Last week, Rajendra Pachauri, who heads the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told BBC Radio that there would be a full investigation of the revelations contained in e-mails and documents leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. This must have been done awfully quickly, as the IPCC’s Working Group I released a statement on Friday announcing it “condemns the illegal act which led to private emails being posted on the Internet and firmly stands by the findings of the AR4 and by the community of researchers worldwide whose professional standards and careful scientific work over many years have provided the basis for these conclusions.” Meanwhile, the UK’s Met Office announced it would fully reexamine its temperature records to ensure the records are accurate and reliable, even though the reexamination could take three years and is opposed by the British government.
The Washington Post has a follow-up story on the controversy, highlighting charges that prominent climate scientists have sought to marginalize dissenting views. The story quotes NOAA’s Thomas Karl saying some climate perspectives, such as those of Roger Pielke Sr., are marginalized because they are not supported by the peer reviewed literature — but it appears this claim is false. (More here.)
For a more comprehensive overview of the ClimateGate controversy, see Steve Hayward’s cover story from the Weekly Standard. Here’s a small bit:
The emails do not in and of themselves reveal that catastrophic climate change scenarios are a hoax or without any foundation. What they reveal is something problematic for the scientific community as a whole, namely, the tendency of scientists to cross the line from being disinterested investigators after the truth to advocates for a preconceived conclusion about the issues at hand. In the understatement of the year, CRU’s Phil Jones, one of the principal figures in the controversy, admitted the emails “do not read well.” Jones is the author of the most widely cited leaked e‑missive, telling colleagues in 1999 that he had used “Mike’s Nature [magazine] trick” to “hide the decline” that inconveniently shows up after 1960 in one set of temperature records. But he insists that the full context of CRU’s work shows this to have been just a misleading figure of speech. Reading through the entire archive of emails, however, provides no such reassurance; to the contrary, dozens of other messages, while less blatant than “hide the decline,” expose scandalously unprofessional behavior. There were ongoing efforts to rig and manipulate the peer-review process that is critical to vetting manuscripts submitted for publication in scientific journals. Data that should have been made available for inspection by other scientists and outside critics were released only grudgingly, if at all. Perhaps more significant, the email archive also reveals that even inside this small circle of climate scientists–otherwise allied in an effort to whip up a frenzy of international political action to combat global warming–there was considerable disagreement, confusion, doubt, and at times acrimony over the results of their work. In other words, there is far less unanimity or consensus among climate insiders than we have been led to believe.The behavior of the CRU circle has cast a long shadow over the entire climate science community, and many honest scientists will now undeservedly bear the stigma of Climategate unless a full airing of the issues is conducted. Other important climate research centers with close ties to the CRU–including NASA’s Goddard Institute and the Climate Change Science Program at NOAA–should not be exempt from a full-dress investigation. Such a reevaluation must begin with an understanding of the crucial role the CRU circle has played in the global warming drama.
UPDATE: The NYT‘s Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, weighs in on the Times‘ ClimateGate coverage. Among other things, Hoyt explains why the Times decided not to post the leaked e-mails on its website. Hoyt concludes: “So far, I think The Times has handled Climategate appropriately — a story, not a three-alarm story.”
PeteP says:
Circling the wagons – which, contrary to Hollywood, most often led to a circle of burned wagons and dead settlers :-)
It’s amazing that the OTHER half of the equation, CO2 levels, never gets questioned – and yet it’s arguable that modern CO2 data is in fact totally wrong !
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/greenhouse_gas_observatories_d.html
WOW ! ‘For some reason, they fail to mention the erupting volcano next door.’
December 6, 2009, 12:57 pmafraid? says:
finally. a post on the topic today by somebody not so afraid of being shown to be wrong as to close comments.
December 6, 2009, 1:10 pmA. Zarkov says:
The word “trick” is definitely used by physicists and mathematicians to describe a clever end-run around a complicated problem. Here’s a real-world illustration.
Consider the following problem: two trains head towards each other on the same piece of railroad track at speed v. A bird flies back and forth between the two engine cars at speed s starting at time t0. How far will the bird have flown when the trains finally collide? This is an easy homework problem usually given in freshman physics classes very early in the term. The hard way to do the problem is to write down the infinite series of trips and sum it.
At a party the famous mathematician John Von Neumann got asked the question, and answered it immediately. His questioner responded: “Oh you know the trick.” Looking puzzled Von Neumann said, “What do you mean? I just summed the series.”
But that’s not what was going on in the Climategate emails. As discussed here, the “trick” discussed in the email was a deliberate attempt at deception. Those who make excuses for the email with the “trick” comment are trying to flim flam the public.
December 6, 2009, 1:24 pmjuris imprudent says:
If you’ve read Kuhn, this isn’t as shocking as so many people seem to be taking it to be. Had climatology conducted this debate without the intermingling of politics, this shouldn’t have raised an eyebrow outside of a faculty lounge.
Suppose that the cold fusion guys had zealously guarded their process and data, and gained powerful political support. Rather than a quick rebuttal and the science moving on, we surely would’ve seen a “movement” in support of cold fusion branding skeptics as “deniers”, perhaps even neo-Luddites.
That is the heart of the issue – the high-jacking of science (preliminary science at that) by politicians (people who care nothing for science and everything for power).
December 6, 2009, 1:36 pmPeteP says:
Zarkov – “Those who make excuses for the email with the “trick” comment are trying to flim flam the public.”
Really ? You equate pasting disparate datasets to each other without telling anyone to a mathmatical technique ?
How, pray tell, do you then equate these :
“Erase all your emails”
“Tell the other guys to erase THEIR emails”
“Get the editor fired to prevent publishing of opposing views”
“I will erase the data file before I comply with FOI”
“We should re-define ‘peer review’ to prevent other views from being considered as ‘per reviewed’ ?
What, just for interest, do you think the word ‘is’ means ? ( ala CLinton ). Is a BJ ‘sex’ ? What say you ?
December 6, 2009, 1:45 pmPeteP says:
Zarkov – having read your closing paragraph, my apologies for mistaking your postion. My prior post was in haste. But it remains as a qeustion for others.
December 6, 2009, 1:47 pmHarry Eagar says:
It’s those OTHER emails and codes you want to see now. Stephen Schneider, uber-alarmist, has published his scientific autobiography.
In it, he says that demands for codes would not be of any value to outsiders, because they are idiosyncratic and contain “undocumented subroutines.”
As we know from HARRY_READ-ME.txt, the CRU codes do, and that’s why nobody can trust the output.
When a researcher says you could never replicate his results, believe him!
December 6, 2009, 2:00 pmArthurKirkland says:
This is a disappointing situation. On one side, researchers who appear to have let their desire to win a debate overwhelm their judgment. On the other side, researchers bought and paid for, marching arm-in-arm with loud voices possessing little or no interest in science. Between them, people of good will wondering where to turn, and an important issue searching for good science.
December 6, 2009, 2:35 pmMichael P says:
ArthurKirkland- Being bought and paid for does not mean wrong. Surely if the skeptics were so off-base, their errors could be highlighted, right? If they have so little interest in science, why have their questions forced retractions of well-known results? If the best arguments of the skeptics can be handily defeated by grad students — or even undergraduates — it would show how bogus their claims are. Instead, we have leaders in the field destroying data and communications rather than checking their premises.
This is a sharp contrast from cases like string theory in physics, where there are many people who have built their careers around it and are convinced it is accurate, but are also willing to admit the limits of their models and hypotheses. In physics, this brings more people into the debate and advances the frontiers of science that much more quickly.
December 6, 2009, 2:46 pmrandom commenter says:
“This is a disappointing situation. On one side, researchers who appear to have let their desire to win a debate overwhelm their judgment. On the other side, researchers bought and paid for, marching arm-in-arm with loud voices possessing little or no interest in science.”
And it’s not at all clear which side of Arthur’s comparison is which. There’s plenty of evidence in the archive that Phil Jones and his influential friends are the ones who are “bought and paid for, marching arm-in-arm with loud voices possessing little or no interest in science.”
I agree with Michael P’s comment above. It’s probably not coincidental that string theory research has a different incentive structure from climate science.
December 6, 2009, 2:50 pmruralcounsel says:
ArthurKirkland, it looks to me as if the researchers with desires to win the debate have been marching arm-in-arm with the “bought-and-paid for” folks with loud voices. Haven’t you been listening to the “green shoots” and “carbon cap-and-trade” and Copenhagen treaty supporters? Not to mention the $3 billion R&D money from the EU and $1.3 billion from NASA for climate “research”? Exxon-Mobil caved in years ago. Large utilities, having been bought off with “CO2 credit grants” for cap-and-trade, and no doubt figuring they had brokered as good a deal as they were going to get before being railroaded, have capitulated on the AGW arguments. Corporations hate waging PR battles for “larger” issues.
This “bought and paid for” theme is pure propaganda crap…and an insult to the individual scientists and engineers who worked in industry, and apparently with far higher ethics and integrity than these academics. The enviro-socialists have been allowed to peddle it for far too long.
The sceptics of AGW have gotten little monetary support. But real science, like truth, can be a stubborn thing. And please note, a large fraction of the sceptics never said that the climate might not be warming, just that it may not be clear if it was or if it wasn’t, and that even if it were, it wasn’t clear if it was due primarily to CO2, and even if it were due to CO2, it wasn’t clear it was CO2 generated by humans.
December 6, 2009, 2:59 pmmariner says:
juris imprudent:
Not really.
Politicians could not have “hi-jacked” science without the active cooperation of some of those “scientists”.
What we have is an unholy collaboration between politicians, academics and “scientists” of the left wing to hijack public discussion and subvert it to their own ends.
December 6, 2009, 3:36 pmArthurKirkland says:
Any bought-and-paid-for scientist (those attempting to bring drugs to billion-dollar markets, for example) should be approached with added skepticism, in my judgment.
Today’s scientists opposed to acting to combat climate change remind me of criminal defense attorneys. They serve a useful role. Rarely, however, are they pursuing truth; more often, they are attempting to create reasonable doubt by any available means, without regard to truth.
They pound on the table a lot, to.
December 6, 2009, 3:39 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Arthur, I suggest that you have set up a false dichotomy. (I will never again let an opportunity pass to use that term.)
You seem to say that every scientist is either pushing AGW, or is in the pocket of Big Oil. That simply cannot be the case. But even if it is – look at the arguments. Unless they’re stupid, “people”, as you say, ought to be able to figure some things out.
For instance, the real temperatures are substituted for the tree ring-derived temps from 1960 on, b/c the tree ring temps seem to yield artificially low results. Is it not obvious that if they are yielding low results now, there is no reason why they may not have yielded low results in the past, so that any temp data derived from them would indicate that the earth was cooler than it really was?
It’s true that just because these people substituted the real temps for the tree ring temps after 1960, to “hide the decline” that the tree ring temps incorrectly showed, that doesn’t mean there is no GW, or no AGW. But I think you should be able to agree that you can’t trust anything from this particular source, whether you are in Big Oil’s pocket or not.
I’m reminded of women who have been treated badly by their husbands or boyfriends, complaining that all men are jerks. Well, all men are not jerks, only the ones they’ve associated with, but it would hurt their pride to say that they picked out jerks to associate with. I think some of the same phenomenon is going on here where people who see that the side they have generally favored is in the wrong – it’s a pride thing, to say that the wrongness is symmetrical.
December 6, 2009, 3:48 pmSammy Finkelman says:
There was an excellent, although not 1005 clear to me, about just exactly the IPCC was doing, in the Tuesday, December 1, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal by Richard S. Lindzen, an aatmospheric physicist and a Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
As I understand it, the big thing wrong here is that the people at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit were creating computer models, and the computer models are all wrong.
We are all familiar with economic models and stick market charting that may appear to match data but are always wrong.
The same thing was apparently going on here – only here the people producing tghe models were insiting that nobody had a right to disagree with them, in a way that economists and stocvk market chartists would not dare.
The whole thing is like as if some economists had a theory that the sole important factor determining economic growth was the size of the government deficit and tried to rig their models so that everything else cancelled out over time. That’s what these people did with carbon dioxide.
The biggest fudge factors they had were aerosols and the effect of clouds on temperature. The effects of clouds should basically correlate with water vapor, but these people in East Anglia either had no need to or didn’t want to twiiddle with water vapor values so they just fixed water vapor at supposed known values – and that alone should mean their model is nonsense.
it is pretty simple what is going on here. If you have got half a dozen different variables to work with and you can make up values and/or equations for some of them – and you can even fiddle around with your dependent variable, temperature, and
you are limited only by a desire for some plausibility in yuour equations, you can make just about anything appear to be true.
What they did here to make this work was they just made up values for some factors that didn’t seem too unreasonable and then tried to show that the only important long term variable was carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.
They had to play around with temperature values also and maybe even some CO2 values to make the whole thing work perfectly.
It has as much value as a stock market chart. It breaks down right away as soon as you go a few more years into the future – but you can play around with your model a little bit more after that and have it match those years too.
Back in 2007 – I see in a book they were saying that the temperature would stay the same for two years and then shoot up – now apparently there are models saying the temperature will start climbing in 2009 or 2013 or 2030.
The Congressional Budget office would do a better and more honest job than what they are doing.
These climate scientists had no place for the Medieval Warm period or the Little Ice Age and their efforts were directede ast making it appeasr that Carbon dioxide was sthe only important variable, that its effects were very strong, and that anything that hapepned with the sun didn’t matter.
December 6, 2009, 4:08 pmBart DePalma says:
The emails do not in and of themselves reveal that catastrophic climate change scenarios are a hoax or without any foundation.
The hacked datasets increasingly appear to be providing just this evidence. The Manmade Global Warming Religion critics to which these climatologists were referring are doing terrific work analyzing the data sets at their blogs:
Watts Up With That
Climate Audit
Engineer AJ Strata is also doing good work in between his political observations at Strata Sphere.
These analyses keep arriving at the conclusion that the leaked raw data from around the world showing little warming or cooling since 1940 has been tortured into showing a sharp temperature rise by selectively deleting and duplicating existing weather stations and even making up completely fictional stations like the Stimulus jobs saved and created figures invented non-existent jobs and even congressional districts.
I can hardly wait for the analysis of NASA’s data when the CEI succeeds in its FOIA suit.
December 6, 2009, 4:31 pmCurious passerby says:
While it appears that the problems affect almost all the data and computer models, the only thing I have heard from the politicians and media is that it’s a tiny thing that doesn’t affect the consensus.
Why is no one saying, hey let’s stop and examine this carefully, maybe things aren’t so bad and we don’t have to destroy our economies? They are all wedded to saving the planet even if the planet doesn’t need saving.
December 6, 2009, 4:32 pmJoe Triscari says:
Arthur,
Skepticism is called for no matter who pays for science. The fact that AGW is putting so much money and so many lifestyle choices in play make it natural that when scientists started inserting themselves into the politics, their work should be questioned. They deserved this.
Your rhetorical attempt to connect climate skepticism to a conspiracy of paid for by evil oil interests is – I suspect – due to the shorthand used in the 80s and 90s of identifying the junk science that claimed smoking was not a problem as due to the fact that is was paid for by smoking companies. Certainly the fact that the smoking companies paid for the work resulted in junk science but the scientifically illiterate fail to understand why it was identifiable as junk science.
The pro-smoking results were junk science because the results were irreproducible. The results were published in (peer-reviewed) journals where the editorial boards and referees were carefully screened (actually this doesn’t make the results junk science but it helps to prop up bad results for political reasons). The data used to make the pro-smoking junk science was carefully screened – cherry picked – to give desired results. Perhaps the people doing this work honestly believed they were doing good but who cares? It was junk science not because of who funded it but because of how it was executed.
Bearing the above in mind, I think raising the specter of the pro-smoking junk science is tremendously bad strategy for AGW supporters these days.
December 6, 2009, 4:33 pmDan M. says:
Sure, the work of any scientist should be viewed with skepticism if it can be shown that he has interests that could be driving his point of view. However, there should be skepticism of all scientific claims, particular claims that are statistical in nature and not governed entirely by physical laws.
How much interesting science is researched by anyone unconnected to the interests of corporations, government, or environmental extremists?
December 6, 2009, 5:01 pmlgm says:
Sounds like you guys are lawyers, which means that you’re not used to seeking actual truth, but arguing cases for one side or the other. If you were interested in truth, you (1) would not pretend to be experts in a field of science you know almost nothing about, (2) recognize that the vast majority of actual experts have long since reached a conclusion, (3) that this conclusion is based on data collected by groups around the world and analyzed again and again, (4) that whatever objections you are raising, if they had any actual scientific merit, would be argued in scientific meetings on climate science.
Why not check out the reactions of actual scientists about the “climategate” emails. (I’m a scientist & can report lunch table conversations — nobody thinks the emails were out of line or unusual in tone, for supposedly private communications among friends. Nobody thinks they show that anyone fudged data.) I’m sorry, that would mean seeking truth, not advantage in court.
December 6, 2009, 5:03 pmAbdul Abulbul Amir says:
Politicians look at problems that call for more control by politicians and more political power to themselves as opportunities to excel.
December 6, 2009, 5:04 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
lgm, which scientists are you talking about, who consider it usual and not out of line to casually agree to destroy data rather than turn it over in response to FOI requests?
December 6, 2009, 5:15 pmkdackson says:
Well.
I am an Engineer by training, and did my doctoral work in mathematical modelling. My MS work was in acid rain, and I have a 2 very old papers published in that area. At the time I graduated, I had enough credits for a MS in Applied Math. So I believe I am qualified to comment on this issue.
While a “vast majority” of so-called experts have reached a conclusion, their entire game has been the active supression of contrary views. It is laughable that they refer to the wieght of their inner circle of peer-reviewed articles, when they were the ones deciding what was worthy of publication and what was not.
When the same few people reanalyze the same data and come to the same conclusions, that is not science. The “hockey stick” graph has been debunked, and I believe Dr. Mann has had to renounce it. So much for “settled” science.
Since the climate change industry is such a tightly controlled clique, it is ridiculous to assume that these ideas would be openly debated.
So one has to ask “what are the warmists hiding” that would lead them to refuse valid FOI requests and mysteriously lose data that might show the weakness of the science?
That isn’t seeking advantage. That’s a person trying to determine what really happened.
December 6, 2009, 5:18 pmnewrouter says:
oh no
link
December 6, 2009, 5:22 pmSoSueMe says:
If Shell, ExxonMobil and BP Amoco all paid CRU to support research, perhaps they should pursue a claim against CRU for honest services fraud.
December 6, 2009, 5:29 pmArtifex says:
Whoa … hold on a bit here. Yes, the emails are pretty damning and it is pretty clear that there is some pretty shady science going on here. However, this in no way invalidates the possibility of global warming. Part of the problem here is that you have a large subpopulation with religious beliefs about “mans place in the universe” who have seized the issue as a nice way to push their agenda. This has mobilized some of the goofballs on the other side to resist the usual suspects attempt to make a “better world for all of us”. This often happens with science that is just as manky. In this world, conspiracy theory viewpoints such as “those evil oil companies” and the “attempts to install the socialist overlords” abound.
Let’s take a deep breath and evaluate what we really know at this point.
First, paleoclimate does not seem too terribly healthy in light of recent events. There are serious divergence problems and so much political flack in the air it makes it hard to get a good read on things. I think these guys are just clueless. An excellent example is to claim one is non-political and then hold a press conference at a progressive think tank. Seriously, what are these guys thinking ? Yes, there may be some valuable information in there, but the prime movers are heavily political and open debate of the topic is squelched at pro-AGW websites. I tend to discount information from these sources until there is time for review from an independent source.
Next, the global temperature record doesn’t seem to be in all that bad of shape. Regardless of the misbehavior at CRU, there are other temperature data sets. Yes, there are some issues such as UHI and we do need the software open and available, but with what is in place it looks very likely that we are in fact heating up.
The models also don’t seem to be so healthy. I am sure I will pick up some flack on this one, but while I don’t think the models have been falsified at the 95% point they are certainly “out there” away from the expected predictions. This is another area where there is so much political fog, that it makes true assessment hard, but I wouldn’t give them much credence.
If we look at the basic thermal physics, it seems very likely that we are going to pick up some heating from increased CO2. The climate sensitivity seems pretty subjective, but it seems likely that it is positive. If there is a consensus point of view, this is probably it.
With this in mind, and even the science shown in the cru-tape letters is utterly bunk, we still may have a serious problem on our hards. We really need to get a fix on the real issues. There are other serious issues we face and we need to get a feel on how to best address them. We don’t want to spend all of our resources on climate change only to be hit by a big rock or a nasty disease.
Might I suggest that if we are considering seriously rearranging our economy, we might want to pull this research from obviously partizan hands and actually spend some dollars on independent review by engineers and scientists who are currently not receiving “climate funds” and would be a truly independent review ? This is scary enough that I don’t think we can ignore it, but it also seems clear that policy recommendations by people who already have a stake in the outcome is also not a good idea.
December 6, 2009, 5:39 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
I think this is what everyone wants to see.
Global warming isn’t invalidated. Anthropogenic global warming isn’t invalidated. Date and projections from CRU and from GISS, and from anyone else using CRU’s datasets, are invalidated.
December 6, 2009, 5:49 pmSoSueMe says:
Well said. Think of it as a prosecutor where an original warrant was defective and the exclusionary rule invalidates a host of evidence flowing from it. If you want to prove AGW, you now have to do it with untainted evidence.
December 6, 2009, 5:57 pmTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » ClimateGate Fallout Continues -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jeff Gentry and Eugene Volokh, Eugene Volokh. Eugene Volokh said: ClimateGate Fallout Continues: Last week, Rajendra Pachauri, who heads the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climat.. http://bit.ly/68Z1nP [...]
December 6, 2009, 5:59 pmWilliam Newman says:
A. Zarkov writes “The word ‘trick’ is definitely used by physicists and mathematicians to describe a clever end-run around a complicated problem.”
Basically agreed. (I might define it as “a reinterpretation of a difficult problem which is useful, nonobvious, and yet in some sense simple;” your von Neumann example does have an end-run quality to it, but many of the technical tricks I know don’t.) And I note that besides your Von Neumann example, curious readers can see the “Replica Trick” in statistical mechanics (online in wikipedia), or in various comments in the source code of the SBCL compiler (online several places, some indexed by search engines), e.g. “the tls-points-into-struct-thread trick is only good for threaded sbcl.”
“Those who make excuses for the email with the ‘trick’ comment are trying to flim flam the public.”
Agreed on that, too. The trick in question seems not to be solving a technical problem, but instead hiding an inconvenient truth for advocacy purposes. Thus, it seems to be the way that ordinary literate people would use “trick:” as “accounting trick” might be used in a newspaper column, not as “technical trick” might be used in the internal documentation of a computer program.
December 6, 2009, 6:01 pmkdackson says:
Yeah, but how do you prove a negative?
December 6, 2009, 6:01 pmJohn Moore says:
Artifex, I mostly agree wit you…
Some heatings is far different from having a serious problem on our hands. The climate sensitivity is certainly positive, but it is not at all clear it is greater than or even equal to unity.
The problem is that we all have a stake in the outcome. The other problem is that, almost certainly, we don’t have enough information to determine the climate sensitivity – and we won’t have it for a while.
It certainly is appropriate to continue researching this issue, although we ought to dial way back the funds going to derivative research (such as the influence of possible global warming on the mating habits of newts, or whatever). To get an idea of how out of hand the derivative research has gotten, check out this tiny bit of Google research I did.
December 6, 2009, 6:01 pmJohn Moore says:
Oops… posted too soon.
The link I meant to post is: http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2009/03/15/climate-change-gold-mine-for-all-kinds-of-scientists/.
December 6, 2009, 6:02 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Well, either you prove, with untainted data and impartial investigators, that the globe isn’t warming or that its warming is in line with previous warming; or you say “I can’t demonstrate with any certainty that the globe is warming (or that we are warming it) so I will refrain from making economy-shattering policy decisions based on what may or may not be happening.”.
Note period placement.
As had been previously noted, warming is not the only possibility, ever. Cooling is a possibility and it’s a more problematic one due to the difficulty of feeding people when growing seasons are shorter and less land is suitable for agriculture.
December 6, 2009, 6:06 pmtarpon says:
There is a far simpler way to look at the whole CO2 driven warming hypothesis … Like with all real science, test the hypothesis by real world empirical data. OK so let’s see, the Global Climate Models(GCMs), every one, uses the now known fraudulent HD/CRU data set as their initial values. Hey let’s ignore that messy point and proceed with our “test the hypothesis”.
All these GCMs predict a hotspot, or as Al Gore referred to it, a warm blanket surrounding the earth’s equator. OK, so let’s measure Gore’s warm blanket. Weather balloon’s, satellite’s choose your favorite weapon. The basic problem, it’s not there, the CO2 greenhouse signature is missing. So the central tenant of the CO2 driven global warming, that is there will be a CO2 hotspot around the equator is false. The hypothesis is therefore falsified.
In a sane world that would end it right there. Need new theory, ’cause it ain’t your cars or power plants warming the planet. Maybe we should start over large, like let’s look at the sun and see where that leads.
The current hypothesis is based on “fake, but accurate” science. Sorry Dan to use your trademark phrase, but it seems appropriate.
December 6, 2009, 6:17 pmA scientist says:
“Nature” Journal Editorial doesn’t think much of the “trick”, nor should they:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7273/full/462545a.html
Yet, curiously, these lawyers are arguing only one side — that of their conservative ideology; and they cite only those sources that advance that same ideology.
Journal “Nature”, the supposed victim of the “trick”, puts it in the context:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7273/full/462545a.html
And, unlike Mr. Adler, the work of the UEA scientists included references and analysis of the contrary views:
December 6, 2009, 6:19 pmkdackson says:
Laura(southernyxl)
I think you missed my sarcasm. There is a serious S/N ratio issue here when the noise overwhelms the signal.
Amazing how for the past millenium the S/N ratio was <<1, and it all of a sudden got >>1 over the last 50 years?
Something don’t smell right.
December 6, 2009, 6:31 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
kdackson, sorry. Sometimes I am humor-impaired.
December 6, 2009, 6:37 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
It’s hard for me to see humor and sarcasm sometimes when people are earnestly saying things like Nature doesn’t mind being lied to and made a fool of, so no one else should care either.
December 6, 2009, 6:40 pmkdackson says:
I understand. However, if you have seen my other posts in this thread and others, I think you could figure out where I stand of the issus.
On another site, someone asked the question: “Is Global Warming Unstoppable?”.
My first thought was: How can you stop something that does not exist?
December 6, 2009, 6:43 pmrmd says:
“Shut up,” he explained.
December 6, 2009, 6:46 pmA scientist says:
An alternative reading would be that “Nature” was not lied to, and they are in a better position to judge that than you.
December 6, 2009, 7:05 pmfsfsfsfsfsfsfs says:
Can any EU lawyers here opine on whether the IPCC position is correct, that the release of the emails was an “illegal act”?
Come on, this is a legal blog, someone should have some idea. Orin Kerr wrote a whole casebook on computer law after all.
I personally do not know if the release was illegal, but I will set down some thoughts of facts to consider.
My understanding here is that the emails were either released (a) by an internal whistleblower or (b) by an external hacker.
If (a), was this illegal? What law would have been broken? There may be privacy laws, but since these emails were the property of the university subject to disclosure under FOIA, there may not have been any expectation of privacy in the emails to violate. Perhaps the release violated the whistleblower’s NDA, but a violation of an NDA is not “illegal” in the sense the IPCC seems to use. There was likely a copyright violation here, perhaps?
If (b) then presumably the initial breaking in was illegal. But case (b) is extremely unlikely, just from the form of the data. And even in this case, would there be a necessity defense? That is, if the hacker knew East Anglia was conspiring to criminally evade FOI laws, and if East Anglia was conspiring to evade FOI laws, could he defend under the doctrine of necessity? After all, Jim Hansen argued that trespassing to put graffiti on a smokestack should be legal under that doctrine.
By the way, this is typical of the IPCC – they make claims in areas far outside their areas of expertise and without any analysis that lets people check these claims. What is the specific factual and legal basis for the IPCC’s claim that the release of emails was “illegal”?
I’m not “denying” the IPCC is right that the release of emails was illegal. I’m just asking them to set down their legal and factual justification for this claim.
December 6, 2009, 7:11 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
A scientist, either Nature was lied to, or it was in collusion.
December 6, 2009, 7:20 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
He’s talking about substituting real data for tree ring data for select time periods to obscure the fact that the tree ring data … but you know all that.
The question is, was Nature on board with it?
December 6, 2009, 7:24 pmgeokstr says:
My irony meter just had a meltdown.
And for some reason, most likely possibly only just a coincidence (probably), all the proposed “solutions” to supposed AGW only forward leftwing ideology, and to a staggering, simply mindboggling degree too.
December 6, 2009, 7:35 pmkdackson says:
Then there’s this:
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/12/climate-scientist-threatens-boycott-of.html
Where a reporter is threatened with being excommunicated from the church of global warming because he is not sufficiently “on board”
Seems the message is pretty clear.
December 6, 2009, 7:35 pmSammy Finkelman says:
Richard S. Lindzen writing in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, June 11, 2001:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=95000606
“….Our primary conclusion was that despite some knowledge and agreement, the science is by no means settled. We are quite confident (1) that global mean temperature is about 0.5 degrees Celsius higher than it was a century ago; (2) that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have risen over the past two centuries; and (3) that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth (one of many, the most important being water vapor and clouds).
But–and I cannot stress this enough–we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future. That is to say, contrary to media impressions, agreement with the three basic statements tells us almost nothing relevant to policy discussions.
One reason for this uncertainty is that, as the report states, the climate is always changing; change is the norm. Two centuries ago, much of the Northern Hemisphere was emerging from a little ice age. A millennium ago, during the Middle Ages, the same region was in a warm period. Thirty years ago, we were concerned with global cooling.
Distinguishing the small recent changes in global mean temperature from the natural variability, which is unknown, is not a trivial task. All attempts so far make the assumption that existing computer climate models simulate natural variability, ut I doubt that anyone really believes this assumption.”
Richard S. Lindzen writing in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, December 1, 2009:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567423917025400.html
“Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century…..The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode. At the same time that we were emerging from the little ice age, the industrial era began, and this was accompanied by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. CO2 is the most prominent of these, and it is again generally accepted that it has increased by about 30%….
… the main greenhouse substances in the earth’s atmosphere are water vapor and high clouds….
…. The IPCC’s Scientific Assessments generally consist of about 1,000 pages of text. The Summary for Policymakers is 20 pages. It is, of course, impossible to accurately summarize the 1,000-page assessment in just 20 pages; at the very least, nuances and caveats have to be omitted. However, it has been my experience that even the summary is hardly ever looked at. Rather, the whole report tends to be characterized by a single iconic claim.
The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn’t reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.
Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false.
Of course, none of the articles stressed this. Rather they emphasized that according to models modified to account for the natural internal variability, warming would resume—in 2009, 2013 and 2030, respectively.
But even if the IPCC’s iconic statement were correct, it still would not be cause for alarm. After all we are still talking about tenths of a degree for over 75% of the climate forcing associated with a doubling of CO2. The potential (and only the potential) for alarm enters with the issue of climate sensitivity—which refers to the change that a doubling of CO2 will produce in GATA. It is generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 will only produce a change of about two degrees Fahrenheit if all else is held constant. This is unlikely to be much to worry about.
Yet current climate models predict much higher sensitivities. They do so because in these models, the main greenhouse substances (water vapor and clouds) act to amplify anything that CO2 does. This is referred to as positive feedback. But as the IPCC notes, clouds continue to be a source of major uncertainty in current models. Since clouds and water vapor are intimately related, the IPCC claim that they are more confident about water vapor is quite implausible….
……There are quite a few papers in the literature that also point to the absence of positive feedbacks. The implied low sensitivity is entirely compatible with the small warming that has been observed. So how do models with high sensitivity manage to simulate the currently small response to a forcing that is almost as large as a doubling of CO2? Jeff Kiehl notes in a 2007 article from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the models use another quantity that the IPCC lists as poorly known (namely aerosols) to arbitrarily cancel as much greenhouse warming as needed to match the data, with each model choosing a different degree of cancellation according to the sensitivity of that model.
What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of “bait and switch” scams. It is only such a scam that lends importance to the machinations in the emails designed to nudge temperatures a few tenths of a degree. …..
…Consider the following example. Suppose that I leave a box on the floor, and my wife trips on it, falling against my son, who is carrying a carton of eggs, which then fall and break. Our present approach to emissions would be analogous to deciding that the best way to prevent the breakage of eggs would be to outlaw leaving boxes on the floor.
December 6, 2009, 7:35 pmFub says:
I think Laura prescribed an excellent bottom line Laura about the data sets. But I think also that the methodology of every publication with an author having a CRU Number[1] less than 4 should be thoroughly reviewed — from sample selection through data massage, analysis methods and computational techniques. Reviewers should include those who disagree with the conclusions, those who agree with the conclusions, and those who claim no dog in the fight.
The behavior of apparently “independent” investigators central to the “consensus” view, indicate that the consensus may well be manufactured.
The wagons were circled long before the present kerfuffle. The leaked information indicates that much at least.
[1]: CRU Numbers by analogy to Erdös Numbers.
December 6, 2009, 7:37 pmHarryEagar says:
Arthur Kirkland, just exactly which skeptical scientists are you impugning as bought-and-paid-for? Sure, we can trust anything coming out of the Competitive Enterprise Institute on this topic to be pure, unadulterated garbage, but not much of that gets into those famous peer-reviewed journals.
But there are skeptical scientists who, so far as I can tell, are bought and paid for by the NSF, if anybody. Ryan Maue at Florida State pops to mind.
Please be specific. We know who’s paying for the alarmists.
December 6, 2009, 7:47 pmJohn Moore says:
“A Scientist” hasn’t offered any information other than a quote from one of the most disgraceful editorials Nature has ever published.
In contrast, there have been a number of posts and comments on Volokh.com which address the actual issues.
Perhaps “a scientist” does his science by innuendo and reputation, and judges others’ work the same way?
Or perhaps “a scientist” is assuming that since he/she has a PhD and thus is superior in all judgment to the rest of us, and that the CRU folks are in his same elite group, he has a direct line to the truth.
Perhaps “a scientist” could address the actual weaknesses in the warmist cause, starting with the very poor quality and spatial-sparsity of the data the goes into producing the CRU “hockey stick.” Maybe “a scientist” could discuss which proxies are best, and why. Perhaps “a scientist” could explain how reliable are future predictions from models which failed to predict the current global temperature status.
Perhaps “a scientist” could address why we should make enormous changes in our global economy based on a p value (the best the politically driven IPCC summarists could get) of .10.
December 6, 2009, 7:48 pmCodebanger says:
If ChiefIO’s analysis of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, temperature Series is correct then even recent climate data sets have distinct problems.
He’s apparently been working on this for awhile.
His introduction is here.
December 6, 2009, 8:01 pmBuffoon says:
I would be more interested to hear the Volokh opinion whether Al Gore, B. Obama and the lot would (/should, of course they should) be subject to prosecution for their obvious treason/fraud. And if so, could/would the DOJ proceed with it?
Of course they could, of course they won’t.
Now what?
December 6, 2009, 8:04 pmrandom commenter says:
“Journal “Nature”, the supposed victim of the “trick”, puts it in the context:”
Indeed, but that editorial has a more consistent rhetorical flavor if you substitute “heretic” for every occurrence (and there are several) of “denialist”. Shame on them.
December 6, 2009, 8:10 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
IANAL, so I can’t give “the Volokh opinion” or anything like it. My personal opinion: Obama, no. Gore, only if it can be shown that he was in on falsification in order to feather his nest; that’s fraud rather than treason, and I’m not sure it’s actionable at all. I don’t think Gore really believes everything he’s been pushing, or his lifestyle would be different; I think he’s somewhat cynically riding the tidal wave here; but I don’t think he has enough actual knowledge about science and math to be really in on any falsification or even to understand its implications.
Basically, my thought is that John and Jane Q. Public need to not be so trusting, and to take great care in who they elect to public office.
December 6, 2009, 8:19 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Remember this from 1996? We’ve known what Gore was. If you know what somebody is, and you let him fool you anyway, at some point you have to take responsibility. Don’t you?
December 6, 2009, 8:34 pmThe Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » ClimateGate Fallout Continues — CLIMATEGATE says:
[...] story: The Volokh Conspiracy | Discuss Cancel [...]
December 6, 2009, 8:51 pmBuffoon says:
Gores fraudulent nest is feathered well at the expense of the taxpayer…hence, criminal activity.
I ask, what parties(D) agenda does Gore stump for?
December 6, 2009, 9:18 pmMark Buehner says:
Regarding the Nature editorial- rarely has such a long winded appeal to authority mixed in so much character assassination and ad hominem nonsense in one column. Bravo.
December 6, 2009, 9:45 pmConnecticut Lawyer says:
So far as I can tell, there seems to be substantial scientific consensus that the globe has been warming for some period and that increased CO2 concentrations has some correlation with that. (Bearing in mind that correlation does not imply causation.)
Nothing else is “settled science.” There is no consensus on how much of this warming trend is caused by anthropogenic CO2, whether this trend is likely to continue, if so, how much global temperatures will rise, and if they do rise, whether that will have bad or good effects. The problem is that CO2 by itself is a weak greenhouse gas. By itself it doesn’t have a big effect. The question is whether increasing concentrations of CO2 somehow cause other, more powerful greenhouse gasses (such as H2O) to trap more heat than otherwise. This phenomenon is called “forcing.” The mechanisms by which “forcing” takes place are not well understood. The famous computer models attempt to quantify all the positive and negative feedback effects of increasing CO2 concentrations on global temperatures. If the CRU climate research scientists (and their allies) were a little more humble about the uncertainties and speculations built into their model, they would have a lot more credibility. But then, that wouldn’t serve their political objectives.
December 6, 2009, 9:54 pmA scientist says:
Yes, I know what you say he supposedly did. Doesn’t make it any more true.
It’s as if the differences in instrumentation and proxy data were unknown and unchallenged.
http://www1.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/fig2-21.htm
refers to published data from ’98 and ’99, with confidence intervals; the tree ring divergence/decline had been documented and discussed for years.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v391/n6668/abs/391678a0.html
But, or course, you know all that.
December 6, 2009, 9:59 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
I confess that I find the whole “hide the decline” business mysterious. As I understand it, the trouble the CRU folks were referring to is that the temperature vs. tree-ring data fit falls apart in the last fifty years; i.e., the proxy temperatures vs. tree-ring measurement curve they’ve fit to the data diverges badly from actual, measured temperature in the last half-century, but fits well before that.
I understand the point of using tree-ring data if we can; we really don’t have many ways of determining temperatures before people started taking systematic measurements, and this seems a promising proxy. Tree ring evidence has been used for a long time in dating wooden objects like musical instruments. You can’t prove that a violin is a Stradivari (as its label claims) from the wood alone, but you can disprove it if the forger was incautious in his choice of wood, because if a certain sequence of fat or lean years in the growth of the spruce used for the top of the instrument belongs to a chunk of time known to be later than the date on the label, the label is fraudulent.
All well and good, so far. Fitting to temperature means doing something rather more involved than telling thick rings from thin ones, but I gather they have a metric of growth density that they’ve found to fit consistently to temperature over a considerable period, and are then using this to project the proxy temperature back into times where we don’t have good temperature measurements. It’s a clever idea; tree growth is conveniently annual, and (as I said) with enough overlapping samples from the same general vicinity you can actually figure out which year a particular ring was laid down.
But . . . the only way you can come up with a proxy in the first place is by fitting the tree-ring data to the known temperatures where you have both. So how does it happen that the two diverge in the last half-century? I can only think that they first obtained a fit with earlier parts of the record, found that the curve didn’t work closer to the present, and for some reason decided to keep the earlier curve rather than trying to fit the later data.
But why would you do that? Presumably (at least, one would hope!) temperature measurement is more reliable now than it was fifty or a hundred or a hundred and fifty or two hundred years back. Is it that the most recent growth in a tree is always unreliable relative to older and more established growth? (If so, it would affect every tree we sample, old or young, live or petrified, at the point of then-new growth, yes?) Or what? I just don’t understand a data-fitting exercise where it’s the most recent and most comprehensive data that fail to fall on the curve being fit to them.
And it is more than a little alarming that no one seems to know why the proxy doesn’t work for the last half-century, and yet it’s still being treated as a useful proxy. If there was a plausible cause that could be confidently confined to modern conditions and excluded from all previous times, I could perhaps understand it (though not trust it), but so fas as I can gather no one even knows why it doesn’t work for recent data.
Can anyone explain what I’m missing here? (Beyond, I mean, “I’m Dr. Science! I have a master’s degree . . . in Science! Trust me!”)
December 6, 2009, 10:02 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
It certainly is tempting to assume that it’s still being treated as a useful proxy b/c if you ignore the last 50 years it tells the story CRU wants to tell.
December 6, 2009, 10:06 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
A scientist, look at the IPCC chart you linked to. Do you see that the proxy temperatures stop short of the end, and only the instrumental numbers continue? Here.
As to discussions about the divergence betw. real readings and tree rings, it seems to me and probably some other folks that once you find that you do not have the correlation you thought you did, you’d quit using the proxy.
December 6, 2009, 10:19 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Also, here.
December 6, 2009, 10:23 pmvic says:
A scientist says:
……http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v391/n6668/abs/391678a0.html
briffa et al are exhibiting amazing chutzpa. they seem to be implying that theire dendroclimatolgy data from the bristlecone pines in diverging from real tempratures suggests that paleo- temperatures were even colder.
No they are not taking the more logical route of saying that the correlation is likely spurious
talk of a house of cards
December 6, 2009, 10:23 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
Laura(southernxyl),
It certainly is tempting to assume that it’s still being treated as a useful proxy b/c if you ignore the last 50 years it tells the story CRU wants to tell.
Or, as the second Nature abstract A scientist links above puts it:
During the second half of the twentieth century, the decadal-scale trends in wood density and summer temperatures have increasingly diverged as wood density has progressively fallen. The cause of this increasing insensitivity of wood density to temperature changes is not known, but if it is not taken into account in dendroclimatic reconstructions, past temperatures could be overestimated. Moreover, the recent reduction in the response of trees to air-temperature changes would mean that estimates of future atmospheric CO2 concentrations, based on carbon-cycle models that are uniformly sensitive to high-latitude warming, could be too low.
I take that to mean that if an incautious researcher fitted recent wood density to temperature and then tried to extrapolate backward, the result would be proxy temperatures for the earlier part of the last century (and whatever we have earlier than that?) that would be higher than measured. And that that effect would continue into those parts of the past for which we need a proxy, having no direct temperature measurements, and make the past look spuriously warm.
The problem here is that, as we have no idea why the proxy isn’t working right now, we also have no idea whether whatever is making it not work now was or was not also operating, say, a thousand years ago. In fact, we have two curves — the one that fits the recent data well, and the one that fits the older data well — and all we can say about them is that they tell different stories, and we don’t know which is true nor why they differ. This does not inspire confidence in the choice of one story over the other.
December 6, 2009, 10:24 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
But they don’t want the past to look spuriously warm, Michelle. If they’ve got to be spurious, cool tells their story.
I only have a B.S., not a master’s or a PhD, but I’ll tell you something that I know Einstein, Hawking, Newton, or anybody else will agree with: A scientist has GOT to be able to say “I don’t know”. If it’s important, he or she hopefully will investigate further and find ways to close the knowledge gap. But when you don’t know, you don’t know. You aren’t furthering science or anything useful if you can’t admit to ignorance.
I know it would be frustrating and embarrassing to throw away a lot of hard-won data, but better to throw it away if it’s bad than to continue to use it. And if that means we don’t know what the temps were in the past, we’re no worse off; we’re better off, because we’re not making decisions based on wrong information.
December 6, 2009, 10:30 pmloki13 says:
It is rare to see an aptonym.
Buffoon asks the VC if Obama and Gore could be tried for fraud or treason. Here’s the breakdown:
Treason: No. Duh.
Fraud: I was going to go through the whole common law fraud, think about jurisdictions, go trhough elements, wonder about detrimental reliance, think about the correct party to bring the suit (and their proof of damages), note the non-commercial nature of these statements (e.g. if I spout off about the moon being made of green cheese, and you overhear those statements, causing you to buy rocket ships to fly to the moon to harvest that green cheese thart does not exist, what action do you have against me? discuss!)…. but then… um…. No. Consult your nom de plume.
I don’t know what makes me more sad, that we have new visitors “elevating” the level of discourse, or that old “friends” enable them.
Anyway, I am glad that this is the biggest thing EVAH that will change everything. Reminds me of how every day dailykos used to post about something that would lead to the impeachment of Bush. Plus ca change.
December 6, 2009, 10:34 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Would you rather see those comments go unchallenged and unmoderated?
December 6, 2009, 10:40 pmloki13 says:
Unfed trolls leave for greener pastures; usually the vapid right/left political blogs.
December 6, 2009, 10:49 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
Laura, I have a degree in mechanical engineering from UC/Berkeley, and my earliest memories are of the married graduate student housing at UW/Madison, where my parents were finishing up their biochemistry Ph.D.s while trying to cope with me. I was brought up around science and in it, and I agree with you. I don’t understand trusting a proxy with a known, repeatedly demonstrated, but utterly unexplained divergence in just the years where you are best equipped to check and double-check it.
If you don’t understand why it doesn’t work now (where you can check), you have no grounds for trusting it where you can’t check. Doesn’t matter if it happens to line up nicely with what you already believe happened (once you truncate the right edge of the curve); it can’t function as independent evidence.
December 6, 2009, 10:49 pmkdackson says:
Michelle:
Here is the basic problem. Tree growth (and tree ring data) is not solely dependent upon temperature; there are other factors involved such as CO2 level, latitude, elevation, soild nutrient load, rainfall, cloud cover, species, local diseases, and probably a whole bunch of others.
The basic problem is that the variables are not independent – they have some degree of co-correlation. In addition, there are no real “controlled” experiments.
They will used advanced statistical techniques – Partial Least Squares (PLS)/Principle Component Analysis (PCA) to attempt to get to the heart of the matter. Essentialy PCA searches for linear co-correlations in the “input” data, then uses the Principle Components (PC) as a new set of variables. The PC are then regressed against SOME of the measured data (tree ring thickness) to come up with a model.
The “SOME” data is important, as this is the “calibration set” of the model. A careful analyst will then take the balance of the data (the validation set) and see how well the model predicts.
Some of the issues is that the number of PC can be arbitrarily specified – however more PC does not necessarily mean a better model. Choice of claibration and validation sets is also very important. A careful modeler will take about 1/3 of the data randomly selected as the calibration set. The randomness is key to avoiding any bias.
The technique (PCA/PLS) is used mostly in chemical spectral analysis, where an investigator can supply a very precise calibration set from a set of designed experiments. It can be very accurate under the right circumstances.
I have used this technique to varying success in analyzing chemical plant performance data. Then it get trickier, as the variable are highly cocorrelated, and the results are less robust – you can get a good sense of the operation, but the predictive ability is generally not something I would risk a multibillion chemical plant on.
Other problems include determining the level of CO2, solar activity, etc. They use proxies for these values as well.
So you have proxy temperature and CO2 data going into a modeling procedure that can have a lot of variability depending upon how the investigator treats the data. Finally, they use this model to make predictions outside of the range of CO2 “measurements” they have.
That is a statistical no-no because the confidence interval rapidly expands outside of the range of measurements. Because you do not have any reliable data on what happens when the CO2 goes outside of the normal range of the data, you cannot claim to have the ability to make accurate estimates.
I hope that helps.
December 6, 2009, 10:51 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
But then immoderate comments are left standing and can be pointed at – see, that’s what they really think; no one argued or objected.
December 6, 2009, 10:52 pmloki13 says:
December 6, 2009, 11:05 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
kdackson,
Here is the basic problem. Tree growth (and tree ring data) is not solely dependent upon temperature; there are other factors involved such as CO2 level, latitude, elevation, soild nutrient load, rainfall, cloud cover, species, local diseases, and probably a whole bunch of others.
Yeah. This is why the violin-dating problem is vastly simpler; once you can assume all the wood comes from roughly the same environment within a fairly limited span of time, and you’re looking for nothing much more detailed than visible sequences of fat and lean years, it is not difficult to be fairly sure. Controlling for everything else you mention would be inconceivably harder; myself, I’d say “impossible,” given that the very large majority of the data are unknowable.
My education, alas, didn’t include anything more than the barest statistics, but I get the idea. Tell me, do people often try fitting the data several times, each with a different (randomly chosen) calibration set? I mean, obviously the point of the statistical techniques is to minimize the difference such initial choices will make, but as I understand it, in some cases we’re dealing with really small samples here. Would researchers ordinarily run the calculations several times with different allocations of data, treating the differences (if any) in the results as themselves a rough indicator of how much trust to put in them?
December 6, 2009, 11:07 pmloki13 says:
Ah, then you’re a better person than me. I tried to do that for a while, but I came to the opinion that immoderate comments will either be correctly seen for what they are, or (just as likely) cheered on by like-minded immoderate people. Either way, my life was too short to give them legitimacy.
Besides, people will make the generalizations anyway. After all, isn’t that always what THE LEFT and THE RIGHT do?
December 6, 2009, 11:09 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
And that is a general statement.
December 6, 2009, 11:13 pmloki13 says:
*shrug* It’s a true one. If you prefer a more specific statement, the commenters on this blog will continue to make general statements. In other news, the Tiger Woods had a bad Thankgsgiving.
December 6, 2009, 11:23 pmA scientist says:
Let’s limit it to the science, not to the supposed “solutions”.
Do you accept that we are in a period of warming unseen in at least many centuries?
Do you accept that it is caused in part by human activities?
Why do you think either of those questions needs to be viewed through an ideological filter?
December 6, 2009, 11:26 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Loki, are you generalizing? Am I generalizing? You are equating “people” with “THE LEFT” AND “THE RIGHT”. Is this possibly another false dichotomy?
December 6, 2009, 11:54 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
A scientist,
Not speaking for geokstr here, but for myself:
Do you accept that we are in a period of warming unseen in at least many centuries?
It depends a bit on the time scale, of course, but there seems general agreement that there’s been warming over the last couple centuries, so sure.
Do you accept that it is caused in part by human activities?
Sure.
Why do you think either of those questions needs to be viewed through an ideological filter?
Because a host of people have leapt right past your two relatively uncontroversial questions on to a number of others (like “Is human impact substantial?”; “Is the likely effect catastrophic?”; “Can we do anything to mitigate it if it is?”; “What should we do?”; and “When should we do it?”), and answered them, and concluded with, respectively “[insert policy preferences here]” and “NOW, if not sooner.” If we were arguing about temperature trends on the surface of, say, Ganymede there would be no ideological implications whatsoever; as the controversy is, unfortunately, about Earth, and one faction thinks nothing less than immediate and massive action will do to avert catastrophe, of course there are ideological implications. This might be the original Good Crisis That Must Not Be Let Go To Waste.
December 6, 2009, 11:58 pmloki13 says:
Woah, nellie. Step back for a second. Seriously. Back…. away…. from…. the….. keyboard…… deepbreath.
Irony doesn’t come in very well when typing. You know- making with the jokes? Get it? Use of all caps? That’s what THE LEFT and THE RIGHT (notice the scare caps?) always do? Joke? Joke about the generalizaitions trolls always make?
Relax. No arguin’ going on. No, um, false dichotomies (nice term you picked up there- don’t break it :) ). Like my namesake, I am not always evil.
December 7, 2009, 12:00 amA scientist says:
Perhaps “John Moore” has a habit of basing his conclusions on inherently incomplete data (about “a scientist”). Perhaps those conclusions just happen to match his preconceptions about “politically driven elite PhDs”.
All that aside, “Nature”‘s reputation is maintained through peer and editorial review. Climate change is not my area of expertise, and my independent “analysis” of the science would carry as much weight as yours — that is, not much. I have enough familiarity with the process, though, to appreciate that no untoward data manipulation occurred.
Since you are enamored to the “warmist” label, would you mind to comment whether you accept that there is a general global warming trend, unseen in at least many centuries?
If you do accept that, do you accept that it is at least in part caused by human activities?
December 7, 2009, 12:12 amrpt says:
Well, reading other blogs gives one a different perspective than the serial posts on this topic here since the whistleblower/theft of the emails. As a nonscientist, which is my standard disclaimer, I can’t get into the technical debate or tell the real technical people here from the poseurs. There just isn’t time to catch up on the missing scientific education. However, from the tenor of many of the critical comments after several weeks, this “debate” is now feeling like the latest Rev. Wright–Bill Ayers–Birther–Kenyan Muslim–ACORN takeover–anti-Obama-anti-”leftist” rhetorical jihad. All AGW scientists are crooks, unethical, all the data is made up, etc. Too bad.
December 7, 2009, 12:18 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
What do you mean by “unseen in at least many centuries”? Do you mean “unprecedented”?
December 7, 2009, 12:23 amMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
rpt,
However, from the tenor of many of the critical comments after several weeks, this “debate” is now feeling like the latest Rev. Wright–Bill Ayers–Birther–Kenyan Muslim–ACORN takeover–anti-Obama-anti-“leftist” rhetorical jihad. All AGW scientists are crooks, unethical, all the data is made up, etc. Too bad.
I don’t think that’s a fair characterization, certainly not of this thread. There are people whose minds appear already to be made up (on both sides), but also people who are honestly trying to assess the situation given the facts we now have.
December 7, 2009, 12:31 amDr. Weevil says:
‘A scientist’ demands that we say whether we “accept that [global warming] is at least in part caused by human activities” as if that would prove anything. Of course, building a power plant and burning thousands of tons of coal tends to warm the environment to some extent. The question is whether it warms the environment significantly, and whether all human activity warms the environment significantly.
December 7, 2009, 12:42 amHere’s an analogy. Suppose the oceans are in fact rising. If I go down to the seashore and spit in the ocean, it is undeniable that my teaspoon of spit is contributing to that rising. But it is not contributing significantly. According to my ‘back of the envelope’ calculations, if every human being were to spit in the ocean 10 times a day, it would take 72,000 years to raise the ocean levels by one inch. What if human contributions to global warming are equally insignificant?
Here’s another analogy. If a boxer is worried about failing his weigh-in, it won’t hurt to wave off a fruit fly sitting on his forehead, but getting rid of the fly is extremely unlikely to make the difference between making his weight and failing to do so.
The important question is not whether the recent spurt of global warming is caused “in part” by human activities, but whether the human contribution is significant. If humans are contributing (e.g.) only 0.1% or 1% or even 10% of the total, and if it would take a 50% decrease in living standards to decrease that by half, would it really be wise to totally wreck our civilization just to put a dent of 0.05% or 0.5% or even 5% in the amount of warming occurring? The vast majority of the warming would occur anyway. Would we not be better off using our wealth and science and technology to palliate the effects instead of leaving ourselves helpless to withstand a warming that would be 99.95% or 99.5% or 95% as severe no matter what we did?
A scientist says:
Michelle,
I appreciate your response, as we are in an apparent agreement.
I have a problem with many here jumping from political disagreements to a rather wholesale denial of fairly uncontroversial basic science.
I would be surprised, though, if this discussion remained abstract were Venus’s run-away greenhouse effect mentioned.
December 7, 2009, 12:45 amJohn Moore says:
Conclusions? How about suppositions – mostly of the political, not scientific variety. Basically, as a result of annoyance at your “argument by authority” tactic when referring to Nature, which has an established and public editorial (not scientific) position of AGW, and a vested interest in the debate.
I’ll give you the same answer you got before.
A1: Yes, at least until a decade or so ago, we were in a general warming trend that had lasted around 400 years. The weight of rather flimsy paleo-climatological evidence indicates we haven’t seen such warming in at least about 1000 years. That being said, surface temperature proxies, whether adjusted thermometry or tree rings are not very convincing data, because of the poor relationship between individual surface measurements and global heat content (due to micro-climate, micro-meteorological and other factors), and the dramatic spatial under-sampling of the data set. Surface data is presumably being used simply because there are no better choices. The consequence is that the surface temperatures are hardly “settled science” as warmists(see below) and alarmists have been asserting. The rapid change in the surface record from the ante-hockey-stick “settled science” to the post-hockey-stick “settled-science” is pretty telling on the subject.
We now have much better instrumentation that, over time, will tell us much more about CO2 sensitivity (e.g. ocean heat content instrumentation and improving satellite radiometry).
A2: basic radiative CO2 physics (one dimensional radiation equilibrium model) implies that at humans are causing the temperature to rise, because the climate sensitivity to CO2 is almost certainly a positive value. In that simple, one dimensional, no-feedback case, that temperature rise would be about 1.2K for each doubling of CO2 level.
—
I’d even take it one further… if we were talking about the temperature on Titan, I would not bother to look farther – I’d leave it to the specialists, and over time an answer would appear – or at least the error bars would be settled. But since we are talking conjectures upon which massive social interventions are to be based, we need not only for reasonable scientific caution (which is obviously lacking at CRU, and apparently at GISS), but exception validation.
The old saying: “exceptional claims require exception proof” in this case needs to be modified to: enormous policy decisions require exceptional evidence.
BTW… the “warmist” label appears to be needed as a shorthand to identify one side of this debate. If I were choosing a rhetorical label, it would be “alarmist.”
December 7, 2009, 12:47 amA scientist says:
I mean, I think the magnitude, geographic extent and duration of warming in the medieval warm period are a distraction, and some here and elsewhere seem to be hung up on those.
December 7, 2009, 12:55 amHarryEagar says:
I haven’t counted how many times ‘a scientist’ has repeated that the divergence problem was ‘known’ and published in Nature, but it’s been several.
Of course it was known. If they didn’t know it, they wouldn’t have felt any need to hide it in a graph they were proposing to publish.
When they said ‘hide,’ they didn’t imagine they could throw it down a memory hole, a la Winston Smith, so that no one would ever have any record of its having existed. They thought they could bamboozle people by conflating two incompatible series without letting on they were doing that.
It worked, so far as ‘a scientist’ is concerned.
December 7, 2009, 12:57 amMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
A scientist,
Um, on the subject of your second question, what Dr. Weevil said.
I would be surprised, though, if this discussion remained abstract were Venus’s run-away greenhouse effect mentioned.
Can a planet that’s staying (so far as I know) at a pretty stable temperature be said to have a “run-away greenhouse effect”? (If Venus were actually getting hotter, that would be politically significant, for the same reason that Mars’s apparent recent warming was: If there are warming trends all over the Solar System, common sense would suggest a common cause rather than one that’s of necessity confined to this planet.) If all you mean is that Venus has a very thick atmosphere that traps heat, I don’t think anyone disputes that, any more than anyone disputes that CO2 is a “greenhouse gas.”
December 7, 2009, 1:07 amJohn Moore says:
If by that, you mean those who try to hide it with hockey sticks, yeah.
Otherwise, the magnitude is significant wrt the current warming, the geographical extent is debated although it seems global in the proxies I’ve looked at – (caveat proxies) and the “little ice age” in between is even more significant.
December 7, 2009, 1:12 amMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
A scientist,
I mean, I think the magnitude, geographic extent and duration of warming in the medieval warm period are a distraction, and some here and elsewhere seem to be hung up on those.
No, but they really aren’t. How can they be? We know that there have been large temperature fluctuations in the Earth’s past, and some of those within recorded history; we know that for at least part of the planet there was a chunk of time about a thousand years back that was markedly warmer than the present, followed by one significantly colder. It makes all the difference in the world whether what we see in the last few centuries is comparable to the start of the MWP or a clean different kind of thing.
These are facts that need to be taken into account in any account of how our climate works; they’re “a distraction” only if we need to DO SOMETHING NOW and must ignore anything that might cause us to think twice or slow down.
December 7, 2009, 1:15 amA scientist says:
On Venus:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1970/1970_Rasool_DeBergh.pdf
This, of course, is a “Nature” paper.
The gist is that the initial planetary evolution after post-nova accretion took Venus and Earth on widely different paths. All caused by a relatively small (~100K) initial temperature difference.
As for the apportionment of blame for the recent warming, I would argue:
1)CO2 atmospheric concentrations seem to be decent proxies for global temperatures, both through historical data and modeling.
2)CO2 levels trend unmistakably with industrial activity
December 7, 2009, 1:56 amhttp://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/graphics/lawdome.gif
ArrowSmith says:
I can see that the alarmists will continue to inundate us with appeals to authority of IPCC, GISS, Royal Academy of Science, etc… Sorry but that’s not how science works.
Richard Feynman on science:
Oh and “a scientist” – no data is EVER a distraction except to alarmists.
December 7, 2009, 4:21 amkdackson says:
I would go further, and invoke Langmuir and his take on Pathological Science:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~ken/Langmuir/langmuir.htm
December 7, 2009, 5:37 amDavid Schwartz says:
Michelle Dulak Thomson: He had three choices. He could have kept the fit to the earlier data and ignored the mismatch with the more recent, higher quality data. He could have made the data fit the more recent, higher quality data and lost the fit with the older data. He could have tried to reconcile it so everything fit, possibly calling into question some of the older data from other sources.
He picked the least justifiable of these three courses, the first one.
I can only speculate to his motives, but my bet is he preferred to have an easy way to confirm earlier studies than a new way to call them into question. And, of course, if you’re willing to do this, every study will confirm earlier studies.
If you calibrate a proxy with the same data you later use to test the proxy, it will always match. In fact, you can “conclusively” prove ESP exists this way.
Test 50,000 people for ESP. Then pick the 10 people who did the best (calibrate the proxy). Then see how good those 10 people are by looking at the very same data you used to pick those 10 people (test the proxy against the very data that calibrated it). You’ll see results that only had a 1 in 5,000 chance of occuring by chance, proof of ESP (the proxy works).
December 7, 2009, 8:51 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
A distraction from what? Not climate science, surely.
December 7, 2009, 9:04 amWidmerpool says:
How predictable is the NYT? Here’s my comment from last Thursday:
Widmerpool says:
I’m looking forward to the explanation in Sunday’s NYT from “public editor” Clark Hack explaining why the NYT’s pitifully poor coverage of this story has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with a political agenda. He will then jump into the back of a fleeing pickup truck and speed away in the face of advancing marines as they stream through Baghdad . . . oh wait, sorry, I’m confusing him with Iraq’s former public editor.
Are you getting a tingly feeling? Are the hairs standing up on the back of your neck? Can Widmerpool see into the future and predict, dare he say it, the future course of our planet’s climate? Well, of course. There will be periods of inordinate warmth followed by periods of inordinate cold interspersed with periods of relative temperate stability. Where’s my government grant?
December 7, 2009, 9:15 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
A distraction, yes. Just how gullible and stupid are we? Don’t tell me – they NEED those limos and private jets. To save the planet.
December 7, 2009, 9:25 amMark Buehner says:
I think the fact that you don’t understand the profound significance of the MWP says a lot. You have no interest in any information, data, or argument that doesn’t fit your preconception.
The rest of us here on Earth realize that if temperatures in the recent past were as high or higher than they are today, then AGW is much less a slam dunk and Occam’s Razor rears his ugly head and encourages us to question whether we are in an entirely natural warming cycle. Moreover it certainly proves that the current warming isn’t cataclysmic, and if that is brought into question the entire idea of subverting trillions of dollars to the climate cause is brought sharply into questions as well. And, of course, that can’t be tolerated. Interesting how alarmists appear to cheering for catastrophic warming (not to mention opposing its most direct solution, nuclear energy).
December 7, 2009, 10:06 amA. Zarkov says:
My lunch table conversations with a bunch of theoretical physicists indicate exactly the opposite. Moreover the emails are not private. For example every computer monitor at a Department of Energy contractor laboratory flashes a notice at boot up reminding the user that the computer and everything it produces is the property of the government, and therefore subject to FOIA requests.
December 7, 2009, 11:02 amJohn Moore says:
A Scientist writes:
Err, the CO2 concentrations are the forcing factor, not a measurement proxy!
The whole point of this exercise is to determine the relationship between temperature and CO2, so using the CO2 as a proxy is entirely circular. I doubt you would find a “climate scientist” considering CO2 as a proxy. Certainly the ones I know do not.
December 7, 2009, 11:20 amMark Buehner says:
John, are you suggesting that it is inappropriate to use CO2 as a temperature proxy when attempting to ascertain CO2s relationship to temperature? Blasphemy!
December 7, 2009, 11:46 amSammy Finkelman says:
Yes, of course. This is a well-known problem.
It’s a possibility any time you have a fixed set of data (usually historical data) and then you try to make ‘predictions’ using that same data to predict itself.
It’s called data snooping when you think they actually got things right and cherry-picking when you think they weren’t honest or careful about it.
What the East Anglia climatologists did was a little bit more complicated. They were playing around with a lot more variables and assumptions. They didn’t look at the data several times, they probably worked ove rthe data dozens and hundreds of times changing some assumptions and even values to get a fit.
Here is an example of them massaging numbers:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/climategate-the-smoking-code.html
Theye presumabably had some reason (not included in the code comments) for inputing these fudge factors, but the point is they probably tried out as lot of fudge factors.
It was very important to them to make the sun (or other natural factors maybe) completely go away.
In one of the climategate emails somebody proposed going back 2,000 years instead of 1,000 years in order to smnooth away the Medievel Warm Period.
What they *maybe* didn’t realize was that what they were doing wasn’t all that different from finding Bible codes or charting the stock market.
Here’s an article explaining what can go with data mining:
http://www.sigkdd.org/explorations/issues/1-2-2000-01/jensen.pdf
Here is a bibliography about data mining or snooping:
http://data-snooping.martinsewell.com
WHITE, H., 2000. A Reality Check for Data Snooping. Econometrica. [Cited by 193] (34.80/year) “Data snooping occurs when a given set of data is used more than once for purposes of inference or model selection. When such data reuse occurs, there is always the possibility that any satisfactory results obtained may simply be due to chance rather than to any merit inherent in the method yielding the results. This problem is practically unavoidable in the analysis of time-series data, as typically only a single history measuring a given phenomenon of interest is available for analysis. It is widely acknowledged by empirical researchers that data snooping is a dangerous practice to be avoided, but in fact it is endemic. The main problem has been a lack of sufficiently simple practical methods capable of assessing the potential dangers of data snooping in a given situation. Our purpose here is to provide such methods by specifying a straightforward procedure for testing the null hypothesis that the best model encountered in a specification search has no predictive superiority over a given benchmark model. This permits data snooping to be undertaken with some degree of confidence that one will not mistake results that could have been generated by chance for genuinely good results.”
It is said this happens most often in medical research and finance (That probably would apply to a lot of economics.)
A Wikipedia article gives two very very simple examples of this sort of thing.
In one let’s say you find two people with the same birthdate in a sample – August 7th. Now you look for other similiartities. By examiming enough variables you can find other ways they are similar. This would be an example when the reseracvhers didn’t care wqhat hypothesis they came up with.
Or – let’s say they have a hypothesis and want to prove it. Say some medical researchers suppose that if someone got lung cancer relatede to smoking they have worse chances than lung canvcer not linked to smoking. They find 1,000 cases, 90% of them linkede to smoking. What do you know they find that the survival rate is the same for cases linked to smoking and cases that are not. They then use some test to limit the data. They have as number of choices. One of their subcategories now has much more survival in cases that are not linked to cancer than in cases that are not and the number of cases is still statistically significant. They publish that.
The point about all of that is that, if you have enough degrees of freedom, MATHEMATICALLY it has to work, regardless of the truth of the hypothesis. But the odds are pretty strong, if it is not true, it will instantly fall apart as soon as new data is added. Which in this in this casde would most often be what happens when a few more years pass because they could not have incorporated data from 2007 in a model made in 1998, and so on.
The climatalogists were hprobably helped by the fact that there probably is some correlastion between CO2 and temperature, so what they were doing was exaggerating the effect, eliminating or minimizing other non-transitory causes, and proposing a sort of “tipping effect” that would occur at a certain level of CO2 that mighyt happen but also might not.
December 7, 2009, 11:53 amswimsaturn says:
I’ve seen this argument a lot, but I don’t think it holds water in the CRU leak. I do numerical models (written in fortran) for atmospheric chemistry, and I certainly do use “tricks” in my research (and in my code). However, by “trick” I mean a simple, clever, or intuitive method to solve a specific numerical problem, e.g. “what’s an easy and accurate way to calculate x or adjust this data y so I can avoid writing 1000 lines of code?”
The CRU “trick” is something completely different: a method applied to the adjust the data (which by itself is not inherently wrong) to give a desired, pre-determined output. If you don’t think the CRU “trick” is illegitimate, ask yourself: would they have applied the “Nature trick” to the dataset, had it already agreed with their desired and pre-determined results?
December 7, 2009, 12:17 pmHarryEagar says:
Nobody has been more distracted by MWP than Michael Mann. A scientist can make what he will of that.
December 7, 2009, 1:11 pmFub says:
Thanks for that link. Although Langmuir discusses early 20th century physics experiments, his cautions are readily applicable to any empirical field that calls itself scientific. Langmuir’s synopsis:
December 7, 2009, 1:33 pmA. Zarkov says:
I agree completely. I hope you read my whole post. Some people did not read the last paragraph. Hiding the decline was not a “trick” in the sense scientists use that term.
December 7, 2009, 1:40 pmArrowSmith says:
You alarmists are getting more alarmed every day that us science-hating rubes are onto ya.
December 7, 2009, 2:31 pmfsfsfsfsfsfsfs says:
Some more on the question of whether IPCC is correct in stating the access to the Climategate emails was “illegal”.
The UK law at issue seems to be the the Computer Misuse Act of 1990 , particularly section 1:
There are some related proscriptions in section 2 for coordinate offenses but these rely on the base offense in section 1.
The main issue therefore is whether, if this was a whistleblower, the access was “unauthorized”. This term, even in the U.S., has a way of becoming highly malleable – again, Kerr has published some stuff on this. But if a sysadmin did in fact have authorized access to the information, the textual reading would suggest that access was not unauthorized. There are insufficient facts released for us to know if the access was unauthorized, which is why it is odd that IPCC is not saying what facts it is basing its “illegal access” claim on.
The most detailed analysis on the question of whether the leak was due to an internal whistleblower or to an external hacker that I have seen is sysadmin Lance Levsen’s analysis. Levsen concludes, as do all other analyses I have seen on the topic, that it is unlikely based on the facts reported that the leak was due to an external hacker rather than to an internal whistleblower or to an accidental release.
December 7, 2009, 2:59 pmjosil says:
There is $$$$ in climate alarmism for scientists and associated organizations. There is recognition in climate alarmism for those in need of it. There is power in climate alarmism for those so inclined.
December 7, 2009, 3:20 pmswimsaturn says:
A.Zarkov – d’oh! I see that now. thanks for being gracious, as I was not the first to make the mistake!
and as we agree, the point still stands…
December 7, 2009, 5:08 pmA. Zarkov says:
Lesson learned for me. Make clear where I am going in the first couple of sentences because many people don’t read through to the end.
Lesson learned for others. Read the whole post– especially the end. But I’ll take most of the blame because it’s my responsibility to communicate effectively.
December 7, 2009, 10:44 pmBuffoon says:
Nope, I’ll still read here, I’m just a vet turned farmer and still think my question legitimate. Not meant as an insult to anyone, but I fear that looking through the prism of the law may cause some not to see what is clearly in front of their faces.
Those in power pushing the climate scam know full well what they are doing, and in my Buffoonish opinion, it makes them criminals and traitors to our republic.
December 8, 2009, 9:02 am