Continuation of the older threads. Please scan those (even briefly) to see whether your point has already been dealt with. Let me know if there is something worth pulling from the comments to the main post.
In the meantime, read about why peer-review is a necessary but not sufficient condition for science to be worth looking at. Also, before you conclude that the emails have any impact on the science, read about the six easy steps that mean that CO2 (and the other greenhouse gases) are indeed likely to be a problem, and think specifically how anything in the emails affect them.
Update: The piece by Peter Kelemen at Columbia in Popular Mechanics is quite sensible, even if I don’t agree in all particulars.
Further update: Nature’s editorial.
Further, further update: Ben Santer’s mail (click on quoted text), the Mike Hulme op-ed, and Kevin Trenberth.
This may be slightly OT, but given the incessantly repeated mantra of the unacceptable costs of limiting CO2 emissions, many people in the US in particular may be missing the point. Solar and wind energy are on the way in anyway, no matter how you look at the climate, increasingly for economic reasons, as commented for example here:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1204/p08s01-comv.html
The den… skept… oh to hell with it… those in denial of the evidence of anthropogenic global warming are actually the ones who threaten the prosperity of what was once known as the free world. By allowing and encouraging vast swathes of the population to choose vociferous brute ignorance and blog science over proven excellence, they may run far greater risk of counseling the destruction of their own economy than do the scientists.
Not all those who have been, for various good reasons, unwilling or unable to put in the years of study and research necessary to gain a degree, let alone any higher qualification, in the domain of climate science (or even physics) – but who nevertheless now feel compelled to appoint themselves judges of the work of those who have – are absolute bastards, but they run the risk of being badly manipulated by various people who almost certainly are. We have had acid rain. We have had smog. We have had oil slicks and lead poisoning. Is it really so inconceivable that our current way of doing things may just also be having more complex and less readily detectable longer term effects on the world about us – including the climate?
From 356, apropos totalitarian politicians piggy-backing on AGW scares
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony… climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
Gavin: …this politician doesn’t want the worst case scenarios to come true.
I don’t think today’s major politicians much care either way whether AGW is true or not. What they _do_ really care about, is that we become instilled with fear at the IPCC-endorsed scenario, and so become pliant subjects in their scaled-up social ‘engineering’ and taxes.
And when scientists fail to respond to such abuse of their conclusions, the public not unreasonably concludes that the scientists share and support the politicians’ project of making science serve politics, rather than be a search for truth. IOW, they begin to suspect scientists’ motives, which means they begin to give the scientists’ findings less credibility too.
To counter skepticism of themselves, scientists need to start speaking out against the fear-mongering political tide of exaggeration and distortion. Which is admittedly problematic, given that this would involve angering their ultimate employers.
[Response: Try thinking about your suggestions empirically. If you were right then wouldn’t there be a difference in govt. science in the Bush and Obama eras? A difference between the US, the EU and Japan with their very different cultural thinking about the role of govt? None of these things happen. Stop declaring things to be true and try demonstrating that they are. If you can. – gavin]
dlharman
Who are the “bad guys”; the inside whistle-blowers that leaked the Nixon shenanigans, including the illegal break-in and cover-up, (Deep Throat), those that leaked the CRU emails and possible (but as yet unproven) illegal actions of using taxpayer funds to manipulate data to deceive those same taxpayers, or the guys committing the improper and illegal actions?
Both US and UK laws do protect whistle-blowers, i.e. confirming in this case that the ends (exposing improper behavior) do indeed justify the means (leaking data to prove this). Get up-to-date.
Max
Gavin,
I assume that is not your comment to Jason’s 394, since you are usually well informed and would not make such a statement.
All four records (HadCRUT, GISS, UAH and RSS) show a significant cooling trend since the end of 2000, and an essentially flat trend since the all-time record strong ENSO year 1998.
The late 20th century warming trend (of around 0.14C per decade) was replaced by an early 21st century cooling trend (of around 0.1C over the period), as I pointed out to BPL with a graph of the original data (386).
Accept it. The Met Office has, and has rationalized it as a result of natural variability (a.k.a. natural forcing).
Max
About the FOI2009.zip file, I noticed something really, really odd about the timestamps on 3 of the files in the .zip: FOIA/documents/briffa-treering-external/ecat/yamal/rw/82/l00311.rw, l00321.rw, and l00331.rw.
Gavin (or anyone else at RC), do you happen to know what the original dates of these files were? I tried to find CRU’s contact information to ask about this, but it seems they’ve redirected their entire web site so I can’t find it.
— bi
Re #352 “What OBSERVABLE climatic events would have to be OBSERVABLE (as opposed to modeled) for you to become convinced that “The DOMINANT cause of climate change is carbon emissions from human activity” statement is NOT true?”
This is, as Gavin has pointed out, the wrong question.
Because scientists DO NOT CLAIM that “The DOMINANT cause of climate change is carbon emissions from human activity”
Scientists claim that climate change is a perfectly NATURAL process, but that human interference with the climate will cause a period of warming which will (if unabated) cause significant damage to the economy/humankind.
The ‘claim’ is, in very simple policymakers terms
“If we keep burning fossil fuels unabated over the next 50 years temperature will rise by 3 degrees or more”
The are many observables that could be used to prove this statement wrong.
A DECLINE in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere over the period of a couple of years would suggest we don’t understand the carbon cycle properly and that the human contribution wasn’t as important as we think it is. (No such decline has been observed since 1750, so good luck)
The observation of a NATURAL PROCESS that was somehow causing the increase in CO2 since 1750 (you’d have to prove how this process was also leading to observed isotope ratio changes in the atmosphere and O2 decline as well, and also show where the CO2 from fossil fuels went if it didn’t go into the atmosphere – likewise, good luck)
Use of paleoclimate OBSERVATIONS (plenty of these around) to show that the response of climate to increased CO2 is low. So we need not worry about CO2 as much as we do now, because its impact on climate is lower than currently believed.
In terms of global temperature observations, you’d have to show that observed global temperatures over a 30 year period were inconsistent with a lower value of climate sensitivity than the (roughly 3 degrees) one we use today.
All of those bits of evidence, based on observation, could be used to show that CO2 is not something we should be worrying about.
Of course, in answer to your actual question about ‘dominant’ drivers of climate change.
If global temperature jumped by 3 degrees next year (either direction), we’d have to find a new mechanism that explained this, because its not predicted by currently understood climate science. So there’s an observable. Not one anyone would welcome, mind you.
Norman:
Norman, the relative molecular weights of CO2, H2O, O2 and N2 are 44, 18, 32 and 28, respectively. CO2, O2 and N2 are all well mixed by turbulence; they literally never have time to settle out by weight. H2O has a different distribution (a very shallow “scale height”) because it is a condensable substance at Earth temperatures and easily changes among gas, liquid, and solid.
For all those demanding maximum transparency and openness: great. I’m all for that.
Now go and demand the same of the denial side, and see what they say if you propose they publish the root password of their mail servers on the net so anyone can see what they’re up to.
If the means don’t justify the ends, then why does it take an FOI request to get data long after it’s conclusions have been reached and published?
Because (if you had been paying attention), the CRU could not legally release all of the data. Some of the data were proprietary, and the original owners/producers of said data try to make money selling it to commercial interests. So when proprietary data *are* made available for research purposes, generally the research institution (like CRU) has to sign a nondisclosure agreement. I don’t like that arrangement (it would be much better for all to have open access to all data), but that’s the way it is. CRU has to operate within the bounds of the law when it comes to intellectual property.
It’s no different than situations where Microsoft agrees to share its Windows source-code with university researchers. There will *always* be nondisclosure agreements involved. What do you think computer-science researchers would be saying in their emails if they were being inundated with FOI requests for the Windows source-code in their possession, code that they could not legally release? What if they had to spend hours of their time dealing with garbage like that?
You do know that there’s no “FOI gadfly” job-order account that researchers can charge to when they are having to deal with crap like this, don’t you? Do you think that their research sponsors would be happy if they said at the end of the year, “We couldn’t meet all our milestones because we burned up so many labor hours of your money dealing with FOI requests”?
And then there’s the matter of Margaret Thatcher pushing to have the UK Met office privatized. What effect do you suppose that privatization has on the free availability of data?
Max: the records all show that it has cooled since the end of 2000.
BPL:
1. You said “the last decade.” That would be 1999 to 2008, not 2001 to 2008. 10 years, not 8.
2. Trend 2001-2008:
NASA GISS: Up 3.45 K per decade, but not significant (t = 0.27).
Hadley CRU: Down -0.12 K per decade, but not significant (t = -1.70).
UAH satellite: Down -0.13 K per decade, but not significant (t = -0.91).
In other words, since none of the year coefficients are significant, there is no “trend.” So quit saying it’s cooling, because there’s no evidence that you’re right, and all the longer-term (i.e., statistically significant) evidence is that you’re wrong.
Richard Steckis:
The most important one is the water-vapor feedback, which is almost impossible to be negative or even neutral, given the Clausius-Clapeyron law. And the empirical evidence confirms that it’s happening, and happening rather strongly:
Brown, S., Desai, S., Keihm, S., and C. Ruf, 2007. “Ocean water vapor and cloud burden trends derived from the topex microwave radiometer.” Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium. Barcelona, Spain: IGARSS 2007, pp. 886-889.
Dessler AE, Zhang Z, Yang P 2008. “Water-Vapor Climate Feedback Inferred from Climate Variations.” Geophys. Res. Lett. 35, L20704.
Held, I.M. and B. J. Soden, 2000. “Water vapor feedback and global warming.” Annu. Rev. Energy Environ., 25, 441–475.
Minschwaner, K., and A. E. Dessler, 2004. “Water vapor feedback in the tropical upper troposphere: Model results and observations.” J. Climate, 17, 1272–1282.
Oltmans, S.J. and D.J. Hoffman, “Increase in Lower-Stratospheric Water Vapor at Mid-Latitude Northern Hemisphere Site from 1981-1994,” Nature, 374 (1995): 146-149.
Philipona, R., B. Dürr, A. Ohmura, and C. Ruckstuhl 2005. “Anthropogenic greenhouse forcing and strong water vapor feedback increase temperature in Europe.” Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L19809.
Santer, B. D, C. Mears, F. J. Wentz, K. E. Taylor, P. J. Gleckler, T. M. L. Wigley, T. P. Barnett, J. S. Boyle, W. Bruggemann, N. P. Gillett, S. A. Klein, G. A. Meehl, T. Nozawa, D. W. Pierce, P. A. Stott, W. M. Washington, M. F. Wehner, 2007. “Identification of human-induced changes in atmospheric moisture content.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 104, 15248-15253.
Soden, B.J., D. L. Jackson, V. Ramaswamy, M. D. Schwarzkopf, and X. Huang, 2005. “The radiative signature of upper tropospheric moistening.” Science, 310, 841–844.
http://www.gfy.ku.dk/~kaas/forc&feedb2008/Articles/Soden.pdf
Richard Steckis:
BPL: Right. Try these:
Crisp, D. and D. Titov 1997. “The Thermal Balance of the Venus Atmosphere.” 353-384 in Venus II, Ed. Bougher, S.W., D.M. Hunten, and R.J. Phillips. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/venusfact.html
Prinn, R.G. and Fegley, B. 1987. The Atmospheres of Venus, Mars, and Earth: A Critical Comparison. Ann. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci. 15, 171-212.
Seiff, A. et al. 1980. “Measurements of Thermal Structure and Thermal Contrasts in the Atmosphere of Venus and Related Dynamical Observations: Results from the Four Pioneer Venus Probes. JGR 85, 7903-7933.
Seiff A., Schofield J.T., Kliore A.J., Taylor F.W., Limaye S.S., Revercomb H.E., Sromovsky L.A., Kerzhanovich V.V., Moroz V.I., Marov, M.Ya. 1986. 3-32 in Advances in Space Research Vol. 5, The Venus International Reference Atmosphere, Ed. Kliore A. J., Moroz V. I., Keating G. M. NY: Pergamon Press.
Taylor, F.W. et al. 1983. “Radiative Transfer in the Venus Atmosphere.” 650-680 in Venus, ed. Hunten, D.M. et al. Tucson, AZ: Univ. of Ariz. Press.
Tomasko M.G., P.H. Smith, V.E. Suomi, L.A. Sromovsky, H.E. Revercomb, F.W. Taylor, D.J. Martonchik, A. Seiff, R. Boese, J.B. Pollack, A.P. Ingersoll, G.Schubert and C.C. Covey. 1980. “The thermal balance of Venus in light of the Pioneer Venus mission.” J. Geophys. Res., 85, 8187–8199.
Von Zahn, U. et al. 1983. “Composition of the Venus Atmosphere.” 299-430 in Venus, Ed. Hunten, D.M. et al. Tucson, AZ: The Univ. of Arizona Press.
Jeffrey Jena:
37.0 C or 98.6 F core temperature.
For environment, almost all permanent settlements are found where the mean annual temperature is between 0 and 30 C (273-303 K).
For our agriculture and economy to be stable, we want it to stay close to the 287-288 K we’ve enjoyed for the last couple of thousand years, since any substantial variation from that (like, by 1-2 K or more) will disrupt the hell out of our food sources and trade.
Within reason, yes.
No idea, but you can’t really generalize from the Ohio River Valley to the world. Some areas have warmed and some have cooled due to regional climate change effects having to do with land use, albedo, and changes in river and ocean flow, local winds and air currents, and local aerosol burden and type. Global warming is about the Mean Global Annual Surface Temperature (M-GAST). That has gone up, and a 1 K change in that can move agricultural growing belts by hundreds of miles.
No, SUVs arose in roughly the 1980s.
Because it will cause more droughts in continental interiors, more violent weather along coastlines, and the disappearance of glaciers which a billion people in Asia and Latin America depend on for their fresh water. In the long run, rising sea levels will drown trillions of dollars worth of coastal infrastructure around the world.
See above about the OH River Valley. The ocean, like the land, varies from place to place. Sea level is actually different from place to place due to variations in local gravity, currents, salinity, pollution burden, and winds. Some areas have gone down and some have gone up, but the average has been rising for a while now.
Rob:
BPL: Here it is a step at a time.
1. Word is that CO2 has already utilized its maximum climate forcing potential.
2. That word is wrong, and the person or people it originates with clearly have no idea of the physics involved.
3. Therefore, we don’t have to worry about that issue.
stevenc:
BPL: The Earth receives 161.2 watts per square meter of sunlight and 333 W/m^2 of IR back-radiation from the atmosphere. The surface visual albedo is 0.15 and the surface IR albedo is closer to 0.004 (ECHAM5 figure), 0.05 at most.
Max: The average observed linear rate of cooling since January 2001 was 0.1°C, as you can see.
BPL: What was the t-statistic on the year term, Max? Or were you using monthly data to inflate it?
Bruce Williams:
No, you’ve gotten it exactly backward. I showed that when the absorptivity of the upper layer went up, the temperature of the ground increased, even though the lower layer already absorbed 100% of the IR from the ground. Please read it more carefully. Better yet, do the math.
Dr. Jerry Pournelle IMHO provides one of the clearest view of the relevant and material issues here:
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2009/Q4/view598
[edit- text replaced with link]
[Response: Pournelle is wrong in every single factual statement and dramatically misreads the emails to support a preconceived narrative. This
ends up neither being clear nor relevant. – gavin]
Pournelle is not advancing any “narrative” other than some fiction books he has written, he is as much an adherent of rigorousness and fidelity in methods as any in your eminent team. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2009/Q4/view599.html#climate
He accepts the likelihood of an overall warming trend, believes the greenhouse effect is an experimental risk worth advancing mitigation for, and sees AGW as the most likely explanation (Although I’m not sure if he sees modelled AGW as providing the best theoretical approach for the majority-view), all reasonable and well-informed views. My main agreement with him is that acceptance is hindered by the sparseness of extraordinary data with which the
extraordinary conclusions and recommendations can be supported. Pournelle’s influential policy experience and skills in operations-driven analysis represents the kind of knowledgeable person you need to bring into agreement – or at least to avoid active contention with.
Mind you, early on I found arguments for AGW (but not GW) not too compelling. But due in no small part to the grounded arguments you and far too few others have tirelessly reasoned with, I have started to see the theoretical case for AGW as the better fit. At least for the moment, pending better data and/or theories, and presuming the current majority-view is not weakened by overtly-partisan behavior among its proponents.
I hope the added information elicits a more considered response than the last one.
And this is an example of the thinking that is overturning climate science? Someone who doesn’t understand what a forcing is? Or natural variability? Doesn’t even understand the vocabulary?
That’s what we’re up against … people who don’t even understand the words they bandy about claiming to have proof that climate science is a fraud.
Check again — I plotted the 1979-1998 trend and then extrapolated it to this year, and I compared that trend with the 1979-2009 trend.
What I showed was that 1999-2009 was entirely consistent with the warming extrapolated from the earlier period. In fact, despite cherry-picking the end date of the earlier trend to maximise the rate of growth that the last decade would have to be consistent with, the last decade actually increased the rate of growth when it was added to the data.
If I really want to see trend stagnation I can compare the temperature now to the temperature five minutes ago. But I wouldn’t learn anything from that.
So, if the past decade is entirely consistent with the warming trend derived from data prior to the past decade (and we’ve been a little “over trend” recently), what does that tell you about the reliability of a trend derived from just 8.5 years of data?
Surely I’d want to start earlier than that to see the “full impact” of CO2?
Sadly the 1979 start date was picked for me because I decided to use the favourite data set of many of those claiming something significant about the past ten years, and that data set only started then. Fortunately, even that data set seems long enough to make the point.
Re #402
“To counter skepticism of themselves, scientists need to start speaking out against the fear-mongering political tide of exaggeration and distortion. ”
What tide would that be, then?
I’m in Copenhagen.
Which of the following statements is true?
A – “Based on the science, politicians are over-reacting to the problem and are proposing mitigation steps that are too severe”
B – “Based on the science, politicians are under-reacting to the problem and are proposing mitigation steps that are too weak as too effectively deal with the problem”
C – “Based on the science, the actions proposed by politicans seem to be about right”
manacker,
It’s a shame your analysis ended in June 2009. I get a “trend” for UAH of -0.146 C/decade using January 2001-June 2009. However, adding just four more months to bring it up to date with the latest figures almost halves that trend to -0.086 C/decade. (The picture I posted earlier omitted November — the second-hottest month since August 1998, according to UAH.)
If adding just four more months of data can have that big an impact on the trend, I’m going to assume that the length of the time series is insufficient to extract the real trend from the noise. YMMV.
I had a disturbing thought yesterday. The hacker who stole the emails and carefully de-contextualised them must be a frequent visitor to RC, since they went to so much trouble to hack RC too. It seems more than likely that the hacker is actually commenting here, probably trying to push the idiotic “it must have been a leak” theory.
For me, the question is “was the hacker working for an organised lobby group, or was he a misguided reactionary?” Either way, of course, he is being used by the big-energy propaganda mill. The only real question is, does he know he is being used?
Gavin, your patience in the face of so much unmitigated, unthinking, vindictive nonsense is an amazing tour-de-force. Your book made my Christmas list.
Sorry, that should be five more months including November. The image I posted only showed four more but the updated trend is using all five.
Comment by Philip Machanick 5 December 2009 @ 8:26 AM:
“Now go and demand the same of the denial side, and see what they say if you propose they publish the root password of their mail servers on the net so anyone can see what theyre up to.”
A thought that has no doubt occurred to many of us. Judging from what we read here from the contrarians most of their internal musings would be utterly painful to digest.
But how about dollar accounting? Public entities such as CRU have what are ultimately open accounting ledgeres. What about the privately financed sites such as Steve McIntyre’s operation? May we be treated to some transparency there?
We hear a lot from contrarians about money and how it supposedly guides the direction of scientific inquiry. “Follow the money” is indeed good advice, but I suspect any serious effort to track contrarian dollars to their source will meet a brick wall, for now anyway.
Later, when the pitchforks and torches come out and show trials begin we’ll probably get some nice accurate accounting of how the PR response to climate change was financed.
BPL,if the surface is warmer then the atmosphere then more energy has to go from the surface to the atmosphere then from the atmosphere to the earth. Now that energy may go from the surface to the atmosphere and back again several times with some of it being lost to space with each cycle but it remains true that it is the sun that is warming the earth and the atmosphere is mearly acting to retain the heat. Hence no violation of the 2nd law.
Latest BBC take: ‘CRU’s programming ‘way below expected standards’’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8395514.stm
“…some climate scientists are suggesting to government that the situation is potentially so damaging that they’d like to see the UK global temperature record re-analysed from scratch to clear the air. That might not be such a bad idea, given some of the fresh concerns about the quality of the programming in question.”
“John Graham-Cumming is a software engineer; he is not a sceptic on climate change but he is shocked by what he’s seen in the programming.”
Dr. Cumming stated, “If you kook at the work that was done here in the alleged CRU files…it is not clearly documented, there is no audit history of what’s happened to it, so it would be below the standard you’d expect in any commercial software.”
He tells of bugs and errors in the programming language resulting in lost data without any warning to the end user.
When asked the question of whether he would be comfortable betting billions or trillions of dollars on this software, he states that he would not, “because it is not obvious what it is doing and why it’s doing it, and that needs to be made clear”.
Looks like a complete re-analysis may be required to clear this up.
Max
Pournelle is just posting old contrarian talking points consistent with his politics, sorry. If you want to rely on a science fiction writer for information about science policy, pick one who is also a scientist.
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2009/12/democrats-and-republicans-two-very.html
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2009/09/and-now-loons-of-left-prove-that-it.html
BPL
Your query (416):
“What was the t-statistic on the year term, Max? Or were you using monthly data to inflate it?”
Sorry. BPL. No “inflation” from monthly data.
The annual data show the same average cooling trend of 0.1 degC. (See plot below).
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3622/3464289034_9e57f541b7_b.jpg
No matter how you try to twist it or turn it, BPL, it has cooled since the end of the 20th century.
Max
JLS (418) — (1) CO2 is a global warming (so-called greenhouse) gas; without it the earth would be too cold to be habitable. Check any middle school earth science text. (2) Humans have been burning lots of fossil fules; obvious. (3) CO2 in the atmosphere continues to increase; check the Keeling curve. (4) More CO2 in the atmosphere produces more warming; radiative physics.
Hence, not just GW but AGW.
Ref #417
I am assuming you are then saying that the absorption is not saturated?
Or at least not saturated in the upper levels?
And if this is true, then on what data do you argue this? I would like to look at it.
@404. Your question, if it is an honest one, is best answered I think by an old post of Gavin’s found here, where it points out questions about trends over an x-year period depend on where you start. As you can see in the graph there, not all 8-year trends are positive, some are flat, and some are even slightly negative. But the trend is what’s important, and the clear pattern is that temperatures are trending upward.
(Gavin, it would be interesting to have the graph there updated.)
It’s interesting that the CRU dataset (as well as other temperature datasets) has features that climate change deniers have tried to use as evidence against the idea of anthropogenic global warming, e.g., the cooling period between the 1940s and 1970s and the apparent cooling of the recent decade. Now, the same people are charging that the data was manipulated to give a false impression that the earth is warming. If the scientists involved had really wanted to “cook the books”, wouldn’t they have eliminated those troublesome (albeit explainable) features? Far from having been manipulated to support an agenda, the evidence is that the data is being presented “warts and all.”
“Hide the decline”
The latest issue on data being massaged to “hide the decline” has to do with the tree-ring proxy temperature record (which showed a decline after 1961) not agreeing with the observed record (which did not). So the observed temperatures were apparently spliced onto the tree-ring record to “hide the decline”. Fairly innocent stuff, if maybe questionable science, when the tree-ring record for the later years is not shown, as well.
If nothing else, it raises major questions as to the accuracy and reliability of the proxy record.
But IPCC has other examples, which are not so innocent. Here is just one example:
Global sea level has been measured by tide gauges at various coastal stations (where sea level has a direct impact on humans) since the 19th century.
These records (from Proudman) show that the rate of sea level rise was slightly higher in the first half of the 20th century (taken as 1904-1953) than in the second half (1954-2003), with the overall average around 1.7 mm/year.
The most recent decade (1993-2003) showed an increase of 1.6 mm/year, according to a study by Carl Wunsch et al., between –0.3 mm/year and 2.0 mm/year, according to two different Proudman reports using different gauges [edit]
See attached graph:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3206/3144596227_545227fbae_b.jpg
In its SPM 2007 report IPCC tells us that the 1993-2003 increase was 3.1 mm/year, compared to only 1.8 mm/year over 1961 to 2003, implying an acceleration.
In the fine print IPCC concedes, “Data prior to 1993 are from tide gauges and after 1993 are from satellite altimetry”.
[edit]
Any comments?
Max
E Zorita calls for Mann and Jones to stay out of future review activities as they are not trustworthy. He does not say that AGW is a fraud or anything like that…his concern is tribalism by certain scientists. Ed is a well published climate scientist (much more so than McIntyre) and has a full time job doing climate science.
I think you should link to it and respond to it. I hope the delay in seeing my previous comment on this same topic is based on one of your huddles to get a response rather than on evasion.
Getting back to the context of the hack: What’s your view on the new ar*eh*legate? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpEGBgHxNTQ
All raw data should be published.
All processing ‘algorithms’ should be published.
The debate can then become less political and more collaborative.
This would also be a wonderful time to place all code/algorithms/documentation into a sensible source control system, with off-site backup.
Welcome to the new Netflix competition.
(Perhaps Al can contribute a $1M for the prize.)
Transparency and Complexity Revisited, Part I of V
Manacker, my apologies, I didn’t see your comment until this morning. To make up for it I have written a somewhat lengthy response.
manacker wrote in 388:
Gavin had stated:
That was in a private letter to Ben Santer dated Decdember 2, 2008. As this was a private letter (one of the letters stolen in the “Climategate” break-in) I have no reason to think that Gavin Schmidt was being anything less than candid. And I find it remarkably applicable to your current demand for “100% openness and transparency now.”
*
manacker wrote in 388:
You write, “Gavin’s statement was ‘pre-Climategate’,…”
What do you think was “uncovered” by “Climategate”? Do you have some specific correspondence in mind? I strongly suspect that any letter that you might bring up at this point and points that you might “reasonably” choose to draw from it have already been addressed, within the past few threads. In fact I strongly suspect that they have been addressed several times.
But in either case you will have to be more specific. Vague allusions establish little more than a lack of the command of the facts.
*
You write, “Gavin’s statement was ‘pre-Climategate’, … ‘Now’ is not December 2008.”
What rules? Are you thinking of the rules against breaking into someone else’s building perhaps? Those against hacking into someone’s computer? In either case I believe that we are speaking of “the rule of law.”
No, “now” is not December 2008 — and yet I find Gavin Schmidt’s statement in a private correspondence remarkably applicable. One might even think it remarkably prescient — but for the fact that it was as applicable then or five years before that as it is now — and he no doubt acquired this insight from experience.
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manacker wrote in 388:
How so? Did I bring up either national security or presidential immunity?
Transparency and Complexity Revisited, Part II of V
My argument against “100% openness and transparency” is essentially the same as Gavin’s — and it is a bit more fundamental than either of these two issues. And for me at least it arises out of my study of of economics, human Action and the philosophy of science. It isn’t a rule. It is a principle — in much the same way as the principles of physics.
The demand for “100% openness and transparency” sounds reasonable on the face of it — that is until one attempts to spell out precisely what it means and how it is to be applied. In “Knowledge and Decisions”, Thomas Sowell elaborates upon an insight by Friedrich A. von Hayek using the example of a restaurant.
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In a well-run restaurant which serves the finest cuisine, many of the details that go into how the restaurant is run and how the food is prepared are left unarticulated or are stated or thought of only in fairly vague terms. A pinch of this, a handful of that, and how to tell when a customer is about request something before they actually consciously signal it. How the floor is to be mopped, when to vacuum, all of the expectations of the owner, the manager, the cook and the maitre de.
People learn first by watching others then by doing, much like one learns how to play a piano, ride a bicycle or type on a keyboard. (These latter examples were used by Ayn Rand to illustrate essentially the same principle.) There isn’t any one time or place in which all of the details that are involved get spelled out.
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And what does it take to spell them out specifically? Setting aside the high end restaurant for the time being at least, you might want to consider McDonalds. They actually try and spell out in precise detail how a given McDonald’s restaurant is to be run. The result? Volumes. (I know because I’ve worked behind the counter and have seen the books for myself.)
It is about the same size as a set of encyclopedias. In this way they are able to standardize practices throughout the entire restaurant chain. They are able to achieve uninformity — and replicability — defining methods, procedures and specifications in such a way that no detail depends upon the tacit expertise of any member of the team in order to duplicate what is done the same way everywhere else.
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But that generally isn’t how it works. Not at most restaurants, nor in most human endeavors. There are those who have expertise — who have automated a body of knowledge that was only in part articulated while they were in school acquiring their degress and the rest of which was acquired in a form that was scattered throughout the experience acquired over the earlier part of their career.
Experts have a body of knowledge — tacit and automized — which distinguishes them from the novice and the man on the street. It is what results in a division of cognitive labor — and distinguishes between the the expert and the novice in any line of endeavor.
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Now admittedly for an individual scientist with respect to a single study, what he does may be less complicated than what it takes to run a restaurant in its every detail. However, what stands behind and is presupposed by the study in terms of its literature, physical principles, methods, significance and implications in all likelihood often dwarfs that which is serves as the foundation for the good majority of human endeavors.
And the scientist doesn’t stop there, honing what he has done to the point that anyone can easily replicate it. He assumes a certain level of expertise on the part of those who read the study, that much of what he has done can be taken for granted as that which is generally assumed, tacit and forms the background as part of the foundation for much of the activity in his line of study. And then after the writeup he moves on to the next study.
Transparency and Complexity Revisited, Part III of V
Other scientists in his discipline have the background. Typically they don’t need to have a great deal spelled out to them. Students do. They need to have the teacher patiently spell out every step in a the solution to a problem in integral calculus. In fact this is part of the reason why I think it is a mistake for a math teacher to teach out of a textbook he has written.
When I went to Iowa State I had an acquaintance, a pretty girl who had gone to a school up in Chicago during grade and high school. She was taking a class in business calculus. At one point she confided in me that she had failed the past three tests and asked me if I would help her study for the next test.
I asked her when the test was. She said, “9:00 PM tonight.” It was 3:00 PM. I found an empty classroom and started by trying to find out where she was in terms of her background in math. It turned out that she didn’t even know how to simplify fractions.
Although conversationally she did just fine, it came to writing she confided that in an essay used to determine where she was in English, upon its being evaluated she was asked if she could speak English. And I suspected her non-standard use of prepositions (think “twice as less”) was getting in the way of her ability to understand mathematical relationships.
So we began with fractions. We dealt some additional math then turned to integrals. I took her step-by-step through the problems. I showed how the principles learned in the case of one problem was dependent and built upon the problems that came before it. She seemed uncertain at first but then to follow me and her confidence seemed to grow.
By the time she went in to take the test I was more nervous than she was. An hour later she came out beaming. She had gotten an “A.” Her difficulties weren’t due to any lack of intelligence or even willingness to learn on her part. She could learn — quickly. She proved it.
Her difficulties were due to a poor education, teachers who found steps one through ten obvious and skipped from the first to the last without any consideration for those to whom these steps weren’t obvious — and a professor who evidently thought that he had already explained everything in the textbook he had written — and could simply breeze through everything in class and expect everyone to pick things up the first or second time.
Transparency and Complexity Revisited, Part IV of V
Now lets look at some of the things which novices at least might matter with regard to climatology: land and satellite temperature measurements. What do these measurements depend upon — which assuming the novice understood – would want articulated and all in only place neatly wrapped up with a bow? So that they could replicate the results, reproduce the study, understand the results and their significance?
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what about the height at which the temperature is taken? If the thermometer is lower it will be closer to the skin temperature. What about the direction of the wind? The shape and constitution of the terrain? This may matter. Was the thermometer in the shade? Did they switch thermometers? What color was the thermometer? What time of day was it? These things may or may not matter to you, but they may matter a great deal to someone else. And these are just some of the aspects one might wish to consider regarding the measurement of just land temperature.
What about satellites? The orbit will most certainly matter. Has it decayed? What about the time of day that it was over a specific point? What direction were the instruments pointed? How were the instruments constructed? What physical principles were they relying upon? How often the satellite gets tested? Are such tests “hands-on”? What algorithms did they use for compensating for orbital decay — assuming they weren’t in the position to put a new satellite in orbit and validate that orbit each year? What of the quality of the materials that are used in the construction of the instruments — and the instruments used in the validation of the satellite’s instruments?
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But typically a great deal of the information such novices are asking for is already available. They simply don’t know where to look — and aren’t really all that motivated to do so. And even were someone to have the time, inclination and desire to walk them step by step through the entire process those who are making the demands of more transparency wouldn’t really have any interest.
They have simply heard that scientists are being secretive and possibly engaged in some sort of conspiracy. Or perhaps they have heard that the scientists are incompetent. Or assuming they are just a little more insightful — as evidenced by their repeatedly demanding material which they know is already available or answers that they have already received, they may wish to create the impression that scientists are either incompetent or engaged in some sort of conspiracy. Or perhaps they simply wish — for various reasons — to harrass scientists whose conclusions they dislike and perhaps bring science to a grinding halt.
Transparency and Complexity Revisited, Part V of V
Scientists are rarely interested in the exact replication of the results of previous studies. They don’t need to have every detail spelled out for them in order to understand the results — and there wouldn’t be nearly as much progress if they obsessed upon such replication rather than coming up with their own new and innovative studies. And given their familiarity with the literature, they are able to see how things fit together and what will be innovative.
But when they need additional details they generally know who they can go to get them — or at least who will know or where to look. This, too, is aquired with experience and constitutes an aspect of expertise. But it is typically tacit, and even in the case of a single study and that which it immediately depends upon rarely all articulated in the same place.
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The principle is closely related to Duhem’s Thesis — which points out the fatal flaw in Karl Popper’s Principle of Falsifiability. No theory can be tested in isolation. Any time we wish to test a given theory, the theory itself is an semi-articulated product of the division of cognitive labor. Its premises and principles stand in the foreground.
But there is much which is tacit — much which is assumed in deriving the the testable implications of the theory. And that which is tacit largely consists of other theories that are preferably more well-established. Their premises are likewise assumed by the conclusion — the hypothesis which is in part “derived” from the theory that is in the foreground, but in part “derived” from the theories that are in the background.
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The principle is also closely related to my understanding of the meaning of “scientific consensus.” Typically a scientific consensus is largely tacit, consisting of that which is essentially well-established and rarely needs to be argued for anymore. Oftentimes within a given discipline it consists of what was established in other disciplines — such as when the principles of optics were assumed in the testing of General Relativity. It will generally be the product of numerous, largely independent lines of evidence where the justification for the conclusion will be far greater than that which it would receive from any one line of evidence in isolation from the rest.
It becomes necessary to articulate the propositions which constitute a scientific consensus (or at least the basis for that consensus) typically only at the interface between the scientific community and the rest of society — typically in science education. Or more recently, when groups seek to politicize science, viewing it merely as a means to an end — and a potential weapon in an economic, religious, cultural or ideological battle. Such as cigarettes and CFCs, the link between HIV and AIDS, evolution or climatology.
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Now I presume that my argument no longer reminds you of the Whitehouse’s defense in the Watergate affair.
By way of contrast, “Climategate” reminds me a great deal of Watergate — inasmuch as it revolves around the attempt to dig up some dirt — or at least material which could be twisted and made to appear questionable — by means of an act of theft. The biggest difference in this case (so far) appears to that the victims are being “put on trial” rather than the perpetrators of the crime.
Yes, Max, I have a comment:
The satellite data are believed to be much better than the tidal gauge data. Unfortunately, the former don’t extend to the beginning of the twentieth century.
Does that mean the better data should be ignored?
“E Zorita calls for Mann and Jones to stay out of future review activities as they are not trustworthy. He does not say that AGW is a fraud or anything like that…his concern is tribalism by certain scientists. Ed is a well published climate scientist (much more so than McIntyre) and has a full time job doing climate science. I think you should link to it and respond to it. I hope the delay in seeing my previous comment on this same topic is based on one of your huddles to get a response rather than on evasion.”
Here’s the link:
http://coast.gkss.de/staff/zorita/myview.html
Ref #409
One cannot get private data through the FOI system. One can only get what should be public data. Check the acts please.
From
http://omniclimate.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/willis-vs-the-cru-a-history-of-foi-evasion/
“As far as I know, I am the person who made the original Freedom Of Information Act to CRU that started getting all this stirred up. I was trying to get access to the taxpayer funded raw data that they built the global temperature record out of.”
manacker #404:
Since you are obviously unfamiliar with the extent of natural variability, take a look at the HadCRUT3 data set for the first 50 years. It is essentially flat (trend 0.08C/century) but with low correlation (R2 = 0.0124, p-value of t-test 0.9 so not statistically significant: no trend in other words). Now look at the data 1887-1899. 1887 was a big peak. 1887-1899 (23 years) has a trend of -0.89C per century, R2 = 0.238, t-test p-value 0.0009, i.e. statistically significant. Now look at the period 1900-2008. You get a trend of 0.7C per century, R2 = 0.74, t-test p-value 0.0001, highly statistically significant.
What can you learn from this? At a period when there was insignificant AGW, you can find a period of over 20 years when there is significant cooling in an overall period when the there is no statistically significant trend. More on my blog, where I illustrate that even if you add a strong artificial trend to the first 50 years of the HadCRUT record, you still get a downward trend starting at 1878.
There is a good reason for this. The combined effects of ENSO and the solar cycle make looking for trends over less than 30 years problematic. Unless you filter these out, finding trends over even as much as 20 years can be very misleading, as you can see here.
> All raw data should be published.
Indeed. Every petroleum and mineral company has a huge proprietary collection of data that gives them reason to look one place or another for whatever they make money from. Once all that is published, science will benefit greatly.
You go first.
ZZT #443:
Absolutely. And we should live in a utopian social-ist universe where scientists have unlimited funding, there is no proprietary data, and we have invented a time machine, so we can transport a few terabytes of disk back to 1980, when the cost of enough disk to store all the raw data would have been in the millions of dollars.
Stoat covers Zorita quite adequately:
http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2009/11/zorita_goes_for_the_jugular.php
> In the fine print IPCC concedes
Manacker (Max Anacker) figures the way to hide something is to label it correctly, because, well, he repeats his claims no matter how debunked.
Bruce Williams — look at the first link under Science in the right hand sidebar, and at the infrared astronomy work, and this search:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Arealclimate.org+%2Bnot%2Bsaturated