Climategate: using the tried and true Madoff approach
Commenter “BumperStickerist” at Ace’s makes the following observation about Climategate:
What the CRU is doing is identical to what Bernie Madoff did.
Bernie asserted that his investment scheme was legit.
Bernie didn’t share his raw data.
There were skeptics who doubted that Bernie’s investment strategy was legit.
But …
The statements put out by Bernie Madoff’s company were “peer reviewed” by a government regulatory agency. So the skeptics were simply kooks who didn’t understand investing – despite many of the skeptics having expertise in the area of finances and regulations.
Nice analogy. But Madoff was a relative piker compared to the masterminds of Climategate. This is not to make light of the substantial suffering of Madoff’s victims, nor the magnitude of the evil of Madoff as perpetrator.
But Madoff was a single person. Although he was in a position of trust to his investors and he grossly violated that duty, scientists hold an even higher obligation to be truthful. In a sense, their investors are the entire population of earth. And the researchers at the CRU, as well as several other climate scientists who were their colleagues, co-conspired to elevate their own belief system above the facts, in order to advance a political agenda (as well as their own careers) that would (and still could) negatively affect the economy of the whole world.
For a very long time they got away with it, even though (much like Madoff) they would not show their work. At least Madoff is now in prison. Will Jones and Mann ever follow?
[ADDENDUM: Daniel Henninger has a must-read column in today’s WSJ. He makes some points similar to the ones I made in one of my first posts on Climategate, when I said:
The foundation of science, as well as our trust in it, rests on the idea that facts are sacred, and that they come before theories. If the facts don’t fit, you must acquit. In science, there is no principle of allowing lies in the service of “a higher truth.” There can only be truth.
Henninger writes:
If the new ethos is that “close-enough” science is now sufficient to achieve political goals, serious scientists should be under no illusion that politicians will press-gang them into service for future agendas. Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an [sic] stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails. Science is on the credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with it.
Climategate is a matter of extraordinary and nearly unprecedented seriousness. Science itself is threatened.
(Hat tip: “Tom.”)]
I don’t believe your characterization of this incident is at all accurate, Neo. There’s simply no evidence of any significant malfeasance here; most of the quotes were taken out of context. For example, the “travesty” quote about not being able to account for the lack of observed warming was simply in reference to poor data collection in a particular data set, not a travesty that there was no observable warming, as there is plenty of observational evidence of significant warming in the latter 20th century in other data sets. Similarly, the “hiding trick” refers simply to plotting real temperature data as a reference in the graph, and omitting data from 1960 on in the tree rings that are known to be inaccurate, because they diverge from measured temperatures on the ground (in general the tree ring data has been discredited for some time as we discussed in an earlier thread on this topic).
I regret to say, Mitsu, that I think you’re wrong here. Indeed, the standard talking point for nearly two weeks from the CRUdeniers always centers on the email’s being “out of context” and or “no big deal.”
What the emails in toto show is just the opposite. They show a culture of corruption so deep and pervasive that it seems normal.
The emails are the center of the lie. It is from the emails we can extrapolate to the actual daily real world/real time decision to deceive over decades.
See:
ClimateGate: First Lie is the Deepest
http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/enemies_foreign_domestic/climategate_first_lie_is.php
Mitsu: you are way way behind here. Whether you are merely ignorant, or just making excuses when you actually know better, I don’t know. But if you want to be considered an independent thinker, get up to speed on what the actual criticisms of the CRU researchers are, and about the realities revealed in all the hacked information, not just the emails.
They conspired to cover up information in violation of the law. They stopped their opponents from being peer-reviewed, and then criticized them for their lack of peer review. They fudged and adjusted their own data beyond recognition in order to conform to a pre-arranged outcome. Then they conveniently lost the data.
For Madoff the damage is estimated at 13 to 15 billion.For climate-gate we are talking, thus far, dozens of times more damage already.Disasters of this magnitude are only possible if gov’t sponsored.
Admittedly I haven’t paid much attention to this, Gerard and Neo, but as I say, the key thing is to look carefully at the actual data. I read your post Gerard, but I don’t see where in your post you make references to the actual criticisms on the science. There are actually three separate questions here: 1) whether some of the analyses made by the CRU are problematic, 2) whether this was due to intentional gross malfeasance, and 3) whether this matters with respect to the overall body of evidence.
Firstly, there’s the question of the tree-ring splicing (i.e., the ‘trick’). The assertion is that tree ring data is problematic after 1960 because it diverges from measured thermometer temperature readings. It appears from what I can tell that because of the divergence problem, the CRU researchers overlaid thermometer readings to make it clear the tree ring data was not accurate. From the reports I’m reading, they didn’t “hide” the fact that they did this, it was just a kind of kludge to correct for an anomaly in the data. So it appears to me this email was taken out of context to imply a purposeful deception when it was just a sloppy hack. So my view is that at least in this case, the answer to 2) is no, this wasn’t a deception but rather just sloppiness. However, I do think that the emails overall do indicate what to my mind is a shameful and unscientific pattern of wanting to spin things — however the notion that they’re doing this because they want to deceive people about climate change I think is clearly wrong. They are doing it because they believe there is a serious problem and they don’t want people to see what they think is contrary evidence … I think that’s the wrong attitude, of course, but there’s no doubt in my mind that these guys clearly believe in AGW. It’s an unfortunate human tendency to want to control spin; everybody does it (there are lots of egregious examples of this on both sides of the political spectrum).
However, the fact remains that the divergence in the latter 20th century is likely to mean earlier data are compromised as well. We discussed this earlier with respect to the hockey stick graph. I agreed then and do now that the analysis looks credible enough to cast doubt on a lot of the tree-ring based data. I think the answer to 1) in this case is yes, in this case tree-ring based reconstructions are doubtful (for instance if tree ring growth is nonlinear it would tend to suppress warmer periods in the past, such as the Medieval Warm Period).
However, the fact remains that we do have reliable thermometer readings for the last 150 years or so, which do show a marked warming this century, with the last decade by far the warmest. There’s reason to believe this will level off for the next several years due to natural cycles in circulation, El Nino, etc., but it will pick up again later next decade. There’s a vast array of other evidence, not merely tree-ring data, for historical climate trends; the CRU is hardly the only group working on this. So I believe the answer to 3) is, this isn’t significant overall.
What I’ve never understood about the “skeptics” is by what mechanisms they expect the additional energy trapped by CO2 to be dissipated without raising the global average temperature? I realize that the very notion that we humans could have an impact on something as big as the planet may seem hard to imagine, but the basic physics is rather simple. CO2 traps energy. Where does it go? Some climate skeptics say well there will be more cloud cover, etc… but more cloud cover STILL implies a higher temperature. Such changes would only serve to dampen the effect, not eliminate it.
Once again, as with health care, the ginned-up carbon mitigation schemes aren’t just about the money, although it would be bad enough if they were. It’s also about the breathtaking loss of freedom implicit in what these various governments are attempting to impose on people. I hold no brief for Bernie Madoff, but the truth is that he really isn’t on the radar screen with these guys, the scale isn’t remotely the same. Madoff’s hijinks had neither the scope nor the magnitude, and certainly not the will to power, that we’re seeing in the ambitions of the climate control movement. It’s absolutely true that disasters of this magnitude are only possible through government agency.
You all need to read today’s piece by Henninger in the Wall St Journal. He gets it. Mitsu, as usual, doesn’t.
James Hansen as NASA is another deceiver. He falsified climate data and results viv-a-vis the warmest year but was caught and forced to fess up to his shenanigans. I’m sure that he will soon be asked to leave NASA as he brings nothing but shame to what would otherwise be revered as a terrific group of rocket scientists. He degrades their science and lowers their otherwise well earned reputations.
Does Al Gore bear any resemblance to Madoff in the broader scenario? Isn’t he attracting investors to his fund, Generation Investment Management, based on the attention he has directed toward climate change?
Mitsu wants to disregard the emails and move straight to the data.
Okay, here’s something from Eric Raymond (a person even Mitsu should agree knows his “data”) on the code:
===
rom the CRU code file osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro , used to prepare a graph purported to be of Northern Hemisphere temperatures and reconstructions.
;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
This, people, is blatant data-cooking, with no pretense otherwise. It flattens a period of warm temperatures in the 1940s 1930s – see those negative coefficients? Then, later on, it applies a positive multiplier so you get a nice dramatic hockey stick at the end of the century.
All you apologists weakly protesting that this is research business as usual and there are plausible explanations for everything in the emails? Sackcloth and ashes time for you. This isn’t just a smoking gun, it’s a siege cannon with the barrel still hot.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447
=====
I’m pretty sure Mitsu knows who Eric Raymond is, but for others here’s the opening to his entry at La Wik:
=====
Eric Steven Raymond[1] (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is a computer programmer, author and open source software advocate. His name became known within the hacker culture when he picked up maintenance of the “Jargon File” in 1990. After the 1997 publication of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, Raymond became, for a number of years, an unofficial spokesman of the open source movement.[2]
=====
A key difference between Climategate and Madoffgate is that one did not have to be a financial rocket-scientist to know that the Madoff’s purported returns were not credible. However, one has to be a meteorologist to understand the climate data — which, it appears, was made available only to those scientists who bought into “global warming” irrespective of the data. Another difference regards the two Federal agencies involved: the SEC and the EPA. The SEC failed because of incompetence and the failure of divisions and offices within the agency to share information. With the EPA you have an agency that was long “sold” on global warming.
mitsu:
Rapidly shedding the “useful” tag, and morphing into simply, “idiot.”
mitsu,
One of the biggest criticisms that can be leveled at the CRU crew is that they refused to divulge their original source data as well as their calculation methods to anything resembling an open peer review.
The only ones apparently doing peer review were the guys deeply involved in this scandal. Anyone outside the club were castigated as “deniers”.
Consider it something of a good ol boy’s club.
You suggest we look at the “actual data” – yet that very data was tossed out decades ago – it can’t be reviewed.
The only thing left is the data they’ve cooked, which we now know is basically worthless.
Likewise they hid their calculations, and now that it’s available for review it’s appearing more and more as if they didn’t have a clue what they were doing.
No matter how it’s sliced, this does not look good for anyone pushing the AGW theory.
The only way AGW theorists can regain any kind of validity for their cause is to go back and do it all over again.
They need to collect original data not tainted by CRU or Mann, perform calculations in an open manner that is completely transparent and available for a true peer review, and then – and only then – can they begin to make the case that there is or is not AGW occurring.
Mitsu,
Again and yet again I will say that AGW enthusiasts are not operating as scientists. They have noted a coincidence and concluded a cause-and-effect relationship. The coincidence is between CO2 levels and global temperature, and they suppose that the one is causing the other. They have not demonstrated this relationship, though, and they have not taken one single step to rule any other possibility out–which they must do, in order to be using scientific method. I have always been skeptical of people whose predictions are based on modeling anyway, and that’s about the only thing these guys seem to use.
You–and, to be fair, many CRU apologists–seem to be saying, “Well, they’re nice guys, earnest and honest scientists, and at worst are incompetent and mean no harm.” But it occurs to me that if they were able to rise to the top of their discipline and still display this level of incompetence, I should for the sake of the discipline prefer that they’ve been malicious.
Your description of the lack of post-1960 tree-ring and temperature data coincidence is correct enough, but you do not address the question of why, if we know that the relationship is undependable, anyone should be allowed to get away with using it in the first place. It’s true that there’s been warming during this century, but that is not unique, or even rare. Many periods in the geological past have warmed, and in fact there have been periods without any glaciation anywhere on earth–and these periods have not been associated with any CO2 anomalies. We are right now somewhere along the continuum of emerging from the Little Ice Age, so it’s not surprising that we should see it warming up.
But the most interesting bit of recent research is contained in a fairly new paper by two German physicists, linked here: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf and usefully reviewed here: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/politics_and_greenhouse_gasses.html. A friend of mine sent me the peer-reviewed paper last week, and I’m still in the process of going through it, but it is fairly astounding. The authors have come up with some pretty conclusive (and scientifically accountable) findings about the failure of CO2 to actually function as a greenhouse gas at all. The simplicity of it is fairly compelling–which is often the case with the best science. If it holds up–and, as I say, it has already apparently survived peer review–then we may be about to see something pretty amazing: a fundamental re-evaluation of our view of atmospheric physics. Hmmm.
Mitsu: Surely we can agree that the straightforward approach is for AGW scientists to release all their data and all their methodology so that others may inspect and attempt to reproduce AGW findings.
I recognize that it is not possible to do this perfectly and immediately. I am asking for good faith efforts, given the stakes of global warming and the burden placed upon taxpayers and the global financial/technological system.
There is an AGW scientist, Dr. Judith Curry, who is recommending the same openness and transparency.
However, when I made this recommendation (as did others) on Gavin Schmidt’s RealClimate site, Schmidt repeatedly dodged the question with half-answers, excuses, ridicule, editing my posts and censorship.
Personally I am persuaded that some of the current warming is AGW. I am now also persuaded that there is something terribly unscientific about the conduct of AGW scientists.
They are behaving, as the great physicist Richard Feynman once described, as “cargo cult scientists.”
“They are doing it because they believe there is a serious problem and they don’t want people to see what they think is contrary evidence … I think that’s the wrong attitude, of course, but there’s no doubt in my mind that these guys clearly believe in AGW.”
Mitsu, this makes no sense at all. If they believed there was a serious problem, they would not be afraid of letting people see “contrary evidence” because they would know what was wrong with the contrary evidence and be able to explain persuasively what it was. Clearly, they didn’t and couldn’t.
Furthermore, who the he** put them in charge of deciding what other people got to see? Nobody except themselves, and only by means that cannot be characterized as anything other than (your phrase) significant malfeasance: avoiding FOI requests for years, deleting material to frustrate the same FOI requests, asking others to do the same thing, conspiring to delegitimize science journals that published “skeptical” research and get rid of science journal editors who accepted such research (and, when one such editor did in fact leave his post, telling each other that a “leak” had been plugged – doesn’t the word “leak” usually connote the escape of TRUTHFUL information?), hiding and “losing” original data obtained entirely with public funds, bragging that from behind the scenes they controlled a supposedly objective climate website (RealClimate, Gavin Schmidt) and could make certain that it broadcast only the proper PR — I mean honestly, Mitsu, if you don’t think all that is significant malfeasance, then you must use a very unusual definition of the word.
The Feynman quote is too good and apropos not to quote directly:
But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. … It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards.
For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked — to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can — if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong — to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it….
In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
— Richard Feynman, Cargo Cult Science adapted from his 1974 CalTech commencement address
Well said, Mrs Whatsit!
I don’t doubt that AGW scientists believe in AGW and consider it important — the same could be said of the Roman Catholic officials who persecuted Galileo — but that doesn’t give them license to sandbag and try to destroy anyone who disagrees with the AGW scientists and their mission.
The Anchoress linked to this article on Hansen:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6941974.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797093
It pretty much shows how the climate crew has not only claimed consensus for their measurements and graphs, but also have extended that consensus to include all sorts of predictions and rectifying measures proposed by their cheerleaders. Hansen’s beliefs seem to have gotten trampled in the process.
Actually, Mitsu, your sneaking insertion did not go unnoticed.
The last decade has most emphatically not been warmer. In fact, that’s one of the things Jones was trying to hide.
“They are doing it because they believe there is a serious problem and they don’t want people to see what they think is contrary evidence”…if true, this would be analogous not so much to Madoff, but rather to a CEO who believed in the future of his company, thought that current financial results done according to GAAP did not represent the deeper truth about the company, and decided to fudge the results to protect (in their view) the long-term viability of the company.
Some of these individuals are going to be spending DECADES in prison.
Mitsu,
You are highly negligent on this story. Very highly negligent.
There are a NUMBER of programmers (IT people) and scientists involved in this scandal and you CHOSE not to read what has happened.
Your choice makes you irrelevant and doesn’t make Neo inaccurate.
This is worse than Bernie Madoff as Bernie has about 80 IT people involved in the development of about 210 programs that did what he wanted done.
Same case here except there are 100’s of billions of dollars that government organizations are looking at spending because of the so-called “settled” science that isn’t. Many organizations including IPCC got data from this place.
Garbage in – Garbage out.
Mitsu, you have your head in the sand and until you get caught up on this one – you can’t speak with any relevance.
“I realize that the very notion that we humans could have an impact on something as big as the planet may seem hard to imagine, but the basic physics is rather simple. CO2 traps energy. Where does it go? Some climate skeptics say well there will be more cloud cover, etc… but more cloud cover STILL implies a higher temperature. Such changes would only serve to dampen the effect, not eliminate it.”
Ok, now where to begin… Mitsu, you seem to have no grasp at all of the physics here.
1) CO2 absorbs and reradiates (basic quantum physics) a small portion of the IR spectrum, both incoming and outgoing. Some of the re-radiated IR returns to the surface, hence the “greenhouse effect”. However, above 250 ppm, its effect is negligible; i.e. all the “greenhouse effect” of CO2 is already in play. Adding more CO2 justs helps plants to grow. Even the Jones types acknowledge the logarithimic dependence of CO2’s effect.
2) Cloud cover reflects more of the spectrum than it absorbs of the outgoing IR from the surface. Anyone remember the old “nuclear winter”scare which is based entirely on this fact? Thus, more cloud cover actually will decrease the net energy budget.
3) We have a grand experiment under way right now to test Svensmark’s idea that a less active sun allows more cosmic rays, which seeds more clouds, thus cooling the planet. His work has been given a positive test on a small scale in the laboratory, and is currently under a larger experimental test at CERN. However, with the sun making signs that it is heading for a Maunder type minimum, we may get direct data of this hypothesis on a planetary wide basis over the next decade. Note all the emphasis on letting nature tell us if Svensmark is correct. Contrast that with Jones et al who were trying to make nature bend to their whim.
Friends:
You all really need to read Henninger today-see Neo’s link above.
The lying, the Lysenkoism is shot through our scientific “community”. That is Henninger’s over-arching point, and it hit home to me the instant I read it. That he should see what the New England Journal of Medicine has become floored me; it is why I earlier cancelled the subscription I started in medical school 40yrs ago. Leftism is floridly afoot in medicine.
We need not attempt our own scientific analyses on this site. Non-scientists need to get a grip on the scientific method, and on the history and philosophy of science instead. You will then see,rather than intuit, what’s going on….though your intuitions have been right on Climategate.
The doctrinaire Left is/has taken over much of the hard science field, as it has the humanities and social sciences (such as they are). That is the critical crisis, bigger than Climategate: being thrust back into the Dark Ages.
Climategate is a matter of extraordinary and nearly unprecedented seriousness. Science itself is threatened.
i am too lazy to go search the time i said way long ago that this was the case and what made it a win win for the left. i laid it out.
maybe i am not so clearly understood because people have little vision and cant look forward more than the tips of their own nose.
to anyone paying attention, i have been way ahead of the curve on most of all this. but then again, i am not working with a pieve meal history that most think is whole cloth.
>The last decade has most emphatically not been warmer.
>In fact, that’s one of the things Jones was trying to hide.
No, you’re misreading this. What he was trying to “hide” was the fact that the tree ring data doesn’t show warming which we know has occurred from thermometer readings. This indicates tree ring data are probably based on a nonlinear response which I agree calls into question all of the tree ring reconstructions. However, as I pointed out there are many other temperature reconstructions which are a lot more reliable (for example, tree ring reconstructions often miss the Medieval Warm Period perhaps for the same reason they’re missing the post-1960 warming).
I totally agree on the Feynman quote — one of my favorites, and I also agree that the scientists here were not doing things correctly. This doesn’t invalidate the whole field, however, by any means.
Betsybounds — the paper you’re referring to is not new, it’s just a new version of something that has been on arxiv in various versions for a long time. It’s been refuted on many occasions. Here’s a post on it:
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2009/03/burrow-project-gerlich-and-t-have.html
Regarding the “warmest year” imbroglio, that was a small correction which showed the warmest year in the United States was 1934 rather than 1998. But the error correction was small; before 1934 was close to being the warmest, and now it’s slightly warmer than 1998. Furthermore, the year is irrelevant as it’s just the United States number, not the hottest year in the global record. The last decade remains by far the hottest on record.
The foundation of science, as well as our trust in it, rests on the idea that facts are sacred, and that they come before theories. If the facts don’t fit, you must acquit. In science, there is no principle of allowing lies in the service of “a higher truth.” There can only be truth.
and i said in power politics (and reading kennan) that this no longer holds at all once socialists/communists are in the game.
their principal weapon is lies.
i said long long long long long time ago, that everything will degrade to dysfunction as they poison the well of truth.
then everyone goes off and disusses the lie that they planted and refuse to acknowlege its a lie and all the methods that humans use to judge veracity
i have been trying to wake yall to the game as its played in this other type of government.
and yet, no one wants to let go of their default ideas of how similar living can be, and not realize how horrible it can be
the lies and games become so much that making a dash for a border abandoning your friends, history, language, home, property, connections, and more…
no one is taking the time to try to imagine their day to day lives so bad that they would jump with the risk of death and torture if a crack showed in the wall.
gp back and read that article on the changes in the ANC i posted several times. the stuff i posted over a year ago should start making more sense!!!!!!!!!!!
without God or the like, Sacred has no meaning
>above 250 ppm
Logarithmic response doesn’t mean no effect over 250 ppm. I don’t know why you assert that.
>Cloud cover reflects more of the spectrum than it absorbs of
>the outgoing IR from the surface. Anyone remember the old
>“nuclear winter”scare which is based entirely on this fact?
Yes, of course. The point I am making is the idea that it’s a damping factor, i.e., the whole idea is there’s more cloud cover because it’s warmer, and the cloud serve to cool. But the equilibrium temperature remains higher, otherwise there would be no increased cloud cover in the first place.
I’m 67 pages into Climate Of Extremes by Michaels and Balling Jr. (CATO), they suggest the following link/blog for climate analysis, for those not already aware of it, and interested in taking a look: http://www.climateaudit.org/
By the way Gerard, regarding the Eric Raymond-found FORTRAN excerpt, here’s a good post about it:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/quote_mining_code.php
By the way: hi.
(Hi, it’s good to see you, even if we are on “opposite sides” here… )
The last decade remains by far the hottest on record.
Mitsu: That’s one way to put it.
The other way to put it is that the last decade was one of slightly declining temperatures in spite of steadily increasing greenhouse gases. Furthermore, this decline was not predicted by any of the AGW climate models ten years ago.
I also agree that the scientists here were not doing things correctly. This doesn’t invalidate the whole field, however, by any means.
That’s also one way to put it.
The other way to put it, strictly speaking, is that these AGW scientists were behaving precisely as the “cargo cult scientists” Feynman was describing in one of your favorite quotes.
Furthermore, all indications are that these AGW scientists will continue to behave as cargo cult scientists unless some kind of gun is put to their heads to start behaving with scientific integrity.
No, it doesn’t invalidate AGW but it doesn’t inspire confidence either by any means.
Huxley: you’re right about the cargo cult. That part of it is disgraceful, but again the specific points being made are being exaggerated as far as I can tell (i.e., the “trick” with the tree ring data and Gerard’s FORTRAN excerpt which wasn’t even being used in the code).
As for the declining temperatures in the last decade — the explanation I have read is that this is due to the usual El Nino/Southern Oscillation pattern which is cyclical and would have caused a significant drop under normal circumstances rather than the rather flat temperatures we’ve seen in the last decade. There are always going to be cyclical variations. What I’ve been reading is that this will continue but once it lets up during the next decade we’ll return to temperature rise.
Mitsu: Sure, I know that AGW folks now have an explanation for the current lull. They’ve also floated SO2 and particulate pollution as the explanation. And it’s not like El Nino is something they just learned about either.
What kind of science is this? It’s reminding me of Ptolemaic epicycles and N-Rays — rife with confirmation bias and post hoc reasoning. Can AGW be falsified?
I wouldn’t care all that much except that these scientists and their political allies, including Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership, are attempting to ram through vast, onerous changes to our way of life, by claiming that “the science is settled” while rigging the game so that AGW skeptics are marginalized and demonized.
AGW advocates are also entirely short-circuiting any cost/risks/benefit discussion of alternatives, should AGW be as threatening as currently touted, to some sort of draconian world government deciding much of our lives based on AGW. We’ve got Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, going on about how Westerners need to eat less meat, avoid ice cubes and air travel and other crazy stuff.
What can one say except it is always sad when pretty dreams die.
I’m with Vanderleun on this. It has been a scam since Hansen closed the windows on a hot day for his presentation to congress back in 1998.
Gore has consistently refused to debate and ignores criticism of the outrageous lies in his movie. The shenanigans of Jones and Mann have been totally outside of scientific ethics and their “science” has been shown to be a crock. See the “Harry read me” files. It’s been called “Climate Scientology” a pretty good description imho.
Screw it.
Promote and vote – conservative
Michael Crichton had some very interesting comments about AGWists.
“Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists.”
One might be able to come up with explanations for some of this, but how do you explain the opacity of the research? That would seem to be the most damning aspect of all. Science is supposed to be fully transparent, because when it isn’t people have nasty habit of using it to their own ends.
Mitsu,
LOL! Thanks for the rabett link. Well, as you can see, I’m not a physicist!
But based on what I do know something about, I can say with some confidence that AGW is not falsifiable, and its proponents have done nothing to try to make it so, to see whether it can be ruled out. And Huxley is correct that irrespective of smaller-scale cycles like the ENSO (which was not kept secret from the modelers), none of the AGW models predicted the current cooling. In fact, they denied it was happening for as long as they could. I’ve seen some AGW believers make the patently absurd claim that the current cooling is merely masking the underlying warming. That strikes me as silly. It’s a bit like saying that this year’s wet summer and fall in the American southeast are merely masking the underlying drought–if things weren’t what they are, they’d be different. I don’t think that’s going to persuade many people that faith in AGW is much more than just that–faith.
Mitsu: You still haven’t responded to the central point of neo’s post, which is the refusal of various global warming groups to release their raw data (and their modeling software source code.) That refusal is a, first, an extremely suspicious behavior and, second, a gross violation of scientific ethics. As long as they refuse, they deserve to be treated as liars.
Physicist David Wright, who has held positions at top universities such as Harvard and is now a senior staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, is more outraged, commenting on a blog: “In my discipline, there were plenty of camps that had strong opinions about whether certain ideas were right or wrong, likely to move the field forward or likely to prove useless distractions. Sometimes discussions became quite heated. But never did I see groups of people plotting to hijack the peer review process in order to shut out those who disagreed with them, or discussing how to hide data that did not look good for their side of the debate.”
“They are making scientific progress more difficult now,” Willie Soon, a physicist at the Harvard University-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told FoxNews.com. “This is a shameful, dark day for science.”
“The attitudes revealed in the e-mails do not look good. The tribalism that some of the leaked e-mails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.” Professor Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia
i find it interesting that they are surprised that collectivists act like collectivists.
on another interesting note…
houstan texas is looking at maybe half a foot of snow..
City bracing for at least 2 inches of snow
Amazingly, it seems likely Houston will see snow Friday, the city’s earliest ever white stuff.
Forecasters are still hedging their bets given all of the puzzle pieces that must fall into place for it to snow in Houston, but now say the most likely scenario is 2 to 4 inches of widespread snowfall beginning Friday afternoon.
Some areas may get half a foot.
Emmett urged employers to use “good common sense” and to consider letting their employees go home early Friday because of the expected inclement weather.
Some Harris County toll roads could be closed down if their surfaces freeze, Emmett said.
State climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon said this event would mark the city’s earliest snowfall by six days.
I linked this here last night on an older thread, and I don’t know how many people saw it. It was a comment left at Ace of Spades on Dec. 2, which is simply the best short synopsis of Climategate I’ve seen anywhere.
Link
The comment was written by Iowahawk. No, he was not joking, although he did include a few humorous asides. From the writing style, I’m sure it really is him.
It is technical enough that it is not dumbed down, yet brief enough so that non-technical people can follow it.
I’m dead serious. If there is a better history of the global warming fraud in a dozen paragraphs or less, I’ve yet to see it. Check it out.
Neo said: “In science, there is no principle of allowing lies in the service of “a higher truth.” There can only be truth.”
Indeed. I’m not sure how far back these perversions reach, and they are not restricted to science. The first one I am aware of was in 1992, when Rigoberta Menchu won the Nobel Peace Prize (surely the most consistently deformed and perverted award in history). She was designated Nobel Peace laureate for her autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchu. Not long after the award was given, she was exposed as a fraud and a liar, but it was said that she had pointed out higher truths, irrespective of her fraudulent autobiography. I wondered at the time how something false could be, nevertheless, true.
The Left is fond of these feints. They may go back even further than Rigoberta’s, but hers is the first one that caught my eye. Can anyone identify other, earlier ones?
I agree that they should certainly release the raw data. Peole can be very paranoid, on all sides of this.
Crichton is not a climate scientist, he’s just a former MD who writes science fiction. In my mind he totally lacks credibility on this subject since he once tried to argue that the fact that it is difficult to predict the weather means it ought to be nearly impossible to predict climate. That’s just evidence of a complete lack of understanding of the difference between predicting small scale details of a chaotic system and predicting average statistical ensembles of the system. We can’t predict the weather 10 years from now but that’s very different from predicting the average temperature 10 years from now.
>cooling
The Earth has not cooled in the last decade; the trend is more or less flat:
http://climate.weather.com/articles/Statisticians-reject-global-cooling.html?page=1
And again, the last decade is still the warmest on record.
The earth stopped warming about 10 years ago, and has been cooling since 2003. The sun has gone quiet, and things are getting colder. The warmest year in the past century was 1934, and the 90s were not the warmest decade, sorry. Stephen McIntyre looked at the CRU’s tree ring data from Siberia and noticed that rings from only 12 trees were included, showing a warming. When the data was expanded to include 35 trees from the same area, any warming disappeared.
We have no reliable temperature data except for the satellite readings from UAH. The thermometer data has been shown to be unreliable, with stations located next to air conditioner exhausts, vast areas of pavement, trash burners and so on. Readings are too warm by several degrees, different depending on the particular location of the station. See Anthony Watts Whats Up With That website. James Hansen’s GISS data has also been discredited. And University of E. Anglia’s CRU has apparently discarded their core data so that no one can check it, and fudged the numbers. Phil Jones (Director) has stepped down and is being investigated as is Michael Mann (author of the discredited Hockey Stick graph that was the basis for the IPCC claims of alarming warming). Queens University in Belfast has some tree ring data, but won’t release it. Denmark and New Zealand have been caught fudging their numbers, and the Aussies have rejected Kevin Rudd’s big cap-and-trade plan.
The climate predictions that we have, depend on computer models that attempt to enter something that approximates our climate. We simply do not know enough about climate at this point. So most of what is entered are guesses. GIGO. The major “greenhouse gas” is water vapor — clouds, mist, fog–and we have little understanding of that, yet it has an important role in climate.
Mitsu,
Your comment is like writing, “The earth is flat – see link showing earth is flat – link”.
Mitsu, the links are ALL POLLUTED !!!
Head in sand. Negligent.
The amusing thing is that today we see Mann trying to “distance” himself from any and all e-mails that do not originate from him or have him replying in agreement. My guess is that as he sees his career go down the tubes from people who are not Believers (or even worse those that believed in him but aren’t so in the tank that they are trying to rationalize everything away) he is trying to retain some level of credibility that wouldn’t get the staff at Taco Bell to make fun of him. It is interesting given the last few days of “defense” when the people being defended start selling the others down the road.
The sad thing is that the AGW people should be the most angry. If we take the IPCC reviews we find that part of it is worse than predicted and some is better – some by a large margin. This means that most likely the situation is either much less or way worse – in either case it is the AGW people who are hurt the most.
Mitsu’s case is already blown by Mann trying to defend his pending investigation. Either Mitsu is correct and he is dishonest in his statements today or Mitsu is wrong and he is so dishonest that he isn’t to be trusted. In either case Mann is selling defenders like Mitsu down the river and I can’t feel sorry for any of them. They dug their own holes in things that *should* have never come to pass.
One of the common fallacies of public perception of science is that ALL science is equally reliable. Actually, this vary wildly from field to field. Climatology is not a hard science. It is in its infancy, and large parts of it are just more or less plausible speculations. Some are even not plausible at all. What really undermines public trust in science is attitudes of scientists themselves, who more and more often jettison traditional norms and values of rigour in search of truth. This postmodern ideology of post-normal science kills the trust and scientific ethics.
When I was at school, children were told that there were canals on Mars and that these had been mapped, by the world’s most respected astronomers. The photos returned from space probes illustrated clearly that many emminent men had meticulously mapped non-existent features, by misinterpreting some physical features and extrapolating from insuffient data, there was never any credible assertion that these astronomers deliberately lied. The favoured explanation was that the human mind filled in details and thereafter, selectively observed, discounting contradictory information. With the availability of computer programs capable of manipulating data, the possible use of corrections whose physical basis is not justifiable may be discountenanced by a proponent of a theory as just statistical cleaning of data, because it clarifies an alledged fact which he wishes to believe. Such distortion of facts is much more likely, if one is surrounded by people who have similar desires and who are not prepared to subject their theories and methodology to critical examination by others, as the scientific methd demands. Why have the world’s leaders not joyfully announced that there is no need to panic or wreck our economies?
When working with data which are noisy, inhomogenuos and pooled from different sources the need for some calibration and adjustment is understandable. But this is the the most arbitrary and judgmental step of data analysis, so it must be meticulously documented, so other researchers could independently assess if this was properly done. Alas, with raw data lost, it can not be reproduced, so all further analysis can be thrown out as well. This is just junk, whether this was done deliberately or not.
“Peole [sic] can be very paranoid, on all sides of this.”
Paranoia? The problem isn’t paranoia, it’s arrogance and fraud.
On all sides? You sound like one of those progressives who would insist that America was just as much to blame for the Cold War as the Soviet Union was…and that the commies were not evil, they were merely paranoid and their paranoia was understandable because they were surrounded by enemies. Always more excuses for evil.
The CRU people are not hiding their data because they are paranoid about enemies, it’s because they know there are problems with their data and their software.
After sleeping all night I find this:
“>above 250 ppm
Logarithmic response doesn’t mean no effect over 250 ppm. I don’t know why you assert that.”
from Mitsu. Ok this may be a dead thread, but I have to respond.
Mitsu, try to follow this: y =a +b*ln(x), or in this particular case Temp = a + b*ln(co2), where using the standard values I came up with fit parameters of 227 = a, and 10=b.
Now let’s run some numbers.
CO2 0 T= 227
150, 277
250, 282
380, 286 today’s value
450, 288 what the IPCC hopes to avoid
Between 0 and 250 ppm, the % change is 24%, while between 250 and 450ppm, the % change is 2%. The system is saturated by almost a factor of 10. This is also assuming a static atmosphere with no feedback mechanisms, and no convection (much more important than radiation in energy transfer). Sorry, but the physics shows that beyond 250 ppm, CO2’s contribution is negligible
Mitsu, the assertions that matter are, first, “The earth’s climate is warming,” second, “A significant part of that warming results from human activity,” and third, “Warming is bad [for humanity], so we must act to minimize or stop anthropogenic warming.” The first may or may not be true overall – but WILL be true someday, because climate does change, with or without human activity.
The second is undemonstrated, since the earth has been considerably warmer (AND colder) in the past without benefit of human activity, and the timing of this “warming,” if it’s occurring, coincides with an emergence from an undeniable cold period. We don’t know at what pace warming would be taking place in the absence of human activity; we could be slowing it, speeding it up, or having no significant effect. This is the first time we’ve been around to observe. Emergence from past ice ages has been rapid in geologic terms – humanity’s entire history can be easily contained in a “rapid” warming.
The third assertion is critical: all the effects of warming that get public-policy attention are the catastrophic ones, all potential positive effects glossed over or ignored entirely, all neutral effects considered unimportant to the discussion. But all of human society is being asked to remake itself on the basis of this third assertion, “supported” by “value-added” data modelled by people willing to circumvent all the safeguards that are supposed to keep science honest.
Ridiculous. To say that these “scientists” “believe in” AGW is exactly accurate: it’s an article of faith, with every confirming datum trumpeted, every controverting one “adjusted” into compliance with the rubric or ignored on the basis of its being irrelevant, poorly collected (!), or the product of “denialists.” Mitsu. The only defense here is an absolutely rigorous return to the basics and the beginnings: show every step, invite vigorous debate, get off their frickin’ high horse and do SCIENCE.
I agree that they should certainly release the raw data.
Mitsu: Sadly, CRU’s current story is that they destroyed the raw data, at some unspecified time in the 1980s before Jones became director.
One thing about “ClimateGate” nagging at the back of my mind is the absence of any discussion by ringleader Phil Jones (or others) of the remarkable, shocking discovery that Jones now claims he had that his precedessor destroyed the raw data in the 1980s.
That is the data that scientists have for years been seeking from Jones under the UK’s freedom of information law. Against numerous such requests he offered equally numerous excuses for refusing access culminating with the September 2009 claim — when it looked like he’d been cornered and had no excuses not to provide it to Prof. Ross McKitrick who met all of his long-stated qualifications — that in fact he’d lost it.
First, it does seem odd that Jones would so firmly and crisply articulate his many, very specific excuses for so many years about why he could not provide something that in fact they had, as he now tells it, lost. His refusals all clearly imply that a belief that he had it.
ClimateGate: So, where’s the “Oh, Snap!” email?
I agree that they should certainly release the raw data.
Mitsu: The second part, just as important and more difficult, is that AGW scientists should also release their methodology — whatever they did with the data, how, and why to build their various hockey sticks and other such graphs plus whatever reasoning and calculations that support their claims as to the certainty and severity of AGW and the various scenarios the IPCC paints for the future.
In other words whatever it would take for others to inspect what went into the AGW papers and check the results.
Just had to mention that here in Houston there’s snow this morning. Not just snow, but a snowstorm.
And again, the last decade is still the warmest on record.
Mitsu: And said record is 150 years long, less than an eyeblink geologically.
the key thing is to look carefully at the actual data
Yes, that would be great. Too bad they threw the original data away. Look, I worked as a data mangler in meteorology. WE NEVER THREW AWAY ORIGINAL DATA. EVER.
Because so long as I had the original data and the programs to process them, I could always recreated the value-added results.
But that’s not the worst of their crimes. They purposely gamed the peer-review process of the journals. They reviewed each other’s journal submissions!!! And they also reviewed their critic’s submissions, rejecting them. And if an editor allowed a paper to published that wasn’t 100% on-board with AGW, they would try to have that editor removed.
Can you actually defend that?
I R A Darth Aggie: See this.
Mitsu, I don’t think your link helps you as you’re thinking it would. The debate within the article is the perfect demonstration of just how non-definitive the data and analysis are in the field of climate research (as Sergey rightly points out). Honestly, it’s pretty obvious from any discussion of the science in that field, that any scientist who speaks about the future climate definitively has departed the realm of science and entered the realm of religion. Scientists are known for the qualifiers and measured responses about things, unless there is a very, very lengthy field of research to verify something so that it can be accepted as fact.
That’s because they know that too many things we thought we knew before, we were wrong about. Which means you can be sure there are things today we think we know, but will be proven wrong about. Remember the resistance to the Big Bang theory? And I would argue we are far more knowledgeable about the age of the universe than the future of our climate.
Oh, and Crichton is just some MD who also wrote some books?
“Crichton graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College, received his MD from Harvard Medical School, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, researching public policy with Jacob Bronowski. He taught courses in anthropology at Cambridge University and writing at MIT. Crichton’s 2004 bestseller, State of Fear, acknowledged the world was growing warmer, but challenged extreme anthropogenic warming scenarios. He predicted future warming at 0.8 degrees C. (His conclusions have been widely misstated.)
Crichton’s interest in computer modeling went back forty years. His multiple-discriminant analysis of Egyptian crania, carried out on an IBM 7090 computer at Harvard, was published in the Papers of the Peabody Museum in 1966. His technical publications included a study of host factors in pituitary chromophobe adenoma, in Metabolism, and an essay on medical obfuscation in the New England Journal of Medicine. “
That’s a pretty fair resume, don’t you think? I believe he has at least as much right to call himself a scientist as those clowns at East Anglia.
The Big Bang Theory, for me, is the best nerd-chick comedy out there, i wish that this tv series runs longer`;”