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Where the Global Warming Data Is
Several readers noted the latest fallout from the Climate Research Unit's Climategate: the admission by the University of East Anglia that the raw data behind important climate research was discarded in the 1980s, "a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue" according to the Times (UK) article. The Telegraph quotes Phil Jones, beleagured head of the CRU: "Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them." Some of the data behind these other results can likely be found in a new resource that jamie located up at the Real Climate site: a compilation of links to a wide variety of raw data about climate. From the former link: "In the aftermath of the CRU email hack, many people have come to believe that scientists are unfairly restricting access to the raw data relating to the global rise in temperature. ... We have set up a page of data links to sources of temperature and other climate data, codes to process it, model outputs, model codes, reconstructions, paleo-records, the codes involved in reconstructions etc."
After seeing all this talk about these guys, they sure do seem like a motley CRU.
Regardless if global warming is a problem, we should ALL strive to lessen our effect on the environment. Restricting emissions that may not heat up the planet, BUT have noticeable problems on health of humans and wildlife. I feel like I have to remind people that even if global warming is false we should always do what we can to conserve our resources and lessen pollution.
This is just another sissy-fit thrown by the denier groups that are willing to use any tactics to distract people from the real issue. If there was any substance to these email, they would've produced the evidence by now. A few sentences blown out of context from a few cherry picked emails are merely red-herring.
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Global Warming Feed @ Feed Distiller
I think they're exaggerating the lost of one particular set of data, from one set of researchers, in
one university, compared with thousands of different climate research around the world. So this
case of data mismanagement at one university, isn't going to make much difference to the case
for global warming being caused by humanities energy usage.
Problem is, some of the other sources aren't looking so good, either.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
Review and duplication does not require publishing all raw data. It requires publishing the methods used to obtain the raw data, so someone else can do the same thing and come to the same conclusion. For a proprietary dataset, this could mean, "go sign your own NDA and see the proprietary data", or it could mean, "go gather data the same way they did" (e.g. in the case of ice cores or other repeatable climate data samples.
Science has never required full access to the publishing scientist's lab notes, lab equipment, or diaries. That's the domain of historians, patent attorneys, regulators, and corporate spies.
You are entitled to your opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
Incidentally "climate change" is the trendy new word because "global warming" has the pesky tendency to be falsified whenever temperatures are cooler than expected. With a generic word like "climate change" you're only wrong if the temperature stays perfectly and exactly the same!
"Deal with it like an adult, or deal with it like a leftist." HAHAHA I loved that. Priceless. People who want big government to provide everything they need and take care of anything that might make them feel bad and thus, make a parental figure of government, are more juvenile and immature than people who understand why this is a bad idea and are satisfied with the parents they have already outgrown. Whodathunkit?
In all seriousness, whether global warming is real or not, and whether it's caused by human beings or not is immaterial. Regardless of any of that, it will be used to justify the taxation of carbon. Fake global warming will justify this as readily as real global warming so there's no reason for the controversy of the issue to divide people on this one thing. A tax on carbon is a tax on life, seeing how we are carbon-based life forms. This will represent a new era of governmental power and control heretofore unknown to us and found only in the wet dreams of statists and other would-be tyrants.
If the _results_ from the lab in question match up with other independent results, what possible grounds to laymen have to presume the data was deliberately changed? Unless they assume that all independent labs falsified their data in concert, which would be a hell of a conspiracy.
What really bothers me about the complaints around the emails is that none of them (as I understand it) come close to proving that findings were deliberately falsified to point to one conclusion over another. All of the emails were either innocuous or, at worst, ambiguous.
And what have some skeptics done with ambiguous data? They have manipulated it to fit their pre-existing theories. Which is very close to the sort of bad behavior they are charging the lab with now.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Except for the fact that this university is the co-ordinating site for many other centers and many of them got their facts and calculations from CRU. So CRU is about to drag a bunch of other universities down with it.
Absolutely right. We used to joke that they would eventually tax us for the air we breathe...
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
There's been another breaking climate scandal. Some big name climate skeptics have been busted big time manipulating temperature data and lying about it.
They've manipulated the data to make it look like it was cooling when it was really warming, and the Drudge Report and blogger Anthony Watts have been caught up in the lies, and have tried to blame it on some New Zealand climate researchers:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/11/new_zealand_climate_science_co.php?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=channellink
http://hot-topic.co.nz/nz-sceptics-lie-about-temp-records-try-to-smear-top-scientist/
"As long as its green, I'm not quite sure about this moralistic issue."
- Quote about writing "scientific studies" for the tobacco industry by Frederick Seitz, the author of that cover letter for that petition of 30000 questionable signatures against the science of climate change.
Let's review... The hacked emails look bad, but they were obtained illegally and were never meant for public consumption - these emails were never "peer reviewed" so to speak. As far as I'm concerned, they are irrelevant, as tempting as it is to see some giant conspiracy in them.
Concerning the data that was tossed out: This was probably due to something as humdrum as cleaning out a room to make space for new equipment or office space or something similar. I remember in the 90s when I was working at a R1 university our group needed more space for new hardware, and we got money to convert a storage room to a cold room where we could stick our hardware. There were rows and rows of old 9-track tape (probably the same kind of tape that was tossed out from the climate research group in question). Nobody claimed them, nobody wanted them, so we threw them out (not before unravelling one and playing with it first though). Had someone actually wanted to retrieve data off of those 9-track tapes, they probably would have been unsuccessful anyway since magnetic tape degrades with time and tar files don't have any error correction built in.
So even if these tapes from the 80s were still around they would likely be useless. Unless some sort of data migration plan had been in place, they were probably destined to decay.
Concerning the paper records, they would likely be just fine assuming they didn't get eaten away from the acid assuming it wasn't acid-free paper. But those were tossed too.
So, to review: Some asshole gets into the private email system of a university, does who-knows-what to it (we don't know for sure whether the emails were filtered, cherrypicked, manipulated, etc.) and releases it to the world. The text of the email appears to contain some language which could be interpreted as a bit dodgy, but honestly if you think science is all fun and games and doesn't involve egos, power struggles, rivalries, and colossal asshattery, well, surprise, it does. Now we have the data loss issue, which is easily explained and is likely due to cleaning up stored crap to make room for office space (I am guessing but that is not an unreasonable scenario).
Meanwhile, hundreds of other independent studies from dozens of different sources of instrumentation and other proxies shows over and over and over again that climate is warming and it's anthropogenic in nature due to greenhouse gas emissions. Is anyone arguing that humans are NOT responsible for 280 ppm going to, what is it now, 385 ppm of CO2 over the past 150 years? Is anyone arguing that CO2 is NOT a greenhouse gas and that all else being equal, a shift in the earth's radiative equilibrium temperature upward would NOT be expected with this increase?
As an atmospheric scientist it's crazy for me to think that anyone would even need to mess with climate data as it doesn't need to be massaged to show the obvious. The fact that there is interdecadal variability (things have flattened out a bit over the past few years) is really nothing too shocking and fits well within the range of predictions.
So wake me up in 20 years an let me know how this whole "conspiracy" worked out. If we're back to temperatures from the 1960s well, I'll eat my hat or whatever serves as headwear in the 2030s.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
Because he's simplifying to the point of being wrong. So are you.
It's called climate change because "global warming" has been so soiled by deliberate misunderstanding that it's problematic to use. "Skeptics" have managed to insert a wedge of "creative" misinterpretation into our popular conscious: they'll note a cooling trend in a specific locale, or a specific time period, and gleefully use that cherry-picked factoid to shoot down the whole theory. It'll get some consideration, too, because the idea that the whole planet can go up in temperature on overage, but Podunk can get two snowy winters, is hard for may laypeople to understand. Skeptics know this, and prey on it.
And a carbon tax isn't "a tax on the basic building blocks of life", it's a tax on emissions of previously-unlocked carbon. This is why things like biofuels aren't being subject to a carbon tax, nor are the production of goods that use non-carbon sources of energy, yet produce something that contains carbon (like, oh, food). It's also why you get credits for locking carbon back up. Of course, people like you and the grandparent devise well, lets not mince words, outright lies about how this stuff works in hopes that people will accept because your lies smell vaguely like truth.
I'm reminded of any number of meetings I've been in where some dickhead vice-president who knows nothing about technology will, for political or budgetary reasons, give his or her creative, oversimplified misundertanding that sounds reasonable enough to other dickheaded VPs and managers, yet is outright wrong. What you're saying it like that.
--srj/mmv
No one disagrees that the earth's climate varies a great deal over any long period of time you care to look at. The question is, if the world is warming at the moment (and over a scale of tens of years, it is), then is this due to man-made causes, and is it happening far faster then it could due purely to natural causes? Furthermore, if the temperature is pushed up, will the effects become decidedly non-linear, in that the processes that regulate climate will themselves change and some (quite different ) equilibrium become the norm? The modeling and experimentation suggests that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere will have a warming effect, though how CO2 interacts with the various climate regulatory and feedback processes is extremely complicated and there's a great deal of work to do. The further question of altering the equilibrium state of the climate (which could be utterly disastrous for civilization, and a great many current species of life on this planet) is even trickier to answer, but there's plenty of good evidence to suggest this could happen (including in the geological record, so we know it is possible).
I am not a climate scientist, but I do know that in my own field it takes about 10 to 15 years to get really useful at anything. Therefore I am loath to make some quick contrary claim to someone who has spent many years thinking about something. Nearly everyone I have encountered who dismisses AGW is either pretty ignorant about doing science (that's fine, I am sure they are good at other things - it's unrealistic to believe scientific literacy could be universal), or are just plainly unable to contemplate or accept the changes required in the organisation of human affairs (even though these changes would also happen in the absence of global warming), or are just full of anti-environmental politics for various delusional reasons of their won.
Interstitial spaces are filled with cream.
I like how you use the word "deniers" to intentionally reference "Holocaust deniers," as if wanting scientific proof of something is so horrible. I also like how you pretend AGW supporters don't spread propaganda, especially now that we know the AGW movement has been censoring opposing papers. Your post oozes bias.
Meanwhile, the global temperature record has shown no rise in temperature since 1998.
In other words, it's bad PR. It's kind of you to admit this so readily -- it saves us time. The moment you are concerned with PR your agenda is no longer a purely scientific one. That is what left you vulnerable to "skeptics".
And rather than educate those laypeople with a more correct message, you'd rather adopt a different name. If that alone doesn't summarize what's wrong with this whole movement, and why many are suspicious of it, I'd be hard pressed to name what does.
Naturally the federal government will get to define "previously-unlocked." I am sure it will be a sensible definition that is logical, true to the science, and fair in every way, one that won't favor any particular interest groups or large financial interests. Because everything else government regulates has turned out this way, right?
Because government has never started with a small, agreeable maneuver that sounded good and was difficult or impossible to politically oppose, and then added more restrictions and complications, incrementally over periods of time. I mean, it's not like they have a track record of doing this, right?
When government sees a new excuse for the levy of a tax or the exercise of power, it is not concerned with whether that excuse accurately reflects the actual science. The excuse need not even have a basis in reality, it only needs to be something that average people will believe. "Any excuse will serve a tyrant."
In those meetings, you spoke up and (politely) corrected those VPs and managers, explaining why their reasoning was oversimplified or wrong, and showed those VPs and managers how their wrong reasoning might be corrected. You did that because as a scientist your primary concern is accurate data and sound reasoning, you recognize that good policies and good decisions are based on these, and all other concerns are subordinate to those two primary concerns. Right?
Here's a nice graph of the NOAA's "adjustments". If you subtract these "adjustments" (their term, not mine) from every OMG Global Warming Will Kill Us ALL graph you've ever seen, you get noise. It doesn't matter whether you add the noise back in forward or backward, or substitute it with properly scaled level data from your favorite MP3: the result is the same alarming graph. But if you reverse the timeline on this "adjustment" and feed in your favorite source of noise you get a chart that looks like a precipitous drop in temperature in 1900-1909 that levelled off. Why did they make these adjustments? Was it because their raw data didn't agree with someone else's observations? I find it difficult to believe that NOAA's measurements became increasingly inaccurate over time with a determinable bias and that at the precise moment their instruments became reliable, the temperature increases stopped. That doesn't jive with my understanding of modern technology and error measurement, nor with my understanding of thermodynamics.
In short since the adjustments are the cause for alarm it would be best if they were examined closely. Most especially since several of the presumably credible sources use such similar "adjustments". The cause for alarm does not appear to be in the raw data. If you know of some credible source of uncooked raw data that does show this cause for alarm continuing to the present day (not ending in 1999), I'd love to see it. Be careful though - adding in these "adjustments" and throwing away the raw data appears to be the order of the day. If that raw data isn't out there, this is just the most amazing piece of pseudo-scientific groupthink I've ever seen.
The story now is that they've only lost 5% of the data, and the rest is good - trust us. This situation is fluid and there will be much more back-and-forth before the truth is finally heard. With the basic facts this dynamic, now is not the time to take bold action on questionable information.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
And each American produces almost 8 times the GNP of their Chinese counterpart. So by that standard, each Chinese produces about TWICE the CO2 per unit of economic output as his American counterpart. China needs to clean up its act.