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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.
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.
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
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
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?
Finally, an answer that will appeal to all the faith-based populists:
"You know who ELSE doesn't believe in global warming? Russia."
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
Now you just have to show that EVERY paper negative about AGCC was always rejected by every journal. Wow, some work, isn't it? It's going to take a lot more to prove a global conspiracy by nearly every scientist involved in the area than a single email by one person about two papers. Because otherwise, the only thing you've shown is that.... a single person rejected two papers based on personal bias against the conclusion.
Not to mention that the email said that they might still be published. In terms of a smoking gun, that's pretty damn weak.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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.
In short, the topic that people are making all of this hullabaloo about failed peer review. Meaning that there were errors found in it that prevented publication. And so what do they do? They turn to the press and hype it up three ways until sunday, hoping people won't notice or care that a peer-review board found the claims bogus. You're burying the lede, trying to allege some sort of peer-review conspiracy, when the reality is that all that says is that a peer review board found the claims as inaccurate/without merit.
Want an inconvenient fact about this article? The selection of stations is not done manually. It's done in an an automated process that has been analyzed by dozens of peer-reviewed papers. The selection process is designed to eliminate bogus or artificially trended data, such as from urbanization, damaged equipment, etc. What the IEA is basically damning them for is not including data that an automated, peer-reviewed process found was bogus.
You simply cannot automatically assume that all stations are good and valid. Because they're just plain not. Heck, normally the deniers themselves are the first ones to point this out.
And lastly, why are we even listening to a report from the "Institute for Energy Analysis" in the first place? Are we going to frontline reports from the Institute for Petroleum Research next?
Nobody pushes buttons like our bunny. Big red buttons with labels that say "IGNITION", apparently.
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.
No, you don't actually.
Showing that the system was rigged and that some valid papers were rejected is enough. Even showing that a single valid paper was rejected is enough, because it's not supposed to be possible.
A conspiracy has been exposed, and that's enough to start questioning the conspirators and treating the evidence skeptically.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
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.
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
Because otherwise, the only thing you've shown is that.... a single person rejected two papers based on personal bias against the conclusion.
He didn't even show that; he showed that a person with a stake in the matter wrote damning reviews of two papers. He may have written damning reviews because he didn't like the conclusion, but he may have written damning reviews because the papers were crap and riddled with errors. All the quote shows is that he wrote damning reviews.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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
Typical denialist bullshit. Cherry pick a few sentences out of a whole email to make a scientist look bad. But the linked e-mail shows exactly why Dr. Jones is planning on going to town on his peer review: people are stating things about the Siberian data that the CRU has already accounted for in published research.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
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.
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
"And since we have found they were suppressing opposing viewpoints in journals" Please try another myth. The papers you are referring to were published in the IPCC reports, given their quality and history they shouldn't have been. Besides, Mann does not work for the UEA CRU.
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'?
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"
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?
Even showing that a single valid paper was rejected is enough, because it's not supposed to be possible.
Yes, because Scientists operate outside of human emotions, and are all Vulcans sequestered inside an alternate dimension where there is no such thing as politics. /sarcasm
If you were ever stupid enough to believe that there never was a single paper that was rejected by someone because of personal rather than scientific reasons, you have no business opening your mouth... on pretty much anything.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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.
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.
Regarding your appeal to authority (dozens of peer reviewed papers), I would point out, as I love to on these occassions, the thousands of peer reviewed papers published with respect to the dietary causes of stomach ulcers.
Now on your substantive point that the automated process throws away "bad" stations and only includes "good" ones, let's be clear here:
That reason may well be something similar to Mann's "confirmation bias" method of proxy selection, ie. throw away all data that doesn't match your pre-conceived idea of what the data should look like.
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?
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.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
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."
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".
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.
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'.