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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.'"
I'm pretty sure you'd die of asphyxia if you tried to read that opening sentence aloud. Holy run-on sentence, copyeditman.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Human beings generally get angry when you accuse them of being involved in a massive global conspiracy to defraud with no evidence.
Climate skeptics don't ask honest questions, they use questions to imply wrong doing.
That depends on whether you're willing to invoke the True Scotsman fallacy. For sufficiently narrow confidence intervals, there is no valid data for anything.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
They're not just asking questions though, they're saying things like "global warming is clearly a scam and politically motivated because look at all the snow we've had this year!"
Science doesn't mind (in fact, it thrives on) genuine critical appraisal of the work being done - it's how we learn and understand and develop more accurate theories.
What it doesn't support is the supposed "equal rebuttal" techniques used by the media and those with an agenda - you can say "I don't agree" if you like, but you had better have some supporting reason for that, and the distorted "facts" and data used (often not even any data, just opinion and 'common sense') used by those trying to discredit climate change really doesn't stand up to any scrutiny, and people get tired of being faced with "all your science is wrong because of ($easily_discredited_propaganda_talking_point)"
The trouble is, a lot of the population are easily convinced by ($easily_discredited_propaganda_talking_point), because soundbites and well-funded media talking heads and purchased senators are easier to understand than the often complex science, and the less-than-media-savvy scientists working in the field.
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?
I'm no climate scientist, but as I understand it, there is a lot of data that is showing the climate changing. As I understand well above the 95% confidence level.
The real issue is how much of that is man made. There it's more of an indirect relation, in the sense that the climate has been heating up at a rate that seems to be higher then ever before, since we started putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere in large quantities. There are also clues that there is a cause and effect relationship between the two, but as I understand that's less clear.
The actual climate change can be measured. The increase in greenhouse gasses can be measured. The link between them is a theory dependant on our imperfect understanding and ability to model the climate of the entire world. But there are many other influences as well, like solar cycles, volcanism besides the man made greenhouse emission.
In the end it boils down to if you want to find out if the theory is correct by waiting to see it happen, or if you dislike the future the theory predicts so much that you want to act now in the hope that if the theory is correct, the worst case scenarios can be avoided.
A pure experimental scientist would do nothing and see if his theory is right. But some of those guys also use themselves as a guinea pig to test how much G-forces the human body can withstand (John Stapp).
Sometimes it's not pleasant to see your predictions come true and you might want to try and avoid being able to prove your theory.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
All I know is that we won't be safe until we can eliminate all the carbon dioxide from our atmosphere.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
There really is no evidence of data 'fiddling'. NOAA makes the raw data available. They make the adjusted data available. The process they use to adjust the data (to account for relocation of weather stations/urban heat islands/etc) is also available and part of the peer reviewed literature.
A retired meteorologist named Anthony Watts did a great job of validating the robustness of the data. He (and a small army of volunteers) rated the weather stations based on how well they met requirements. Weather stations outside of urban areas and away from pavement were rated a 5. Poorly placed weather stations were rated a 1. He had hoped to find that poorly placed weather stations were responsible for the warming trend. In the end it was found that well placed weather stations actually record a greater warming trend. The reason for this may be that the warming trend of poorly placed weather stations is masked by the artificial heat in the area.
Most locations in the world are oversampled. We have high confidence in the results for those areas. Some locations such as Antarctica are under sampled. We have less confidence in the results for those areas.
Luckily we also have satellite data since 1979. The satellite data confirms the weather station data.
We have a very clear understanding of the global temperature. It's going up at a rate that is likely unprecedented over the last 1000 years.
Are you actually claiming that if his administration were to uncover fraud in climate science that he'd lose the vote of unions, trial lawyers, gay rights supporters, and civil libertarians? He'd lose the vote of just the few people for whom climate change is the biggest issue.
And if his agenda were based on fraud that his administration uncovered, he'd simply change his agenda. It's not an embarrassment if his assessments were based on a fraud that he himself uncovered.
I can not find any conflict of interest here. I think you're looking too hard for one.
Developers: We can use your help.
Is there enough statistically significant clear, objective data that is available to be verified that indicates anything with any amount of confidence?
Yes. Anyone honestly interested in understanding this or any other scientific finding can start their education here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_interval
And once you understand the principles of statistical confidence, you can get some data and run the numbers:
http://rainbow.ldeo.columbia.edu/datasources.html
Or you could just trust in the scientific community that does this kind of research for a living to not be part some some enormous, X-files worthy conspiracy.
Sorry if this all sounds patronizing, but it really pains me when I see people trusting politicians more than scientists.
Ask me about my sig!
While nobody's proven that the current extraordinary warming trend is man-made, scientists have been very successful in ruling out the other causes you mention (even in combination). The current warming is not caused by volcanism, changes in solar radiation levels, etc. Which means that it's either (a) man-made (a theory for which there is good evidence) or (b) it's due to some completely different force that we don't know about (aliens, the earth's core going out of alignment, mutating neutrinos, ok, I kid).
Either (a) or (b) should be a subject of concern for us. In fact, I think that if you're inclined to rule out (a) then you'd better be working damn hard on figuring out what (b) is.
But more importantly, while the theory begins with experimental science, it's now mostly an exercise in risk management. We know that there's a phenomenon occurring, we know that it may prove very --- if not catastrophically --- costly to our society, and we know that industrial waste emissions are probably (meaning, with some very reasonable probability) the cause of it.
So the question is: from a cost-benefit perspective, what's the best thing to do about emission levels today? Obviously the answer to that question depends on your evaluation of all the factors. However, given that the costs seem quite high (especially when you factor in the low-probability outcomes), you don't need anything approaching absolute proof to justify reducing GHG emissions --- even if there's only a moderate probability that it helps, you can justify it against the potential costs. I think that that the science is firm enough to justify pre-emptive GHG reduction.
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.
Regarding station data errors, I have an interesting story. People used to judge the brightness of stars by eyeballing and comparing to other stars. A rating of 10 was given to the brightest stars and 1 to the dimmest. Thousands of stars were surveyed by thousands of people. The instruments used for measuring brightness (eyeballs) were very poor compared to what we use today. It was found however that the average of the eyeball results were correct to two decimal places for any given star. By oversampling you can get good results from imperfect instruments. It's also important to note that with temperatures we are only interested in the anomaly - how much did the temperature change vs the same day last year. Any station that has a systemic error of two degrees will keep the same error from one day to the next. It won't record +2 degrees one day and then -2 the next. Since we're only interested in the anomaly it doesn't really matter that it's not recording the correct temperature - only that it is consistent.