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396 responses so far ↓
John Mashey // August 31, 2009 at 11:33 pm |
See Center for Inquiry – Senate Minority Report on Global Warming Not Credible, an exhaustive analyis of Morano/Inhofe’s big list earlier this year, with a person-by person trackdown.
I’ve been doing a somewhat-similar kind of analysis on the Singer/Happer APS petition, and I know how much work it must have been to do their much longer list.
JimV // September 1, 2009 at 8:58 pm |
I just saw this on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, by guest-blogger Jim Manzi:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/09/the-socialism-implicit-in-the-social-cost-of-carbon.html
In it, he cites the IPCC as saying a 4C increase in global warming would have a small (3%) effect on global economic output, and concludes therefore that global warming is one of our least important problems.
That blog doesn’t take comments, but has a place you can click to send an email about a post. I have done that before with posts I disagreed with and occasionally gotten a reply or a follow-up post in response. I hope this post will get a lot of emails and a retraction or at last a follow-up due to them, but don’t know enough about the economics of climate change to write a good email on the subject myself. So I am hoping some here will (assuming the post is as far off base as I think).
Richard C // September 1, 2009 at 10:20 pm |
JimV, why encourage him?
Phil Scadden // September 2, 2009 at 4:04 am |
Some musing on bringing down CO2 fast. NZ has committed to 10-20% reduction from 1990 for Copenhagen and media is buzzing about this is too much or too little. Never mind the treasury we-are-in-another-planet report which suggested we should increase emissions. I was looking to see what reducing emissions by 20% would mean (which is 40% reduction from current levels).
Problem: NZ emissions are broadly 50% farming (largely cow methane plus NO2), about 25%+ for transport and <15% for electricity generation. Rest odds and sods. Now it is politically and economically extremely difficult to reduce the size of dairy herds, especially for current govt. Building extra renewable generation fast isnt technically a problem (lots of wind, still some significant hydro and geothermal). You could wipe thermal stations with better efficiency alone.
The problem is transport. If you ring-fence farming (it has delayed entry to ETS), then you need better than 50% or so reduction in transport. We could generate the power for electrification but replacing the vehicle fleet in 10 years?
The only way I can see that would realistically make 20% achievable in 2020 would big increase in forest to buy time while dealing with transport. Get dairy off marginal lands which wold have other benefits too. Perhaps that is main reason gov prefer ETS to carbon tax.
Any other bright ideas on what we should do?
Chris S. // September 2, 2009 at 8:52 am |
[Pig power plants](http://www.reuters.com/article/deborahCohen/idUSTRE52M3LM20090323) could maybe be converted to cows?
Mark // September 2, 2009 at 9:51 am |
“Problem: NZ emissions are broadly 50% farming (largely cow methane plus NO2), about 25%+ for transport”
Halve the transport.
Sorted.
Luke Silburn // September 2, 2009 at 10:11 am |
Phil @4:
From your account, cow methane is the biggest item on your list of fruit (low hanging or otherwise). Given that NZ’s cows are politically sacred at present are there indirect approaches which could make a start on attacking this item?
Ideas off the top of my head:
– capture the methane and use it for local/distributed cogen (only feasible if the cattle are indoors a lot I think).
– work on reducing fossil inputs to the dairy herd (bovine methane is much less of an issue if all they are doing is moving carbon around the within the active cycle)
Regards
Luke
Gavin's Pussycat // September 2, 2009 at 12:47 pm |
JimV, read Mr Sullivan’s linked-to page 17 to see the caveats.
The range stated is 1-5%; there are huge uncertainties, and some areas are going to get hit much harder than others. I.e., we’re going to enjoy the company of climate refugees and nutjobs born of desperation, quite possibly with their fingers on the nuclear button.
…and note that according to the same IPCC report’s WG3,
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-spm.pdf
Table SPM.4, the costs of timely mitigation are likely an order of magnitude smaller — though, also with large uncertainties at the present time.
Looks like a sound investment to me… and looks like Mr Sullivan is reading the IPCC “like the Devil reads the Bible” :-)
JimV // September 2, 2009 at 3:44 pm |
Ruchard C. (“Why encourage him.”): Rather than that, I would like to discourage him (him being Jim Manzi) from telling a large group of readers (Andrew Sullivan’s blog won the 2008 Weblogs Award for Best Blog – it has a lot of readers) that climate change is nothing to be concerned about.
Gavin’s Pussycat: thanks for your points. I would add that anything that gives us incentives to begin a transistion away from a fossil-carbon based energy dependence is apt to pay off greatly in the long run.
Geoff Beacon // September 2, 2009 at 7:23 pm |
Phil #4
“NZ emissions are broadly 50% farming (largely cow methane plus NO2)”
I suspect that the estimate of methane’s Global Warming Potential has been measured over 100 years (GWP100= 25 times CO2). We haven’t got that long. Surely it should be measured over a shorter period, e.g. 20 years, because we may be approaching various tipping points. Measured over 20 years methane has a GWP 72 times CO2. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas for details.
A note on http://nobeef.co.uk/wordpress/ uses research commissioned by the UK Government to calculate that beef has a carbon footprint 25 times it’s own weight … and that’s dead-weight, bones and all. I suspect that gives a beef steak a carbon footprint about 50 times its own weight in carbon dioxide equivalent.
Sheep meat is a bit worse.
Phil Scadden // September 2, 2009 at 9:08 pm |
Mark, halving transport would definitely solve the issue but its extremely hard to do in practice. I asked a local sustainability group I belong to what level of petrol price would result in them halving kms travelled. It would need to be cripplingly high – high enough to force major, house-selling type lifestyle change. Could the economy function? Everyone would look to substitution first. The group would be atypical in that probably have already done easy transport cuts. On other hand, rural NZ would really struggle.
Methane from cows. Almost all cows are outside and fossil fuel inputs are insignificant. Lots of research going to ways to reduce methane production in the digestion process.
The more I think about it, the more I think price levers are way to go. Retiring marginal land to forestry is not politically difficult so long as rewards for doing so match the profits from dairying.
Of course, finding a way to make milk products very unattractive so demand goes into free fall would be the other way to reduce the herd. Or an upsurge in demand for wool – dairy herd size is also result of sheep farming becoming uneconomic.
Sekerob // September 2, 2009 at 10:35 pm |
Someone proposed to put cows on a kangaroo diet and replace their digestive bacteria with those of Skippy. But, it seems the feed mix can dramatically reduce the methane belching.
David B. Benson // September 2, 2009 at 10:54 pm |
Phil Scadden // September 2, 2009 at 9:08 pm — I opine that North Island could grow Jatropha or oil palms to produce biodiesel; South Island might be able to grow rapeseed or soy beans for the same purpose. Any vegetable oil will do.
Research on algae production for transportion fuels contiinues; rather expensive just yet. However, any wet biomass can be put through an anaerobic digester to produce biomethane; use CNG vehicles powered by processed poop.
Phil Scadden // September 3, 2009 at 12:19 am |
We already grow rape seed for biodiesel but to ramp that up to 50% in 10 year? By my back-of-the-envelope calculation, 50% of transport fuels would take around 30% of arable land, (assuming 0.5W/m2 of diesel). I remain skeptical you can change transport that fast. Adding carbon sinks is faster and cheaper.
Changing the diet of cows is certainly interesting but so far I have only seen claims for a few % improvement. Sheep and cows produce very different amounts of methane on exactly the same paddock. Kangaroos arent even ruminants
Hank Roberts // September 3, 2009 at 12:39 am |
Makes me wonder, what ended up in the eddies in the ocean that are now filling up with plastic scrap, before plastic? Plankton? Seaweed? Nutrients? Part of the food chain? Nothing?
As all that scrap plastic has been so nicely collected in two (large, thin) places, North and South, if we could run some kind of big skimmer/harvester (without also taking out some critical component of the food chain for the planet) and bundle and sink that stuff, that’d be a lot of carbon sequestered.
Phil Scadden // September 3, 2009 at 12:59 am |
Geoff.
Discouraging stuff. The cow herds are predominantly dairy not beef. Sharply rising prices for milk solids and the decline of wool have resulted in large scale conversions of sheep to dairy. You cant do this in the steeper hill country of course but many areas considered too high or too dry for dairy have been converted (with unsustainable irrigation demands bundled with them). Palm residue (from palm oil production) is being imported for supplementary feed. With so many farmers having big debts to pay off for the conversion, its one hot political potatoe to suggest limiting the dairy herd while prices (profits) are so high.
David B. Benson // September 3, 2009 at 1:05 am |
Phil Scadden // September 3, 2009 at 12:19 am — I suspect that NZ produces a substantial quantity of agriculture wastes to greatly suppliment muncipal waste waters. All that would make a fair amount of biomethane. Converting automobiles to run on CNG costs a few hundred US$.
Hank Roberts // September 3, 2009 at 12:39 am — In the Pacific those aree low biological productivity areas. Cost of collection is likely to be high, but wind power would help lower the costs.
I’d rather the stuff would be reprocessed before sinking so that the carbon storage becomes permanent.
Phil Scadden // September 3, 2009 at 2:52 am |
Dave – “All that would make a fair amount of biomethane. Converting automobiles to run on CNG costs a few hundred US$.”
Not to be sneezed at but potential is estimated at 14Gwh – a drop in the ocean. (http://www.eeca.govt.nz/sites/all/files/biogas-and-landfill-gas-fact-sheet-jun-05_0.pdf) or for general overview
http://www.eeca.govt.nz/efficient-and-renewable-energy/renewable-energy/bioenergy
Phil Scadden // September 3, 2009 at 3:05 am |
Oops, not 14Gwh(that was just pigs) – 392Gwh. A much bigger drop but only around 0.26kwh/person/day versus the 31kwh/person/day spent on transport.
Sekerob // September 3, 2009 at 7:44 am |
Phil Scadden, think the Dutch aggricultural institute or something experimented and achieved something like 70% reduction in methane output from cows. This quick search reports 20%:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/09/new-cow-diet-reduces-emissions.php
Think their global cow count number is missing a zero or two.
Mark // September 3, 2009 at 10:33 am |
Phil, given that so little is the result of transport and NZ is, after all, VERY small, what’s the problem with making the cuts in fossil fuel use by half?
And all your twisting seems to be of the form “well that change could be done but it is small”. Well add up a lot of small changes and you get one big overall change.
Mark // September 3, 2009 at 10:34 am |
“You cant do this in the steeper hill country of course but many areas considered too high or too dry for dairy have been converted (with unsustainable irrigation demands bundled with them)”
And being unsustainable, these dairy herds will die.
Thereby removing the problem.
Mark // September 3, 2009 at 10:42 am |
“We already grow rape seed for biodiesel but to ramp that up to 50% in 10 year?”
Algae.
Electric motors and wind/tide/solar power. It’s not like you have 1000 mile journeys to take and with all those hills the greater torque of an electric motor makes MUCH more sense.
Ray Ladbury // September 3, 2009 at 2:14 pm |
Phil,
I agree that reducing miles driven will likely take significant increase in fuel costs. However, we could also facilitate the process by increasing telecommuting, increased use of videoconferencing, etc. These days there aren’t very many of us who couldn’t do our jobs from home.
Mark // September 3, 2009 at 3:14 pm |
“I agree that reducing miles driven will likely take significant increase in fuel costs.”
Isn’t it the reverse?
Reducing the miles you drive DECREASES fuel costs.
Now, if you mean that people are too self-centred to walk, why don’t these people just say so?
Geoff Beacon // September 3, 2009 at 3:21 pm |
Sekerob
The green ration book says
‘The average UK citizen creates 11 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide ( CO2e) a year. New UK targets aim to cut this by 80%. Dividing the ration equally between categories “consumables”, “building”, “transport” and “government”, allows 1.5kg per day. ‘
http://www.greenrationbook.org.uk
Food will be probably be a large proportion of a consumables ration. Let us say 1kg CO2e, or 2.2 pounds. If beef steak has a carbon footprint 50 times its own weight, a whole days food-carbon ration would be 20gm or 2/3 oz of beef steak.
I would not blow my daily food-carbon ration on 20gm of beef. Even a reduction of 70% would only give a 67gm portion.
But I would be interested to see some references to the work suggesting 70% is possible.
Mark // September 3, 2009 at 4:04 pm |
“Food will be probably be a large proportion of a consumables ration. ”
But over a decade, the food will take up a large CO2 proportion.
“But I would be interested to see some references to the work suggesting 70% is possible.”
Why do you say it is impossible?
After all, a 50% reduction from UK values is possible for Swedes.
And it’s colder and darker in Sweden than in the UK.
Gareth // September 3, 2009 at 8:55 pm |
NZ: I know something about that…
Agricultural emissions: there are two ways to reduce emissions enough to make them play their part in a reasonable (20-40%) target. Nitrous oxide is an important chunk of the total, and nitrification inhibitors (which increase the efficiency of N fertiliser, reducing run-off/emissions while increasing farm profitability) can have a large impact. They’re already in use on some farms, and in advanced regional trials.
Methane’s a tougher nut to crack, but there’s a lot of encouraging work being done by the Pastoral Greenhouse Gas Research group. However, de-stocking and tweaking the systems in use, coupled with on-farm offsetting (trees and biodiversity offsets) could help farms bear a realistic share of the emissions reduction burden.
Changing land use is also feasible. There are high value crops which are a great deal more resilient to climate change – grapes being one.
For transport fuels, I’d suggest Phil chase up a report written by the NZ Royal Society a few years ago on renewable energy sources: they reckoned that cellulosic ethanol from willow plantations could meet 100% of transport fuel needs by 2020 – but that was the personal hobbyhorse of the then RS president, so perhaps a tad optimistic… ;-)
(Much more on all this at my place, naturally).
Kipp Alpert // September 3, 2009 at 9:19 pm |
JimV: Most deniers are wondering if they can do business while the World is in chaos. If your clown writes another post, just tell him he can also do business from Hell. If he wants to get his startup going, that he better go there now. He should see a lot of his old friends there. Does he deserve your attention?
Geoff Beacon // September 3, 2009 at 9:39 pm |
Mark
The 70% reduction Sekerob alluded to was in the methane generated by beef production.
An overall reduction of 50% is possible but we should aim at 150% … Yes that’s possible. We can capture more carbon than we emit. First steps include:
1. No flying.
2. Little driving.
3. Minimal meat eating.
And lots of carbon capture. Let’s try:
1. Biochar
2. Biomass generated electricity
3. Artificial trees.
4. Everything else
We may just be able to avoid a re-run of a fast track PETM. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum)
I confess to paranoid tendencies but who said “Only the paranoid survive”?
Geoff Beacon // September 3, 2009 at 9:42 pm |
Correction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum
And clarification:
3. Biomass generated electricity … with carbon capture
Phil Scadden // September 3, 2009 at 9:49 pm |
Wow, lots of interesting stuff. Sekerob – thanks for that link – note that they are claiming 20% not 70%. Still better than we are doing. Note that farming is NZ is open pasture with winter supplement feeds not barning like NH so this kind of thing is major, major change to farming practice. Gareth’s point on NO2 inhibitors is good as well. They are a major component. A 50% replacement of transfort fuel by cellulosic ethanol in 10 years sounds a complete pipe dream to me though.
Mark, what NZ does is insignificant except that our renewables are so good and population low, so if we say its impossible its discouraging for everyone else. I cant understand why you think 50% reduction in transport is easy. To get most of population to make that kind of reduction means jacking fuel costs so high that they care. Population densities are so low, we have useless to non-existent public transport. Telling people to walk or bike works only if they do so in say 30 minutes. You dont do the that structural change in 10 years. 20 years – no problem. Thats why I cant see alternative to LUC to buy time.
“Unsustainable irrigation” – yes but on 20-50 year time frame or perhaps even longer.
And, yes I am BIG fan of videoconf. I am in a district office and would normally have to commute 500km once a month to HO. Now with big vidconf, no more. No more wasted time on travel either. Also good to see more science conferences being run with vidconf. Still needs work to make the experience as good as being there in terms of contacts but it is getting there.
David B. Benson // September 3, 2009 at 10:11 pm |
Phil Scadden // September 3, 2009 at 3:05 am — Leaving asidde increased mass trnasport for commuting, yoou’ll need lotsa biomethane for CNG cars! I suggest algae for the anaerobic digesteers. There is a CSIRO sponsored demonstration project using seawater algae along the west coast of Australia. Since it uses a point source for extra CO2 productivity is quite high. The details are in the report, available on the web.
Without point sources of CO2, one can expect to grow 10–15 tC/ha/yr with about 80% of that going into the biomethane so quite a bit of land (or lagoon) is required. You might consider buying some of it from South Australia or New Caledonia.
Gareth // September 3, 2009 at 10:46 pm |
Re biomethane: NZ has a company developing interesting algae tech: Aquaflow.
Phil Scadden // September 3, 2009 at 11:00 pm |
David – do you think that algal will be full production in 10 years? I hope so. We want to shut down most CO2 sources, but the steel mill would in my mind be a “legitimate” CO2 source – you cant make steel any other way. Capturing the CO2 from that and with 20,000ha of land, you could produce about 2/3 of the diesel needs for heavy trucks and agriculture. Doesnt dent the car figure but surely part of any solution in the long run even if not in 10 years.
David B. Benson // September 4, 2009 at 12:13 am |
Phil Scadden // September 3, 2009 at 11:00 pm — Techniques for turning algae into biodiesel exist, but are still too expensive. Even producing ethanol this way is just on the edge so far, although one company in Mexico (next to a coal fired power plant at the edge of the sea) is developing a several hundred hectare algae farm.
I know best about the much simplier matter of turning algae into biomethane. Just now the price of natural gas in the USA is artifically depressed and much too low for biomethane from algae to compete (without massive subsidies). Within two years the price of natural gas ought to be high enough for places with a desert seashore to begin profitably making biomethane to compete against LNG from various sources. As long a the cost of the desert seashore (or nearby) land is low enough and investors are confident of fairly low risk returns, setting up a hundred hectare algae farm with on-site digester is a matter of about 10 months; expansion could be rapid, but do recall one is then competing in the natural gas market (unless there are incentives for being a non-fossil fuel). This market may well end up being controlled by the price of natural gas which is now being just flared. One company has stated that they can make enough from the butane and propane that they can basically give away the methane; just the price of LNG transportation. This might tend to keep prices so low that algae farm biomethane cannot compete without subsidies.
By the way, it is possible to buy CNG powered trucks, up to 45 tonne carriers; a Spanish(?) company manufacturers them.
Phil Scadden // September 4, 2009 at 12:16 am |
I dont want to run Aquaflow who I think are doing a great job, but they are working with existing waste ponds and no CO2 enrichment. ie. normal limits on photosynthetic conversion apply. Its great use of existing waste and area but scaling to cover transport fuel needs wont be easy. NZ uses about 215 PJ of oil (2007). 1l/m2 of biofuel is 0.3TJ/ha/y. So with 5l/m2 (I doubt they can do that), you would need 143,000ha of land in oxidation ponds. Currently we dont have that much sewerage.
David B. Benson // September 4, 2009 at 2:07 am |
Phil Scadden // September 4, 2009 at 12:16 am — Algae do not require sewage, just the nutrients therein, NPKS. One problem with making liquid transportation fuels is to retrain as much NPKS as possible to re-introduce into the algae ponds; not a problem with making biomethane.
Geoff Beacon // September 4, 2009 at 4:00 am |
I have some questions about anerobic digestion, which rots wet organic matter to make biomethane.
1. How much methane/energy can be retrieved from a given source: sewage, food waste, agricultural waste & etc.
2. If this is measured on the dry-weight of the feedstock? Is this easy to measure? For example how can we estimate the dry weight of cabbage stalks or discarded food?
3. If my local sewage works uses anerobic digestion should I chop up my food waste and flush it through the sewage system?
John Mashey // September 4, 2009 at 4:02 am |
NZ: I’ve visited a dozen times, been to Stewart Island, driven around both North & South, to the extreme ends, horse-trekked from Wanaka to Arrowtown, etc. Great place, everyone should visit.
But as far as I know, NZ has little or no petroleum, is the most isolated first-world country, is heavily dependent on exports, especially of agricultural goods, and has nowhere near enough population to do everything by itself. With 4.3M people (a third of whom are in the Auckland area), much of the country looks like Yorkshire: hills&dales, sheep and cows. NZ is about 60% of the size of CA, with 11% of the people.
Farms: telecommuting doesn’t move fertilizer and food around very well.
Rather than asking how expensive gas has to get to get to cut down on driving, one might better say:
By 2050, world oil production will be down to 50%, and by 2100 10%, and even worse, the net energy will drop faster, because the EROEI is going down.
Given that, how should NZ develop to:
a) Electrify anything that can be, including any farm machinery possible.
b) Minimize the amount of actual fuel necessary, and go all-out on efficient building to minimize gas/oil burning for heat.
c) Get ready, within NZ, to create enough liquid fuels for the applications that need it. Among other things, that may well be the only way to keep intra-NZ air travel in existence. If that isn’t possible, a lot of work needs to be done on railroads.
Likewise, although ocean transport is very efficient, freighters will need to get refueled wherever they go, or they will stop coming.
Of course, actions for dealing with Peak Oil overlap with those dealing with climate change, although the latter has some extras.
Geoff Beacon // September 4, 2009 at 4:54 am |
Last December I spoke to Hiliary Benn, Sectratary of State for the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. He asked me to write to him with one suggestion I had:
“At what carbon price would it be profitable for farmers to give up hill-top sheep farming and produce biochar and its by-products instead?”
Has this relevance for NZ?
Phil Scadden // September 4, 2009 at 8:51 am |
David – Aquaflow’s system is sewage pond. Useful but a small part of answer. I am aware of the CO2 enriched systems.
John. Actually we do have oil and gas. Western North Island so far and part of my work. 30 years ago, CNG conversion were common in NI because CNG was so cheap and an infrastructure to deliver was developed. Gone with end of cheap gas. We also a few billion tons of coal but the whole point is not to use these resources if we are to make 40% cuts in 10 years.
Phil Scadden // September 4, 2009 at 8:54 am |
Other countries have made Copenhagen committments that would be at least as challenging to obtain. Any comments from people in those countries about how they are achieving it?
Mark // September 4, 2009 at 10:46 am |
“Mark, what NZ does is insignificant except that our renewables are so good and population low, so if we say its impossible its discouraging for everyone else. I cant understand why you think 50% reduction in transport is easy.”
But your complaint was about NZ’s 25% coming from cars and most of the CO2e coming from farming.
Can you please stick with one subject at a time.
either
a) NZ. In which case the conditions of NZ population IS pertinent
b) The world, in which case only 25% coming from transport is not relevant.
Mark // September 4, 2009 at 10:50 am |
Geoff, if this:
“The 70% reduction Sekerob alluded to was in the methane generated by beef production.”
is true, then what does this (also from you) mean:
“I would not blow my daily food-carbon ration on 20gm of beef. Even a reduction of 70% would only give a 67gm portion.”
?
Since the carbon contained in beef has nothing to do with the exhaust of farming methods.
Reducing cow farts doesn’t make skinny cattle.
Ray Ladbury // September 4, 2009 at 12:04 pm |
Another note on NZ. I, too have had the pleasure of visiting this wonderful country. One to the most interesting things I found out energy-wise, was that attempts to harness the geothermal energy of Rotorua resulted in a noticable drop in geyser activity. In other words, there’s no free lunch. We’re going to have to develop a new energy economy, and NZ is as good a place to start as any.
Deech56 // September 4, 2009 at 1:44 pm |
New paper in Science this week.
David B. Benson // September 4, 2009 at 7:58 pm |
Geoff Beacon // September 4, 2009 at 4:00 am — Read
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_digestion
to know almost as much as I do.
For vegatative food wastes, a composter is fine if you have a garden. For meat & bone wastes, yes, grinding followed by sewage system disposal is sanitary.
Phil Scadden // September 4, 2009 at 8:35 pm |
Rotorua homes draw-down geothermal waters for for heating and hot water. Excessive draw down did indeed affect the geysers. The geothermal power stations though arent on those shallow fields. Much more damage was done to the geyser systems with the hydroelectric dams which just drowned them in several places (not Rotorua but on Waikato).
Its possible (and probable) to treble the existing geothermal generation without major environmental impacts. By itself though, this isnt enough to close the coal/gas generation. Wind and remaining hydro have higher potential.
John Mashey // September 4, 2009 at 8:38 pm |
Phiul:
oops, thanks for the correction; I knew NZ had a coal, but I didn’t know there was much oil&gas around.
My general feeling is that people will sue all the oil&gas they can, everywhere. Personally, I would love to see coal be replaced by gas, if one could make that happen, especially since it is much more complementary with {wind, solar}, i.e., gas peakers.
From a tactical viewpoint, I just suggest that there exist people for whom the argument:
“If we don’t cut use of fossil fuels, there will be bad climate problems, especially in other parts of the world”
does not induce action.
But some subset of those may think harder via the message: “There’s a finite amount of fossil fuel, and you can burn it, but your children will have a lot less, and your grandchildren will have very little. Do you care, or not? If not, tell them so.”
JimV // September 4, 2009 at 9:07 pm |
Following up on my previous comments, some excellent responses to Jim Manzi’s post were made, prompting this post on Andrew Sullivan’s blog:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/09/global-warming.html
Phil Scadden // September 4, 2009 at 11:50 pm |
John – agree entirely. Oil is too valuable to use in our current way never mind the climate. I’m pretty confident we make the 15% commitment. The fights about when agriculture moves into ETS, who gets forestry credits etc. If nothing else, Australia will want an equivalent regime in NZ to whatever they do and the winds of change are blowing there.
Hank Roberts // September 7, 2009 at 5:31 pm |
Here comes the big one, folks.
You may have thought overturning the rule against bucket shops and financial speculation in 2000, letting loose the people who brought us the 1930s Depression financial scams, was a big deal. And look how that turned out.
But there were even bigger restraints placed on corporate excess.
Now they’re deciding to undo those limits, weak as they have been, which have interfered to some degree with the best government that money can buy.
Watch for it:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_09/019812.php
“… Instead of deciding the case before it, the court engaged in a remarkable act of overreach. On June 29, it postponed a decision and called for new briefs and a highly unusual new hearing, which is Wednesday’s big event. The court chose to consider an issue only tangentially raised by the case. It threatens to overrule a 1990 decision that upheld the long-standing ban on corporate money in campaigns.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/06/AR2009090601188.html
Glenn Tamblyn // September 9, 2009 at 7:47 am |
Here is something that people far more knowledgable me might like to read & critique.
Published in the latest New Scientist, a prediction of cooler temperatures for maybe 20 years before warming kicks in again. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17742-worlds-climate-could-cool-first-warm-later.html
This could give the Denialosphere apoplexy and policy makers a serious case of week knees.
Hank Roberts // September 9, 2009 at 3:03 pm |
_New_Scientist_ is not a science magazine. They told me that specifically some years ago after I’d been nitpicking mistakes for a while. NS is an entertainment magazine.
CM took the New Scientist/Fred Pearce story apart based on the audio transcript they claim to be reporting, quite thoroughly, here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/08/ups-and-downs-of-sea-level-projections/comment-page-6/#comment-135312
In other news, Steckis is popping up lots of places recently, e.g.
http://www.desmogblog.com/climate-denial-crock-week1998-revisited
where in the first several comments he contributes:
“… I have conducted extensive statistical analyses on the GISSTemp HadCRUT and satellite data sets. There is a statistically significant cooling trend in all data sets over the 2000s….
and
“… Why have you used 2000 as a start point? That is cherry picking on a grand scale. Breakpoint analysis shows that there is a breakpoint in the temperature time series in December 1997. Therefore, 1998 should be used as a start point for statistical analysis…..”
Nice to know the expertise so often demonstrated here is being used so widely.
Wrong.
Hank Roberts // September 11, 2009 at 12:56 am |
Illustrating why it’s worth revisiting a good article and seeing who’s been citing it:
http://cel.isiknowledge.com/InboundService.do?product=CEL&action=search&SrcApp=Highwire&UT=000247363000066&SID=3F2ihDmhhPa6LDpJhNl&Init=Yes&SrcAuth=Highwire&mode=CitingArticles&customersID=Highwire&viewType=summary
jyyh // September 11, 2009 at 4:29 am |
Meanwhile, the arctic sea ice has melted to an extent below 2005 minimum and is on track to become the 3rd lowest minimum in satellite measurements.
TCO // September 13, 2009 at 5:00 am |
The man who fed the world.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090913/ap_on_re_us/us_obit_borlaug
Deech56 // September 13, 2009 at 10:58 am |
jyyh , you know that the message, “on track to become the 3rd lowest minimum in satellite measurements” will be touted as “Arctic sea ice is recovering.”
Didactylos // September 14, 2009 at 12:09 am |
It’s weird how people who hold illogical or absurd ideas in one field, have equally weird ideas in other fields. We’ve seen this with Intelligent Design, of course, but I found a more interesting example:
Tamino’s use of “not even wrong” led me to the blog of the same name. There, I spotted a string theorist by the name of Lubos Motl – who also has a blog. I was totally unsurprised when I saw the second post on his site was a totally intelligence-free ramble about CO2, claiming that increases in CO2 will improve food production: “so I find it obvious that the Earth will be able to support at least 20 billion people in 2100 if needed.”
The next post was about abiogenic oil.
Why do morons like this still have jobs?
TCO // September 14, 2009 at 4:38 am |
String theory is not really physics although it is actually mainstream (the issue is that the whole thing is essentially a conjecture…and after 30 years the bloom is coming off the rose). And Lubos has not distinguished himself on enviro topics either. That said, the dude is probably wicked bright and knows some wicked hard math. Probably better than Mike Mann (who dropped from math phys). Certainly can sling a Bessel function much better than I can.
Barton Paul Levenson // September 14, 2009 at 2:25 pm |
Lubos Motl is, indeed, very good at math, but he is also a raving right-wing crackpot and pseudoscientist. The two aren’t necessary incompatible. Heisenberg was a Nazi, Shockley thought blacks had lower IQs due to genes, Pierce was a racist militia nut. All very good at math.
luminous beauty // September 14, 2009 at 3:27 pm |
TCO,
Graduating with honors from UC Berkeley with a double major in Physics and Applied Mathematics and going on to a Doctorate in Geology and Geophysics at Yale is not exactly well described as dropping out.
The real problem with string theory, as I understand it, is it is impossible to test without building a linear accelerator half-way to alpha Centauri, though not impossible results from CERN may make it more or less tenable. Motl hasn’t proven to be the sharpest knife in the string theory drawer, either. An embarrassing disappointment to his sponsors, really.
Layman Lurker // September 14, 2009 at 3:57 pm |
BPL, if you don’t mind my asking, how is it going with the c02 / wheat yield paper you submitted?
Kevin McKinney // September 14, 2009 at 4:57 pm |
And, sadly, Arrhenius–an admirable character in many ways–bought into the theories of eugenics which helped wreck more than a few lives between the 30’s and 60’s.
Robert P. // September 14, 2009 at 6:15 pm |
BPL – while Heisenberg did indeed collaborate with the Nazis during the war (and lied about it afterwards) he was not himself a Nazi. He defied the “German Physics” movement by continuing to teach Relativity and other “Jewish Physics”, as a result of which an SS newsletter described him as a “white Jew.” That said, there is much to not admire about his behavior during the Nazi era. He was more of a coward than a crank.
Didactylos, LM did in fact lose his job – he resigned from Harvard well in advance of the usual time scale for a tenure decision – although no one knows why. It may just have been low productivity (two papers in three years.)
dhogaza // September 15, 2009 at 3:46 am |
WUWT has an interesting top post:
On the plus side of what, Anthony?
The political argument, obviously. Not science.
Deech56 // September 15, 2009 at 9:35 am |
The researchers looking for parallels between the 1918 influenza and this year’s H1N1 might want to consider other factors, like virulence. The 1918 bug was particularly nasty, causing a potent cytokine storm. There has been some excellent work arising from resurrected virus.
Mark // September 15, 2009 at 9:56 am |
“That said, there is much to not admire about his behavior during the Nazi era. He was more of a coward than a crank.”
Maybe he was just uncertain…
KenM // September 15, 2009 at 7:09 pm |
UHI –
I’ve read about it all over the place and I’ve got a question. Why are we trying to “correct” for it? Isn’t UHI part of the climate? I can see why you’d want to ignore the occasional BBQ flare-up next to the thermometer – but what about the rest?
If we paved 100% of the landmass with black asphalt, wouldn’t the global air temp be higher?
Didactylos // September 15, 2009 at 7:26 pm |
Did anyone else notice that Ian Plimer appears to be ignorant of the meaning of a double-blind experiment?
Or is this just a huge joke – Monbiot was ignorant of Plimer’s intentions, and Plimer was also ignorant of the meaning of the questions he asked? Under this definition, it almost is double blind…. Plimer is certainly ignorant enough! But I’d like to see a methodology that could eliminate his bias….
I also noticed that Plimer seems to have this idea that all criticism must be original. I almost fell out of my chair!
Deep Climate // September 15, 2009 at 9:23 pm |
Regarding that New Scientist article, here’s what it says:
Now here’s what the denialosphere, as personified by one Lorne Gunter of Canada’s shame the National Post, said:
So notice that Gunter puts as an actual quote what was likely an incorrect New Scientist paraphrase. And then changes the speculative “could” to “likely”, totally changing the original sense.
And the part on conceding that the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade, is nowhere to be found in the New Scientist article as far as I can see.
So, as usual, New Scientist gets it wrong, then Gunter takes that and distorts and exaggerates it beyond recognition.
Grrrrrr ………
dhogaza // September 15, 2009 at 10:04 pm |
No, it’s a local phenomena.
Only a very small percentage of the earth’s surface is paved …
KenM // September 16, 2009 at 3:55 am |
Trying to follow the logic here….where is the temperature measurement that is not influenced by local phenomena?
If all temp readings are affected by local phenomena of some type, then why are we trying to “correct” any of it (I understand there’s also a correction for readings that are too cool)?
As for paving all land masses, clearly (although you didn’t address it) the “global” temperature would rise. So at what point does pavement or UHI go from being a local phenomena that needs to be corrected to a global phenomena that needs no correction?
Tom Dayton // September 16, 2009 at 5:11 am
One original reason for correcting for UHI was the suspicion that UHI increases as the urbanization grows around a temperature measurement station, thereby biasing the long term trend upward. Of course, even natural changes can lead to local increases in temperature, but an abundance of caution, a suspicion that rarely would there be a counterbalancing urbanization caused cooling, the abundance of urban growth, and fairly easy correction methods, all led researchers to focus on detecting and correcting urbanization-caused biases.
But as other commentors have noted, there is good empirical evidence that temperature-measuring stations are not biased by UHI.
In the “Version 2″ monthly dataset, NOAA has abandoned a separate step for correcting specifically for UHI. Instead, NOAA makes a series of completely sensible tests and adjustments for an assortment of problems, which automatically correct for any UHI biases along with everything else.
A key to all this is that the goal is to find the “true” temperature within a grid square that may contain multiple temperature measuring stations. Nobody’s really interested in the temperature of a given station itself.
Gavin's Pussycat // September 16, 2009 at 10:10 am |
KenM, it’s about the concept of “average”. What we want is the areally averaged, i.e., integrated, mean temperature of the air close to the ground (i.e., “surface air temperature”). We are trying to estimate this average using a discrete set of stations. Every station “represents”, as it were, the area between it and half-way to nearby stations in all directions, roughly. Now, for an urban station this may be too much: land use wise it only represents the built-up area it is in, which may be much smaller than this “area of representativity”.
KenM // September 16, 2009 at 2:13 pm |
Ahhh – so then I can assume a “correction” for an urban station is not some simple adjustment to the reading to attempt to make the temperature the same as a field 10 miles away? In other words, if the area we are interested in is 15sq miles and 10 of those are urban, then the correction would not be as great as for a station where the urban area was was only 1mi of the total?
Gavin's Pussycat // September 16, 2009 at 7:38 pm
That’s how I understand it, yes.
Note that implicit in your question is also that of the definition of the global warming trend, i.e., do we want it to include the effect of urbanization, or do we want to exclude it? Note that, as TCO notes, we already include the effect of (non-urban) land use change, which is small but (contrary to UHI) clearly significant.
If we’re interested in all these different definitions of global warming trend, it becomes a problem of attribution: how much comes from CO2, how much from land use, how much from urbanization (and the list is a lot longer). This is certainly a legitimate scientific question.
Mark // September 16, 2009 at 10:59 am |
“If all temp readings are affected by local phenomena of some type, then why are we trying to “correct” any of it”
Because the thermometer is measuring a small volume and we’re assuming it is representative of the surroundings.
If it’s sitting on concrete slab 1m across and the rest of the 15km around is grassland, what do YOU think happens to “representativeness”???
KenM // September 16, 2009 at 2:14 pm |
I sort of excluded this type of example with my statement about BBQs – I think. See Kevin’s reply – he got it ;)
Ray Ladbury // September 16, 2009 at 11:48 am |
KenM,
If you are interested in GLOBAL trends, you have to compensate for local effects that might make the data too noisy to pick out that global trend.
Let’s say you are interested in CD sales statewide. You might want to take into account the fact that the artist’s mother bought up 1 million CDs in his home town.
KenM // September 16, 2009 at 2:15 pm |
And what I’m getting at is – how can you analyse statewide sales if you pretend his mom didn’t buy 1 million copies? They ARE sales, aren’t they?
dhogaza // September 16, 2009 at 1:14 pm |
That’s not what you asked. You asked if the phenomena were large enough to effect climate, along with a “what if the earth were paved over” emphasis.
As to the rest, I’m getting a troll vibe here …
Kevin McKinney // September 16, 2009 at 1:25 pm |
An interesting question, Ken. The point of corrections is to ensure that temperature measurements–whose methodology & siting was mostly designed for meteorological, not climatological purposes–are representative of a wider area. (This isn’t a given, since as you say many local factors can affect the reading.) Probably the single most effective measure is to deal with anomalies, rather than absolute temperatures.
But I like your question. At what point does the “noise” of UHI become part of the actual climatological signal? In the US, probably not very soon; urban areas are estimated at 3% of the total area, and impervious surfaces–a related measure is about 1.12% of total area. In the UK, on the other hand, 8.9% of the surface was considered to be urbanized as of 2001. It’s easier to imagine some kind of larger scale effect at those levels.
But it’s not clear to me–nor as far as I can tell to climatology today–what the overall effect of typical UHI is on the energy budget regionally or globally. Most of the UHI effect has to do with how the urban environment reacts to solar heating, not with direct human energy usage–urban building materials such as concrete can store a lot of heat, and tall buildings block a large proportion of the sky, inhibiting radiative cooling at night.
But while this could in theory–though apparently not in practice, as we have seen–affect temperature measurements, it’s not so obvious that it should affect the actual climate.
KenM // September 16, 2009 at 2:34 pm |
Thanks Kevin – you were able to decipher what I was getting at! From everything I’ve read it appears that UHI doesn’t seem to have any real affect on temperature trends. Either that or the corrections that are being done are inadequate in some way. I suspect correcting for UHI doesn’t change the result because UHI *is* part of the climate. It’s not an aberration.
Incidentally, I’ve solved the GW problem – feel free to develop my idea –
We genetically modify crops to turn white when CO2 goes above a certain threshold.
TCO // September 16, 2009 at 1:59 pm |
The IPCC talks about the actual effects of development. It has some name like land usage or the like. It is a worldwide factor, although smaller than CO2 in magnitude. There’s also an interesting paper by Christie* on land use conversion (I think from forest to irrigate farmland) in California Central Valley having an impact on local climate (observed temps). I think he uses temps on the valley slopes (not developed) as a control for the valley floor.
*Not making any pro-Christie or denialist versus skeptic point…or even endorsing that paper…just of interest the concept.
Tom Dayton // September 16, 2009 at 3:08 pm |
I agree that Ken’s question is good, because it challenges the common denialist insistence that only pristine rural temperature stations can ever be relevant, so NOAA should discard all other stations’ data, not adjust it.
As other responders to Ken have implied, an ideal set of stations would be a set that contains the same ratio of urban stations to rural stations as the ratio of the world’s urban area to rural area. An early worry was that there are far more urban stations than that ideal ratio dictates.
The worry that urban versus rural siting of stations actually affects station measurements has been shown to be exaggerated, probably because stations tend to be sited in cool areas, and because the changes across time are not affected by urbanization.
Other sources of contamination are at least as significant and often more so, than urbanization. Correcting for them–even ones whose exact nature is not known–requires having lots of stations, which NOAA uses in the procedures I linked to earlier. So there is tremendous value in retaining the urban stations, and the stations with microsite issues.
Orantydannemn // September 16, 2009 at 3:29 pm |
Can someone tell me the difference between photovoltaic panels and solar panels or are they the same thing?
Mark // September 16, 2009 at 3:58 pm |
“From everything I’ve read it appears that UHI doesn’t seem to have any real affect on temperature trends.”
It has an effect on whether your sample is representative.
Which Watt’s study could have done some good with.
Except that fixing this problem is a “solved problem” and therefore didn’t have any effect on the RESULTS.
This didn’t gel with what Watts wanted so he ignored it and just pointed the pictures out and said “Look! Bad Siting!!!” and hoped like hell nobody would ask him “Well, does it make the measurement results suspect”?.
When NOAA did this, Watts got really pissy.
Ray Ladbury // September 16, 2009 at 4:20 pm |
Orantydannemn,
There are two types of solar energy–active and passive. Usually, when one is talking about solar panels, one is talking about the active kind, which would be photovoltaic. That’s the case with your link.
Onc could also be talking about an passive panel, e.g. a black panel that just absorbs sunlight and heats up in the process.
Dan L. // September 16, 2009 at 4:54 pm |
CA’s attack on Kaufman, et al.’s “Recent Warming Reverses Long-Term Arctic Cooling” has been picked up by the denier dog pack, and they are in full howl about it.
Has anyone seen a direct rebuttal to M&M’s criticism of K et al. 09? Has Kaufman answered?
Hank Roberts // September 16, 2009 at 6:11 pm |
> If all temp readings are affected by local
> phenomena of some type, then why are
> we trying to “correct” any of it
The best explanation is at the site of the agency that maintains the database, and this has been asked and answered repeatedly for years.
Has anyone a handy pointer to the agency publication or website? This is one of those questions that never seems to go away.
Kevin McKinney // September 16, 2009 at 6:14 pm |
To expand just a tad on what Ray said, an example of a passive type would be a solar hot water panel. This is very doable as a DIY project, and I’ve heard it has a good pay-back period on that basis. A more-or-less random portal:
http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/WaterHeating/water_heating.htm
Dan L. // September 16, 2009 at 8:39 pm |
Re: Kevin on solar hot water:
Payback on solar HW depends to a large extent on the insolation the system receives. There are tables on line to calculate this based on latitude, etc.
http://www.apricus.com/html/solar_energy_calculator.htm
Hank Roberts // September 16, 2009 at 10:48 pm |
Thermoelectric from waste automotive heat — a bit outdated, there may be something newer:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4133301
Ray Ladbury // September 17, 2009 at 1:02 am |
Dan L. asks “Has anyone seen a direct rebuttal to M&M’s criticism of K et al. 09?”
Really. Who cares? Ultimately, the name of the game is science. If you don’t publish, you aren’t doing it. And the denialosphere is demonstrably not evidence based in any case–they’ll remain proudly ignorant. So who is left? A tiny percentage of fence sitters too clueless to tell the difference between real science and “fraudits”. They aren’t worth convincing.
Timothy Chase // September 17, 2009 at 4:02 am |
Why solar power is rapidly expanding — elsewhere…
dhogaza // September 17, 2009 at 4:10 am |
Totally true, and I almost responded earlier, saying similar things.
Yet … ultimately the name of the game is *politics*, unless we want to view the science as being simply an abstract, remote, objective view as to how we are screwing ourselves.
The science is right, but the politics of denialism are winning. And M&M and Watts are in the thick of it …
Dan L. // September 17, 2009 at 11:37 am |
dhogaza: “The science is right, but the politics of denialism are winning. ”
Indeed. On a non-climate site I inhabit, I am a lone voice in the wilderness. Thoroughly indoctrinated spear carriers there use bs talking points, provided by the likes of M&M and Watts, to Gish gallop their way through the arguments .
Call me Don Quixote, but I feel it is my duty, layman that I am, to confront this crap. How can I not? This is too important–for several reasons–simply to surrender the field to ignorance and propaganda.
M&M produce the toughest talking points for me to rebut. They are the best at producing mathy- sciency-sounding stuff to wow the faithful. I look to sites like this one and RC for help against them, so if anyone knows of, or is willing to create, a direct rebuttal to M&M’s assault on Kaufman (and continuing libel of Mann, BTW) I would much appreciate the assistance.
Ray Ladbury // September 17, 2009 at 11:53 am |
dhogaza,
This goes beyond climate change–though that is probably the biggest threat today. Ultimately, it’s a question of whether our politics will be reality-based or not. If we embrace reality, we’ll be guided by science and economics (the real kind that looks deep into the future and not just into the next quarter). If not, it’s a moot point, as reality will eventually confront us with a threat we will not survive.
Deep Climate // September 17, 2009 at 12:19 pm |
Personally, I tend to put more energy into counteracting the stuff that makes it into the mainstream press. It takes a lot of energy to deconstruct McIntyre’s stuff on the ground and it’s really not worth it (been there, done that). He occasionally comes up with a valid point, but they are invariably of minor import, and the signal-to-noise ratio is unbelievably low.
So far the Kaufman criticism has only been discussed once according to Google News – by Tim Ball in Canada Free Press. So I wouldn’t bother.
dhogaza // September 17, 2009 at 3:55 pm |
Oh, yes …
TCO // September 17, 2009 at 5:37 pm |
I think it is a very FAIR criticism on M&M (and Lucia), the lack of publishing. Heck, I bet he would understand things HIMSELF better if he forced himself to measure extents, cut the meandering snark and write things up properly. If it is too much bother to deconstruct his stuff, then quite REASONABLE to blow it off. I have little energy though for hard core math deconstructing even more silly stuff like Watts. That just becomes a battle of PR in the end, rather than logical noodling among scientists.
Someone like Hugh (or even Ross) gives me a better feeling that he will write things up properly, report things “whichever way they turn out”, measure extents rather than running with sound bites, etc.
I’m amazed that someone like McI touts his business experience and financial writing. If he wrote like that, no wonder he was stuck with shady Canadian mining stock shell companies.
I mean any grown up person should be able to figure out how to write a science paper. Read a few. Read the directions for contributors. Read a book on how to. And then ROCK THE HOUSE by doing it way better than a grad student. McI is WORSE than a typical grad student, despite having a higher IQ and way more life experience and even at this point, more years studying the field!
As it is now…McI is a 5 year TEASE. He hasn’t delivered since the JAN05 GRL paper. I will continue my own little jihad to get others to see through him. Heck it is interesting how many of the hard core guys who were there in 2006, have dropped out of his blog. They tired of the never-ending tease as well. All he has is middle-weight hoi polloi now.
And if he mans up and writes decent stuff fine. If he can “prove” skepticism, I will cheer. But now it is a tease and the mentality is actually getting lower. Just like El Nino says, he brags about “fine mind”. Well, write a piece of science then and use it and show it.
Have better hopes for someone like Hugh. He will either write decent stuff and make his points and assess their impact (not sound bite games) or he will move back to doing more classic econ and leave the skeptic sphere for more blog silliness and flame wars with McI and the like.
TCO // September 17, 2009 at 5:42 pm |
“other skeptics I mean”. Most here don’t “see through” McI. You just have sides picked. (I except those like Tammy, Gavin, Phil, couple others that are wicked bright. Ray and Dhog are in the lefty hoi polloi group, though.)
dhogaza // September 17, 2009 at 7:05 pm |
Sigh … look, my introduction to McI was after the NAS report largely backing up Mann’s first “hockey stick” paper came out.
McI was one of those that claimed that the NAS report agreed that the “hockey stick” paper was bad science and wrong.
To do so, he (as denialists are still doing today) quote-mined and otherwise twisted the report’s contents. This dishonesty was apparent to anyone who bothered to read the report (as I did).
The man’s dishonest. I “see through” him clear as day.
It’s obvious why he doesn’t bother writing up and submitting stuff for publication. He has no need to. His agenda has nothing to do with improving our scientific knowledge.
dhogaza // September 17, 2009 at 7:07 pm |
And keep in mind, TCO, that it is you, not I, who’s been forced to “revisit” their opinion of McI over the years.
David B. Benson // September 17, 2009 at 9:22 pm |
M&M? I like the yellow ones. :-)
Ray Ladbury // September 18, 2009 at 1:03 am |
TCO, What you fail to understand is that McI doesn’t publish not because of laziness or some fear of rejection. Rather, its that he has nothing to publish. His viewpoint is sterile. It suggests no fertile avenues to advance our understanding of climate. As a result, all he has left is left to criticize those whose methods and theories are more fertile. There’s a reason for the consensus: It’s the way forward for understanding. It merely has the unfortunate, unavoidable consequence that our primary energy sources are irreparably altering the climate.
So, TCO, have you published anything lately?
TCO // September 18, 2009 at 3:43 am |
Dhog: that report did not dig into the technical details of MnM. (Nor has Tammy…we had a 4 post long tutorial on basic PCA and no real payoff on the interesting areas.) The report changed their mission from a review of MBH to a general review of paleoclimatology. Thinking that something like that validated something just shows your general hack attitude. You’re not actually intersted in digging into things themselves, just (as 90% of people on political blogs are) finding points to back up your pre-existing bias.
Ray, you’re right in a sense and wrong in a sense. I think the issues that McI tends to bring up are interesting enough to be publishable…but that publishing them would show their true impact, which is often less than what he attempts to allude and what his hoi polloi take it for. But a real scientist wouldn’t care. Would be interested itself. Even if correcting a mistake only changes an answer 2%, that’s still a great contribution…since you are improving TECHNIQUE and rigor. It’s not about how warm we can make the MWP or how bad we can make AGW…but about curiosity into nature and even into mathematics and inference methodology.
No.
[Response: You're full of it. It's been shown that the MBH hockey stick remains if you do centered rather than noncentered PCA, that it remains if you don't do PCA at all, that it remains if you remove the bristlecone pines, and the latest Mann et al. hockey stick is stronger than ever. Everybody else who's done a paleo reconstruction that was valid (which does NOT include Lohle) came up with a hockey stick.
McIntyre continuing to try to beat the hockey stick (including the latest arctic one), his idiotic insistence that it's broken, are some of the strongest evidences that he has neither objectivity nor competence. I say, let him continue his mental masturbation while the rest of us try to learn something.
You're entitled to a different opinion. But we've already heard it and don't want to hear it again so give it a rest.]
TCO // September 18, 2009 at 3:45 am |
Also, publishing would force him to finish work, to make it easily understandable by others, would help him understand it, would show it’s relative impact, would put it in context of literature, etc. etc. Real science should be published.
dhogaza // September 18, 2009 at 3:53 am |
I’ll repeat. He doesn’t publish because his agenda doesn’t require it, and indeed trying to do so (and being rejected) would hinder his agenda.
McI is driven by politics, just as “smarter than you or me” TCO is. They think they’re smarter about the science (and, yes, TCO, this means you) because of their deeply-held political beliefs.
I think that TCO’s coming slowly around to this POV, but it doesn’t stop him from hurling personal insults.
Maybe it makes his acceptance of his past stupidity (not that the cure’s complete yet) easier to digest.
Or ever …
TCO // September 18, 2009 at 4:13 am |
Moving on from beating on Ray and Dhog…
I tried reading the Kaufman crap on CA. It is a mess of different posts and comments. All written in almost stream of consciousness style. And mixed with meanders and other “team” griping. I’m definitely exercising my right to blow off that kind of analysis and write-ups. If McI has something…then he can figure it out and write it up properly. Right now…it’s just disrespect to readers to publish such disorganized crap.
Dan L. // September 18, 2009 at 1:31 pm |
dhogaza: “The man’s dishonest. I ’see through’ him clear as day.”
You and anyone else with a sincere interest in the science do, but that does not matter to McI. His target audience, the general public, does not.
http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,22476.0.html
I understand the exasperation with McI expressed here, but as long as no scientists are publicly debunking his libelous attacks on his betters, he has a license to lie. As we see, he is using it effectively.
dhogaza // September 18, 2009 at 3:33 pm |
Whether or not they did a good job (as you see it) is not the point.
The NAS report *clearly* was supportive of Mann’s overall results, whether or not they were justified in their conclusion.
McI *lied* about the contents of the NAS report, and AFAIK still does so.
*That* is the point.
Deech56 // September 18, 2009 at 6:03 pm |
dhogaza wrote:
The other important points are that Mann’s (et al.) 2008 paper addressed the points raised by the NAS and that MBH’s initial findings have been confirmed by others.
MBH’s millennial proxy-based temperature reconstruction was pioneering work back in 1998 and 1999. These were good papers, but (by themselves) do not define the current the state of the field.
Ray Ladbury // September 18, 2009 at 6:20 pm |
TCO says, “The report changed their mission from a review of MBH to a general review of paleoclimatology.”
And this was entirely appropriate. There was considerable activity in this sphere AFTER MBH98. Science is never about “auditing” a single paper. When something innovative comes out (and any reasonable person must give MBH credit for innovation) you look at the method and results. If you think you could do it better, you do it. You don’t just do a damn blog post on the mistakes! NAS concerned themselves with people doing science, and rightly so.
dhogaza // September 18, 2009 at 8:00 pm |
I’m trying to find justification for TCO’s claim that the National Research Council’s committee changed the task they were charged with as he claims.
I can’t.
Here is the Statement of Task for the committee:
I see nothing there that says “Prove MBH98 right or wrong and ignore everything else.”
Yeah, my hack attitude, like not trusting anything denialists like yourself say …
Marco // September 22, 2009 at 5:40 pm |
A bit of a late response, perhaps, but the committee also made a chart of the ‘network’ of paleoclimatologists and commented on that. That was not part of its task, and it is rather questionable that these statisticians subsequently drew conclusions from that chart, considering they are far from expert in that area.
Saul // September 19, 2009 at 1:05 pm |
Is there going to be an abrupt drop in planetary temperature do to the current solar change?
I found a number of papers that show there is evidence of cyclic solar magnetic cycle changes that correlate with past planetary temperature changes. Has anyone looked at those papers?
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009JA014342.shtml
If the Sun is so quiet, why is the Earth ringing? A comparison of two solar minimum intervals.
“The present solar minimum is exceptionally quiet, with sunspot numbers at their lowest in 75 years and solar wind magnetic field strength lower than ever observed.”
“Despite, or perhaps because of, a global weakness in the heliospheric magnetic field, large near-equatorial coronal holes lingered even as the sunspots disappeared. Consequently, for the months surrounding the WHI campaign, strong, long, and recurring high-speed streams in the solar wind intercepted the Earth in contrast to the weaker and more sporadic streams that occurred around the time of last cycle’s WSM campaign.
In response, geospace and upper atmospheric parameters continued to ring with the periodicities of the solar wind in a manner that was absent last cycle minimum, and the flux of relativistic electrons in the Earth’s outer radiation belt was elevated to levels more than three times higher in WHI than in WSM. Such behavior could not have been predicted using sunspot numbers alone, indicating the importance of considering variation within and between solar minima in analyzing and predicting space weather responses at the Earth during solar quiet intervals, as well as in interpreting the Sun’s past behavior as preserved in geological and historical records.”
Sekerob // September 19, 2009 at 3:33 pm |
Saul, I asked Leif Svalgaard some time ago about Solar Winds [and see another paper being quoted on a conclusion that sunspots are not of material relevance to the cycle quoted at he most popular populist science blog]. Anyway, he compared solar wind to a 1 McBurger+fries per second in energetic terms. True or not, others may pitch in.
Question: As for Aurea Borealis is that maybe because of a specific square angle of the sun right on the equator or at least that short period before till after ? Seems like the winds then rub pretty ‘past’ to the magnetic poles. Just wondered as it’s said that noone yet at all understands why they’re big during the solstices
David B. Benson // September 19, 2009 at 8:50 pm |
Saul // September 19, 2009 at 1:05 pm — See Tung & Cabin (2008) for a study of temperature variations over the solar cycle. There is also a more recent paper; one of the authors is associated with NCAR.
Saul // September 20, 2009 at 4:37 am |
“The next part is the really interesting and most important part. In poster by Tung, Yau, Li, Shia, Li, Waliser and Yung (GC43A-0935) the authors look at 22 IPCC models from the AR4 archive used in the Fourth Assessment report. 11 of these models include solar cycle forcing by irradiance variations, and the other 11 use a constant solar irradiance. All of these models have a fully dynamic ocean. The latter, as expected, do not show any significant 11 year cycle in surface temperature. However, all of the 11 models with solar variability show a significant solar cycle in temperature. Some models have a weaker response than others, and all are somewhat weaker than the observed cycle. The NCAR model has the highest amplitude cycle. An ensemble of 10 runs gives an amplitude of
about .10K in surface temperature, but one of the individual runs of the ensemble has an amplitude of .14K, only slightly less than the observations. That says that the high amplitude of the observed cycle could be just a matter of natural variability of the response. Even more important, the spatial pattern of the response is similar between models and observations.”
The solar wind burst are hypothesized to modulate planetary cloud cover. Is there any data that shows a reduction in planetary cloud cover?
David B. Benson // September 20, 2009 at 5:38 pm |
Saul // September 20, 2009 at 4:37 am — There is satellite data which suggests that during solar minima the low cloud cover over the northeastern Pacific lessens.
Dan L. // September 21, 2009 at 4:17 pm |
Smoking through our tracheotomy:
“Oil giants zero in on untapped Greenland”
http://tinyurl.com/rdeljp
dhogaza // September 21, 2009 at 6:06 pm |
Ah, that Watts is very creative. Most of us would say “2009 had the third-lowest minimum summer extent on record”.
The Watts spin, now that the melting season has ended and the extent is edging up?
“2009 Arctic Sea Ice Extent exceeds 2005 for this date”
Gavin's Pussycat // September 21, 2009 at 7:21 pm |
Dan L., you stole that line from Gore: “junkies looking for the veins in their toes”.
True though.
Dan L. // September 22, 2009 at 12:52 am |
Gavin’s Pussycat: “…you stole that line from Gore: ‘junkies looking for the veins in their toes’.”
How can one steal a line without using it?
But I agree with the sense of your comment; I had forgotten Gore (the Magic Fat Man) had made that pithy observation.
Appalling, isn’t it, the human race blindly repeating useless, destructive behaviors?
It seems there are huge natural gas deposits being discovered and waiting to be brought on line. In some circles, that is reckoned a *good* thing.
David B. Benson // September 22, 2009 at 1:15 am |
Dan L. // September 22, 2009 at 12:52 am — Better than coal.
Gavin's Pussycat // September 22, 2009 at 5:27 am |
Dan L., HE’S NOT FAT!
Seriously, I saw the youtube he made that statement on, and he has an incredible stage presence and a great sense of humour. And he does his homework.
Some stereotypes never die.
george // September 22, 2009 at 3:08 pm |
TCO says
That statement is now officially in the running for “understatement of the new millennium”.
The actual impact of the “Y2k error’ that McIntyre found on the global temperature was “of order one-thousandth of a degree, so the corrected and uncorrected curves are indistinguishable. ” (NASA)
But TCO is right about one thing. The reason that McIntyre does not publish these results is almost certainly that he knows they make no significant difference to the primary scientific conclusion in each case.
I suspect that the only reason McIntyre DID published on Mann’s PCA method was that he thought it somehow ’shattered’ the hockey stick.
What McIntyre (and lots of others) failed to appreciate is that PCA is simply one way (out of many) of representing data. Nothing more.
And, despite what some of its proponents (including some PCA experts) might have you believe, it’s NOT the “greatest thing since sliced bread”.
Dan L. // September 22, 2009 at 3:13 pm |
David B. Benson: “Better than coal.”
In the sense that cocaine is better than meth, I suppose so.
But I hear you: coal is the worst of the worst. I am a member of an organization that is helping fight mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. Though the primary goal is stopping the colossal environmental destruction, my hope is that we can help drive up the price of coal and allow renewable energy costs to be compared to more nearly realistic numbers for coal. Of course, the *total* cost of burning coal, if one includes environmental impacts, should make the economic folly of it obvious.
Ray Ladbury // September 22, 2009 at 5:13 pm |
Gavin’s Pussycat,
Al Gore reminds me of the character of John Adams in the musical ‘1776′, where the tag line is, “John, you’re obnoxious and disliked.” He’s been the bete noire of the right for so long that they’d collapse if he left the stage–or at least they would have until the election of a black President put the starch back in their briefs. .
David B. Benson // September 22, 2009 at 5:58 pm |
Dan L. // September 22, 2009 at 3:13 pm —
A gas turbine generates about 70% of the CO2 that a coal burner does for the same output. A
wind turbine in a Tier 1 location runs about 30% of the time. Using a gas turbine as backup
for the wind power, one has only 49% of the CO2 as produced by burning coal. But much better can be obtained.
Burning the methane in pure oxygen produces a exhaust stream containing only water, CO2 and a little O2. Run through a condenser to remove most of the water, the resulting gas stream is ready for compression and removal to a sequestration site. There are extra power costs, primarily to obtain the pure oxygen stream, but also pumping costs at the end. Using a combined cycle gas turbine ups the power produced but in addition, wind power could be used to obtain the pure oxygen, when available, and compressed into a storage tank. Similarly, wind power could be used for some of the exhaust pumping and compression. This way, other an the CO2 produced during manufacture, the result is 0% CO2 into the air, carbon neutral. But one can now do still better.
Produce biomethane (at about the same cost as natural gas). Burn a mixture of biomethane and
natural gas, the more biomethane, the better. In any case, the result is now carbon negative, removing CO2 from the air.
Some part of the Department of Energy is working on a oxy-fuel gas turbine, but work is going
rather slowly due to lack of funding. Help to change that, please.
Deep Climate // September 22, 2009 at 8:32 pm |
Over at the “Communicating Science” thread at RC, Tamino answered Richard C:
But the only reason they do that is the swift-boat campaign of Marc Morano, Senator Inhofe, Bob Carter, Ian Plimer, the Heartland Institute, etc.
Otherwise the mass media would long ago have made all those mistakes and gotten over them. They’d now be reporting correctly about fundamental knowledge while sensationalizing cutting-edge science as they usually do. Instead we’re subjected to a perpetual “debate” over the basics, not because of the media but because of the “swift boat veterans” for climate dishonesty.
Stop blaming the scientists, stop blaming the media. Blame the lies, and the lying liars who tell them.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/09/communicating-science-not-just-talking-the-talk/comment-page-5/#comment-136025
Here’s a case in point, for those that haven’t seen my response at RC:
The liars include “scientists” like Monckton, “astroturf” organizations and think tanks like Friends of Science, the Frontier Centre and the Fraser Institute, duplicitous foundations like the Calgary Foundation, and of course the hidden corporate interests funding the liars.
All of this can be seen in Lord Monckton’s upcoming tour of Canada, as seen here:
http://deepclimate.org/2009/09/22/friends-of-science-behind-moncktons-magical-mystery-tour/
I first blogged about this back in July – not that too many were paying attention then:
http://deepclimate.org/2009/07/16/friends-of-science-theyre-back/
Dan L. // September 22, 2009 at 8:54 pm |
Interesting stuff; I had not heard of the pure O2 combustion strategy. That still leaves sequestration as an unresolved problem, doesn’t it?
I like the biofuel ideas, at least those not involving tilled agriculture.
David B. Benson // September 22, 2009 at 9:23 pm |
Dan L. // September 22, 2009 at 8:54 pm — Today’s TNYT has a front page article about the first sequestration demonstration project. I’ve read enough to be quite unconcerned about the feasiblity, although I very much prefer mineral carbonation:
In situ peridotite weathering:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4292181.html
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21629/?a=f
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/45/17295
In situ basalt weathering:
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/29/9920.full.pdf+html
Biomethane is obtained from biogas by removing the CO2. Biogas is the gaseous result of anaerobic digestation of any non-ligneous wet biomass,; algae will do, especially good because the removed CO2 goes back into the algae pond to promote faster growth.
Sekerob // September 22, 2009 at 9:59 pm |
David B.
BP UK has a CO2 pump back project in Scotland. A big oil wanted to do something in the Netherlands pumping CO2 in formerly depleted Carbohydrate reservoirs. As always big resistance… what’s if it escapes? The endless NIMBY.
Phil Scadden // September 22, 2009 at 11:08 pm |
“A wind turbine in a Tier 1 location runs about 30% of the time.”
The meaning of “tier 1″ has to be pretty country dependent. My former home town, Wellington NZ, is famous for its wind. NZ’s first experimental wind turbine was built on a hill top there a decade or so ago. It was gleefully reported by the other NZ cities, that it set a record for something over 90% of time generating – and its shutdown periods were caused more by excessive wind rather than not enough. So is that tier 1 or what?
Kevin McKinney // September 23, 2009 at 12:16 pm |
David Benson, do you have some specific actions in mind WRT improving oxy gas turbine funding?
Paul Tonita // September 23, 2009 at 5:12 pm |
Funny post of the day:
WUWT- Busting the science pay-wall.
Though he still carries an advert for E&E subscriptions.
David B. Benson // September 23, 2009 at 6:55 pm |
Sekerob // September 22, 2009 at 9:59 pm — Mineral weathering produces carbonates; no carbon dioxide left to escape. More minor chemical attractions happen in other rock formations. Finally, below 2.7 km the CO2 is denser than H2O, so will stay there. Please read the links I provided.
Phil Scadden // September 22, 2009 at 11:08 pm — Wow! I, of course, was thinking of USA Tier 1, but I suppose there might be a few similar Tier 0 sites as well.
Kevin McKinney // September 23, 2009 at 12:16 pm — Yes. The funding from the Department of Energy for this project was scaled back under the previous administration. Secretary Chu can restore it to its orginal size, or even increase funding to speed it up.
To grow enough algae to replace the approximately one billion tonnes of coal burned each year in the US with biomethane would require about 500,000 km^2 in sunny locations. That’s about 5/7ths of Texas.
Hank Roberts // September 24, 2009 at 7:02 pm |
Discussion on HR 210, the Industrial Carbon Reduction Partnership: don’t miss this one:
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/breaking_news_bat_loose_in?utm_source=videoembed
Hat tip to the Reveres http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure
Frank O'Dwyer // September 24, 2009 at 10:38 pm |
Interesting new tool from google – sidewiki.google.com : might be a good way to correct misinformation on denialist blogs?
dhogaza // September 24, 2009 at 11:25 pm |
Sidewiki is already being used by some of The Banned at Uncommon Descent.
Seems like some fun could be had with WUWT, and of course they’ll do the same at RC and here.
Talk about parallel universes existing side-by-side…
Timothy Chase // September 26, 2009 at 3:02 am |
Quick update regarding my heart problems…
Surgeon tells me I would have been plant food within a year — but at this point we have low-risk options. One involves a bypass and a stint, the other three stints — medicated this time around, which greatly reduces scarring — and presumably the likelihood of having to go through this again any time soon. Oddly enough I don’t like the idea of being cracked open like a crab so I am leaning towards just stints, but even if they go that route they may end up having to do a bypass if things begin to go south.
No further news though until we get something done — probably next week. Anyway, thank you for the well-wishes, but I would prefer from this point forward to keep it to “congratulations” once everything is done. However, I didn’t think it would be right just to leave everyone in the dark.
Finally, if anyone wants a little more info my email is timothy chase (all one word) at gmail. But as I have said, it is all low risk, so don’t worry. And don’t worry about having to cheer me up or anything. I have a wife and cats, family, school starting up, etc.. Oh, and “The RNA World”, nearly all of NIN — and the first four seasons of Babylon 5. (Wasn’t as much of a fan of the fifth season, but the first four seasons… heck, the series is a novel for television.)
David B. Benson // September 26, 2009 at 11:15 pm |
Jerry — Find and “talk up” energy efficiency ideas. Here is one.
‘Green’ Roofs Could Help Put Lid On Global Warming
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090923133000.htm
Hank Roberts // September 27, 2009 at 5:03 pm |
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LifeHack/~3/ALLrE5RTu-g/writing-research-papers.html
Pass it on to anyone you know who ought to publish and hasn’t a clue how to start
dhogaza // September 27, 2009 at 7:41 pm |
Joseph D’Aleo, better than comedy central.
Even some of the sycophants over there at WUWT are able to see the idiocy of this one.
Deech56 // September 28, 2009 at 12:04 am |
dhogaza, it’s those pesky oceanic UHIs.
Timothy, I will be happy to send congratulations and wishes for a speedy recovery later, but in the meantime I thought I would send in a pic of our cats, who made the big time.
dhogaza // September 28, 2009 at 4:36 pm |
I loved that, don’t you? Really, one of the best laughs I’ve had in a long time.
Gavin's Pussycat // September 28, 2009 at 7:55 pm |
Yeah. And don’t forget Antarcticpeninsulaville Airport.
David B. Benson // September 28, 2009 at 11:37 pm |
Recently a utility in South Carolina decided to convert a coal burner to a wood burner, avoiding the costly pollution abatement equipment otherwise required for relicensing. Even more recenty TVA decided to shut down four coal plants and convert a fifth to a wood burner for the same reasons. (Is this an EPA requirement or are these state requirements?) Probably TVA will replace the shut down plants with combined cycle gas turbines (CCGTs), producing the same electricity with only 40% of the carbon dioxide emissions. Of coure the wood burners have no fossil carbon dioxide emissions. Just replacing all the USA’s about 670 coal burners by CCGTs would lower the nation’s excess carbon dioxide emissions by 24%; converting some to burn wood lowers the total even more.
Here is an alternative, distributed and retail, worthy of considering right away:
Biomass Task Force Report
http://www.westgov.org/wga/initiatives/cdeac/Biomass-full.pdf
jyyh // September 29, 2009 at 2:48 am |
I once did a calculation of the oil usage around the world in ‘General Shermans’, the most massive tree in the world, and thought it could give some people some perspective as to can man have an effect on the enviroment (well climate also).
Geoff Beacon // September 29, 2009 at 8:38 am |
“Four degrees of warming ‘likely’ ” reported on the BBC website. But not on the main page.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8279654.stm
Al // September 29, 2009 at 10:00 am |
On the denialosphere recently there has been a great fuss about Briffa and Yamal. Of course, I know that all these complaints are worthless denialist nonsense, probably funded by very nasty people in the attempt to undermine Copenhagen. But I am finding it hard to refute the statistics, especially the part about the selection of the samples and the cherry picking accusation. Can any of you experts give me any help with this and comment on the situation?
dhogaza // September 29, 2009 at 2:05 pm |
Proxy reconstructions without tree ring data also show the same shape and magnitude.
The world around us is telling us that warming is real.
Deech56 // September 29, 2009 at 7:09 pm |
RE: Al // September 29, 2009 at 10:00 am
Dhog is correct. The other point is that McI is still arguing MBH 98/99. The science has progressed and the earliest reconstructions have been confirmed using more robust reconstructions using more data. The state of the science for Mann’s and his colleagues is now Mann, et al. 2008. In another thread Hank linked to a 2009 temperature reconstruction.
None of this contradicts the evidence that CO2 is rising and we are in a multi-decade warming phase. None of this contradicts the temperature sensitivity to increasing CO2.
pough // September 29, 2009 at 11:45 pm |
The latest brouhaha regarding Yamal’s supposedly censored data that “erases” the blade of the hockey stick is particularly baffling. Are they under the impression that nobody bothered to record temperature any other way than via tree rings in the 20th century? As far as I can tell, the excluded data follows along with everything else until the second half of the 20th century, at which point it goes bonkers – deviating wildly with what we know is true.
The take-away point for denialists: all methods of ascertaining temperature that are not “censored” tree ring data are wrong.
WTF?
Hank Roberts // September 30, 2009 at 12:36 am |
What ever becamse of McI’s own tree lab work, did it ever get published? Much was made of his trip to the bristlecone pine source trees a while back, and I recall the cores were sent off, and I haven’t see anything since.
Hank Roberts // September 30, 2009 at 12:40 am |
Much interesting work here:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=plankton+distribution+warming&hl=en&scoring=r&as_ylo=2004
example:
High-resolution modelling of phytoplankton distribution and adaptation
M Losch, M Schröter, S Hohn, C Völker, K … – NIC Symposium, 2008 – fz-juelich.de
http://www.fz-juelich.de/nic-series/volume39/voelker.pdf
It begins:
“Introduction
The marine biology, especially the phytoplankton (suspended microscopic algae and photosynthesizing bacteria), is tightly involved in the geochemical cycling of many elements, especially of carbon, but also compound substances that may have climatic impacts, such as dimethylsulfide or organohalogens. The ocean contains approximately 50 times as much carbon as the atmosphere, and over time-scales longer than a few decades the CO2 partial pressure of the atmosphere is tightly coupled to the distribution of carbon within the oceans. An important process in regulating this distribution is the so-called ’biological pump’, the fixation of carbon through photo-synthesis close to the ocean surface, and the subsequent sinking and decomposition of parts of the produced biological material in the deep ocean. Changes in the growth, mortality and sinking of phytoplankton therefore have the potential to act as a strong feedback on the change in climate that is induced by the anthropogenic accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere ….
Al // September 30, 2009 at 6:11 am |
Yes, I have read this stuff again and puzzled about it some more, and then re-read it all again.
In the end the suggestion is that they should have used different trees. I mean, that is putting it in a simple minded way, but that’s what it amounts to.
Well, those other trees were not indicators of temperature. So what they want, these idiots, is for the scientists to use trees which we know are not indicators of temperature, rather than trees which we know are indicators of temperature.
It just shows how totally confused and illeterate these denialists really are.
Dean // September 30, 2009 at 12:18 pm |
Al, that’s not what it says at all. It says that the trees used were not representative of the population of 1) the trees from which data was gathered and 2) the trees nearby (within a few hundred miles) from which data has been gathered for other proxies.
Mark // September 30, 2009 at 12:50 pm |
“dhogaza, it’s those pesky oceanic UHIs.”
One word:
Atlantis.
Duh!
dhogaza // September 30, 2009 at 1:51 pm |
Something I’ve wondered about, and sort of wish I’d checked up on at the time, was whether or not he got the proper permits before boring them.
AFAIK all the really old ones whose location is public are in protected stands.
Old trees are often kept secret by researchers these days, because of worries of vandalism. I had a couple of beers down in SE Oregon with a researcher from Oregon State whose team was carefully boring 1,000 year-old western junipers on Steens Mountain. Even though he knew of me he wouldn’t disclose the location on principle (and I agreed with that, as much as I wanted to see a 1,000 year-old juniper, I had no idea they could live so long). And the results would be published without disclosure, either, other than “somewhere on Steens Mountain”, the kind of “secrecy” which would cause McIntyre to call for his head if he were interested in the data.
dhogaza // September 30, 2009 at 1:55 pm |
They’re convinced that the instrumental record is wrong, that there’s no warming, that it’s just an artifact of UHI, BBQs, and air-conditioners.
I’m not joking.
dhogaza // September 30, 2009 at 2:18 pm |
Yes, Dean, and on this basis McIntyre is excluding those trees that match the modern instrumental record in favor of “representative” trees that do not match the modern instrumental record. He claims that these are a more reliable proxy …
dhogaza // September 30, 2009 at 4:19 pm |
This is an absolutely brilliant comment from WUWT:
Think about that for a bit …
dean // September 30, 2009 at 9:00 pm |
Dhogaza,
Except that the temperature record of the Yamal peninsula does not match the Briffa proxy data. A poster from the AGU conference in 2008 shows that Yamal had a slight negative Sea-ice trend but no land trend.
Here’s the presentation
http://neespi.org/web-content/meetings/AGU_2008/Walker_AGU_2008.pdf
See chart #14. Note that the authors also say that the arctic shows a greater positive temperature trend than the Yamal peninsula. So now it seems that the 10% of the trees track the overall arctic trend, but not the local trend. How does a tree do that?
dhogaza // September 30, 2009 at 11:47 pm |
Gosh it would be really interesting if you guys would show a level of skepticism towards non-reviewed conference poster papers as you do to peer-reviewed science.
Not saying that the poster paper is necessarily wrong, but even McIntyre’s given poster papers …
Marco // October 2, 2009 at 5:55 am |
Worse, dhogaza: that temperature record starts in 1982 and it actually DOES show warming. Lower than the arctic as a whole, and within the confidence interval, but the cooling in “the Schweingruber variation” is definately way out there.
dhogaza // September 30, 2009 at 11:58 pm |
Which, of course, also falsifies McIntyre’s reconstruction which shows a deep *dive* in temperature …
But you folks aren’t mentioning that, are you?
Al // October 1, 2009 at 8:48 am |
dhogaza, you are absolutely right and that had not occurred to me. We cannot have these denialist luddites endangering our selected old trees, which are after all the only reliable indicators of past climate that we’ve got, and very fortunate we are to have found them too. As soon as the location of that sample tree that McIntyre is writing about so furiously now is revealed, you can be sure some luddite is going to head over there and chop it down.
I am sure these guys archive their locations in a safe place, probably in escrow somewhere with a law firm, and they are quite right not to talk about it.
Dean // October 1, 2009 at 1:34 pm |
For completeness, here’s a response from Briffa
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2000/
He disputes some of SM’s points; the main one being that SM’s replacement of the 12 cores is without reason. SM has stated that he was looking at the sensitivities of those 12 cores and not commenting on the validity of replacing them.
Briffa also says that SM has raised some valid issues that will be addressed.
dhogaza // October 1, 2009 at 1:41 pm |
Ha ha ha, Al, you’re such a card. Truly funny guy.
I mean, the fact that groves have been vandalized in the past is proof that the USFS and NPS are being totally paranoid for no reason at all!
dhogaza // October 1, 2009 at 1:42 pm |
Which is relevant how to my wondering if they got the proper federal permits before doing so?
dhogaza // October 1, 2009 at 2:01 pm |
Dean needs to read more closely. Briffa says that McI has raised some legitimate caveats regarding his (McI’s) reconstruction:
Emphasis added to help Dean’s reading comprehension.
Lars Karlsson // October 1, 2009 at 2:43 pm |
Here is RealClimate about the Yamal incident:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/09/hey-ya-mal/
Kate // October 1, 2009 at 4:43 pm |
I’m currently undertaking an undergraduate dissertation looking at whether there is a relationship between glacier recession in British Columbia and El Nino Southern Oscillation or whether the link is more with global warming. Could anyone suggest what statistical analyses I could carry out to test for an association or correlation between temperature/ precipitation data and glacier mass balance and front variation data in order to prove or reject a relationship? I would appreciate any suggestions.
Hank Roberts // October 1, 2009 at 5:59 pm |
Kate, a thought from an amateur reader; I’d go to the reference librarian and find any paper ever written that has addressed the issue you want to look at and see how they handled it, perhaps you’d find something done for other locations.
I think you’ll recognize some glaciology author names as participants in climate blogs, and asking scientists questions after reading their papers is usually very welcome.
Anyone seen an update to this from 2007?
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.global-warming/msg/b330ac6c32fbfd44?
Climate change in Google Earth:
http://www.google.com/landing/cop15/#intro
Dean // October 1, 2009 at 6:52 pm |
Here is a link to the GISS data for the Yamal region:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/findstation.py?datatype=gistemp&data_set=1&name=&world_map.x=513&world_map.y=52
Taking a casual, qualitative look at the records within 1000 km of Yamal, it looks like most of the plots show warming from 1960 through 2009, but the temperatures aren’t above the 1930-40 timeframe.
I’m fighting with Excel right now on working with plotting these records… As soon as I coerce it to do what I want, I’ll post more quantitative results.
[Response: Here is a link to the post where I already looked at arctic stations in detail. I looked at the arctic as a whole, and at grid boxes about the size you're talking about.
Taking a thorough, quantitative look, it's abundantly clear that temperatures ARE above the 1930-1940 timeframe. That goes for the arctic as a whole, the grid containing Yamal, and its neighbor grids. The last decade is well above the 1930-40 timeframe, the arctic was NOT as warm back then as it is now, neither was the area of Yamal.
Did you miss that post? Am I just wasting my time?]
Hank Roberts // October 1, 2009 at 7:01 pm |
Dean, bogosity warning:
Dean // October 1, 2009 …
“… Briffa also says that SM has raised some valid issues that will be addressed.”
Ding. You’re pasting talking points, incorrect ones. Someone else pasted the same talking point at RC.
Stephen says:
1 October 2009
“… Professor Briffa’s measured and dignified response, which acknowledges that Mr. McIntyre’s work merits further investigation ….”
Dhogaza nailed that one there:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/09/hey-ya-mal/comment-page-1/#comment-136687
Where do you guys get your copypasted ‘opinions;? There must be an original source you believe unquestioningly, somewhere, that you’re willing to channel under your own names as though it were your own work.
Hank Roberts // October 1, 2009 at 7:15 pm |
http://www.dailytidings.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090831/NEWS02/908310315/-1/NEWS02
Renewable Oil International President Phillip Bader shows off bio-oil Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2009 produced by his portable fast pyrolysis unit from wood chips. The Umpqua National Forest is evaluating the unit as a way to pay for thinning national forests to reduce fire danger. A report from the departments of Agriculture and Energy estimates 11.6 million dry tons a year of biomass is available from natioinal forest thinning, enough to make about 40 million barrels of bio-oil. Researchers are working on ways to refine the bio-oil so it can be mixed with diesel. (AP Photo/Jeff Barnard)…
…
The demonstration unit he secured from Renewable Oil International in Florence, Ala., shoots superheated steel BBs into a chamber filled with wood chips to flash-bake them without oxygen. In a matter of seconds the wood turns into a bio-oil that can be upgraded to diesel, a mix of gasses that can be tapped to fuel the pyrolysis process, and charcoal powder that helps trees and plants grow while providing long-term storage of carbon that would otherwise contribute to global warming.
“Until you can get it to pencil out, there is nobody willing to pony up that kind of money,” Archuleta said of the billions of dollars required to thin forests that a century of putting out wildfires has left in an unhealthy and flammable state. “This may offer enough value to actually generate enough money to make things viable.”
No one has penciled Archuleta’s solution out yet, and it is just starting to work its way up the Forest Service chain of command. But the technology has drawn the interest of the U.S. departments of Agriculture and Energy, universities and oil companies.
“There are a lot of exciting things happening,” said Sam Jones, associate director for research at the Center for Sustainable Environmental Technologies at Iowa State University. “The thing we are really working on now is how we get the bio-oil we make into a usable transportation fuel or commodity chemicals or heating oil.”…
Hank Roberts // October 1, 2009 at 7:51 pm |
Also of interest to somebody, perhaps:
http://www.northernforest.org/downloads/Payments-for-Forest-Carbon-2009%20%284.1MB%29.pdf
Hank Roberts // October 1, 2009 at 8:36 pm |
And here’s what to watch for — slipping in a term at the last minute that makes clearcutting part of the forest plan for carbon capture:
http://www.environmentalleader.com/2009/09/04/california-forest-carbon-credit-standards-to-go-national/
“… As the official carbon offset standard used by the California state government, CAR’s protocol was included in the House’s Waxman-Markey emissions trading bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, reports Carbon Positive.
However, the Pacific Forest Trust (PFT) has criticized the protocol for its weak protection of mature forests, reports Carbon Positive. PFT said the baseline measurement for avoided conversion projects is set too high, reducing the volume of carbon credits paid for carbon-rich forest well above that benchmark, and the financial incentives for owners to conserve these forests, according to Carbon Positive….”
First commenter says:
“… Embedded in the language is the endorsement and “support” for “evenaged forest management”. It turns out that is the timber industry’s code word for clearcutting! How can this be? The language was “mysteriously” inserted into the last revision.So the protocols may simply exchange smokestack pollution for clearcutting ….”
Phil Scadden // October 1, 2009 at 10:00 pm |
Kate, as a starting point, get Fitzharris, Clare, and Renwick: Global and Planetary Change 59 (2007) 159–174.
This is southern hemisphere glacial response to El Nino, but if feed that into web of science you will ready find other papers analysing glacial/ENSO connections.
Hank Roberts // October 1, 2009 at 10:27 pm |
Oh, and read the logic behind making forest fire restoration a carbon credit.
So if you run out of available carbon credits, what’s the answer? Burn a forest. Then there are newly minted carbon credits available to replant it. Which means you can burn the equivalent amount of fossil fuel. Although the end result is — more CO2 in the atmosphere than before, even after the forest gets regrown.
Logic is absent from this stuff.
Ray Ladbury // October 1, 2009 at 11:12 pm |
Hank, re: denialist talking points.
The ultimate source is the denialist mothership. Of course, there are some denialists who haven’t made contact in a long time and still post drivel like “CO2 lags temperature,” or “Al Gore is fat”.
Ray Ladbury // October 1, 2009 at 11:18 pm |
Tamino, since your wife is helping you with the typing, did you warn her about the occasional weapons-grade stupidity that finds its way here from the denialosphere? Proper protection is essential to avoid the occasional third-degree stupidity burn.
[Response: She already knows about the stupidity megatonnage of the denialosphere.
And for comment moderation/replies, I'm just doing the job with one hand (super-slow).]
Dean // October 2, 2009 at 3:07 am |
Yes, tamino, I did miss that post. But the entire arctic isn’t relevant. If the local area to Yamal doesn’t show dramatic warming (and it doesn’t), then how can the proxy developed from that area show it?
If you plot out the closest locations (within 1000 km), there is good representation from all directions, but obviously thinner to the north and west (but not vacant). Mys Zelanija, Malye Karmaku, Waigatz , Ostrov Dikson and Ostrov Uedine 1/2 are to the north and west. Given your post, one would expect those locations to show significant warming similar to the rest of the arctic.
From those areas:
Mys Zelanija: no data post ‘70, shows constant temp from mid-50’s through 70. One data point in early 80s but is lower than the ‘70 point
Malye Karmaku: Even to negative trend from 1920s through mid-90s. 3 lone datapoints (2006, 07,09) are slightly higher than the mid-90s, but not the highest on the plot (mid 50s are higher)
Waigatz: no data post 1950. slight negative trend, but very high variability
Ostrov Dikson: slight positive trend pre-1960. significant negative step between mid-50s and early 60s. distinct warming trend from 1960 through current, but the current temperature does not rise above the mid-50s temperatures.
and Ostrov Uedine 1/2 : slight negative trend from 1950s through mid 60s. No trend from there through 1989.
Once again, how can trees from Yamal exhibit warming when the temperature record doesn’t show it?
Dean // October 2, 2009 at 3:39 am |
For help in visualizing the data, here’s a link to the Google Earth bbs where I’ve uploaded a placemark file showing the GISS locations. It definitely helps to see what we’re talking about
http://snipurl.com/s9stw
Marco // October 2, 2009 at 10:13 am |
Dean,
Try to combine the data of those stations close to Yamal. You just can’t rely on eyeballing individual stations.
Dean // October 2, 2009 at 12:49 pm |
Marco,
My understanding of how to do much more than just a straight averaging is limited. Given that disclaimer, I took the 20 records and averaged each year. I used the GISS yearly average from the dataset. Some years has as few as 2 records, some as many as 19. I did not attempt to weight the temperatures due to the distance from Yamal (defined for these purposes as 69.8N, 70.4 E, and plotted in the google earth file I linked to earlier).
The straight averaging shows a plot in many ways similar to the Ostrov Dikson data and contained very obvious trends:
1880-1905 – Clear warming (from -7°C to -3°C)
1905-1918 – Clear cooling (-3°C to -7°C)
1918-1940 – Clear warming (-7°C to -2.5°C)
1940-1969 – Clear cooling (-2.5°C to -8.5°C)
1969 to Present – Clear warming (-8.5°C to -3°C)
The number of stations grew steadily from 1881-1960. Remained basically constant (16-18 stations) until 1980 and then dramatically dropped off to the present (8 stations in 2000, 11 now).
[Response: You can't get a valid area average by simply averaging station records, unless every one of them has a value for every year (or month or whatever the time scale is).
That's because different stations have different overall average values -- some are colder overall, some hotter, partly due to differences in latitude/longitude, partly due to differences in terrain, in large part due to differences in altitude. So the changes shown by such a naive average usually are more a reflection of when "hot" and "cold" station records are added to or omitted from the average, than of changes in the overall climate of the region.
Instead you have to compute temperature anomaly, so you can at least be in the ballpark of averaging temperature changes. And, all the anomalies have to be computed relative to the same baseline period.
That's what I did for the study of arctic stations, using only series with data at least into the 21st century and at least 30 years of data. The result for the grid containing Yamal is shown in the 1st graph in the update to this post; a lowess smooth is superimposed on the annual averages.
The smooth is superimposed because even if you get the averaging right you can't just "eyeball" 1-year averages and declare what the climate trend is. "Climate" is a lot longer than 1 year. So you need to apply a robust smoothing technique, or at the very least average over periods longer than a year. The 2nd graph in the update shows 5-year averages together with the lowess smooth, the 3rd graph shows 10-year averages, the 4th graph shows 5-year *moving* averages and the 5th, 10-year moving averages. All of them illustrates clearly that there's a lot of fluctuation even on medium time scales, but the long-term trend value is higher today than it was in the 1930s-1940s.
Subject closed.]
Petro // October 5, 2009 at 4:34 pm |
Here is an interesting story on a conversion of a climate sceptic (meteorologist) into the main stream:
http://climate.weather.com/blogs/9_13685.html
This pdf
http://image.weather.com/web/multimedia/images/blog/globalwarming_synopticmeteorology.pdf
from the same guy (warning 17MB+ not for those with low bandwith) where is described several weather events influenced by global warming.
Gavin's Pussycat // October 5, 2009 at 7:36 pm |
Petro, that’s an interesting story. Though, my impression is that this meteorologist wasn’t converted from being a climate sceptic as much as from being a sceptic on the observable effect of climate change on weather phenomena.
I have some questions about the effect he describes (and would have commented if comments hadn’t been closed there). He describes how the surface of 500 mb constant pressure has moved up from 1976 to 2006. The problem with this “observation” is that it was made on reanalysis products, i.e., three-dimensional pictures of atmospheric circulation generated by general circulation models, constrained to comply with observational data — i.e., surface data at the lower surface, and a very few radiosonde observations — of sometimes questionable precision and long-term stability — higher up. A hi-tech interpolation technique, so to say, filling in the holes between observations.
How is the height above “sea level” of a radiosonde determined? Nowadays often with GPS. Over recent history, typically using radar reflected from the corner cube reflector suspended under the sonde. But, the sonde often drifts off horizontally over large distances. How precise is then the height determined from the radar bounce?
Mind you, I don’t doubt that the phenomenon described is real. But let us not rush to call it independent evidence from what the GCMs provide… I have my doubts about that. At the very least it should be analysed.
Timothy Chase // October 8, 2009 at 4:41 pm |
Back from the coronary procedure.
Originally my right coronary artery had two stents. Now it has four more. The left main now has its own stent. So a total of five stents were put in. Procedure lasted two hours starting at noon yesterday. Didn’t sleep that well in the hospital bed, but I am home now — so I will be going to bed in the next few minutes.
[Response: Rest well, recover quickly. And enjoy life.]
Kevin McKinney // October 8, 2009 at 6:31 pm |
Second that wish, TC.
Hank Roberts // October 14, 2009 at 6:07 pm |
Too wonderful not to share:
http://marsroverdriver.blogspot.com/2009/01/ray-bradbury-part-2.html
dhogaza // October 14, 2009 at 8:57 pm |
Hank Roberts, of all the links you’ve provided all this time …
That’s gotta be the best.
Hank Roberts // October 14, 2009 at 10:47 pm |
Don’t miss his daily driving blog:
http://marsandme.blogspot.com/
And don’t miss this earlier visit by Bradbury:
http://books.google.com/books?id=A1QwWZCbHjQC&pg=PA276&lpg=PA276&dq=%22Ray+Bradbury%22+NASA+Houston&source=bl&ots=Mt6h4r4i1R&sig=AvPf6sz14SulkusdDnWjMD_g1-4&hl=en&ei=y1TWSojKEoWosgP74uDdAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CA0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Ray%20Bradbury%22%20NASA%20Houston&f=false
David B. Benson // October 14, 2009 at 11:15 pm |
What dhogaza just wrote.
Kevin McKinney // October 15, 2009 at 1:13 pm |
“Oh, my.”
Yes.
dhogaza // October 16, 2009 at 3:00 pm |
Watts goes even further off the deep end …
Deech56 // October 16, 2009 at 8:26 pm |
Lordy, they’re really coming out of the woodwork at WUWT, aren’t they. Hitching a ride on His Lordship’s star.
Kevin McKinney // October 16, 2009 at 9:27 pm |
Dhogaza, that is so wacky I knocked over my beer (not a figure of speech; I was reaching for it, but was too bemused to look away from the screen for a second.)
It’s wrong on so many counts, yet there will be not a few who swallow this dreck whole–as all here will be able to predict.
(Head-shaking ongoing. . .)
However, I came by to mention that I have a new article up that may be of interest to some; it’s an “enhanced” (meaning, mostly, “illlustrated”) summary/review of The Long Thaw. I’ve had a couple of kind reactions to it, so perhaps it may interest some here.
http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Long-Thaw-A-Review
dhogaza // October 16, 2009 at 9:52 pm |
Well, there’s a post from the good Lord himself there, along with a link to a video of his talk, which I’ve been told is quite entertaining …
David B. Benson // October 16, 2009 at 11:11 pm |
Time series analysis; I am blogging elewhere with someone who doesn’t seem ready to take the advice offered in “Numerical Reciepes” about taking first differences (of raw data, mind you) and claiming this has any meaning about anything. “Numerical Reciepes” states “[Taking first differences] is almost guarenteed to produce inaccurate results”. The authors suggest using Savizitz-Golay filtering, followed by fitting a low order polynomial and obtaining the first derivative approximation in that fashion.
Somehow my attempt to communicate this (to a BS Physics guy professionally working in video analysis) completely failed. Any suggestions of what to try next? Anybody?
Hank Roberts // October 18, 2009 at 2:44 am |
> what to try next
Hypnosis?
http://www.gregegan.net/APPLETS/32/32.html
Hat tip to:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/README.html
apropos of math questions, there’s always
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/questions.html
David B. Benson // October 18, 2009 at 8:27 pm |
Hank Roberts // October 18, 2009 at 2:44 am — I don’t know how to hypnosize over the internet. :-)
While I have enjoyed my several, but all too few, conversations with John Baez in the previous century, the problem is more one of proper numerical methods and statistics, so John’s not the right choice, I fear.
Thanks for trying.
Timothy Chase // October 19, 2009 at 12:16 am |
Hank Roberts wrote:
Beautiful stuff. I have a certain fondness for quasi-periodic tesselations. One of my grandmother’s offered to create a quilt for each of her grandchildren but wanted them to come up with the patterns, and to tease her just a little I suggested a fat/thin-diamond Penrose tesselation — then she insisted on doing it despite my protestations. But it had red (infinite) stripes, white finite stripes, and white stars inside blue decagons — if I remember correctly. That too was my design. I figured if she insisted on doing it, I might as well make the best of it. Stars and stripes — scrambled.
Later while at Iowa State University I had the chance to hold a dodecahedral quasi-crystal based upon a three-dimensional extension of Penrose tiles. It was created by means of some alloy and a gradual cooling process.
I had no idea, though, that quasi-periodic tesselations were being explored in the Medieval Islamic world, though. Must have been during their renaissance and Europe’s dark ages — prior to the crusades causing their open societies to turn inwards — and the knowledge acquired of Rome and Greece liberated the European Mind. (I know — Irish monasteries also played a part.)
Hank Roberts // October 19, 2009 at 12:33 am |
I was thinking of his pointer to where to ask
… for more advanced questions …
* sci.math.research
(if only to ask “what’s a better newsgroup to ask this question in?” — which has worked for me in the past when I did my best effort to inquire)
David B. Benson // October 19, 2009 at 10:27 pm |
Hank Roberts // October 19, 2009 at 12:33 am — Aha!
Deep Climate // October 20, 2009 at 5:29 am |
Another new contrarian voice from north of the border (these guys are keeping me busy).
Andrew Revkin interviews Canadian futurist Vaclav Smil, who claims that a looming (unspecified) pandemic is a much greater threat than global warming.
Oh, and did you know that there has been “no global warming in the past ten years”, and James Hansen should have been able to predict that global warming would “basically stop for 10 years”?
See:
http://deepclimate.org/2009/10/19/vaclav-smil-no-global-warming-in-past-ten-year/
Revkin’s highlights are at DotEarth (but don’t include the “no global warming” comments):
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/smil-on-hummers-hondas-meat-heat
Meanwhile, McIntyre has also “reported” on Smil:
“He observed that neither Hansen nor anybody else in 1998 had predicted 10 years of no temperature increase. ”
Does McIntyre really think that Smil’s point was valid?
Sekerob // October 20, 2009 at 11:52 am |
So i Smi or any of his compadres going to explain why temps have not declined to pre-1998 El Nino levels… after all the atmosphere has a very short memory. Yet, as was reported, the 4th mean Jun-Sept Ocean temps were amongst highest on record. Is this what extended solar minimum does? No wait it’s more clouds (cushy blanket effect) and light diffusion due GCR’s ;>)
HADSST2 Jun-Sept Mean Anomaly (yes, comma is decimal here)
1998 0,484
1999 0,210
2000 0,248
2001 0,386
2002 0,373
2003 0,450
2004 0,391
2005 0,448
2006 0,380
2007 0,316
2008 0,336
2009 0,467
Was heat Ocean content up or down in this period?
Hank Roberts // October 20, 2009 at 4:31 pm |
Antarctic sea ice — is being formed from fresh water refreezing after melting off of the bottom of the ice tongues:
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/igsoc/jog/2009/00000055/00000192/art00014
Properties of a marine ice layer under the Amery Ice Shelf, East Antarctica
Authors: Craven, Mike; Allison, Ian; Fricker, Helen Amanda; Warner, Roland
Source: Journal of Glaciology, Volume 55, Number 192, September 2009 , pp. 717-728(12)
Abstract:
The Amery Ice Shelf, East Antarctica, undergoes high basal melt rates near the southern limit of its grounding line where 80% of the ice melts within 240 km of becoming afloat. A considerable portion of this later refreezes downstream as marine ice. This produces a marine ice layer up to 200 m thick in the northwest sector of the ice shelf concentrated in a pair of longitudinal bands that extend some 200 km all the way to the calving front. ….
Hank Roberts // October 20, 2009 at 5:41 pm |
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/48586/title/Science_%2B_the_Public__Report_tallies_hidden_energy_costs
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12794
Report tallies hidden energy costs
By Janet Raloff
Web edition : Monday, October 19th, 2009
The average retail cost of U.S. coal-fired electricity was 9 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2007 (the most recent year for which data are available). But there are health and environmental costs of that power that consumers don’t pay, at least as part of their electric bill. According to a new report, accounting for those costs would double the true cost of shooting some electrons through the nation’s power grid.
As long as such costs remain hidden, they risk skewing policy and purchasing decisions. A new report released today by the National Research Council now attempts to compute and tally those hidden health and environmental costs associated with energy. And although the sums it offers up are huge, the report acknowledges that society may decide they’re well worth accepting in light of the benefits provided by that energy.
At least as long as those costs are recognized….
JCH // October 21, 2009 at 3:20 am |
Why Hank, if we were to unveil the costs, it might hurt the economy.
And we should know the great excuse makers would never be themselves doing something that might hurt the economy because they are the economy’s protectors.
Hank Roberts // October 21, 2009 at 5:11 pm |
Learn or teach some physics, pick your own cheap price
http://2dboy.com/games.php
(Through 10/25)
2D Boy, the independent game studio behind World of Goo, recently celebrated the game’s one-year anniversary by offering it at whatever price buyers cared to pay.
“World of Goo is a physics based puzzle / construction game. The millions of Goo Balls who live in the beautiful World of Goo don’t know that they are in a game, or that they are extremely delicious….”
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/10/21/071251
—–
I’d love to see what these two guys could do with climate education. They’re in San Francisco.
Hank Roberts // October 22, 2009 at 2:52 pm |
http://quietlittlelies.com/article/reflections-enormous-puddle
Hat tip for pointing me to the author of that goes to ’silk’ http://www.iamsilk.com/
who recently posted at rc: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/climate-cover-up-a-brief-review/comment-page-4/#comment-139218
Hank Roberts // October 24, 2009 at 1:05 am |
One of the places I’ve shopped for a long time is doing the right thing, in a very large way:
http://eshop.macsales.com/green/index.html
Kevin McKinney // October 24, 2009 at 12:41 pm |
Very cool, Hank. Thanks for sharing.
Sekerob // October 24, 2009 at 2:55 pm |
Hank, our e-company actually actively promotes windmills of a smaller scale… just one click away and fed back into the national grid.
Enelmill
Noticed going through the mountain pass at least 20 big ones popped up, this time positioned in places with a fairly regular wind instead of the others that were just blindly placed 5-7 years ago and idle 70-80% of the time and ARE because of that feature deemed horizon polluters. The thought has occurred that the energy company intentionally wasted money to kill interest at that time.
Hank Roberts // October 24, 2009 at 4:41 pm |
two more tidbits:
Model for how islands create plankton blooms:
The development of phytoplankton blooms in Von Kàrmàn vortex streets in island wakes has been investigated using a coupled bio-physical model which evolves a geostrophically balanced flow past a relatively small (L = 10 km) oceanic island. Three major processes associated with the “island mass effect” are found to occur in series in our numerical experiment. …. The demonstrated detailed features of island mass effect are remarkably consonant with previously observed phenomena in the real ocean.”
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL039743.shtml
Might make it easier to create the same effect (with what? I dunno, maybe ring bubbles on a large scale or something like that, a small floating device lowering tubing in a big circle and pumping just a bit of warm air and water down so it bubbles up and creates a similar effect? Cheaper than building actual islands)
—-
It’s been noted elsewhere that our current acute ocean pH change problem is unusual because of the rate-of-change problem; natural warming events, much slower than ours, have included increases in precipitation and runoff flushing more organic material and minerals into the oceans, and likely increasing biogeochemical cycling of the carbonic acid in the oceans, buffering the rate of acidification and eventually reversing it.
Here’s a new mechanism described that might fit that process.
“… dissolved organic matter produced by marine phytoplankton during photosynthesis is a newly identified buffering component in the ocean, and indicates that the contribution of dissolved organic matter to seawater alkalinity can be significant in the biologically productive upper ocean, where to date it has been unrecognized or considered insignificant.”
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL040271.shtml
——–
(As always I know nothing about this stuff, I’m just picking up the occasional piece that catches my eye as interesting, to see if it might fit into the climate jigsaw puzzle others are putting together.)
David B. Benson // October 24, 2009 at 10:36 pm |
Sekerob // October 24, 2009 at 2:55 pm — Just 30% availability is considered to be a class 1 site; so idle 70% of the time.
In this region we have some notoriously windy locations; 33% availability.
Sekerob // October 26, 2009 at 3:26 pm |
Different tangent. Hadley/CRU. Are these people actually committed to providing temperature data on a regular basis? Each month they come out it’s a different day of the month, but October 26 to still not publish the September hemispheric and global temps is pretty much a new lateness record. Can’t remember even seeing CET… or are they in fear of what this will show once Tamino gets his wrist/arm out of the plaster ;?
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/09/19/seasonal-cycle-in-central-england-temperature/
David B. Benson // October 26, 2009 at 5:27 pm |
Sekerob // October 26, 2009 at 3:26 pm — Many possible reasons for the delay. One might be that term begins with October.
Sekerob // October 26, 2009 at 6:23 pm |
Seek and though shalleth find, so at least the Central English Temps surfaced all through October 25… quite a bit above mean for the year. http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/cet_info_mean.html
Still no HADOBS global data as precursor to the release of HADCRUT3v and CRUTEM3v.
Sekerob // October 26, 2009 at 8:50 pm |
Hank, I thought of that, but their quarters are JJA – SON etc. Anyway, I’ve seen in the past month or 2 so many complete recalculations back to the starting year of record, 1850, 1880, 1966 (Rutgers snow cover), that I’d not surprised to see them doing same.
Hank Roberts // October 29, 2009 at 4:52 am |
Spooky:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/10/28/notes102809.DTL
Deech56 // October 30, 2009 at 1:24 am |
Keith Briffa and Thomas Melvin have a detailed analysis of the Russian data used in their manuscripts, along with analyses based on the McIntyre criticisms. There are several links in the post that are also worth reading.
Kevin McKinney // October 30, 2009 at 6:57 pm |
Cross-posting from RC, I’ve just published my “enhanced” review of Climate Cover-Up. As mentioned on RC, I’ve tossed in a fair selection of pics (and even the Monckton “Silly Graph #2, which some will remember.)
Comments and corrections welcome. . .
http://hubpages.com/hub/Climate-Cover-Up-A-Review
And thanks to Kevin Grandia for the invitation to review!
Deep Climate // October 30, 2009 at 9:18 pm |
I can second Deech56’s recommendation of Briffa’s detailed response to McIntyre.
I was working on a post enumerating various problems in McIntyre’s Yamal analysis and that post now incorporates the highlights of Briffa’s analysis (including the sensitivity analysis mentioned by Deech56).
http://deepclimate.org/2009/10/30/briffa-teaches-but-will-mcintyre-ever-learn/
Meanwhile, there’s no mention yet of Briffa’s response in the mainstream media. What a surprise … Andy Revkin, here’s your chance to scoop Seth Borenstein.
Deech56 // October 31, 2009 at 11:40 am |
I, in turn, highly recommend Deep Climate’s take on Briffa’s response. Very well done and deeply appreciated.
There will probably be wailing and gnashing of teeth on at least one site, but the fact remains that Briffa will turn his analysis into a publication, Hantemirov and Shiyatov will have their updated reconstruction published and McIntyre and his amen chorus will still be doing the blog science thing. Meanwhile, nature still follows physical laws.
David B. Benson // November 4, 2009 at 7:11 pm |
Here are the only 13 data points I’m going to obtain. The times are indeed known to the millisecond. The b01 data seems to be only good to within about 10%.
time after formal start: b01 measurementsFrom physical principles, this time series ought to be strictly monotonicaly increasing. Suggestion on how to filter and interpolate the b01s will be appreciated.t= -3.637: b01= 0.000
t= -0.300: b01= 0.681
t= 0.033: b01= 1.080
t= 0.367: b01= 1.738
t= 0.701: b01= 2.939
t= 1.034: b01= 5.308
t= 1.368: b01= 5.948
t= 1.702: b01= 7.464
t= 2.035: b01= 8.088
t= 2.369: b01= 8.545
t= 2.536: b01= 9.067
t= 2.703: b01= 10.173
t= 2.870: b01= 9.106
Kevin McKinney // November 5, 2009 at 6:21 pm |
Hank, thought you might be interested in this version of an analogy that (AFAIK) is originally yours (cross-posted from cbc.ca):
“. . .what essentially is happening is that there are more CO2 (or other GHG) molecules “in the way” of an IR photon that’s headed for space. There can be multiple interactions as IR is emitted randomly–some up again, but some downward.
“A great analog: picture a stadium full of baseball fans, randomly hitting promotional beach balls, which are being thrown into the stands by a (presumably publicity-hungry) team management. The highest concentration of beach balls will be nearest the field; but a certain number will get randomly punched way up into the stands, where they can actually get hit out of the park.
“If this goes on for a while, you’ll reach equilibrium; the number of balls going out of the park at the top will equal the number going into stands at the bottom.
“Now imagine the fans getting a bit tired; they can’t hit the balls quite so far. The number of balls going out of the park drops a bit, because fewer fans are close enough to knock ‘em out with the reduced “oomph” they still have. But this is only temporary, because the number of balls in the stands goes up, moving more balls into that outer ring, until you have a new equilibrium and once again the balls going out of the park equals balls supplied from the field.
“The fans are analogous to GHG molecules, the balls are IR photons, and the fans’ fatigue represents the effect of increased CO2 concentration. (This is the most strained part of the metaphor, admittedly.) Global temps are represented by the numbers of balls in circulation.”
Feedback–no pun intended–welcome on this free educational product. . .
Hank Roberts // November 8, 2009 at 7:48 pm |
Hmmm, I liked my older versions better. As whoever wrote that said, the “fatigure represents … concentration” fails to convince.
I bet it can be improved on.
Let’s put in the oxygen and nitrogen — say each individual grownup (greenhouse-gas) is accompanied by a dozen small children (oxygen and nitrogen molecules) who are capable of picking up, holding, and passing the balls but don’t have the pitching arm to really throw them any distance.
Then we start sending more grownups onto the field, until we eventually double the number of grownups (capable of pitching) — without changing the number of sprogs underfoot.
What happens? Briefly, the number of balls going out of bounds drops, as each of the new grownups starts catching balls and handing them off to adjacent kiddies.
But once more of the kiddies around each parent have taken on any excess of the balls bouncing around, or extras that a grownup has caught — so once again the grownups are unencumbered and able to throw one at a time — the rate at which the grownups are throwing goes back up, and the kiddies each have more balls available to supply to them.
Hmmmmm ….
If we could get the grownups to actually throw randomly, this could be done in meatspace — but no, that would probably require excessive amounts of beer and endanger public safety.
Someone competent in such matters might be able to do it in Javascript animation, though.
Heehee … make a boundary line for the top of the troposphere, and have a cohort of preteenagers (water molecules) — they’d be limited to inside the base lines, so they rarely if ever throw a ball out of the park, but they can throw it a decent distance.
So if the source is at the catcher’s station feeding balls into play, the preteens are going to be able to feed balls to the outfield (or back into the backstop, of course, since all throws are random).
Hmmmmm …. if I understood sports at all I could’ve made more sense of this analogy. Handing off to anyone who can do anything with it.
It ain’t the MIT Bathtub Model, fer sure.
Kevin McKinney // November 10, 2009 at 2:30 am |
You’re going for the detail, Hank.
I’m thinking KISS.
But it would be a gas to enact in (as you put it) meatspace. That’s why it’d have to be beachballs; something harder (like a baseball) would, as you say, endanger public safety.
Sadly, I think the number of beachballs you’d have to put into play is probably prohibitively large in terms of finances and time to actually be able to do this.
But, as you say, there’s always Javascript.
Neven // November 11, 2009 at 10:04 am |
Everyone, don’t forget to vote for DenialDepot (Best Science Blog 2009): http://2009.weblogawards.org/nominations/best-science-blog/
Sekerob // November 11, 2009 at 4:10 pm |
Sort of a take the mickey out of denialists blog, kind of the anti rocket rocket rocket where they pride themselves to sell BSD, but, I think this comment sums it up on the the winner of the last ballot:
Hank Roberts // November 12, 2009 at 5:52 am |
Bumper sticker:
http://www.illinoisloop.org/pix_opinionated.jpg
Deep Climate // November 13, 2009 at 3:19 am |
More shenanigans from the Fraser Institute:
http://deepclimate.org/2009/11/12/understanding-climate-fraser-institute-chernoff/
It’s time for Canadians to look beyond blaming ExxonMobil for all contrarian propaganda. There’s no shortage of Canadian individuals or companies (usually from Alberta or B.C.) ready to step up.
This comes on the heels of some contrarian defacement of the NOAA climate eductaion website (glad that’s fixed now):
http://deepclimate.org/2009/11/02/contrarian-education-noa/
Deep Climate // November 13, 2009 at 3:21 am |
BTW, I still would like to see RealClimate in its rightful place as best science blog.
But Denial Depot should be recognized too. Perhaps it could place in more than one category …
Timothy Chase // November 13, 2009 at 6:33 pm |
Deep Climate wrote:
Exxon is a big player, in the US, Canada and the UK — more or less.
But if I remember right, the amount that they have spent on propaganda over the past decade (at least tax-deductible stuff above the table in the US ) amounts to less than $20,000,000 US. In contrast, the Scaife foundations have contributed over $120,000,000 between 1985-2006 to the same set of denialist organizations, the Bradley foundation over $64,000,000 from 1985-2005, and the Koch foundations over $36,000,000 from 1986-2004.
Just with those foundations alone we are talking about nearly a quarter of a billion dollars being funneled to the same set of denial organizations being used by Exxon — more than ten times what Exxon has spent above the table. Then there are the coal companies, other petroleum companies and so on.
I’d say that just looking at the United States we need to be looking beyond Exxon. But just as Exxon does not respect borders, neither do these other organizations. Personnel are widely shared between organizations as part of a coordinated campaign, and just as the US religious right has been involved in attempts to push creationism into UK and Australian schools, we are seeing multi-national organizations working across boarders in their propaganda campaigns, spokesmen from other countries being the “experts on tap,” and so on.
It definitely past time to start looking beyond Exxon, both in Canada and the United States. But I would also argue that it is time to begin looking at how the companies and organizations work across borders, to start viewing this not as so many separate denialist campaigns, but as something more integrated — in terms of the financing, personnel, propaganda and coordination.
michel // November 15, 2009 at 8:20 pm |
Ray Ladbury,
Question: do you think the LIFE project, controlled fusion, is for real? I just read an article about it and did not know what to think.
Ray Ladbury // November 15, 2009 at 10:33 pm |
Michel, Laser inertial fusion is probably the most viable approach, but that isn’t saying a whole lot just yet. Keep in mind that not only do you have to initiate the fusion, you have to capture the energy (including that pesky 14 MeV neutron) and make it do useful work. It’s way too early to prejudge the winner here, and it would be unwise to count on fusion as a solution to our energy problems in the near term.
Hank Roberts // November 15, 2009 at 11:13 pm |
Michel, re the “LIFE” controlled fusion project, it’s not real _now_, nobody’s claiming it is. Yet.
https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/missions/energy_for_the_future/life/
“Ignition experiments designed to accomplish NIF’s goal will begin in 2010 …”
Paul Middents // November 16, 2009 at 10:45 pm |
Early this year Nicolas Nierenberg dissected on his blog Stefan Rahmstorf’s simple model of sea level rise:
A Semi-Empirical Approach to Projecting Future Sea-Level Rise, Science 19 January 2007
This might not be of much fundamental interest were it not for his promoting it now on Stoat as an example of “nonsense” produced by Dr. Rahmstorf. Nierenberg’s analysis is a statistical critique together with some obligatory snarking about code availability and transparency.
Tamino, your take on this would be real interest to me.
I apologize for the lack of links but the spam filter seemed to reacting to them.
Paul Middents
Sekerob // November 17, 2009 at 12:23 pm |
Anyone having trouble reaching RealClimate? I’m getting the below on the main site and all the bookmarks to specific topic threads:
[Response: I got it too.]
Mike G // November 17, 2009 at 12:37 pm |
I came across a real doozy at WUWT yesterday. I’m not sure how many other people besides a handful of commenters there picked up on it, but it’s on par with the CO2 snow for stupidity.
I was actually searching for a recent news article that has been getting a lot of attention, somewhat out of context, in other venues unrelated to global warming when I came across it.
The original news article can be seen here (I won’t link to WUWT on principle): http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091113083307.htm
In typical WUWT fashion the article was copied and pasted with the insinuation that the sponges are soaking up CO2 from the oceans. Trouble is, CO2, carbonate, and bicarbonate (the forms dissolved CO2 takes in seawater) are dissolved INORGANIC carbon. The sponges take up dissolved ORGANIC carbon- sugars, glycerol, etc. The difference between the two is something even undergrads are expected to know.
The paper has absolutely nothing to do with CO2 uptake or acidification of the oceans.
dhogaza // November 17, 2009 at 2:45 pm |
Science blog of the year. Don’t forget it!
I really hope denial depot wins this year …
Paul Middents // November 17, 2009 at 5:18 pm |
Tamino,
I see you have provided your take (Sea Level Rise) on Rahmstorf’s simple model.
I am not competent judge the technical detail of Nierenberg’s analysis, but it looks like his objection is to Rahmstorf hinges on sensitivity to data period selection and bin size.
The issues he raises hardly seem to rise to a level justifying his characterization that Rahmstorf publishes nonsense.
Rattus Norvegicus // November 18, 2009 at 5:12 am |
WTFUWT is at it again, maybe not as good as Erl Happ, but obviously wrong none the less:
Just because we need some denialist laughs: Willis Eschenbach reworks the global energy budget.
It seem that he believes this needs to be done because he can’t add. Now by my math 324 + 168 = 492 and 24 + 78 + 390 = 492. Now my understanding of this may be wrong but incoming radiation in w/m-2 should be equal to outgoing radiation in w/m-2, if the surface is in equilibrium. If I recall my math correctly 492 has always equaled 492.
For some reason Willis doesn’t think this, so I could be wrong. Maybe all of climate science really is wrong!
Kevin McKinney // November 18, 2009 at 5:19 am |
RC is still accessible, just not through the front door; you can get in via subject headings in a Google search.
Hank Roberts // November 18, 2009 at 5:39 am |
> RC
Me too. Earlier today it was happening on and off briefly then the problem disappeared; now it’s back.
Anyone noticed whether New York is still there?
Hank Roberts // November 18, 2009 at 5:44 am |
http://www.google.com/search?q=realclimate+webfaction
The “about” archive link still works:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/about/
And from there links into recent posts work:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/a-treeline-story/#comment-141684
and ‘Start Here’ works — but the “Home” link goes to that WebFaction host page.
Must be time to catch up on sleep.
Hank Roberts // November 18, 2009 at 2:48 pm |
Dang. Still??
Hank Roberts // November 18, 2009 at 2:56 pm |
But you can go ‘around’ the entry page via the links above and then read new material and, at least it appears, comment.
So it’s just the front door that’s broken, I guess.
David B. Benson // November 18, 2009 at 8:29 pm |
I have experienced no difficulties whatsoever reaching RealClimate.
Deech56 // November 19, 2009 at 1:09 am |
If anyone still has trouble getting to RC, you may need to clear the version that’s in the cache. If you can get to any page on the site, click on the “Home” link and then reload the home page that comes up. That worked for me yesterday.
Nothing like the “OMG” feeling when RC is down. It’s pretty much the essential site for climate science (with all due respect to our host).
Hank Roberts // November 19, 2009 at 3:58 am |
Worked all day; now I’m seeing this again:
Coming soon: Another fine website hosted by WebFaction.
Site not configured
Going in sideways still works. Dunno.
I left email at webfaction.com, just in case nobody’s told them. Could be it’s just a few of us out in the domain system boondocks with something that will correct itself, maybe.
Deep Climate // November 19, 2009 at 5:52 am |
Friends of Science radio ads are playing across Canada. And, as in the case of the Monckton tour and the 2006 election ads, the usual suspects appear to be involved: The Calgary Foundation and oil and gas lobbyist Morten Paulsen (who also happens to be well connected with Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party).
http://deepclimate.org/2009/11/19/friends-of-science-hits-the-airwaves/
No problems at RC myself.
Hank Roberts // November 19, 2009 at 1:54 pm |
aha: on good advice
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/muddying-the-peer-reviewed-literature/comment-page-4/#comment-141817
cleared the cache, removed the cookies, restarted Firefox, and RC loaded (very slowly the first time, normally thereafter). Problem seems to have been there.
Duh. That was obvious in hindsight.
Lazar // November 21, 2009 at 8:45 pm |
This is bad. So is this.
Working under the assumption that the emails are genuine…
Nothing has been found to incriminate the science itself. The personal stuff is irrelevant. The bad stuff relates to responses to FOI and one presentation of results, and are imv very bad…
a) Requesting that scientists delete email correspondence
b) in the knowledge that those emails may be subject to FOI
c) Proposing to deliberately mangle/supply requested data into a form that is more difficult to use
d) Proposing the deletion of parts of a dataset before it is released under FOI
e) Considering the deletion of an entire dataset to avoid FOI release
f) Deliberately concealing a mismatch between reconstructed and instrumental temperatures (“to hide the decline” is unambiguous, and is not excused by the fact that the discrepancy is discussed in *other* publications; Pat Michaels’ omission of Hansen 1988’s B & C scenarios in Congressional testimony is not justified by the fact that they were available in Hansen 1988 — I am not saying though that the two are ethically equivalent)
This appears to be (hopefully) ‘the lot’. All relate to Phil Jones.
With to the release of data, some of the less frequently cited emails reveal that Jones and other climate scientists were genuinely concerned that it would be used by ‘auditors’ and other ’skeptics’ to obfuscate the science. Scientists other than Jones also claimed a huge waste of time would result from debunking such distortions. There is no evidence of an intent to ‘hide errors’. I thoroughly agree with those assessments, having observed the actions of ‘auditors’ and other ’skeptics’ for some time. The intention of Jones may have been ‘good’. That does not excuse the actions. The ends do not justify the means, as the means are part of the ends. This is a war between science and PR disinformation. War has ethics, and sides may have different standards. What are scientific ethics in this regard? Of course the other side are engaged in a scope and depth of dishonesty which makes the current kerfuffle appear trifling. Sadly, and ironically, they can now cast doubt on the integrity of the climate science community and the science with impunity. I think this will shake public confidence and setback understanding by years. If the climate science community act to defend Jones’ actions, it will make the issue worse in the public eye. Discussing climate science with ’skeptics’ is even more pointless forevermore, as any discussion will inevitably derail to this issue. Meantime, emissions rise, the atmosphere and oceans warm, and the trainwreck continues to steam down the track.
I’ll be crossposting to other climate science sites in the hope of eliciting comment and criticism (particularly from Barton, Hank, Chris, Deep, TCO, George, Eli, Timothy, and David.)
Hank Roberts // November 22, 2009 at 2:14 am |
> crossposting
You’ve missed rule one of database management.
Post once. Then post pointers to it.
Pick one place you put it, any place, just one.
Then at the others post a link to it.
When you post the same thing many places, you spread your name and your question widely, but no one sees all the answer.
That gives maximum exposure to the question — it’s everywhere — and minimizes how many people see a coherent set of replies.
michel // November 22, 2009 at 11:25 am |
“If the climate science community act to defend Jones’ actions, it will make the issue worse in the public eye.”
True, and a wise remark in a wise post. However, maybe you miss one key aspect of it?
What is there about the information that tactics like this were justified, along with the risks they involve, which as you point out, were huge, to stop it getting out?
Ray Ladbury // November 22, 2009 at 1:10 pm |
Lazar, While I do not condone attempts to circumvent FOI requests, I think that it is important that what we are talking about here is an attempt by the denialists to criminalize the practice of science. There are a lot of people out there who really hate being told what they don’t want to hear and who are willing to go to any length to silence the truth.
Whether or not scientists should even be subject to FOI requests is not clear. It depends on how their grants are worded, not on whether the money comes from government sources. In many cases, the institution doing the research retains ownership of the data and all correspondence related to the research. In this case, they could and should tell the denialists to pound sand.
In those cases where data, emails, etc. must be released under FOI, the free exchange of ideas will be inhibited of necessity. Of course, research institutions could always take a page from gov’t agencies and release datasets in a state where it would be a life’s work of the denialists to get it into a state where they could draw conclusions from it.
I’m afraid that to maintain a semblance of sanity, I must take a detached viewpoint wrt the survival of the species.
I leave no hostages to fortune, and recent events certainly do not encourage the view that the loss of the human species will diminish the amount of intelligent life in the Universe.
This is our midterm exam as a species. I don’t like our chances.
Lazar // November 22, 2009 at 6:13 pm |
Hank,
Wise advice. Thanks :-)
Lazar // November 22, 2009 at 6:42 pm |
Ray,
My question to scientists; is nullifying a public’s legal right to certain information, through destroying the information beforehand, ethical or not? — particularly as an action by scientists, particularly when the issue has overwhelming public implications? My answer is worth squat, but would be that it is unethical. What matters is that scientists give a public answer in a timely manner, without prevarication, equivocation, or half-hearted responses (e.g., Gavin’s “This was ill-advised” does not go far enough). I worry that some scientists are not aware of how bad this whole thing appears. If the answer is that the practice is unethical, then it must stop. Whatever the answer, a precedent needs to be set, and reasoning behind the answer given in a manner which convinces the public.
If the answer is conditional on the motives of those requesting the information, even though it effects data availability for the public as a whole, this needs to be justified i.e. under what circumstances and why.
Indeed.
Lazar // November 22, 2009 at 6:48 pm |
michel,
I think under no circumstances can content justify the actions. I doubt Phil Jones expected to be victim of a hack. What I’ve seen suggests the information is banal — personal stuff i.e. remarks about the work of other scientists which go beyond the politeness of published responses, and stuff which is harmless but could be used for PR purposes.
dhogaza // November 22, 2009 at 11:23 pm |
An interesting hypothetical question, the answer to which apparently has nothing to do with the reality of how CRU has actually dealt with FOI requests.
Oh, BTW, did you miss the bit where McI’s FOI request was turned down? No public right was nullified. McI has the right to make FOI requests. He doesn’t have the right (legal, ethical, or otherwise) to determine whether or not his FOI requests should be accepted and acted upon.
dhogaza // November 22, 2009 at 11:29 pm |
For the record, here are some relevant bits from the rejection of McIntyre’s appeal of the rejection of his FOI request:
In other words, CRU doesn’t have the right to distribute all of the data McIntyre asked for, and the individual organizations’ rights to the data they provided under agreement trumps any FOI considerations.
Not often discussed by the denialist side is this excerpt from the appeal rejection:
Oh, looky, looky, the university’s been working to get agreement from original data rights owners to make it possible to release the data in the future.
Now why don’t we hear much about that from the denialist scream machine?
P. Lewis // November 23, 2009 at 2:47 am |
Re Steven Geiger’s
I realise this may just be a case of “being dragged along with the flow”, but comments such as this really are tiresome and wrongheaded.
The
is just a straw man.
One doesn’t have to release the information requested. There is no absolute right in UK law whereby the recipient of an FoI request has to supply the requested material, not that that means the recipient of the request can escape their obligations under the FoIA.
The EAU/CRU’s policy with regard to the FoIA is virtually (if not wholly) identical across all higher education establishments in the UK.
The EAU/CRU, as with any other public body in the UK, has to issue a Publication Scheme covering all the material it routinely makes available. It does do this.
If the information required is not amongst that routinely made available, then the route is to request the information via, in the case of the EAU/CRU, the Information Policy and Compliance Manager (IPCM). The IPCM will then contact the holder of the data being requested. The holder of that data in consultation with the IPCM (who will guide the data holder on what to do) will come to a conclusion on whether the data being requested can/should be released (in full or with redactions and/or omissions) or cannot/should not be released. In coming to this conclusion they will have in mind the exemptions and instances allowed within the FoIA to reject part/all of a request (see Part I, Sections 12-14 and Part II of the FoIA for the legal exemptions).
If the requester of the information is not happy about the outcome of their request for information to the public body (in this case EAU/CRU), then they can appeal to the independent Information Commissioner (IC) and Information Tribunal. If the IC makes a decision in the requester’s favour, then that institution must release the information requested. There are prescribed courses of action and penalties within the FoIA for failure to comply with the act, any ‘failure to comply’ notices or any enforcement notices, which is basically looked on as a contempt of court IIRC.
Consequently, there are three “refusal to release” scenarios:
(1) The legal procedure for requesting material under the FoIA has not yet been followed to its ultimate conclusion and the material is still legally being refused to the requester — it’s not avoidance.
(2) The legal procedure for requesting material under the FoIA has been followed to its ultimate conclusion and the material is still legally refused to the requester — it’s not avoidance.
(3) The legal procedure for requesting material under the FoIA has been followed to its ultimate conclusion and the material is being illegally refused to the requester — this would be avoidance, in which case the public body, maybe the IPCM or even the data holder (depending on the actual scenario) will be served with the appropriate notice and ultimately the material will be released or the body/person will be held in contempt.
It’s not avoidance in the case of (1) or (2). Release or not is purely in compliance with the FoIA.
It’s not whistleblowing in the case of (1) or (2). It’s theft of legally retained information.
Has (3) happened with the EAU/CRU? Not to my knowledge. So, it’s theft. And those blogging about it and in that process publishing, or allowing to be published, tracts of illegally obtained material are probably dealing in stolen goods to my way of thinking. At the very least it is reprehensible behaviour.
If (3) has happened and it’s not yet been played out in full, then it would be avoidance and I can see that it would be whistleblowing, though the whistleblower would have to be careful not to release information that would not have been allowed to be released anyway and would have to ensure they did not release any material that would fall foul of the provisions of the Data Protection Act.
**********
And Gavin is always “great”, even when dealing with vexatious idiots, of which the blogosphere has in overabundance (and that is not meant to be a dig at you personally Steven).
Hank Roberts // November 23, 2009 at 4:42 am |
> why don’t we hear much about that
That must have been ‘randomly’ not ’selected’ eh?
Kevin McKinney // November 23, 2009 at 4:55 am |
“Now why don’t we hear much about that from the denialist scream machine?”
‘Cause that’s too subtle a “conspiracy” for their script writers. . . so far, at least?
P. Lewis // November 23, 2009 at 5:42 am |
Tamino, my last post, in moderation, has inadvertently been posted to the Open Thread #16 rather than the Hack thread. Can this be corrected by you (without me reposting)?
michel // November 23, 2009 at 7:02 am |
Lazar, my comment was not intended to justify the hacking and distribution of the emails, which is indeed wrong.
It was to wonder about the apparent proposals to delete material held by the parties which is relevant to duplicating their academic results, ahead of or in the light of a pending FOI request.
I would caution again that we do not know for sure that this is part of the unsalted record.
But if, and its a big if, it is authentic, it really does raise the question, why is violation of the FOI preferable to release? After all, what seems to be being proposed has horrendous legal penalties in the UK. Why on earth did the participants think it worth risking them?
Is there something about the data, and the consequences of making it publicly available, that would make this risk worth taking? Otherwise, what on earth would make them take such risks?
Gavin's Pussycat // November 23, 2009 at 11:13 am |
It’s not about the information, it’s about the trust. Preparing a major document like the AR4 involves a heck of a lot of communication — it’s a creative community effort on a scale that is pretty unusual. Most of that communication will be informal, with an expectation of privacy, written by people that know each other, are part of a shared subculture, understand each other from half a word, and share corpora of inside jokes, some of them sick ;-)
Now, imagine if these people have to think, whenever they engage again in that activity, about their mail becoming public property? Would they express themselves as candidly? Sure, most of it is innocent, but would you speak as frankly even with your significant other if you thought the walls had microphones? Would you ‘manage’ in bed?
Already, as is evident also from several of these mails, scientists are thinking, whenever they prepare a text or a picture for publication, ‘how will this be intentionally misunderstood and taken out of context?’. It absorbs lots of energy that could be put to better use — and undoubtedly that’s a feature, not a bug.
Can you say ‘chilling effects’? I expect that that will be the real damage — the community process ending up in the molasses of exposure fear. Much, much more damaging than anything these ‘revelations’ could do.
Sekerob // November 23, 2009 at 1:58 pm |
Curiously, CRUTEMP3v on-line data was rolled back to no further than Feb-2009, whilst HadOBS did update thru Oct-2009. Former comes off an emergency web site.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/climon/data/themi/
Ray Ladbury // November 23, 2009 at 2:31 pm |
Michel,
The real question is why scientists are being treated like criminals MERELY FOR DOING THEIR JOBS!!! Science does not advance by auditing. It advances when scientists argue, and struggle and think and compete with other scientists.
The data issue is merely a pretext for slowing down progress. Most denialists can’t even do anything with the data they already have, and those few that are conversant with data analysis have contributed nothing to the understanding of climate. Sorry, but this isn’t “no child left behind”. This is serious work, and scientists are too busy to hold the hands of a bunch of wannabes, nutjobs and tin-foil-hat conspiracy theorists.
Lazar // November 23, 2009 at 6:34 pm |
Gavin’s Pussycat,
Does the above (which I agree with), in your opinion, justify deleting information? If so, and the case is made to the public that scientists are thus ‘justified’, the effects on public perception are largely unpredictable, but I feel are likely negative — is the trade off (communication efficiency) worth the risk?
Lazar // November 23, 2009 at 6:41 pm |
michel,
I know, I think we both got our wires crossed. Glad to hear it anyway.
Deleting information prior to receiving an FOI request is not illegal, at least in the UK.
An inevitable consequence of such action is that suspicions are raised, whether or not they are justified…
michel // November 23, 2009 at 6:58 pm |
Ray, I have real trouble seeing that they are being treated like criminals for doing their job. I do think they should not be hacked. I do think that much of the correspondence shows ordinary people just getting on with things. But I think the remarks about deleting stuff, apparently ahead of a UK FOI request, is something else.
I have worked in regulated environments, and this stuff is a real no-no. Phil Jones (if the file is not salted, and that remains a rather big if) has actually requested people to delete material. No, that is career terminating.
The thing that strikes me about this is, so much of it could have been avoided just by publishing. I really cannot see why Lonnie Thompson does not just publish his data. i can’t see why Jones would not publish the names of his Chinese stations. Or why Briffa resisted for so long. Or for that matter, why CRU would not publish its raw data and algorithms that generated the global temp series. Or why Mann would not publish the algorithm behind MBH98. After all, its on the basis of this stuff or partly on the basis of it, that we are being asked to spend trillions and radically change our lifestyles.
A lot of this mess could have been avoided had they just published with the remark, here it is, and you are on your own.
That is what my advice to the senior people in the Universities would have been, at any rate. Just publish, and it will go away. Even if there are flaws, they will be found, corrected, and it will go away. But start deleting files, talking about deleting files, and you will end up knee deep in it.
As, unfortunately, they now have.
Lazar // November 23, 2009 at 7:04 pm |
dhogaza,
Sorry, I meant… ‘the public’s potential legal right’. Of course whether a legal right exists is decided by the FOI process — which is nullified if the data is deleted beforehand, hence the ethics issue.
Trust in that is greatly undermined by alleged comments attributed to Phil Jones.
michel // November 23, 2009 at 7:05 pm |
Ray, on a totally different subject, can you point me to some mainstream reference to the effects of CO2? The thing I need is a reference to the logarithmically declining effects of rises, before water vapor feedbacks. If i understand it correctly, the effect of doubling is to raise temps by about 1C for every doubling. Maybe 1.2C. That is the physics of the CO2 IR absorption spectrum.
So we have, roughly:
300-600ppm 1C
600-12000 2C (an extra 1C)
1200-2400 3 C (an extra 1C again)
I know there are other feedback effects on planet earth, but this is only the effect from CO2 absorption.
Is that right as regards the physics of CO2? And is there a mainstream reference which explains it someplace?
Appreciate it if you know of one.
Lazar // November 23, 2009 at 7:46 pm |
Ray,
Agreed that scientists are being treated in a sh**** manner. But they still have ethics. And still must act ethically under such conditions. We *know* what the ethics of the other side are. What are ‘our’ ethics? How do ‘we’ respond? How ‘open’ do we strive to be? What is acceptable, and what is not?
dhogaza // November 23, 2009 at 8:55 pm |
I don’t know why this dead horse needs so much beating, but it wasn’t Briffa’s data to release, and he responded to McI’s request by saying “you need to ask the Russians”, which is exactly the correct response for him to have made.
David B. Benson // November 23, 2009 at 11:00 pm |
michel // November 23, 2009 at 7:05 pm — It might bee in Ray Pierrehumbert’s
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/ClimateBook/ClimateBook.html
Lazar // November 24, 2009 at 12:40 am |
1) I doubt much extra time would be taken using an external server for private stuff and applying a sensibility filter on what goes through official email, e.g. putting ‘I think the work of xxx is fraudulent’ and ‘I’d like to duff xxx up at the next conference’ into the former. This seems more publicly defensible than deleting to avoid FOI requests.
2) There’s a low limit to the rate at which cr*p that needs attention can be produced, as there are only a few individuals like McIntyre that are willing and capable. When more scientists release more code & data; a) the ‘knocking down cr*p’ workload becomes distributed b) public trust in scientists increases c) science speeds up in terms of obtaining data d) encouraging somewhat more speculative ‘what if’ analyses, and e) enabling genuine contributions from the public.
Ray Ladbury // November 24, 2009 at 1:31 am |
Michel, First, wrt the logarithmic dependence. What I’ve seen mostly are “handwaving” derivations–e.g. making use of the power-law shape of the intensity vs. wavelength distribution in the wings of the line to show that the additional energy increases logarithmically. The thing is that the logarithmic dependence makes sense once absorption in the center of the line is “saturated”. I’ll look around, though.
WRT the hack, most of the individuals are not government employees, but employees of various Universities. They are not civil servants, and while their research institution likely retains rights to all communications generated in the course of their research, they should not be subject to FOI requests.
Lazar // November 24, 2009 at 1:40 am |
This PR assault on science and all the dirty tactics catches science wrong-footed and indeterminate. It’s like with openness of code and data, on the one hand, we say; look at GISS aren’t they great?, but in instances where scientists *do not want* to release whatever, we then claim that the data or code would be misused, the recipients wouldn’t know how to use it, etc. The latter may be true, but the inconsistency is what worries… we need to be clear where we stand; a priori ethics, how we act, what is right and what is practical and what are the tradeoffs… instead of improvising ad hoc efforts against successive PR campaigns, which actions taken as a whole end up as contradictory, indeterminate, and in the public eye, somewhat unconvincing.
george // November 24, 2009 at 4:18 am |
Ray said:
That made me laugh, Ray.
brings back memories of all the whining by Climate Audit to get NASA to “Free the code”.
..and after they did, a new wave of whining ensued, because no one seemed to have any clue how to even compile it!
McIntyre is an obvious exception, but I’d have to say that most of these people are simply pathetic.
They don’t deserve the time of day precisely because they have nothing of any value to add to the science, which, after all is what is most important.
I think we have actually reached an absurd state of affairs.
No researcher in his right mind would even consider making data and computer code (and laboratory animals?) available to every Joe Nitwit on the internet who claimed he wanted to “audit” medical research and procedures or to “audit” NASA’s rocket launches (and certainly no one would take him seriously if he did perform such an audit), but for some reason that I will never understand, many people seem to think it just fine and dandy for this to occur with climate science.
michel // November 24, 2009 at 9:24 am |
Well, seems pretty obvious to me. If you will not or cannot publish both data and code, that is your right of course. But in that case, your studies must be banned from having any input into public policy, because they are essentially unreproducible results.
I’ve always felt this, but now its confirmed. We need to go through the IPCC reports with a blue pencil, take out the stuff that depends on secret data or code, and see what is left afterwards.
Of course we have to compensate the data owners to get publication rights. That is not the issue. The issue is, pay or do whatever it takes, but get the data and the code out so the results and studies can be validated.
If it really is true that CRU has lost the data that goes into their global temp series, well, that’s a pity, because it means that series has to be withdrawn. And so for everyone else.
I can’t see any reason why, in a matter of this importance, anyone thinks for a moment that there can be any valid objection to publishing the lot. Certainly the objections of some Russian author to releasing the underlying Briffa data do not count as that. By all means pay any reasonable fee for the rights, but get the stuff out there.
Chris S. // November 24, 2009 at 2:31 pm |
“they are essentially unreproducible results.”
Why is there a continued blind eye being turned to the fact that these “unreproducable results” are supported by a myriad different lines of enquiry (other recronstructions, phenological studies, marine studies, etc. etc. etc.)?
Science, historically, has been carried out by this method – not reprocessing the same data to see if you get the same result, but by collecting different data to see if they show similar (or different) conclusions.
george // November 24, 2009 at 2:57 pm |
Lazar says
The problem is that there is no monolithic “we” in this case. In a free society, the decision about just whom to give one’s data and code to (if anyone) is left up to individual scientists or agreements they have made with other scientists, journals, government funding agencies etc.
While one can encourage a scientist to make all their code and data available (arguably the most desirable situation from the scientific standpoint), one can not force them to do so unless they have already made a legally binding agreement regarding the specific data and code in question (emails are usually not part of such agreements unless a judge has ruled that all emails must be preserved, for a FOI request, for example. There is nothing “illegal” — or even necessarily unethical — about deleting emails when there is no existing legal order in place. If I had been badmouthing someone in my emails because they were harassing me for code or data and generally acting like an a-hole, I would not want those emails getting out to the public either (who do not know the context), so it is very possible that I might encourage the recipients to delete the emails after they had read them. Would that mean I was covering something up? Only my disgust.)
While all this might seem “ad hoc, contradictory, indeterminate and/or unconvincing” to the public, unfortunately, in a free society, that’s simply the way it is.
People simply need to face that reality and live with it. To pretend that things are otherwise is simply one more form of denial.
Ray Ladbury // November 24, 2009 at 3:14 pm |
Michel says, “But in that case, your studies must be banned from having any input into public policy, because they are essentially unreproducible results.”
Horse Puckey! All that is required is that other researchers working with data available to them reproduce the results of your study. Replication in science is not mere repetition. To the extent possible everything, including data gathering, analysis and methodology should all be independent. That is how the state of the art advances and how you avoid repeating errors as well as analyses.
What it’s time for is for idiots who don’t understand the scientific method to stop pretending that they are scientists.
Gavin's Pussycat // November 24, 2009 at 3:46 pm |
michel, sure.
Any suggestions as to where the money should come from?
BTW you would be surprised how little you would end up using that blue pencil. There’s lots of freely available data out there. Some of them linked to at the top of this page.
Gavin's Pussycat // November 24, 2009 at 4:18 pm |
…and michel, precisely where do you draw the line? At the raw data? How raw? I assume you want to see the Matlab code and Excel sheets used in the computations; fine. Do you also need to see the source to matlab and Excel? Do you need blueprints of the thermometers used, the satellite instruments? Psychological profiles f the authors, their medical histories? Of their husbands and wives, dogs and cats? Where do you draw the line?
Chris S. // November 24, 2009 at 4:19 pm |
As this is an Open Thread – this caught my eye: http://www.esa.org/esablog/?p=2083&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Ecotone+%28EcoTone%29
Hank Roberts // November 24, 2009 at 6:36 pm |
Sekerob’s link says:
“The main CRU webserver is currently down.
These pages are being served from the CRU Emergency Webserver.
Not all pages from the main server are available, and what pages are available may be out of date. ”
—-
That most likely means they’re only opening up a machine they know has not been compromised — which would most likely mean for them, as it would for any of us, only relying on a fairly old backup, that we hoped was old enough to have data that wouldn’t be compromised or loaded with a trojan or something like that.
Remember we have been hearing from journalists that the hacked material was sent to them long before it was made public.
I doubt anyone yet knows how far back the original site breach happened.
michel // November 24, 2009 at 9:32 pm |
“…and michel, precisely where do you draw the line? At the raw data? How raw?”
It going to vary from case to case, isn’t it? In the case of the HADCRUT series I guess we want the names of the stations and the temperature readings and the program that was used to generate the plots. In the case of MBH98, the algorithm. The raw data was supplied. In the case of Briffa, he has supplied in response to pressure from the journal, so no more is needed. In the case of the Chinese Stations, it was just a list of 80+ names, so metadata or the lack of it would have been just a page.
But really, you cannot expect to publish a weighted average of stations, some of whose readings have been adjusted, and then refuse to supply either what stations, or how you adjusted them. Not if you want people to spend real money. Don’t care if the results are confirmed by others or not, if its my money, show me.
David B. Benson // November 24, 2009 at 10:38 pm |
michel // November 23, 2009 at 7:05 pm — I just recalled there is a section in IPCC AR4 WG1 report on such approximations, with citations to the literature.
Lazar // November 24, 2009 at 10:39 pm |
george,
I’m not suggesting taking away decision making, I’m asking what target for data availability is best practice, what maintains scientific integrity, what is ethical. What is the scientific consensus?
Either best practice is
a) striving to make as much data & code available as is possible to everyone (ala GISS), or
b) releasing data selectively, and striving to prevent certain individuals (as argued for in some of the emails)
The public upon reading this statement by CRU…
alongside reading an email by Phil Jones where he talks of hiding behind IPR, may be confused… or think scientists are.
Marco // November 25, 2009 at 6:42 am |
Lazar: do take into account that Phil Jones is being HARASSED to release the data. However much he may be willing to provide the data, it’s not an easy task, and being continuously harassed by someone who is never satisfied will put any off to being helpful.
Lazar // November 26, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Marco,
My concern is about a) the reactions of scientists, b) being clear where we stand c) as a guide to future action. If Phil Jones has erred then he can take it on the chin and be welcomed back into the fold after appropriate contrition. All humans are dishonest, it’s what we do, and we’re not even good at it. I’m also not for making excuses for other people’s actions, as it paints them as weaker than they perhaps are or perhaps should be. No blame and no excuses.
David B. Benson // November 24, 2009 at 11:57 pm |
michel // November 24, 2009 at 9:32 pm — All of that is available for GISTEMP, which correlates with HadCRUTv3 at around 97%.
Grow up.
luminous beauty // November 25, 2009 at 2:26 am |
michel,
So scientific reason and the fate of civilization be damned unless the Chinese government, et al, surrender their sovereignty and/or proprietary interests to your personal notions of political correctness ?
How very narcissistic of you.
michel // November 25, 2009 at 7:06 am |
luminous, I don’t know what you are talking about. There was no particular difficulty in publishing the names of the Chinese stations, Jones did so a couple of years ago as a result of FOI. The meta data could then be verified, and turned out not to exist on, from memory, around half of them, and to be not quite as represented by his co-author on another quarter or so. I don’t recall the Chinese government having any problem one way or the other about naming the stations. Why should they?
But to answer the implied question, it is my view that if the data and the code cannot be supplied, the studies have no place in public policy. I think this whether the subject is educational policy or climate or medicine. This is about assessing the evidence. Take the case of the supposed link between MMR and autism.
Would you make public policy on whether to continue to use the vaccine on the basis of studies where we could not know the data or the methods, but only knew an alleged correlation? The fate of the children was at stake after all. What would you make of an educational policy, in part based on twin studies of inherited ability, where the data on which the studies were based was kept secret? Studies on the safety of nuclear power where the data could not be inspected? Climate science is no different from anything else, and gets no free ride.
If its not available, the studies, from a public policy point of view, do not exist. The more people wave their arms about how critically important all this is to the survival of civilization, the less there can be any argument for not releasing the data and the code.
David Benson. Yes, I know there are other studies which correlate. That is not a reason for refusing to release code and data. Its not just HADCRUT. Lets see, please, the MBH algorithm and Dr Thompson’s ice cores, and all the rest of it.
The issue is not making these guys do a huge amount extra work, though you’d think if the fate of civilization is at stake, they maybe should just get on with it as a priority. The issue is, they need to publish the data as they have it and as they used it. It really does not have to be, and should not be, prepared in any special way for publication. If it was good enough to use as input to the peer reviewed studies, it is good enough to be released. And if it is not good enough to be released., well, the studies are not good enough to be included in public policy.
Ray Ladbury // November 25, 2009 at 1:22 pm |
Lazar and Michel,
Science has always had a protocol for obtaining data from a researcher. It’s called “asking nicely”. It does not always work, but it has worked for me about 95% of the time. I do not know of any scientific enterprise that is not run on a shoestring, and making data available to colleagues takes time and effort (read $$). If the ones one is releasing the data to are not conversant with best practices of how to use the data, you can count on that work being multiplied many fold. Moreover, merely replicating the same analysis with the same data carries very little value. If a researcher does not have some expectation that a colleague will get more out of the data, then what incentive do they have for cooperation? It is my opinion that McI could have saved everybody a whole lot of trouble if 1)he’d asked nicely, and 2)he’d had more skill at data analysis to bring to the table. But then trouble was his agenda from the beginning.
george // November 25, 2009 at 5:14 pm |
Lazar
I think coming to a “consensus” (among ALL scientists?) on such an issue is highly impractical — if not impossible.
There are far too many extraneous factors involved (proprietary, personal, legal, etc) that I just don’t know how one could ever arrive at a consensus (whatever that means).
goodness, it’s hard enough to come to a scientific consensus on scientific matters for which there actually is a “right” answer (or at least a best approximation to it)
But there is no correct (or even best) answer when it comes to data and code release policy — precisely because it’s not purely a scientific question.
Lazar continues
To make “as much data & code available as is possible to everyone”??
How much is “as much as possible”? Isn’t that in itself a judgment call ? ( making the policy of limited usefulness)
“Possibility” depends on lots of things, like available resources, for example.
Not only that, who is to be the arbiter? (gets back to personal decisions)
NASA GISS may be underfunded in their opinion, but they have far more resources available than the average university researcher.
Second, while “striving to prevent certain individuals ” may be the goal in some cases I think it is inaccurate to use that example as the only possibility other than a)
There are LOTS of quite legitimate — practical, legal, financial, even ethical — reasons why a researcher may not make data available to every Tom Dick and Mary who requests it.
Finally, to make a “data and code release” policy practical, someone (or some body) not only has to establish it, but someone (or some body) has to ‘enforce” it — or at the very least, ensure that there are some negative ramifications for those who “violate” it.
I just don’t see how such a “consensus” on this would ever come about or how it would ever be workable even if it were possible.
luminous beauty // November 25, 2009 at 5:47 pm |
michel,
Very rarely do pharmaceutical companies make their proprietary data of drug trials publicly available. Only in the case of lawsuits, and even then certain metadata is withheld, for obvious reasons.
The names of those Chinese villages were supplied after negotiation with the Chinese government to alter the existing agreement, and not under FOIA, but as a normal sharing of information per UEA policy.
According to independent examination of pertinent records by researchers at the University of Beijing supplied to the Office of Research Integrity at the State University of New York – Albany, your, Steve McIntyre’s and Douglas Keenan’s speculations from ignorance are wrong about Chinese metadata.
But, I suppose, those independent institutions must all be in on the fraud.
You all remind me of the adage:
“The whole world is crazy but for me and thee . . . and your erratic behavior is starting to make me paranoid”
luminous beauty // November 25, 2009 at 6:11 pm |
It would be interesting to know how often, when it comes time to publish, funding resources have been used up and researchers have to pay some or all publication costs out of their own pocket.
Magnus W // November 25, 2009 at 7:36 pm |
Might fit here… If some one have time to respond to the jorunal.
AGW proven wrong again…
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ef800581r
Marco // November 26, 2009 at 6:44 am |
Essenhigh AGAIN? He’s published something very similar before, also then failing to understand the definition of “residence time” as discussed by the IPCC. Sigh.
David B. Benson // November 25, 2009 at 7:51 pm |
michel // November 25, 2009 at 7:06 am — I say again, grow up!
Noboody would use the data, so a complete waste of time.
Scientific replication is adequately served by the three main global surface temperature products, NCDC, HadCRUTv3 and GISTEMP. More demand for “data” is simply harassment.
Which you are parroting.
guthrie // November 25, 2009 at 9:53 pm |
I entirely support the move towards more openness with datas and models, eg archiving of it all online when the related papers are published. But to chastise climatologists for not doing so over the last decade is insane. It takes time to introduce changes and improvements and agree on what to do with new opportunities, and science is a lot more conservative than some people think.
Hank Roberts // November 25, 2009 at 11:39 pm |
In other news, a candidate for the “Own Good Advice, Neglected” category, ESR of “How to ask questions the smart way” doesn’t.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447
michel // November 26, 2009 at 1:37 am |
…Office of Research Integrity at the State University of New York….
Luminous, very interesting, do you have a reference?
David Benson, the request to people to grow up is not an argument. The young sometimes fail to realize this.
If its fit to base a study on, then when the future of humanity is at stake, its fit to be published. Think of the children, David. I know I do, often,
Timothy Chase // November 26, 2009 at 3:35 am |
Gavin’s Pussycat wrote:
michel responded:
michel, if it is on a case by case basis, who gets to decide?
Perhaps in the first case you have decided that all you want are the names of the stations, the raw temperature readings and the program. But what if someone else wishes to go further? Lets look at the rest of what you were responding to and imagine that Gavin was addressing someone else by the name of “Michael” instead of “michel” — who might not be quite as reasonable…
Gavin’s Pussycat also wrote:
You see, these things matter. Just recently there was an issue regarding how you measure sea temperature. With a bucket that caught water, or through a water intake? This made a difference in the 1940s as the British switched from one to the other.
But to take your first example, what about the height at which the temperature is taken? If the thermometer is lower it will be closer to the skin temperature. What about the direction of the wind? The shape and constitution of the terrain? This may matter. Was the thermometer in the shade? Did they switch thermometers? What color was the thermometer? What time of day was it? michel, these things might not matter to you, but they may matter a great deal to Michael. And these are just some of the aspects one might wish to consider regarding the measurement of just land temperature.
What about satellites? The orbit will most certainly matter. Has it decayed? What about the time of day that it was over a specific point? What direction were the instruments pointed? How were the instruments constructed? What physical principles were they relying upon? How often the satellite gets tested? Are such tests “hands-on”? What algorithms did they use for compensating for orbital decay — assuming they weren’t in the position to put a new satellite in orbit and validate that orbit each year? What of the quality of the materials that are used in the construction of the instruments — and the instruments used in the validation of the satellite’s instruments?
And who is going to pay for your education so that you can follow each and every step that is required to “validate” the data from the satellite? To validate other sources of data such as the proxies for studying paleoclimate temperatures? And not just you but every Tom, Dick and Harry who claims that he has a right to stop everything until he personally can follow each and every step?
What of the conspiracy nuts? The people who are in the pay of Exxon but who won’t admit it? The dim-witted? They work for their money, too. What of the libertarians who won’t be satisfied with any taxes whatsoever — so long as they can come up with some sort of excuse for not trusting the conclusions of science? But if that is the case, how are we going to pay for the education of Michael, Tom, Dick and Harry? And how long will it take to educate them until everyone is satisfied? It would appear they have a great deal to learn. And it would appear that you do as well.
Kevin McKinney // November 26, 2009 at 4:31 am |
Magnus:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Another_Nail_In_The_Coffin_Of_Global_Warming.jpg
IOW: rusty, dull, and bent.
Lazar // November 26, 2009 at 12:32 pm |
george,
What I mean to say is — motivation; what outcome is ‘good’ or ‘best’ ‘of itself’; what is the ideal to be strived for; what should be the intention of a scientist. Decide what to aim for first, then consider constraints right?
If an individual intends to ‘hide behind IPR’, that demonstrates an intention to avoid releasing data, not just to one individual, but to the world.
Ok, let’s simplify;
a) Open source data and code
b) Data and code supplied on request to all
c) Data and code supplied on request to some
d) Refusal to supply data and code to anyone
What ‘of itself’ is the ideal situation? What should a scientist aim for?
A few additional points not covered in 2);
Culture is becoming increasingly open. The net is an almost lawless source of great potential for new goods and evils. It’s the wild west.
Open access can produce timewasting nonsense like ‘global warming stopped in xxxx’ or the more sophisticated Yamal dendro kerfuffle. On the other hand, most likely there would not exist wonderful public education sources like Open Mind, nor productive collaborations as seen with Tamino and Gavin Schmidt, James Annan et al., or between Tamino and Ian Jolliffe.
I strongly believe that data and code produced with public funds gives the public a legitimate claim absent national security issues.
Lazar // November 26, 2009 at 1:11 pm |
george,
It is not my intent to diminish the relevance of the wasting of scientists time or other tactics that result from data availability (or lack thereof). I would like that we become clear to ourselves and to the public what our aims, methods, and justifications are. It worries me when I read Michael Tobis, James Annan, Gavin Schmidt and others admit that parts of the emails cause them concern, but not discuss why, and spend their time knocking down the obvious misrepresentations — not that the latter does not need to be done, but that we need to face the stuff we’re unsure of head on.
Lazar // November 26, 2009 at 2:44 pm |
Ray,
There are a growing number (I’ve lost count) of projects that are dedicated to the collation and open electronic distribution of data series, particularly for the environmental sciences. Funding exists for what a number of scientists clearly view as a pressing need.
Lazar // November 26, 2009 at 2:54 pm |
george,
Earlier you write;
You seem to be implying that providing open access is irresponsible. In that case, should we be encouraging GISS & GHCN to take down their data and code, and do themselves a favor by saving resources?
Simple questions like the above can be asked and answered, and refined and asked again. It is imv more important that we have a set of reasonably self-consistent answers that are widely shared, than what the answers are… e.g. consider the analogy with rule of law.
Ray Ladbury // November 26, 2009 at 4:35 pm |
Lazar, while I am generally in favor of openness, I think the way climate denialists have used access to what data they have to imped progress in science provides an excellent argument against wide sharing of data, and particularly code.
It is certainly arguable that if you are sufficiently educated to be able to use such material then you will be sufficiently educated to do the work yourself. I don’t see the benefit to science. Certainly, it will not quiet the denialists, who are not members of the reality-based community in any case.
Hank Roberts // November 26, 2009 at 5:00 pm |
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinion/ssi/images/Toles/s_11262009_520.gif
michel // November 26, 2009 at 6:47 pm |
The US and the UK made their decision on this when they passed the FOI legilslation. The matter is settled. Now its just a question of complying with it.
Is it right to have FOI legislation? I don’t know. A pure free market Friedmanite view would argue that if there is a free market in information, then it should eventually require and deliver just the right amount of openness. Friedman famously argued in the same vein that we should not regulate the practice of medicine or law. Good practitioners will acquire reputations, get insured, and so on. No need to regulate.
I tend to think this understates the amount of friction in free market systems of this sort, and that it does not take account of the costs of delay in the market adjusting.
But whatever the merits, we seem to have made the decision, and now Jones and others need to just get on and obey the law. If the law says you have to release your code, do so, and be gracious about it. The law does not provide that you may judge the motives or affiliations of those requesting the data, so you may not.
I am not particularly impressed with the whimperings of the participants about how inconvenient this all is for them. For one thing, the law just says you must release. It does not say it has to be turnkey, or that you have to support it. For another, fi the future of the human race is at stake, and if you are playing an active role in saving humanity from extinction, you must expect some inconvenience and long hours. Yes, this may be a real crisis.
In that case, get the data and the code out there, and silence the skeptics once and for all.
No I do not know exactly where to draw the lines, nor do I think that is any objection to the principle. It is always difficult to draw lines in law, this is no worse than lots of other areas, and we find our way through.
dhogaza // November 26, 2009 at 8:13 pm |
Just look at how Eric Raymond is using a snippet of code to declare scientific fraud, malfeasance, etc on the part of CRU people.
dhogaza // November 26, 2009 at 8:16 pm |
Who isn’t complying with it? Certainly not CRU, which reviewed and rejected the requests, including on appeal.
The law allows for rejection, you know, it would be *noncompliance* to release information *not* subject to the FOIA.
And the UK law allows for rejection on broader grounds than the US law does.
Likewise, the CEI requests to NASA are bogus, actually far more bogus, than those to CRU.
Yeah, it certainly shut up Eric Raymond, didn’t it?
dhogaza // November 26, 2009 at 8:18 pm |
It does no such thing. Among other things, the UK law allows for cost considerations when a FOI request is made, along with judging whether the FOI is “vexatious” or “harassing”.
Lazar // November 26, 2009 at 9:56 pm |
Ray,
Yep. And I don’t care too much what form of answers are agreed upon to the issues that have arisen as a result of the hacking… my main point is that they are agreed upon, that we actually discuss the issues, and that they are cogently argued for like above. Personally, I agreed with selective access ’bout a year back, but recently have changed to supporting open access, certainly the hacking has clarified things a lot in my mind…
Hank Roberts // November 26, 2009 at 11:07 pm |
Well, Michel, then you’ll be glad to know the law did its job, the FOI requests were evaluated and answered — they were rejected.
That’s the law.
You were saying?
By the way:
http://www.ginandtacos.com/?p=1052
“Like there are allegedly no atheists in foxholes, I intend to prove that there are no libertarians in airplanes.”
Riccardo // November 26, 2009 at 11:12 pm |
Freedom of information is not a passpartout to whatever happen inside an agency. There are considerations, procedures and limitations.
For example, there’s the need to distinguish between personal records and the agency records, the former usually not covered by FOIA.
Also, relevant to the CRU hack, not all emails are treated the same; some may be deleted unless they have already been requested under FOI.
Agencies might have records of which they do not have complete control, e.g. something they’ve got under a non-disclosure agreement or protected by copyright or patent.
But the matter is quite complicated, it varies somewhat from country to country and definitely i’m no expert. For sure, it is not like “you can get anything you want, under FOIA!”
Deech56 // November 27, 2009 at 12:04 am |
RE Hank Roberts
OK – I took the bait. ESR didn’t bother to go to RC because Gavin is part of the “Team”. Looks like he does have an agenda.
george // November 27, 2009 at 5:15 am |
Lazar says
Actually, it’s not a matter of irresponsibility.
It’s a matter of “why should I, as a researcher, waste my time and resources to make data and code available to some Joe Schmo who has no scientific credentials (no papers, no degrees in the relevant area, etc) and thus in all likelihood neither the knowledge nor expertise to add anything of value to the science?
It’s really kind of absurd to expect someone with no background in climate science to even understand most of the issues involved.
It’s analogous to a junior high student asking for the data from the latest elementary particle experiments. It’s just ridiculous.
And the absurdity of such an expectation is actually born out by the “science” [sic] that comes out of the “skeptic” camp in this regard from the data and code that HAS been released.
Most people would question the value of having nuclear scientists provide data on leading edge elementary particle physics to someone who has no background in physics — because there IS no scientific value. None.
But for some strange reason, many people seem to think that there IS value in having climate scientists waste precious time, money and effort to provide data and code to people who have no background or expertise in climate science.
That’s a completely contradictory (and illogical) position to take: to (rightly) question the value in the first case (elementary particle physics) and not question the value (ie, believe there is value) in the second.
I would encourage anyone who believes otherwise to please point me to the groundbreaking climate research that has been done by rank amateurs using the relatively large amount of data and code that IS available (eg, from NASA GISS).
The whole call for “data and code release” in the case of climate science is NOT primarily about science at all and I think it is actually very naive to believe that it is.
Gavin's Pussycat // November 27, 2009 at 6:21 am |
That’s the twist, innit. Seeing how McIntyre cannot even find data sitting on his own hard disk, or code that’s a polite email away — this is just harrassment, plain and simple.
BTW Timothy, most of the satellite (meta-)data you describe is already freely available — although not on-line, you have to ask for it, due to the huge volume.
BTW2 about my nom de plume, which I chose in the spur of the moment years ago and held on to after Tamino took a liking to it, is an expression of admiration for Gavin Schmidt. I am not GS. But becoming more and more proud at being his namesake ;-)
michel // November 27, 2009 at 7:29 am |
Hank, look. We could take the view that what is made available is entirely up to the researchers. I think that is your view. Realize however that when this is done, and they refuse, it has consequences. The downside is that fraud when it happens takes an awful long time to be discovered, as with the Burt twin studies. And insinuations of fraud or incompetence become much easier to make plausibly.
There are downsides to a degree of openness enforced by regulation, also. They include the burden placed on researchers if they feel obligated to answer ill-informed criticisms of their work.
My feeling is that we are dealing here with very large financial commitments to public policies. Also to choices which are alleged to affect the future of human life on earth.
We don’t have to have a democracy, but if we are going to, if we are going to deal with emissions through elected bodies and through regulatory agencies, we have to make available the data that underlie these policies. There really is no way not to, and regardless of the chorus of anger about the very idea, here, there is no reason not to.
Think again about Burt, not about your favorite topic. Think about the implications of basing educational policy toward English black and working class people on the basis of twin studies where the twins never existed. Think about how long it took to find out that they didn’t exist.
I am not talking about fraud in climate science, before anyone gets all hot under the collar, or suggesting there is any. I am talking about social policy on open access, and explaining carefully that leaving it up to the researcher as a general policy has real costs, and ones that can be hard to forecast, because you cannot leave it up to the researcher in climate science and make it open for other researchers.
If you want to get your head around this issue, you have to stop thinking about it as a question whether climate scientists should reveal, and think about it as how much data needs to be given open access on public policy questions. Before we implement nationwide screening for access to higher education at age 11 on the basis of twin studies, we need to know that the twins existed, and that the passage from their scores to the plots and correlations was properly done. We need access. After all, the future of the children is at stake.
Deech56 // November 27, 2009 at 2:11 pm |
RE Gavin’s Pussycat // November 27, 2009 at 6:21 am
You mean Hansen’s Bulldog? ;-)
Igor Samoylenko // November 27, 2009 at 4:11 pm |
Michel,
Firstly, as it has been pointed out many times, the data is (generally) available. All you need to do is ask politely.
Secondly, who do you propose will do all this validation and verification (to detect errors, fraud etc) once all the code and data is released?
Other scientists in the field? As it has been pointed out to you many times, this is not how results are validated. No one validates the result of a paper by re-running the same code against the same data. Results are validated when they independently replicated by independent research teams.
Outsiders? It is very unlikely outsiders will make any serious contribution simply by looking at the code and data (nor can they be expected to). Possible but unlikely. It is very likely that they will miss something, misinterpret (intentionally or unintentionally), misunderstand what they are looking at etc. See Watts web site for example of the outsiders getting their knickers in the twist over the most elementary basics. As such their net contribution to improving our overall understanding of climate science is likely to be negligible.
If you disagree, point me please to a substantial contribution made by outsiders to any code or data that is currently publicly available. ModelE is openly available on-line. Apart from the general criticism of the way code is written and the documentation, have sceptics made any improvements or corrections to the model?
And finally, the confidence in any particular result or a conclusion is proportional to the number of independent lines of evidence that support that particular result or conclusion. Anomalous warmth of the last several decades in the context of the last two thousand years for example is supported by a vast array of independent studies, undertaken by independent research groups using very different data sets and techniques. Mann’s 1998 paper is only one single piece out of literary a mountain of other supporting evidence.
Nobody will base an important public policy on a result of a single paper. If the result is new and important, independent research groups will attempt not only to replicate and confirm it but also to understand the underlying causes and extend it as much as they can. This is when errors and fraud will be detected. Only after the independent replication the result will gain acceptance and support of the majority of scientists in the field and only then this result can serve as a basis of a public policy.
Once again: independent verification and validation of any important results is what increases our confidence in those results, not public availability of the code and data all and by itself.
Can you point me to any proposed or adopted public policy that is based on the results of a single paper (regardless of whether the code and data are publicly available or not)?
So, to your main points:
Fraud and errors are most reliably detected by independent verification and validation, which is precisely what happens already in science generally, not just climate science. If you disagree, point me to any example of a fraudulent or erroneous paper that survived independent replication by several independent research teams?
Public policy decisions are not made based on the results of a single paper but rather on the results that have multiple, independent lines of supporting evidence regardless of whether the underlying data and code are openly available to everyone or not.
Ray Ladbury // November 27, 2009 at 5:23 pm |
An example of the ilk we are up against:
http://www.conservapedia.com/Talk:Black_hole#Falsifiability
Excerpt: “There’s a broader point here. Why the big push for black holes by liberals, and big protests against any objection to them? If it turned out empirically that promoting black holes tends to cause people to read the Bible less, would you still push this so much? Certainly there is no practical justification to pushing black holes; no one will ever be helped by them in any way.–Andy Schlafly 12:03, 13 November 2009 (EST) ”
Interestingly, this is the same group who loves the Bible so much they want to purge it of liberal bias:
http://conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible_Project
If folks are motivated more by ideological purity than by evidence, an evidence-based system like science cannot accommodate them.
Hank Roberts // November 27, 2009 at 6:47 pm |
http://imgs.xkcd.com/store/imgs/correlation_shirt_300.png
Hank Roberts // November 27, 2009 at 6:53 pm |
Michel, you’re making up nonsense like this:
> We could take the view that what is made
> available is entirely up to the researchers.
This is ridiculous. You can look up the real situation instead of coming up with these flights of fancy.
“Under section 14(1) of the Freedom of Information Act, public authorities are not obliged to comply with vexatious requests. Whether a request is vexatious is determined by the information requested, not the person making the request. An individual can make as many requests for information as he or she wishes. Each of their requests must be considered on a case-by-case basis (although it may be appropriate to reject substantially similar requests under section 14(2), see Repeated requests, below, and the provisions on aggregating costs may be relevant, see Fees and aggregation.”
“Vexatiousness needs to be assessed with reference to all the circumstances of an individual case. However, if a request is not a genuine endeavour to access information for its own sake, but is aimed at disrupting the work of an authority, or harassing individuals in it, then it may well be vexatious.”
http://www.justice.gov.uk/guidance/foi-procedural-vexatious.htm
“the consensus of expert opinion based upon systematic reviews can either result in a solid and confident unanimous opinion, a reliable opinion with serious minority objections, a genuine controversy with no objective resolution, or simply the conclusion that we currently lack sufficient evidence and do not know the answer. It can also lead, of course, to a solid consensus of expert opinion combined with a fake controversy manufactured by a group driven by ideology or greed and not science. The tobacco industry’s campaign of doubt against the conclusion that smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer is one example. The anti-vaccine movement’s fear-mongering about vaccines and autism is another.”
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=2741
David B. Benson // November 27, 2009 at 7:22 pm |
michel // November 26, 2009 at 1:37 am — Once again you missed the point about behaving responsibly. Many others here have subsequently shown you the error of your ways so I shan’t repeat and yet repeat again…
Lazar // November 27, 2009 at 10:24 pm |
Tamino, has TCO been permabanned?
[Response: No. But I now have far less tolerance for irritation.]
Lazar // November 27, 2009 at 11:54 pm |
Kudos to Judith Curry and to Joe Romm for putting this up.
Hank Roberts // November 28, 2009 at 4:32 am |
Somebody in a thread at Deltoid
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/11/new_zealand_climate_science_co.php#comment-2108291
is promoting this as the current science–”NASA’s own words” –
http://spacescience.spaceref.com/newhome/headlines/essd06oct97_1.htm
It starts like this:
“Accurate “Thermometers” in Space
The State of Climate Measurement Science
October 2, 1997
Just how accurate are space-based measurements of the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere? In a recent edition of Nature, scientists Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and Dr. Roy Spencer of NASA/Marshall describe in detail just how reliable these measurements are…..”
Yes, Skepticalscience has the refutation.
dhogaza // November 28, 2009 at 6:20 am |
Curry’s become a tool, really, not intentionally, but really … she equates the moral position of McI etc with that of those doing science …
In the face of the illegal – felonious – e-mail hacks, the continuous accusations that all of climate science is fraudulent, a hoax (neatly but with “plausible deniability” orchestrated by McI).
I’m sorry, I’ve lost my respect for her.
Timothy Chase // November 28, 2009 at 7:08 am |
Ray Ladbury wrote:
Well, just remember Luke 23:34 where Jesus states, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
Wait a second: that is one of the liberal passages they intend to strike. Never mind.
Hank Roberts // November 28, 2009 at 7:18 am |
Speaking of thermometers, here’s a page for anyone who has one of those increasingly available handheld infrared thermometers:
http://littleshop.physics.colostate.edu/docs/CMMAP/tenthings/IRThermometer.pdf
michel // November 28, 2009 at 9:00 am |
I don’t understand, and I don’t think many people outside the ghetto do, and fewer and fewer people inside it do either now they are thinking about it, what would be so terrible about publishing the algorithms from MBH98. For instance. Or what would be so terrible about Dr Thompson publishing hs raw data. Or why Briffa would not publish for so long, given that he did finally, in response to nothing more serious than a firm journal request. The argument that the sky will fall if they do is simply stupid.
But that’s fine. If climate science wants to run things so that no-one can tell whether the computation of the HADCRU indices was done properly (judging from the code comments in the harry readme file, there is some question about this), and if it wants to rely on the suggestion that if you have doubts, go roll your own, that is fine. If it wants to argue that you are not allowed to see how these results are generated, because you can see that other studies agree, and you have no acquaintance with the concept of a non-sequitur, that’s fine too. If Jones wants to argue that something dreadful will happen if he releases the names of 80 surface stations, that is fine too. I do not really want to tell climate science how to behave.
What I am clear about, and more and more people are getting clear about, including people like Hulme, Monbiot, Curry, and Lazar in this forum, now apparently Zorita also, is that if this is how they are going to behave, none of these studies and individuals have any place in the public policy debate.
See, when Curry posts on CA and WUWT, when Monbiot calls twice for Jones to resign, this particular argument has been lost. The AGW hypothesis may be correct. But this particular way of trying to manage the public policy issue, its over. They are going to have to choose between disclosure and irrelevance, and quite a few insiders are realizing this now.
[Response: What's truly irrelevant are claims that this brouhaha in any way alters the conclusions of an objective, scientific evaluation of the information. CRU is too secretive for you? GISS is an open book. MBH98 hasn't been disclosed to your satisfaction? Their latest paleo reconstruction is online -- data and programs alike -- for anyone to reproduce.
Those who obsess about criticising data/code availability do so not because they have valid reason to doubt the results of climate science, but because they staunchly refuse -- for ideological, not scientific reasons -- to accept the truth that's right in front of their eyes.
And the ones who crow loudest about misconduct by climate scientists are usually exactly the same people who engage in the most outrageous misconduct themselves.
I'll happily put the behavior of all climate scientists under the microscope -- AFTER we've done something about the really important issue, dangerous climate change caused by human activity. Until then, pontificating about the need for more data transparency is nothing but a sham, a diversionary tactic by the delusional or the downright deceptive. Our kids will pay a heavy price for their shameful behavior]
Nathan // November 28, 2009 at 10:12 am |
LAzar
I am curious as to why she didn;t articulate exactly what they did they was wrong…
Lazar // November 28, 2009 at 1:36 pm |
Nathan,
You need to read the linked CA (urgh) post.
Ray Ladbury // November 28, 2009 at 1:36 pm |
Michel, as I have said repeatedly, science has a protocol for obtaining data and code. Ask nicely. Just so you understand, a Congressional subpoena is not asking nicely and tends to poison the well for future cooperation.
What I would like to understand is why folks like you are so keen to get ahold of “data” when you have refused all along to look at evidence. I mean, you must admit, you kind of have to go out of your way to avoid evidence of climate change. Is it that you guys are desperately afraid that somewhere there might be a piece of evidence you haven’t denied yet?
Lazar // November 28, 2009 at 1:52 pm |
dhogaza,
She may be rather uncritical, perhaps a bit naive, of the PR side of CA, but she spares the ’skeptics’ nothing…
Kevin McKinney // November 28, 2009 at 1:59 pm |
Dhog, FWIW, I didn’t read Dr. Curry as proposing an equivalence between McI and climatologists–she just said that it would be good policy to take serious skeptical arguments (if any) seriously. No moral judgements stated or, as far as I could tell, implied.
My two cents.
Deech56 // November 28, 2009 at 2:37 pm |
RE
Michel, I respect the fact that you come here to engage a host and readership that does not agree with you, but your characterization of the Briffa/Yamal affair is verging on being a zombie lie – it never dies. The Yamal data belonged to the Russians (a fact that Science acknowledged in their response to McIntyre’s repeated requests) and when the Russian were co-authors on the latest paper, the request for information became routine and reasonable.
For MBH98/99: That’s old, but pioneering, science. Evaluation of those papers now should be based on confirmation from other published sources. Mann, et al. 2008 is really their gold standard.
I do agree, though, there are benefits to having the data public, but to think that this will answer the critics is mistaken. Just look at the “Y2K bug”. How many times to we have to hear that 1934 was the warmest year?
Ray Ladbury // November 28, 2009 at 3:41 pm |
Kevin McKinney says, “Dhog, FWIW, I didn’t read Dr. Curry as proposing an equivalence between McI and climatologists–she just said that it would be good policy to take serious skeptical arguments (if any) seriously. ”
OK. We’re waiting….
Hank Roberts // November 28, 2009 at 4:05 pm |
> what would be so terrible about
> Dr Thompson publishing hs raw data.
You realize his raw data is in the form of long cylinders of frozen water, and it’s read destructively? This isn’t trivial work
In at least some cases — I went looking for this years ago, and you can probably find it yourself if you make the effort — OSU would be violating the agreement the granting agency made when they funded the expedition.
OSU is required to share the information with researchers in the same field who are willing to pay a portion of the costs of acquiring it. That’s actually quite a stunning deal — a researcher who wants to do a study of an ice core can simply get a grant covering part of what doing that cost years ago, rather than what it would cost now.
You can, of course, say that once anyone gives anyone else some money to do science, they have to give all their results away free.
But you’ll need a big refrigerated truck, and have to realize that the archive is by now probably unique in the world and can’t be replaced.
You sure you want to give any idiot with an icepick the right to take a chunk off of it?
dhogaza // November 28, 2009 at 4:15 pm |
She exempts McI, and holds him up to be a serious worker doing valuable science and therefore proving that blog science is a valuable adjunct to traditional, peer-reviewed science.
Lazar // November 28, 2009 at 5:02 pm |
george,
Agreed that amateurs are unlikely to contribute greatly, but perhaps a little is better than nothing. McI contributed a little (problems with decentered PCA in Monte Carlo significance testing and the incompleteness of methodology descriptions–that the former did not significantly impact conclusions was by luck not by design.) I think a principled case can be made against excluding individuals simply for lacking formal training but who may possess genuine interests and abilities, particularly as self-education becomes ever more within reach. A principled case can be made against witholding data from the public which funded its provision–many (most?) scientists are public employees and ‘their’ data is the inheritance of future generations. Granted that, talking of access on request (b&c), satisfying requests sacrifices resources, but I’m not convinced that this is an important factor, particularly as data *should* be properly archived and code *should* be clean and commented for future reference. The incremental costs of access on request are also an argument (among others) for server-based open access.
In any case, it’s not clear-cut, at least to the scientific community. So far, in favor of giving McI data on request; Judith Curry, Jonathan Overpeck *. Against; Phil Jones *, Ben Santer *.
* from emails.
It’s good this is being discussed.
Ray Ladbury // November 28, 2009 at 6:24 pm |
Lazar, No McI did not contribute anything of value. Hell, by the time he had identified the issues in MBH98, that article was history of science rather than science!
This isn’t “No Child Left Behind”, and we can’t waste valuable scientific resources trying to educate the ineducable.
Ray Ladbury // November 28, 2009 at 6:43 pm |
Lazar,
For the record, just to be clear, I have no objection to giving out data (where legal) to anyone who asks for it. The pathetic inability of the denialists to put it to any use merely highlights their ineptitude.
What I object to are distribution of algorithms (even between legitimate climate researchers) and anything that takes climate scientists away from doing climate science.
David B. Benson // November 28, 2009 at 8:12 pm |
All the serious arguments were thrashed out several decades ago. Read “The Discovery of Global Warming” by Spencer Weart:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.html
Put bluntly, there are no, none, zip, nada, alternative hypotheses about the major elements of earth’s climate. Indeed, all it takes is some understanding of thermo and a bit of radiative physics, although I’ll state that the latter is moderately difficult.
Nathan // November 28, 2009 at 10:48 pm |
Lazar
I looked at her essay on CA, and all she does is announce tht she thinks they (the email writers) have acted badly. She doesn;t give any evidence of what they did. So I am curious as to what she actually knows. Does she somehow have more access to the information? Is there some special context she is aware of?
I guess itjust reads like some opinion piece, and there’s no substance. Why would she write something like that?
Lazar // November 29, 2009 at 12:32 am |
Nathan,
Here (I don’t agree with every stt);
… although Curry does not list precisely the emails or give quotes, they are easy to guess at. She describes a standard for scientific openness by which it is easy to contrast with practices described in the emails;
Here Curry makes two points similar to ones I made in a response to george;
Kevin McKinney // November 29, 2009 at 12:33 am |
Ray, just to clarify, I’m actually not waiting for those skeptical “serious arguments” any more than you are. (Hey, the millenium already arrived, and no change. . .)
Hence the “if any.”
Hank Roberts // November 29, 2009 at 2:11 am |
Nathan, you’re just gossip-mongering.
Go where you read what you wonder about and ask the person directly.
michel // November 29, 2009 at 7:11 am |
“You realize his raw data is in the form of long cylinders of frozen water, and it’s read destructively? This isn’t trivial work”
I don’t understand the alleged problem. Does this make it difficult or impossible for Dr Thompson to post his raw data on a web or ftp site?
He must have had the data in usable form, or he could not have done the processing on it to produce his articles. He must have already done the destructive readings. He did do it, right? I don’t understand Ray L’s point for the same reason. Getting your stuff in order, so that you can do a quality job, IS doing climate science.
Its like saying, I don’t want those guys tidying up their code, putting in comment lines, getting rid of global variables and do loops. You have to do that anyway, to have quality code. Its like having a filing system. Do you want them to not have a filing system, so they can spend more time on climate science? Get real. Do you want carpenters to stop sharpening their tools so they can spend more time shaping wood?
All he has to do is post it. He does not have to reply to questions on it, he doesn’t have to correspond with anyone about it. Just post whatever it was he used, in the form that he used it. Then let anyone get at it, do any sort of analysis they want, publish whatever they want about it.
The truth will emerge, idiots will be discredited. You have to have faith in human nature and reason. What is for sure is, keeping it secret just gives ammunition to the insinuations of skeptics. And I can understand this, if you have your data organized enough that it can be used reliably to do a quality study, there would be no problem putting it out there. So if you or a group of you consistently refuse to do it, people ask why.
In the end, its about public policy. You want to make policy on the basis of your studies, release the data. You won’t, in the end your stuff is going to be excluded from the debate.
Lazar // November 29, 2009 at 2:37 pm |
Psst… another excellent open education resource;
… there are some fascinating lectures by David Mackay (that David Mackay), he’s one smart guy.
Ray Ladbury // November 29, 2009 at 4:18 pm |
Michel says, “You have to have faith in human nature and reason. ”
No, Michel, you have to put faith in continual vigilance against self-deception. That is what science is. And if you honestly think that someone will be able to put raw data on the web and then never have to answer the questions of idiots, then you are astoundingly naive. Have you even bothered to follow the Herculean task Gavin has undertaken on RC. Do you not think that this time could be better spent with Gavin actually doing climate science rather than trying to bring along the “slow class”.
And there is no secret data. Anyone with the proper bona fides could go to the original data sources, ask politely and get access to the data. What is more, because it is GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE, the trends should not depend on exactly which data sources one uses as long as they take care to make sure the data used are representative. That is how science works–not by reproducing line for line the data and code of the original work. If people do not understand this they have no business mucking about, because the result will be the same as MicroWatts Station study–lots of hype and zero effect.
Again, my objection is not to independent verification. Science provides for that. My objection is to idiots mucking about with zero knowledge and legitimate scientists having to clean up the damage.
Gavin's Pussycat // November 29, 2009 at 6:30 pm |
Michel, from what I understand the ‘raw’ data are in large numbers of notebooks. Aritmetic averages, computed by hand, have been entered into files and are available digitally.
The question really boils down to if wish to extend your faith in human nature and reason to Lonnie Thompson’s team’s ability and willingness to correctly calculate arithmetic averages ;-)
luminous beauty // November 29, 2009 at 10:22 pm |
michel,
I know where there is a rich goldmine high on a mountain in Peru. If you’ll just spend the next 20 years hauling hundreds of kilos of mining equipment up and down the hazardous mountainside and over treacherous glacial crevasses on your back and then busting your butt at 6000 meters extracting the gold by hand, I’ll gladly pay you minimum wage for your efforts out of which you must pay all expenses; if you, in return, give all the gold to anyone who asks for it.
Nathan // November 30, 2009 at 2:13 am |
Hank
I don’t think Judith Curry should have written what she did. She seems to be claiming some deeper understanding of what was in the emails – something that no one here understands. I was just curious as to why anyone would do that. I get the feeling she is ‘cutting them loose’ to try and offer the skeptics an olive branch. I don’t think that will work either.
Hank Roberts // November 30, 2009 at 4:29 am |
michel // November 29, 2009 at 7:11 am
> He must have had the data in usable form
The ‘data’ is the ice core.
You’re asking for his lab notebooks now, aren’t you? Show yours first, where are they posted? Let’s see how your work looks, that will help your reputation.
Technology changes fast, that’s why ice cores are split lengthwise and archived in the freezers, so the next researcher will have something as close as possible to the same original material to analyze.
If you have the expertise to work with the material you can get a grant and apply to do it.
You wouldn’t use the same methods someone would use even five years ago, let alone ten or twenty years ago.
Hank Roberts // November 30, 2009 at 4:38 am |
Nathan, you write:
> She seems to be claiming some deeper
> understanding of what was in the emails –
> something that no one here understands.
This is what you’re doing wrong:
You’ve gone from “curious” to “something missing” to “no one here understands” — as though you’re on the verge of claiming that everyone at Tamino’s has agreed with you.
Sorry. If you don’t find what she wrote clear enough, ask her! Don’t claim support here.
dhogaza // November 30, 2009 at 5:39 am |
I’ve been thinking “crush on McI” but that seems sexist …
I am unable to understand her acceptance of McI as being a serious “blog science alternative” to real science, particularly when she admits that she’s been subjected to the same crap the rest of the professionals have been subjected to.
She’s an odd duck. It’s like Dawkins reaching out to YECs saying, “oh, my colleagues are too harsh on you, we may have 6,000 things in common …”
Someone, educate me.
Ray Ladbury // November 30, 2009 at 1:29 pm |
Dhogaza says, “I’ve been thinking “crush on McI” but that seems sexist …”
No, that IS repugnant. Thanks for the help with my post-Thanksgiving weight loss.
Nathan // November 30, 2009 at 1:32 pm |
Hank
whatever – I think you misunderstood me.
Dhogaza
My thoughts is perhaps she thinks that the UEA guys are an acceptable loss, if you like. As though she thinks an investigation will find some trivial wrong-doing, that will perhaps result in some extra openess but that their work stacks up (but may result in the loss of their credibility). So it sort of gives CA (and the other skeptics) some scalps but also re-affirms that AGW is real. This would give her additional cred with skeptics and perhaps enable her to maybe use it to say AGW isn’t some sort of conspiracy. You see this sort of thing in politics all the time; but she’s being pretty clumsy about it and it’s a weird tactic for a scientist.
george // November 30, 2009 at 1:35 pm |
Lazar quotes Judy Curry (as quoted by Steve McIntyre) on the “Credibility of climate research”
“Circling of the wagons”?
While Curry is entitled to her opinion, that opinion seems to be at significant odds with (and a bit more “colorful” than) that of Gavin Schmidt and others at Real Climate, as indicated here, here, and here (at least with regard to the “deep meaning” of the stolen emails)
But then perhaps Curry represents the Climate Audit Consensus?
After all, her view (on the matter at hand, at least) does seem to closely echo that espoused by Steve McIntyre and other CA regulars.
All I can think is that Curry must be trying to improve her own credibility at CA.
Nathan // November 30, 2009 at 1:42 pm |
Those leaked emails have their first real casuality
The Australian Liberal Party
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/
These Republican-lite fools have blown themselves up because half the party think the emails prove some sort of conspiracy; they brought them up in Parliament today. Tomorrow they vote for a new leader … Australia will get a emissions trading scheme for sure now, as the biggest opposition party split right down the middle.
For a bunch of emails supposed to reveal the big ‘fraud’ – seems the first casualty will be on their own side!
Oh the irony!
Ray Ladbury // November 30, 2009 at 5:43 pm |
Nathan, I believe this is known in the parlance as an “own-goal.”
Igor Samoylenko // November 30, 2009 at 5:54 pm |
Surely, the main issue here is that of communicating climate science and not the science itself or the way it is done. There is no problem with scientists taking on sceptics in peer-reviewed research. In fact, this division of climate scientists into AGW “believers” (she did not use this term but this is what she is essentially suggesting) and “sceptics” is ridiculous. Papers get published and evaluated on their merits.
The issues with communicating climate science are well recognised (see for example a couple of recent discussions at RC: ‘Unscientific America’: A Review, Communicating the Science of Climate Change). There is also a good article on the subject by Mark Lynas (h/t to Deech56). There are issues for the scientific community to address and Curry herself suggests a few ways to address them (see for example one of her linked presentations, page 12).
But to suggest as she does that the communication issues can at least in part be solved by engaging “sceptics” on “their terms” in their blogs, outside of the peer-reviewed domain, is naive and ill-advised. Is she seriously suggesting scientists should directly engage with the “sceptics” PR machine in the “sceptical” blogs? Quite apart from the obvious question of whether this is the best use of their time and talent, I just cannot see how this is going to work – scientists are good at doing science, not PR. The problem is also asymmetric – it is much easier to misrepresent/undermine science then to correct these misrepresentations (a good parallel with creationism/ID in comments).
The other question is why? If these so called “sceptics” have anything to contribute, they all know what they have to do – publish it! Until they do, it is not science – it is PR and should be handled as such.
I think PR of climate science should be the task of science communicators, such as Mark Lynas, and also individual scientists who are actually good at communicating science (Gavin at RC is a good example) but I don’t think all (or even many) scientists should be wasting their time on “sceptical” blogs.
I don’t have a problem with some of her other suggestions though. If she wants to engage McI, fine, whatever; it is her time she is going to be wasting and I doubt others will join her in her effort. Encouraging students to look at the arguments by the climate “sceptics”, debate them, understand what they are – is not a bad thing. It is a part of the learning process to understand how not to think and some of the logical pitfalls to avoid. :-) It will also help them understand the environment in which they will operate when they graduate.
george // November 30, 2009 at 7:59 pm |
Igor saks
The problem is that on blogs, any legitimate skepticism gets all mixed up with FUD (some of it very well funded and with slick ad campaigns and the like)
Nothing of any scientific value will ever come out of FUD so there is no point in giving the purveyors of said FUD anything (data, code, or even the time of day).
But without being able to “divine” motivation, it is impossible to determine which blogs (and which “skeptic” arguments) are actually legitimate skepticism and which just plain old vanilla FUD.
So, that’s why it is imperative that scientists continue to insist that skeptics play by the scientists’ rules, ie, publish in the peer reviewed literature. (agreeing to “debate the skeptic bloggers on their own terms is a step in the wrong direction)
The scientific publication process was “designed” to weed out most of the crap at the getgo and it actually works surprisingly well in that regard — which I suspect is precisely why the FUD purveyors hate it so much and why the vast majority of the “skeptics” refuse to even make an effort.
Igor Samoylenko // November 30, 2009 at 11:40 pm |
Following up on Monbiot:
In his latest article in Guardian on 25
Nov he clearly softened his tone somewhat but still called for Phil Jones to resign. His two main issues are 1) a comment on keeping a couple of
papers out of IPCC report and redefining peer-review process and 2) comment on deleting FOI-related material.
From the latest update at RC, it is clear that 1) is a
complete bogus given the context (Comment at RC: “Nobody actually gets to do that, and both papers discussed in that comment – McKitrick and Michaels
(2004) and Kalnay and Cai (2003) were both cited and discussed in Chapter 2 of the IPCC AR4 report.”). As for 2), Prof Jones has made a clear statement categorically denying that.
Again like with all of these emails, context is the key. And given the context, it is clear there is nothing incriminating in those emails. Nothing! A
poor choice of words perhaps (but it was a private email exchange for god’s sake!) but nothing to justify a call for a resignation. Especially from
Minbiot.
As I said before, the sooner he apologises the better. I really don’t think now he has a leg to stand on. As he said himself: “We’ll be able to get past
this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate…”.
Quite.
Igor Samoylenko // November 30, 2009 at 11:42 pm |
Sorry, my formatting seems to have got messed up… Hard without a preview!
Deech56 // December 1, 2009 at 12:40 am |
RE Igor Samoylenko
Some good points, Igor. So now, the blaming of the scientists (who get where they are by being good at, well, science) seems to be proceeding. Ironically, this message was ina little local chat I’ve been having.
I don’t have time to respond there to the various posts tonight – have to do some peer reviewing and am busy procrastinating, but I have been applying face to palm.
Lazar // December 1, 2009 at 12:56 am |
Robert Grumbine on openness and reproducibility.
Ray Ladbury // December 1, 2009 at 11:03 am |
Here’s the deal: If climate scientists stay “above the fray,” then denialists will claim that the environmentalists are perverting the science (remember a guy named Al Gore). If the scientists say, “No, they’ve got the science right,” then they are accused of politicizing the science.
And it is not enough to point out the threat and leave policy up to the politicians. The politicians have demonstrated repeatedly that they are satisfied with feel-good measures (Kyoto, anyone) or pie-in-the-sky, hail-mary remediation measures.
And attempts to raise the issue above politics by creating a global body (IPCC) to assess science and the adequacy of policy have merely brought out the tin-foil-hat-and-black-helicopter types.
Ultimately, what is at issue is whether humans in aggregate are smart enough to realize that they have to embrace physical reality instead of some comforting lie. I’d say it’s a litmus test for survival of the species–and maybe an answer to the Fermi Paradox.
Hank Roberts // December 2, 2009 at 1:43 am |
Belatedly, from Robert Parks:
https://listserv.umd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0910&L=bobparks-whatsnew&T=0&H=1&O=D&F=P&P=417
CLIMATE: LEFT FOR DEAD FOUR YEARS AGO, DSCOVR TWITCHES. Congress appropriated $9 million to refurbish the climate observatory, and its instruments have now been removed at the Goddard space flight Center for refurbishing. That’s a good sign, but of course NASA says $9 million is not enough. The observatory is meant to be located at the L1 point between the Earth and Sun from which it will determine whether climate change is due to variation in solar emission or human activity.
Hank Roberts // December 2, 2009 at 1:47 am |
Oh, and a bit earlier:
Fri, 2 Oct 2009 18:44:15 -0400
Sender: Bob Park’s What’s New
2. CLIMATE CHANGE: WHAT HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING? My e-mail is stuffed with blogs and articles from libertarian magazines saying the climate isn’t warming, it’s cooling. And it’s been doing it for almost 10 years. But how unusual is that? Not very. But, as today’s Science put it, “climate researchers are responding in their preferred venue, the peer-reviewed literature.” Which leads me right into my almost- weekly rant: where were these people when the Bush administration canceled the DSCOVR project? By now we would know whether the warming is anthropogenic.
Sekerob // December 2, 2009 at 10:55 am |
Hank, DSCOVR aka Triana was in hindsight a dud so I read not so long ago. It would not have provided the information needed from 1 million miles aloft that is needed to conclusively measure the energy budget. But it’s positive anyhow… more generated at ground level than can exit the atmosphere.
The umpteened too warm autumn and now the palmtrees are dying in Italy by the thousands attacked by some bug, same as what’s happening to the pines in North America. The big one in our garden literally folded within 4 weeks and no cure. Everything, literally everything is blossoming. Ever seen outdoor eyelets come up in December? Global cooling, only for those with eyes wide shut.
Hank Roberts // December 4, 2009 at 6:07 am |
> It would not have provided the information
> needed
Half of it though, if I recall Gavin answering when I asked; the other half would require a corresponding instrument on the opposite side of the Earth measuring emission from, well, the dark side.
——
In other news, checking citations forward in time is always interesting.
Now you see it:
http://74.125.155.132/scholar?q=cache:12y9TN4AzwsJ:scholar.google.com/+0707.1161&hl=en&as_sdt=2000
THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT DOES EXIST!
Commentary on the paper:
Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics [1]
Dipl.-physicist Jochen Ebel
23. November 2009
arXiv:0911.3735v1 [physics.ao-ph] 19 Nov 2009
That’s the Google cache, which only provides the text file, not the figures.
Now you don’t:
Title: The Greenhouse Effect Does Exist!
Authors: Jochen Ebel
(Submitted on 19 Nov 2009)
Abstract: In particular, without the greenhouse effect, essential features of the atmospheric temperature profile as a function of height cannot be described, i.e., the existence of the tropopause above which we see an almost isothermal temperature curve, whereas beneath it the temperature curve is nearly adiabatic. The relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed temperature curve is explained and the paper by Gerlich and Tscheuschner
[arXiv:0707.1161] critically analyzed. Gerlich and Tscheuschner called for this discussion in their paper.
Comments: Removed by arXiv admin because of inappropriate and excessive quotation of arXiv:0707.1161
Subjects: Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph)
Cite as: arXiv:0911.3735v1 [physics.ao-ph]
Hank Roberts // December 5, 2009 at 2:02 am |
Good, thoughtful, long blog post
http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/12/statistics_damn_statistics_and.php?utm_source=editorspicks
about a good, thoughtful discussion of statistics and science:
—-brief excerpt follows—–
“… Unfortunately the word “significant” in “staistically significant” is frequently misunderstood in the more colloquial sense of “important.” It doesn’t meant that. It just means that something unusual occurred relative to what you thought would occur, given a particular hypothesis (e.g., that the vaccine doesn’t make a difference). It’s just the beginning, not the end of the process of putting the evidence from the study into some kind of context. That’s where much of Rind’s two posts concentrate their attention, and there is much to say about that, too, but this post is already too long. Still, I can’t refrain from making one more comment prompted by his excellent piece….
…
It’s not a matter of expertise as much as the fact that statistics is a discipline riven by faction is a well kept secret. This isn’t just about frequentists and Bayesians, but Fisherians and Neyman-Pearsonians, logical probabilists, likelihood advocates and more. In his book, Statistical Inference, Michael Oakes says this (h/t D.O.):
It is a common complaint of the scientist that his subject is in a state of crisis, but it is comparatively rare to find an appreciation of the fact that the discipline of statistics is similarly strife-torn. The typical reader of statistics textbooks could be forgiven for thinking that the logic and role of statistical inference are unproblematic and that the acquisition of suitable significance-testing recipes is all that is required of him. (Oakes, Statistical Inference, Epidemiological Resources, Inc., Chestnut Hill 1990)
Oakes goes on to quote a book review of a statistics text in a technical journal (the reviewer is Dusoir) :
“A more fundamental criticism is that the book, as almost all other elementary statistics texts, presents statistics as if it were a body of coherent technical knowledge, like the principles of oscilloscope operation. In fact statistics is a collection of warring factions, with deep disagreements over fundamentals, and it seems dishonest not to point this out.”
Both of Rind’s posts bring up a large number of interesting issues like this. Read them here and here (links repeated for your convenience). At some point I hope I’ll have time to take a further look at them…. ”
(links in original)
David B. Benson // December 5, 2009 at 2:37 am |
Not a solid and agreed upon notion of information gain by applying any particular analysis method, I fear.
Tom Dayton // December 5, 2009 at 7:09 pm |
Dear Tamino,
Will you please write a few posts that we Taminoheads can point to in response to folks who have done their own home-brewed and incorrect analyses of raw data? I think there will be an increasing need, because people (not just deniers!) are taking advantage of their new awareness of how to download the raw data–but really raw, with no adjustments of any kind, not even gridding.
A case in point is a recent contention by blogger Kevan Hashemi that he legitimately can conclude whatever he wants from his purportedly nearly perfect proxy for CRU data. (He seems to be a nice guy who is not nearly as presumptive as some of his writings make him appear, so please don’t take offense from his phrasing. He’s just passionate; he seems to genuinely want to listen, understand, and constructively contribute.) He wrote:
Marcus and then I pointed out to Kevan that his processing of the data will not necessarily create a dataset that is the equivalent of the CRU-processed data for all subsequent analyses. But he stuck to his calculators:
I’d appreciate you writing a series of posts at a level that really and truly is accessible to the average person such as Kevan who might be trying these analyses. Assume they have a fundamentally good attitude and just don’t have enough statistics knowledge to avoid leaping to incorrect conclusions. To a layperson, Kevan’s conclusion that he has a nearly perfect proxy really would seem reasonable. Maybe you could address these topics:
1. Just because your own type of processing happens to yield similar results to the results after the appropriate processing (gridding, etc.) when you make one particular comparison, you cannot conclude that your resulting dataset will yield similar results from all comparisons. That is, you have not created a perfect proxy for the correctly processed data. Maybe you (Tamino) could provide one extreme example of the same inadequately-processed dataset looking similar to the properly-processed one when making one comparison, but looking completely different when making another comparison. You might even use Kevan’s case of dropping disappearing stations, if it really does suffer from this statistical problem. (I don’t remember enough statistics to know.)
2. Why gridding is important. The points made should include not only geographic representation, but also how gridding helps handle disagreement among stations that are near each other.
3. How disagreement among stations is properly handled by CRU and NCDC. I haven’t looked at exactly how they do it, but I assume it is a combination of dropping outliers, averaging, and other approaches. Maybe you could briefly explain advantages and disadvantages of each of those approaches.
4. How to do analyses at home. I don’t mean detailed instructions, but advice on:
whether it’s feasible to download and process really raw data, or whether only certain kinds of adjustments are feasible for folks to do at home
how to get the info needed for gridding; Kevan, for example, has politely asked for that.
what order to do the processing of raw or partially-processed data (within-cell adjustment first, versus adjusting then gridding the resulting values,…)
if you’re going to experiment by dropping some data as Kevan has done, which adjustments should you do, if any, before dropping them?
Thanks for your consideration and all the hard work you already have done, Tamino!
– Tom Dayton
Tom Dayton // December 5, 2009 at 7:12 pm |
Whoops. The last several lines of my last comment were supposed to be bullet items indented under “4. How to do…”. Apparently your blog doesn’t support that. Will you please clean up? Thanks!
David B. Benson // December 5, 2009 at 10:00 pm |
Tom Dayton // December 5, 2009 at 7:09 pm — I”m sure 5the literature is clock-ablock with what you need. For example, Petersen (1999) and several others since have demonstrated that UHI makes no significant difference.
Tom Dayton // December 5, 2009 at 11:42 pm |
Yeah, David, I already gave Kevan a bunch of info on UHI. Different topic than I’m pursuing now, though.
I really am interested in giving Kevan and other palying-along-at-home people some basic guidance.