Erich Boldt: 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:

I was i biotechnological scientist, used modelling, and always required raw data available from my students. In the 1995 +/- i got an interest for seeing the raw data for global warming from east anglia. And there they were on their website. !900/10 – 1990. Nice coloumn diagrams form “all” over the world. In my surfing, I foound nowhere, where the temperature had encreased. I regret very much now, that I did not take sample printouts. The next time I visited, the link had gone. It is unlikely that I am the only person who has seen the data on the web. In my memory I think I got the idea of visiting the site possibly from, Nature, New Scientist or Science. It may be possible somehow to get evidence.

May be you have an idea how to proceed

Erich Boldt: 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:

I was i biotechnological scientist, used modelling, and always required raw data available from my students. In the 1995 +/- i got an interest for seeing the raw data for global warming from east anglia. And there they were on their website. !900/10 – 1990. Nice coloumn diagrams form “all” over the world. In my surfing, I foound nowhere, where the temperature had encreased. I regret very much now, that I did not take sample printouts. The next time I visited, the link had gone. It is unlikely that I am the only person who has seen the data on the web. In my memory I think I got the idea of visiting the site possibly from, Nature, New Scientist or Science. It may be possible somehow to get evidence.

May be you have an idea how to proceed

Edward A. Hoffman:

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?

David Schwartz:

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.

And a better analogy: If you are diagnosed with a fatal disease that could be caused naturally, or by some artificial lifestyle choice you’re making, it behooves you to determine which cause to address if you intend to try and treat it.

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.

Edward A. Hoffman: 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?

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.

badlaw: 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.

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?

badlaw: 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.

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,

HarryEagar: 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.

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,

D.O:
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.

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.

Nick

Any species that cannot deal with a small change in temperature (and there are some) is doomed anyhow. Climate has never been static.

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.

David 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”?)

Not to mention, some might have private doubts, but feel compelled to circle the wagon when the hoi polloi question the priesthood.

HarryEagar: 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.

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.

This was quite drastically demonstrated when AGW alarmists immediately responded to Climategate with “everything else is right, nothing to see here, move along”.

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.

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.

Bruce Hayden: 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).

Bruce, I think we were robbed. We have not been paid what we were promised. Maybe we should go over to the other side.

OperationCounterstrike: 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.

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!

Eg. Are we making the temps rise 1 deg every 10 years (very bad?) or 1 deg every 50 years (not so urgent?).

Try 0.8 degrees C over the past 157 years. Thats 0.005 degrees per year.

John Skookum: 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.

Ironically, in the UK “global warming” is now an officially recognized religion. :)

Bruce Hayden: 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.

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.

Edward A. Hoffman: 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.

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?).

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!

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.

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.

Things like billions of acres of new farmland from currently frozen tundra

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.

So, why the rush to spend trillions of dollars before we can even determine whether or not we would be better off?

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.

Bruce Hayden: 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.

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.

Federal Farmer: 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.

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.

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.

P>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. </blockquoteFederal Farmer: 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.

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.

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?