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Scientists Cleared of Misusing Global Warming Data
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The NY Times reports that an inquiry by the Commerce Department's inspector general has found no evidence that NOAA scientists manipulated climate data (reg. may be required) to buttress evidence in support of global warming after climate change skeptics contended that e-mail messages between climate scientists that were stolen and circulated on the Internet in late 2009 showed that scientists were manipulating or withholding information to advance the theory that the earth is warming as a result of human activity. 'None of the investigations have found any evidence to question the ethics of our scientists or raise doubts about NOAA's understanding of climate change science,' says Mary Glackin, the agency's deputy undersecretary for operations. The inquiry, requested last May by Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who has challenged the science underlying human-induced climate change, comes at a critical moment for NOAA, as some newly empowered Republican House members seek to rein in the EPA's plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, often contending that the science underpinning global warming is flawed. Inhofe says the report (PDF) was far from a clean bill of health for the agency, and that contrary to its executive summary, showed that the scientists 'engaged in data manipulation.'"
To be clear, the "lie" in question is a discrepancy in one scientist's account of the origin of a piece of legal advice during an FOI request. It has nothing to do with the science itself.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Who is advocating "throttling back technological advancement"? Reducing carbon dioxide emissions will require lots of new technological advancement, such as clean nuclear power plants that burn their waste instead of leaving it emitting radiation for thousands of years, cheap solar power, advancements in energy efficiency, and carbon sequestration. It's the people who say we shouldn't be reducing carbon dioxide emissions that say we shouldn't be investing in these technologies.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
There are certain fingerprints we can look for to determine whether the current warming is caused by increased carbon. For instance in 1896 Svante Arrhenius predicted that nights should warm faster than days if there is an increase in greenhouse gasses. If the warming was due to increased solar activity we should expect days to warm faster than nights.
There are other indicators as well. With an increase in greenhouse gases we would expect the poles to warm faster than the equator, and winter to warm faster than summer. These are all fingerprints that we are able to detect. This gives us confidence that we are attributing the warming to the correct cause.
I looked at his web site. He looks like a kinder, gentler climate denier, but still full of propaganda.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/24/inspector-general-finds-noaa-climategate-emails-warrant-further-investigation/#comment-607154
He made a big post quoting Senator Inhofe that there are still some emails that "warranted further investigation". That line was taken out of context, and one of his commenters added the next sentence to the quote, which totally changed the nature and tone.
“In our own review of all 1,073 CRU emails, we found eight emails which, in our judgment, warranted further examination to clarify any possible issues involving the scientific integrity of particular NOAA scientists or NOAA’s data. As a result, we conducted interviews with the relevant NOAA scientists regarding these eight emails, and have summarized their responses and explanations in the enclosure.”
That's taken so badly out of context that this guy should look into getting a job at Fox News. The very next sentence of the quote disproves the entire allegation made by the headline.
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If you have actually followed the debate that arose over the infamous "hockey stick" graph that erased the medieval warm period and little ice age (McIntyre and McKittrick) and sundry additional papers since, you know that while they may or may not have done anything to the data per se, they've abused the hell out of statistical analysis, for example experimenting with untested and unstudied methodologies until they get one that shows warming, then publishing results obtained using it without giving any hint of the fact that what they are doing is most sketchy. I've been following this with great interest for just under a decade now, and IMO there is absolutely no question that this has been repeatedly done in the past (by MBH and nearly all the papers on which any of them have collaborated) and continues to be done today. And I won't even go into the bristlecone pine problem and the general problem of using tree-ring proxies for temperature when tree ring thickness is not a monotonic function of temperature only.
For example, a recent paper was published in Science (Steig) that claimed that the Antarctic is warming at an alarming rate. I've read over the paper and the counterchallenge to the statistical methodology used (which basically coarse grained thermal sensors on the thin peninsula that sticks out into the ocean from continental Antarctica until their generally warming trend overwhelmed the generally and clearly trend of the mainland). This all involved infilling data on continental thermal sensors on the basis of temperatures basically on the other side of the continent, an effect clearly visible if one computes the (infilled) sensor-sensor correlation as a function of sensor separation. The actual real (not infilled) sensor-sensor correlation falls off with distance fairly rapidly, as one might expect (Chicago weather isn't like LA's weather). The infilled correlation function shows substantial station correlation out at two or three thousand kilometers. If one simply includes one more principle component in the PCA, this effect disappears, and so does most of the warming; cooling for the last 30 years appears instead.
Is this lying with or manipulating data or simple lack of competence with statistics? You decide.
A reliable statistical estimate of warming of the sort that somebody with no horse in the race might do (and the sort that is done in computing the actual global average temperature from satellite data) shows moderate warming from 1957 to 1980, and cooling from 1980 to 2010. The latter, of course, confounds the predictions that as CO_2 goes steadily up, everything gets warmer; the fact that the fifty year warming is completely negligible is anathema to the scientists who make a living from the AGW hysteria.
Of course, anyone in the world who wants to can go read the climategate emails (or the comments in the actual hockey stick code), where it is made perfectly clear that the "hockey team" set out to erase the MWP and LIA and does anything and anything necessary to defend the AGW conclusion, right up to having journal editors fired if they dare to print a paper that concludes otherwise. Perhaps science is broad enough that they did all of this in good faith, although if they pulled these sorts of shenanigans in medical research e.g. verifying drug safety there would be immediate, permanent, negative sequellae. But it doesn't make it good science.
Anybody who actually understands statistics and things like R^2 and principle component analysis can read over things and judge for themselves, of course. If I point out that R^2 for the infamous hockey stick graph in the extrapolated region was basically 0, you will understand exactly what that means...
AGW may or may not be true, but so far it has been a poster child for confirmation bias, incredibly poor statistical analysis, cherrypicking of data (of course it has happened and continues
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
The entire panic about CO2 is politically driven, and many scientists have hooked their wagons to it, in order to get research funding.
Yeah, I'm sure you're an atmospheric physicist. No? Well, I have news for you. As a scientist who has worked in multiple fields I can tell you that scientists do not take positions just to get research funding. Yes, there may be an occasional bad apple who does, but they are very few. The large number of scientists who have looked at the data and run computer simulations (not you), and have reached a common conclusion is insurmountable.
Your statement is deluded and insulting.
I see the global warming situation to be the same as the recession.
There is one key difference: the recession is a datum observed and then explained after the fact. Global warming was predicted before there was the ability to measure it, as far back as the 19th century.
It was based on a very simple, reasonably obvious model: CO2 absorbs infrared. Burning fossil fuels increases CO2. That the climate would warm up is a single step in reasoning.
The details of it are governed by many, many more variables, and as such can be compared to the economy, but it's very important not to be misled by the comparison. This is not a model constructed after the fact, explaining only the data in the past. It is a model which was constructed over a century ago and for which a century of experiment corresponds well with the prediction.