independently duplicate your work. Actually, I’d want both.
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November 30, 2009, 11:07 amgeokstr says:
...rolls eyes...
That is why I don’t take (to be charitable) disingenuous leftists seriously.
If you’re going to spread outright falsehoods, at least be somewhat creative and make up stuff that can’t be disproved by a 2-second google search that leads to a site that is pro-AGW in the extreme, gate-guarded on all issues AGW by someone associated with the CRU, of all things.
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November 30, 2009, 11:11 amFub says:
I’d add a small nit here, based upon my slowly developing perception of the size of the data sets involved.
Affirmative programming errors are not the only sources of “bugs” in statistical analysis of large data sets. Some sources of error are more arcane, but potentially disastrous. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I made a minor algorithmic contribution that alleviated one such arcane error in the analysis of a huge data set. That method made the projects’ analysis not just “more accurate”, but possible at all.
Floating point roundoff and truncation error is a largely under-recognized issue in most analysis. This is in part because the data sets involved are not sufficiently large, and the magnitudes of the data values are not sufficiently disparate, to cause errors in the more significant digits of most results. The use of larger numeric representation formats such as double precision representation, at least for most typical and non-gargantuan data sets, tends to make computed results accurate to at least a few significant digits.
But, if you are making global floating point calculations, such as means and moments, over a sufficiently large set of data with sufficiently disparate magnitudes, the cumulative results of these inherent floating point errors can become monumental, to the point of rendering results meaningless and risible.
This effect is aggravated if your analysis of large data sets is seeking to find a small magnitude “signal” buried in high magnitude “noise”. It is aggravated by every sum or difference computed from global means or moments already affected by the errors.
There are many ways to reduce or alleviate such inherent arithmetical errors, including the most obvious: fixed point semi-infinite precision arithmetic. But from what little I read of the revealed code, this did not appear to be the case in these computations, nor did any of the purely floating point methods for reducing arithmetic error seem to be used.
I have only looked at snippets of code, and some relatively vague comments on the size of the data sets and the magnitudes of the data values involved. So, I have no basis to say that cumulative floating point arithmetic error would necessarily be a major issue. But the descriptions I continue to read of the data and the analysis methods and codes suggest to me that it is at least possible.
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November 30, 2009, 11:12 amDotar Sojat says:
If global AGW does not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.
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November 30, 2009, 11:13 amTamerlane says:
uh_clem:
Does this mean you don’t take Hanson and his fellow hysterics seriously because they actually have suggested such trials (Hanson Calls for Show Trials)or just that you don’t want to deal with people who accurately point out the hysteria?
And I have worked as a programmer on projects to recover fifty-year-old scientific data from obsolete card, tape, and disk formats, so my experience suggests it is common for scientists to store even apparently unrecoverable data. Which leads me to question who are the better scientists, people like you and the CRU folks who junk their data for possibly nefarious reasons or researchers who choose to preserve their data.
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November 30, 2009, 11:17 amwfjag says:
I believe, that as fsfsfsfsfsfsfsfs implies, a number of defense strategies commonly used by attorneys are represented within the CRU’s pronouncements. Looking at them gives some clue as to why such defenses are skeptically received by the public or a jury — somthing to keep in mind when teaching Trial Practice:
– aka the “William Jefferson ‘I never had sex with that woman’ Clinton Defense” (which is sometimes called “The Devil in the Blue Dress” defense).
– aka “The Devil Made Me Do It Defense” — sometimes used as part of an insanity defense (the substantial inability to appreciate the difference between right and wrong, and conform one’s conduct to social norms).
– aka “The Dan Rather Defense” or “the evidence is bogus but the story is true.”
– aka the “’Every thing you know is wrong’ Defense – named after the Fire Sign Theatre routine of the same name.
– aka the “’Your Tax Dollars At Work’ Defense (which is one of my personal favorites). It is closely related to the “Saved or Created Defense”.
Personally, I’m most impressed with the CRU’s ever changing positions, which are classic pleading in the alternative. First it was that there was no need to release the raw data since it was readily available publicly. Then, after FOI requests were received, it was that we can’t release the data because it is the proprietary property of others. Then, after the email and code release (or hacking/posting), it was that everything, including posting the emails in full text and the code in full, it was our detractors are taking things out of context. When that failed to silence the critics (aka “deniers”), CRU announced a few days ago that we’ll release the raw data shortly. And, now, CRU has said that it threw out the raw data with the broken mops and other trash when it moved to new digs a couple of decades ago and didn’t note that the raw data on which all our claims have been based and to which such data was repeatedly referred, wasn’t really there (and no one had seen it around for quite a while). This brings to mind Racehorse Haynes’ explanation of pleading in the alternative:
CRU has gotten to the fourth alternative defense.
WayneJarvis says:
Actually, this is a “hot topic” (groan at pun) for those of us interested in ZGW (Zombopogenic Global Warming – which is the opposite of AGW or Anthropogenic Global Warming).
There is increasing evidence of large scale ZGW effects. See, for example, “Dead people sent 60 million items of junk mail” (23 Oct 2008), reported in http://www.telegraph.co.uk (“Almost 60 million items of junk mail a year are being sent to dead people, with Hull the worst affected city, new research claims. “).
A further explanation, using movie Fx in the manner which Mr. Gore did in his film, is found in documentary “Død snø”, a full discussion of which can be found on http://thevaultofhorror.blogspot.com (which is the Ms. Horror Blogosphere – the one-stop-shop for all things horror and cheesy horror flix pix). As explained in the documentary, as the effects of global warming (er, “climate change,” since as CRU and other AGW scientists have repeatedly proven, the climate can only change for the warmer), as the average temperature rises in the arctic, the Zombies left by the Nazis will thaw and attack, and establish the dominance of a clinically dead Master Race. OK, I’ll admit that ZGW doesn’t satisfactorily explain how a Master Race can be clinically dead. But, it’s still a “new science,” so do not be deceived by “ZGW deniers.”
So, Wayne, maybe if you post extracts from your study on the threat of zombie attack on The Vault of Horror website, may haps someone interested in funding your study, or producing it as a documentary, will contact you. If you can work in Vampires into the study, you’ll have the trifecta for ZGW research funding – Global Warming, Zombies and Vampires.
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November 30, 2009, 11:21 amDonald Kilmer says:
Too bad there is no analog to the Bancroft Award to revoke.
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November 30, 2009, 11:21 amzuch says:
Where do the purloined e-mails indicate “Harry“‘s difficulties were in reading in the raw data records at issue here (which were magtapes and paper)?
The Jones comment (“delete”) would seem to indicate electronic files.
You (or at the very least Strata-Sphere) use a loose definition of prove. Why don’t you accept the AGW papers then? Or is this definition of “prove” situational?
Cheers,
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November 30, 2009, 11:32 amzuch says:
Cite for this? Or are we to simply take your word for it without any raw data?
Cheers,
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November 30, 2009, 11:41 amzuch says:
I’d say that this summation is far more apropos of the “argumentation” in the blogosphere, rather than the published papers.
Reminds me of how Philip Johnson sought to use legal forensic methods and standards to criticise evolution. It might have even convinced a few lawyers, but then again, they tend to be more ... ummm, “outcome oriented”.
Cheers,
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November 30, 2009, 11:56 amduckhawk says:
Apparently all — 100% — of the raw data is still available, and it’s the redundant copies and enhanced database that was modified:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35233_Did_Climate_Scientists_Destroy_Data_A-_No
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November 30, 2009, 11:59 amzuch says:
Academic coding (for various reasons) usually falls far short of what’s considered GMP by industry and the gummmint (as does a fair percentage of industrial and gummint coding as well, FWIW).
Back-door attacks on the science by attacking the coding (or even worse, comments in coding) is reminiscent of:
Cheers,
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November 30, 2009, 12:04 pmBrett says:
I’d be wary of extending this to climate research in general beyond the CRU. Realclimate, for example, has a list of links to data sources, including raw data if you want to look at it.
Was the CRU’s storage the only known record of this raw data? It’s possible that they destroyed the raw data because they simply believed they could get it again from the various constituent sources of it later on if they had to, so there was no point to keeping a vast amount of raw data taking up storage space (particularly since they didn’t think it would be that important later on).
He’s referring to comments James Hansen made, calling for oil company executives to be put on trial for crimes against humanity for their role in fomenting global warming dissent. Which is more a problem with Hansen than climate change — Hansen can’t open his mouth without saying something inflammatory these days.
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November 30, 2009, 12:08 pmfsfsfsfsfsfsfsfs says:
Small addendum to my earlier comment about the software code: there’s a long thread about the code on Eric Raymond’s blog. And I had elsewhere pointed out this thread on Dave Freer’s blog.
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November 30, 2009, 12:09 pmgeokstr says:
On the previous thread on this subject, you said the only reason that you had to be posting so many comments and dominating the conversation is that people weren’t reading all the comments so you had to repeat yourself over and over and over and over ad nauseum.
I already addressed this issue above. The quote is from wikipedia, a site with a known pro-alarmist gatekeeper, and it states that Hansen made this demand in high-profile interviews.
Maybe if you read the whole thread, then I wouldn’t have to repeat myself either. And now you can get off your high horse when we ask for cites for your unsupported claims.
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November 30, 2009, 12:12 pmReal American says:
science isn’t up to a vote. as the e-mails indicate, and as has been obvious to even casual observers of the political debates surrounding global warming alarmism, dissenters from the rigged consensus have been targeted for expulsion from the mainstream scientific community. That makes whatever consensus is proclaimed complete and utter garbage. There isn’t a consensus based on the science, but only one based on intimidation and politics.
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November 30, 2009, 12:14 pmzuch says:
Strangely enough, perhaps yes. Rooted in both ancient and common law, it is witness testimony that is at the zenith of the evidentiary hierarchy [despite recent studies showing that human witnesses are far more prone to error than one might be prepared to accept], and in fact, physical evidence will only be accepted if introduced and vouched for by a witness. This came in part from the fact that physical evidence in olden days was very poor or completely absent or unknown [one of the reasons for torture in olden days was the requirement for a confession, because only a confession or the testimony of two actual witnesses (often not possible) could suffice to prove the crime]. Physical evidence tends [nowadays] to confirm and bolster the testimony of said witnesses, but without the witnesses, there would be no evidence at all.
Now back to topic....
Cheers,
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November 30, 2009, 12:16 pmPatHMV says:
zuch (and uh clem), here are Mr. Hansen’s own words:
Full “context” is available in this article written entirely by him (this is not an interview or excerpt of his remarks).
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November 30, 2009, 12:17 pmHarryEagar says:
They threw out the records to save space. That would be because CRU was moving to a smaller building?
Doesn’t pass the sniff test.
As for arguments that you don’t save all your data, that will be true in some cases, but it should not have been true in this case: What they didn’t save were the primary observations.
And the adjustments they made to them. (That’s what Harry_read_me is about.)
Apparently, climate scientists do not keep laboratory notebooks.
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November 30, 2009, 12:33 pmM. Gross says:
I’m not sure if Duckhawk is being intentionally dense, but he’s claiming the data wasn’t destroyed... by pointing out the database was destroyed and not all the individual station results.
Well, in theory, the data may not be gone forever, if each of the stations can be revisited, but that doesn’t change the fact the original CRU database of raw data has apparently been toasted.
It appears, at this point, we’ll never know if the raw CRU data correctly matched station outputs before “adjustment.”
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November 30, 2009, 12:45 pmjccamp says:
duckhawk —
CRU collected temperature data from thousands of WMO stations. CRU then adjusted, deleted, averaged, weighted, created, smoothed, extrapolated, whatever from the original temperature readings, and created a new data base of temperature readings. The original readings received from the WMO stations were then dumped from CRU records. CRU is no longer able to describe in detail how or why the original readings were modified, or even what those readings were; they can only say with certainty that such homogeneity has been done. It is true that presumably the original unadjusted readings could be re-created by again going to each of the thousands of individual station records and re-compiling. I don’t know who is expected to do such, but it certainly won’t be CRU since that’s a no-win proposition for them. But, of course, even if some entity is tasked collect and compile all those records again, there is no way to verify records re-compiled are the same as those which form the basis for the CRU data base which seems to be the gold standard for proof of global warming. That’s because we cannot re-create how CRU got from collected numbers A to homogenized numbers B.
BTW, when the HARRY programmer tried to re-create — sorry, the term was ‘correlate’ — the results of v2.1 while processing new data for v3.0, he was unable to do so, and expressed much frustration over his inability to even establish where the original (v2.1) massaged data was among a morass of identically named data bases. He did establish that some data was simply gone. He also speculated that the data would not correlate because it had been subject to some undocumented adjustment, thus his attempted at various adjustments and weightings trying to get a match to previous results.
For instance, see Fub’s post @ 11:12. That’s just one example, although I don’t recall seeing that specific issue raised by HARRY.
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November 30, 2009, 12:47 pmzuch says:
I see neither “Stalinist show trials” nor an indication that the suggested trials should be for the ‘crime’ of disputing data and results (as opposed to other things, you know, like dumping a million barrels of oil along coastlines, ripping off the people of poor but oil-rich countries, lousy and unsafe working conditions, etc.).
Cheers,
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November 30, 2009, 12:53 pmfsfsfsfsfsfsfsfs says:
Some folks have expressed skepticism that James Hansen, a prominent climate scientist who heads a large department at NASA, has called for the incarceration or punishment of individuals who do not concur with his theories of anthropogenic global warming. And in light of the lessons we thought we learned from Lysenko, it is difficult to believe that such calls would be made or taken seriously. But it happened.
In an article for The Guardian on June 23, 2008, Hansen argues that people who spread doubt about his theories of catastrophic anthoprogenic global warming should be criminally charged:
The call for trials of his opponents was not made by a private citizen: Hansen is a federal employee who heads a huge department at NASA. His threats were no doubt taken quite seriously. Note that he was not threatening trials for violating a law, but for “spreading doubt”.
By the way, I am really surprised by the hullabaloo over the Jones/Mann/CRU attempts to suppress or game peer review as contrasted with the relatively localized and innocuous response to Hansen’s comments. It seems to me that Hansen’s threat to prosecute people who fund research doubting global warming theories warps peer review far more pervasively than CRU’s antics did. Hansen (and his accomplices) essentially set up a culture in which only government-sponsored research would be considered — even permitted — on the topic of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.
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November 30, 2009, 1:07 pmChrisIowa says:
It is good to know from all of this that I can now, with good precedent, stop carting around my thesis data and notes from the mid-1970’s.
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November 30, 2009, 1:07 pmErich Boldt says:
In no way did I use a loose definition of prove as you claim but parenthetically (kinda, sorta, not really) retract. There has been at least an implication that the data was no longer available and I simply provided a claim to the contrary to provide additional information for the discussion.
As far as not accepting the AGW papers I’m not aware of any confirmation of the predictive power of the model. If you can point me to where predictions based on the model were published and reviewed that have since been shown to be true and not due to any other factors that would be a start.
Also, I’m not aware of any verifiable claims that isolate the anthropogenic effects of global warming from natural global warming that show that changing human behavior will reduce global warming in a significant way.
And, as a professional programmer of over 20 years experience, the apparent lack of any configuration control of the model software and data indicates a certain sloppiness on the part of the climatologists. I don’t know for a fact that this lack of rigor carries over to other aspects of their work but it does cause me to have a significant degree of skepticism about their results.
Finally, the quality of the code I have reviewed gives me little confidence that the programmers had a clue what they were doing. Obvious problems include poor program structure, undocumented magic constants, ignored error conditions and poor choice of algorithms. Based on what I’ve seen so far I’m sure that if I had the time to dig further I would find much more. Programming is difficult under the best of circumstances and code like this makes it that much harder to verify the software and ensure that changes are made properly.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary justification and the need to spend trillions of dollars and restrict human freedom in order to mitigate AGW is certainly an extraordinary claim. The extraordinary justification, however, just isn’t there as far as I can tell.
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November 30, 2009, 1:13 pmBasil says:
This is not so. There are only a handful of scientists at work on global temperature data sets, not “thousands of scientists at institutions around the world.” There may be “thousands of scientists at institutions around the world” working in the broad field of “climate science,” but this is all about a select few in charge of collecting sea and surface temperature data from around the world that has been assimilated into a global data set that has then be used as evidence of global warming. There are only three or four alternative data sets widely used to chronicle global temperature, and the other land-sea data sets (not the satellite data sets) are as shrouded in mystery, as to their origins, as is the CRU data set. I have some familiarity with the data, and do not consider the revelations as irreparably damaging as far as the integrity of the data is concerned. But you overreach, and one wonders why. There are issues here, and this cannot be swept under the rug.
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November 30, 2009, 1:16 pmAbdul Abulbul Amir says:
Fub wins the thread!
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November 30, 2009, 1:17 pmMark Buehner says:
There are a handful of raw data collections and they have been traded and intermingled over the years. Moreover, Phil Jones himself has problems with the other major dataset at NASA”
Link
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November 30, 2009, 1:38 pmWayneJarvis says:
Crimes against nature? Doesn’t that mean “buggery”? Although I am not sure what a “high” crime against nature would be. Super-buggery?
In any event, I thought Lawrence v. Texas got rid of those laws. . .
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November 30, 2009, 1:52 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Piling on to say that this is not true. Calibration records go with the data.
Used to have a boss who said that “bad data is worse than no data at all”. If it couldn’t be validated, he didn’t want it. That’s a good policy (if somewhat reminiscent of what women are told about men) especially when it comes to issues in which (1) validation, such as calibration of thermometers, is a standard thing to do and is very easy, and (2) the quality of the data really matters.
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November 30, 2009, 2:02 pmDavid Schwartz says:
Also, that the data sets are “consistent” is really meaningless because of the combination of two factors:
1) The data sets are continuously validated and cross-corrected against each other. Correction factors are ‘tweaked’ based on such agreements. And the warming signal is very small and buried in lots of noise. (And the data sets not subject to such tweaking, such as the NASA higher-altitude satellite data either do not show warming or show statistically insignificant warming. I found this graph in a few minutes of searching, I don’t claim that it alone defends this claim.)
2) The issue is not whether the data is reasonable but whether it’s precise enough and consistent with *itself* enough (over long time frames) to justify considering the warming as signal rather than noise. Gross consistency across data sets provides no evidence to support that conclusion.
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November 30, 2009, 2:05 pmFederal Farmer says:
Why aren’t man-made contributions to GW considered ‘natural’? Humans are natural beings naturally inhabiting this planet and all of our works are thus ‘natural’. A concrete building is no less ‘natural’ than a beehive or termite mound.
To consider us super– or extra-natural is a major conceit. True arrogance.
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November 30, 2009, 2:12 pmwlpeak says:
OK, I’m confused. If CRU threw out the raw data a decade or so ago. Then what exactly have they been interpreting and reporting on since?
I mean if the first compilation was peachy, then why does CRU still exist? And if there were issues with some of CRUs products since then, why didn’t they ever revisit the raw data?*
*I assume they never revisited the raw data based on their not having it now and seemingly not knowing that until just recently.
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November 30, 2009, 2:17 pmHarryEagar says:
‘there isn’t the need if infilling is going on OK’
We need a glossary of CRU-speak. ‘in fill,’ for example, means ‘invent’
What they do is, when for some reason an observation station did not observe or observed but did not report temperatures, they just make ‘em up.
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November 30, 2009, 2:19 pmDavid Schwartz says:
wlpeak: They have been interpreting and reporting on the “cooked” data. This is data that was derived from the raw data, but suffers from a combination of deficiencies. Key among them are:
1) Precisely what processing the raw data received is unknown. And we can’t even try different kinds of processing against the raw data to try to replicate this cooked data. So it may or may not have received certain types of reasonable corrections. It may have received some corrections twice.
2) The code that processed the raw data was almost certainly buggy in various ways and required human input as it ran (feeding in the correct data sets, choosing the correct options). There is no way to know what affect mistakes in this process had.
3) There is a lot of room for adjustment in producing the final data sets. So even large mistakes can be hidden as much as needed until the data “looks right”. (This can happen even with no dishonesty on the part of the researchers.) You keep fixing mistakes until it looks like there are no more. However, this ensures your data “looks right” (that is, is consistent with everything known to date) but any additional apparent data in there is totally invalid (because your next fix, had you kept going, could have changed it completely).
And worse, you start to need to be bug-for-bug compatible to maintain your own credibility. If you find and fix a bug, and that makes your previous data look completely inconsistent with your current data, what do you do?
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November 30, 2009, 2:52 pmBruce Hayden says:
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November 30, 2009, 3:35 pmjccamp says:
wipeak -
CRU took the original reported figures, “homogenized” them in a number of various fashions, and then discarded the original figures. Everything since has been based on the homogenized data.
There are any number of definitions of “raw data” floating about. It does not mean the uncorrected, simple temperature readings as reported. Raw data in CRU-speak — and maybe common climate research terminology — means those original temperatures readings, minus “outliers”, plus numbers created from some mean for outliers and non-reported stations, multiplied or weighted by precipitation influence (“synthetic”, not actual), adjusted for instrumentation error, station siting, environment, transcription errors and who knows what else. All that is within reasonable practice, except we are piling assumption upon assumption, creating, as pointed out, a small signal within a large potential noise. Then we are expected to accept this process differentiates less than one degree C over nearly a century. Except maybe the past 9 or 10 years, of course.
The (homogenized) data is continually updated. The science of collection improves, supposedly the science of interpreting the collected data improves, and of course, time goes by, adding to the historical record. And naturally, all this new data and new science is validated by comparing it to, yes, the original suspect findings which are considered sacrosanct.
Not only did they not re-visit the original numbers and homogenization process, they actively fought attempts by others to do so. It now seems they lost any ability to do so some years back, but kept that little fact a secret.
I think the validation process worked like this.
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November 30, 2009, 3:37 pmBruce Hayden says:
I was trying to be cute there, and it failed miserably. Let’s try that last comment again, skipping my original comment that Federal Farmer was responding to.
Since my comment above has come up at least twice now in this thread, I thought it advantageous to respond.
The global climatic temperatures go up, and they go down. They have been doing so for far longer than man has existed. Most likely, we have had major swings within recorded history.
In this case though, we are being urged to beggar ourselves and our children to prevent further AGW by significantly reducing our CO2 production. Any delay is deemed criminal (see Hanson show trials above). We are never given the opportunity to ask whether or not man, or the Earth, would be better or worse off if the planet were a bit warmer, and there is some evidence that it would. And, ditto with slightly higher CO2 concentrations. Things like billions of acres of new farmland from currently frozen tundra, and that man has thrived in times of warmth, and suffered in times of cooler temperatures. That sort of stuff.
So, why the rush to spend trillions of dollars before we can even determine whether or not we would be better off? The justification seems to be that the GW is allegedly man caused, and thus upsets the balance of nature. In short, some form of Gaea worship.
But, if we (man) are not a primary cause of the warming (or more recently, likely cooling), then this rush to judgment loses its moral force. Instead, the burden is almost exclusively on those who propose massive change to justify it in terms of whether we would be better off with the massive changes, and whether our intervention was morally imperative.
Of course, as an AGW agnostic, I have always been of the view that we should slow down and look to see whether we might actually be better of with a warmer world, and if not, whether there were more cost effective ways to address the problem. But then, I am apparently a “denialist”, and so my views are considered reactionary and irrelevant.
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November 30, 2009, 3:37 pmFederal Farmer says:
Sorry, I did not intend my response to be directed at your per se, but at the notion that seems held by some that it is more appropriate for mankind to live in grass huts and starve down to some hazy ideal population level while subsisting on roots and nuts.
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November 30, 2009, 4:27 pmBrett says:
Aside from all of this happening far faster than we’ve seen in nature (the early Eocene was a nice warm place, but it took more than 10,000 years to get to that situation — and a mass extinction still occurred), rising temperatures has other, rather less pleasant effects.
It’d be a poor trade if you lost the Amazon rain forest and much of the world’s existing agricultural land in the process, along with uprooting millions of people due to sea level rises.
Nobody’s saying that studies shouldn’t be done on what the effects might be — in fact, what they might be is a big part of the latest IPCC Report. But the whole situation is very time-dependent;if, say, you decided twenty years from now that the science is showing massive negatives overweighing the positives, then it may be too late to change the situation. Enjoy.
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November 30, 2009, 5:51 pmHarryEagar says:
‘Aside from all of this happening far faster than we’ve seen in nature ’
Don’t wander too far off the AGW reservation, Brett, or Gavin won’t let you comment at Real Climate any more.
The alarmists have often purported to have found instantaneous (in climatic terms) changes in climate, and this has been used to beat up the skeptics on the grounds that the looming catastrophe might be nearer than we imagine.
It’s pretty obvious that nobody in the AGW camp ever was taught logic, because they simultaneously argue that any change will eliminate the polar bears, leatherback turtles or whatnot, even though the bears, turtles must have gotten through the rapid changes in the past all right.
You don’t have to be a scientist to get the fundamental incoherence of the arguments to do something now!
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November 30, 2009, 6:08 pmguy in the veal calf office says:
Dr. Edward R. Cook offers the best summation of this that I’ve read: “we know with certainty that we know fuck-all”
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November 30, 2009, 6:20 pms lee says:
Yes, by and large majority of us accept that humans have had some affect on the global temps. The real question is how large of an effect we are making, which in turn determines the scope and breadth of proposed policy changes. Eg. Are we making the temps rise 1 deg every 10 years (very bad?) or 1 deg every 50 years (not so urgent?).
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November 30, 2009, 6:23 pms lee says:
Not to mention that many of the supporting research released by other groups/scientists built upon data and/or research performed by the UEA scientists, which we can all safely agree should be looked upon with skepticism given that it can no longer be reproduced without the original data.
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November 30, 2009, 6:27 pms lee says:
Ironically, in the UK “global warming” is now an officially recognized religion. :)
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November 30, 2009, 6:29 pmrmd says:
I have read all the comments up to this point in the thread and I can hold my tongue no longer. The vast majority of the comments are missing the most important point. To wit: “data are,” not “data is.” Thank you.
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November 30, 2009, 6:48 pmAbdul Abulbul Amir says:
Try 0.8 degrees C over the past 157 years. Thats 0.005 degrees per year.
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November 30, 2009, 7:39 pmHugh says:
Okay, I will accept that all AGW skeptics are on the payroll of the energy industry. So, where is my freaking check? Garsh darnit, I’ve been a skeptic for years and I have still not been paid!
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November 30, 2009, 7:40 pmHugh says:
Bruce, I think we were robbed. We have not been paid what we were promised. Maybe we should go over to the other side.
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November 30, 2009, 7:43 pmLN says:
I make thousands of dollars a year as a global warming believer. And if a nobody like me makes that much money, imagine how much a really famous climate scientist makes. You know, like... that guy... and that guy.
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November 30, 2009, 8:32 pmJustin Levine says:
With all due respect Professor V., that is a naive philosophy that demands some rethinking on your part. The fact of the matter is, most scientists don’t know more about the subject than you do. They do not conduct their own independent tests on the subject. They simply read a few scientific journals authored by a core group of elites (who may very well be biased) and then ‘defer’ to them the same way you do. The end result is a false ‘consensus’ that is not based on independent experiments run over and over again, but rather on ‘group-think’ stemming from a very small cadre who act as gatekeepers of information. Scientists are ‘convinced’ of their position simply because other scientists told them so — not through their own independent thought and analysis.
If they really were more educated about the subject, then they should easily be able to EDUCATE you about by going through the raw data in such a way that it would allow you to understand it on your own and reach the same conclusion yourself. But they never do that. They simply say “Trust me. I’m a scientist.” No need to educate you at all. You should just trust my credentials and leave it at that.
Science is truth that we can believe in. But the community of “scientists” have always been frauds. The former in its pure form has no need of the latter.
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November 30, 2009, 8:41 pmDavid Schwartz says:
And many members of the consensus see the flaws within their areas of expertise but assume that they must not matter because all the rest of it is right. (And surely someone would have said something. And why risk your career arguing with “settled science”?)
This was quite drastically demonstrated when AGW alarmists immediately responded to Climategate with “everything else is right, nothing to see here, move along”.
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November 30, 2009, 8:51 pmEdward A. Hoffman says:
It’s pretty obvious that the wildfire headed toward your house isn’t a threat, since the previous wildfires didn’t destroy your neighborhood. Therefore you shouldn’t bother calling 911, building firebreaks, evacuating the area or even breaking out the garden hoses. Would you accept that logic? I sure hope not. Here are just a few of reasons why:
1. The underlying conditions (amount of available fuel, how much rain has fallen recently, wind speed and direction, humidity, etc.) change from one fire to the next, so there is no reason to presume that a given fire will cause the same damage in the same places as the last fire.
2. If we don’t know when the last fire was and/or when the homes in your neighborhood were built, the presumption that it was around during the last fire (or at least that it was in something like its current form) is likely to be false.
3. We don’t know how quickly the last fire moved. People may have had enough time to deal with that one, but it doesn’t follow that there will be time to deal with this one even if we decide to do something about it.
The same is true of your argument about polar bears. Offhand I don’t know when the last significant global warming took place, but the species may be quite different now from what it was like then. Also, that episode may have begun when the world was much colder than it is now and ended before reaching current temperatures; if the polar bears survived a local rise in winter temperatures from, say, 25 degrees Farenheit to 30 degrees (leaving the ice where they hunt intact) it does not follow that they will survive an increase from 30 to degrees to 35. More importantly, the last increase may have taken 20,000 years instead of 200, giving species 10,000% more time in which to adapt than they will have this time around.
But even leaving all of that aside, polar bears are not the only species in imminent danger. Even if you’re somehow right that they will survive, that doesn’t mean you can say the same thing about others.
But I will grant you one point — “You don’t have to be a scientist” in order to analyze the problem the way you do.
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November 30, 2009, 9:14 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Not to mention, some might have private doubts, but feel compelled to circle the wagon when the hoi polloi question the priesthood.
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November 30, 2009, 9:16 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
Dearieme, you asked: “I’m baffled — if you don’t know what I do for a living, how do you know that I don’t know what Eugene’s chums know?”
Because no scientist would write the sophomoric silliness you have written.
Bw, no, the energy radiated from the earth is NOT solar energy. Sure all the energy on earth comes from the sun but that does not maek it solar energy. The energy in coal came from the sun, too, but coal is not solar energy.
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November 30, 2009, 10:29 pmHarry Eagar says:
Hoffman, it’s obvious (from finding defunct forests much closer to the North Pole than they grow today) that there was a noticeably warm phase, at least in that part of the world, maybe 5,000–8,000 years ago. I doubt polar bears have evolved very much since then.
Any species that cannot deal with a small change in temperature (and there are some) is doomed anyhow. Climate has never been static.
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December 1, 2009, 12:05 ambadlaw says:
I just love how some people are such shills for evolution being taught to kids with no mention of creationism, but then they show they have little understanding of natural selection. If the polar bears can’t adapt to change, well, you tell me, Darwin-lovers.
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December 1, 2009, 12:14 amNickM says:
[in Sean Connery voice] I’ve found the data for the plague of the 21st century, and now I’ve lost it!
Nick
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December 1, 2009, 3:43 ammarkm says:
In this case the raw data was surface temperature measurements going back to the mid 1800’s. You cannot reproduce that unless you’re prepared to wait another 150 years.
It’s not tree rings or anything else that others can reproduce, it’s the basic data that they attempt to use to calibrate tree rings and climate models — except that the raw data is not directly usable (it was collected at different times of the day and often affected by changing local conditions). If the adjustments that were applied to make it possible to average all the readings were in error or biased to exaggerate the temperature increases, then everything else is going to be off.
Steve McIntyre and others have been asking for the raw data for a long time, so they can check the adjustments that were applied. Some months ago, CRU finally had to respond to an FOIA request (or whatever the British version is), and they said that the raw data was lost.
I don’t definitely know whether the data would be duplicated in other repositories, but my impression was that the four major ones tried to avoid duplicate effort by collecting data from different sets of stations. It should be possible to recover much of the CRU collection, from the temperature stations themselves (f they still exist and didn’t dump their own records after transferring to the CRU repository, but this is a huge task: thousands of stations, data in all kinds of formats, mostly obsolete, and much of it in hand-written logs. It’s likely that the GW alarmists’ predictions will have been tested by time before the data is recovered that way.
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December 1, 2009, 5:49 amzuch says:
Well, yes, some of us eschew such simplistic inductive ‘reasoning’, when there’s perhaps more to the story that might be applicable. I’d note, just in passing that every extinct species also survived some events before they finally bit the big one. There are far more extinct species than extant ones, if you want to do some real high-quality inductive logic.
And that species are around now as ‘reasoning’ that they will be in the future is a bit circular; we wouldn’t be talking about them surviving if they were not around.
But what (and where) is the “simultaneous[] argu[ment] of which you speak?
Cheers,
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December 1, 2009, 9:43 amzuch says:
Nice to see a creationist step in. Now the party can really get rolling.
Part of evolution is extinction. Yes, it’s natural for species to die off. That doesn’t mean we have to freakin’ help out. For instance, I’m quite sure it was the Yangtse River dolphins’ fault their genetic drift just couldn’t keep up. Same for the dodo anonanonanonanon....
Go read Farley Mowat’s book “Sea of Slaughter”. Nice bedtime reading.
Cheers,
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December 1, 2009, 10:46 amFernanda says:
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December 1, 2009, 2:05 pmEdward A. Hoffman says:
Let me get this straight — if hunters kill all the remaining Siberian tigers, their extinction will be because they didn’t adapt well enough to the introduction of guns and bullets into their environment? And how, exactly, do you think this undermines Darwin?
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December 1, 2009, 2:50 pmFederal Farmer says:
It doesn’t. But if we hunt them to extinction that is a natural event which was the result of Darwinian natural selection.
However, as a lover of biodiversity, I have a selfish desire to maintain species’ existence. It is also natural for us to decide not to hunt an animal to extinction or not, as is more common, drive them to extinction by encroaching on their habitat.
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December 1, 2009, 2:57 pmKarl Lembke says:
One thing I was taught in my physics lab classes was that one never, ever, ever erases or obliterates anything in the lab notebook. Everything that goes in, be it data, calculations, or anything else is to stay there.
If I found a mistake, say in a calculation, I was to line it out.
If I wrote down some bad data, say if I trasnposed some digits, I was to line it out.
It might turn out, on reflection, or after a good night’s sleep, the original item was right after all, and I might want to be able to recover it.
I guess the lab instructors for the scientists at the CRU was less strict than mine were.
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December 2, 2009, 5:31 pmKarl Lembke says:
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December 2, 2009, 6:04 pm