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Scientific Journal Nature Finds Nothing Notable In CRU Leak
eldavojohn writes with an update to the CRU email leak story we've been following for the past two weeks. The peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature has published an article saying the emails do not demonstrate any sort of "scientific conspiracy," and that the journal doesn't intend to investigate earlier papers from CRU researchers without "substantive reasons for concern." The article notes, "Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers." Reader lacaprup points out related news that a global warming skeptic plans to sue NASA under the Freedom of Information Act for failing to deliver climate data and correspondence of their own, which he thinks will be "highly damaging." Meanwhile, a United Nations panel will be conducting its own investigation of the CRU emails.
This video explains quite clearly how these leaks and the reactions on it should be placed in their correct context:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg
Dependency hell? =>
Both the Nature article mentioned in the summary and the NS article linked by Idiomatick are clear and sensible articles and well worth a read. I do not, of course, hold out any hope that they will prevent the oil company shills and SUV drivers from baying for blood.
... will be bamboozled. There is nothing new in that. It lies behind all political folly.
The data that was adjusted was paleoclimate data, and what it was being adjusted to was temperature data (i.e., the more reliable modern temperature data). As far as I can tell, they neither could nor did adjust the measured temperature data.
The OP did not quote the really important part of the Nature piece :
Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.
The evidence for this is literally all around us. Throw all of the CRU data out if you want. It won't change a thing.
The source code is another thing that has been taken completely out of context. For example, the "Very ARTIFICIAL correction" in was computed, but the line where it was applied was commented out. This is clearly a case of someone playing around with the output to explore various effects and scenarios. They did the experiment, then commented it out to removed that effect from the production output. Does anyone really believe that a real attempt at fraud would be blatantly labeled in the code?
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
FFS, not this shit again. Frankly, given the number of times this has been pointed out, I can only assume that people still mentioning it are wilfully ignoring anything that contradicts them.
However, one last time. It's commonplace to have multiple versions of analysis code with variations including "artificial" changes. I've done it lots of times, mostly for testing purposes - it's quite useful [1] to know how the output of your analysis depends on variations in the input. Only a small fraction of the code in existence was actually used to process the data "for real". Unless you have some evidence that a) arbitrary modifications were made to published data without explanation in the publication and b) any such modifications were not scientifically justified, please stop with this ridiculous and discredited point.
[1] By which I mean "essential for any non-trivial analysis"
If you look at the actual code instead of some blog you'll see the reference to the adjusted value is commented out and never used in the plotting call.
; ;filter_cru,5.,/nan,tsin=yyy+yearlyadj,tslow=tslow ;oplot,timey,tslow,thick=5,color=20
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,'Oooops!'
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
;
;
filter_cru,5.,/nan,tsin=yyy,tslow=tslow
oplot,timey,tslow,thick=5,color=21
;
oplot,!x.crange,[0.,0.],linestyle=1
;
plot,[0,1],/nodata,xstyle=4,ystyle=4
Without revision control one can't say for certain but there's no evidence any adjusted data made it into a paper. There's only evidence that a single piece of code from the thousands of modeling sims had at one time an adjustment that was commented out.
Dude, you're not just talking about any journal here. You're talking about THE journal for the physical sciences. This journal has more than a century of scientific reporting as testament to its quality. It predates the Nobel price. It predates the work of Einstein and Schrödinger. Interestingly though it is not older than the discovery of the atmospheric greenhouse effect, which was first described by Fourier in 1824.
Just to give you a clue what you're actually implying in your post...
Two points.
1) That paper is nearly a year old so the logic that "Now finally counter arguments can be heard" seems a bit specious.
2) That paper is a complete crock of unrefereed shit. I read 92-94 which are the conclusions and was so confused I went and read the earlier portions. There are numerous fallacies in their assumptions and they get some pretty fundamental thermo issues flat wrong.
If you'd like to read physicists (not climatologist) opinion of the paper go here:
http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-300667.html
On that same blog you link to, there is an "Update": Read the comments below. It's been pointed out to me that there's a later version of code in the archive in which similar correction code is not commented out. Details and link below.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I will, however, admit that the researchers should have noted the issues with the tree-ring data in question.
Good thing they did, then. Only ten years ago, mind you.
Seriously, this whole "climategate" debacle tends to run like this:
1- Deniers exhume some e-mail / piece of code which they don't understand, but assume is definite proof of evil scheming on the part of the great academic conspiracy ("Trick!" "Hide the decline!" OMGconspiracy send teh copz!!) .
2- Scientists post explanation, showing the deniers' allegations to be baseless (The "hidden" decline in tree ring growth was published a decade ago - see Nature link above; in this very publication, it was shown to diverge from the actual instrumental record after 1960; so for the post-1960 period we basically replace tree rings with the actual instrumental data, because we trust thermometers more than tree rings when the two fail to agree; we cited the relevant articles in the caption for the graph just to be sure).
3- Deniers completely ignore scientists' explanation, and keep fantasising about their glorious victory over evil scheming scientists. See GP for an illustration.
Rinse. Repeat.
To GP and all the folks who keep harping about this "VERY ARTIFICIAL" correction code: the code in question is a one-time code for temporarily re-calibrating the tree ring data. The reason, and the coefficients, are ultimately derived from the Nature article I linked to above. For an interesting hypothesis concerning the source of this code, see comment #147 and linked manuscript on this thread.
A real scientist would have investigated why the proxy failed to to reflect actual temperatures in recent times, and might have questioned if the methodology actually applied correctly to any time in the past.
Which is exactly what these guys did ten years ago. Answers: we don't know (trees are living beings, not thermometers), and yes it does.
Notice the "Briffa" name in the author list? And the "University of East Anglia" in the list of institutions? Reminds you of something?
... and yet they continued to publish a dataset which they knew didn't hold up to scrutiny.
Either the proxy isn't a good proxy, or the temperature record isn't a good record. You can have either, but not both.
No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, "grafted the thermometer record onto" any reconstrution. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum. - Michael Mann
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7810
it's in my head
Which version was used to produce the plot that is in the Nature paper? It is easy enough to tell by looking at the Nature paper. Hint, the plot in the paper does not have this correction applied.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
"Sharing data with scientists who already agree with you isn't science."
I don't defend his apparent attempt to thwart one of the 50 odd FOI request he has on his plate by requesting Mann delete some emails. However I do defend his commitment to opening up the data sources. The HADCrut data set has been available on the web to scientists, the general public, and psudeo-skeptics alike for years due mainly to his efforts. However I don't expect easily verifyable facts to stop uninformed wankers from being lead around by nose for fun and profit.
As the Nature editorial points out a small percentage of that set is still locked up by national governments such as France and is only available to researchers willing to fillout the red tape and wait months to get it, they are leaglly bound not to publish it!!! If not for the efforts of Jones 100% of the data would still be locked up with similar red tape.
I have no doubt as to the motives of the CEI and their ilk who continually bombard climate scientists with such requests while simultaneously running inumerable front sites for the FF industry (eg:icecap), and doing their very best to smear the reputations of leading climate scientists (eg: Mann, Schmidt).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The graph was not a demonstration of the skill of their method, it was the cover graph for a report for policymakers. Their actual scientific publications show the proxy record directly. And they did not ignore the discrepancy between the two time series. The "divergence problem" is well known, well cited, and frequently discussed among dendroclimatologists. There are some reasons to believe that trees are now responding to non-climatic human influences which they previously were not subject to, such as changes in atmospheric aerosol loading, CO2 content, and pH of precipitation in some locations. You can debate whether these causes are legitimate or not, but in a graph for policymakers it's not inappropriate to drop the data where you suspect it's contaminated and switch to data you think is more trustworthy. Again, their actual publications indicate the decline which is the whole basis for the divergence problem literature in the first place. It's not like this is some huge secret that nobody knew about or the authors refused to acknowledge.