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Paul D at 19:40 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
cjshaker: "Regarding the post from whomever 'The Ville' is, I provided the link to an article which talked about the reported failure to follow FOI laws, and the deleting of emails." UK FOI law doesn't require emails to be kept in advance of an FOI request. eg. if the email is deleted and then later a copy is requested at a later date, the law is not broken. -
Paul D at 19:31 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
cjshaker: "So far, I have not yet found your post where I assume you do the same." My reference is myself, because unlike you, I went to a public meeting of climate scientists including Mike Hulme. eg. first hand direct info, instead of second or third hand info from a news paper. -
Paul D at 19:28 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
cjshaker: "Clean up my own act? I just posted comments from sources, and included the actual sources. So far, I have not yet found your post where I assume you do the same. Your main intellectual activity seems to be name calling. It is not very flattering." 1. My comment was about you and your comment. 2. My previous comment stands. If you choose outdated media sources as a reference, then you do indeed meed to clean up your act. 3. Suggesting someone cleans up their act isn't name calling. -
Tom Dayton at 19:09 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Chris, peer review normally is brutal. M&M's rejection was not the least unusual for any scientific field. See: Stephan Lewandowsky's The Peer Reviewed Literature Has Spoken. Stephan's Peer Review vs Commercials and Spam. My comment #25 here, My comment #33 but with its correction #35, and my comment #34. My comment #40. -
cjshaker at 19:07 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Tom: Thank you for the pointers to the documents on temperature deltas. Was wondering why that was done. I think that's enough reading for tonight for me. Drinking from the fire hose again. Chris Shaker -
Philippe Chantreau at 19:05 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
"I don't have to pretend to be perfect." Yes but you don't have a rabid herd of lunatics to accuse you of fraud when you happen not to be perfect. Wanna try having them watching you 24/7? Wanna try having them call you a fraud every time that you make an honest mistake? Or just when there is something they don't understand? That wouldn't make you a little defensive? M&M failed to convince Science that their paper was important. The same thing happened to probably 10s of thousands of researchers. Do they go on accusing their entire area of exercice to be fraudulent? Please... -
gpwayne at 18:56 PM on 20 November 2010The Fake Scandal of Climategate
As worthy as this defense is, surely this is the kind of political bun-fight SkS has resolutely stayed away from since its inception. The debate can only become a quagmire of competing claims, because this is part of an adversarial process that does not depend on, or even require, scientific evidence. Only by sticking resolutely to the science and the advocacy of the scientific method can SkS continue to avoid being drowned in the kind of mud through which we are obliged to wade elsewhere. -
Philippe Chantreau at 18:55 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Nonsense. A skeptic once posted on this site a compilation of 700 papers that were skeptical of AGW, how do they do it? As I said, McLean et al was published, Lindzen was published, and Spencer etc, etc. It's quite possible Shaviv's paper was bad, it happens. Sometimes a paper is rejected for no good reason (or so it seems to the author), it happens in biology, chemistry, archaeology, any and all area. You try again, or you try another journal or you put it on the shelf until you can make it better and you move on. If you don't move on and just go on belly aching about how it's all unfair you end up never publishing anything. That's life. -
cjshaker at 18:53 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Adelady: We all make mistakes. In my life, I've been better served by being up front with my numerous mistakes, and letting the chips fall where they may. I don't have to pretend to be perfect. Chris Shaker -
Tom Dayton at 18:47 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Chris, temperatures are converted to anomalies to reduce noise. See NCDC (hat tip to the Yooper) and the IPCC Working Group I report from the TAR. -
adelady at 18:45 PM on 20 November 2010Economic Impacts of Carbon Pricing
actually thoughtful, $4 per gallon? Yesterday morning, petrol was 1.33 a litre at my nearest servo, which is just over $5 a US gallon. I managed to buy some in the afternoon for the wonderful bargain price of 1.15. $4.35 a gallon. I do not understand why petrol is so cheap in the USA. I do not understand why people think that the USA could not survive if prices were higher. -
cjshaker at 18:43 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Phillipe: Given what has been reported in the press about suppression of articles critical to the AGW premise, criticizing someone for not having a peer reviewed article may be a circular argument. Given what Dr. Muller says on his website, I'm not surprised that M&M were unable to get a paper published. http://muller.lbl.gov/ "Some people may complain that McIntyre and McKitrick did not publish their results in a refereed journal. That is true--but not for lack of trying. Moreover, the paper was refereed--and even better, the referee reports are there for us to read. McIntyre and McKitrick's only failure was in not convincing Nature that the paper was important enough to publish." Here is one from Israeli Astrophysicist, Nir Shaviv: "I witnessed how an editor rejected a paper I wrote without forwarding the reviewers my detailed response to their comments (he was perhaps afraid that the reviewers would actually be convinced with my detailed response which included detailed referrals to published results proving my points). I saw another rejection (perhaps by the same editor...), this time of a paper written by a colleague that included the punch line: "any paper which doesn’t support the anthropogenic GHG theory is politically motivated, and therefore has to be rejected" I saw how proposal reviewers bluntly reject funding requests, based on similar beliefs in the global warming apocalypse. I even know of someone who didn't get tenure because he advocated non party line ideas. " From http://www.sciencebits.com/node/211 Chris Shaker -
cjshaker at 18:19 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
They address third party data that was not generally accessible, but now is archived: "24. On the allegations in relation to withholding data, in particular concerning the small sample size of the tree ring data from the Yamal peninsula, CRU did not withhold the underlying raw data (having correctly directed the single request to the owners). But it is evidently true that access to the raw data was not simple until it was archived in 2009 and that this delay can rightly be criticized on general principles. In the interests of transparency, we believe that CRU should have ensured that the data they did not own, but on which their publications relied, was archived in a more timely way. " They address the FOI act as well: "27. On the allegation that CRU does not appear to have acted in a way consistent with the spirit and intent of the FoIA or EIR, we find that there was unhelpfulness in responding to requests and evidence that e-mails might have been deleted in order to make them unavailable should a subsequent request be made for them. University senior management should have accepted more responsibility for implementing the required processes for FoIA and EIR compliance. " They criticize University Management for not having proper FOI compliance procedures in place. I'll ask some possibly stupid questions regarding this paragraph: "One of CRU‘s most important contributions to climate science is the production of a land based, gridded temperature data set showing how the temperature has varied year by year since 1850 relative to the 1961 to 1990 average." I noticed that convention, of storing a delta from a temperature average in looking at the temperature proxy data extracted from the ice cores. Why do they store a delta? And what is the 1961 to 1990 average? Is it some kind of global average? Or an average for the reporting station over that time period? Thank you, Chris Shaker -
Marco at 18:14 PM on 20 November 2010Climategate a year later
Contact me directly, Daniel (I guess someone from the website can see my e-mail address, I'm not going to publish it here!). -
cjshaker at 18:01 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
What justification would they have had for withholding station identifiers? I assume that is just the ICAO name of the weather reporting facility? http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf "18. On the allegation of withholding station identifiers we find that CRU should have made available an unambiguous list of the stations used in each of the versions of the Climatic Research Unit Land Temperature Record (CRUTEM) at the time of publication. We find that CRU‟s responses to reasonable requests for information were unhelpful and defensive." Chris Shaker -
cjshaker at 17:57 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Philippe: Your post seems to be saying that the FOI laws need to be updated to add a 'rate limiting' feature, and or some way of preventing them from being used for harassment? A friend of mine who is currently working on modeling fire fighting systems told me about how distracting some of the scientists find the FOI requests. I'm currently reading the report that Daniel pointed me at: http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf I like the fact that the panel of reviewers were not climate scientists. Seems like a diverse group of well educated people did the review. They also say "15. But we do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of the CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA, who failed to recognise not only the significance of statutory CHAPTER 1: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 12 requirements but also the risk to the reputation of the University and, indeed, to the credibility of UK climate science. ". Continuing to read. Thank you for the pointers, Chris Shaker -
adelady at 17:38 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
chris@88 You didn't look very hard. If you go to Mann's CV you'll find a list of publications when you scroll down (a fair way, he's a busy man). You can count for yourself the number of _listed_ publications since the date you seem to be worried about. Many commentators, including your good self, behave like literature critics getting stuck into a writer because characters or plot seem a bit underdeveloped in the first chapter of a book. The fact is that everyone who's read the rest of the book says that none of this matters because the whole book is well written. Dr Mann's done what all scientists do. He's kept on working and produced better and better work. Is the reason that people harp on about this early piece that they've found nothing to criticise in the many, many papers he's since written? So they have to stick with nagging about the one and only thing they have any argument at all with. -
Philippe Chantreau at 17:30 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
CJ, Mann et al 2008 has similar findings to the paper you allude to, using different methods and data. The data and code are available. Have McIntyre and McKitrick attempted to publish anything about it? How about the multiple other reconstructions that show similar results? In fact, exactly how many papers have M&M attempted to publish in the many years of casting suspicion and spreading rumors about fraud, conspiracy and what not? How many have they actually published? Do they even bother with trying E&E, where skeptics can have their say to the exclusion of all others? If papers as poor as Soon&Baliunas or McLean et al made it to peer-review, surely the serious work of M&M should pass, shouldn't it? So why is there none to be read? -
Daniel Bailey at 17:29 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Re: cjshaker (88-90) 1. RealClimate is not Michael Mann's website. Mann's site is here. 2. The McIntyre and McKitrick paper is overblown. They had a minor point, it was adopted, the reconstructions were re-done. The result? Hockey sticks. With or without PCA. With or without tree ring data. Read it for yourself, here. If you have any questions after reading this post, come back here and ask. (slow typist I am, I see Tom Dayton already linked this for you) 3. Read the Muir Russell report for context on the stolen emails. The true hallmark of intellect is to rise above what one is taught, to see the merits and weaknesses of the teachings, and to surpass the teacher. You have the intelligence, Chris. I have pointed the way to you. But it's a looonnngggg road to the truth. And few walk it. And fewer still reach the destination. Will you? The Yooper -
Ari Jokimäki at 17:29 PM on 20 November 2010The human fingerprint in the daily cycle
This is just my own thinking here without looking into the scientific literature on the matter: I think the reason for DTR decrease has something to do with the differences in the ratios of the forcings during the day and during the night. During the day the sun contributes to the temperature strongly and GHG forcing is not so large player during the day. During the night the solar forcing gets very small and GHG forcing dominates. If GHG forcing increases, it has larger effect during the night because its fraction of the whole forcing is bigger then. -
Tom Dayton at 17:18 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Chris, type "hockey stick" into the Search field at the top left of this page. Do the same in the Search field at the top right of any page on RealClimate. In particular, read the article by the statistician Tamino, titled The Montford Delusion. I have studied statistics, and used it as a scientist, and taught it to PhD students, and peer-reviewed the statistical aspects of submissions to scientific journals. I am not anywhere close to having Tamino's expertise, but I am expert enough to judge his opinion is well grounded.Moderator Response: In particular, see "Hockey stick is broken." -
Philippe Chantreau at 17:17 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Cjshaker, you did not fully read. They do things with the data: cherry-picking, misrepresentations, distortions, innuendo, gratuitous attacks on people's integrity, all summed in blog posts with shocking titles. The FOI requests thing is so abusive that anyone who really cares about conserving the FOI process should be concerned. One of McIntyre's blogposts generated 48 FOI requests in a week-end. That qualifies as harassment. Not suprisingly, that's when bloggers have more time on their hands. A disproportionate share of these requests were for private communications instead of material useful for research. As for your confession that you need pointers and clues to look into the reality of this, it unfortunately indicates that your investigation has so far been superficial. Real Climate has a good search engine. However, if you really care, forget about news reports. Look at peer-reviewed litterature. If the research was really flawed, everyone looking to make a name in science (that's a lot of sharp young people) would have latched on, gone over the "bad stuff" and published rebuttals. New findings or comments on existing papers would have flourished. Has that happened? Of course not. Climategate is a mountain out of a molehill, a non-story not worthy of any attention if one cares to actually try to understand the state of scientific knowledge in the field. -
cjshaker at 17:08 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Daniel: I think the quotes that I've mined from the articles reflect poorly on the scientists involved, and do not make climate science look very credible to the general public. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to ask questions about Climategate, or respond to questions without using sources and quoting from them... Chris Shaker -
cjshaker at 17:04 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Daniel: I have not seen any claims that these quotes from scientists who appear to be behaving poorly were fabricated. Have I missed such? Thank you, Chris Shaker -
cjshaker at 17:02 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
RealClimate seems to be Dr. Mann's webpage. I have looked at it before, attempting to see any acknowledgement of the problems with statistics supposedly identified in his work. Professor Muller at Berkeley claims to have also verified problems with his statistics work. Search for 'Global Warming Bombshell' at http://muller.lbl.gov/ "But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records. But it wasn't so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken. Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called "Monte Carlo" analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape! That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen? What is going on? Let me digress into a short technical discussion of how this incredible error took place. In PCA and similar techniques, each of the (in this case, typically 70) different data sets have their averages subtracted (so they have a mean of zero), and then are multiplied by a number to make their average variation around that mean to be equal to one; in technical jargon, we say that each data set is normalized to zero mean and unit variance. In standard PCA, each data set is normalized over its complete data period; for key climate data sets that Mann used to create his hockey stick graph, this was the interval 1400-1980. But the computer program Mann used did not do that. Instead, it forced each data set to have zero mean for the time period 1902-1980, and to match the historical records for this interval. This is the time when the historical temperature is well known, so this procedure does guarantee the most accurate temperature scale. But it completely screws up PCA. PCA is mostly concerned with the data sets that have high variance, and the Mann normalization procedure tends to give very high variance to any data set with a hockey stick shape. (Such data sets have zero mean only over the 1902-1980 period, not over the longer 1400-1980 period.) The net result: the "principal component" will have a hockey stick shape even if most of the data do not. McIntyre and McKitrick sent their detailed analysis to Nature magazine for publication, and it was extensively refereed. But their paper was finally rejected. In frustration, McIntyre and McKitrick put the entire record of their submission and the referee reports on a Web page for all to see. If you look, you'll see that McIntyre and McKitrick have found numerous other problems with the Mann analysis. I emphasize the bug in their PCA program simply because it is so blatant and so easy to understand. Apparently, Mann and his colleagues never tested their program with the standard Monte Carlo approach, or they would have discovered the error themselves. Other and different criticisms of the hockey stick are emerging (see, for example, the paper by Hans von Storch and colleagues in the September 30 issue of Science). Some people may complain that McIntyre and McKitrick did not publish their results in a refereed journal. That is true--but not for lack of trying. Moreover, the paper was refereed--and even better, the referee reports are there for us to read. McIntyre and McKitrick's only failure was in not convincing Nature that the paper was important enough to publish. " I looked for this to be addressed at RealClimate.org, and found this condescendingly named article, which should be addressing the claims: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/02/dummies-guide-to-the-latest-hockey-stick-controversy/ I don't actually see Professor Muller's claims about the supposedly easy to understand mistake being addressed. I have NOT studied statistics. It appears that Professor Muller is well respected in the scientific community, as far as I can tell. Did Dr. Mann screw up? If so, did he ever admit his mistake? Thank you, Chris ShakerModerator Response: Please do not post such long quotes. Instead link to the source, and direct readers to the most relevant portions, and perhaps provide a few highlights. -
Daniel Bailey at 16:44 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Re: cjshaker (81) Here's a link to the Muir Russell report. The relevant section is Pp 45-48. Links to the openly available datasets are therein, as well as the methodology used by the investigative team. In light of the multiple investigations (and exonerations in every instance) into this matter, your quote-mining of the WSJ piece you link (and others) reflects poorly on you. Here's the latest Skeptical Science post on this matter. Consider it a must-read for anyone maintaining to have an open mind. (-edit: fixed, thanks! -end edit-) The YooperModerator Response: The second link is broken. -
cjshaker at 16:40 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
As a member of the public, Climategate is what got me interested in reading about the whole issue of AGW, and the controversies surrounding it. I was reading articles like this one, which talks about suppression of opposing views from scientific journals, and subverting the peer review process: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/02/hacked-climate-emails-flaws-peer-review ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- "In another email exchange CRU scientist Dr Keith Briffa initiates what looks like an attempt to have a paper rejected. In June 2003, as an editor of an unnamed journal, Briffa emailed fellow tree-ring researcher Edward Cook, a researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, saying: "Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting [an unnamed paper] – to support Dave Stahle's and really as soon as you can. Please." Stahle is a tree-ring professor from the University of Arkansas. This request appears to subvert the convention that reviewers should be both independent and anonymous. Cook replied later that day: "OK, today. Promise. Now, something to ask from you." The favour was to provide some data to help Cook review a paper that attacked his own tree-ring work. "If published as is, this paper could really do some damage," he said. "It won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically, but it suffers from the classic problem of pointing out theoretical deficiencies, without showing that their improved [inverse regression] method is actually better in a practical sense."" Chris Shaker -
Tom Dayton at 16:35 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Better than that, Chris, is RealClimate's page of links to data and code. -
cjshaker at 16:31 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Tom, DeVille, etc: I'm happy to read news reports that should have told me that the data they were seeking was actually available, if you'd like to point me at them. Or, give me a clue about what to search for with Google, and I'll take a crack at it. Chris Shaker -
Tom Dayton at 16:31 PM on 20 November 2010The human fingerprint in the daily cycle
Jeff T, I don't know why DTR should decrease due to GHG increase. But I do know that increased radiance from the Sun should increase DTR by increasing day temperatures more than night temperatures. DTR's failure to increase is yet more evidence that the Sun is not to blame for overall warming. -
Tom Dayton at 16:25 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
cjshaker, the few agencies that withhold some of their data from free distribution do so in order to charge for the data, to fund the data's collection and archiving. Many of the agencies that distribute their data for free insist that the distribution come from them alone rather than second hand, to help ensure that anyone thinking they have the data really do have the real data rather than a version that might be incomplete or erroneous. -
cjshaker at 16:09 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Philippe: Your post seems to be a good justification for always releasing the data and software. If they never do anything with the data anyway, why not disarm them with total disclosure? Full disclosure increases credibility with other scientists, and with the general public. Chris Shaker -
actually thoughtful at 16:05 PM on 20 November 2010Solving Global Warming - Not Easy, But Not Too Hard
Batsvensson - you continue to claim it cannot be solved. And yet. And yet people all over the world are solving it - house by house, business by business. With current technology. Without the necessary price signal via a carbon tax. If we address the political/economic issue by imposing a carbon tax, things get significantly easier. The work is vast, but we have a few decades (so long as we START now). While you might wish that Skeptical Science stay restricted to only stating the obvious (that global climate disruption is happening now); I applaud John for taking this respected site to the next level - dealing with the known problem Denier class skeptics would prefer that this site just continue to trumpet the obscenely obvious facts that climate change is well underway. Progress calls for turning up the heat and getting real about solutions. -
Tom Dayton at 16:05 PM on 20 November 2010The human fingerprint in the daily cycle
Karamanski, without much of an atmosphere, the Moon lacks the Earth's 26% reflected and scattered by atmosphere and clouds. So during the day, the Sun has little impediment to heating the surface. -
Jeff T at 16:04 PM on 20 November 2010The human fingerprint in the daily cycle
Why should greenhouse gases (GHGs) reduce diurnal temperature range (DTR)? Yes, the sun warms the earth's surface during the day, but some of the heat is radiated into space. GHGs reduce that radiation loss both day and night. It's not obvious to me that the effect of GHGs should be greater at night. None of the three papers cited presents an argument that greenhouse gases should reduce DTR. Braganza's simulations predict a much smaller change in DTR than has actually been observed. See his Figure 2. The same claim is made here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/Empirically-observed-fingerprints-of-anthropogenic-global-warming.html, "Climate models predict that as a consequence of anthropogenic global warming, the planet should warm more at night than during the day." This argument needs more support and a reference or two. -
cjshaker at 16:02 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Daniel: I would be happy to read URLs from reputable sites saying that the data they were seeking was available to them from the source countries. I have not yet read that, but would be interested in doing so. Those of us in the general public don't get a very good picture of climate scientists. We read about things like this: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125883405294859215.html "Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University that skeptics' research was unwelcome: We "will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Chris Shaker -
Philippe Chantreau at 16:01 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
cjshaker, letting "hostile" (strange terminology really) researchers use data and code is not the problem. The problem is hostile bloggers and a crowd without the qualifications or even the desire to do real research with the data and code. That crowd's only intentions is to distort, cherry-pick, misrepresent and twist the data to reach predetermined conclusions, without the burden of peer-review. This has now been going on for years. I note that the likes of McIntyre or Watts are the only ones compaining about data availablility, whereas real researchers do not seem to have that problem. How come? Watts has had for a long time the data to verify if the basic premise of his web site's existence is valid. Still no data analysis to date. McIntyre is notorious for having complained about Briffa not releasing data to him, while he had already had access to these data before. He simply forgot that at the time he was making his rethorical complaint, whose only purpose was to fire up his crowd. Many were all fired up about GISS code and foaming at the mouth about how Fortran didn't phase them. They were all over it the moment GISS code was made public, and what happened? Nothing, zilch. Having learned his lesson, Michael Mann had both data and code available with his latest reconstruction. How many publications were submitted by skeptics following that? The truth is that skeptics quickly loose interest when there is real work to do. The most they produce with data and code will amount to a little cherry picking here and there with a blog post about it. It's more productive for them because they get more public attention anyway, especially considering that what they put out there would never pass review, except perhaps at E&E. Climate researchers are in a "damned if you, damned if you don't" situation. If they do release, all sorts of unqualified ill-intentioned characters try to use it in the public media to undermine their results, and their reputation. If they don't, the same characters accuse them of all the world's evil. After watching skeptics complain about this for years, it is obvious to me that the skeptics' complaints about data and code are made for the sake of rethoric and amount mostly to hot air. In fact, in the majority of instances, the data is available, they just don't bother looking carefully. -
actually thoughtful at 15:51 PM on 20 November 2010Economic Impacts of Carbon Pricing
Gestur - re-analysis is always useful. I don't think Waxman would be front loaded, as they were trying to pass it, which inevitably means put the pain off. However, when we had $4 gas in Bush's last year - it sure seemed like there was a tipping point achieved and the gas guzzlers were seen as a HUGE liability. I doubt this can be modeled, but somewhere between $4 and $5 gas this country will start to pay attention to fuel economy, and switch from marketing for excess (SUV) to marketing for usefulness (this vehicle converts a set amount of fuel to a further distance traveled/weight hauled). One could look at Europe - they have figured out how to tax energy (and grow their economies. Also, are those figures restricted to transportation? Anytime you reduce coal your numbers look pretty good because coal is so CO2 rich. So the big documented savings may be in the electricity side. -
Rob Painting at 15:50 PM on 20 November 2010Antarctica is gaining ice
Chris Shaker @ 53 It claims that we reached temperatures 4.5C warmer than today during the previous warm phase. If that is true, why would we not reach similar temperatures during this warm phase, with or without man's CO2? Because the orbital and rotational parameters of this interglacial are different from the last, the Eemian. Changes in the Earth's orbit (less eccentricity, greater perihelion distance) and rotation (lower obliquity & precession) mean the Earth won't heat up as much during this interglacial from solar radiation. Relying only on Milankovitch cycle forcing, the Earth should be cooling: Variations in the Earth's Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages "A model of future climate based on the observed orbital-climate relationships, but ignoring anthropogenic effects, predicts that the long-term trend over the next several thousand years is toward extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." -
cjshaker at 15:46 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Regarding the post from whomever 'The Ville' is, I provided the link to an article which talked about the reported failure to follow FOI laws, and the deleting of emails. I'll provide it again for you: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/27/uea-hacked-climate-emails-foi "The University of East Anglia flouted Freedom of Information regulations in its handling of requests for data from climate sceptics, according to the government body that administers the act. In a statement, the deputy information commissioner Graham Smith said emails between scientists at the university's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) that were hacked and placed on the internet in November revealed that FOI requests were "not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation". Some of the hacked emails reveal scientists encouraging their colleagues to delete emails, apparently to prevent them from being revealed to people making FOI requests. Such a breach of the act could carry an unlimited fine, but Smith said no action could be taken against the university because the specific request they had looked at happened in May 2008, well outside the six-month limit for such prosecutions under the act." As for your claims that their breaking FOI laws is none of my business, I disagree, and I don't know why I should care that you think it is none of my business. Chris Shaker -
Tom Dayton at 15:38 PM on 20 November 2010The human fingerprint in the daily cycle
Karamanski, see the post How Much Did Aerosols Contribute to Mid-20th Century Cooling?. -
Tom Dayton at 15:28 PM on 20 November 2010The human fingerprint in the daily cycle
Karamanski, daytime temperatures on Earth are not decreasing, they are increasing. They just aren't increasing as fast as nighttime temperatures are. The cooling of daytime temperatures from the 1950s to the early 1980s was not due to increasing greenhouse gases, but to reflective aerosol pollution. -
Kooiti Masuda at 15:12 PM on 20 November 2010The Climate Show #2: Merchants of Doubt and Twitterbots
It is very regrettable that Poptech conflated two very different things. I think that Singer misrepresented Revelle and Lancaster and Oreskes and Conway correctly describes the affair. On the other hand, the interpretation by Oreskes and Conway about actions of William Nierenberg before he joined G.C. Marshall Institute seems prejudiced based on his action after that, and in this aspect the account by Nicholas Nierenberg (his son) seems relatively more reliable. The latter issue is discussed by William Connolley of Stoat several times the most recently in August 2010, and a little by myself as comment to Brian Angliss's review of the book. I do not want to discuss it here against the will of the moderator, so I just show pointers. -
Henry justice at 15:12 PM on 20 November 2010CO2 effect is saturated
I see the skeptics argument differently. What I see they are preaching is not that GHGs are saturated with energy, but are at or near peak absorption for the energy available. This is quite different from saying the molecules themselves are saturated. They are not. Why increases in GHGs do little to add to atmospheric warming is due to the fact that there is no additional energy available, it has already been used up. With this argument, the skeptics say any increase in any or all GHGs will cause little meaningful warming by citing the example when the Earth had 10x to 15x the amount of CO2. No runaway warming! Since CO2 is a GHG, increases in any GHG will not increase global warming. Humph! Because the GHG are at maximum warmth already. Finally, they state that the energy in the GHGs are in a sort of equilibrium with the atmospheric humidity. So, if more CO2 is added, the atmosphere rains out the moisture and re-equilibrates by noting an observed drop in upper atmospheric humidity. -
Karamanski at 14:34 PM on 20 November 2010The human fingerprint in the daily cycle
It does make sense that the stronger the greenhouse effect, the smaller the difference between daytime and nightime temperatures. But it doesn't make much sense why the moon, which doesn't have a greenhouse effect, has daytime temperatures of 118 degrees celsius. Why is it very different on Earth when it experiences global warming? Why aren't daytime temperatures decreasing as the greenhouse effect strengthens, like on the moon? -
Daniel Bailey at 12:48 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Re: cjshaker (77) You miss the point: the data that the Hadley CRU people used to produce their products was publicly available - from the originating countries. Something the "hostile parties" were well aware of, long before their endless FOI onslaught. If you have an issue with the originating countries withholding the datasets, then take up your beef with them. CRU was legally bound to not release data subject to the nondisclosure agreements. Several independent parties have replicated CRU's work, including the investigating Muir Russell Commission (which they accomplished in a mere 2 days, saying it wasn't hard to do and was something that any competent researcher could have done similarly). So ask yourself, if it's true that replication of the work can be done in 2 days and wasn't hard to do, as the Muir Russell Commission did and said, why haven't any of the "independent" or "hostile" parties clamoring for glasnost/openness done so? So the science CRU was accomplishing was only controversial in the sense that certain parties exist with a vested interest in making it so. Anyway, I think AGW would be a lot easier for the public to accept if it wasn't constantly obstructed by an active disinformation campaign. The Yooper -
cjshaker at 12:10 PM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
One can question the wisdom of using data that isn't available to hostile parties for science research. If you're doing science, don't you usually expect your work to be examined and questioned? If it is based on proprietary data, say from researchers in China or in France, who don't want to give their data out to hostile parties, how can that verification happen? I'd expect people to think about that, especially if your science is at all controversial. I'm a retired computer scientist. My work was peer reviewed, by other computer scientists. In spite of our best efforts, our code always has some undetected flaw in it, either by design, because we didn't fully understand the problem before we started out trying to solve it, or by accident, because of some interaction with other code that we didn't know about, or by simple coding error. I don't know why these computer models of the climate would be any different. I would find the AGW premise a lot easier to buy if it wasn't accompanied by a political machine that tries to ram it down our throat by any means possible. That political machine, and the religious frenzy of the true believers make the science look bad. Chris Shaker -
Daniel Bailey at 11:55 AM on 20 November 2010Antarctica is gaining ice
For interested parties, a recovered copy of Tamino's post Sea Ice, North and South, Then and Now (from the Further Reading section at the end of the post above) is available here. The Yooper -
Rob Honeycutt at 11:52 AM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
cjshaker... If you read a little further as well, you discover that not all the data was theirs to hand over. The data was provided to the CRU by other organization under license. It was NOT their data to just give out. McIntyre and his minions knew that, had ample access to the actual data they were filing FOI requests for, but continued to barrage the CRU to release the data. This is a time honored legal trick. You bury your opponent in paperwork so they can't get their job done. -
cjshaker at 11:48 AM on 20 November 2010Antarctica is gaining ice
It was interesting to learn about the GRACE satellite, the shrinking land ice mass, and the growing sea ice mass. Thank you, Chris Shaker
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