Jones - "peer review means no one looks at it..."

Remember all of that science that Al Gore assures us correct? Because, after all, it's all "peer-reviewed?" Sounds pretty formidable, doesn't it? Herds of scientists diligently poring over ever piece of data, every piece of code in the model?

Yeah, apparently not...

[On-leave CRU head Phil] Jones's general defence was that anything people didn't like – the strong-arm tactics to silence critics, the cold-shouldering of freedom of information requests, the economy with data sharing – were all "standard practice" among climate scientists. "Maybe it should be, but it's not."

And he seemed to be right. The most startling observation came when he was asked how often scientists reviewing his papers for probity before publication asked to see details of his raw data, methodology and computer codes. "They've never asked," he said.

So the CRU has produced "data," which consists of manipulated raw climate station data, apparently no longer extant, run through models of poorly-written, poorly-maintained and never reviewed computer code, and the "science is settled."

I've written a lot of software over the years, and modeled a lot of different hardware behavior in a lot of different ways, so this is something I know something about. Let me tell you this - if no one's reviewed the model, nothing that the model produces can possibly qualify as peer-reviewed¹. I don't care whether an editor did a grammar check or some other acolyte at the church of AGW agrees that it accurately represents his point-of-view. If no one has walked through the process, including careful examination of the tools that produced the output, then the data isn't peer-reviewed. Or, to put it a little bit differently, if that's what passes for peer-review in the climate apocalypse movement, then none of those peer-reviewed journals are worth the paper on which they're printed.



¹ - And let me just say this again - if the models cannot explain a 15-year period of non heating, which they cannot, then the models don't work. There's something either wrong or missing, but either way, the output is not trustworthy. The amount of centralized control that the Al Gore's of the world are looking for, the amount of economic devestation, is unjustifiable without far, FAR better information than we have right now...

Schmitt on AGW

Harrison Schmitt is a geologist and a former Senator from New Mexico. He's also the last man to have stepped on to the surface of the moon¹ (until the next one). And he has a great article this morning about the earth's climate and the AGW movement.

Global surface and near surface temperatures have risen about half a degree Centigrade (about 0.9 degree Fahrenheit) each 100 years since the minimum temperatures of the Little Ice Age in 1660. Multi-decade intervals of more rapid warming and cooling have occurred during this current, centuries-long general warming trend as they have for over 10,000 years since the last major ice age.

Indeed, by the end of the 17th century, glaciers had advanced over valley farmlands cultivated as those same glaciers receded during the preceding Medieval Warm Period (about 800-1300). Since the last major ice age, decades long periods of warming and cooling have been superposed on longer cycles, the longest repeating about every 1500 years.

All of this has occurred without any significant human activity. Cooling between 1935 and 1975 and since 2000, and warming between 1975 and 1995 have been the most recent such variations and correlate strongly with variations in solar activity.

In contrast to these facts, climate change assumptions and computer modeling, rather than real-world observations, underpin the government’s efforts to restrict American liberties and confiscate trillions of dollars of American income in the name of “doing something” about climate change. The scientific rationale behind this proposed massive intrusion into American life requires more than a “consensus” of like-minded climate analysts and bureaucrats. It needs to be right.

Recent disclosures and admissions of scientific misconduct by the United Nations and advocates of the human-caused global warming hypothesis shows the fraudulent foundation of this much-ballyhooed but non-existent scientific consensus about climate.

Go ahead and read the whole thing...



¹ - None of that, of course, should cause anyone to listen to what he has to say on this topic. People should listen to what he has to say because he's right...

An interview with Professor Jones

Professor Phil Jones is the currently-on-leave director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, source of the massive "leak" in November of e-mails, data, computer code and other files related to climate change research ("Climategate"). Professor Jones is the author of the controversial e-mail in which he talked of using "Mike's nature trick" to "hide the decline."

He is a man who is supported with taxpayer dollars because of concern about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, and has, therefore, a vested interest in producing materials which perpetuate or exacerbate concerns about that possibility. To quote Al Gore quoting Sinclair Lewis, "it's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon his not understanding it." (The climate alarmists have for years been warning us that we couldn't trust any "science" funded by the oil companies - why we should trust science funded by zealous, power-hungry bureaucrats and performed by leftist academicians?)

Professor Jones has been a significant figure in the propagation of the kind of scientific information which leads to widespread panic and enables "well-meaning public servants" to argue for greater central control of world-wide economies and private behaviors. He's fought to suppress any kind of research which doesn't support the AGW position out of peer-reviewed literature, to "hide the decline," and, in short, to paint the picture of "settled science" which suggests a imminent catastrophe.

And the BBC got a chance to ask him some questions last week. Before we look at some of the excerpts, here are a couple of key points to remember. There are some who have questioned various aspects of the official story, as represented by the UN's IPCC, and been criticized or ostracized as "deniers." In the case of the AGW story, "skepticism" has been a dirty word. The following articles of the AGW case are considered to be "settled science," which no one of any intelligence would challenge, indisputable facts.

1. There has been an unprecedented rise in global temperature over the past 30 years.
2. The earth has never before been this hot.
3. The rise in temperature has proven to be caused by human behavior.
4. There is no legitimate "debate" about the causes of the current unprecedented warming.
5. Warming has continued rapidly over the past 15 years.

So, let's hear from Professor Jones:

Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?

An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I've assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.

Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).

I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.

So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

C - Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?

No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.

G - There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global or not. If it were to be conclusively shown that it was a global phenomenon, would you accept that this would undermine the premise that mean surface atmospheric temperatures during the latter part of the 20th Century were unprecedented?

There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented.

N - When scientists say "the debate on climate change is over", what exactly do they mean - and what don't they mean?

It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.

Let's see. The debate's not over, the MWP may have been warmer, the recent warming is similar to other warming periods in the last 150 years, there's been no statistically significant warming in the last 15 years, there's been cooling in the last 8 (albeit also not statistically significant). It sounds to me as if Professor Jones is one of those "skeptics" or "deniers" that draw so much opprobrium from the likes of Al Gore.

I know this - I need a LOT more convincing before I'll peacefully acquiesce to the planned destruction of the US economy...

Quote of the day

Noted by Derb:

Exercising the right of occasional suppression and slight modification, it is truly absurd to see how plastic a limited number of observations become, in the hands of men with preconceived ideas.

— Francis Galton, Meteorographica, or Methods of Mapping the Weather (1863), p.5 [quoted in Stigler's History of Statistics, p.267]

Carlin on CRU

Remember Alan Carlin? He was the EPA scientist that suggested to the agency that "the extensive portions of the EPA's Endangerment TSD which are based upon the old science are no longer appropriate and need to be revised" and was told that

the time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has [sic] decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision...

Well, he's back, and he's got a good piece at Pajamas Media.

the EPA — perhaps at the urging of others in the Obama administration — has proposed to regulate GHG emissions on the basis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports … and reports primarily based on the IPCC reports.

This is highly unusual for the EPA. I cannot think of any instance where the EPA depended so heavily on non-EPA synthesis reports to justify proposed regulatory action in their almost 39 years of existence.

...

It seems clear to me that if a group (such as the EPA) wanted to get an objective scientific judgment on climate change science, CRU et al — and therefore the IPCC — might be the last place that they would want to rely on.

...

Despite the uproar concerning CRU et al’s data and research, the basic problem remains — the UN hypothesis that increases in GHGs/CO2 will result in significant increases in global temperatures has not been confirmed by comparisons with real world data. Unless it is, attempts to decrease GHG/CO2 emissions in order to significantly change global temperatures are very likely to fail. This is the primary question that the EPA and climate scientists need to address before any control efforts are undertaken.

There are some good links in there, too. Read it all...

A question for the Associated Press

AP:

Britain's University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.

Is it still prestigious?

Or, more to the point, if the AP still considers it prestigious, is there anything that could come out which would actually damage its prestige to the point where the AP would not consider it prestigious?

Great CRU piece

This - CRUdGate - Why this can't be swept under the carpet - is excellent. With a couple of outstanding graphics explaing the AGW process from science to politics.

Lastly and as a slight aside, why so little from the MSM? That one is easy. You need to have a decent analytical brain just to deal with the chain of events. You need to have a decent analytical brain, a mathematical/scientific mind and a good grasp of some very hard statistics to understand what is being done to massage the numbers and to see how significant it is to the chain of events.

Slice your average environment correspondent through the middle and you're going to find a left-leaning liberal arts graduate who is utterly out of his/her depth. Their world view is being swept from underneath them and they are being shown—in ways that they do not really and have never had to understand—that the guys they thought were the goodies are in fact "at it" and that those they have spent a decade disparaging as deniers were in fact spot on.

I would find that hard to report too.

I liked that last bit, but go read it - the decision tree diagrams are fantastic...

Global Warming - What I Believe

What I Believe - Global Warming Edition:

1. I am not a climate scientist, and am dependent on others who are to explain the "nuts and bolts" of the Anthropogenic Global Warming model.



2. On the AGW front, I have seen and heard a lot of loud demagoguery.



3. In my opinion, this demagoguery tends to weaken the case rather than strengthen it.



4. Some aspects of the AGW theory are not in dispute.



5. Mankind has, through various activities, increased the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere over what it would contain if mankind did not exist.



6. Mankind continues to engage in activities that increase the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere.



7. No one disputes that.



8. One of these activities is breathing.



9. Many of the others contribute in substantial ways to the health and well being of mankind.



10. I am willing to stipulate that human activity has raised the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ from 280 PPM (Parts per Million, .000000280) to 380 PPM of CO₂.
    
    
11. The difference between 280 PPM and 380 PPM of CO₂ in the atmosphere does not seem like a particularly huge change in the chemical composition of the atmosphere.



12. It is not, to a layman, prima facie evidence of impending catastrophe that requires enormous and world-wide economic sacrifice to address.



13. Despite that, it is conceivable, and a reasonable hypothesis, that the accumulated CO₂ in the atmosphere could have some effect on the planetary climate.



14. As Al Gore showed in his move, An Inconvenient Truth, there does appear to be a relationship between temperature and atmospheric CO₂ concentration, given possible reconstructions of both values over the last several million years.



15. Unfortunately for Al, his chart shows temperature changing before CO₂.



16. That's right - Al Gore's big temperature vs. CO₂ graph shows temperature leading and CO₂ following.



17. Look for yourself - temperature goes up and then CO₂ goes up, temperature goes down and then CO₂ goes down.



18. That is to say, if there is a causal, and not just correlative, relationship between temperature and atmospheric CO₂, it is the opposite of what Gore is claiming.



19. I once believed that there was fairly compelling evidence that the planet has warmed over the past 150 years.



20. I now believe that there is some evidence that the planet has warmed over the past 150 years.



21. The evidence is nowhere near as compelling as it once was.



22. The evidence of data manipulation and outright fraud in the published records is compelling.



23. If the data were as compelling as the people at the CRU and other places claim that it is, there would be no need to hide it.



24. If the "contrarian" position were so weak that it couldn't pass peer review, there would be no need to rig the peer review process.



25. If the "contrarian" position were so weak that it was indefensible, getting the papers published, criticized and mocked could only help the AGW position.



26. It is a reasonable hypothesis to suppose that there is a relationship between increased CO₂ levels and increased temperature on a global level.



27. This hypothesis has not been proven to my satisfaction.



28. I do not believe that the scientific "consensus" is as strong as the warming alarmists would have us believe.



29. If this hypothesis were proven to my satisfaction, I would then expect realistic scenarios presented for the costs vs. benefits of mitigation and the costs vs. benefits of living on a planet with the increased CO₂ levels.



30. The pro-Kyoto, pro-Copenhagen, AGW alarmists have never, to the best of my knowledge, presented a reasonable, rational cost-benefit analysis.



31. Many of the people favoring what may objectively be looked at as anti-Western civilization, "spread the wealth to the poor" policies with regards to carbon have a history of favoring anti-Western civilization, "spread the wealth to the poor" policies at other times in history, for other reasons.



32. Many of the people who are pushing the AGW story the hardest have profited, are profiting, and can be expected to continue profiting from policies and government outlays that are based on their assumptions of short-term climate catastrophe.



33. Many of the people who are profiting from the climate change storyline are living their lives as if it weren't a problem.



34. The AGW scientists admit, among themselves, that they cannot account for the past decade-plus of cooling.



35. I've built complex multi-variable models, based on past data, and used them to predict future data.



36. If the model doesn't correctly predict the future data, something's wrong with the model.



37. It could be an algorithmic problem.



38. It could be a data entry or assumption problem.



39. It could be a problem of failing to understand and include a vital input, or multiple vital inputs.



40. If you kludge a model with fixed data-specific adjustments to say what you want it to say every time you get new data, as they did at CRU, you can always make it match.



41. A model which matches new data based on kludging it after that data is known, has no useful predictive power for future events.



42. An old computer acronym is GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out.



43. The CRU model was garbage, and it was fed garbage.



44. I would not gamble a nickel based on the output of the CRU model.



45. Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama want us to sacrifice our economy and our lifestyle based on it.

It is difficult to believe that engaging in economically destructive activities based on the output of a fudged model using an uncertain and non-reproducible data set is a rational course of action.

Climategate/Climaquiddick

I haven't written about the CRU scandal yet, for a couple of reasons. I've been busy with actual work, for one thing, so that's limited my time, and there's a lot of information to go through. Another is that there's a tendency for initial reports to be wrong, and for people to get up in arms about something that turns out to be innocent or at least explicable. But as the story has developed, it has become clear that there is, in fact, a "there" there, and I've got a couple of things to say.

First, for those that haven't followed the story, some anonymous source, a couple of weeks ago now, posted a massive bundle of data from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia on a (I think) Russian web server, from which the data has been uploaded and examined by people around the world. First reports attributed it to a "hacker," but the content of the file seems to indicate an insider, a whistle-blower, as the content is all relevant to the "climate change" research taking place at CRU. There is source code for the various models, some data, and a lot of emails between various "alarmists," proponents of massive and radical government action to curb global warming.

The emails got the first attention, and they paint a damning picture. The impression created is not that of a group of scientists committed to the truth. Instead, we see what seems to be a small cabal of high priests, committed to their religion, devoted to its truth regardless of the facts, willing to hide and potential defects in their story, fudge data to support it, and punish heresy wherever it appears. They don't come across well.

After a few days, people have also had a chance to look at the model code. It also doesn't reflect well on anyone. The code is poorly structured, poorly commented, and what commenting exists is fairly damning, talking about "fudge factors," and data manipulation tricks to get desired results.


Anyway, this has been the major story in the blogosphere for the past week. I was hesitant to post at first for a couple of reasons. One is that we all have a tendency to jump at information that confirms our pre-conceptions ("confirmation bias"), so I'm aware that I'll tend to credit information which disputes and/or disparages AGW. So I try not to go there, especially with something this big, until I've seen enough to be convinced that there's a real story. There's definitely a real story.

Another reason is that a lot of the early coverage focused on one e-mail, in which Dr. Phil Jones claimed to have "used Mike's Nature trick" to "hide the decline." Too much of the first wave of coverage was focused on the word "trick," which is not actually damning at all. We've all got "tricks." "What's the trick to getting that lawnmower started?" "My trick for getting those cookies that color is to bake them faster and take them out before they're done." So the focus on the word "trick" bothered me. That passed quickly, however, and "hide the decline" is a lot tougher to explain away.

So that's the background for those who haven't been following the story. (I'll have more links and more comments going forward.) The absolute best-case interpretation that you can put on what's been released, as near as I can tell, is this - the scientists pushing the "carbon is killing the world" message are sloppy, short-sighted, fanatical, petty, and willing to manipulate the data in order to present the most effective case to the world on a real danger. The worst-case is that they've lied for grant money, to the detriment of pretty much everyone else on the face of the earth.

Is it "the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'" as James Delingpole says? Or would "a far wider conspiracy ... have to be revealed," as George Monbiot claims?

I don't know. I do know this - in order to justify ANY kind of government action to reduce carbon emissions, there needs to be some compelling and convincing science done, science that we can all trust. I'm not aware of the existence of any thus far.