Cimategate: cherry-picking the data
Climategate continues to get richer, as much of the world continues to ignore the growing storm.
Now the Russians appear to have confirmed that a great deal of the temperature data from their part of the world has been ignored by CRU and the IPCC, and—no great surprise—the eliminated readings do not support global warming, while the included ones do:
Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.
The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.
The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.
On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.
IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.
The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.
Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.
But these inconvenient truths are hardly affecting most AGW believers, except to make them circle the wagons. Will doubt reach critical mass among the general population at some point?
I am not at all sure that it will, no matter how much evidence is amassed that AGW, so far, has been based to an unacceptable degree on smoke and mirrors. Survey your friends: how many are even aware that Climategate involves a great deal more than a couple of emails from understandably angry scientists, upset that the truth they’ve so reliably proven has not been universally accepted?
How many PHD’s does it take to convince the MSM that they have degraded themselves to the status of common shills (as eager fools following and enabling idiots) for a bunch of left-wing political demagogues, and that history will record the truth in the long run? The answer, apparently, is that they believe that no number of qualified and accredited scientists has the authority to challenge the international central planning left-wing elite, of which the American Democratic Party are their primary leadership; while abdicating their loyalty to America for the promotion of the U.N.; and ultimately one world government legitimizing some of the worst despots in history. Though needless to say, what a bunch of jerks… Most of you may have seen this: http://current.com/1j6ti4c
I haven’t asked, but I hear people comment. The word is out that something has happened and some people think it undermines AGW. However, most comments from any side of the issue betray a lack of any real knowledge about what has happened. Not that this has stopped people from offering forceful opinions – it never does. Some will say they never believed in AGW on the basis of some stray article they read in a waiting room, others that they know it is real on the basis of their childhood winter memories.
It pays to remember that many of those who agree with us are also fools.
Ohhhh, it just keeps getting better, doesn’t it ?
All those climate socialist-slicks in Copenhagen are hunkered down from the blizzard–first at Xmas in 14 years–and thunderously applauding Hugo Chavez for his damnation of EVIL Capitalism. Now, back to their carbon footprinting private jets. Yowzzaaaaahhhh..!
We’re being sucked through a Vortex of Self-Caricature !
My friends are mostly believers because they have only read the MSM propaganda. Most of them see the lines showing rising CO2 and rising temperatures as pretty good proof. Throw in the MSM drumbeat on melting glaciers, disappearing ice caps, and endangered polar bears – well, it just sounds like it is irrefutable.
Most picture a layer of CO2 in the atmosphere holding heat in like a “greenhouse,” unaware that CO2 is a minor trace gas that only reflects a tiny slice of the radiated heat spectrum. I try to have them picture a small segment of the atmosphere the size of an 8″X8″X8″ cube. Then tell them that the CO2 in that little segment of the atmosphere would be a tiny dot, barely visible. Then I ask them how much of the radiated heat passing through that segment of the atmosphere would be stopped by the CO2. That tends to get their attention, but they still say, “Then why is it warming?” They have not been exposed to the facts that the Earth has been warmer in the past than it is now and that the warming we are experiencing is not unusual. The Warmers and the MSM have managed to make the Medieval Warm Period disappear down the rabbit hole. My friends then revert to, “Those people are climate scientists, they must know what they’re talking about. Why should I listen to you?” That’s when I send them to sites like Climate Audit, WattsUpWithThat, Greenie Watch, and others.
They seldom ever spend any time looking at those sites and connecting the dots. It is, after all, a bit of mental effort. They fail to see the connection between AGW and governmental control over a major necessity of life – energy. They generally think I’m a curmudgeonly conspiracy theorist. But I keep trying.
At the risk of boring long-time readers, I’ll repeat my formula for dealing with believers: ask them what fraction of the atmosphere CO2 composes. (Usual guess: 5%).
After they guess, tell them the answer (i.e., that they’re off by two orders of magnitude), and point out that only 3% of that is anthropogenic.
Then the clincher: ask them how many people that would correspond to in the population of the U.S. (Answer: ca. 1500 people – out of 300 million).
I usually just let that one hang in the air for a while.
The logic here is that most people have no intuitive grasp of numbers (e.g., few people can relate a “part per million” to a percentage). Likening the numbers to a quantity for which they do have a feel makes the point in an evocative fashion.
Afterthought: It can be useful to relate ClimateGate to a criminal trial. Tainted evidence – and all potentially tainted evidence – has to be thrown out. Once a liar is exposed, we’re hardly going to take his word for anything. The burden of proof (which always was on the proponents of AGW) lies even more heavily on them now to establish the provenance and validity of their data. And that’s before we even get to examining their conclusions from those data.
I would also try to relate cap and trade to Wall Street trading. If bankers couldn’t dtermine the values of real existing houses, how can we trust similar traders to be honest about valueing invisible air? Separate the science a bit from the proposed political “solutions” because it is easier to criticize the latter without being put in the flat earth camp. People might understand that Obama, Pelosi, and crew are planning to invest tax money with green-tinted Madoffs and Lays.
Obama was praised for his superior judgement during the campaign. Use Kevin Jennings, Rezko etc to undermine that perception and raise doubts about his abilty to recognize frauds.
Good point, expat. I’ve used the Wall Street implosion as an argument against taking climate models too seriously. On one hand, we have Wall Street, with essentially unlimited resources and oh-so-much incentive failing dismally to model the economy, and miscalculating risk correlations; on the other, some smelly-socks clowns at third-tier universities trying their hand at programming. Is it likely that the latter succeeded where the former failed? This is not to say they’re wrong, but rather that some skepticism is in order.
In a similar vein, when libs start bleating about “the experts,” it’s also wortwhile to ask if these experts are more clever than the ones at Long Term Capital Management. Remind me: how many economics Nobel Laureates were involved with LTCM? And how did that turn out? Again, not saying that they’re wrong, but once again, skepticism is healthy and ever so warranted.
Once again, and like Occam at the risk of boring long-time readers, I will say that the exercise of establishing correlation is not science. As nearly as I can tell–and I pay fairly close attention to this one–such a correlation is all the alarmists, the AGW theorists, or whatever else one calls them, have ever bothered to even try to rely on. Science does not prove things. Science operates by RULING THINGS OUT. That which has not been ruled out remains possible. In order to approach any potential atmospheric warming, the hypothesis must be stated and tested against evidence with a view toward ruling the hypothesis out.
It’s true that one test of a theory’s validity is its predictive power. For example, in the portion of global plate tectonic theory that deals with hot spots, the hypothesis predicts that as the Pacific Plate passes over a stationary hot spot beneath the Hawaiian Island chain, the hot spot will continue to generate new volcanic islands to the southeast of the big island, Hawaii. And in fact, there is a new sub-sea volcano rising from the ocean floor, precisely in the predicted place. It’s been named Mt. Loihi. It’s interpreted as evidence supporting the existence of the hot spot there, in the middle of the Pacific Plate, and the plate moves, passing over the hot spot, which in turn does not move. It’s not dispositive, however, because it’s not a unique prediction: It’s not held to be the only possible way to account for the observed volcano development. General relativity, is a rather different case. It has been accepted as successful because it generated a unique prediction, one that no other known theory generated: It predicted the precise deflection a ray of light passing the sun would undergo as a result of gravity. In 1919, during observation of a total solar eclipse and as a test of the theory, Einstein’s precise prediction was in fact observed. Now, this did not prove the theory. What it did was rule competing theories out. Relativity is generally accepted, but it is not, in science, regarded as proven.
Let’s leave aside the question of whether or not the atmosphere is warming. It may be. But the evidence–such as it is, and it has lately been shown to be pretty thin, to the extent that it’s believable at all–is not conclusive, and the AGW enthusiasts have undertaken no actions whatsoever to address other possible explanations. And it’s not as though there are no other possible explanations. Milankovitch cycles, sunspot cycles, normal regional variation, and cosmic ray behavior are just a few–and none of them has been addressed with a view towards ruling them out, in proper scientific fashion, in favor of AGW. AGW itself has not been tested in any rigorous scientific fashion. These wizards have confined themselves to searching for supporting data, and we now see that they’ve not only searched for it, they’ve manipulated and censored that which they’ve found. Now, any geologist can tell you that throughout the span of geologic time, the climate has varied greatly. There have been times in the geologic past when there were no glaciers anywhere on Earth. No one knows why this is so–but we do know one thing that cannot have caused it: Human activity. This is true because there was no human activity to speak of during the periods in question–and certainly no CO2-generating activity.
If people had been educated to understand scientific method properly, none of this would be mysterious or even questionable. The AGW guys rely largely on models, which are not scientific tests of anything at all. I would suggest that the recent cooling, which not one of their models predicted, has ruled their theory out. It’s the only test we have of this fantastic idea, and the idea has failed.
End of story.
I should add that most of my friends are also geologists and colleagues, and the ideas I’ve addressed are pretty well understood among us. Some of my colleagues are not geologists, and instead have credentials in things like ecology and environmental science. I regard these as bogus disciplines, at least partly because they include heavy doses of political ideas (leftist, of course), and in unsurprising fashion, they tend to accept the popular notions of human destructiveness, including AGW. We have some interesting discussions at work!
post, betsy.
Models are not data. This obvious yet essential point seems to escape many. A model produces what it’s programmed to produce. Jurassic Park wasn’t a documentary, after all.
Oops.
That should have read:
Excellent post, betsy.
Models are not data. This obvious yet essential point seems to escape many. A model produces what it’s programmed to produce. Jurassic Park wasn’t a documentary, after all.
oh my
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/putting_our_economy_in_the_hands_of_chavez_fans
betsy and Occam,
Those are terrific comments and deserve to be more widely read.
And betsy, the same lesson about what is and is not science was hammered home to me years back by a geologist specializing in plate tectonics. He also taught an astronomy 101 class just for kicks. I learned more about science from him in my first week of class than all of the K through 12 years. Good stuff.
For what its worth, when explaining the significance of the CRU hack, I like to use the analogy of a judge who has been found to be corrupt. Every single case the judge presided over must be reviewed with a fine tooth comb. All those poor clerks, paralegals and lawstudents going through a mountain of ominous white cardboard file folder boxes checking for evidence of malfeasance. Not fun but oh so necessary.
betsy and Occam,
I’m so going to use your comments [with proper attribution, of course. ;-)] to press the issue with my friends. Pure gold! Thanks.
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The emails also revealed that the data has been mishandled from the beginning, with much fudging going on to “prove” global warming. In fact, there was only one programmer in the beginning of this process and the program he created did not segregate the data from the program but incorporated it. So, there was no way to extract the data to demonstrate how the program worked. Imagine if the word processing program you used incorporated all of your correspondence as you wrote to others but could not be extracted as separate files. And, there was no independent reliability analysis ever done to demonstrate that the program could do what it was created and intended to do. A second programmer, brought in to replace the first (for whatever reason), could not figure out what the program did and added notes to the software indicating that, in order to obtain the results desired by the IPCC, random numbers had to be added at this place and that, so that is what he did.
So, there is this one massive program that contains data that is integral to its operation and temperature information is coming in from Russia, from tree rings in Africa,from stations in countries around the world, and who knows from where else. And this information is being massaged somehow and run in the program (where it seemingly disappears). Does the program take into account the season, the time of day, the weather that day, surrounding conditions that might influence the accuracy of the data, the relative accuracy of the method (how accurate is a tree ring in determining the actual temperature 500 years ago and is that “reading” comparable to a thermometer reading?), and so on and so on…? In fact, this is GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) on a massive scale. It is this lack of scientific and programming integrity that can and will be used to overturn the EPA’s finding that carbon dioxide is causing “climate change”.
Will doubt reach critical mass among the general population at some point?
Even before Climategate doubt became the majority American opinion.
With Climategate and the palpably colder weather, such doubt will only increase.
Plus it’s one thing to say how much a problem AGW is; it’s quite another to approve taxes and regulations that cripple the nation’s economy and send billions of dollars yearly to other countries.
I’m a freelance writer/consultant working in the area of technology and business in all its forms. I see the arguments over climate change getting very polarised and partisan (‘If Al Gore/Sarah Palin thinks X I’ll believe Y’). I’ve tried to see whether there are areas of consensus that most people would agree on.
This is my take on
10 Points about Global Warming that Most People could Agree with
1. Carbon Dioxide absorbs heat from solar radiation. The physics of that has been pretty clear for about 100 years, thanks to Arrhenius and others.
2. Humans are burning a lot of hydrocarbon fuels that have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
3. You would expect the heat absorbed by the extra carbon dioxide has to go somewhere.
4. Our global climate and weather should be affected by the extra heat – there is more energy driving the fronts and cyclones around. You’d expect some impact on eco-systems, an increased likelihood of extreme weather events, and some movement of humans and other species to new habitats (including tropical diseases occurring in temperate regions)
5. You can’t make any useful conclusions about the changes in global climate from individual episodes of good/bad weather – weather is a chaotic system, which means tiny changes in the starting conditions have huge changes in the final weather outcome. Indeed, chaos maths was first discovered by a meteorologist.
6. Carbon dioxide is clearly not the only thing driving changes in global climate – there are solar variations, Milankovitch cycles etc. In particular we don’t know nearly enough about the role of methane as a greenhouse gas, and the impact of aerosols in mitigating the greenhouse effect.
7. The fuss/controversy about the ‘hockey stick’ graph and the East Anglia data set/’climate-gate’ are confusing to most of us. The climate scientists seem to be trying to measure subtle changes in global average temperature (against a background of much larger daily and seasonal changes). However, changes in average temperature don’t kill you – its the possible increase of extreme events that’s damaging. Its a problem if a 1 in 300 year flood actually happens every 25 years.
8. At some point we will have to move to a renewable non-fossil fuel economy so it makes sense to invest in these technologies. Given the sources of much of the world’s oil and gas (We’ve all helped to make Chavez, Bin Laden, and Putin rich and/or powerful men by consuming large amounts of fossil fuel) there are probably good political reasons for doing so.
9. The cost of converting large quantities of the world’s power supply to renewables/nuclear could be huge (the International Energy Authority are talking about a trillion dollars a year for the next thirty years!), but its not dissimilar to the amounts Governments are spending/talking about spending to reflate the world economy out of the current recession/depression.
10. Although a lot of attention is focused on the impact of transport (from SUV’s to air travel), actually the biggest source of greenhouse gases is the heating lighting and air-conditioning of buildings (about 40% in the UK for instance). Reducing the carbon footprint of buildings can usually be achieved by decreasing their energy consumption – in other words it can save you money to reduce your emissions. There are lots of easy gains here – there is typically a 500% difference in energy consumption between the best and worst office buildings for example. So it makes sense to ‘turn the lights off when you go home’.
Do I have biases? Well I have sufficient technical background to understand some of the climate science but I’m not a practicing researcher in the area – I come from a physics chemistry background not climatology.
I am an ex-employee and current shareholder in a major oil company.
Comments welcome!
oops sorry
forgot to unbold it after the title – I wasn’t trying to shout!
KP