Guest commentary from Ben Santer
Part 2 of a series discussing the recent Guardian articles
A recent story by Fred Pearce in the February 9th online edition of the Guardian (“Victory for openness as IPCC climate scientist opens up lab doors”) covers some of the more publicized aspects of the last 14 years of my scientific career. I am glad that Mr. Pearce’s account illuminates some of the non-scientific difficulties I have faced. However, his account also repeats unfounded allegations that I engaged in dubious professional conduct. In a number of instances, Mr Pearce provides links to these allegations, but does not provide a balanced account of the rebuttals to them. Nor does he give links to locations where these rebuttals can be found. I am taking this opportunity to correct Mr. Pearce’s omissions, to reply to the key allegations, and to supply links to more detailed responses.
Another concern relates to Mr. Pearce’s discussion of the “openness” issue mentioned in the title and sub-title of his story. A naïve reader of Mr. Pearce’s article might infer from the sub-title (“Ben Santer had a change of heart about data transparency…”) that my scientific research was not conducted in an open and transparent manner until I experienced “a change of heart”.
This inference would be completely incorrect. As I discuss below, my research into the nature and causes of climate change has always been performed in an open, transparent, and collegial manner. Virtually all of the scientific papers I have published over the course of my career involve multi-institutional teams of scientists with expertise in climate modeling, the development of observational datasets, and climate model evaluation. The model and observational data used in my research is not proprietary – it is freely available to researchers anywhere in the world.
The 1995 IPCC Report: The “scientific cleansing” allegation
Mr. Pearce begins by repeating some of the allegations of misconduct that arose after publication (in 1996) of the Second Assessment Report (SAR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These allegations targeted Chapter 8 of the SAR, which dealt with the “Detection of Climate Change, and Attribution of Causes”. The IPCC SAR reached the historic finding that “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”. Information presented in Chapter 8 provided substantial support for this finding.
I served as the Convening Lead Author (CLA) of Chapter 8. There were three principal criticisms of my conduct as CLA. All three allegations are baseless. They have been refuted on many occasions, and in many different fora. All three allegations make an appearance in Mr. Pearce’s story, but there are no links to the detailed responses to these claims.
The first allegation was that I had engaged in “scientific cleansing”. This allegation originated with the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) – a group of businesses “opposing immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”.
In May 1996, a document entitled “The IPCC: Institutionalized ‘Scientific Cleansing’?” was widely circulated to the press and politicians. In this document, the Global Climate Coalition claimed that after a key Plenary Meeting of the IPCC in Madrid in November 1995, all scientific uncertainties had been purged from Chapter 8. The GCC’s “scientific cleansing” allegation was soon repeated in an article in Energy Daily (May 22, 1996) and in an editorial in the Washington Times (May 24, 1996). It was also prominently featured in the World Climate Report, a publication edited by Professor Patrick J. Michaels (June 10, 1996).
This “scientific cleansing” claim is categorically untrue. There was no “scientific cleansing”. Roughly 20% of the published version of Chapter 8 specifically addressed uncertainties in scientific studies of the causes of climate change. In discussing the “scientific cleansing” issue, Mr. Pearce claims that many of the caveats in Chapter 8 “did not make it to the summary for policy-makers”. This is incorrect.
The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the IPCC SAR is four-and-a-half pages long. Roughly one page of the SPM discusses results from Chapter 8. The final paragraph of that page deals specifically with uncertainties, and notes that:
“Our ability to quantify the human influence on global climate is currently limited because the expected signal is still emerging from the noise of natural variability, and because there are uncertainties in key factors. These include the magnitude and patterns of long term natural variability and the time-evolving pattern of forcing by, and response to, changes in concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols, and land surface changes”.
Contrary to Mr. Pearce’s assertion, important caveats did “make it to the summary for policy-makers”. And the “discernible human influence” conclusion of both Chapter 8 and the Summary for Policymakers has been substantiated by many subsequent national and international assessments of climate science.
There were several reasons why Chapter 8 was a target for unfounded “scientific cleansing” allegations. First, the Global Climate Coalitions’s “scientific cleansing” charges were released to the media in May 1996. At that time, Cambridge University Press had not yet published the IPCC Second Assessment Report in the United States. Because of this delay in the Report’s U.S. publication, many U.S. commentators on the “scientific cleansing” claims had not even read Chapter 8 – they only had access to the GCC’s skewed account of the changes made to Chapter 8. Had the Second Assessment Report been readily available in the U.S. in May 1996, it would have been easy for interested parties to verify that Chapter 8 incorporated a fair and balanced discussion of scientific uncertainties.
Second, the “pre-Madrid” version of Chapter 8 was the only chapter in the IPCC Working Group I Second Assessment Report to have both an “Executive Summary” and a “Concluding Summary”. As discussed in the next section, this anomaly was partly due to the fact that the Lead Author team for Chapter 8 was not finalized until April 1994 – months after all other chapters had started work. Because of this delay in getting out of the starting blocks, the Chapter 8 Lead Author team was more concerned with completing the initial drafts of our chapter than with the question of whether all chapters in the Working Group I Report had exactly the same structure.
The reply of the Chapter 8 Lead Authors to the Energy Daily story of May 22, 1996 pointed out this ‘two summary’ redundancy, and noted that:
“After receiving much criticism of this redundancy in October and November 1995, the Convening Lead Author of Chapter 8 decided to remove the concluding summary. About half of the information in the concluding summary was integrated with material in Section 8.6. It did not disappear completely, as the Global Climate Coalition has implied. The lengthy Executive Summary of Chapter 8 addresses the issue of uncertainties in great detail – as does the underlying Chapter itself.”
The removal of the concluding summary made it simple for the Global Climate Coalition to advance their unjustified “scientific cleansing” allegations. They could claim ‘This statement has been deleted’, without mentioning that the scientific issue addressed in the deleted statement was covered elsewhere in the chapter.
This was my first close encounter of the absurd kind.
The 1995 IPCC Report: The “political tampering/corruption of peer-review” allegation
The second allegation is that I was responsible for “political tampering”. I like to call this “the tail wags the dog” allegation. The “tail” here is the summary of the Chapter 8 results in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers, and the “dog” is the detailed underlying text of Chapter 8.
In November 1995, 177 government delegates from 96 countries spent three days in Madrid. Their job was to “approve” each word of the four-and-a-half page Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC’s Working Group I Report. This was the report that dealt with the physical science of climate change. The delegates also had the task of “accepting” the 11 underlying science chapters on which the Summary for Policymakers was based. “Acceptance” of the 11 chapters did not require government approval of each word in each chapter.
This was not a meeting of politicians only. A number of the government delegates were climate scientists. Twenty-eight of the Lead Authors of the IPCC Working Group I Report – myself included – were also prominent participants in Madrid. We were there to ensure that the politics did not get ahead of the science, and that the tail did not wag the dog.
Non-governmental organizations – such as the Global Climate Coalition – were also active participants in the Madrid meeting. NGOs had no say in the formal process of approving the Summary for Policymakers. They were, however, allowed to make comments on the SPM and the underlying 11 science chapters during the first day of the Plenary Meeting (November 27, 1996). The Global Climate Coalition dominated the initial plenary discussions.
Most of the plenary discussions at Madrid focused on the portrayal of Chapter 8’s findings in the Summary for Policymakers. Discussions were often difficult and contentious. We wrestled with the exact wording of the “balance of evidence” statement mentioned above. The delegations from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait argued for a very weak statement, or for no statement at all. Delegates from many other countries countered that there was strong scientific evidence of pronounced a human effect on climate, and that the bottom-line statement from Chapter 8 should reflect this.
Given the intense interest in Chapter 8, Sir John Houghton (one of the two Co-Chairs of IPCC Working Group I) established an ad hoc group on November 27, 1996. I was a member of this group. Our charge was to review those parts of the draft Summary for Policymakers that dealt with climate change detection and attribution issues. The group was placed under the Chairmanship of Dr. Martin Manning of New Zealand, and included delegates from the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Kenya, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. Sir John Houghton also invited delegates from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to participate in this ad hoc group. Unfortunately, they did not accept this invitation.
The ad hoc group considered more than just the portions of the Summary for Policymakers that were relevant to Chapter 8. The Dutch delegation asked for a detailed discussion of Chapter 8 itself, and of the full scientific evidence contained in it. This discussion took place on November 28, 1996.
On November 29, 1996, I reported back to the Plenary on the deliberations of the ad hoc group. The Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti delegations – who had not attended any of the discussions of the ad hoc group, and had no first-hand knowledge of what had been discussed by the group – continued to express serious reservations about the scientific basis for the detection and attribution statements in the Summary for Policymakers.
On the final evening of the Madrid Plenary Meeting, debate focused on finding the right word to describe the human effect on global climate. There was broad agreement among the government delegates that – based on the scientific evidence presented in Chapter 8 – some form of qualifying word was necessary. Was the human influence “measurable”? Could it be best described as “appreciable”, “detectable”, or “substantial”? Each of these suggested words had proponents and opponents. How would each word translate into different languages? Would the meaning be the same as in English?
After hours of often rancorous debate, Bert Bolin (who was then the Chairman of the IPCC) finally found the elusive solution. Professor Bolin suggested that the human effect on climate should be described as “discernible”.
Mr. Pearce – who was not present at the Madrid Plenary Meeting – argues that the discussion of human effects on climate in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers “went beyond what was said in the chapter from which the summary was supposedly drawn”. In other words, he suggests that the tail wagged the dog. This is not true. The “pre-Madrid” bottom-line statement from Chapter 8 was “Taken together, these results point towards a human influence on climate”. As I’ve noted above, the final statement agreed upon in Madrid was “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”.
Is “suggests” stronger than “points towards”? I doubt it. Is “The balance of evidence” a more confident phrase than “Taken together”? I don’t think so.
The primary difference between the pre- and post-Madrid statements is that the latter includes the word “discernible”. In my American Heritage College Dictionary, “discernible” is defined as “perceptible, as by vision or the intellect”. In Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, one of the three meanings of the verb “discern” is “to recognize or identify as separate and distinct”. Was the use of “discernible” justified?
The answer is clearly “yes”. Chapter 8 of the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report relied heavily on the evidence from a number of different “fingerprint” studies. This type of research uses rigorous statistical methods to compare observed patterns of climate change with results from climate model simulations. The basic concept of fingerprinting is that each different influence on climate – such as purely natural changes in the Sun’s energy output, or human-caused changes in atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases – has a unique signature in climate records. This uniqueness becomes more apparent if one looks beyond changes averaged over the entire globe, and instead exploits the much greater information content available in complex, time-varying patterns of climate change.
Fingerprinting has proved to be an invaluable tool for untangling the complex cause-and-effect relationships in the climate system. The IPCC’s Second Assessment Report in 1995 was able to draw on fingerprint studies from a half-dozen different research groups. Each of these groups had independently shown that they could indeed perceive a fingerprint of human influence in observed temperature records. The signal was beginning to rise out of the noise, and was (using Merriam-Webster’s definition of “discern”) “separate and distinct” from purely natural variations in climate.
Based on these fingerprint results, and based on the other scientific evidence available to us in November 1995, use of the word “discernible” was entirely justified. Its use is certainly justified based on the scientific information available to us in 2010. The “discernible human influence” phrase was approved by all of the 177 delegates from 96 countries present at the Plenary Meeting – even by the Saudi and Kuwaiti delegations. None of the 28 IPCC Lead Authors in attendance at Madrid balked at this phrase, or questioned our finding that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”. The latter statement was cautious and responsible, and entirely consistent with the state of the science. The much more difficult job of trying to quantify the size of human influences on climate would be left to subsequent IPCC assessments.
Mr. Pearce’s remarks suggest that there is some substance to the “political tampering” allegation – that I was somehow coerced to change Chapter 8 in order to “reflect the wording of the political summary”. This is untrue. There was no political distortion of the science. If Mr. Pearce had been present at the Madrid Plenary Meeting, he would have seen how vigorously (and successfully) scientists resisted efforts on the part of a small number of delegates to skew and spin some of the information in the Summary for Policymakers.
The key point here is that the SPM was not a “political summary” – it was an accurate reflection of the science. Had it been otherwise, I would not have agreed to put my name on the Report.
A reader of Mr. Pearce’s article might also gain the mistaken impression that the changes to Chapter 8 were only made in response to comments made by government delegates during the Madrid Plenary Meeting. That is not true. As I’ve mentioned above, changes were also made to address government comments made during the meeting of the ad hoc group formed to discuss Chapter 8.
Furthermore, when I first arrived in Madrid on November 26, 1995, I was handed a stack of government and NGO comments on Chapter 8 that I had not seen previously. I had the responsibility of responding to these comments.
One reason for the delay in receiving comments was that the IPCC had encountered difficulties in finding a Convening Lead Author (CLA) for Chapter 8. To my knowledge, the CLA job had been turned down by at least two other scientists before I received the job offer. The unfortunate consequence of this delay was that, at the time of the Madrid Plenary Meeting, Chapter 8 was less mature and polished than other chapters of the IPCC Working Group I Report. Hence the belated review comments.
The bottom line in this story is that the post-Madrid revisions to Chapter 8 were made for scientific, not political reasons. They were made by me, not by IPCC officials. The changes were in full accord with IPCC rules and procedures (pdf). Mr. Pearce repeats accusations by Fred Seitz that the changes to Chapter 8 were illegal and unauthorized, and that I was guilty of “corruption of the peer-review process”. These allegations are false, as the IPCC has clearly pointed out.
The 1995 IPCC Report: The “research irregularities” allegation
The third major front in the attack on Chapter 8 focused on my personal research. It was a two-pronged attack. First, Professor S. Fred Singer claimed that the IPCC’s “discernible human influence” conclusion was entirely based on two of my own (multi-authored) research papers. Next, Professor Patrick Michaels argued that one of these two papers was seriously flawed, and that irregularities had occurred in the paper’s publication process. Both charges were untrue.
On July 25, 1996, I addressed the first of these allegations in an email to the Lead Authors of the 1995 IPCC Report:
“Chapter 8 references more than 130 scientific papers – not just two. Its bottom-line conclusion that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate” is not solely based on the two Santer et al. papers that Singer alludes to. This conclusion derives from many other published studies on the comparison of modelled and observed patterns of temperature change – for example, papers by Karoly et al. (1994), Mitchell et al. (1995), Hegerl et al. (1995), Karl et al. (1995), Hasselmann et al. (1995), Hansen et al. (1995) and Ramaswamy et al. (1996). It is supported by many studies of global-mean temperature changes, by our physical understanding of the climate system, by our knowledge of human-induced changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, by information from paleoclimatic studies, and by a wide range of supporting information (sea-level rise, retreat of glaciers, etc.). To allege, as Singer does, that “Chapter 8 is mainly based on two research papers” is just plain wrong”.
In the second prong of the attack, Professor Michaels claimed that a paper my colleagues and I had published in Nature in 1996 had been selective in its use of observational data, and that our finding of a human fingerprint in atmospheric temperature data was not valid if a longer observational record was used. Further, he argued that Nature had been “toyed with” (presumably by me), and coerced into publishing the 1996 Santer et al. Nature paper one week prior to a key United Nations meeting in Geneva.
My colleagues and I immediately addressed the scientific criticism of our Nature paper by Michaels and his colleague Chip Knappenberger. We demonstrated that this criticism was simply wrong. Use of a longer record of atmospheric temperature change strengthened rather than weakened the evidence for a human fingerprint. We published this work in Nature in December 1996. Unfortunately, Mr. Pearce does not provide a link to this publication.
Since 1996, studies by a number of scientists around the world have substantiated the findings of our 1996 Nature paper. Such work has consistently shown clear evidence of a human fingerprint in atmospheric temperature records.
Disappointingly, Professor Michaels persists in repeating his criticism of our paper, without mentioning our published rebuttal or the large body of subsequently published evidence refuting his claims. Michaels’ charge that Nature had been “toyed with” was complete nonsense. As described below, however, this was not the last time I would be falsely accused of having the extraordinary power to force scientific journals to do my bidding.
A Climatology Conspiracy? More “peer-review abuse” accusations
Mr. Pearce also investigates a more recent issue. He implies that I abused the normal peer-review system, and exerted pressure on the editor of the International Journal of Climatology to delay publication of the print version of a paper by Professor David Douglass and colleagues. This is not true.
The Douglass et al. paper was published in December 2007 in the online edition of the International Journal of Climatology. The “et al.” included the same Professor S. Fred Singer who had previously accused me of “scientific cleansing”. It also included Professor John Christy, the primary developer of a satellite-based temperature record which suggests that there has been minimal warming of Earth’s lower atmosphere since 1979. Three alternate versions of the satellite temperature record, produced by different teams of researchers using the same raw satellite measurements, all indicate substantially more warming of the Earth’s atmosphere.
The focus of the Douglass et al. paper was on post-1979 temperature changes in the tropics. The authors devised what they called a “robust statistical test” to compare computer model results with observations. The test was seriously flawed (see Appendix A in Open Letter to the Climate Science Community: Response to A “Climatology Conspiracy?”). When it was applied to the model and observational temperature datasets, the test showed (quite incorrectly) that the model results were significantly different from observations.
As I have noted elsewhere, the Douglass et al. paper immediately attracted considerable media and political attention. One of the paper’s authors claimed that it represented an “inconvenient truth”, and proved that “Nature, not humans, rules the climate”. These statements were absurd. No single study can overturn the very large body of scientific evidence supporting “discernible human influence” findings. Nor does any individual study provide the sole underpinning for the conclusion that human activities are influencing global climate.
Given the extraordinary claims that were being made on the basis of this incorrect paper, my colleagues and I decided that a response was necessary. Although the errors in Douglass et al. were easy to identify, it required a substantial amount of new and original work to repeat the statistical analysis properly.
Our work went far beyond what Douglass et al. had done. We looked at the sensitivity of model-versus-data comparisons to the choice of statistical test, to the test assumptions, to the number of years of record used in the tests, and to errors in the computer model estimates of year-to-year temperature variability. We also examined how the statistical test devised by Douglass et al. performed under controlled conditions, using random data with known statistical properties. From their paper, there is no evidence that Douglass et al. considered any of these important issues before making their highly-publicized claims.
Our analysis clearly showed that tropical temperature changes in observations and climate model simulations were not fundamentally inconsistent – contrary to the claim of Douglass and colleagues. Our research was published on October 10, 2008, in the online edition of the International Journal of Climatology. On November 15, 2008, the Douglass et al. and Santer et al. papers appeared in the same print version of the International Journal of Climatology.
In December 2009, shortly after the public release of the stolen emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, Professors David Douglass and John Christy accused me of leading a conspiracy to delay publication of the print version of the Douglass et al. paper. This accusation was based on a selective analysis of the stolen emails. It is false.
In Mr. Pearce’s account of this issue, he states that “There is no doubt the (sic) Santer and his colleagues sought to use the power they held to the utmost…” So what are the facts of this matter? What is the “power” Fred Pearce is referring to?
- Fact 1: The only “power” that I had was the power to choose which scientific journal to submit our paper to. I chose the International Journal of Climatology. I did this because the International Journal of Climatology had published (in their online edition) the seriously flawed Douglass et al. paper. I wanted to give the journal the opportunity to set the scientific record straight.
- Fact 2: I had never previously submitted a paper to the International Journal of Climatology. I had never met the editor of the journal (Professor Glenn McGregor). I did not have any correspondence or professional interaction with the editor prior to 2008.
- Fact 3: Prior to submitting our paper, I wrote an email to Dr. Tim Osborn on January 10, 2008. Tim Osborn was on the editorial board of the International Journal of Climatology. I told Dr. Osborn that, before deciding whether we would submit our paper to the International Journal of Climatology, I wanted to have some assurance that our paper would “be regarded as an independent contribution, not as a comment on Douglass et al.” This request was entirely reasonable in view of the substantial amount of new work that we had done. I have described this new work above.
- Fact 4: I did not want to submit our paper to the International Journal of Climatology if there was a possibility that our submission would be regarded as a mere “comment” on Douglass et al. Under this scenario, Douglass et al. would have received the last word. Given the extraordinary claims they had made, I thought it unlikely that their “last word” would have acknowledged the serious statistical error in their original paper. As subsequent events showed, I was right to be concerned – they have not admitted any error in their work.
- Fact 5: As I clearly stated in my email of January 10 to Dr. Tim Osborn, if the International Journal of Climatology agreed to classify our paper as an independent contribution, “Douglass et al. should have the opportunity to respond to our contribution, and we should be given the chance to reply. Any response and reply should be published side-by-side…”
- Fact 6: The decision to hold back the print version of the Douglass et al. paper was not mine. It was the editor’s decision. I had no “power” over the publishing decisions of the International Journal of Climatology.
This whole episode should be filed under the category “No good deed goes unpunished”. My colleagues and I were simply trying to set the scientific record straight. There was no conspiracy to subvert the peer-review process. Unfortunately, conspiracy theories are easy to disseminate. Many are willing to accept these theories at face value. The distribution of facts on complex scientific issues is a slower, more difficult process.
Climate Auditing – Close Encounters with Mr. Steven McIntyre
Ten days after the online publication of our International Journal of Climatology paper, Mr. Steven McIntyre, who runs the “ClimateAudit” blog, requested all of the climate model data we had used in our research. I replied that Mr. McIntyre was welcome to “audit” our calculations, and that all of the primary model data we had employed were archived at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and freely available to any researcher. Over 3,400 scientists around the world currently analyze climate model output from this open database.
My response was insufficient for Mr. McIntyre. He submitted two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for climate model data – not for the freely available raw data, but for the results from intermediate calculations I had performed with the raw data. One FOIA request also asked for two years of my email correspondence related to these climate model data sets.
I had performed these intermediate calculations in order derive weighted-average temperature changes for different layers of the atmosphere. This is standard practice. It is necessary since model temperature data are available at specific heights in the atmosphere, whereas satellite temperature measurements represent an average over a deep layer of the atmosphere. The weighted averages calculated from the climate model data can be directly compared with actual satellite data. The method used for making such intermediate calculations is not a secret. It is published in several different scientific journals.
Unlike Mr. McIntyre, David Douglass and his colleagues (in their International Journal of Climatology paper) had used the freely available raw model data. With these raw datasets, Douglass et al. made intermediate calculations similar to the calculations we had performed. The results of their intermediate calculations were similar to our own intermediate results. The differences between what Douglass and colleagues had done and what my colleagues and I had done was not in the intermediate calculations – it was in the statistical tests each group had used to compare climate models with observations.
The punch-line of this story is that Mr. McIntyre’s Freedom of Information Act requests were completely unnecessary. In my opinion, they were frivolous. Mr. McIntyre already had access to all of the information necessary to check our calculations and our findings.
When I invited Mr. McIntyre to “audit” our entire study, including the intermediate calculations, and told him that all the data necessary to perform such an “audit” were freely available, he expressed moral outrage on his blog. I began to receive threatening emails. Complaints about my “stonewalling” behavior were sent to my superiors at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and at the U.S. Department of Energy.
A little over a month after receiving Mr. McIntyre’s Freedom of Information Act requests, I decided to release all of the intermediate calculations I had performed for our International Journal of Climatology paper. I made these datasets available to the entire scientific community. I did this because I wanted to continue with my scientific research. I did not want to spend all of my available time and energy responding to harassment incited by Mr. McIntyre’s blog.
Mr. Pearce does not mention that Mr. McIntyre had no need to file Freedom of Information Act requests, since Mr. McIntyre already had access to all of the raw climate model data we had used in our study (and to the methods we had used for performing intermediate calculations). Nor does Mr. Pearce mention the curious asymmetry in Mr. McIntyre’s “auditing”. To my knowledge, Mr. McIntyre – who purports to have considerable statistical expertise – has failed to “audit” the Douglass et al. paper, which contained serious statistical errors.
As the “Climategate” emails clearly show, there is a pattern of behavior here. My encounter with Mr. McIntyre’s use of FOIA requests for “audit” purposes is not an isolated event. In my opinion, Mr. McIntyre’s FOIA requests serve the purpose of initiating fishing expeditions, and are not being used for true scientific discovery.
Mr. McIntyre’s own words do not present a picture of a man engaged in purely dispassionate and objective scientific inquiry:
“But if Santer wants to try this kind of stunt, as I’ve said above, I’ve submitted FOI requests and we’ll see what they turn up. We’ll see what the journal policies require. I’ll also see what DOE and PCDMI administrators have to say. We’ll see if any of Santer’s buddies are obligated to produce the data. We’ll see if Santer ever sent any of the data to his buddies”
(Steven McIntyre; posting on his ClimateAudit blog; Nov. 21, 2008).
My research is subject to rigorous scrutiny. Mr. McIntyre’s blogging is not. He can issue FOIA requests at will. He is the master of his domain – the supreme, unchallenged ruler of the “ClimateAudit” universe. He is not a climate scientist, but he has the power to single-handedly destroy the reputations of exceptional men and women who have devoted their entire careers to the pursuit of climate science. Mr. McIntyre’s unchecked, extraordinary power is the real story of “Climategate”. I hope that someone has the courage to tell this story.
Benjamin D. Santer
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow
San Ramon, California
February 22, 2010*
*These remarks reflect the personal opinions of Benjamin D. Santer. They do not reflect the official views of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory or the U.S. Department of Energy. In preparing this document, I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Tom Wigley, Myles Allen, Kristin Aydt, Graham Cogley, Peter Gleckler, Leo Haimberger, Gabi Hegerl, John Lanzante, Mike MacCracken, Gavin Schmidt, Steve Sherwood, Susan Solomon, Karl Taylor, Simon Tett, and Peter Thorne.
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Rick Brown says:
1 March 2010 at 11:38 AM
Natural cycles such as El Nino events, can redistribute heat, and temporarily increase surface temperature (think 1998), but they can’t increase the heat content.”
Bingo.
You win an internets. Please use BitTorrent.
Gilles wrote: “Fossil fuels can not be replaced cheaply for a number of essential applications […] And that’s not enough to sustain civilization.”
First of all, if you are correct, then civilization’s days are numbered, since the supply of fossil fuels is finite … and the supply of economically recoverable, let alone “cheap”, fossil fuels is even more finite than that.
We don’t need to literally run out of fossil fuels: once it takes more energy to get fossil fuels out of the ground than they provide when burned, then fossil fuels are no longer a source of energy.
Second, if you are correct, there must have been no such thing as human civilization in the world until fossil fuels became cheap and plentiful — around the late 19th century. Are you really saying that there was no such thing as human civilization until large-scale coal mining and oil drilling was under way? I guess all the science, literature, art, philosophy, legal systems, etc. that predate that time are just an illusion?
Third, you display the general ignorance of alternative energy and what it is capable of, that is common to people who have listened to too much fossil fuel industry propaganda.
The earth receives more solar energy in one hour than the entirety of present day human civilization uses in a year. Concentrating solar thermal power plants on less than five percent of the USA’s deserts could produce more electricity than the entire country uses. The commercially exploitable wind energy resources of only four midwestern states could do the same. Ditto for the USA’s off-shore wind energy resources.
Do you think we are too stupid and incompetent to learn how to harvest, store, distribute and efficiently use that vast flow of energy?
“Gilles says:
1 March 2010 at 10:55 AM
I agree. But the economic growth is not driven by EROEI but by productivity per capita – which has increased a lot ”
But that isn’t through fossil fuels.
That’s through easy availability of energy and technology.
Or do you think that the increase in engineering tolerances that was a result of better engineering design wasn’t why we’re able to make so many cheap aluminium cans, increasing productivity per capita?
How about the digital revolution: it has increased the profit margins and productivity of music, movies and to a more limited extent, books by increases through technology.
None of that technology needs fossil fuels.
It needs ENERGY.
But you won’t change your mind. Your mind is wedded to Fossil Fuels as the One True Source Of All Progress.
You’ve dismissed the power of technology and counted for nothing the work of our engineers.
“I understand you believe that. I simply don’t share this opinion. Fossil fuels can not be replaced cheaply for a number of essential applications.”
Which you cannot name…
“Most of the so-called “alternatives” are only possible for producing a limited amount of electrical power. ”
How limited?
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/an-open-letter-to-steve-levitt/
Not very limited at all.
In potentia, enough to lift all the humans into outer space faster than we humans can pop them out.
Sou says:
1 March 2010 at 10:10 AM
“@586 Dave G:
While taking on board the fact that you have to pick your battles, I think that if scientists were able to get an organisation to sponsor an international fund to fight this stuff, they they might have a shot.”
I agree and would certainly be willing to contribute to such a fund. I also agree that picking the correct battle to wage would be important.
George Galloway sued any newspaper who alleged that he had profited from the “Oil for Food” program and nobody dares to reprint those allegations now. If he had not sued, the allegations would still be being made. Suing is a deterrent for possible future libels, as well as a remedy for those libels that have already occurred.
At the moment deniers can write or say anything with impunity, because their lies haven’t been legally challenged, so they have no fear of being held to account. If a particularly egregious falsehood were to be successfully challenged in a libel court, it would at least give deniers some pause for thought and they may be forced into using more temperate language, which could only be a good thing.
nick 253
You are quite wrong to believe that Sonya has “no interest” in sovereign debt or project funding of scientists’ salaries. Read her submission to the investigation to broaden your naive and limited knowledge.
Rick Brown #597, but if natural events can change the weather they can change the albedo and hence the energy budget.
John Peter,
Why not try reading what I actually wrote – you know, just for a change? I said most people do not spend their time thinking about sovereign debt, and that the issues are nothing to do with scientists’ salaries, and everything to do with profits from fossil fuels. Of course a professional denialist like Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen (not “Sonya”) will use any stick to beat climate science with. So what?
Re #603, thats a little harsh on the man dont you think secular? After all its a big topic to know, AGW, civilization and its energy requirements. Personally I reckon its a tough call getting off of fossil fuels in time to avert significant atmospheric warming due to our global need to grow. We live longer and consume more in ways that previous generations would scarely believe. Our politics and culture don’t really see science for what it really is either and we are loathe to change culturally so its a technological fix first and if that does not work significantly enough its culture and the economy second and third.
How do you know Sonya so well? After all, you’re not agreeing with the stated aims on the IPCC website about their activities and the reason for it:
http://www.ipcc.ch
No Geoff, you are 100% right. You have to consider the temperature gradient. In the troposphere, it’s warmer at low altitude, while in the stratosphere it’s warmer at high altitude. More greenhouse gasses means that they can more efficiently radiate heat away when excited by collisions with warm molecules (e.g O3 excited by UV absorption). The lower loss of IR from the troposphere plays very little role.
Sou (591), it’s not clear how such an organization would have standing with the court. Generally an entity can not sue if it was another entity that was wronged.
Gilles says, “Simple experiment. Look at a village in Africa, and at a village in America.”
Well, having lived in both rural Africa and in the US, I feel qualified to say that your idea that everything that separates them can be reduced to fossil fuels is risible. Do you actually expect civilization to end in a century when there are no fossil fuels left? Is your imagination (not to mention your technical understanding) that limited?
#600 CFU
“Don’t let them frame it as a PR battle.”
The anti-science forces construct playing fields and define rubberband rules to further their propaganda guerilla warfare as they see fit. But to keep powerful interests at bay, I think a direct confrontation on strategic fronts is imperative.
I’m sure science and reason will prevail, the only question is how long it will take and what the cost for mankind will be.
[edit – that is unlikely to result in constructive commentary. Please (everyone) try and avoid simply shouting. ]
Andrew 519
Until we discover who deep throat was, we can’t say the access to the internet emails was unauthorized. Even then, here in the states, we can’t say any law was broken. Even then we can’t say deep throat was guilty of a crime beyond reasonable doubt. A US prosecutor won’t even try to go to court over reading internet email and passing it or its contents on. Because the privacy don’t hold in that specific case.
WRT the CRU and RC servers, I believe that was unauthorized access and probably a crime. Security experts don’t agree, they believe it was an employee, possibly authorized because “hackers” usually boast which hasn’t happened.
Net, in IPCC terminology,
Reading the emails on the internet very unlikely to be a crime.
Breaking into servers very likely to be a crime.
Any prosecution very unlikely in the US – too hard to prove intent beyond reasonable doubt.
Sorry, that’s the way I see it.
“But to keep powerful interests at bay, I think a direct confrontation on strategic fronts is imperative.”
The powerful interests are the politicians who come up with the laws.
PR battles will not work unless the politician WANTS to be PR’d. And if they want to be PR’d into believing the science, then they’re going to believe the science when it’s explained without PR.
#616 John Peter
Bogus.
Even if you’re the server admin you’d be prosecuted.
Go ahead and analyze the CRU data theft (or whatever you want to call it) using the categorical imperative. Or for that matter, feel free to use any ethics theory.
Let us know what you find. If you still defend your position, I guess it tells us a lot.
“617
John Peter says:
1 March 2010 at 2:45 PM
Andrew 519
Until we discover who deep throat was, we can’t say the access to the internet emails was unauthorized. ”
Yes you can.
If it wasn’t authorized by the president (or Congress under supermajority(?)) then it was unauthorized. And even then, there are laws which limit the president’s power to bypass laws and authorize actions.
He’s a citizen of the United States too, you know.
Since no president has said that it was authorized and nothing has been shown to have the actions legal, then we do not need to know who Deep Throat is.
Ray, a quibble. You said:
“The salesman tries to appeal to the unconscious mind to get people to act in the interests of the salesman–and sometimes counter to their interests.”
The ethical salesman doesn’t. (And they exist, snark aside.)
The intelligent salesman doesn’t either, not if he or she ever expects to deal with that customer again. (And not if there’s any indication that they know how to publicize bad treatment, either!)
I’m thinking that the denialists are moving themselves into the territory eschewed by ethical and intelligent salespersons.
Of course, it’s a race–and the four guys on the other side are proverbially well-mounted, if you take my meaning. (Cf. Revelations chapter 6.)
Hank Roberts 542
I agree with almost everything you say, and I’ll agree with it all if you would straighten me out on this:
You say …The increased CO2 in the stratosphere isn’t getting as much heat from below, because it’s “shaded” by the extra CO2 below it….
I was under the (probably mistaken) impression that
there wasn’t change in the troposphere because it was already absorbing as much radiation as it could (GHG+H2O)
the changes from CO2 came in the stratosphere because there was little H2O there and the additional CO2 could be more effective
I know that the radiation exchange, uv as well as ir, is intricate but that’s what I’m trying to learn about. Can you help straighten me out?
TIA
Just a quick post, slightly off topic, but Phil Jones was put through the mangle today by the House of Commons Select Committee, who made a good point of being outraged that Jones hadn’t put absolutely everything – codes, intervening analyses, you name it – in the public domain:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8543289.stm
When asked why he hadn’t, his reply was that to do so was not standard practice within the climate research community. Presumably this is because that community is fairly up to date on all the techniques and methods employed among its practitioners, and it takes up a lot of time and space to display “everything”, whilst not serving advancement of the science to any great effect.
So far as I am aware, this is not simply a climate science practice either. I would be quite astounded if anyone really wanted to see all of my raw data, my metadata and my codes and scripts with regard to landscape evolution modelling, hydrological modelling, geomorphometry, bootstrapping and correlation, metamodelling and emulation, etc. etc. etc., regardless of whether the codes and scripts worked or not, or whether the output made sense or not. For every modelling effort I finish that actually works reasonably well, or metamodelling exercise that comes up with something sensible, I must go through dozens that don’t, and scores of analyses that are half-baked or incomplete in some respect, as one tries to find a way through a difficult set of problems – and sometimes problems that feel downright impossible.
If the politcal commmunity, and the skeptic community, thourhg this type of questioning is seriously suggesting they want to see all of this sort of thing from scientists, that it all has to be laid out for them on a plate and explained again and again to the nth degree, including all of the dead ends, all of the codes and analyses we get wrong or that lead nowhere, and so on, well, I wonder whether we might just as well pack up and go home, as it seems to be a ridiculously burdensome standard of examination. And particularly so when, how shall I say, much of that examination appears to be somewhat vexatiously intended?
Does any other branch of human endeavour have to be subject to such scrutiny? Would the critics of people like Jones, for example, or his questioners for that matter, last more than a day in the job if their procedures and motives were taken apart in this way?
Or am I just plain wrong here somehow, just over-reacting?
#617 John Peter
“Security experts don’t agree, they believe it was an employee, possibly authorized because “hackers” usually boast which hasn’t happened.”
You are incorrect in saying possibly authorized. The person whether working there or not was not authorized according to the law. That is obvious. That person took information on the server and posted it on the internet. I think you are confusing being allowed to use a computer, and being authorized to steal data and post it. Let say a defense contractor was authorized to use a computer and decided to copy information and post it on the web.
Or this case where the employee exceeded his authorization.
http://www.databreaches.net/?p=6523
And you say if it were a hacker he would come forward. Why? If he were hacking for just hacking purposes, maybe. If he was paid well and his hacking was for the purpose of money, and him getting caught could lead back to those that paid him off he’d have no reason to. However if it was a “whistle blower” why haven’t they come forward, especially in the current political climate and make a statement as to how he just had to do it? I think he’d have plenty of people come to his defense. So I find that it was a “whistle blower” very very unlikely.
I hate to be rude, but come on dude. Sheesh.
#618 CFU
I agree.
PS. I may have been a bit unclear in my previous post. I wasn’t primarily referring to politicians…
#617 John Peter
“Any prosecution very unlikely in the US – too hard to prove intent beyond reasonable doubt.”
That is like saying that you have to prove intent when someone breaks into a house and takes property. The law was broken when the data was copied and reproduced, and published online. That’s all the intent that was needed under the law as I posted.
Doesn’t matter if the server was completely open with no security at all. It was against the law.
Now you are like a cybercrime denialist. I’ve posted more than enough evidence. Now I know how the climate scientist must feel like.
Seems Fred Pearce is a lost cause. Sad to see someone go down like this.
dhogaza 563
1-slander
2-Not Robert Woods
3-huh
4-have
5-wrong
6-repitious
JRC 596
Excellent summary, I believe we agree.
Thanks again for your research and comments
Nick 609
Not worth the time
McIntyre made quite a gaffe in his written submission to the UK Science and Technology Select Committee. He culminated his criticism of the CRU tree-ring proxy data by presenting a reconstruction he put alongside Briffa’s claiming in his final sentence “The medieval-modern differential changes with one seemingly inconsequential change of version.”
However, his figure caption says something different, that it was calculated by “varying the Tornetrask and Urals versions to newer versions.”
Even more surprising is McIntyre’s response at Climate Audit:
“Thanks for noting the inconsistency. I re-used a graphic and will have to check against the generating script to see which I did. I have a hugely busy week, but will try to post up a turnkey script for the a various results.”
So in his submission to the Select Committee he included a figure and based his conclusions around it without being sure how he had calculated his plot. Of all the accusations McIntyre has made against various climate scientists, I don’t think included was publishing plots without knowing quite what they had calculated.
617 John Peter: From published accounts, it seems very likely that the CRU e-mail release was enabled by inside access. In the public domain there is less to go on re the RC release. I agree with you that prosecution in the US is unlikely.
Gilles wrote: “Fossil fuels can not be replaced cheaply for a number of essential applications […] And that’s not enough to sustain civilization.”
I would add to my previous comment, that if you really want to bring an end to human civilization, then continued business-as-usual burning of fossil fuels looks like the best way to do it.
> the politicians who come up with the laws
Ah, but first you need to reach the lobbyists who provide them with the material:
http://blogs.chron.com/newswatchenergy/archives/2010/01/_lobbyists_writ.html
“the House of Commons Select Committee, who made a good point of being outraged that Jones hadn’t put absolutely everything – codes, intervening analyses, you name it – in the public domain:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8543289.stm
When asked why he hadn’t, his reply”
should have been “why don’t you do that?”
“628
John Peter says:
1 March 2010 at 3:59 PM
dhogaza 563
1-slander”
Nope.
It isn’t.
Even if it had been spoken.
Opinion is not libelous.
“632
two moon says:
1 March 2010 at 4:14 PM
617 John Peter: From published accounts, it seems very likely that the CRU e-mail release was enabled by inside access.”
It actually seems very unlikely. Physical access may have happened, but that isn’t all that likely either.
And it would still be illegal access.
Gilles (592): Fossil fuels can’t be replaced for metallurgy,
BPL: Electric furnaces.
Gilles: organic chemistry,
BPL: Biofuels.
Gilles: cheap and fast transportation,
BPL: Electric trains. Biodiesel. Bioethanol. Biomethanol. Hydrogen from electricity.
Gilles: fertilizers,
BPL: Organic farming.
Gilles: and even stable electric grids in most countries,
BPL: Simply not true. Solar thermal power, wind, geothermal and biofuel over a wide-area smart grid can do BETTER than fossil fuels
Gilles: or more exactly the replacement would be so difficult and expensive that the whole economy would collapse.
BPL: Wind is CHEAPER than coal.
Hank: “Ah, but first you need to reach the lobbyists who provide them with the material:”
And that’s the point. If you can’t pay more than the oil industry you won’t win PR because cupidity is the only thing that sells PR: how much wonga.
Same when it comes to marketing drugs: more than half the cost of drugs goes on marketing. Dinner time chats with doctors, etc.
Gilles #592: in your world view, civilization ends when fossil fuels end. How soon is that? If you take 200 years as the current stocks at current rates of use and escalate by the current rate of growth in demand of 2.4%, you are left with 75 years of supply. The current rate of growth is a low-ball figure because the massive growth in China and to a lesser extent India will sooner or later break out of the background average. If Africa industrialises too based on a high carbon economy, and all this adds up to growth of 5% per year, 200 years’ supply is gone in 50 years. We can add some to this by using really dirty fuels like tar sands, but, in the face of exponential growth, those only add a few years at the end.
So what are you going to do? Start investing in cave futures for your grandchildren?
You are right that the easy alternatives are for stationary power, but that includes land-based transport (maybe you’ve heard of electric trains)? The hardest challenge is air travel, where you need a fuel of high energy density by both weight and volume. Chemical industries also present some real challenges but one effect will be that we change materials we use. Plastics are cheap so they are ubiquitous. If they were not, we would find some other material, possibly used less wastefully (remember when all drinks were sold in reusable bottles?). Steel manufacture needs carbon, not fossil fuels (it’s an exothermic reaction). Carbon is not in short supply, it just happens to be a lot cheaper today in the form of coal (or coking coal). An insoluble problem? I don’t think so, but if we wait until oil (the fossil fuel closest to peaking) is really expensive, there certainly will be massive worldwide misery as we transition. So much better to accept the inevitable now and expend the R&D dollars when we have the luxury of time.
As for the African village, getting electricity there by conventional means is an extremely hard project because there is no grid right next door to wire into. In that scenario, a small-scale renewables option can work well and indeed may be the only viable option. All the more reason to do the R&D to get the costs down. Some people are already working on this in Bangladesh.
Don’t forget to sign: http://www.petitiononline.com/clim4tr/petition.html
“621
Kevin McKinney says:
1 March 2010 at 3:05 PM
Ray, a quibble. You said:
“The salesman tries to appeal to the unconscious mind to get people to act in the interests of the salesman–and sometimes counter to their interests.”
The ethical salesman doesn’t. (And they exist, snark aside.)”
I’m reminded of a Scott Adams discussion on sales. You don’t HAVE to deceive or cheat or lie, but they set the quota so high they don’t have to.
May I say this could be a place where 90% of the salesmen give the rest of them a bad name.
After all, if they were ethical and in the majority (so they couldn’t be shouted down), there wouldn’t need to be the No-Call lists or anti-SPAM laws, or consumer protection laws.
JP (617): Until we discover who deep throat was, we can’t say the access to the internet emails was unauthorized.
BPL:
“Climate emails hacked by spies”
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/climate-emails-hacked-by-spies-1885147.html
Interception bore hallmarks of foreign intelligence agency, says expert
By Steve Connor, Science Editor Monday, 1 February 2010
“A highly sophisticated hacking operation that led to the leaking of hundreds of emails from the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia was probably carried out by a foreign intelligence agency, according to the Government’s former chief scientist. Sir David King, who was Tony Blair’s chief scientific adviser for seven years until 2007, said that the hacking and selective leaking of the unit’s emails, going back 13 years, bore all the hallmarks of a co-ordinated intelligence operation – especially given their release just before the Copenhagen climate conference in December. … “In an interview with The Independent, Sir David suggested the email leaks were deliberately designed to destabilise Copenhagen and he dismissed the idea that it was a run-of-the-mill hacking. It was carried out by a team of skilled professionals, either on behalf of a foreign government or at the behest of anti-climate change lobbyists in the United States, he said.”
[Response: This was just speculation and I wouldn’t take it seriously at all. – gavin]
two moon (632): it seems very likely that the CRU e-mail release was enabled by inside access.
BPL: See my post above to JP. No, it doesn’t seem likely at all. That’s right-wing disinformation, pure and simple. And you bought it.
Few subjects
John Peter 617
“WRT the CRU and RC servers, I believe that was unauthorized access and probably a crime. Security experts don’t agree, they believe it was an employee, possibly authorized because “hackers” usually boast which hasn’t happened.”
Hackers might usually boast but that would depend on who the hacker was and why he did it. Governments don’t boast when they access secret information that helps them achieve an aim. The fact that no one has boasted or come forward to say that they did it is probably a decent clue as to who did it and that they had a lot more than just a political agenda.
Efforts to improve the PR associated with AGW
Some of the comments seem addressed to the wrong group. There are Environmental groups who could be advised on how to win the hearts and minds propoganda war. Maybe some of the spokesman who have gotten involved have too much old baggage to be as effective as they could be – though given how any person who seems to speak on the wrong side politically of an issue gets demonized pretty much with impunity (going after Michael J Fox was a pretty impressive low), any person/organization who speaks up is going to be trashed.
Deniers/skeptics
I think that there are deniers/skeptics (whatever is the term that least offends) who truly just need to see more to be convinced. I think Ronald Bailey who was/is? the science correspondent on the Libertarian web site Reason is an example. Some time ago I saw an article by him agreeing that he’d been convinced that AGW was real etc but that he did not agree with the proposed fixes he’d seen to date. Of course he could have gotten beaten back into the standard line by now so his position might have shifted.
I agree with some of those worries. I don’t know that I agree with cap and trade or some of the other proposed fixes/remediation efforts. We’ve wasted so much time not doing a lot of the less dramatic things that could have bought more time. Now we’re headed to fewer and fewer options and still no plans in place. And having to talk far more severe interventions because the people equate climate with weather and all the other factors mentoned on the posts on the subject. But not agreeing on any one or more of the proposed actions does not equate with denying the science. That’s where I would agree in not shooting the person asking the questions, raising concerns. There are legitimate disputes and concerns about some aspects of the situation (too bad that too few ‘skeptics’ ever raise those, instead just continuing to play their useless games)
I don’t think civilization will end if nothing is done. After all civilization survived the Black Plague, the fall of Roman, fall of Egypt etc. We just had long periods of time of misery that could have been avoided and lots of people died who could have lived.
So some at least will suffer through and likely some historian will write a book on “if only”.
Martin Vermeer:
Looks like some knowledgeable people are taking him on in the comments, at least. I’m sure the thread will be drowned in a denialbot s***storm soon, but hopefully he’ll read a few of the comments from rational people before that happens.
Philip Machanick wrote to Gilles: “So what are you going to do? Start investing in cave futures for your grandchildren?”
Yup.
Because history shows that before we had cheap, abundant fossil fuels to burn, human beings were incapable of building houses or any type of structure, and that’s why we all lived in caves until the late 19th century.
Gilles knows that. Don’t you?
Posted at the Guardian:
The vicious anti-science attack continues. If you find this as repulsive as I do, sign my petition.
Fred, how does it feel to destroy a fellow human being with invective and ignorant snark? What do you mean “survived”? Did you expect him to drop dead? You really are a repulsive specimen of humanity and The Guardian has descended to the dank depths of the tabloid press.
A few points.
Sharing derived data and computer code is not nor should it be the primary check on scientific results. All you get if this happens is a very good chance that any errors are repeated. The best check is if other scientists recreate the results using their own methods. That is how climate science has worked. NASA for example produces their own temperature record using a slightly different mix of data sources and their own computer code. They as it happens do make everything public, as do many other organisations. So there is nothing sinister in CRU not making every detail of their data and programs public, nor in the fact that others haven’t asked for them. This would be an issue if their results were inconsistent with those of others who have processed the raw data in different ways but they are not.
Second, the people claiming that CRU is at odds with broad scientific practice are obviously not familiar with fields where the data is vast. In the 1980s, the total data involved in calculating the planetary temperature would have cost millions of dollars in disk space. To store all that in a convenient form along with all intermediate results would have been very expensive, and not many organizations in that era had the resources to do so.
Third, CRU used to be held up by deniers as a “good” data source because their warming trend was slightly lower than NASA’s (mainly because NASA includes Arctic data and CRU doesn’t). Strike CRU from the record, and you still have NASA who do publish everything. So the significance of this attack on CRU is negligible. It does not overturn the science, and it is not significantly at odds with broader scientific practice.
Fourth, the China thing is an absurd beat-up. A paper in 1990 arrived at certain conclusions with possibly flawed data. A 2008 paper supports those conclusions with more accurate data. Why do you need to trawl over the 1990 paper? Many published papers contain errors, which is why you never base a scientific understanding on one paper. You look for follow-ups, and check whether the results have broadly stood up. They have. No big deal.
If there is any fraud going on, it’s the people who actually understand how science works who cry “fraud” whenever they uncover an error in the mainstream – but at the same time when one of their side publishes a work riddled with errors, they accuse anyone pointing out those errors or nitpicking.
Just making sure this one is taken note of, from Tom P ;)
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/close-encounters-of-the-absurd-kind/comment-page-13/#comment-163936
Not only did Lawson “make a mistake” (cough) in evidence today, by claiming that RSS and UAH trends showed significantly less warming trend than the other two…
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1979/trend/plot/rss/trend/plot/uah/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1979/trend
…(not), and McIntyre was refused the Yamal data for 10 years (not again, 2004 ring any bells?), but other submissions seem to have been amiss.
Re: 622
Yes you were right in saying that you might be mistaken. Amongst other things you are confusing the stratosphere with the upper troposphere. This may not be your fault. Some accounts do not distinguish between the two.
> 622 John Peter
Sounds like you’ve heard the notion that the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere is “saturated” by infrared from the ground so adding more CO2 doesn’t block more of the heat radiated by the ground. It’s wrong. (Do you recall where you came across it? I’m always curious about sources for ideas.)
Someone will have a better pointer, but — have you seen infrared band weather satellite pictures? The ground is visible in the infrared; if all the infrared were being blocked the lower atmosphere would look in that band like a white fogbank. So the idea doesn’t make sense on its face.
It’s gone into extensively in some of these threads, and you can always get Rod going at great length about the question, as you’ll see in all these threads. My advice, maybe skim the response/comments from us ordinary readers, but rely on what’s written by the scientists– read the main topic post, and look for inline answers by the climatologists.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Arealclimate.org+saturated+gassy+argument
Barton Paul Levenson says:
“BPL: Simply not true. Solar thermal power, wind, geothermal and biofuel over a wide-area smart grid can do BETTER than fossil fuels”
Not to for get that there are interesting advances being made in the nuclear industry… those fast breeder liquid fluoride(thorium salt) reactors look to be a huge advance in that area! They could run 100% passive safeties, basically you could run “frost plugs” on the reactor chambers, and they have the theoretical ability o 95% efficiency, they can use waste material from the old school reactors and nuke weapons to boot. Something i think the world could benefit from investing in anyway.
Wind is always going to have physical limitations just because of materials and stress’s limiting scale. Geothermal is very muchly so location dependent, same as solar. So they may be viable for some areas, they wont be viable for all, same as hydro.