Climatologist Mike Hulme, who worked at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, gets the big picture in a WSJ Europe op-ed. Some excerpts:
One thing the episode has made clear is that it has become difficult to disentangle political arguments about climate policies from scientific arguments about the evidence for man-made climate change and the confidence placed in predictions of future change. The quality of both political debate and scientific practice suffers as a consequence. . . .
If we build the foundations of our climate-change policies so confidently and so single-mindedly on scientific claims about what the future holds and what therefore “has to be done,” then science will inevitably become the field on which political battles are waged. The mantra becomes: Get the science right, reduce the scientific uncertainties, compel everyone to believe it. . . and we will have won. Not only is this an unrealistic view about how policy gets made, it also places much too great a burden on science, certainly on climate science with all of its struggles with complexity, contingency and uncertainty. . . .
The problem then with getting our relationship with science wrong is simple: We expect too much certainty, and hence clarity, about what should be done. Consequently, we fail to engage in honest and robust argument about our competing political visions and ethical values.
Science never writes closed textbooks. It does not offer us a holy scripture, infallible and complete. This is especially the case with the science of climate, a complex system of enormous scale, at every turn influenced by human contingencies. Yes, science has clearly revealed that humans are influencing global climate and will continue to do so, but we don’t know the full scale of the risks involved, nor how rapidly they will evolve, nor indeed—with clear insight—the relative roles of all the forcing agents involved at different scales. . . .
The central battlegrounds on which we need to fight out the policy implications of climate change concern matters of risk management, of valuation, and political ideology. We must move the locus of public argumentation here not because the science has somehow been “done” or “is settled”; science will never be either of these things, although it can offer powerful forms of knowledge not available in other ways. It is a false hope to expect science to dispel the fog of uncertainty so that it finally becomes clear exactly what the future holds and what role humans have in causing it.
There are also good comments from Roger Pielke Jr. and Roger Pielke Sr. on Dot Earth.
LTEC says:
The piece by Hulme is very balanced. It seems to me that he is saying that, on the one hand, the CRU scientists were lying about half the time, in an attempt to completely transform the politics and economics of the world, and this is wrong; on the other hand the skeptics are claiming that the CRU scientists were lying all the time, and this is also wrong.
December 2, 2009, 11:02 pmPeteP says:
“Politicization of Science” indeed – today Babs Boxer, Senator, stated that she thinks this should be called ‘stolen email gate’, and THAT should be the issue.
Unreal…. after the armed robbery she committed a few weeks ago in the EPW committee, to pass her own bill by violating every Rule of the Senate….
December 2, 2009, 11:18 pmHarry Eagar says:
Ask her if the code was stolen, too, or whether, since we paid for it, it should be ours.
December 2, 2009, 11:32 pmzuch says:
Anyone who’s looked at the creationism/biology debate would have a good cynical chuckle at this…. When you get the True Believers involved, things devolve quote rapidly.
And before a third ignerrent commenter claims that I am a True Believer (not bothering to say whether they are), let me say in advance that I think that AGW is quite probable, but not known to be true to the accuracy and confidence of, say, the fine structure constant….
kCheers,
December 2, 2009, 11:36 pmPatHMV says:
LTEC… I’m a skeptic, and I don’t think the CRU scientists were lying all the time. Assuming they were lying half the time, though, the question is: which half? Once someone has been revealed as being willing to falsify any results (or, to use politer terms, fudge the analysis because of political concerns), there’s no escaping the conclusion that you have little choice but to distrust everything they’ve done. That doesn’t mean that everything they’ve done is wrong, of course, simply that all of it needs to be reexamined and reestablished by independent scientists not relying on any of their original work.
December 2, 2009, 11:38 pmzuch says:
Where does he say this?!?!?! His caveat seems to be the unremarkable one that any study even topping the P<0.001 range does not mean the debate is over, and that the science is "settled". Science is never “settled”, and always up for revision.
My addendum to that obvious comment would be: Yes, it’s never settled, but once you have a P<0.001 result, you need to accept this tentatively (as you said you would do when you designed the experiment), and then let the folks that want to disprove this or say it was a fluke show otherwise … to sufficient confidence.
Cheers,
December 2, 2009, 11:48 pmJohnF says:
What exactly are we to make of ” Yes, science has clearly revealed that humans are influencing global climate and will continue to do so, but we don’t know the full scale of the risks involved, nor how rapidly they will evolve, nor indeed—with clear insight—the relative roles of all the forcing agents involved at different scales. . . ”
If we exclude the hyped temperature numbers from the CRU, and research that depends on them, what articles have shown a connection between human activity and global warming that shows it to be anything close to the catastrophic scenario that the U.N. and its CRU henchmen painted?
Sure, it’s very good to say now that we do not know the full scale of the risks involved, but that has not been the message of the leading CRU scientists and their political useful idiots.
December 2, 2009, 11:55 pmOren says:
Part of the problem is that, in moving the locus of discussion to science, we’ve encouraged them to act like politicians because they feel the burden of justifying the policy. In politics, of course, talking about uncertainty, open questions or contingency is suicide — the nuanced position practically invites your opponent to attack the very weaknesses you’ve just espoused. You didn’t see Bush talking about the possibility that Saddam didn’t have WMDs (even though the evidence wasn’t certain) or the chance of post-invasion Iraq descending into sectarian conflict (even though that was a possible outcome). JFK didn’t say that his policy in Vietnam only makes sense if the domino-theory holds or talk about the possibility that we would still be there 15 years later. It doesn’t even make sense.
Of course, I should add that nothing here can excuse the CRU for their (clear) departure from the ethical prerogatives of their profession, irrespective of its newlyfound political role.
December 3, 2009, 12:42 amdiversity jurisdiction says:
I have, and I didn’t “have a good cynical chuckle.” You strike me as having the disguised fervor of creationists claiming that intelligent design is “probable.”
December 3, 2009, 1:01 amNobody At All says:
I would add only that this compounds an observational bias: the public is more familiar with climate scientists who contribute an exaggerated public presence than it is with those who toil in relative anonymity. Most remain relatively unknown, as do their contributions.
December 3, 2009, 1:05 amBruce Hayden says:
Except that it isn’t yet clear that the emails, etc. were stolen, or rather, just released without permission. My bet right now is on the later, given that it appears to be an inside job. But, we shall see.
In this case, I really don’t see this as bilateral, but rather, primarily on the part of the proponents. That is why we couldn’t debate whether man would be better off with a warmer climate, or if there were cheaper and more efficient ways of reducing man made CO2 and/or global temperatures.
Which is, again, why it is/was foolish to run out and beggar ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren before the jury was fully in.
Again, agreed, except that we were never allowed to even debate this part of the issue.
December 3, 2009, 1:18 amBruce Hayden says:
Except that this goes both ways. While I agree that creationism has essentially been scientifically refuted, it appears to me to be a mistake to lump Intelligent Design in the same category. While evolution through single mutation is well accepted and established, there are still big jumps consisting of numerous (sometimes upwards of a dozen) apparently simultaneous mutations that are much more problematic. They are maybe probabilistically feasible, but just barely. The problem may be that we just don’t have a thorough enough genetic record yet, or, it may be that ID has some merit.
Note that I am not claiming that Intelligent Design is true, but rather, that while evolution through genetic mutation is far better established by science, there is still some room for doubt about ID. And, thus, while I tend against ID, I don’t think that we are to the point of discarding it completely.
So, I think, even here, things are not as black and white as many might believe.
December 3, 2009, 1:34 amA. Zarkov says:
Climate science really isn’t a science in same sense that physics, chemistry and biology are sciences. It doesn’t even come close to astrophysics or planetary science which also deal with observational data. Climate science is more akin to something like economics or social science. If you drill into this discipline you will see it’s kind of a hodgepodge of meteorology, atmospheric physics, atmospheric chemistry, statistics and modeling. You need to know a little about thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, radiative transfer, scattering theory, some solar physics, and even a little astronomy to understand the Milankovic cycles. You can download a free book by R. T. Pierrehumbert that covers all these subjects here. But a word of warning. Judging from his website Pierrehumbert is a true believer, and a leftist. The IPCC and the attack dogs at RealClimate.org all reference him. Nevertheless the science parts of the book seem ok. You will need this stuff to understand the modeling efforts, otherwise the main technical discipline used is statistics, and here the climate scientists seem really weak as shown in the Wegman report. The climate scientists seem to have shut out the professional statisticians from the global warming enterprise almost completely. I’m not surprised at this because statisticians tend to be a skeptical lot, and they constantly tell their clients, “you can’t do that” or “that’s not right.” The clients get sick of this stuff and shop around for someone who will bless what they want blessed. But had Mann included some mathematical statisticians on his team, he would never had suffered the embarrassing take down of his “hockey stick.” He would have avoided getting the stick shoved “you know where.”
I say all this because Hulme seems to be pretending climate science is a real science instead of a little science and a lot of politics with big doses of self promotion and Madison Avenue like campaigns. Real scientists would have avoided Al Gore and crackpots like John Holdren like the plague. Real scientists encourage skepticism, and if they follow Richard Feynman’s dicta. Real scientists are repelled by the notion of a “consensus” as a path to truth.
December 3, 2009, 1:36 amPaul R says:
It is not all fog. It is much easier to falsify or disprove a claim than to prove one. The sky is not falling, disaster is not imminent.
December 3, 2009, 1:42 amArrowSmith says:
Based on this pseudo-science we are supposed to beggar ourselves. We are literally at a cross-roads in our history. Can you imagine the absurdity of putting ourselves in the poor-house over a hoax? Maybe we just managed to save ourselves in time, but I don’t think so. The schoolchildren have already been brainwashed in AGW. Even if carbon-taxes never happen under Obama/Pelosi, one day they will happen when the AGW-kids grow up and it will be a landslide.
December 3, 2009, 2:06 amArrowSmith says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitigation_of_global_warming#Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emissions_comparisons
Nuclear power produces the least amount of CO2 compared to any other electricity production source. Yet even this sane measure, the greenies oppose vehemently. I can only conclude they want to severely reduce the American standard of living to Soviet Union levels.
December 3, 2009, 2:11 ameyesay says:
I have watched the debate over climate change on the Volokh Conspiracy for a long time. Rarely if ever mentioned are ecological footprint and sustainability.
There are 308 million people living in the U.S., just 4.5% of the world’s population. But we produce 21.5% of the world’s CO₂ emissions, almost five times our proportionate share.
According to the World Bank, about 1.4 billion people live in absolute poverty, on an income equivalent to $1.25 a day or less. Almost half the world’s people live on the equivalent of $2.00 a day or less. Obviously, these people are not burning much fossil fuel; they can’t afford it. The wealthiest 20% of the world’s population consume over 75% of the world’s resources, and our consumption of carbon-based energy is roughly in that proportion as well.
But the rest of the world is developing. Already, China is generating more CO₂ than the United States. Eventually, most of the world’s people will escape poverty and they will want to live like we do.
The CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere has increased from about 280 ppm in 1750 to about 380 ppm now, and the difference is attributable to human activity. If we don’t change our consumption patterns, how much more will it increase as the rest of the world escapes poverty?
We are already at or near the point of peak oil, where sustainable increases in the rate of extraction will be very difficult to achieve. Even if climate change were a hoax, we would have to change our consumption patterns almost as much as if it is real, simply because the United States has an outsized ecological footprint. The earth cannot supply our level of consumption to everybody; the resources do not exist. We need to transition to different ways of transporting ourselves and our stuff, growing our food, and heating and lighting our homes and workplaces, because what we are doing now is not sustainable, climate change or no climate change.
December 3, 2009, 2:59 amJeff Wilson says:
If you haven’t seen it, check out James Burke’s original “Connections” series from (I believe) the 1970′s. One of his points at the conclusion was that science was playing a greater role in our everyday lives, and that we had a potential problem when Joe Citizen had to make an educated decision on a political policy that relied upon scientific considerations.
The series is well worth watching, apart from its application to the topic at hand.
December 3, 2009, 3:03 amDavid Schwartz says:
eyesay: That argument is based entirely on a false presumption that people are not justly entitled to that which they pair fair price for on an open market using wealth they created through the sweat of their brow. When other nations are as productive as we are, they can buy the same share we do.
It’s also based on a changing definition of what constitutes a “resource”. We can only show that resources are running out if the supply is fixed. But if the supply is fixed, it must include anything that might one day be a resource. So either resources aren’t fixed, or the supply of resources is effectively unlimited. You can’t have it both ways arguing that what we can use today as a resource is running out, therefore in the future we will run out of resources. Was oil a resource in 1354? If so, why isn’t Jupiter a resource today?
December 3, 2009, 3:23 amBrett Bellmore says:
Well, how could there ever NOT be “some room for doubt” about a theory that posits an all-powerful being capable of faking the evidence beyond our power to penetrate the fraud? There’s always going to be ‘some room for doubt’ about the proverbial unicorn hiding behind the tree, too, but most people don’t lose a lot of sleep over the possibility.
December 3, 2009, 3:41 amzuch says:
It has??? News to me … seeing as one of the primary failings it has is that it is not science and thus is not amenable to scientific refutation (i.e., lacks such qualities as falsifiability).
ID has the same essential flaws as creationism (and for good reason; it’s essentially creationism in drag).
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 4:28 amDavid Newton says:
Intelligent design is not a valid scientific theory. The reason it is not a valid scientific theory is that it is impossible to design an experiment to test the hypothesis. As mentioned by Brett Bellmore, if the theory itself says that there is an all-powerful being capable of manipulating results of an experiment then the results of any experiment performed under the theory are always suspect and the hypothesis is not disprovable.
By the same token at the moment much of string theory in particle physics is not a valid scientific theory as it is impossible to design an experiment to test the theory. However the difference between intelligent design and string theory is that there is at least the possibility of designing experiments to test the bits of string theory which we cannot test at the moment when we have more advanced instrumentation. There is also the point that string theory does not posit an all-powerful being manipulating the results of any experiment.
The very essence of a scientific theory is that it not only explains what has happened in the past but that it provides testable predictions. If those predictions are borne out then the theory is strengthened. If those predictions are false then the theory must be re-worked. Moving back to climatology, the problem that we consistently run into is that the predictions of a climatologists are often out of kilter with what really happens. For example the cooling observed over the last ten years was not predicted by the computer models. What is even worse with the CRU fiasco is that the basic data used by the computer models has been manipulated to massage the results.
With climatology we have bad theories where prediction does not even come close to matching reality, bad statistical analysis and manipulation of data. That is not a good record to say the least.
December 3, 2009, 4:52 amzuch says:
Oh, yes. Real scientists throw up their hands and say “we really don’t know for sure” and “you shouldn’t listen to a word we’re saying and actually do anything, because we’re just playing our little mind games with your money and nothing we do is ever really ‘settled’ and thus useful for acting on….” This of course avoids any taint of policy implications, and the inevitable politics.
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 5:00 amzuch says:
Assuming arguendo your latter claim, how is this a problem?!?!? Isn’t this precisely the mark of good science (or at least one such mark compared to creationism) that the predictions can be [allegedly] refuted and the science thereby further tuned?
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 5:05 amzuch says:
I keep hearing this, but I don’t see the evidence. Are we supposed to take your assertion here as true without any facts to to back it up? Now that doesn’t sound like good science….
If such “manipulation” were true, of course, that would be serious scientific misconduct. So anything you know about such perfidious acts ought to be made public. Out with it.
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 5:10 amzuch says:
Wow. That’s impressive. Sounds like the makings of a Nobel-worthy paper there for you. Out with the data.
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 5:14 amzuch says:
This shows a lack of perspicacity on your part.
Your other factual errors aside, the essential part of ID is not such a claim, but rather argumentum ad ignoratiam attacks on evolution as not “probable”.
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 5:18 amDavid Schwartz says:
There simply is no other known way they could have produced the data they produced. As I’ve explained several times already, there is no way the method they used could produce they data sets they produced. The data needed to produce those data sets does not exist.
There is no scientifically-defensible way to produce comparable data for the temperature of a region in 1950 that had no nearby reporting stations and minimal population and of that same region in 2007 with 8 reporting stations and a suburban development — not for global climate change assessment purposes. Any cross-coupling between increasing population or increasing numbers of reporting stations destroys your result.
If you try, the output will be brittle to your corrections. (And I suspect this is the real reason CRU doesn’t want to disclose any more than they have to.) So the only thing you can do is choose corrections that produce outputs you consider sensible.
I suppose you could simply guess at the corrections and ignore whether the data seems sensible or not. Is that what you’re suggesting CRU did instead?
December 3, 2009, 5:57 amDavid Schwartz says:
One more point. I won’t go into detail unless someone really cares, but this can occur in completely innocent ways. For example, the way this data was collected and processed was decided before anyone was particularly interested in looking for tiny global climate trends over decades. And then when it occurred to people to do that, what else could they do but use the best data they had?
And then, when they realized they diverged from other data sets, why not revisit their corrections to bring better convergence — the initial values were at least in part arbitrary. And at this point, they probably realized they couldn’t recalculate older values with new corrections, both because they hadn’t kept the data and they would have to admit they were wrong.
And so on.
But at some point, you have to realize it’s a house of cards. And then you get the CRU emails. (They were likely very good scientists at first.)
The big systemic problem is that everyone, future modelers and past reconstructors, had tuning values with wide reasonable margins. People chose the best values, where ‘best’ meant converging with other data sets, equally bad. A ‘consensus’ was thereby reached in the data sets, but the fine details of the ‘consensus’ are not actually based on any valid data but likely due to uncorrected UHI effects in at least some of the data sets participating in the ‘consensus’.
It’s a lot like a Ouija board.
December 3, 2009, 6:10 amzuch says:
Huh? How so? Your ignorance here does not an argument make.
“[E]xplaining” this is not what you need to do. You need to show this. Then you can hand your work over to the investigators.
They were reporting data for many years with “no nearby reporting stations”, to wit, remote areas and years prior to the 20th century. That’s part of this difficult task of estimating global temperatures over a large range of years. You may not like their methodology or their assumptions, but then attack that substantively and/or propose your own.
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 6:19 amDavid Schwartz says:
Zuch: What are they claiming the error bars are on those reports from areas with no nearby reporting stations? It’s not that I don’t like their assumptions, it’s that they used unsubstantiated assumptions. If their results are brittle to variation on those assumptions, that is sufficient proof that the results are unreliable.
As for proposing my own, I freely admit that I know of no way to do it. Some data is simply lost. We will never know how many seconds it took to paint the Mona Lisa, no matter how much it matters.
And I fear we may lack enough past data to make future modeling reliable. (The assumption of modeling is that the future will be like the past. You need to know the past well enough to predict.) Of course, at some point in the future that will change, both because we can do more prediction from pure physics and because there will be more past. Also, some errors may be due to limits on computing power, and that is in ever increasing supply.
December 3, 2009, 6:26 amDavid Newton says:
Source code has been quoted on the internet with comments which clearly indicate fudge factors are being arbitrarily applied. For example, a direct quote from the source code which I have seen:
” yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,
-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,
2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor”
That last part after the semi-colon is a comment by the programmer who wrote the code. I am not sure which language that code is written in, but to my eye that code definitely looks like it is doing something dodgy to the inputted figures, and the comment at the end is damning to say the least. In fact apparently the title comment for one of the modules in the source code was, “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” If that’s not a smoking gun then I really don’t know what is.
If you want to see more detailed information about analysis of what was wrong with the leaked source code then simply do a Google search with the terms “cru”, “source”, “code” and “fudge”.
There is fire to go with the smoke in this case, and for CRU this has a real danger of turning into a firestorm.
December 3, 2009, 7:15 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
I wouldn’t worry too much about this. In my day it was the coming ice age, and nuclear war – we were instructed to build fallout shelters at our homes. I think we all got over that. We also had to watch films that showed in horrifying graphic detail what happens to the lungs and bodies of people who smoke, yet many of my classmates took up smoking after that.
Education simply isn’t all that effective, which is both a blessing and a curse.
December 3, 2009, 7:53 amSara says:
As I understand it, one of the bases for man made climate change is that, we have been releasing carbon into the atmosphere for 150 years from fossil fuels, at ever increasing rates. Do skeptics not believe that such a carbon release will have any effect? If so, why?
December 3, 2009, 8:00 amDavid Schwartz says:
Sara:
At least for me, it’s not that I don’t believe it will have any effect. It’s that the effect will likely be small and impossible to predict. Climate is filled with positive and negative feedback mechanisms, some known and many unknown. There have been all kinds of climate changes in the past whose mechanisms are unknown.
Even assuming we had no effect on climate, at some point in the future it is a certainty that Earth’s climate will become significantly other than what we humans would like. But we have no idea when this will be or what direction it will be in. If it’s another ice age, we sure shouldn’t be fighting any global warming.
If you just want to say “heck, it has to do something”, fine. But without knowing what and whether that’s bad or good, there’s no point in paying very real costs to combat it.
I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to do better in the future, and I have no objections to continued scientific research. It’s the “we have to do something” that’s fundamentally broken.
December 3, 2009, 8:14 amHumle on Climategate « Daniel Joseph Smith says:
[...] Humle on Climategate By Daniel J. Smith http://volokh.com/2009/12/02/hulme-on-climategate-and-the-politicization-of-science/ [...]
December 3, 2009, 8:21 amSara says:
Thanks. Why will the effect be small?
December 3, 2009, 8:24 amXanthippas says:
I agree with him about the necessary appearance of fallibility, but I don’t understand his conclusion:
The reason that the science of climate change is a political battlefield is because climate change denialists have attacked the science of climate change with specious “scientific” arguments that are in fact political arguments. That’s why they’re so delighted by these emails, because to them it undermines the very foundation of the scientific argument for policies to attack man-made climate change. If he’s saying that scientists should be more humble and open about their work then yes, I heartily agree with that. If he believes that denialists are suddenly going to switch to policy arguments if scientists are more humble and transparent, then he’s naive.
December 3, 2009, 8:46 amDavid Newton says:
Effects in nature are often smaller than they might initially appear to be because nature is a very, very complex system. As mentioned in the earlier post there are a great many interacting mechanisms in climate and with systems in nature in equilibrium there are often tendencies for a move back to equilibrium if a system is perturbed.
For a practical example of an unexpected effect in climatology which caused a diminution of the effect of what might have been expected from CO2 release consider particulate matter. CO2 was released when coal was burned but particulate ash was also released at the same time. The CO2 increased the greenhouse effect, but at the same time the particulate matter reflected sunlight back into space, reducing the greenhouse effect. As we have moved to cleaner fuels the effect of particulates is less of an issue, but the effect was unexpected and not taken into account by many earlier models of climate change. Even now with the amount of coal burned in China the effects of particulate matter in some parts of the world are still large.
Another, more current, example is the effect of cosmic rays on cloud formation. This was only discovered very recently and the question of how much effect it has has been discussed over the last few years. It is another example of an effect which blindsided many climatologists. Climatological systems are so complicated that it is immensely difficult to sort out everything which is affecting them. Another problem we run into is that accurate temperature records for past climate only go back at a maximum 350 years (the central England temperature record) and in that case in only one location. Given that climactic conditions persist for geological timescales the lack of data is a serious problem. Dendrochronology and ice core samples can give some data, but again the number of locations is limited. To try and extrapolate anything more than the general climactic conditions 200,000 years ago from an ice core sample from Greenland and an ice core sample from Antarctica is ludicrous.
December 3, 2009, 8:52 amgeokstr says:
1) All the geological evidence appears to show that the increase in CO2 lags the rise in temperature by about 800 years, something always conveniently ignored by alarmists. For all we know, the rise in CO2 today might be the aftermath of the Medieval Warming Period, which ended, coincidenally, about 800 years ago.
2) There have been times in the geological past when atmospheric CO2 has been hundreds of times higher than it is today. The dinosaurs ruled for 100 million years during such a time, when the entire planet was lush with life. I’ve yet to see an alarmist study show that we’ll have a hard time breathing if CO2 tripled, either, since our lungs are full of the stuff half the time anyway.
December 3, 2009, 9:04 amBlue Neponset says:
I don’t think Mr. Hulme understands the big picture at all. He writes:
All he has to do is read through the comments here and see that the AGW deniers are attempting to use “climategate” to discredit his chosen profession. As many, many, many others have pointed out the work done at AGU has been reproduced over and over and over again. There is no doubt in the scientific community about AGW.
This guy gets it:
What Mr. Hulme and his colleagues are up against is a PR campaign, and they are losing on this front. I hope for his sake he can’t see this because he is naive.
(h/t – Link)
December 3, 2009, 9:05 amKen Arromdee says:
That’s like saying “I’m not claiming that AIDS is a white conspiracy to commit genocide on blacks, but there’s still some room to doubt the standard scientific understanding of AIDS”. Or “I’m not claiming that 9/11 was caused by Bush intentionally killing a few thousand people, but there’s still some room to doubt that it was Muslim terrorists with airplanes”. Actually, no, there isn’t any room for doubt, and taking a “moderate” stance which just doubts it a little bit is as bad as going over to full doubt.
Furthermore, ID is documented as an attempt to intentionally disguise creationism.
December 3, 2009, 9:17 amKeith Jackson says:
Geokstr,
1) That lag is most certainly not ignored. In fact it is one of the reasons that many, if not most, climate scientists expect a 3C warming per doubling of CO2 (Including all feedbacks, 1.4C or so from CO2 alone). Milantkovich induced differences in solar energy alone are not great enough to account for the temperature differences in the ice age cycles. Those temperature differences require a 3C sensitivity to CO2 doubling based upon everything we know about the atmospheric conditions at the time. (Feel free to argue that we don’t know enough, I’m just pointing out that climate scientists are not ignoring this lag, and are using the best available data for those projections)
2) We absolutely know that the increase in CO2 is man-made. Carbon isotope analysis pretty much proves it must be from a sequestered biogenic source (ie. fossil fuels), and the lack of increase in other kinds of isotopes (Be10) for example, eliminate any other known source. If you won’t acknowledge that the CO2 increase is man-made, there is no evidence that will ever convince you of anything in this debate. This is not a point upon which reasonable minds can differ.
December 3, 2009, 9:25 amgeokstr says:
Well, Bruce, while I agree with you 98.734% of the time, now you’ve forced me to do what I loathe beyond belief – take sides with Zuch. I had occasion to study the evolution/creationism issue quite in depth for a couple years, and he’s right about it. There is a fascinating huge, fully documented site devoted to refuting every word that comes out of the mouths of creationists, if you have a couple years to spare:
Talk Origins
It’s been well-documented that Intelligent Design is, as is colorfully stated by such, creationism in drag. In fact, the Discovery Institute, the main pusher of creationism, wrote a strategic plan (The Wedge Project) for getting it taught in public schools in the 1990′s. Then creationism was thoroughly discredited, so they used the “Replace” function in Word to change every instance of “creationism” to “Intelligent Design” and proceeded forward as if nothing had happened.
The Discovery Institute has offered generous grants to anyone who will do basic research to support ID for years, and no one has ever taken them up on it. In fact, Michael Behe, one of the stars of ID, was forced under oath a few years back to admit that there is no, as in none, nada, zilch, zip, zero, research that supports ID.
It’s totally all a “god of the gaps” argument from ignorance. Well, we don’t understand how “X” could possibly have happened through random chance (distorting what both “random” and “chance” mean to begin with), and science can’t prove “X” not “Y”, therefore, goddidit.
This does differ from the current controversy over global warming, as accepting evolution says nothing about the world about to end if we don’t trash our worldwide economy, transfer trillions to third world dictators, revert to Stone Age technology and give algore and his minions complete control over our lives.
December 3, 2009, 9:30 amcirby says:
Blue Neposnet:
There is no doubt in the scientific community about AGW.
Yes, there is. There always has been – it’s just that people like yourself never read anything outside of the popular-press “the Earth is heating up and we have to panic” stories.
Even among the subset of scientists who fully support AGW as a theory, most of them did so out of an ingrained trust that the scientific method was being followed. As recent events have shown, that wasn’t the mechanism.
One of the biggest scams was “X thousand scientists support the theory of AGW.” But as the leaked emails show, what they had was a few climate scientists in their camp, and a whole lot of “whoever we can get to sign the petition” (including laymen with zero knowledge of the field).
Even among the actual climatologists who supported the theory, there was a startling amount of poor education. About ten years ago, I had one “climate scientist” look me straight in the eye and say “insolation is a constant.” It really, really isn’t, and the fact that someone “in the field” could say so with a straight face says more about the level of scientific skill among climatologists than anything.
December 3, 2009, 9:42 amgeokstr says:
Huh?????
The “lag” means the warming comes first, then the increase in CO2 800 years later. What you just said is totally premised on exactly the opposite, that CO2 increases cause the warming.
Geez.
Please show me where I said that man does not cause some of the increase in CO2. From everything I’ve read, even on the alarmist side, that contribution is so small against the natural sources as to be negligible.
And you have not refuted anything about my statement that the earth was lush with life in past epochs when the CO2 was hundreds of times higher than the IPCC says it will get, or that we would have any trouble breathing or otherwise existing in such an atmosphere.
Typical. Here come the adhoms. If we rightwing racist capitalist roaders weren’t so stupid and unreasonable, we’d be forced to agree with you. Heard it before, thanks.
December 3, 2009, 9:50 amMarkCh says:
Many people say that these emails (and terrible programs) don’t prove that all climate science is rubbish, and this is true. However, what scares me is that we have not seen other leaks from other groups of pro-AGW climate scientists, showing that all is well with those groups. My question is, why should we trust any of these scientists? As days go by with few other scientists condemning these miscreants, this question becomes more and more concerning.
December 3, 2009, 9:50 amBlue Neponset says:
This is a good example of what I am talking about.
Mr. Hulme doesn’t seem to understand that this is what he is up against.
December 3, 2009, 9:53 amA. Zarkov says:
Go here and read about the Climate Sensitivity Factor, and why it’s likely much smaller than that predicted by GCM models. I don’t see any political arguments here. Do you? If you do, then point them out. I see only equations, graphs and a narrative based on physics written by an astrophysicist. Now tell me specifically where is his argument specious?
In case you don’t know it, the Climate Sensitivity Factor lies at the heart of the debate over global warming. If its’ really small, then AGW falls apart. You control carbon emissions all you want and it will make only a small to no difference in global temperature. Let’s talk physics and statistics not “consenus.”
December 3, 2009, 10:00 amgeokstr says:
Except for that inconvenient petition that lists over 31,000 scientists who seem to have a few doubts.
Petition Project”
Of course, I understand that your team has managed to find one whole entire scientist on that list who claims he never signed it, so it is your side’s contention that the entire petition is now worthless, and can be trashed, ignored and ridiculed.
And if that doesn’t work, you can claim that, unlike the supporters of the IPCC, all of whom have advanced degrees in relevant fields (wink, wink, snicker, snicker), the Petition Project has thousands of medical doctors and other unrelated fields. But that means you didn’t even bother to read the website, which has a breakdown by field. I did a total a while back that showed over 6,000 of the signers with degrees in climatology, meteorology, atmospheric physics, computer modelling and statistics, etc, all with direct application to the study of global climate.
Gosh, Exxon will go broke in no time paying off all those shills, eh?
And there are many others as well.
December 3, 2009, 10:14 amDavid Schwartz says:
Sara: There are two main reasons the effect is likely to be small.
First, when you add CO2, you add more and more absorption at the same frequencies. CO2 has an absorption spectrum that looks like four fairly small peaks, not like a big flat plateau. Two of those peaks are already mostly absorbed by water vapor. So for every ton of CO2 you add, the next ton absorbs less radiation because more of the radiation it could absorbed already has been absorbed.
Second, look at the long term temperature record. CO2 has been on a long-term decline, and life has been fine when CO2 levels were much, much higher than they are now. If stable climate is good, increasing CO2 would seem to be the way to go to combat its downward trend. If climate excursions are bad, we should end this period of anomalously-low CO2 levels ASAP.
December 3, 2009, 10:15 amChem_geek says:
Where’s Professor Feynman when we need him?
December 3, 2009, 10:27 amA. Zarkov says:
One of the problems with the field of “Climate Science” is that it fails to attract top talent. Physicists like to explain why things happen in terms of basic principles and come to a definitive conclusion. Right now the hot topic for physicists is the search for the Higgs boson. The Standard Model for high energy physics was formulated more than 30 years and explains almost everything perfectly. It does not explain the mass of the neutrino, and you need to input all the empirically determined masses into the theory. So the theoreticians came up with the Higgs Mechanism. To verify this theory, the experimentalists need to find the Higgs boson using big machines like the LHC. This is the kind of thing that attracts real talent, not a subject like global warming which is laced with politics and uncertainties. In a sense the global warming problem is so hard it comes “easy.”
Note we don’t find scientists of the caliber of a Feynman, Gell-Mann, Zel’dovich, Bethe, Wheeler, and Dyson in climate science. We get dim bulbs like Mann, Hansen, Schmidt who hob nob with politicians and answer their critics with insults. Dyson has been critical of GCM models, and he gets smeared by the climate community. Dyson is ten times smarter than any of them.
December 3, 2009, 10:28 amKeith Jackson says:
Geokstr,
Of course a small amount of warming comes first, hence the Milantkovich reference in my reply which you seemed to ignore. The point is that the warming then leads to feedbacks, increased CO2, which causes further warming. The initial increase in solar radiation caused by the orbital variance is insufficient to explain the total temperature increase.
As for “Please show me where I said that man does not cause some of the increase in CO2.” You stated: “For all we know, the rise in CO2 today might be the aftermath of the Medieval Warming Period, which ended, coincidenally, about 800 years ago.” I was refuting that point.
As for the alleged ad hom, your previous statements seem to indicate that you agree with me… I’m not sure what you complaint with that statement in the context of attribution of increased CO2 levels is…. oh wait – “This does differ from the current controversy over global warming, as accepting evolution says nothing about the world about to end if we don’t trash our worldwide economy, transfer trillions to third world dictators, revert to Stone Age technology and give algore and his minions complete control over our lives.” I suppose you are an expert in ad homs. My mistake for engaging you in the first place, I will make sure not to interrupt your ranting in the future.
December 3, 2009, 10:28 amBlue Neponset says:
Another good example of “Politicizing Science”. The anti-AGW folks like to make this an us v. them kind of a thing. My “team” is losing while your “team” is winning. This type of thinking is understandable when you are talking about a PR war, but it has no place when we are trying to discuss what the best compromise solution to this problem may be.
My guess is, if I were to ask the commenter what he/she would do about the problem of global warming his/her answer would be something like, we don’t have to do anything because AGW isn’t a problem. That position is as extremist as outlawing gasoline, yet we are forced to deal with this crowd of people because they scream the loudest. That, IMO, is the problem here.
December 3, 2009, 10:35 amMark Buehner says:
Or so say the models. Many of which were built to match datasets that apparently can’t be reproduced.
A fair question is if we have already been seeing the warming in the 90s, why hasn’t the warming continued in the last 11 years, given the feedback and all?
As far as the CO2 humans contribute- of course we do and of course its rising. That isn’t the issue (the quantity of little red balloons have also skyrocketted over the last hundred years). The issue is whether the amount we are adding is creating imminent, catastrophic warming.
Keep in mind that 95% of the CO2 added to the atmosphere every year is from non-human sources. Certainly our ‘extra’ 5% adds to the aggregate every year, but the popular conception that we are adding many times the natural amount all the time is not true. Its a small percent every year (in the 2ppm per year range). And that is important because it goes back to imminent, catastrophic issue. If this is a long term problem that wont really show its teeth for a century or more, spending trillions of dollars of scarce resources (to the detriment of other life and death issues certainly) now would be premature, given our technological advances. It would be like cutting off the industrial revolution in 1890 in fear of a mounting horse manure overload. Technology is incredibly likely to find us a cheap and simply answer to this problem. In fact, it has. Its called nuclear power.
December 3, 2009, 11:04 amzuch says:
Your cited code fragment is not arbitrary. AFAIK, this is based on the Briffa paper which indicates a divergence in the temperature-ring correlations.
Now people may say that Briffa itself is not good science, or that the need for the “fudge” indicates that the data is less that reliable and should not be used, but that’s quite a different thing from asserting that they made up the coefficients so as to arrive at a predetermined result after using them.
And a warning on comments: They’re supposed to illuminate the code and to explain accurately what it does … but in the end, it’s the code that matters, not the comments. Compilers ignore comments (so that it was permissible for a programmer to comment “What do you get it you take 6 X 9?” in some disk driver code that had nothing to do with multiplication tables). You want to show that a program is wrong, show that the code is wrong, not that the comments are alarming….
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 11:18 amDavid Newton says:
Is any of that work based on the poisoned data sets? If it is then it cannot be taken seriously. If it is not then due to the poisoned data sets it has to be subjected to a higher level of review due to the poisoned data sets.
There are some who are pro-AGW who are refusing to see how serious this debacle is for climatology. Someone I know compared this situation to what happened with Piltdown Man in paleontology and how Piltdown Man made discoveries over the next few years instantly suspect. I think that is an apt comparison. Until and unless results in the field are re-analysed to a high standard and any based on the contaminated data are discarded then climatology will suffer from an instant suspicion in the minds of ordinary people.
It should also be pointed out that silly statements like, “There is no doubt in the scientific community about AGW.” are harmful. I have a degree in chemistry and thus have significantly more scientific training than the average person. I have serious doubts about AGW and since I am a part of the scientific community in some of its broadest senses my doubts immediately contradict the quoted statement. I am far from alone and there are those with training much more directly related to climatology who have expressed doubts.
If the AGW theory survives the re-analysis then it needs to be taken much, much more seriously than it is now. Given the extent of the contaminated data it is an open question as to whether climatology will be able to survive in its current form. After the contaminated data and publications based upon it are purged what will be left? Will there be enough data to do serious work? Will there be enough publications left to form a serious body of work? I have no idea of the answer to those questions, but they are the sort of questions which must be asked if climatology as a serious discipline is to survive in anything like its current form.
AGW has been dealt a very bad blow by the contaminated data and bad analysis which have come to light over the past few days. When combined with the infamous hockey stick graph there is a pattern of abuse of the scientific process by the CRU researchers. I really hope that climatology learns the lessons of this fiasco.
December 3, 2009, 11:28 amMark Buehner says:
Are you suggesting that the compiler isn’t reading the word FUDGE and creating a computation all by itself? Oh thank goodness. So I suppose a comment has absolutely no relation to… the function its commenting on.
Zuch, come on. What you are saying makes no sense. We are all where aware that the comment itself isn’t the culprit. It is a record of something that is the culprit. What you are claiming is like dismissing a written confession because clearly a piece of paper with writing on it didn’t pull the trigger and shoot someone. The comment isn’t the fudge (duh) the comment is a confession that the fudge happened. And exactly where it happened.
December 3, 2009, 11:31 amzuch says:
Indeed. Why should we trust any scientists. Period. Hell, they’re human … at least some scientist had claimed that once.
This is part of the unfortunate sequelae of this Swiftboating of the AGC scientists: Decreasing public trust and support for science in general at the very time when the (American) public is increasingly immune to facts and reason. But some folks don’t mind if they burn down the house to chase the (supposed) rats out….
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 11:36 amMark Buehner says:
Again:
Swiftboating: to hold your betters accountable for their actions.
Only a complete ideologue can look at those emails and the code and not conclude that these scientists in question have done nothing that should diminish their credibility.
December 3, 2009, 11:39 amzuch says:
… because otherwise the reviewers will send back your manuscript for revision after they’ve done the above themselves….
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 11:43 amzuch says:
Dyson is a bit of a polymath, so don’t assume that he didn’t dabble in climate science. One might even claim his suggestions for avoiding (or at least putting off) universal heat death might be “climate science” of a sort.
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 11:53 amDavid Newton says:
It is indeed quite a different thing to say the fudge factors are used and that data has been massaged deliberately to produce a desired result. A fudge factor is necessary but not sufficient to say that data has been massaged deliberately to produce a desired result.
You say that this particular fudge factor is based on a paper by Briffa. He is part of CRU and he contributed to the hockey stick graph from what I can tell. That instantly makes anything climatology-related he says suspect and any fudge factor based on that work suspect. As for programmer comments, they are indeed meant to inform on what the code does. It is the code itself which matters, but in this case the code itself—if based on Briffa’s hockey stick graph work—is most definitely suspect.
This is not a fudge factor like the cosmological constant. This is a fudge factor in the generally more accepted meaning of the term.
December 3, 2009, 11:59 amzuch says:
After a lot of strident anti-GW people made a lot of noise, the gummint looked into this, in the form of a rather exceptional National Research Council review. Here’s some stuff from that:
and
Nature magazine summed it up this way:
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 12:08 pmzuch says:
How so? Swiftboating is making up lies about honourable people (like decorated war heroes). Agreed they may be “your betters”, but how is sliming them “hold[ing them] accountable”?
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 12:11 pmMark Buehner says:
The academy confirmed the conclusions, not the methodology. Moreover Mann’s “trick” wasn’t public at that point. I don’t hear anyone defending the practice of cutting out the Briffa data after 1960 and grafting the thermometer data over it. In fact Mann said he didn’t know anyone who had even suggested it (liar). Either the Briffa data is valid and is valid at all timeframes, or its not and you explain publicly why you think the past is accurate but not so for recent years, or its not accurate and it shouldn’t be used at all. This is a blatant case of cherry picking- Mann literally pasted over the data that didn’t agree with him with data that did.
December 3, 2009, 12:13 pmMark Buehner says:
See, the problem here is that to an ideologue like yourself, pointing out the words somebody else used is ‘sliming them’ if it damages the outcome you are intent on. Its just that kind of attitude that created this scandal.
December 3, 2009, 12:15 pmzuch says:
I stand by my previous comment on comments. I think it’s accurate. If you had only the comments to go by, that might be circumstantial evidence. But when the actual code is there as well, best to go to the “source”, so to speak, and criticise the code rather than the comments (unless you’re a “coding style” Nazi). I do think comments should be good, and the code straight-forward … but that’s a matter of maintainability, not a reflection of incorrect operation.
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 12:17 pmzuch says:
Their work is wrong. That makes them suspect. Because they’re suspect, that makes their work unreliable. Because it’s unreliable, it’s wrong. That makes them suspect [and round and round and round we go....]…
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 12:22 pmMark Buehner says:
Absolutely. The problem is you are a priori assuming the code is valid and the reasoning behind it sound. Hence the comments are some sort of lunatic rambling that have no relation to the code its commenting on. That doesn’t make any sense. Certainly the code should be examined to see just what exactly the programmer ended up doing… but the why he did it is self-evident, he’s kludging the code to make the code work. How do I know- BECAUSE HE SAYS SO.
December 3, 2009, 12:24 pmDan Weber says:
Intelligent Design may be true. Some day it may even be proven (to a reasonable degree). But it is impossible to disprove, which makes it invalid for science.
(emphasis mine)
We’re getting a few issues conflated here, again.
First, CO2 is currently about .037% of the atmosphere. Tripling it won’t have any effect on humans’ breathing. Raising it by “a hundred times” will make that 3.7%, large enough to have direct negative health effects (drowsiness, increased blood pressure). If by “hundreds of times” means at least 200-fold, we’re up to at least 7.4%, where people will have shortness of breath. And we’re very close to the range at which people will pass out.
Second, even schlock like “The Day After Tomorrow” doesn’t have extinction of the planet as the result of CO2 rising. Even a nuclear war would have a planet “lush with life” after a few decades, as whatever manages to survive spreads into the new ecological niches.
There are extremeophiles that are able to withstand 100°C temperatures. That doesn’t mean it’s a place humans would want to live.
December 3, 2009, 12:50 pmRichard Aubrey says:
zuch.
December 3, 2009, 1:12 pmJones should have consulted Nature to discover there was no decline to worry about hiding.
In addition, somebody should be telling us about the “900AD” date; what caused it to be warm, what caused the cooling, whether it was good, bad, or indifferent wrt humanity.
’cause that way we’d know a lot about what is supposedly coming.
But it might be that…a bit of warming is invariably followed by a bit of cooling, and the MWP was pretty congenial, and this stuff just happens (i.e. CO2 is not an issue)
Clearly, pretending the MWP did not exist, or refusing to discuss it is the preferred path.
Chem_geek says:
(R)eviewers who, according to the e-mails, have been bought and paid for by the CRU’s AGW-High-Priests.
December 3, 2009, 1:15 pmDavid Newton says:
Wrong. That is not what I said.
I said Briffa contributed to the hockey stick graph and a series of conclusions flowed from that and the fact that the hockey stick graph has been shown to be significantly flawed. It has selective data cherry-picking and incorrect statistical manipulation of that data being the chief charges. Briffa’s methodology appears to follow that same path and if that is true—which I believe to be the case—then Briffa’s methodology can be criticised and taken apart in exactly the same way as the hockey stick graph was.
If a methodology is suspect on one major piece of work then all other pieces of work fall under suspicion of having similar dodgy methodology. That may be not be true, and it may not be fair but it is how people react. In this case not only do we have the hockey stick methodology being used back then, but it appears to still be in use. That is not just one isolated data point. That is a decade of use.
The comments in the code which I quoted are extremely relevant to this discussion. If something is commented as “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” then that is precisely what I will treat the code as; ie something with an artificial (read arbitrary) correction in the code. If the methodology in one piece of earlier work can be criticised substantively in this kind of manner then all other work by that same person is called into question.
Their methodology is suspect. That makes that particular work suspect as a whole. Because that particular work is suspect their whole body of work is also suspect. That is not circular reasoning. It is straight train of thought and it is a train of thought a great many people have been using over the last couple of weeks.
December 3, 2009, 1:42 pmzuch says:
No. I’m just saying that no one’s shown it to be wrong. When people focus on the comments instead of the code (and then try and make a mountain out of commenting molehills; extracting ‘meanings’ from words like “fudge” that may not have been intended by the comment writer), one begins to suspect that the concentration on the comments despite the code beign available belies a paucity of substantive criticism of the code. Either that, or many of the commenters don’t know how to read code … which then makes one wonder why they’re commenting on it.
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 2:01 pmzuch says:
Huh? Plain English, please.
I believe the 900AD date was the cutoff for the study’s time frame. The MWP was later with that period included in the study and in the NRC comments:
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 2:10 pmMark Buehner says:
Probably because the code is so hopelessly twisted up its almost impossible to follow. For goodness sake it took this poor guy A YEAR to decipher it. Clearly it will take time and access to the datasets to figure out what happened here.
That being said, here is a site where some programmers are trying to slog through it.
But in the meantime, are you suggesting that the comments this guy made to his own coding were lies? Why would he be making those comments if it wasn’t the case? Is it common operating procedure in computer science to leave comments about doing things that you didn’t do? Doesn’t that kind of piss on Occam’s Razor pretty badly?
Think about it- what’s more likely here? Your theory that this programmer spent a year untangling this mess but magically made it entirely consistent.. but meanwhile left a bunch of false comments about the arbitrary shortcuts and kludges he had to make to make the thing work? Or the theory that in fact that’s what happened?
December 3, 2009, 2:11 pmBrian K says:
So for those above who are using climategate to dismiss everything done by pro-AGW scientists, how are you sure that anti-AGW scientists aren’t doing the same things? 1) it has already been shown that some most certainly are “fudging” things to appear more anti-AGW than it really is, why aren’t using those scientists to discredit everyone who holds the same beliefs? 2) if one side engages in politicization of the data, what makes the other side immune? (the answer “because they are confirming my prior beliefs” is not acceptable). 3) how do you explain the fact that nearly everyone so far who is using climategate to discredit scientists were already discrediting them before climategate without any evidence to do so? you can’t say “it just confirms what we already knew” when what you already knew was based on nothing more than a visceral dislike of their results.
December 3, 2009, 2:13 pmzuch says:
Where do you get this? Cites, please?
But FWIW, I was commenting more generally on the scientific process (Feynman’s comments) and such.
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 2:17 pmJames T. Carrington says:
Can someone call Cheney and have him turn his weather machine back on to fix all this?
December 3, 2009, 2:24 pmzuch says:
I said that independent reviewers, after a lot of high-volume screaming by GW sceptics, essentially confirmed the “hockey stick”. See my links above.
Oh, really?!?!? Cites, please.
Then do so. But show your work. And I’d advert to my links once again. If “exactly the same way” means that the NRC says Briffa also had it right, then what?
Perhaps. Particularly when some people are screaming at the top of their lungs on blogs and whatnot that such is true. Which has what-all to do with science?
That I’ll grant you. The evidence for such seems to be compelling, and no one seems to disagree.
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 2:29 pmMark Buehner says:
Again- why do you alarmists insist on pretending that there are some sort of exterior ‘accusers’ whose testimony we need to judge in this scandal? Everything about this has come from their own mouths! Unless you are talking about Michael Mann when you mean discredited scientists….
December 3, 2009, 2:35 pmMark Buehner says:
That was before the temperature grafting came to light. And they confirmed his results, not his methods. The Wegman report criticizes his methodology.
December 3, 2009, 2:37 pmPaul R says:
You haven’t been paying attention to the other criticisms anti-AGW scientists have made of AGW theory. Your skepticism is merely personal. Previous anti-AGW arguments have necessarily been scientific and abstract, while the CRU files provide less abstract, easier to understand evidence of scientific failure.
December 3, 2009, 2:39 pmzuch says:
It does something. And that something can be figured out; computers are determinate machines (absent hardware failures, or real-time interactions likely not present here). If the code is so bad (assuming this for purposes of argument), why would you rely on the comments?!?!? If they were written by the person writing the code, shouldn’t they be similarly suspect? If by another, then someone “figured it out” at least as well as you. This makes no sense to me … unless perhaps it is the comments that are the low-hanging fruit that clueless and/or unknowledgeable people with a bone to pick are able to seize on and yell, “Aha! Fraud, I tellya! Don’t raise my taxes!!!”…..
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 2:41 pmMark Buehner says:
Also- anti-AGW (whatever that means) scientists are irrelevant. Either the these scientists can prove their case in a way that is reproduceable, or they can’t.
December 3, 2009, 2:43 pmzuch says:
You need to show they were “arbitrary shortcuts and kludges” that in fact affected the integrity of the process. Do so. As I pointed out above, the “fudge” comment was WRT the Briffa paper. You may disagree with the Briffa paper, but until you show that is wrong, what’s the matter with taking it into account? Particularly since they said that’s what they did…..
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 2:49 pmdiversity jurisdiction says:
Don’t flatter yourself. The same could be said of your attacks on AGW skeptics, whose views on the intensity of anthropogenic global warming you regard as “not probable.”
So you’re exactly like the fervid creationists you disdain. Look in the mirror. Try introspection.
December 3, 2009, 2:59 pmMark Buehner says:
Huh? Rely on the comments for what? Have you looked at the code? The code contains the comments this guy Harry documenting what the code looked like when he got tasked to clean it up, and what he had to do to make it work. He was simply trying to make the code run with a current dataset- ie, reproduce the experiment.
Again- are you suggesting that his guy lied in his comments? Why?!
I absolutely cannot understand what you are trying to say here. Suspect of what?
That much is clear sir. I suggest you go take a look at the Harry_read_me files for yourself, because you don’t seem to have a grasp of what is going on here.
December 3, 2009, 3:00 pmwfjag says:
James T. Carrington says:
Why? Aren’t you satisfied with “change you can believe in” ?
Anyway, the declining ave temps started about 11 years ago, so Al Gore was V.P. So, I guess it’s his weather machine. Maybe that’s why his house uses all that energy — he leaving his AC running and doors open.
December 3, 2009, 3:00 pmMark Buehner says:
Well, dtr2cld is not the world’s most complicated program. Wheras cloudreg is, and I
immediately found a mistake! Scanning forward to 1951 was done with a loop that, for
completely unfathomable reasons, didn’t include months! So we read 50 grids instead
of 600!!! That may have had something to do with it. I also noticed, as I was correcting
THAT, that I reopened the DTR and CLD data files when I should have been opening the
bloody station files!! I can only assume that I was being interrupted continually when
I was writing this thing. Running with those bits fixed improved matters somewhat,
though now there’s a problem in that one 5-degree band (10S to 5S) has no stations! This
will be due to low station counts in that region, plus removal of duplicate values.
Had a think. Phil advised averaging the bands either side to fill the gap, but yuk!
Thats one of about 50 you can find with little effort.
December 3, 2009, 3:13 pmzuch says:
His statistical methods, mostly. I’m shocked, shocked, I tell ya, that a statistician should find shortcomings in the statistical work done by a climate scientist. To tell the truth, I’d have preferred my old thesis advisor used different tests too, but he wasn’t the world’s brightest bulb on statistics, and T-tests and such were what he’d learned….
The NRC report also said that there were some statistical shortcomings, but that the effect of such was small and that the prime results (that get so many people’s panties in a twist) held up.
Here’s more commentary on the Wegman “review”.
What “temperature grafting”? And why do you say it was “before” this (assuming you’re talking the Briffa stuff). The NRC and Wegman reviews were in 2006. Mann acknowledged using the Briffa findings in the papers published long before this. It wasn’t hidden away somewhere.
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 3:21 pmzuch says:
Cognitive dissonance set in yet?
BTW, “tain’t so!” is not necessarily a “scientific” argument. Neither is “it’s tooooo expensive.”
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 3:28 pmzuch says:
… which says:
OK. “Coding style” Nazi? Waddaya think?
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 3:37 pmMark Buehner says:
Do you know anything about this scandal? This is really a losing battle- you haven’t followed any of this but you’re arguing at the top of your lungs. I can point you to places with direct evidence but you’re not going to follow up, so what’s the point?
Well, this is for the benefit of anyone else who may actually be wondering and exercising intellectual curiosity instead of just wasting everyones time being argumentative:
from Climateaudit,
Here’s Mann lying about the ‘trick’ he invented:
Michael Mann 2004
Phil Jones 1999
In laymens terms- Jones (at Mann’s urging) lopped off the Briffa data from 1961 onwards (because it showed cooler readings than the instruments did), replaced it with instrument data, and smoothed it over so they appeared to be one continuous reading. This was published for the WMO in 1999.
December 3, 2009, 3:39 pmHarryEagar says:
Brian K. sez: ‘how do you explain the fact that nearly everyone so far who is using climategate to discredit scientists were already discrediting them before climategate without any evidence to do so?’
Well, I explain it for me because the evidence I have against unusual warming has not changed this month. I am not a scientist, but I can read, and, eg, I read in Gregory of Tours’ ‘History of the Franks’ that during the 580s roses regularly bloomed in January.
In the 1980s, the average January temperature in Tours was 40 F and roses did not regularly bloom.
I could multiply examples all day.
Climategate (or, more elegantly, the CRUtape letters) just shows how feeble the attempts to overthrow the historical record have been.
December 3, 2009, 3:43 pmMark Buehner says:
I think a climate model should provide a bit more confidence than ‘it may well produce the correct results’. That was not a vote of confidence my friend, I dont know how you read it.
December 3, 2009, 3:47 pmzuch says:
Nonsense. Where have I said any thing like that? To be sure, the major component of anti-GW “science” is in fact very similar to the creationist/ID attacks on evolution: To attack the theory of the other side and say that what the other side is claiming isn’t “proven”, rather than perform original work of one’s own. The reason for this is that absolute proof is rather hard to come by, so it’s always easier to tear someone else down than do something positive yourself. Creating “uncertainty” is as good as it gets … when you don’t have anything better. And if it just increases public distrust for science in general, no big deal … science has a well-known liberal bias, you know….
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 3:49 pmRichard Aubrey says:
zuch.
December 3, 2009, 4:30 pmIt seems reasonable to think that if somebody’s theory says it’s getting warmer NOW and got warmer in the recent past, it should be possible to indepedently show that the temps have been rising.
That seems to be a problem, as temps have not been rising, shown by the necessity of NASA and CRU to fudge the facts.
Plus other sources which question–a polite way of saying “contradict”–the AGW mages’ figures.
Or the reluctance and eventual surrender of Hansen and NASA as to warmest years and warmest decades. Once that came out, even NASA said that we don’t have recent warming. Not happily, I grant you, and not without a good deal of pressure, I grant you. Not that they wanted to, I grant you.
But if a theory says something is happening NOW and it’s clear that it is NOT happening NOW, we are entitled to doubt.
To make a homey example and tempt zuch to some personal snark, if I tell my wife I did the dishes and, upon inspection, it proves the dishes are still dirty, what does she have to “prove” to insist I didn’t actually do the dishes?
diversity jurisdiction says:
So you regard the skeptics’ views on the degree of warming as probable?
But I thought you disagreed with the skeptics.
You’re incoherent. Very much like the creationists I used to debate.
December 3, 2009, 5:06 pmdiversity jurisdiction says:
This pretty much sums up why “zuch” is dishonest as well as disingenuous.
If X is so bad, why should we rely on X’s self-incriminating statements? So confessions are inadmissible, amirite?
If Y is so bad, why would we rely on the unflattering appraisal of Y from someone involved with Y? I guess plea-bargained testimony is inadmissible too?
Logically of course, the quality of the code has no logical relation to the truth of comments appraising that code. But “zuch” would misleadingly have you think otherwise.
Arguments from incredulity might wash with creationists, ideologues, and zuch, but they won’t wash with me.
December 3, 2009, 5:26 pmlogician says:
And wiretapped self-incriminating statements are out too. Somebody alert the mafia!
December 3, 2009, 5:32 pmChem_geek says:
Easy.
http://di2.nu/foia/1067194064.txt
This is an e-mail wherein Mike Mann dismisses a peer-reviewed paper as not peer reviewed because “…nobody we know has been asked to ‘review’ this so-called paper”.
His (& others’) so-called “science” attempted to resurrect slavery for the world (except, of course, for the High Priests). Now we have proof.
December 3, 2009, 6:27 pmDavid Schwartz says:
Because CRU had been claiming to have done something that there was no known way of doing. And they never disclosed precisely how they were doing it. So it was obvious that something was up. However, these charges were dismissed without any scientific answer as FOI requests were ignored.
If someone claims he can turn invisible and that hundreds of people witnessed him do it, you know immediately he is likely lying. No way of doing that is known, and it is unlikely he has found one. So you complain loudly that he can’t be right. Then, when you find out the witnesses don’t exist, your argument doesn’t change, you just now have new evidence.
The fact is, we don’t know enough about the past to reconstruct it to the level CRU claimed to have done. The technology and data simply does not exist. CRU’s claims had to be false (with GIGO being the most logical explanation for the data sets existence), it was just a question of how to prove it.
And the problem with the future modeling is simply that you need to reconstruct the past to test and calibrate your models. A model based on a suspect reconstruction will itself fail to predict the future — it will, at best, predict the future to the accuracy to which we reconstructed the past, and that assumes it adds no errors of its own.
How do you explain the fact that the other side maintains that the CRU data is just as reliable post-Climategate as it was before?
Just think about this simple question: There’s some region of the Earth that had no reporting stations nearby and was rural in 1940. It’s now urban and has many reporting stations. Do you honestly believe it’s possible to get a 1940 temperature and a 2008 temperature for this cell that can be meaningfully compared for purposes of assessing global climate change and excluding local ground effects and natural variation? (Accuracy would need to be less than one degree over the Earth as a whole.)
December 3, 2009, 6:46 pmA. Dawson says:
Has the public completely forgotten about engineers???
There is a big difference between an a scientist and an engineer. Scientists study scientific things (bear with me), the should not be involved in policy making arguments. Why? Scientists, generally speaking, have no pratical experience in design, constructing, commissioning, and decommissioning infrastructure.
That’s where engineers come in. Policy makers set goals, scientists focus studying the fundamentals of the science… and engineers bridge the gap between the two.
I find it interesting that engineers have largely been excluded from the discussion as a whole. From a pratical standpoint, this is a huge problem. Policy makers shouldn’t make policy without checking with engineers to see what is feasable in the first place. If the establish a goal for reducing GHG’s but the target is unreasonable or unachievable, the unintended consequences of making this policy may cripple our ability to adapt to other eventualities.
On a whole, as an engineer, I think the policy statements regarding climate change are ridiculous and unachievable. Worse, the threaten our viability as a society. Most of the environmental legislation that has be written in the last 50 years has had a DEVASTATING effect on our ability to grow as a nation and a minimum maintain the infrastructure we have built. It’s all crumbling around us and the environmental legislation on the books is actually harming our ability to do “the right thing” even from an environmental point of view.
One of the big problems with this environmental mumbo jumbo is that it attempts to be the end-all / be-all of utilitarian calculations (heavily weighted on the environmental / anti-development side of things). The result is that projects both small and large have to produce a mount of environmental justifications for constructing a project. These documents take years to produce and NIMBY’s typically launch obstacle after obstacle. The end result is that some projects get delayed by 10 years or more. All projects escalate roughly by at least 4% per year (compounding as it goes) and the net result is that each project increments its cost by more than 50%. Because we fail to make Records-Of-Decision (go/no go decisions) quickly we squander much of the little money that goes to infrastructure. Compound that with the fact that our nation / states / municipalities are in debt and in little position to maintain the infrastructure they have… let alone try to expand it… the result is that we are not being good stewards of our infrastructure. This has hugely NEGATIVE environmental effects.
So when a scientists spin up a theory such as anthropormorphic global warming (AGW) and demand that everyone reduce their GHG’s… I laugh. ASSUMING, the theory is true, it’s unachievable. Which in turns, means, the focus needs to be on how we ADAPT to the inevitable instead of approaching the problem like neanderthals. There ways to design around these problems as they come. Attempting to reduce GHG’s just reduces our industrial capacity and doesn’t solve the problem. It just makes us poor… which in turn.. results in greater environmental catastrophe’s.
Another criticism of these scientists. They are approaching climate change by placing an emphasis on utilitarian thinking. Everything but the environment is negotiable. Our individual rights are at the bottom of the pile in their environmental / utilitarian calculation. Everytime politicians took this approach to a theory and made it policy it has had disastrous effects. Eugenics is a good example. Eugenics was a curious theory worthy of study and coffee table discussions and governments around the world took that theory (hijacked and coopted by others) and negatively affected the individual rights of many with no positive benefit. It was too esoteric… too theoretical. The Eugenics movement culminated with the Holocaust. However, if you think this sort of absurd logic was limited to the European theater, one has to look no further than “progressive” California and their involuntary sterilization laws. (If you think I’m kidding, google Buck v. Bell.) Climatetologists are selling the idea that their models are sophisticated and accurate enough to predict small changes in global temperature decades from now. It’s amazing to me that people are buying into this when meterologists have difficulty predicting temperature changes 5 days from now!
To summarize… I don’t thinking AGW is real. If it is, it the effects are small and unmeasurable or the effects are large and “catastrophic”. If the effects are small, why were we making such a hoopla about it in the first place. Adapt to the change. If the effects are large, making modest reductions in GHG’s isn’t going to stop it. Therefore it makes no sense to kill our industrial making capacity. Our efforts are best focused on how to adapt to the changes as they come.
The problem with scientists is that they do not have any practical experience in building a society. They do not understand what it takes to build infrastructure. Their climate models do not know what it takes to build roads, buildings, mass transit systems, ports, waste water treatment facilities, power generation stations, etc. Ultimately, it does not account for humans and their need whether they be hierarchical or essential liberties.
Would we be willing to give up our freedoms or clean water in an attempt to control the climate? The statement may seem absurd but it is designed to help the reader prioritize what is more important. That is what is being lost in all these discussions.
December 3, 2009, 8:36 pmHarryEagar says:
‘ Most of the environmental legislation that has be written in the last 50 years has had a DEVASTATING effect on our ability to grow as a nation and a minimum maintain the infrastructure we have built.’
Yet we have grown economically by about an order of magnitude (depending how you want to count).
If we had spent the money we spent on unoccupied condos on infrastructure, we’d be fine on infrastructure.
December 3, 2009, 8:45 pmRichard Aubrey says:
WRT NIMBY. I like HAYBY. (How About Your Back Yard)
December 3, 2009, 9:05 pmA. Dawson says:
@HarryEager… All my clients are gov’t. It never ceases to amaze me how they manage to piss money away on the non-essential or esoteric and completely ignore the meat and potatoes. The question has little to do with private vs. public infrastructure development. It has to do with the anti-development tone of the environmental policies of the country (e.g. NEPA, ESA, etc). Given our current financial conundrum, I think it might make more sense to invert the legal and tax structure for these sorts of things.
@Richard Aubrey WRT HAYBY’s… HAYBY’s become NIMBY’s and force other HAYBY’s to become NIMBY’s so they don’t have to be NIMBY’s anymore. (Someone is going to get screwed or geta really great price on their property.)
Eminent domain is a reality in order to invest in PUBLIC infrastructure. (That being said the decision in Kelo is abyssmal. The expansive definition of “public” in the 5th amendment practically strikes the relevant clause from the 5th amendment entirely. I think Justice Thomas was entirely correct in his observation about SCOTUS’s view of constitutional interpretation.) As a consultant, I’m OK with the People making the decision they do not want a particular infrastructure project because the costs to the public are too high for the benefit. What I would like the public to stop doing is pissing their money away by debating whether or not to do a project for decades. This wastes everyone’s resources and a terrible effect on the overall cost of projects.
December 3, 2009, 9:57 pmzuch says:
Did the code write the comments? I don’t think so. If it didn’t, your analogy breaks down.
Besides that, the fact remains that if X is unreliable, you shouldn’t trust anything he says very much. And that goes for confessions … unless you’re outcome-driven and just want the cheap convictions regardless of the truth of the matter. Some people do falsely confess. As for “plea-bargained testimony”, you really don’t want to go there. Many of the cases of wrongfully convicted innocents on death row were there through plea-bargain testimony or promised or expected leniency, etc.
Huh? That was almost my precise point here and on one past thread….
Huh?!?!? WTF are you talking about? Where do you get such notions? Comprehensible English, please, and fully formed and clearly explicated thoughts. Thanks.
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 10:40 pmzuch says:
Where do you get your earlier statement? This stuff you bring up here shows no such thing. Care to try again?
Cheers,
December 3, 2009, 10:57 pmDavid Schwartz says:
zuch: If someone swears that they are a liar, you should believe them.
December 4, 2009, 2:29 amzuch says:
Ummm, how? I’m not smart enough to figger this one out.
Cheers,
December 4, 2009, 7:14 amDavid Schwartz says:
Zuch: Too bad, because the joke is not funny when you have to explain it. Oh well. To make the point without humor — a source that earnestly asserts its own unreliability is not reliable, even when it’s correct.
To put it much simpler, suppose you wanted to get some information about a particular type of car. You could have one delivered to your driveway, take it apart, study all the pieces, and put it back together. Or you could ask someone who bought, drove, and maintained one to describe the process. Which will actually give you the most information about reliability and value?
December 4, 2009, 8:29 amzuch says:
I think I said the same thing you just said … earlier. Why would you want to repeat such wisdom back to me … in the form of a “joke”? I’m all for a little levity and humour in these threads, but….
Cheers,
December 4, 2009, 10:51 amDavid Schwartz says:
Zuch: No, I disagree with you. I’ll try again to explain why you are wrong since you still don’t seem to get it. I think it’s my fault, I’m trying to be clever rather than clear. So here it is as clear as I can make it:
Suppose a car has a problem, say at some RPM levels, the engine can produce enough torque to cause the transmission to slip. Assume that initially you have no reason to suspect this specific problem. You’re just generally concerned with how well the car will work as designed.
Which of these two methods is more likely to detect the problem:
1) You read the detailed notes of someone who has extensive experience driving the car.
2) You disassemble the car and look at each part in excruciating detail.
December 4, 2009, 11:07 amgeokstr says:
Of course, don’t bother to address the Petition Project’s 31,000 signatures that totally refute your “settled science” and “consensus” story. I’ve brought it up on quite a few posts on AGW and the one and only response from the left has been, see, we found this one whole entire scientist who is on that list, and who claims he never signed it…
The other 31,000 are an inconvenient truth to deal with, I suppose…
And it’s pretty obvious that you have never read the comments I’ve written here on this subject, which have been plentiful. I’ve never called AGW a hoax, but the “settled science” and “consensus” are hoaxes. I’m an atheist who is a strong proponent of the scientific method, but the extreme politicization of AGW by the left has convinced me that there’s more than science involved here.
I’ve said over and over and over that AGW may or may not be real, and it’s now obvious that the issue has been rigged to make it appear that it is. I’ve advocated putting a ton of money into real, objective, unbiased research, and then if the planet is warming and/or it’s man-made (not just Mann-made), then we still need to determine if the warming is good or bad (and the evidence of past warmings seems to indicate it’s better then cooling in almost every way possible). If it’s bad then do we necessarily need to do the only things we are being allowed to consider now, i.e., every leftwing wet dream to fight it, like one-world government, supra-national taxation, central control over the daily decisions now left to individuals and corporations, discarding capitalism, huge wealth transfers to undeveloped nations apparently as reparations for the West’s past exploitation, etc, ad nauseum. Maybe it would be more cost-effective to simply pour resources into doing what evolution would do naturally, that is, adapting to the warmer temperatures.
“…but, but, but, the poor cuddly widdle polar bears, and the Maldives, or something…
Yes, heard it all here before, also ad nauseum.
And, excuse me, sir, but which side has had the megaphone and done all the screaming about Apocalypse Now (TM) if we don’t socialize the planet in the next few years? Which side of this debate has had the entire media/entertainment complex (with a few timid relatively recent exceptions) shilling for AGW and ridiculing the skeptics, when they deign to recognize their existence, for decades? Suddenly you’re all offended that the skeptics actually have a voice and are getting some attention for 15 whole days in a row.
Puh-lease.
December 4, 2009, 1:17 pmlogician says:
If you find the phrase “argument from incredulity” incomprehensible, then it’s really a function of your own ignorance, since arguments from incredulity are a well known species of logical fallacy.
December 4, 2009, 3:06 pmlogician says:
But you make the opposite point here on this thread, arguing that if the code is so bad, one should disbelieve the comments that accompany the code.
All you’re proving is your own incoherence.
December 4, 2009, 3:15 pmlogician says:
Not quite. Since the coder wrote the comments, the analogy remains sound. You made the implication yourself that if the code is so bad (and therefore so is the coder) why should we rely on the coder’s comments?
If you reject that suppressed premise, then you reject your own argument.
Make up your mind.
In any event, wire-tapped self-incriminating statements would also be inadmissible according to your own logic. That’s the reductio ad absurdum outcome of your argument. Which handily illustrates why you are unhinged from reality.
December 4, 2009, 3:34 pmMark Buehner says:
Wow. We’ve devolved to this. In the history of lame defenses, this one would make Johnny Cochran blush.
Pathetic.
December 4, 2009, 3:38 pmlogician says:
Only the delusional would assert that the coder was “falsely confessing” rather than making candid statements on the state of the data and code.
December 4, 2009, 3:46 pm