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Second Inquiry Exonerates Climatic Research Unit
mvdwege writes "After being cleared of charges of misconduct by a parliamentary committee, now the CRU has the results of the inquiry (PDF) by a panel of scientists into their scientific methods. Here is the CRU press release. Criticisms: The statistical methods used, though arriving at correct results, are not optimal, and it is recommended future studies involve professional statisticians if possible; and the CRU scientists are lacking somewhat in organization. A very far cry from the widespread allegations of fraud. It seems 'Climategate' is ending with a whimper."
blue-ribbon committees of politicians
From page 7 of TFA:
APPENDIX A
PANEL MEMBERSHIP
Chair: Prof Ron Oxburgh FRS (Lord Oxburgh of Liverpool)
Prof Huw Davies, ETH Zürich
Prof Kerry Emanuel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Prof Lisa Graumlich, University of Arizona.
Prof David Hand FBA, Imperial College, London.
Prof Herbert Huppert FRS, University of Cambridge
Prof Michael Kelly FRS, University of Cambridge
Fraud you say ? Don't you think your view lacks a bit of perspective ?
From the report, on dendroclimatology:
"Although inappropriate statistical tools with the potential for producing misleading results have been used by some other groups, presumably by accident rather than design, in the CRU papers that we examined we did not come across any inappropriate usage although the methods they used may not have been the best for the purpose. It is not clear, however, that better methods would have produced significantly different results. "
"With very noisy data sets a great deal of judgement has to be used. Decisions have to be made on whether to omit pieces of data that appear to be aberrant. These are all matters of experience and judgement. The potential for misleading results arising from selection bias is very great in this area. It is regrettable that so few professional statisticians have been involved in this work because it is fundamentally statistical."
"After reading publications and interviewing the senior staff of CRU in depth, we are satisfied that the CRU tree-ring work has been carried out with integrity, and that allegations of deliberate misrepresentation and unjustified selection of data are not valid. In the event CRU scientists were able to give convincing answers to our detailed questions about data choice, data handling and statistical methodology. The Unit freely admits that many data analyses they made in the past are superseded and they would not do things that way today."
On historical instruments reports:
"Like the work on tree rings this work is strongly dependent on statistical analysis and our comments are essentially the same. Although there are certainly different ways of handling the data, some of which might be superior, as far as we can judge the methods which CRU has employed are fair and satisfactory. Particular attention was given to records that seemed anomalous and to establishing whether the anomaly was an artefact or the result of some natural process."
"The Unit has demonstrated that at a global and hemispheric scale temperature results are surprisingly insensitive to adjustments made to the data and the number of series included. "
"Recent public discussion of climate change and summaries and popularizations of the work of CRU and others often contain over-simplifications that omit serious discussion of uncertainties emphasized by the original authors."
In the conclusions:
"We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it."
In case anyone is wondering about these people (because I was, and thus checked):
* Prof Ron Oxburgh FRS: a geophysicist, strongly worried about climate change. Worked with Shell and has ties to a number of alternate energy companies.
* Prof. Huw C. Davies: Works in the Institute of Atmosphere and Climate, is a climate modeler. Couldn't find any industry links for him.
* Prof Kerry Emanuel: Professor of Atmospheric Science, is extremely interested in hurricanes and cyclones. Seems to disagree with the IPCC position that hurricanes are increasing because of global warming.
* Prof Lisa Graumlich: Director of the school of Natural Resources and the Environment. Doesn't seem particularly an expert on global warming, but if you want to know what effect a changing climate would have on agriculture, ask her.
* Prof David Hand: a statistician. He's done statistic work for a lot of companies. Doesn't seem to know much about climatology, but he knows more about statistics than I even dreamed existed.
* Prof David Hand: Professor of Theoretical Geophysics. Has publicly criticized the Mann Hockey Stick graph. Also really likes math.
* Prof Michael Kelly: spent a lot of time researching semiconductors. Seems to have no relation to climate science at all, but he is the part-time Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department for Communities and Local Government, whatever that is.
Seems they chose a good variety of people, and the chances of these guys being part of a conspiracy are low. Also, they are a smart group, and I would not try to trick them.
Qxe4
Whoops, I messed up on that second to last line, got the wrong person. Should have been:
* Prof Herbert Huppert: Professor of Theoretical Geophysics. Has publicly criticized the Mann Hockey Stick graph. Also really likes math.
Qxe4
It seems some "skeptics" have (finally) got off their arses and made an honest attempt to make their own global temperature reconstruction using the NCDC dataset. Which is a great improvement over the morons who think filling in form letters for vexatious FOI requests has something to do with science.
And what a surprise! They find that their record pretty much agrees with the CRU compiled record. If anything it shows a little more warming.
It is discussed here http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/global-land-temps-cru-style/
You want some falsifiable predictions from mainstream climate science. Try these:
1. The global temperature will increase - predicted by Hansen's model from early eighties. There is an observed increase in temperature.
2. Arctic and antarctic to warm faster than rest of the planet - predicted by all models. Observed.
3. Troposphere to warm and stratosphere to cool - predicted by all models. Observed.
4. Increasing signature of CO2 in long wave spectrum form top of atmosphere. Observed by satellite spectrographically.
5. Increasing acidification of the oceans. Observed.
and plenty more where those came from. Please cut the crap about climate science not being falsifiable. Try looking at the evidence, the science and the facts for a change.
To scientists, the theory is this: adding CO2 to the atmosphere will somewhat warm the atmosphere. This may cause some minor changes in the earth's climate system.
Several degrees of warming is not trivial, it would result in sea level rises large enough to wipe out many coastal areas which are currently heavily populated - parts of Florida, Bangladesh, India, Bangkok, etc, etc, quite apart from other changes possibly precipitated by the loss of the ice caps. Changes to mitigate the sea level rise after the fact will be hugely expensive, more so than adjusting our behaviour now in my opinion. In addition to this, our reliance on fossil fuels is soon to become a large problem, as they start to run out. Oil, Coal and Gas will probably run out this century, or become incredibly expensive, so we have to deal with these issues for other reasons too.
There are plenty of reasons to respond rationally to the very rapid changes in climate (rapid in geological terms) over the last few centuries, whether you accept they are man-made or not. They are not minor problems, and will probably constitute the largest problems we have to face this century.
OK, so I read the file the parent linked and what a shocker.
Some quotes
OH FUCK THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm :
hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform
data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found.
I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can't get far enough
into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and
semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog.
I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections - to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more.
Now, this is a clear indication that the standard deviation limits are not being applied.
Which is extremely bad news. So I had a drains-up on anomauto.for.. and.. yup, my awful
programming strikes again. Because I copied the anomdtb.f90 process, I failed to notice
an extra section where the limit was applied to the whole station - I was only applying
it to the normals period (1961-90)!
Probably the worst story is temperature, particularly for MCDW. Over 1000 new stations! Highly
unlikely. I am tempted to blame the different lat/lon scale, but for now it will have to rest.
If I fix that, I get:...14 stations LESS than the previous exercise. That'll do, surely? It's not going to be easy to find 14 missing stations, is it? Since the anomalies aren't exactly the same. Should I be worried about 14 lost series? Less than 2%. Actually, I noticed something interesting.. look
at the anomalies. The anomdtb ones aren't *rounded* to 1dp, they're *truncated*! So, er - wrong!
The problem is that the synthetics are incorporated at 2.5-degrees, NO IDEA why, so saying they affect ;0)
particular 0.5-degree cells is harder than it should be. So we'll just gloss over that entirely
So, under /cru/cruts/version_3_0/fixing_tmp_and_pre/custom_anom_comparisons, we have a
'manual' directory and an 'automatic' directory, each with twelve 1990 anomaly files. And
how do they compare? NOT AT ALL!!!!!!!!!
46137
The parent is factually wrong on several accounts. It has nothing to do with "denier" or "supporter" - the facts are available.
1) You do not know whether the emails were leaked or stolen.
2) Some code was used, some code wasn't. There was no documentation as to what was where and for what.
3) Hide the decline indeed had to do with temperatures, if you accept tree rings as temperature proxies (which was the whole point of using them)
4) The "trick" referred to something that anyone with any statistical education knows is wrong (merging unrelated data sets into one)
As to your claim that there was nothing new in the emails, that's also factually wrong. Both the emails, and more importantly the documents and data, contained a lot of new information. To find out what, you might need to visit a so called "denialist" web site, or two, though.
The tree ring data from after 1961 is not used because it doesn't match the temperature Simple enough for you?
Yes. To a scientist it means "tree rings aren't good temperature proxies". You know, what the dendrologists have been saying the whole time.
http://climateresearchnews.com/2010/04/119-useless-oak-tree-ring-chronologies-used-by-mann-et-al-2008/
(disregard the site, linked since it contains the relevant quote from the tree ring specialists themselves)
it's in my head
Their numbers are the records of temperature measurements. They literally came from a book. How, exactly, do you propose we determine if the numbers were right? Check for massive transcription errors that all happen to go one way?
The entire "climategate" scandal was about their ANALYSIS of the data, not the data.
As a less snarky answer, if you want to see the data go look at their journal papers.
Well, if you understood science, perhaps you'd have looked into the problems here.
First, we didn't have thermometers 5000 years ago, so there's no accurate data. So we have to look for other ways to measure temperature after-the-fact. Tree rings and ice cores seem to correlate well, with tree rings having higher fidelity than ice cores. And for most of the time period where we do have thermometers, tree rings correlate well with the thermometers from the 1800s until the 1960s.
Starting in the 60's, tree rings are showing a colder temperature than we measure with thermometers. Why? Nobody knows. Best guess is pollution, but it's a problem for the biologists, not the climatologists.
Should we then treat the pre-1800 tree-rings as accurate? Well, that's going to be subjective. Since we don't know what's causing the slowdown for the last 50 years, an argument could be made that tree ring data is unreliable. On the other hand, our other source of pre-1800s data (ice cores) match the pre-1800 tree rings and we have a hypothesis whereby the slowdown is a new phenomenon.
In addition, we have this habit of placing the thermometers where people are. Since the thermometer is in a city, we know there will be a heat island effect. For modern readings, we've placed thermometers outside cities so that we can measure that effect. But that won't help for old readings. So we have to compensate for heat island effects without being able to accurately measure them and their change over time (small city = smaller effect). This correction, by definition, has to be subjective.
If you really were interested in the science here, you'd go fire up Google Scholar and read their papers where they explain all this. On the other hand you are moving the goalposts from "look! Bad analysis!!!" at the beginning of "climategate" to "look! Bad data!!". That kinda indicates you aren't actually interested in the science.
Why start at 1800? We can try to verify tree rings a lot further back than that, using ice cores as well as other proxies. It turns out the tree rings show a completely different pictures compared to the other proxies - a very flat picture. No MMW, no LIA.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFbUVBYIPlI (see the very end for sources)
To be frank, tree ring proxies (especially merging a lot of them together to hide how wildly different they are even from each other) are the only ones that can be used to show the handle of a hockey stick.
To get the blade, you need to switch away from the proxies again and graft direct temperature measurements to the end.
( ... and to be REALLY frank, you also need to modify the temperature measurements so you can minimize the warmth of the 30s and the cooling in the 60/70s.)
Here's the shocker: We HAVE earlier temperature data. That data does not agree with the tree proxies, and it gives the concept of AGW dubious support if any.
http://i45.tinypic.com/kqbd4.jpg
it's in my head
Given the gravity of their findings, the seriousness they attribute to the situation, the huge nature of the changes they propose, the affect the actions will have on everyone, the potential devastation to the world economy, etc. etc., the AGW crowd has to meet the Gold Standard of scientific evidence.
They have to document every last fact, provide access to all the data, provide the means and methods they used to draw their conclusions, account for every oddity, inconsistency, and anything else that would cast doubt on their conclusions. Their case must be iron clad. They have answer their critics, no matter who they are, thoroughly and in a timely manner...again and again if necessary.
Every aspect of their work has to be meet the highest level of professional standards and scrutiny. You have a conclusion based on statical analysis? It had better be done by a PhD in Statistics. You have a conclusion based on thermodynamics? Only someone with a PhD in that discipline is acceptable. Preferably with decades of experience and unquestionable standing. Cobbling together a little bit of skills here and there is unacceptable, unprofessional , shoddy and careless. Too much you say? Too bad. The stakes are too high for anything less.
You want to change the world? You better fucking bring your A Game.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
But, if AGW is true and we do nothing, then the consequences would be worse than if AGW is wrong and we do something.
Ignoring AGW, most of the solutions for global warming are also good things on their own, even without the added kick of preventing hypothetical warming.
I personally am on the fence about AGW, though I do see evidence for global warming itself. I just am not sure if humans can be attributed to it. But I am fully in favor of limiting our impact, developing sustainable, weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels, and generally being good stewards of our environment. If this causes the CEO of Exxon-Mobile to cry, sobeit. We have a greater obligation to our planet, and future generations than we do to keeping some rich buggers rich.
Solutions to AGW are good, even if AGW turns out to be wrong.
I would rather have done something than nothing. When dealing with consiquences as grand as those of AGW (if true), then I'd rather opt for the "better safe than sorry" solution. It is, in my opinion, too much to gamble.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey