Slashdot Mirror
House of Commons Finds No Evidence of Tampering In Climate E-mails
dwguenther writes "The first of several British investigations into the e-mails leaked from one of the world's leading climate research centers has largely vindicated the scientists involved. The House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee said Wednesday that they'd seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit ... had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming."
According to the article, the head of committee which produced the report "said the lawmakers had been in a rush to publish something before Britain's next national election, which is widely expected in just over a month's time"; two further inquiries are to examine the issue more closely. The "e-mails appeared to show scientists berating skeptics in sometimes intensely personal attacks, discussing ways to shield their data from public records laws, and discussing ways to keep skeptics' research out of peer-reviewed journals," but the committee concluded that East Anglia researcher Phil Jones was not part of a conspiracy to hide evidence that weakens the case for global warming.
Exxon-Mobil finds no evidence of danger in fossil fuel use.
RTFA, it does find that they had a keen interest in stonewalling critics. So much for peer review, taking some criticism, and I dunno integrity?
Truth should be easy to defend. There's not much scientific integrity if you have to stifle descent.
Also FTFA: "Lawmakers stressed that their report — which was written after only a single day of oral testimony — did not cover all the issues and would not be as in-depth as the two other inquiries into the e-mail scandal that are still pending."
As Winston Wolfe said: "Let's not start sucking each other's dicks just yet, Gentlemen."
No UK government investigation has found any evidence of any wrongdoing for anything in at least the last ten years - even when the previous six weeks have been wall-to-wall damning evidence reported in every UK newspaper, TV channel and website regardless of its usual political stance.
Actually the data from weather research posts is freely available to the public. All you have to do is find the relevant website (I don't have it on hand at the moment). One of the weather-scientist associations provides access to it I believe. As part of a final project for my weather science class in college, we actually had to analyze data from four different stations around the world and correlate our findings with local geographical data. Almost every student in the class found evidence of the global temperatures rising over the last 80 year period.
While rising one level above the simplemindedness of the left-vs-right mindset, you have not reached enlightenment, young padawan. There are no easy answers. "The left is correct", "The right is correct" - those are simple answers and therefore in all probability wrong. "All politicians are liars" - this is also a simple answer - and therefore in all probability wrong. The habit of judging statements not on their merit, but on their source is what is destroying political discourse, young grasshopper. No go and meditate. BUT DO IT OFF MY LAWN!!!
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Let me give you a hint.
The instant you show you're only concerned with your political party being 'right' ... thats the instant everyone with a clue just stops bothering with what you said and moves on.
No one really gives a shit what political fanboys think, you included. Its not about democrat or republic, its not about left or right, its about doing the right thing, which apparently to you means whatever democrats are ranting for this month.
You are just as retarded as the republican ranters.
Both groups are ignorant fucks who don't deserve the right to vote.
Its not a fucking football game. Stop fucking ranting and cheering for your political party, open your fucking eyes and vote for the right person for the job, not because they are wearing red or blue this week.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
How does working to increase efficiency and reduce pollution wreck the economy? Last I saw, every technological advance drove our economy forward in ways no one even imagined beforehand.
Seems to me that the common sense approach is to invest heavily in technology to fix the problem, not invest heavily in public relations aimed at extending the problem. That way, we all win no matter what the truth is.
Oh, do you mean in this article, where he admitted that there has been no statistically significant evidence of warming since 1995?
Being a man of integrity, he of course answered that question truthfully. Here's his full response:
It's funny, because whoever wrote that question did their homework; 1995 is the latest year at which, if you run the calculation, there's no statistically significant warming until 2009 - though I'm sure that'll change when we get the 2010 data. Of course, if you run the same calculation from 1994, you do get a statistically significant result at the 95% significance level. Further, if you decrease the significance level from 95% to something like 85%, the warming trend is again significant. The thing is that a mere fifteen years is just not enough time to do actual climate science. Generally, you have to look back at least thirty years to get reasonable statistical significance; the fact that there's such a strong signal even if you start in 1995 should be good evidence in itself.
Well if the House of Commons can't find it, it doesn't exist!
"Lawmakers stressed that their report -- which was written after only a single day of oral testimony -- did not cover all the issues and would not be as in-depth as the two other inquiries into the e-mail scandal that are still pending."
But still, the original hysteria and fingerpointing was based on a few e-mails out of 1,000+ distributed by an anonymous source. The lack of context, coupled with the public's general ignorance about science, provides a ready made tempest in a teapot.
Let me put it another way: how many different investigations (and from whom) would be required to convince the doubters?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Truth should be easy to defend. There's not much scientific integrity if you have to stifle descent.
You'd think the truth that cigarettes cause cancer and emphysema would have been easy to defend too, but look how long the tobacco industry strung out that debate. They even went so far as to lie, under oath, in front of Congress.
And climate change is infinitely more complicated than "smoking is bad for your health," while having much more money involved.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I'll tell you my problem with the science behind global warming.
.12C a decade and ask, how much of that is due to CO2. If you dig into, for example, the IPCC report, you get the answer is that most of it is probably caused by CO2 (and other GHG). OK, fair enough, how do we know? Dig deeper into the IPCC report and it's based on climate models. OK, and how do we know the climate models are reliable? The answer is we don't, and if you keep digging, you will find that they aren't.
Usually when I want to understand something in a science field that I am not an expert in, I can ask a real expert to explain it. For example, I might ask, "how do we know dark matter exists?" I am not an astrophysicist, and don't know all the details, but they can explain it. If I want to understand something at a deeper level, say, "how does lensing work?" they can explain it deeper. The more I dig, the more obvious the answer becomes. In some fields, the answer is, "we think X because Y, but we don't know yet."
Global Warming on the other hand is being sold as something that "we must fix now, or disaster will occur!" So you start digging deeper, and ask, "what disaster? will oceans rise dramatically?" and the answer is, well, not really. Are glaciers going to melt and ruin the water-sources in India? Well, upon further investigation, no. Are global rain patterns going to change? Well, people are willing to predict, but if you dig deeper you find that no one actually has a clue.
So then you go to what we do know, that temperatures have risen
So now we have this system, where there are massive unknowns, and people are preaching it like it's gospel truth. And then when you get to that point, people start using the same argument that they use to show God exists, "What if we do nothing and we are wrong?". That is not science, that is insanity.
I am in favor of developing alternative energy sources, and if electric cars are like the Tesla, I really want one. But let's be sane about it. All this focus on CO2 is distracting from real problems in places like India where they actually have sulphur in the air, which is 100% known to cause problems; it's not just some theoretical issue. Let's focus on real problems, and deal with global warming when we know what the actual problem is.
Qxe4
So pointing out a flaw in software being used to model the climate is being a "denier"? Well count me in. I deny that software works properly sir because it's a fact. Reviewing with a critical eye a process that could change the world, well that is wise not foolish.
It's "you" people that scare the shit out of me. "Consensus" has removed the ability to disagree apparently. Attacking critical thinking is not part of science. Climate science is becoming a religion and it makes me want to puke.
The very basis of our current scientific method, when you go beyond the individual scientist, is the idea of transparency and repeatability. When a scientist, no matter what field, blocks all efforts to have their data and methodology made public... when they won't disclose "internal" code used for dataset modification... they are painting themselves into a corner.
I'm still trying to figure out how anyone can 'bless' the CRU dataset when we don't even know if all of the data has actually been made public? Couple this with yesterday's NASA revelation - that everyone is using a lot of the same underlying measurements - then it even brings into question the validity of coming to the same results.
If you and I walk into the same room, look at the same thermometer, and we agree that it says 50 degrees F... have we really 'validated' each other's result for the temperature of the room? It's still a single measurement source at the same point in time, even if it's being viewed from two different points in space.
I'm one of those people who downloaded the 40MB foia.zip file. I've read the emails. I've read the HARRYREADME file, and I've looked at the code examples. I get the impression from reading the comments here that most people have not actually done that. Oh, they'll say "The data proves" but they haven't actually LOOKED at the data. I would have thought that slashdot readers, being the objective technically-minded people they say they are, would have wanted to tear into that code and take a look.
What you will find is really fascinating. It's not very good. Climate scientists, on the whole, aren't really very good programmers; and they are not good statisticians. Why should they be? You can't be expert in everything. So you have a situation where Michael Mann, for example, rather than use the statistical manipulation suite "R" instead used Fortran, sometimes. When you read through poor "Harry's" lament you find a kind of frustration only a programmer could feel. Missing data, bad data, programs that throw an error, don't tell you, and keep on going. Missing data sets for entire countries.
Now, the essence of science is replicability, correct? If you're going to claim 'cold fusion' you publish your data and your methods and other scientists attempt to replicate your findings, or not. But the climate gate folks have steadfastly refused to release their methods, including their computer code, and the data they did release was not the data they used in their publications. Further, they 'lost' some data altogether.
Let us turn to the most famous of the emails: "I've just used Mike's Nature trick to hide the decline." Jones says he used the word "trick" to mean a "clever thing to do." Let's look at his "cleverness." What he actually did is meld together the historical record, based on proxies like tree rings, and the more recent instrumental record. On the surface that looks like an okay thing to do, but why did he do it?
The reason is that the tree ring data showed a warming since the early 1800's, and the instruments showed a warming since 1960 or so. Meld them together and you get warming! Global Warmimng! Yay! But why take out the tree ring data? Did it not continue and show warming into the nineties along with the instruments, thus verifying what these guys were saying?
No, it did not, thus you have the problem of "divergence" which is a fancy way of saying the tree ring data wasn't cooperating and showed COOLING since 1960! Well, these Climategate guys decided it 'must be something else' so rather than include the tree ring signal, they CUT IT OFF to HIDE THE DECLINE it showed. Thus an 'inconvenient truth' was 'disappeared' in favor of not 'confusing' the issue. They were afraid that if they showed just this one tree-ring line in their spaghetti chart declining, they'd have to explain it.
And they could not. In fact, the issue of the tree rings not cooperating calls into question using tree-ring data AT ALL. If it's not an accurate 'treemometer' how can you base historical climate on it? This is but one example of dozens and dozens of manipulations done by the Hockey Team as they attempt to salvage their careers and grants. It is simply not true that 'thousands of scientists' have replicated Global Warming. They have not. They have all used the same corrupted data sets in their calculations.
The Himalayan glaciers are not disappearing. The rain foretss are not turning into grasslands. African crops are not failing. Arctic ice is normal in every respect. There were 2500 polar bears a couple of decades ago and now there are 15,000. The Antarctic has record ice. The Netherlands is not 50% below sea level and the sea levels are not rising any faster than they have since 1800. Hurricanes are not more frequent, nor are tornados. Forty years ago there were 6,000 surface-temperature measuring stations, but only 1,500 by 1990, which coincides with what global warming alarmists say was a record temperature increase. Most of the deleted stations were in colder regions. Geologists for Space
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
To be honest, the evidence for global warming is so blatantly obviously everywhere, so incredibly pervasive that it becomes hard for anyone with a scientific mind to treat those that can't see the obviousness with dislike. Just how must of us hate the flat earth society.
I mean, just think about the oceans, and the amount of heat water can store, the amount of heat it takes to melt ice, and you realize the melting ice caps and the warming oceans are more than enough proof that global warming exists.
Really, with that overwhelming visual evidence, it is obvious the earth is warming, regardless of surface air temperatures (which vary drastically and constantly based on local conditions). Not only that, but scientists must do exactly what evolution scientists and geologists are forced to do, and comb over every last detail with a fine tooth comb and make sure their are NO published discrepancies, because even the smallest data variation leads to thousands of crazed unscientific nut-jobs storming about how everything you have ever said is a lie and that you are a dirty fraudulent alarmist and nothing more.
Whether or not it is caused by people? that is easy enough, just look at any city from afar, or smell the city air compared to the country air, or go within a few miles of a factory. You quickly realize that we are polluting to no end, and even if it isn't bad for the environment it is bad for us. But that is clearly at least slightly bad for the environment. Whether or not we are causing global warming is irrelevant to whether or not we should limit pollution, it is just used as a distraction and crux for major energy companies and industries that have the entire republican party and those that worship it in their pocket.
Attacking consensus with logical and valid evidence is one thing, but to deny the blatantly obvious is what makes scientists dislike deniers. Just as they dislike evolution deniers (and we can watch evolution before our vary eyes), radio-carbon dating deniers, and so on. There was once a time when the absolutely insane were widely accepted as such, but scientific illiteracy has made this not only main-stream, but has caused a whopping 50% of people to deny well accepted science (in the case of global warming).
As XKCD says, "A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them" It troubles the lovers of science when the fate of their future is at stake over such idiocy though.
Climate science is no more a religion than is belief in the heliocentric model of our solar system.
Bugs in software are one thing, but it is undoubtable that our ice-caps are glacial deposits are shrinking, and that the oceans are getting warmer. No amount of bugs in software can make that false. And no number of calculation mistakes make the smog clouds above cities disappear.
The Hatchet
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
Buzz! Wrong. We calibrate models on historic data and check if their predictions match the reality.
When I was in school about three years ago I was taught that current climate models, given any set of historic data as initial conditions, are unable to accurately match more than the next ten years of climate data. To clarify, if all of the data up to, say, 1980 was fed to any given climate model, then the data produced by the model beyond about 1990 no longer match what data was recorded for the '90's. This was hammered into myself and my peers because we were getting prepped and ready to work in the spacecraft design industry. Our job was going to be to ensure the survivability of satellites orbiting the Earth (in part). That meant we had to account for things like planet-shine and Earth albedo in our thermal control designs so that we didn't bake our electronics. That also meant that we had to have accurate models of the solar activity as well as accurate models for variances in the Earth's magnetosphere. The models that we could use, with any validity, to base our designs upon were purely historic in nature. That is, we had decades worth of recorded data and we made the assumption that any patterns and cycles that were observable were likely to repeat themselves in the short term because we had no viable means of proving otherwise (we could not predict a deviation from common cycles). The reason climate models got brought up was because Earth albedo was not accurately predicted by any existing climate models. In other words, no climate models, as of 2007, were accurate enough in their modeling of Earth's atmosphere to reflect, appropriately, how much solar radiation was reflected back into space and how much was trapped/absorbed.
Do you see where I am going with this? In 2008, for our spacecraft design classes, where we had to present all of our design criteria and assumptions to spacecraft design industry members. We were restricted to using historic models of Earth's thermal data because no accurate model could do what you claim they can do now. That is, no model could reliably predict, past about a decade, what the hell was going to happen with Earth's thermal systems. The same, so far as we were taught, held true for all comprehensive Earth-climate computer models.
Now, it's 2010. Please tell me, if you know, what climate models are acutely accurate beyond about a decade. Please explain to me what mathematical constructs they used to create such a model. Please explain to me where I can read a comprehensive analysis of the accuracy of said climate model beyond a decade. That is, show me a model where I can input a historical data set that terminates in 1900 and have it accurately predict, to a statistically significant degree, most of the climate happenings up through 2000. If you can point me to this data, and these models, I and many other spacecraft designers will be eternally thankful to you. You see, such models would be one significant step in designing spacecraft to survive for more than about 10 -15 years without it being a wild crap-shoot.
If you cannot point me to said model, then please check the input signal on your buzzer, because it seems to be going off for not apparent reason.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Great, except that you need to classify carbon as "pollution" for your argument to make sense. And carbon is "pollution" only if it significantly contributes to global warming, so your argument has to assume its conclusion!
Limiting carbon emissions is expensive - that's why there is a legitimate argument about how much human contribution to emissions matters and whether incurring those costs now is the best way to respond to the risks of global warming in the future.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
There is a real scientific problem with your skeptics dismissal.
The properties of Co2 are not in question here and never were. The question is whether or not the change in the amounts of Co2 is large enough on scale to have the claimed effect outside of other observations because the raw physics equation doesn't side with observations. Co2 is a very small part of the atmosphere and the amount that is supposed to be a problem something like .0005 of the total atmosphere. And to add to that, there are plenty of other green house gases that display properties similar to Co2 in much larger quantities which are more effected by natural events then man made events. There are many outside factors that contribute to the problem like submarine volcanic activities, shifts in oceanic currents along with the decadal oscillation events responsible for El Mino and so on. That's why there is a complex climate model and not a climate math problem that any high school child could figure out.
I mean seriously, if it was as simply as Co2 has X heat retention value when exposed to Y amounts of heat then the entire proof would be X+1*y. And for every one in addition to X, simply measure the temp and see if it's accurate. Well, it's not that simple and to date, no attempts to make it that simple have been accurate.
What you are doing is essentially saying Wool is warm, I see ten sheep with wool, I am going to be warm and criticizing anyone who doubts you. Your league of followers may believe that you will eventually shear the sheep and make fabric from the wool that you will eventually make into some warm clothing and wear, but I don't have to believe you will, the guy you responded doesn't have top believe you will, actually, no one who can critically think should believe you will until we see you wearing the wool sweater and socks. SO if Co2 is actually the problem, more specifically, man made Co2, then show us the damn wool socks and sweater already. Don't sit there and cry because the properties of Co2 are such or that someone questions the claim. `All that does is show how little about the situation you actually do know. And when I say situation, I mean both global warming as well as the skeptics.