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Albatross at 06:10 AM on 22 November 2010Climategate: Tampering with Temperatures?
caerbannog @8, "all the people associated with that project should be presumed incompetent until they can demonstrate otherwise." That would include Pielke Snr.... To be fair though, Watts et al. claimed recently that they have submitted something for publication. -
caerbannog at 06:02 AM on 22 November 2010Climategate: Tampering with Temperatures?
Folks, this post, among other things, should show you how utterly *incompetent* Anthony Watts and his "surfacestations.org" crew are. The "surfacestations" project has been active for *over three years*. And in the three+ years of project's existence, nobody affiliated with it has been able to produce even *one* cursory analysis of temperature data collected by the stations. This, in spite of the fact that the temperature datasets are no more than a few mouse-clicks away for anyone smart enough to figure out how to use a web-browser. It would have been a simple matter for the surfacestations folks to download and crunch the temperature data from the stations as they were conducting the survey. And it would have been almost a "no brainer" for them to compare temperature data collected from "well-sited" vs. "poorly-sited" stations in order to confirm or disprove their claims about temperature data quality. But in 3+ years' time, nobody affiliated with the project has done that -- this in spite of the fact that the gridding/averaging procedure is a task that capable undergraduate compsci/engineering students would have no problem implementing. It was left to others to perform the analysis work that the lazy and/or incompetent surfacestations folks were unwilling or unable to perform. The fact that the Muir Russell commission was able to do in *two days* what the Anthony Watts' and his surfacestations crew were unable to do in 3+ years should be a reminder to one and all how lazy and/or incompetent the folks who have been attacking the surface temperature record are. The surfacestations project is a complete joke; all the people associated with that project should be presumed incompetent until they can demonstrate otherwise. -
Albatross at 06:00 AM on 22 November 2010Climategate a year later
KL, May I point out the irony, neigh hypocrisy, of you (falsely) accusing others of "smear". I am merely stating the widely-known facts about NP and Corcoran. NP is being taken to court for very good reasons-- NP repeatedly libeled Weaver (and other scientists) and frequently fabricates or distorts information pertaining to climate science. By knowingly doing so, Corocoran is actually smearing his own reputation. In short, the NP is not a credible, trustworthy, or impartial source of information on climate science. Anyhow, Marco has addressed the misinformation that you quoted from NP in his post @57. KL, is the theory of AGW/ACC a hoax? The reason I ask is that I'm trying to figure out what your position is, because you seem both skeptical of the nuts and bolts (i.e., the science and data) as well as the scientists. In fact, you seem to opportunistically attack the science and scientists whenever you think that doing so will reinforce/support your belief system. My assessment of your posts here at SS is that you are a contrarian and that you think/believe AGW is either a hoax or a non-issue. I could be wrong, so please do state clearly for the record exactly where you are coming from. You might not believe this, but I often naively wish that I could wish away AGW, to make it a non-issue-- but the fact is, is that AGW/ACC is a reality and multiple, independent lines of evidence support a warming of around 3 C for doubling CO2 (and we will easily more than double CO2). And warming is not the only issue, the negative impacts of ocean acidification are already making their presence felt. -
Camburn at 05:57 AM on 22 November 2010The human fingerprint in the daily cycle
The ghosts are laughing at us right now, astonished that we are using temperature, by itself, as a measurement of heat of the atmosphere. -
Alexandre at 05:54 AM on 22 November 2010Climategate: Tampering with Temperatures?
For "skeptics", the temperature record is reliable just as long as it supports "cooling" or "no warming". If Phil Jones says the last 15 years had no warming trend to the 95% confidence level, then the record is spot on. If someone says it stopped in 1998, then NASA, NCDC and CRU are beyond suspicion. But if you point out the obvious long term warming trend, then it's just a bunch of numbers made up by the secret brotherhood of the warmist scientists. -
Albatross at 05:38 AM on 22 November 2010Climategate: Tampering with Temperatures?
Ed @4, Thanks for picking up on that. I checked Michael's testimony again and he does not specify which records he is using-- he refers to using the CRU surface temperature data or using data from the Hadley Centre. So it looks like he may have been using both HadCRUT and CRUTEM, the fact that he did not uses the accepted nomenclature does not help. Anyhow, the whole point is the irony of the "skeptics" making (fallacious) claims as to the integrity of the CRU and CRU data, but then going on ahead and using those data repeatedly because they are underestimating the amount of warming. -
fydijkstra at 05:31 AM on 22 November 2010The Fake Scandal of Climategate
Caerbannog (#26): The moderator does not want this topic to be discussed; he deleted the comment that you are commenting. My original comment can be found here. It can never be a scandal that a paper appears in a peer-reviewed journal. That only means that an editor and two reviewers appreciate the paper. Any other scientist who disagrees can write another peer-reviewed paper to demonstrate that the first article is wrong. The scandal begins, where Jones tries to keep the paper out of the IPCC-report, without a peer-reviewed article that shows that the paper is wrong. The task of the IPCC is to review the peer-reviewed literature. Keeping out some articles, because Jones does not agree with them, is wrong. Jones was lead author of a very important scientific review, he was not editing a private publication supporting his personal views. So Jones, Mann and Trenberth were making a secret plan to narrow the scope of the IPCC-report, without justification in the peer-reviewed literature. That was harmful for the quality and independence of the IPCC-report. According to Longman's dictionary, that can be called a conspiracy. -
Ned at 05:31 AM on 22 November 2010The human fingerprint in the daily cycle
The ghosts of two centuries' worth of physical geographers will be astonished to learn that "temperature is [...] a poor metric when measuring climate". -
Camburn at 05:06 AM on 22 November 2010The human fingerprint in the daily cycle
"Water vapour is a strong greenhouse gas and the dry desert air traps much less heat than more humid areas." And this statement in the article, in and by itself, shows why temperature is such a poor metric when measuring climate. -
Lazarus at 03:30 AM on 22 November 2010Skeptical Science Firefox Add-on: Send and receive climate info while you browse
Sorry, but I have just noticed a problem with this addon. When I first installed it, Firefox started playing up, I had recently upgraded my video driver and thought maybe that was the cause - which is one of the reasons that I decided to update my PC as mentioned in my last post. The problem I was having was that my mouse pointer, when over a link, would flicker and change back to an arrow from a hand. Having just installed this addon it started happening again until I disabled it - now all is fine again. Does Shine Tech know of this issue? -
Camburn at 03:21 AM on 22 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Marcus@11: You say the sun has just come out of the deepest solar min in 100 years. It would appear that you are basing that on sunspots? On what basis are you suggesting that sunspots are the measure of solar activity?Moderator Response: See both the Intermediate and the Advanced versions of the Argument "It's the Sun." -
Lazarus at 03:20 AM on 22 November 2010Skeptical Science Firefox Add-on: Send and receive climate info while you browse
You really need to add a link to this from your Home page like yopu have done for the iPhone App. I have just reinstalled it after updating my PC and it took me a while to remember it was for Firefox and find it. -
hank at 03:17 AM on 22 November 2010It's not us
> fossil carbon ... we know this ... > the two types of carbon have > different chemical properties. Erm, well, that's not how; isotopes can behave slightly differently in chemical reactions, but http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/how-do-we-know-that-recent-cosub2sub-increases-are-due-to-human-activities-updated/ -
Daniel Bailey at 02:23 AM on 22 November 2010Climategate: Tampering with Temperatures?
Re: Ed Davies (4) The Review would be the independent Muir Russell Commission. Link here. The Yooper -
Marco at 01:28 AM on 22 November 2010Climategate a year later
Ken, it indeed appears GRL deliberately ignored Mann. In fact, Mackwell implicitely admitted to Mann that they only would allow a reply by the criticised authors if the criticism was submitted as a comment. A "original paper" would just be reviewed by reviewers GRL selected, which apparently did not standard include those that were criticised. Now, the reviewers for M&M need not be biased, they simply may have been incompetent. Indeed, this appears to be the case here: follow-up comments by Huybers and Von Storch&Zorita showed that M&M's GRL paper was fundamentally flawed. Why did the three (not four) reviewers not see what Huybers and Von Storch&Zorita did see?! Simple: they were not competent enough. It is a major embarrassment for a journal to get a comment pointing out that a paper is wrong. Getting TWO is even more embarrassing. Finally, I like to point out again that I will soon submit a comment that will require the authors or the journal to retract a published paper, due to even the most basic aspects already being fatallay flawed. It was most assuredly peer reviewed, and yet those peer reviewers did not see the flaws. Worse even, well over a hundred papers have been published with the same type of mistakes (although this particular paper took it to new levels of incompetence). All peer reviewed. Mistakes are made. But if a paper criticises someone else's methods, it is not only common practice, but even morally appropriate to get the original authors to review the paper (not as sole reviewer, though!). The fact the GRL Editors did not do so is poor scholarship. A "leak" in proper scholarship. I hope the journal I will use to submit a general criticism will use reviewers from papers I criticise. If not, I merely have further confirmation as to why they published so many flawed papers: they are incompetent Editors. -
h-j-m at 01:27 AM on 22 November 2010It's the ocean
KR, first you may have to explain why you estimate the diagram by Trenberth to be more reliable than that of NOAA. Besides, Trenberth states that he got the numbers for the IR radiation from the ground by calculations applying Bolzmann's law. I am pretty sure that if he tried living in quarters where the floor emits 396 W of IR peer square meter he will rather fast learn that this approach might be inadequate. Second, about my argument on evaporation. Unfortunately you completely failed to show any evidence that at least one part of my argument is wrong. Therefore I will apply Mr. Hitchens advice to your comment, though I am unaware that he is considered some sort of authority on science theory. -
Ed Davies at 00:24 AM on 22 November 2010Climategate: Tampering with Temperatures?
"The Review took a similar approach, ..." Which review is being discussed here? There have been quite a few reviews of different aspects of the "climategate" non-sense so it's worth being clear. Albatross: I don't suppose it's that important but note that this article is talking about CRUTEM (which is the land-only dataset compiled by the Climatic Research Unit) and is only a component of the HadCRUT which also includes the sea-surface temperatures from the Hadley Centre.Moderator Response: Sorry, I meant to say the Muir Russell review. The full context is given in the first post in the series. - James -
Ken Lambert at 23:57 PM on 21 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
The Skeptical Chymist #122 You are a brave man to call me a dunce on the meaning of Dr Trenberth's papers. You answer is here: (Riccardo's quote from the paper) "" "The TOA energy imbalance can probably be most accurately determined from climate models and is estimated to be 0.85 ± 0.15 W m−2 by Hansen et al. (2005) and is supported by estimated recent changes in ocean heat content (Willis et al. 2004; Hansen et al. 2005). A comprehensive error analysis of the CERES mean budget (Wielicki et al. 2006) is used in Fasullo and Trenberth (2008a) to guide adjustments of the CERES TOA fluxes so as to match the estimated global imbalance." So they choose to take the value from Hansen et al. 2005 and adjust the CERES TOA fluxes to match this value."" The actual CERES imbalance is 6.4W/sq.m and this is 'corrected' back to 0.9W/sq.m - a 5.5W/sq.m correction. And Hansen's 2005 model is not supported by recent OHC measurements - see here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-cherry-pickers-cooling-oceans.html and 'Robust warming of the global upper oceans" -
Ken Lambert at 23:17 PM on 21 November 2010Climategate a year later
Ian F, Albatros, Marco, What counts here is not the source of the story but whether or not it is true. Smearing NP and Corcoran does not address the truth of the quotation. Marco seems to carry the story further and refers to Mann not getting a right of reply by GRL as a 'leak in the proper scientific process'. An omission is a leak? - strange way to describe that. Or are you saying Marco that the Editor of GRL was deliberately ignoring Mann and publishing hopelessly flawed papers by design or neglect in order to damage Mann's reputation?? What of the report that 4 scientists had peer reviewed the subject paper which raised Mann's ire?? Is this false? Was there no peer review of 1,2,3 or 4 scientists involved? Are you asking us to believe that not only the Editor of GRL was biased or incompetent but 4 other scientific reviewers were similarly prone to passing hopelessly flawed papers for publication in a respected journal?? Pull the other one Marco - it has bells on it. -
muoncounter at 23:12 PM on 21 November 2010The Fake Scandal of Climategate
#27: "the border line between being experimental and observational is not a black and white one but a gray scale." Thus own words render it utter nonsense to declare 'it is a fact that climate science is ... '. It is your opinion as to where 'experimental' ends and 'observational' begins. Here is another opinion. This misconception arises because people assume that climate science is all about predicting future climate change, and because such predictions are for decades/centuries into the future, and we only have one planet to work with, we can’t check to see if these predictions are correct until it’s too late to be useful. In fact, predictions of future climate are really only a by-product of climate science. The science itself concentrates on improving our understanding of the processes that shape climate, by analyzing observations of past and present climate, and testing how well we understand them. So there is physical theory, data gathering and verification of model by comparison to the past. Of all the sound byte issues raised by skeptics, this is more of a bit than a byte. It is also veering wildly off-topic. -
tobyjoyce at 21:43 PM on 21 November 2010The Fake Scandal of Climategate
@batsvensson, No, I am not calling you a creationist, just pointing out that nearly all denialists sooner or later come around to using similar arguments. To be anti-science, there are only a certain amount of arguments you can use, so this is no surprise. I cannot see why picking out climate science as "observational" implies anything negative. Atmospheric physics, on which a lot a climate science is based, is one of the earliest branches of physics (going back to Franklin, Fourier, Tyndall, Beaufort, Arrhenius, Angstrom and on to Gilbert Plass in the 1950s). Incidentally, in defining "astrophysics" as "observational", you seem to have forgotten that the physics of planetary motions is the oldest branch of physics, the daddy of them all. How many "just so" stories did Newton and Galileo make up? -
Bart Verheggen at 20:47 PM on 21 November 2010Climategate: Tampering with Temperatures?
Besides the numerous replications of the temperature record, see also these two links showing that CRU’s data handling has not inflated the warming trend: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/are-the-cru-data-suspect-an-objective-assessment/ http://www.gilestro.tk/2009/lots-of-smoke-hardly-any-gun-do-climatologists-falsify-data/ -
hengistmcstone at 19:47 PM on 21 November 2010The Fake Scandal of Climategate
This is part of a broader problem with climate change reporting: the media holds scientists to far higher standards than it does contrarians. I think that really needed to be said. -
Kooiti Masuda at 19:19 PM on 21 November 2010Climategate: Tampering with Temperatures?
Some of the observational data that CRU held did not have restriction about re-distribution, but some others had. Let me call them "open source" and "closed source", though this is not about computer program codes, because the situation is analogous. CRU refused to give the closed source data because of the conditions given by the organizations which provided the source data. (CRU was also reluctant to give the open source data as responses to freedom of information requests, because they think that providing source data is not their job, but of data centers such as U.S. National Climatic Data Center.) As for global scale syntheses aimed at global mean or hemispheric mean temperatures, we now know that open source data are enough for us to reproduce essentially the same results which CRU achieved by a mixture of open and closed sources. That is a good news, but it does not mean that scientists should always avoid closed source data. We (scientists etc. of the world) still need data from high density observation networks in order to study regional climate changes. And they are often closed sources. Very regrettably, many governments think about potential economic returns by intellectual property rights more seriously than about freedom of information or transparency in environmental assessments. (People gathered at Surface Temperatures project discussed the way how to make use of closed source data.) The case of urban effects in China really needed closed source data, and obscureness around it mainly comes from the policy of the Chinese government which discloses information about only those stations selected for international exchange. -
David Arthur at 19:03 PM on 21 November 2010Satellites show no warming in the troposphere
So rate of tropospheric warming is less than expectation. How was the expectation derived? Did it include, for example, heat transfer to oceans? Did it include increased rates of evaporation (due to surface warmth) and consequently of condensation/precipitation ("Water cycle"). Water molecules absorb sensible energy at the surface when they evaporate, and re-release that energy at whatever tropospheric height when they re-condense. That is, intensification of the water cycle results in energy "bypassing" tropospheric greenhouse gases as it departs earth. (Also, surface layers of ocean are now rather less opaque than previously thought (lower densities of phytoplankton), then insolation is penetrating to greater depths. This would tend to decrease surface temperatures because energy is not being absorbed at surface.) -
Marco at 18:42 PM on 21 November 2010Climategate a year later
Ken Lambert: Let me point out another thing about M&M's comment to Mann (because that was what it was: a criticism of Mann's prior work): did Mann get the possibility to reply? Yes? No? that would be a no, which is really odd. We thus have indeed a leak: a leak in the proper scientific process of allowing the author of a criticised paper to reply to that criticism. Thus, Mann expressed concern with that rather odd path. Mackwell then 'offered' Mann the option of sending a comment, which would be followed by a reply by M&M. Mann declined, after a flurry of hopelessly flawed papers in GRL indicated to him, and various others, that the Editors of GRL were clearly not doing their job. With new leadership, the "leak" of publishing hopelessly flawed papers and criticisms without letting the criticised author respond, was plugged- FYI: I recently got a comment published that I found was not reviewed at all by any of the authors I criticised. It made me upset and angry as a scientist that this had happened, and I have noted my dismay to the Editor of that journal. He did not respond. -
ginckgo at 17:25 PM on 21 November 2010The Fake Scandal of Climategate
batsvensson #32: observational data can essentially be experimental if predictions were made before going out to observe. Think the prediction that palaeontologists would find something like Tiktaliik in Greenland - and they did. This was an experiment. You're arguing like a creationist, which does not mean you are. The accusation seemed simple enough. -
Albatross at 15:27 PM on 21 November 2010Climategate: Tampering with Temperatures?
James, you make some excellent points, inconvenient points that I am sure will be lost and/or dismissed by the skeptics. One of the many things that I find ironic about the CRU faux scandal, is that on the one hand the "skeptics" are claiming that Jones et al fudged the data, but on the other Lindzen, Michaels and others have recently cited the HadCRUT data. In fact, Michaels showed the HadCRUT data in his misleading testimony to congress earlier this week. And we know why that is; HadCRUT is very likely underestimating the rate of warming: "The ECMWF analysis shows that in data-sparse regions such as Russia, Africa and Canada, warming over land is more extreme than in regions sampled by HadCRUT. If we take this into account, the last decade shows a global-mean trend of 0.1 °C to 0.2 °C per decade. We therefore infer with high confidence that the HadCRUT record is at the lower end of likely warming." The 'skeptics' and those in denial about AGW are now even turning on their beloved UAH MSU data now that it is allegedly being "stubborn". The incoherence and inconsistency of the "skeptics'" actions and arguments continue to amaze. -
actually thoughtful at 12:28 PM on 21 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Chris Shaker - Let's try a different approach. Climategate is ancient history, and has been pointed out, didn't change the science one fig. So, as I ask many skeptics - what will it take to convince you? How warm? How much CO2? How acidic the oceans? How much sea level rise? How many droughts and floods? How many melted glaciers? How much ice loss in Greenland and the Arctic? Just think about where you will believe/understand. Because whatever your level, under BAU, we will get there. -
JMurphy at 12:25 PM on 21 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
fydijkstra wrote : "Concrete examples that the Climategate e-mailers were highly in doubt can only be given from interpretations of the e-mails. Concrete examples that they wanted to hide uncertainty and prevent that other views are published. Again, we are talking about the interpretations of the e-mails..." If I may be allowed to interpret your post, I don't believe you understand the difference between a 'concrete example' and an 'interpretation of an email'. What you can interpret (or, at least, read what other people have interpreted) from a limited number of emails taken out of context, means nothing unless you can point to real-world actions that followed on from those emails. Can you ? -
actually thoughtful at 11:06 AM on 21 November 2010Economic Impacts of Carbon Pricing
Gestur, If you share some links about where you are looking I will waive my eyeballs over the graphs too. Coal accounting for 80% of electricity emissions makes sense - I think source 2 and 3 are zero carbon (ie nuclear and hydro-electric). Then you get to gas, which of course does have emissions. As to 2050 - let's get this puppy started. I doubt that whatever policy we have now will have any bearing on 2050. Course corrections will be required. Regarding behavior changes. We only had about 6 months in 2008 to pull your data. I am giving you anecdotal evidence, both from people I knew looking for/buying cars, and from my solar thermal business, which went through the roof at that moment, and has since almost collapsed. Incredibly fuel priced sensitive (in my little corner of the universe). And, as SoundOff points out - whatever we are doing now doesn't really matter. As soon as we price in carbon, significant breakthroughs will occur (not the least of which will be behavior changes). We really, really, really need to take the baby step of putting a tax on carbon. -
kdkd at 11:04 AM on 21 November 2010How significance tests are misused in climate science
BP's claim that induction is not a valid part of the scientific method is absurd. Induction is a cornerstone of the scientific method, without which we would be unable to perform scientific research. No wonder that BP has such trouble with making a coherent scientific argument if he lacks this basic understanding (his maths is clearly not too shabby, although he seems to lack sufficient grounding in statistics to be coherent there too). It looks like BP is not alone in criticising the validity of induction, although as Fisher (1955, p 74-75) shows, this anti-induction interpretation, in the context of the kinds of probablistic reasoning used in climate science and elsewhere, is clearly totally incorrect. It may make sense in some engineering fields, but as I have no expertise in that area, I can not comment. -
actually thoughtful at 10:57 AM on 21 November 2010Economic Impacts of Carbon Pricing
Adelady - Are you OK? Can you breathe? As an American, our current political majority leaves me to believe you should be dead right now. We CANNOT survive if fuels are priced anywhere near their actual cost (ie over $4/US gallon). -
The Skeptical Chymist at 10:56 AM on 21 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
David Keith from the University of Calgary recently described his attempt to get Dyson to define a specific criticism against climate science on Dot Earth recently. "I had an interesting experience talking to Dyson and Will Happer at a meeting last year...... Dyson’s comments on climate were disappointingly shallow. I said, “Are you concerned about the exaggeration of climate impacts or do you have serious concerns about the science?” “Both”, he replied. But when I pressed him on the science the only thing he said was that CO2 radiative forcing was logarithmic and complained that nobody knows this or talks about it. It was disappointing to hear such a shallow commentary from such a great man. Everyone who needs to knows that CO2 forcing is (roughly) logarithmic. This science is more than half a century old; it is in any textbook; the I.P.C.C. even as an “official” log forcing function that is widely used in simple policy analysis models. This science of building good high-resolution radiative transfer codes was nailed by Gilbert Plass and others at the air force geophysics lab in the 1950’s. If one is going to attack the climate science this is a very odd place to start." Sorry about the long quote but I think it is quite instructive. Dyson, great physicist that he may be, simply doesn't know much about the climate change science. -
kdkd at 10:55 AM on 21 November 2010The Fake Scandal of Climategate
KL #8 "The fact that three quick fire threads have been run on Climatgate on this excellent blog in the last few days is an indication that Climategate (fairly or not) has does serious damage to the cause of AGW activism." Nope. I seem to recall at the time (one year ago), that so-called sceptics were crowing about what an enormous deal this was, being evidence of fraud etc. These days, we see that you're making the same tired claims, but are tacitly admitting that your claims are without substance. Worth examining as a case study of the psychology of delusion from the so-called climate sceptic if you ask me. -
Dikran Marsupial at 10:52 AM on 21 November 2010How significance tests are misused in climate science
The issue about stratospheric intrusions looks like a red herring to me. According to the paper BP linked, they are small scale events 300m-1km, which suggests they have very little effect on the measurement of global radiative forcing. -
How significance tests are misused in climate science
Berényi - So, the cycle of multiple observations, generalizations, identification of common elements, hypothesis, testing - that's not science by induction???? Because that is how the theory of evolution came about, and it is inductive reasoning. You are using a very different dictionary than most, if that is the case. Darwin, incidentally, did not propose a mechanism for inheritance, acknowledging that while offspring carried traits of their parents, he did not know the details. Your reference to Wallace is interesting, but I don't think relevant - both Darwin and Wallace held much the same ideas. And your use of the terms "spiritualist" and "Augustinian monk" appear to be ad hominem references - I sincerely hope I am incorrect in appraisal. -
caerbannog at 10:23 AM on 21 November 2010The Fake Scandal of Climategate
adrian smits at 06:47 AM on 21 November, 2010 even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! Don't you get it? Even if the (peer reviewed papers) were crap which most are by the way.That doesn't mean you change rules of the game so you can keep an extra man or 2 or three or more on the field to maintain your unfair advantage.It's like asking the other team to play a man down the whole game! Ummm... this is called "venting" in a private email message. Jones can't change the peer-review procedure for independent journals, no matter how frustrated he becomes. It would be like me complaining to a friend how I'd like to keep idiotic comments from being posted to skepticalscience.com. No matter how much I'd like to change the moderation rules here, there's nothing I can do but vent, because I don't have any more say over the management of this web-site than Phil Jones has over the management of Climate Research. That being said, it's rather interesting to see how much more upset you are about Phil Jones' venting in a private email message than you are with the publication of incompetent garbage filled with schoolboy errors in what should be respectable peer-reviewed journals. Or does incompetence not matter when it confirms your own political ideology? -
Paul D at 10:06 AM on 21 November 2010The Fake Scandal of Climategate
batsvensson: "It is at it best in state of being unknown until confirmed by an observation and as far as I know someone has yet to came back from say year 2100 and reported X meter elevated sea levels with predicted catastrophic events in case we do nothing." You misunderstand science. You don't have to prove a theory by repeating an experiment that has already verified the theory. It was only necessary for one experiment to be done to confirm Einstein's theory, it didn't have to be repeated. Experiments are only repeated for demonstration/educational purposes, not to confirm the theory is true every time. As far as climate science is concerned we already have evidence of what happens when GHGs increase or decrease. The experiment to confirm it has been done in Earths past. -
funglestrumpet at 09:58 AM on 21 November 2010The Fake Scandal of Climategate
While I am grateful for the information you regularly provide, I do wish you would cease concentrating on the anthropomorphic aspects of climate change; they are a distraction. What is relevant is the fact that the planet is warming at an alarming rate. While I very much doubt it, the fact that human carbon emissions match the rise in temperature could be down to coincidence. It really doesn’t matter now. It will matter considerably when the time comes to pay the cost of the effects of climate change. Those nations that can be identified as culpable will pay a heavy price, and the more they procrastinate, the higher will be the price, but not yet. We know the science of the greenhouse effect and know that reducing carbon emissions is our best hope of avoiding a catastrophe. Let the sceptics believe that the current trend is not caused by human activity if it will make them happy. We need the scientific community to spell out where the current trend could lead us. We must identify the level of danger that is all too imminent. In a few short years we will have increased the population by almost 50%. We have food riots now, what then? Put global warming into the mix and some learned scientists believe that we will only be able to feed about one third of them. That is a truly awful statistic if it should be a reflection on the reality we face. Take Catastrophe Theory, plot time on the ‘x’ axis, food production on the ‘y’ axis and rate of change on the ‘z’ axis and the potential for harm is both obvious and the speed at which it will happen is also all to obvious. It would be a very strange sceptic who, while refusing to believe in the cause being human in origin, failed to agree with the overwhelming body of evidence that says reducing carbon emissions will help fight it. It would be like the captain of cruise liner doing a cruise in Antarctic waters who refused to alter course round an iceberg dead ahead because the iceberg was not human in origin. To continue to argue about the origins of climate change will only hinder action that is becoming more urgent by the day. Mel TisdaleModerator Response: The anthropogenic causes of climate change are not a distraction. If we weren’t causing climate change (which we are), then eliminating CO2 emissions would not stop it (which it will). - James -
Dikran Marsupial at 09:56 AM on 21 November 2010How significance tests are misused in climate science
First as to the thirty year period of cooling, I note that you ignored the part about all other focings remaining approximately constant, which does not hold for the 1943-1976 period. Indeed the sulphate aerosol issue made some scientists at the time discuss the possibility of an ice age. Second, the precice definition of the radiataive forcing is not needed for observational falsification of the theory as a whole. Popper's idea of falsifiablity assumes that both parties attempt to find a test of the theory in good faith. If we observed sufficiently extended period of cooling with CO2 rising and all other forcings constant, that would falsify AGW theory, regardless of how you measured radiative forcing. Lastly, regarding evolution, lets take Darwinian evolution as a particular case; it is entirely inductive, a general principle based on observation of particular examples. But most scientists would agree it is science. If you think it has been falsified (please do give links - genuinely interested), then it is by definition falsifiable, and hence a scientific theory according to Popper. -
Paul D at 09:55 AM on 21 November 2010The Fake Scandal of Climategate
batsvensson: "Not sure about that really. Science is use a bat in the debate." That is debate not science. You prove my point. It is valid to take science and debate the theory or result, it is done by everyone, but that debate isn't science. -
Albatross at 09:50 AM on 21 November 2010Climategate a year later
Ian @53, I have recently warned KL about the perils of quoting NP, and yet he still insists on using quotes from a newspaper run by ideologues to try and back up his arguments. That is a very weak argument to try and make-- resorting to using Corcoran as a source smacks of desperation. -
JohnMashey at 09:42 AM on 21 November 2010Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
William O'Keefe, CEO of GMI, was an executive for 25 years at the American Petroleum Institute. If people want to lean more about GMI, see Crescendo to Climategate Cacophony, March 2010, which includes funding flows, various key people at GMI & elsewhere, activities, etc. It overlaps a little with MoD, but is focused elsewhere. Fortunately, Naomi&Erik had already covered a lot of the earlier material, so I didn't need to repeat that. -
Ian Forrester at 09:39 AM on 21 November 2010Climategate a year later
Ken Lambert said:I have no reason to not accept the truth of the below excerpt from NP
KL surely has not read very many articles in the NP or he would not be making that statement. NP is a well known right wing, AGW denying and anti-science rag. -
Berényi Péter at 09:33 AM on 21 November 2010How significance tests are misused in climate science
#70 Dikran Marsupial at 22:10 PM on 18 November, 2010 Is the theory of evolution scientific? I am not aware of a single well defined scientific theory of evolution. If you mean that vastly American idiosyncrasy, the so called Evilution vs. Cretinism controversy, I refuse to play that game. There are specific theories of various aspects of the overall evolution process that can be called scientific, none of them based on induction. If you mean the simple observation the geological record is full of fossil remnants of extinct species, that's not a theory, just a bunch of facts begging for a theoretical explanation. Some attempts of such an explanation may be inherently scientific in nature, others are not so much. Early theories like Lamarckism, Spencerism or Darwinism are already falsified, at least to the extent they were specific enough in their predictions and proposed mechanism behind phenomena observed to lend to a well defined logical procedure as falsification. There's also a cohort of recent theories going under the umbrella term Neo-Darwinism, all based on a unification of ideas from Alfred Russel Wallace (a spiritualist) and Gregor Johann Mendel (an Augustinian monk). It is not a unified theory either, just a meta-theory, which encouraged the formation of various scientific theories, some of them still standing. There is nothing specifically inductive in the principles underlying those theories. They are generally based on the postulated existence of variable replicators in an environment with finite resources. As the replicators are capable to increase their number exponentially, some (natural) selection inevitably occurs. However, the outcome heavily depends on the type of replicators, spontaneous development of even simple autocatalytic sets is empirically unsupported in real chemistry. In this sense generation of complexity by evolution is still not well understood. There is strong indication that below a certain (quite high) level of algorithmic complexity entities are not able to function as Darwinian replicators. There should be a specific type of variability in the replication process in order to selection be able to work in a creative way, that is, it's not true that just any kind of variability would suffice. This is why abiogenesis is still outside the realm of science with no "standard model" of the origin of life in sight. As we have never seen life outside Earth, there is no empirical basis for assessing the probability of spontaneous occurrence of life either. All we know is the conditional probability of life having been appeared, provided we consider this problem, and that conditional probability is exactly 1 (see anthropic principle). So I do not quite know where you are trying to get by bringing up evolution in the present context, but it is obviously more problematic than you would imagine.* a thirty year period of cooling, with increasing CO2 and all other forcings remaining approximately constant would kill AGW theory stone dead That's not true. Between 1943 and 1976 (in 33 years) global land-ocean temperature index was dropping (by 0.12°C) while atmospheric CO2 concentration has increased from about 300 ppmv to 332 ppmv.
If CO2 radiative forcing is supposed to be a logarithmic function of its concentration, this is 14.6% of the forcing for CO2 doubling. If we go with the IPCC mean estimate of 3°C for doubling, surface temperature should have increased by 0.44°C during the same period. Therefore the missing heat is 0.56°C in 33 years which indicates a cooling trend at a 1.7°C/century rate without CO2 contribution. And that with the heavily adjusted GISTEMP figures (raw temperature data as measured by thermometers show a more severe cooling in this period, in excess of 0.3°C). Effect of CH4 and other trace gases with absorption lines in thermal IR are not taken into account either.
Therefore AGW theory would have been killed stone dead a long time ago, if there were no "all other forcings remaining approximately constant" clause.
In the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007: Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis: Glossary the following definition is seen:
Radiative forcing Radiative forcing is the change in the net, downward minus upward, irradiance (expressed in W m–2) at the tropopause due to a change in an external driver of climate change, such as, for example, a change in the concentration of carbon dioxide or the output of the Sun. Radiative forcing is computed with all tropospheric properties held fixed at their unperturbed values, and after allowing for stratospheric temperatures, if perturbed, to readjust to radiative-dynamical equilibrium. Radiative forcing is called instantaneous if no change in stratospheric temperature is accounted for. For the purposes of this report, radiative forcing is further defined as the change relative to the year 1750 and, unless otherwise noted, refers to a global and annual average value. Radiative forcing is not to be confused with cloud radiative forcing, a similar terminology for describing an unrelated measure of the impact of clouds on the irradiance at the top of the atmosphere.
The remarkable part of it is that radiative forcing is defined at the tropopause, at an ill-defined surface (because of occasional tropopause folding events) high up in the atmosphere but well below any satellite orbit, a surface where practically no measurements of IR irradiance are done (either up or down). The only direct way to determine if CO2 induced warming effect (of a magnitude similar to the one estimated by the IPCC) is falsified by observed surface cooling between 1943 and 1976 or not is to analyze the difference of two unmeasured quantities at an unknown surface. Otherwise, as this quantity is obviously unknown, one can assume there was a negative forcing there, canceling the effect of increasing CO2 concentrations. And this is exactly what people do (by setting supposed aerosol effects to a suitable value, neither supported nor contradicted by measurements). That's what I mean by the theory being melleable enough to resist falsification attempts. Not because it is true, but because it is flexible (not good for a theory that is supposed to be scientific). -
Albatross at 09:31 AM on 21 November 2010The Fake Scandal of Climategate
James, Thanks for this. I'm afraid though it is probably a futile effort. Self-proclaimed 'skeptics' have had a year now to educate themselves on the facts, and yet we are still hearing people saying ridiculous things like this: "even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! Don't you get it?" It seems that they are OK with skeptics simultaneously reviewing each others' papers at the journal of Climate Research. Well, credible and ethical scientists rightly objected to that. There were other issues too at Climate Research which rightly concerned scientists with integrity. Also, many papers by "skeptics" continue to be published (often in second rate journals like E&E). How is it the fault of credible and ethical scientists that the research by "skeptics" is often sub-par and soundly refuted after being published. For example, McKitrick and Michaels (2004) was junk, still is and should not have included in the IPCC. Yet, in the end it was. So much for all the claims of gate keeping-- in fact the opposite seems to be true, junk science by "skeptics" being included in the IPCC the spirit of "balance" and fairness, not based on merit. Well, that is just wrong, and fails to advance the science and improve our understanding of the climate system. While the "skeptics" seem to be OK with that, people with integrity and interests of the advancement of science are not. There are other serious issues with the Wegman report James, see DeepClimate's most recent posts. I for one am looking forward to everyone focussing on the science again soon, especially the public release of the first Cryosat-2 data.... -
batsvensson at 09:11 AM on 21 November 2010The Fake Scandal of Climategate
Well assume X and Y is some (one or several) climate related factor - I grant you the favor to pick whatever factor you like. Is your answer "a" or "b"? -
dhogaza at 08:49 AM on 21 November 2010The Fake Scandal of Climategate
how do u falsify the statement "if condition X, Y then the sea level will raise with Z meter"? Do you falsify it with a) an experiment, or b) an observation
"if X is changed by Y amount, then our prediction is Z" can be applied to a wide range of things that you would accept as an experiment ... except for the special case of planet earth, apparently. Even as you state it, you may falsify it with an experiment, i.e. "make conditions X and Y true, and observe the results". Which is exactly what we're doing. Now, the experiment we're doing is on a very complex system, perhaps that's confusing you ... -
batsvensson at 08:45 AM on 21 November 2010The Fake Scandal of Climategate
dhogaza, how do u falsify the statement "if condition X, Y then the sea level will raise with Z meter"? Do you falsify it with a) an experiment, or b) an observation ?
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