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Russians Claim More Climate Data Was Manipulated
DustyShadow writes "On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) claimed that the Hadley Center for Climate Change had probably tampered with Russian-climate data. The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations. The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley CRU survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century."
Proposed supporters of climate alarmism methods to combat global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions are not only scientifically unfounded - in the absence of extraordinary characteristics of modern climate change, but also incredibly expensive in economic terms. Especially dangerous such measures, if adopted, are for the medium and low levels of economic development, effectively cut off their path to reduce the economic gap with more developed nations of the world.
I'm going to venture out on a limb here and say that the Institute of Economic Analysis is primarily concerned about the economic problems with combatting anthropogenic global warming. Unfortunately, that's not what this is about. This is about what scientific tools we can apply to develop a percentage of how sure we are that such climate change is created by man and -- actually happening. Until we establish it is or isn't, will the economic institutions relax and let the institutions who contain the most appropriate experts publish, release and make conclusions from the data.
Credibility skyrockets when I read the subtext of the blog's heading (that is linked to by the story):
James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including Welcome To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com
Oh if you think he might be an unbiased reporter working for the telegraph, please visit his page that he shamelessly plugs.
Unless the IEA produces data it claims is 100% raw uncut, this story is below the threshold of credibility.
My work here is dung.
ahh, famous last words.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Yeah, way to skip right over the actual allegation. Do their claims, in and of themselves, have merit? Wouldn't take long to find out. But attacking the claimants sure is a handy shortcut in logical argument, isn't it?
If the CRU letters are any indication, I guess this is how "science" is done these days, now, anyway.
Welcome to the "new science." Guess we better all just get used to it.
Of course they don't believe in global warming, it's freezing there.
Oh if you think he might be an unbiased reporter working for the telegraph ...
Yes as soon as I saw the TFA, my first reaction was, "isn't there any more reliable source from this other than James Delingpole?"
So if is there any reputable source that is publishing a story about this, could a link please be posted in the original submission.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
hidden motives of thinly disguised advocacy group . . . question you!
Yeah, way to skip right over the actual allegation. Do their claims, in and of themselves, have merit? Wouldn't take long to find out.
I hate to break it to you but neither side has given me data. Saying so and so skipped over data from here and there does nothing for me when I can't see the data and do my own statistical analysis. If the IAE is so sure and has the data, why don't they publish the adjusted figures to show us just how much we were lied to?
No choice but to listen to those with the data publishing the reports. Does it suck? Yes. But oftentimes that's how studies with empirical data works--especially if it cost a lot of money to acquire that data. We're not talking about a repeatable experiment here to be verified in another lab. And for some reason, we're not demanding they open the sequencing data on the cancer gene we just accepted that story and we trusted those scientists. But suddenly it's about climate change therefor you're now all more qualified experts than those with the data. Why is that? What is it about climate change that suddenly everyone and their dog can tell you how wrong the scientists are?
Welcome to the "new science." Guess we better all just get used to it.
Grow up. Your faux apathy rhetoric is amusing after I listen to you accuse me of an ad hominem attack.
My work here is dung.
These Russian experts in particular have a history of opposing international climate treaties (based on flawed expert analysis, as determined by other experts in the linked paper below):
http://www.edf.org/documents/3978_Review_InstEcAn_09082004B.pdf
I think it hilarious that you discredit the Russian statements purely on the basis of financial interest, when there are billions of dollars riding on cap & trade and the whole green industry behind it.
Both sides are well funded, so let's please get over this phobia of money being involved and consider the science instead.
And the science we have seen, is terribly compromised across the board. There simply is no way to produce any rational decisions based on the data and hand, which is hardly surprising given that no-one was allowed to peer review. That was never science, and we now see the result of what happens when not-science meets the light of visibility.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
He links to the original Russian story. He's just reporting what the Russian experts say.
On what basis do you accept that this site is the work of Russian "experts?"
I think you need to excercise a modicum of scepticism. Their description, insofar as the Google translation is correct, of orthodox scientists, (whether they are correct or not), as "proposed supporters of climate alarmism" ought to ring the warning bells, no?
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
It doesn't matter if global warming is real or not.
The root question is, does it make sense to pump pollution into a thin atmosphere? No, of course not, it is wrong to keep doing so. Therefore, we need to take steps to stop.
There are monied interests deliberately prolonging this useless debate about "Global warming - real, or not?" Think about why they do that.
Pollution is wrong. Let's come together in some comopolitan city - hmmm, maybe Copenhagen? - and agree to end pollution.
It doesn't matter if global warming happens today or 10,000 years from now. What matters is ending air pollution.
It's not "The Russians" making these claims. It's a privately funded free-market "think tank" that is based in Russia.
They posted a PDF on their web site, issued a press release, and a British paper reported it without doing any source-checking.
For example, the article highlights a quote from an anonymous poster to a blog thread about the press release describing the web-posted report. How's that for "cherry-picking" your sources?
Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL. Cheers Phil
Now, I'm not saying global warming is a hoax, but at this point, if anyone comes up arguing from an appeal to authority instead of an appeal to evidence, they are braindead. The climate authorities have lost a lot of respect through all this. And that goes for the guys in Russia, too. Let them show us the evidence if they want us to believe.
Don't tell me "climatologists say we should act now to prevent global warming!" show me the estimated radiative forcing changes and how exactly that's going to cause sea levels to rise. Show me the effect CO2 is having on the global temperature, and most importantly, tell my WHY you think that is happening. And if you can't explain it, then I'm not believing you. Because I can explain special relativity in terms simple enough that anyone can understand, and climate science is no more complex than that.
Qxe4
Finally, an answer that will appeal to all the faith-based populists:
"You know who ELSE doesn't believe in global warming? Russia."
Where is their peer-reviewed paper in a respected journal?
The CRU made sure it was never published?
That's the problem with gaming the system you see, eventually people find out you were playing a game when they thought you were serious.
And since we have found they were suppressing opposing viewpoints in journals, it's a circular argument to claim the need to see peer-reviewed articles to prove the point...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Become a peer. All you have to do is get an education. Quit being a lazy skeptic and man up. Become a climate scientist. I dare you.
Here is an hypothesis: In the early 1980's, people who had made claims about the massive impacts of SO2 on the earth (anybody remember acid rain) realized that SO2 had made another impact. Not only did it cause acid rain, but it cooled the earth. Then came Pinatubo. OMG! What have we done!
Now it was time to come up with a scape goat for the impending impact on climate that was certain to occur with a world wide reduction in SO2. How about CO2? Hard to prove, impossible to eliminate, and 'everyone knows that CO2 is a green house gas'. Tin foil hat time? Maybe. Of course, the fact that CO2's impact on radiant heat loss is, and always has been, maximized, may have something to do with all of this. And really. deltaF=5.35lnC/Cnought? Isn't that just a little too idiotically simple?
Cheers
JE
Its pretty clear that the "Institute of Economic Analysis" is a right wing whackjob source. It was founded by this guy. His wikipedia entry
Who also authored stuff like:
"Kyoto is killing off the world economy like an "international Auschwitz," "The Kyoto Protocol is a death pact, however strange it may sound, because its main aim is to strangle economic growth and economic activity in countries that accept the protocol's requirements."
and
"A Liberal Agenda for the New Century: A Global Perspective"
and has been in a ton of questionable institutes.
So believing anything from a group like this would probably not be wise to say the least.
Hey, I mean they have an open society where anyone can say what's on their mind right? I mean Glasnost and all, eh?
Or maybe they have a shitload of oil and gas reserves that they'd really rather not have devalued by anyone actually deciding burning more fossil fuels would be suicidally stupid. Oh, was that the sound of one of Vlad's enforcers putting a bullet in the back of someone's head?
Get real people. Now the deniers are the Russians and the Saudis. Laughable what kind of crimes people will do for a buck.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Where is their peer-reviewed paper in a respected journal? Is that too "sciencey"? Why do people with no credentials insist that their claims merit as much attention as carefully researched and reviewed investigations?
They insist because they do not know. They do not know because they insist that they don't need to. It's a perpetuating result of the opinionated layman.
I urge all skeptics to become climate scientists. It requires the mere effort of education. I can assure you that many opinionated layman are pissed off at this very comment and insist that I don't make any sense right now.
So be it. Life is strange.
The problem with your assertion is that it is an appeal to authority type logical fallacy, in and of itself;
1) The scientists have the data, so 2) they must know more about the data than we do, so 3) we should trust them implicitly in their interpretations of that data.
This does not follow, because it totally ignores that the scientists with the data may have intrinsic bias, or even that they could be wrong. This is exactly why when you get a diagnosis from a doctor that says "Operate!", you get a second opinion.
The problem here, is exactly like you stated; The data to get the second opinion is not public. Unlike the patient who may need an operation, who's body is the evidence, and is available on demand for inspection by the doctor giving the second opinion, all the potentially qualified persons to give a respectable response to this question are blocked out because of finanical interests on the data.
Essentially, we have the global climate change fear mongers on one side, shouting "OPERATE!" (through drastic slashing of manufacturing technologies, draconian cap and trade taxation, repossession of private property, and a whole host of other proceedures of questionable value), and on the other, you have the alternative medicine quack that says "The pain is all in your mind" (EG, the non-scientists that say that human released carbon dioxide has no impact on the environment whatsoever, in spite of the fact that this is not supported by even the slightest bit of chemical evidence.)
The patient (which is represented by the public in this case) is then left seeking a REAL second opinion; Are cap and trade&Co really necessary? The patient WANTS a *REAL* answer to that question, but is continually fed the PR pamphlets from both (disreputable) extremists.
I for one, want the data to be released publicly. This is especially true if the data was collected using public funds, such as through NOAA, or in this case, through the russian government and russian taxpayer money.
Right now, the patient is basically pleading with reputable doctors for a second opinion, but the doctors have to turn them away, because the medical history is "Confidential."
Stop trying to sound high and mighty about how fantabulously reputable the CRU scientists are, when you know damned well that scientists are people, and people are faulty.
The *ONLY* way to settle this, is to release the data. Given the far reaching implications of the decisions that will be reached through interpretation of this data, FOR EVERYONE IN THE WORLD, I fail to see how the financial interests of the people who collected it can outweigh the invested interest of the rest of the whole world, who's economical and climatological futures hinge upon it.
If there is bad interpretation, and a misdiagnosis, sunshine will reveal it.
If not, Sunshine will also reveal it.
What we need is sunshine on the raw data; NOT specious arguments one way or the other on which side of the debate to "Simply Trust", when both have shown signs of being disreputable.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The same is true of the climategate "scandal"
Are you saying Climategate is not a scandal?!!
Russian crackers (possibly with Kremlin approval) are hired by some US disinformation organization to brake into the computer system of a British university? Sure sounds like a scandal to me.
WHO PAID?
> Quit being a lazy skeptic and man up. Become a climate scientist. I dare you.
What would be the point? You see, I actually have spent some time reading through the leaked data and email. The whole game is rigged. If you aren't known to be a warmer you don't get to peer review for the journals considered important to the climate change game. When an editor broke with the unwritten rule the warmers had the offending editor removed. Another journal allowed a few doubting papers in, the warmers are writing about organizing to not publish in, cite from and generally shun the heretical journal. In other words the science is settled, therefore dissent isn't going to be considered science.
More important, you don't need to be a climate scientist to realize these guys aren't practicing science. They suppress debate, suppress the data and the details of the models used to analyze it. Basically they are putting on their Science! priesthood robes and making pronouncements we are expected to accept without question based on their authority.
But the funny part is they aren't even claiming to be experts in most of the stuff they spew. Several papers have been blown up because they were making claims based on statistical models put together without the input of a real statistician. The Hockey Stick debacle came about because someone used math they didn't really understand... or was outright fraud. Then beyond proclaiming impending DOOM! they go beyond their area of science and push specific solutions. That is the duties of engineers, economists and politicians. Nothing in a climate science degree qualifies anyone to pick a solution out of the dozens of options available. Then they let an idiot like the Goracle be their spokesperson and he is so clueless he things the inside of the earth is millions of degrees.
Democrat delenda est
It's nothing new, either. Remember that Russia is one of the major oil-exporting countries, and significantly dependent on oil exports for its budget. Furthermore, it's a major provider of gas, too, particularly to Europe. If, under the guise of combating climate change, Europe moves to greener power generating and heating tech - solar, wind, or better yet, nuclear - that will leave Russia out in the cold, with no well-paying customers for its only valuable exports.
On the other hand, Russia actually stands to benefit a lot from rapid climate change, if current models are to be believed. For one, it has a legitimate claim to a huge chunk of resources under the polar cap, should the latter melt - that even leaving the disputed areas aside. Furthermore, Siberia would be one of the regions for which climate change would indeed be a regional warming - it is already heating up much faster than any other part of the globe, and if it keeps doing so, it will become much more prospective for human settlement and agriculture, and in short-term perspective provide for easier access to the vast natural resources of the region.
At the same time, there are relatively few important coastal cities that would be threatened by ocean level rise - vast majority of the population is living deep inland.
So Russia would have much less trouble coping with the effects. The icing on the cake is that U.S. (because of its heavily populated coastal cities) and quite a few European countries would be in a very tough position, and those are perceived as historical global opponents, especially the U.S.
So, yeah. There are a lot of political reasons for Russia to downplay effects of climate change, specifically so that other countries reduce their efforts to combat it.
Cars were a solution to a pollution problem. Go replace every car on the road with a horse or donkey, then watch the death that follows from all that shit piling up everywhere attracting flies and spreading disease.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS NO POLLUTION. Unless you've figured out how to stop poop from exiting your butt, there will always be pollution. The skies above our major cities are far cleaner than they were 20 years ago, yet you still emorage.
I supposed you want to eliminate every single benefit that oil and coal have brought us, from roads to plastic too eh? How many medical devices and procedures would become impossible without them?
I hate the ignorant, narcissistic, ungrateful generation you represent. Your ancestors made life unbelievably comfortable for you and all you can do is cry like a damn baby about it.
Something must be done! Cap & Trade is something, Therefore it must be done!
You can reduce pollution without upending the entire western economy. Indeed, one of the false choices presented is that if you are not for Cap & Trade, you must be *for* pollution!
Besides, if pollution were really a problem the people meeting would act like it instead of renting thousands of limos and taking private jets to converge to talk about it while using a ton of energy to heat large conference centers...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Apparently someone tried, but was blocked by the people at East Anglia, as you can see from this quote: [eastangliaemails.com] "
So there were two articles submitted for publication. They were peer reviewed. Someone in East Anglia, as part of the peer review, recommended rejection. Where is the issue here? If you've some evidence that the articles did not deserve rejection, then you forgot to post it. If, in fact, the other peer reviewers recommended against rejection, then it seem likely that one or both of them got published.
Play Command HQ online
"There is little doubt that the email and files that were released were from the CRU and they contain emails showing that some of the leading people involved WERE actively trying to suppress papers by people with opposing viewpoints. Is it still a conspiracy theory when it's true"
In other words: an academic writes a negative review about somebody else's paper and sends it in to the editor! Shock me Amadeus! Wasn't academia supposed to be all about 110% supportive people, there are no bad papers, everybody's computation is right in its own special way? Don't tell me it ain't so!
Quoting: "Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL. Cheers Phil"
And what if said reviewer honestly thinks that the other paper is wrong and bullshit? Guess what: sometimes paper submissions ARE wrong and bullshit!
And also, sometimes negative reviewers do have a stick up their rear---the editors of the journals have seen this before, many many many many times. They can sniff this out, and when they think the negative review isn't really valid they will publish the paper nonetheless.
This supposed mighty "power to suppress" literally consists of writing a reply to the editor of a journal---unpaid labor---with a summary rating and technical evaluation. That's it.
Compare this to the power wielded by those who have large financial interests in actually obfuscating pretty clear scientific results.
It doesn't matter if global warming is real or not.
The root question is, does it make sense to pump pollution into a thin atmosphere? No, of course not, it is wrong to keep doing so. Therefore, we need to take steps to stop.
There are monied interests deliberately prolonging this useless debate about "Global warming - real, or not?" Think about why they do that.
Pollution is wrong. Let's come together in some comopolitan city - hmmm, maybe Copenhagen? - and agree to end pollution.
It doesn't matter if global warming happens today or 10,000 years from now. What matters is ending air pollution.
I agree. Pollution is bad. So let's concentrate on pollution to limit it and stop this silly war on CO2!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
CAPSING random WORDS doesn't make your ARGUMENT stronger.
The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.
There is the key word: often. That does not mean that all, or even the majority, of the stations shows this. Is the percentage of stations not getting much warmer the same as the percentage in the officially used data? They just leave that point dangling in the hope that we will infer that it is not the same.
Already people have taken this to say more that it does. Some blogs have already claimed that ALL of the stations used did not show warming. For example, here is a blatent bit of misquoting from a randomly googled blog:
The data from the unused stations reportedly did not show any substantial warming trends.
Oh dear. It is just a slight change, but it completely changes the meaning. And where is that skepticism that is supposed to be at work here? Why assume that the economic think tank is correct?
I will wait to find what the selection criteria was before taking this to be any proof of a global conspiracy.
>both have shown signs of being disreputable.
Who are these pro-warming scientists who won't release their data? It sounds to me like the anti-warming crowd has convinced you of false equivalency. e.g. "The other side is just as big scumbags as we are."
The source material seemed a little suspect, so with the aid of Google Translate, I attempted to understand a bit about the Russian IEA Mr. Delingpole quotes so freely. The IEA, or Institute of Economic Analysis, is hardly an expert on climate science. The first article on the IEA's website says:
This hardly seems to be an unbiased website, so I thought I would dig deeper. The article the IEA quoted is also fairly suspect, since it goes into detail and reveals the inherently anti "global warming" bias of the source.
I shouldn't have to point out the satellite photos of Arctic Ice and how it has shrunk, or how Polar Bears are in real danger of extinction because of the loss of their frozen habitat.
This drivel seems to come right out of the climate skeptic/big business lobbyist handbook. Normally, I wouldn't bother to respond, but the author's Russian source got me interested enough to investigate. As I suspected, its bullshit.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
But it does ADD to the CRANK factor of the POSTER and add to the general SLASHDOT milieu. Intermix with TLA for added effect, YMMV.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
it's no good attacking them based on the fact they export oil. all the climate researchers who advocate AGW have a budget dependant on global warming research funding, do we also attack them and cast doubt on their motives because of it?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Okay, how's this for credibility: the Russians are believed to have been the ones who hacked into the servers and then selectively released out-of-context quotes to try to discredit the CRU scientists. So gee, should I act shocked that they're continuing their assault? Russia is being the number one impediment these days to a global climate change accord, and it seems to go to the top. For example, they've been one of the main forces holding up a Copenhagen accord.
Back on the initial topic: 100 to 1 odds says that any data exclusions are due to bad data and incomplete records. This is the standard sort of mistake made by people who either don't know how the analyses are done or who deliberately want to mislead. The meteorological station calculations are NOT done by simply taking all data and averaging it. If you did that, the way that the amateur deniers think that contaminated data would enter the record -- such as stations becoming urbanized, being tampered with, etc -- would actually be true. But the data is first analyzed, problem stations detected (in an automated method), and eliminated from the record or normalized. And the preprocessing is itself studied to verify that it's valid -- for example, comparing individual regions to other climate analysis methods, comparing windy days with calm days to make sure the heat island effect has been properly eliminated, etc.
In short, claiming that many stations are being eliminated is complete nonsense because that's *supposed* to happen, and if you didn't do that, the record would be readily thrown off by human development and equipment faults. I'd bet dollars to donuts that this is all that this comes down to. And that quite a few people at the agency putting this out know this, but are deliberately using it for manufactured doubt nonetheless.
And let's all not forget that the CRU dataset is just one dataset using one particular type of datasource and one particular analysis. There are many datasources and many analyses, and of equal prominence to CRU's datasets are NOAA's and NASA's. No, the different datasets don't match up perfectly (for example, whether 1998 or 2005 was the hottest year -- they were close), but the datasets all yield similar results.
Nobody pushes buttons like our bunny. Big red buttons with labels that say "IGNITION", apparently.
CAPSING random WORDS doesn't make your ARGUMENT stronger.
LIAR!
The CRU made sure it was never published?
If that were true, then you'd be able to find perfectly good articles were "censored". Perhaps you think that the CRU had the scientists bumped off and their hard disks melted. That would explain why there is no evidence, right? The scientists, the papers, EVERYTHING is gone.
Either that, or you'd be able to back up your accusation.
Let me guess. You have no idea what papers the CRU never published, AND YOU COULDN'T FIND THEM IF YOU TRIED.
Remember, you are not paranoid if everyone really is against you.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I find it amusing that while railing against the bias and closed minds of the establishment you refer to them as "warmers". Irony knows no bounds.
Indeed. I've always thought "alarmists" was a much more apt description.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
It's misinformation after misinformation. Almost all of the refusals to release data by the CRU come down to data shared by national weather services that they are contractually not *allowed* to share. Almost 100% of the data that they are allowed to share is publicly posted.
Now, there were a couple scientists who tried to find every excuse that they could not to share their particular data -- most notably, Phil Jones. But you only have to look at Jones' past to see why. He initially responded to all FOI requests -- including one by a financial trader named Douglas Keenan who fancied himself an amateur climate scientist (almost all of the professional climatologists are on one side of the issue, and its their ideological foes, generally people who don't know what they're doing, who are filing the requests). Keenan "discovered fraud" on the part of Jones's partner, Wei-Chyung Wang, and tried to get the FBI to arrest him. The university cleared Wang of all wrongdoing, but honestly, can you blame Jones for looking for any excuse not to have to deal with that again?
These are people who just want to work. They want to deal with litigious "amateur scientists" as much as they want a hole in their head.
Nobody pushes buttons like our bunny. Big red buttons with labels that say "IGNITION", apparently.
Yep. One of the most shocking things about global warming (should you choose to accept this theory) is that the Western countries that are causing it also stand to benefit. Russia was a no-brainer once you mentioned Siberia, the all-time classic example of a vast tract of land unsuitable for use because it's too cold. But I also question whether Europe or the US will be badly affected - affected for sure, but if the farm belt moves north into the Dakotas, so what?
The whole history of Western expansion is that we've built our economy on the backs of cheap foreign labor. As an American, you're "rich" precisely because the Chinese who make your goods earn 10x less than you. This system has survived because the "slave labor" class is like a hot potato that gets passed around. Once the Chinese grow out of it, they'll just hand it off to $THIRD_WORLD_COUNTRY.
But now we're threatening to take the very air they breathe and water they drink from the third world, via climate change, and profit from it. Under these conditions, how long do you think the empire-based economic model can survive?
So, I would like to add something here. I think that a blanket release of the raw data could be problematic, but am for a data release. Even as someone with a degree that covers environmental sciences, economics, and statistics, I am not qualified to make a true analysis of this data and neither are 99% of the people who would attempt it, then claim one thing or the other. However, I am in support of the release of the data. Withholding data understandably engenders mistrust and releasing it would help, but I think that it should be released to a broad group of people who are agreed to have enough expertise to analyze the data.
This isn't to create some elite walled garden, but to give the science and data the respect they need in order to tell us anything. I feel like if the release was made to a broad enough group, and specifically a group of people with no history of weighing in on climate change, it should quell a lot of concerns about who is allowed to interpret the data.
Finally, thanks for making a real post with genuine concerns about the data instead of simply screaming hysteria like so many have on this data release without attempting to understand the context of the release.
Except there has been no evidence shown whatsoever that it was a hack. No computer logs, nada. Moreover, the fact that a BBC blogger was emailed the file and decided not to publish it weeks before it became available on the russian site seriously undermines the hacker theory. Not to mention the fact that everything is collated into a FOI folder.
ok first off I am pretty sure the data from that little breakthrough will be published in a way that it can be verified objectively if it has not already. second the cancer gene people are not asking the planet to collectively spend trillions of dollars on blind faith in their research. If they where I am pretty sure people would be as concerned(if not more) about the integrity of it. For example any company that plans to spend even millions in r&d based on that research will likely want more than the scientists word.
The only way to bust a doper--is when you yourself become a smoker!
Good post. Maybe also worth noting is that all scientists depend on grant money, and winning grant money depends on politics. The best scientists have to compete with the most politically adept ones. If the public were more interested in science and less in empowering their own faction it would make things a lot easier.
It seems like I'm being bombarded by propaganda from both sides and the only way I'm going to find the facts is if I become a climatologist and study the data myself.
Sure, wouldn't it be great if there were a peer reviewed article somewhere that also looked at the Siberian data to see if it was accurate?
You won't have to wait long, in press now ... Esper J, Frank DC, Büntgen U, Verstege A, Hantemirov RM, Kirdyanov AV, 'Trends and uncertainties in Siberian indicators of 20th century warming'. Global Change Biology.
Now, I'm not saying global warming is a hoax, but ...
Great! I don't have to write you off as a nutty conspiracy theorist then. ;)
I agree that that quote doesn't paint Dr Jones in a good light, but I there are two things I would point out.
Firstly, in context the quote seems less evil, though I agree, still not what one would hope for from a peer reviewer. Jones is responding to an email asking whether he had seen "this piece of crap by Esper" (an earlier "piece of crap" that is, not the one cited above). It appears that both scientists in this conversation genuinely think the paper is not good. Quoting from the same email just above your quote:
Jan [Esper] doesn't always take in what is in the literature even though he purports to read it. He's now looking at homogenization techniques for temperature to check the Siberian temperature data. We keep telling him the decline is also in N. Europe, N. America (where we use all the recently homogenized Canadian data). The decline may be slightly larger in Siberia, but it is elsewhere as well. Also Siberia is one of the worst places to look at homogeneity, as the stations aren't that close together (as they are in Fennoscandia and most of Canada) and also the temperature varies an awful lot from year to year. Recently rejected two papers ...
Similarly, it is just possible that Jones genuinely believed that the papers he rejected were not worthy of publication. That's actually how peer review works.
Secondly, even being less generous to Jones, --and it is undoubtedly bad luck to draw the chief of the institute whose work you are criticising as one of your reviewers or stupidity for submitting it to a journal where they are on the review board, take your pick -- Science, and the peer review process, is bigger than one biased reviewer (or even a nest of biased reviewers). As the publication of the Esper paper I cited above demonstrates.
Nice to have the luxury of expertise and time to examine all the evidence, but in practice Science relies largely on authority. I cannot spend years arguing or denying that the floating point processor on this box works as it should. I take it on authority from Intel engineers, and if another expert can come out and conclusively demonstrate that it doesn't, I expect them to fix it. Well actually that's not true, this is an AMD ... :?
Because I can explain special relativity in terms simple enough that anyone can understand, and climate science is no more complex than that.
I think you are wrong. It's way more complex and far less certain. Unfortunately the uninformed denialism (as opposed to the informed skepticism of your Lindzen's and Pielke's) has somewhat masked the uncertainties, as climatologists are constantly led to defend the relative certainties.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
There's a big difference between the cancer gene thing and the climate data thing. Those ones working on the cancer stuff have found something that might help fight against cancer. They're not asking anything of us, they're presenting their information. We can ignore them and go on with our lives.
But the climate change people are claiming that we've got to do this and do that and etc in order to prevent the end of the world. They're trying to make us do something and are using their finds to make us do it, so it's essential that we see their data so that we know that they aren't just manipulating via fraud.
I think this is what they call a strawman argument.
This does not follow, because it totally ignores that the scientists with the data may have intrinsic bias, or even that they could be wrong. This is exactly why when you get a diagnosis from a doctor that says "Operate!", you get a second opinion.
One problem with this analogy is that it's not just one "doctor" that's saying "operate", it's thousands . How many more "second opinions" do you want before you accept that perhaps you actually need an operation? Are all those doctors quacks, every one of them?
I do agree the data should be public - and AFAIK there already are a great many public datasets, at NOAA and other places. You can gain access to more datasets once you exhibit certain basic qualifications (like a relevant degree). Just make sure you analyse a significant proportion of the data, and not just cherry-pick the bits that appear to agree with your conclusion, like so many deniers are guilty of.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I find it more interesting how the argument against climate change has been evolving.
First we have "there's no such thing as global warming"
Then it's "okay, there is global warming but it's not man-made"
Then it was "okay it is man-made but there's nothing we can do about it now"
THEN it was "Wait- it's a lie after all. This is all about MONEY. Climate change has no evidence behind it-- it's a massive collaborate scheme by those get-rich-quick green people. If by get-rich-quick you mean don't get particularly rich or quick, and of course the green titans of industry will have to wait 20+ years for their invented theory to persuade the majority of scientists in nearly every field from climatology to sociology-- I mean for them to be slowly recruited into the mass hoax. I certainly believe the poor oil industry establishment over those moneybag scientists.)
Now it's taken a real conspiracy twist: "Climategate!!!" followed by "The Telegraph quoted a russian free-market lobbying press-release!!"
Sorry, but when the truth threatens the profits and practices of major industries, we should just expect these obfuscation and lies. And ignore them.
(And yes, smoking really does cause cancer. That wasn't a hoax either.)
A number of problems with your argument:
1. Sea ice extent is not the same as sea ice volume. Extent measures surface area covered, but not the thickness. Survey of the thickness of the arctic sea ice (by both satellite and manually) have shown that the overall ice volume of the arctic is rapidly declining. See here for some data: http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/seaice.html
2. Finally, given the amount of noise in the signal and the number of years it takes to make a statistical difference show up, it is impossible to make any determination of current trends using only a few years. Climate trends need to be taken over decades, not a few years. The shorter the time period, the more likely you are just measuring differences in weather and not necessarily climate.
This was all settled years before it became a political football. When politicians figured out AGM had policy implications, they wanted *their* vote in the matter, but it was too late.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I think you are wrong. It's way more complex and far less certain.
OK, let me explain to you simply the climate science behind global warming. Understanding all the nuances of the climate system will take years (or more likely, is impossible for a single human brain), but anthropogenic global warming only needs three facts, two of which are probably reasonable, and the other which is not. Anyone will be able to understand this.
Fact 1: CO2 blocks some light from escaping the earth, causing energy to stay in the atmosphere that otherwise wouldn't. This is very well established, I don't think anyone seriously doubts this fact.
Fact 2: The earth is getting warmer. True, although the degree of change is small: within a degree or so.
Fact 3: Human produced CO2 has caused most of that warming. Unfortunately no one has ever been able to convincingly demonstrate that this is true.
The IPCC report tries to support fact three by saying that the computer models predict it. Unfortunately, there is no computer model that can accurately simulate the earth's climate. In order to bolster their claim, the IPCC report says, "we can't think of anything else that could cause such a warming other than CO2." What? Why not just show, "CO2 contributes X degrees to the earth's atmosphere, if we double it, then it will contribute X more degrees." There is no such statement because we don't know how much CO2 is actually affecting the earth's temperature. Would it make a difference of any significance at all if we completely stopped CO2 production? We don't know.
In fact, I challenge anyone here to show fact number 3, because I REALLY want to know about it. I've carefully read a lot of the literature looking for an answer to prove that link, but it really doesn't exist. Until it does, anthropogenic global warming remains nothing more than a conjecture.
If you have a way to establish that link, please show it.
Qxe4
I have to agree with you that a conspiracy theory generally involves thousands of people keeping their mouth shut.
You have to be fair here however. In this case, thousands of people *didn't* keep their mouths shut. The issue here isn't that people aren't vocal in their dissent, it's that they are ignored or demonized. Some even had to go so far as to threaten to sue to be taken off the 'everybody agrees' list.
Personally, I think real scientists are more interested in their science than yelling doom. Sure they love to be published but they aren't really going to go yell all over the place that they were ignored if such were the case. They leave that to people more interested in being pundits than scientists and as was mentioned in several previous posts, there's no shortage of that on either side of the fence.
Especially given that the opposing views here are 'no big deal' vs 'omg everybody dies by 2025'. That's a gross exaggeration, obviously, but it's always harder to get people's attention when you're holding the 'no big deal' sign.
If I am to be honest with myself that's what I'd do anyway. If I had conclusive evidence against AGW (Not the smoking gun, just an 'hey guys you made a mistake there') and didn't get published, I'd shrug it off and keep working at this point. Sure my data might be entirely valid, but who's going to genuinely care besides the journals who refused the data in the first place? The news? Am I able to fit my data in a 30sec soundbite? Is it worth the effort? Will people even care? Do I really want to be labeled as that evil bastard who wants polar bears to drown?
Mind the frickin' laser...
A few days before the story broke a hacker took control of the realclimate.org site and posted a file containing the emails (reported on realclimate.org). Since then, some of the scientists at realclimate have recieved death threats that are currently under investigation by the FBI (reported on ABC Australia). There have also been reports of people impersonating IT staff at a Canadian climate research center.
Perhaps I have been wrong about the conspiracy theorists, maybe they have a point but just got it backwards.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I know this might be a bit far out there, but a) you did qualify with a big "if", and b) there may be (and I don't know being unilingual, and sometimes I'm not so good in that language, either) a colloquialism or idiom in Russian that translates poorly into English.
Not being monolingual and being accutely aware of how badly Google translation munges stuff I wrote (in the message you are responding to) "insofar as the Google translation is correct." Apparently you missed that.
Basically, you said, "if I'm right, I'm right, no?" ... But that's just a strawman
Had I "basically" written that, I did not, it would be a tautology, not a strawman.
Then again, even should we grant you the big assumption ...
Which big assumption?
you're tearing down their argument based on an interesting combination of ad hominem
I agree with you my objection to Mr Delingpole (or Ms Divine from the SMH) is ad hominem. But allow me to explain. There are some authors attached to (semi-)reputable journals such as the Telegraph, and other's I may read from time to time, whose work has proven to be so scandalously poor that I have made a conscious decision never to reward them with clicks. This is my right. When Delingpole's page came up I felt violated.
Here I cannot agree, what I wrote was not an appeal to authority and your saying so leads me to question whether you understand the fallacy you are citing.
Moreover, while argumentum ad verecundiam might strictly speaking be a lgoical fallacy, ie. X is not True because A says so, Science is, as I am constantly reminding people, largely based on authority. ie. A is more likely than I to know whether X is True or not. Authority tells me that cars can hurt human bodies, as a result I avoid walking in front of them.
Secondly a statement implying that scientific orthodoxy accepts AGW as highly likely, is in no way an appeal to authority, it is a simple statement of fact.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
According to the emails we read that definition appears to include "Data that does not agree with our hypothesis."
Can you point to where ALL this fossil evidence that supposedly "proves" evolution is held. What about Piltdown man doesn't that invalidate the rest of the fossils? Please don't point to the tens of thousands of papers and the godless "scientific community" who invariably fail to question the basic premise of evolution becuase the discovery institute has already debunked them using nothing more than a bannana. /sarcasm
Just case the sarcasm is too subtle.
The "missing raw data" is not neatly compiled into an easily acceessible database. It is held by countless weather and archival centers around the world, some of whom are unwilling to share unless you are willing to jump through hoops and wait months. It is on paper, in diaries, incompatable data bases, microfilm, ancient computer tapes, you name it. Anyone remotely familiar with the enourmous effort by Phil Jones and others to painstakingly collate, correct, and open up the HADCrut data set cannot help but see "climategate" for the witch hunt that it is.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Easy.
Go to any open cut coal mine and look at the big hole and the piles of overburden on the side of the pit. Look at the depth of the pit and the amount of overburden and get an idea of what is missing. Most of that missing stuff burned and left carbon dioxide.
Pretending that reality doesn't contain the annoying bits does not make them go away. You are not gullable, you are simply part of the target group of some expensive PR that tries to trap people into the circular logic of conspiracy theories. I suggest reading some back issues of New Scientist of the late 1970s and early 1980s long before politics, fundamentalism and PR got mixed up this.
I beg your pardon, phantomfive, you are in fact my interlocutor. I should perhaps not have given you such short shrift, but that impertinence (in both senses of the word) was calculated to stop me reading another line. However since we are apparently in conversation ...
As you your point three, there are 2 lines of evidence, both of which are fairly convincing on their own. Firstly there is the carbon audit (for and interesting discussion see the beginning of this talk. Secondly, there is the isotopic smoking gun (ie C12/C13 ratios), which demonstrate that the increase in C02 concentration is largely the result of the combustion of biogenic (ie. land clearing and fossil fuels) sources. As I have to run, I'll leave it to you to pursue that yourself.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Replying to an ad-hom with another ad-hom is normally called a retort. Besides I'd say that the words "Grow up. Your faux apathy rhetoric..." are an astute observation, not an ad-hom.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
If that were true, then you'd be able to find perfectly good articles were "censored".
Yes, here's one example.
Where are they? Well how should I be able to find them, when they could not publish them. Meanwhile we have a perfectly good report here from Russia that you are dismissing out of hand. How come *you* don't have to prove *that* is false? What happened to the scientific method here where someone else challenges a theory and you explain why the challenge is wrong using facts, instead of Ad-Hominem attacks?
There's that circle again, that you love to spin around so much. Whee!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The raw data is in pretty good shape and easily accessible. However this is just a collation of what is held on paper etc, so the conspiracy theorists still have an escape hatch wich their brain can escape through.
Hat tip to the article on Realclimate for the link. I'm sure you know of realclimate, they're the guys who won't show anyone their raw data.
"It may come as a surprise to some that the first compilation of world-wide meteorological data was published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1927, long before anthropogenic climate change emerged as an important issue (Clayton et al., 1927). This volume is still widely available on the library shelf as are updates that were issued periodically. This same data collection provided the foundation for the World Monthly Surface Station Climatology, 1738-cont. As has been the case for many years, any interested party can access this from UCAR (http://dss.ucar.edu/datasets/ds570) and other electronic data archives." - Realclimate
I await the analyisis of the of the slashdot skeptics.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
We find no such thing. You are dishonestly stating things that are not in that linked e-mail at all. Dr. Jones points out that the problems in the Siberian data set are known and published about, and yet people keep submitting papers about it without referring to the existing literature. That's sloppy research, and he is right to recommend a rejection as a peer reviewer.
But don't take my word for it, here's the full text:
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Russia is a nation heavily dependent on fossil fuel exports, in fact, their entire economy depends on it else it would just flat out collapse again as it did at the fall of communism.
So the issue is this, even if Russia has made the allegations, even if they do provide data, there's no real way to tell that they haven't manipulated the data themselves to suit their own agenda of keeping the burning of fossil fuels the main form of energy worldwide.
We've seen the same tactics from Saudi Arabia, they have tried extremely hard to discredit climate research because again, without oil sales, their country would be in ruins.
So if the source of the reporter's claims itself is flawed then the whole article is flawed and a good and truly unbiased journalist wouldn't put such an article forward for publication. The fact the reporter himself is clearly quite biased and incompetent doesn't do much to help the situation, it just means he's found a biased source that suits his agenda. So yes, his source, might be right, that this institution did discard a lot of the data, but is that because they found a trend that demonstrate the data itself was bad, which would be no suprise coming from a country with such vested interests in pushing bad data. A good reporter would look for other sources in nations that don't have vested interests in showing up climate change as a sham, but oddly these don't really seem to exist. Even China accepts the problem and with their economy based on needing to pollute by way of their massive manufacturing base, they have much more to lose.
Pointing out the reporter is a joke, just opens the door for realising that even if he has reported what his source said or gave him correctly, doesn't mean his source is even correct and unbiased. It just means he's found someone willing to make such allegations for him to report on even if they're false. If however it had been a reporter with a good track record of being unbiased then we could have more faith that he'd used a valid, unbiased source.
I'm sure I could find plenty of sources willing to testify god exists so that I could write an article hence proving he does, but it wouldn't mean I was right, or that they were right, it would just mean I'd found people willing to push the same agenda as I.
So yes, the objectivity and fairness of the reporter matters, because it's a reflection of the whether or not they're likely to care about the validity of their source or mindlessly just publish without verifying.
I see what you're doing there. You're trying to suppress Slashdot moderation! You're clearly conspiring to suppress all skeptical of Global Warming posts!
Don't lie! I know your scam now.
1) Point out the mistakes the parent made.
2) Offer a reasonable and passionate counter argument.
3) Attempt to cover counter arguments that might be made against you.
Clever, but not clever enough to escape my suppression detection systems. You're rigging Slashdot for your own liberal conspiracies! You might as well have said... "I sure went to town on that slashdot argument. Honestly I would be surprised if it broke +2 insightful"
His point three is not about whether the current concentrations of CO2 are human-produced (as you say, the isotopic ratios seem conclusive), but how much of the measured warming is due to CO2 concentrations. "We can't think of anything else" is not very good as an answer and, according to him (I have no idea), predictive models of temperature-vs-CO2 concentration seem to be lacking.
OG.
He initially responded to all FOI requests
It's worth pointing out that at one point CRU were getting over 50 FOI requests per week from climate skeptics. Maybe it's more now. That is a crazy additional workload for the CRU scientists who are paid to do actual research and not fill out FOI replies.
It is probably also worth noting the fact that Russia also has some of the worlds largest reserves of oil and natural gas and considers exploiting them to be one of it's most likely avenues to economic success.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Thousands of experts would have assured you that pholgiston and the ether existed. The consensus view in medicine has been wrong lots of times: routine tonsilectomy, eggs and other foods as contributing to high cholesterol, the effects of tobacco and alcohol - the last is particularly good because you can very easily see that many individual doctors use their medical knowledge to bolster their own prejudices and choices.
You can gain access to more datasets once you exhibit certain basic qualifications (like a relevant degree).
Why should that restriction exist at all? Who decides what a relevant degree? Do you need to be a climatologist? a statistician? is my econometrics heavy MSc enough?
And how will AGW proponents respond to this in the media? With appeals to authority, ad hominem attacks, and bluster.
The media and the scientists who have become the public faces of AGW in the media have taken the position that the public is too stupid to understand AGW, and must be convinced by multimedia slideshows, appeals to authority, and bluster. They do not seek to convey an understanding of the data, methods, and conclusions. Instead, they seek to replace one belief with another. When this is how you approach your audience, it doesn't matter whether what you teach is true or false, it is indoctrination, not education.
How should they handle it in the media? They should spend 4 hours in primetime, instead of Dances with Fucktards, walk the public through the data, walk the public through the methods, examine the claim being made here, and explain its impact or irrelevance to the conclusions. You know. EDUCATE. Not pontificate. Not intimidate.
And what difference will that make? The ignorant will remain ignorant, the faithful will keep believing, the pundits will scream, and Sean Hannity says it snowed in Houston.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Dump all their data on a website. Respond to FOI requests with a link. Any scientist that doesn't disclose their data SHOULD be viewed very skeptically; they're asking US to 'have faith'. That's not how science is supposed to work.
Wtf
Climategate is about a whistleblower releasing email, data and code having been gathered for a long time (likely due to FOI requests). The only other possible explanation is that it was done by mistake (yes, seriously)
There's absolutely no indications whatsoever that this was done by "hackers" - it would be near impossible actually.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/07/comprhensive-network-analysis-shows-climategate-likely-to-be-a-leak/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/23/the-crutape-letters%C2%AE-an-alternate-explanation/
it's in my head
You can gain access to more datasets once you exhibit certain basic qualifications (like a relevant degree).
Why? Is the data DANGEROUS? There is no justification for that behavior. They aren't temple priests, and they shouldn't act as if they were. Free exchange of information isn't a problem for an honest scientist.
In order to bolster their claim, the IPCC report says, "we can't think of anything else that could cause such a warming other than CO2."
This is a (deliberate?) misunderstanding. The IPCC says, that the numerical calculations agree with the current warming trend and show a rather dramatic temperature increase in the future.
What? Why not just show, "CO2 contributes X degrees to the earth's atmosphere, if we double it, then it will contribute X more degrees." (...) In fact, I challenge anyone here to show fact number 3, because I REALLY want to know about it. I've carefully read a lot of the literature looking for an answer to prove that link, but it really doesn't exist.
This is a bullshit request. Temperature is not a simple analytical function of CO2 concentration. Your request is equivalent to ask for the exact solution to the three body problem (or, rather, the 1-million-body problem), or wave function of a crystal. For all these problems, no analytical, easy solutions are known, and the "easy" part is very likely impossible.
Still, we do have numerical approximations of these things (and in some cases damned good ones!), just as the climate scientists have developed numerical approximations of the earths climate.
If you want to reject the conclusions of the climate scientists on the philosophical argument that "it is just a computer model", then you can reject most of the physics done in the last 50 years.
You could of course detail why you think that the models/approximations of the climate scientists are horribly wrong (preferably backed up with data/simulations on your own), but that is not what you are doing.
There is no such statement because we don't know how much CO2 is actually affecting the earth's temperature.
Yes we do, at least considering the overall trend. Because we do have numerical approximations of these things.
But Russia is only a part of the world and even if the IEA were right it doesn't affect anything else enough to change the fundamental conclusions about global warming.
Russia is regularly the "most warm" part when the monthly global numbers are released, and extrapolations made from stations in Siberia are often used to get numbers for the Arctic.
So, on the contrary, this does effect the global numbers released a lot.
it's in my head
Here are some "second options" :
Are all those doctors quacks, every one of them?
But the climate change people
:)
Back to the point! If by 'climate change people', you mean scientists working in the field of climate change with a specific emphasis on human contribution, then the ones I listen to don't advocate any change in human behaviour. In fact they do exactly what you have posited for the cancer research people, present their data, explain their conclusions and leave the rest to the politicians. If others choose to listen to those that infuse their case with hyperbole (on either side of the discussion) then more fool them.
Perhaps I am alone in not requiring the raw data - there is a point beyond which doubt makes no sense - if we are going to doubt the whole peer-reviewed edifice on which scientists rely to sort the wheat from the chaff - then the discussion shouldn't be about which field we can trust (cancer versus human influenced climate change) but on the how the scientific community present and validate their findings in general.
You don't need science to refute this, you only need to look at the way it's presented - as a religion. Did you read, "State of Fear?" The last great hoax was eugenics - we saw where that went with Hitler. This is similar stuff - "the whole world is going to die unless you listen to us!" BS. This is just so much horse-hockey, with ulteriour motives of carting as much cash as possible out of the developed nations and spreading it around every 3rd world shit-hole on the planet. Well, its not going to work. We're finally getting to the bottom of this, and exposing the fraud. Maybe the fruadsters will go to jail. That'd be sweet. The supposed crisis would have cost us 50 trillion dollars by year 2050. That's far worse than any warming, rising sea level, etc. would be worth stopping. We're just going to live with whatever happens - that's what would have happeed after wasting $50T anyway - CO2 mitigation is doomed to fail anyway, since we need the energy and that's the only way to produce it right now.
foia requests aren't so simple that you can point out a link with everything you have. at least in america they aren't. you are asked to search your data, files, emails, physical papers and notes, everything for specific terms. it really does take a while to get everything together.
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
Free exchange of information isn't a problem between honest scientists. To some random political asshole who will merely use it as ammunition? Not really.
Thousands of experts would have assured you that pholgiston and the ether existed.
But upon experimentation we found evidence that said otherwise, and on the basis of that evidence, our understanding of reality changed. Still some people clung to the old mythology. So you can't justify the notion that you don't have cancer on the basis of past mistakes in medicine because the evidence is with the doctors, and not with you and your comforting mythology.
Thousands of experts would have assured you that pholgiston and the ether existed. The consensus view in medicine has been wrong lots of times: routine tonsilectomy, eggs and other foods as contributing to high cholesterol, the effects of tobacco and alcohol - the last is particularly good because you can very easily see that many individual doctors use their medical knowledge to bolster their own prejudices and choices.
I think the key difference here is that the human body is a complex, hard to diagnose system. Its functions were not deterministically designed, but instead arose in a complicated, interdependent fashion.
The climate of the Earth on the other hand, well all you have to do is lick your thumb and hold it to the wind to figure out what's going on!
If I had a nickel for every time I had a nickel, I'd be richcursive!
That sounds nice, and all, but I call bullshit. First, if they were contractually obligated to keep their raw data secret, they could simply say so, instead of just stonewalling FOI requests. Feel free to post copies of the contracts and prove your assertion. Second, if they had the evidence -- the raw data -- that would shut the mouths of "deniers" once and for all, they'd release it in a heartbeat for the very reason you cite that they don't.
The bottom line is that the fact that we still don't have the raw data sets WEEKS after this story broke is damning. Either they don't have it, or they know that it doesn't show what they SAY it shows and are simply trying to avoid exposure, or they are cooking the books (some more?) to support their theories before releasing it. There's absolutely no excuse to not just simply but EVERYTHING on the table at this point, and let EVERYONE, professionals and "amateurs" alike, have at it.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
Phlogiston, persisted as a theory because no competing hypothesis existed at the time could better explained the data, and the data available at the time did not contradict the theory.
Climate science today is different with many scientists going out of there way to enormous quantities of data ranging from this such as tree rings, to limestone deposits, to sun spots to ice cores to real temperature data from the ground and from satellites.
Mind you, the term "greenhouse effect" was introduced way back in the late 19th century, so the idea is hardly new. It is certainly way longer than say the intervening time between the discovery of eggs in cholesterol, and the discovery that consumption of eggs do not increase blood cholesterol levels.
To equate climate change to phlogiston or egg cholesterol is a long stretch indeed.
Why would any part of this climate information lead someone to go to the FBI?
It is climate info, and when you compare it to bankfraud or idtheft, it pails in comparison to what evil you can do with this info. Seriously, I smell BS here, as for Jones, I think he is a quack that needs to stop whining and share what he has, like a little spoiled brat in the sandbox, I think he is just afraid someone will debunk him (which happened in the past already) and prove him inadequate to hold on to that data.
Greetings and Salutations.
My father was a Microbiologist, and, spent most of his professional life researching yeasts and molds. His method was to gather as much data as possible, and see what results stemmed from it. I believe he would be shocked and dismayed to see this widespread tendency to come up with a conclusion, then, find the data that supports it.
Those so-called scientists who are doing this, either to push a personal agenda or to ensure the continuation of grant money should be ashamed of themselves, and, should either clean up their act, or get drummed out of the scientific community!
This sort of activity not only wastes huge amounts of resources, but, what is worse, undercuts the credibility of the scientific community, making it far harder for the good scientists who are following good protocols and producing good results to be believed.
I observed elsewhere that it appears that the entire world is falling into a pit of hair-trigger, paranoid madness. This example, sadly, supports that belief. I hope I am wrong, but, I fear I am not...
Pleasant Dreams
Dave Mundt
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
...who does not trust some Russian cracker more, than some scientists?
Seriously, those are the guys who normally maintain botnets for a living, create pretty much every crack out there (the elite in cracking definitely is Russian), etc.
OK, I don’t really trust anyone of them, but prefer to have double and thrice checks by (actually) opposing groups, coming to the same resulting conclusions.
But trusting some weird guy from who knows where, who claims something that just so happens to fit with the goals of some other criminals (Big Oil , FOX News friends, etc.), just strikes me as being very counter-intuitive.
(I do not make a judgment here, as they still could be right. But just that for natural reasons, they will have a much harder time, making me believe their statements.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Yes, admitting the entirety of data into calculations of this scale would be foolish.
However, that is NOT what the Russian IEA is claiming Hadley Center did.
The 21-page PDF (http://www.iea.ru/article/kioto_order/15.12.2009.pdf) specifically explains how the English "scientists" discarded more-complete datasets in favor of less complete, used data from stations that were moved around (less reliable) and ignored stations that were, ahem, stationary, etc, etc.
So it's not a question of admitting all data & risking contamination - it's a question of intentionally choosing worse data when better data was available.
There's a translation of the "Conclusions" section of the PDF (can't blame the guy for not translating the entire document, it's a linguistic bitch). Not posting it here - too long - follow the link http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/16/iearussia-hadley-center-probably-tampered-with-russian-climate-data/ and search for "Posted Dec 17, 2009 at 2:44 AM".
Yes, blue is the EIA data (all 476 weather stations across 152 "cells"), while the red line is the CRU cherry-picked data (90 stations from 121 "cells"). Actually, even though the line may look synchronized, the "Conclusions" section of the linked PDF specifically explains that by selectively discarding the data, the CRU made pre-1950's temperatures lower than actual, and post-mid-1990's temperatures higher than actual - thus producing an intentional skewing of the trendline. Those couple of millimeters' offsets between the blue and red lines *are* significant to scientists, looks like :)
But suddenly it's about climate change therefor you're now all more qualified experts than those with the data. Why is that? What is it about climate change that suddenly everyone and their dog can tell you how wrong the scientists are?
If you're looking for a reason, it's about money. The skepticism comes from governments trying to impose new taxes while propaganda machines try to convince people that we're all gonna die if we don't do something NOW. Typically, when someone tries to rush/scare you into parting with your money, there is some sort of scam involved.
Why should that restriction exist at all?
To weed out trolls.
The background knowledge needed to interpret raw climatological data is immense. I'm knee deep in it now, and it's not straight forward. It's not a nice excel spreadsheet. The amount of work that needs to be done to just get the data into the sort of shape where statistics can be done on it is tremendous. A few quick examples:
Arctic measurements. You may already know this, but shit breaks in the cold. All the time. Add in ice melting and thawing, and 50 mph winds, and equipment does not last long. So our data from arctic areas is filled with holes. It's got bogus measurements. Knowing how to spot those bogus results requires an understanding of the equipment being used, how it functions in the cold, and where it's located. You may be able to totally trust a piece of equipment at temperatures over -10C, but have to throw out all data for temperatures below -60C. Just handing out the raw data to anyone will result in some fool taking it as absolute truth.
There are dozens of climatological oscillations in the earth's atmosphere and oceans. El Nino is half of the most famous one. (No, the other half isn't La Nina, it's the Southern Oscillation) When you look at something like temperature data, you see all sorts of ups and downs. When a couple of these oscillations are in phase, you'll have abnormally high or low temperatures. When they're not in phase, you'll have some mixture. If you're trying to analyze temperature patterns on earth and don't know to take these into account, you're just wasting your time, and potentially going to publicize incorrect findings because of it.
Geophysical data is ridiculously hard to work with. You need to understand the engineering of the tools used to collect the data, the tolerances and quirks of them, the areas they're used in, sometimes even HOW they're used to take measurements. On top of that, you need to have a very good understanding of the physical processes of the earth's climate systems to be able to isolate any sort of signal. Otherwise, it's just a chaotic mess.
In short, this requires experts. It's not something that anyone can just hop into Excel with stats 101 under their belt and do. A lot of work is a partnership between engineers, climatologists, AND statisticians. No, your "econometrics heavy MSc" is not enough. Not by a long shot.
Like anything stupidly complicated, it requires the work of experts. If you want to be an expert, you generally need to spend the time studying to BECOME an expert. How does one prove this? Relevant degree and some peer reviewed publications under your belt.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Let's take a look at the situation, shall we?
Just show us the facts; the raw data, without any spin of "ZOMG! GLOBAL WARMING!^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCLIMATE CHANGE! OH NOES!!" bullshit editorializing. If you want to be taken seriously and convince even those who are not merely skeptical, but "won't" believe even in the face of evidence, then show us the raw fucking data without any tweaking - and accompany that data with a history of each temperature sensor (for example, if a parking lot went up next to it, and the temperature spiked the next few years and gradually increased, don't obfuscate that fact). That way, if there really is an issue, one can come to a scientific conclusion rather than political.
Until then, count me among the skeptics who consider this a political rather than scientific issue, especially in light of the fact that it is believed that the Antarctic and arctic shelves are breaking from stress (from "overgrowth"), not due to heat, since they are larger than they have been during recorded history, and that when the alarmists are proven conclusively to be wrong, they change the terminology ("global cooling" to "global warming" to "global climate change" - face it, the global climate always has been and always will be very dynamic).
I could go for some global warming about now, by the way. It'd be nice for winter to just go away. :-)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
//Free exchange of information isn't a problem for an honest scientist.//
Responding to each and every request for data can be quite time-consuming. How many requests from random, miscellaneous, and often politically-motivated people do you expect a working scientist to entertain per day? Per week?
The way studies of this sort work is the author should include the method he used for gathering data (and correcting it, if applicable). The primary source for the data is NOT THE AUTHOR OF THE STUDY. It is the same place from which he obtained it. Whether this source is NOAA, foreign weather observatories, or international climate bodies is irrelevant---the author is never a primary source of data unless he is performing experiments, and anyone who has done real science understands this.
Another scientist should be able to come along, gather the same data, and analyze it according to the same method. There is an expectation that the author would clarify his methods if asked by another qualified researcher---the imposition on his time is worthwhile because the scientific process requires these checks. A simple data entry error can skew results, and followup investigation can always uncover errors or address shortcomings in methodology. If a neutral and qualified researcher says, "I followed your method with the same data set and got X where you got Y" then certainly further investigation is necessary.
Scientists are not obliged to respond to spurious demands for data or explanations of methodology from anyone at anytime.
The primary data sources (e.g., observatories) may place restrictions on access to the data as well in order to avoid excessive overhead. If it's coming from NGOs, then tough. If it is funded by your government, then contact your representative and demand open access and the funding/staffing to supply it.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Sure. Do you know who showed that phlogiston and the luminiferous aether didn't exist? Scientists. People who had a good grounding in the field. You may remember the continental drift controversy, but its big proponent, Wegener, was a geologist himself.
What the experts say may be wildly mistaken. What the non-experts who loudly disagree with the experts say is almost certainly mistaken.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Not really, no. Generally scientists are assumed to be honest until proven otherwise. How would you work any other way? Perhaps *if* data collection was done by a completely separate team to analysis (with no possibility of collusion) and absolutely everything was published down to the last detail. In practice, these conditions can't be satisfied and would be horrendously time consuming, expensive and wasteful.
Fortunately, there's no need. Since the whole point of science is that results are reproducible, any fraud of significance isn't going to last long before it's discovered. Someone claiming a great discovery that nobody can reproduce looks pretty suspicious. Even fields with large, centralised data sets (such as climatology) have more than one set and typically more than one researcher working on it. Fraud would require conspiracy on a grand and utterly implausible scale - even if there was a plausible motive, which there isn't.
I don't know, who they are, but I do know, that no full, raw, unedited and "uncalibrated" series are nowhere to be found. The recent "leak" of the materials from East Anglia's CRU contained e-mails and programs (some showing obvious attempts to apply bogus corrections), but not the data files.
Worse — whatever raw data this particular CRU had before, was dumped "to make room", and only the result of their "calibration" is preserved. Whether they sincerely believed, the original data will never be needed, or maliciously thought to hide imperfections in their calibration algorithm is a hot topic. But what's clear, is that it is not available — to anyone.
But, again, even if the calibration were perfect (or, at least, sincere) — we can't get it. And so, there is no way to reproduce the results — for example, a highly-moderated poster (mrsquid0) claimed to have discerned from the leaked IDL-programs, that the correct, rather than bogus version of the script was used to produce a chart published in Nature. However, when asked, where he got the data to run the program for himself, he posted no response... Because he never has... Have you?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
So basically the data is incomplete, and you have to make guesses to fill it in. Oh, wait, I mean 'educated' guesses, since the only people you let guess are the ones whose guesses agree with yours.
If I want to become an expert on SQL, I go read the specs. If I want to become an expert on climatology, I go ask people to tell me how to guess which numbers will be useful to feed into the statistical analysis specs. I don't consider this crap as coming close to 'science'.
. Unfortunately, there is no computer model that can accurately simulate the earth's climate.
Isn't there? That depends on what you mean by "accurately". A model which predicts a temperature change of 0 +/- 50 degrees C is obviously not precise or indeed useful, but it's nevertheless correct. One that claims 4 +- 0.1 when the correct value is 5 is wrong. The last time I looked the models had fairly wide error bars associated with their predictions but the lower bound was still positive, and some decent estimates could be made as to the likely effects of different emissions scenarios. There's always the possibility that something has been missed and that the error analysis is not correct, but that's true of pretty much any measurement or calculation. But you don't need perfect precision in your predictions to get a useful result, you just need a decent understanding of the errors and limitations of your method.
You don't think they're capable of twisting, distortion, selective quoting, poor analysis? Yes, it all *could* be debunked given enough time, and willingness of people to listen. But who has that kind of time, especially considering they'll never accept they were wrong and just drop it [1] and move onto their next poorly thought out point. And all people will remember is that there were a lot of criticisms, with the fact that they were unfounded being lost in the cognitive biases. Don't forget, if you don't care about the quality of your criticisms, you can throw them up much faster than they can be shown to be wrong. And it's all made worse that invalid criticisms can nevertheless look quite plausible to the untrained eye.
This isn't just paranoia on my part, there's clear evidence of the "sceptics" doing just this if you look. As with the boy who cried wolf, I've now filed most of them in the "not credible and can be ignored" bin.
Your suggestion that the true evidence will win out in the public sphere is quite amazingly naive.
[1] Temporarily, anyway. I've seen lots of cases where some point was comprehensively proved wrong but the same person used it again later anyway, despite the fact that he must now be well aware of the flaws. Honesty? Fat chance.
"note: Until 1961 only sea level pressure, surface pressure, temperature, and precipitation are available"
Meaning that pre 1961 we don't have data for: Geopotential Height, Humidity, Sunshine, Surface Air Temperature (or Sea Surface Temperature, the quote above seems ambiguous as to which), and Surface Pressure.
Since these obviously factor in to the 'adjustments' people keep making on the data, and since we don't have hard data for them, any trend beyond 1961 is essentially a guess. Right? So our short term trends are meaningless, and our long term trends are based on guesses, right?
I agree with you to a point. I'm all for less pollution, just for the sake of less pollution. The point of contention for me is the thought that the ONLY cost would be economic. The past 100 years we've seen our standard of living and life expectancy increase at a nearly exponential rate. The cause of much of this increase? Transportation and the ability for a single human being to more easily obtain and use energy ... mostly in the form of fossil fuels.
... fossil fueled. Batteries/biofuels etc aren't there yet, so should we go back to living/dieing within a 20 mile radius as our great grand-parents did? (Unless of course they came to America on a coal powered ship.) Throw our wildly efficient modern farming techniques in there as fossil fueled as well.
... also nice, but not economically viable in the poorer parts of the world. Could America go nuclear + solar + wind? Sure, it would hurt financially but could be done. Could Sub-Saharan Africa? Not without even more people starving.
... if that's the choice, fuck the polar bears.
... even here in the states.
ANY form of VIABLE transportation
Electricity? Nuclear is nice, but the world isn't comfortable (for good reason) with unstable countries having these capabilities. Solar/wind/geo-thermal etc
I'll stop there, but hopefully my point is clearly stated. I would gladly trade a couple *C warming for the vast increases in quality of life we've enjoyed over the past century. Should we try and curb emissions if possible YES!! But we mustn't lock out the developing world from the very advantages we've enjoyed, economically or otherwise. Nor should we force ourselves to go backwards! If we did, we would essentially be trading people for polar bears
To assert that the only cost to reducing emissions are economic in nature is to dismiss the fact that economies feed people. When these economies are unduly burdened, people starve
You're calling BS on the AP. Keenan went to the FBI because in his fantasy world Wang had used government money to commit fraud.
Nobody pushes buttons like our bunny. Big red buttons with labels that say "IGNITION", apparently.
Yeah, except that was the press saying so, not the scientists. Watch this video. So your argument falls apart.
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No there wasn't. This was not scientific consensus at all. Watch this to educate yourself.
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