The article mentions "modulations" over and over again as if they are some sort of evil force messing with your head.
Roughly speaking, modulations are changes in the energy at the sidebands of the carrier where the information is carried. Old cell phones were pure frequency modulation, the digital ones use a different scheme. But from you're brain's perspective, it shouldn't mean more than a slight change in the total energy being radiate at 2.4 GHz or whatever. The idea that your brain is affected by "modulations" seems extremely specious.
The fact that you're warming up your brain slightly when you hold the cell phone to your ear for a long time might have some sort of long term effect, I dunno, but I'm not too afraid of modulations.
The damage is done: nobody will believe ANY temperature data any more. Personally, I'm tacitly accepting of AGW, but even I will no longer put any value on that data. Even if somebody tries to reconstruct this data from other sources, I'm not going to believe it. The political influence is just too strong.
Nice projection. You, Chemisor, will not believe any temperature data any more. The rest of the world will make up its own mind. Belief has no place in science anyway. That belongs to religion.
People like you have an influence through the political process, but you have no influence in the realm of scientific research. You can pick and choose what to believe. We scientists will continue to do research and publish our results using established scientific guidelines accepted by scientists all around the world, and our results will be made public. You, Chemisor, have the option of ignoring these results, cherrypicking the bits which fit your worldview, or trying to take a step back and analyzing the data like a scientist and drawing a rational conclusion. We cannot do this for you. Good luck.
Well stated. The thing is, most everyday people do not understand how science and research is done and hence they filter everything through the lens of their own non-science-understanding experiences. They leap to extraordinary conclusions based upon sketchy data or anecdotal evidence. Unless you've published and been through the peer review process and have actually collected data and done exhaustive literature review etc., it's easy to think that research results could be easily manipulated like an accountant cooking the books. The big difference is that in science, there is a global "community" of scientists scrutinizing your output, somewhat like the open-source many-eyes model that just about everyone here praises.
As researcher in meteorology the CRU stuff has been an obvious source of hallway chatter between myself and my colleagues. If you could summarize our conclusions, it's mostly that (a) this looks band, but will blow over (b) we scientists just want to be left alone to do science and finally (c) most people just don't understand anything about the scientific process. Few of us are good at relating what we do to the general public or handling the press. When you peek behind the curtain and ask us to explain ourselves, don't expect a slick press release. Many of us want to scurry away to our dark labs and put our hands over our ears and work on the plodding, grudging, often infinitesimally satisfying world of scientific discovery.
Either that, or THE CONSPIRACY GOES DEEPER THAN I EVER IMAGINED POSSIBLE!!!!
I have open sourced my code (http://hdftools.sourceforge.net) but it's so nichey that nobody but a few people would find it useful. So there are only a few eyes. The many-eyes advantage goes away for tiny niche projects, unfortunately.
What a load. Peer review is not accuracy checking in the slightest. It is a sanity check on submitted articles, to remove obvious poseurs.
They have tossed the raw data, not intermediate runs. Their numbers simply cannot be reproduced. Their data set is essentially meaningless. They are saying "trust us", and the code that is evident in the files posted shows that you can't even begin to trust them.
Their work is completely discredited. They are disgraced.
You obviously aren't submitting articles to the same journals I am. Were it so easy to publish if all it took was not being a "poseur."
Based upon your logic, all experimental science involving measurements should be highly suspect or discarded where the measurements cannot be reproduced exactly. This would involve all experimental science conducted before say 1950 or so. Toss it out, the original objects being study have turned to dust, hence those experiments are worthless!
There is a lot of inherent trust involved in science. Sure, some rogue could cook data, but that would eventually work itself out when other scientists came up with alternate hypothesis which called the rogue study into question. It really is survival of the fittest when it comes to scientific hypotheses. Nothing is sacred.
Reproducibility exists within the countless other observational datasets involving climate change, although perhaps not with their exact observations. So what. Just because their exact raw data isn't available doesn't negate their science. Should all scientific data ever collected be kept forever? What you neglect to appreciate or understand is that new experiments are being conducted all of the time. It's not as if the entire basis for anthropogenic climate change rested on some data collected a handful of scientists in the 1980s.
Mewl and puke about it all you want, I don't care. It sucks, it's a black eye for climate research, but this too shall pass and the rabbling masses will find something else to distract their attention before long while we continue to head to the inevitable 500 ppm CO2 by the time I shed this mortal coil...
Unless those tapes were 100 or more years old, they would probably have been perfectly readable. Magnetic tape does not degrade rapidly if it is stored decently. Unless your storage closet was extremely hot and humid with an arc welder operating nearby, then the tapes would probably be readable 50 years later. Magnetic media isn't as horrible as you seem to believe, excepting 3-1/2" floppies of recent manufacture. These floppies don't survive being stared at for three seconds.
Well, then I have had horrible luck then with both 9-track and DAT tapes. Just sitting on a shelf in my office for 10 years and half of them have read errors.
SDLT tape seems much more reliable, I haven't had any problems with that, but I've only been using it for 5 or so years.
I would be interested to know real experiences of people who, today, are reading data successfully (or unsuccessfully) from 9-track tape which was written in the 80s.
Isn't the main criticism leveled by serious critics (as opposed to knee-jerk reaction critics) about misuse of statistics? It may be that the criticisms I've seen have been unrepresentative, but that's certainly the impression I've formed. In that light it's interesting that you don't mention statistics in the list of skills, and it's worth considering that a statistician could potentially find flaws without understanding the details of the meteorological processes modelled.
I would agree with you here. If statistics was improperly applied it could lead to faulty conclusions.
I don't think very fancy statistics have been applied to most climate data. Running averages, 10 year averages, weighted averages etc... most of it is just time series data. Often times the "raw" data is superimposed on the smoothed data anyway. Where I would be more concerned is the way proxies are used to infer things like temperature. Oxygen isotope analysis and dendrochronology can both be applied incorrectly - any climate proxy could. To me, the statistics is the easy part.
Concerning models, it's the assumptions that go into the model and the parameterizations that are the source of most consternation, not the pretty maps that come out from the model data. I can't stress the usefulness of ensemble data, since there is robustness when you have many different models running many different scenarios. Of course, most of the models share the same basic physical assumptions, so there is always the chance that an updated parameterization common to all the models could trend the model forecast envelope upwards or downwards.
Maybe I completely misread your post, but are you really suggesting that only climatologists could spot bugs in climatologists' code?
Bugs of the programming sort, no, I would heartily welcome pure computer scientists to go nuts and look for programmer errors.
Bugs of the procedural/physically flawed reasoning stuff, very likely yes, because a computer programmer would likely not understand the science or parameterizations behind the code.
How would you know if I was choosing the wrong constants or using a flawed physical approach if you didn't have a background in the science? The code could be "perfect" from a programmer's perspective but be giving bad answers. That is what my point was.
My point was, raw data may be some proprietary binary file that can only be read by some manufacturer's expensive code. So in order to make this data available for public consumption, it would need to be converted, and already you've lost the raw data. I would expect all the original raw data would be archived, but that doesn't mean it will be useful to many people.
If I gave you the model code I used you would likely find it useless. If you were auditing the code for errors it would take someone with a very high level of meteorological education (PhD with years of experience and who has read all the relevant literature) as well as a lot of programming and computer experience. Very few people in this world have that combination of skills and knowledge. At some level, you just have to accept that even though the peer reviewed process is flawed and the scientific process is not infallible, it works pretty damned well (the fact that you can read this on a computer screen should underscore that point - your grandparents likely sat in front of radios powered by vacuum tubes at some point in their lives, and their grandparents may have made use of the telegraph).
Climate change is being held to a different standard (expectations of every piece of "raw data" ever collected being made publicly available) because it's so controversial and because everyone and their pet wombat has an opinion about it (opinions mean nothing in science). Thankfully there are enough people who understand both politics and science who are making (slow) headway towards tackling this issue.
Cuttings indeed. Well when presented like that it looks bad. And I would agree it looks like unethical activity is going on. But I come back to the original question: Is climate changing, and are humans responsible? The answer is still yes to both. Is it going to get worse? The answer is still, with a very high confidence level, yes. The basics of greenhouse warming do not magically go away because of asshole egotistical scientists.
It's not as if people who already thought climate change was bunk are going to feel any more strongly that way, and it's not as if scientists such as myself are going to suddenly burn all our textbooks and journal articles.
The truth is, seeing a dip in temperatures over the past decade would be A REALLY KICKASS RESULT because it would imply perhaps something weird (AND INTERESTING) was going on, and this would prompt MORE research. I don't think people who are outside of the research world really understand the power of novel results in science. The tree ring data you showed is only one source of data and it's not global. If it's true, it's an interesting result that should be explained. I really don't understand why anyone would want to try to hide this kind of result. If the science is sound, it will pass the peer review process and make someone famous, at least for a short while.
In my area I use models which are open source (WRF, CM1) for modeling thunderstorms.
The source code is freely available. Yes, I would agree this is always best, and most (but not all) cloud model codes I am familiar with are open or available. Some researchers keep their innovations closed in order to keep an upper hand. I would imagine, however, were they asked to produce the code because of a strange result they would do so.
Good luck making heads or tails out of model source code though:) Well, it's usually not that bad, but the amount of code and knobs to twiddle via parameterizations is mind boggling. This is not nefarious, it's just the nature of modeling work. You do the best you can.
A big improvement in IPCC 4 vs 3 is that model ensembles were used. Dozens of different models each run dozens of times and then statistics were applied to these models. This really gives us a lot more confidence in the predictions. There is still a lot of uncertainty, but it's bounded within very high confidence levels. Much better than just looking at individual simulations.
"Raw data" - what does this exactly mean? Atmospheric scientists studying climate have multiple sources of data in multiple data formats. We don't save every bit when we collect our research, and stuff does get tossed out for various reasons. Heck, I have model-generated data from 10 years ago that it sitting on tape somewhere, but when it goes, it's gone. The model code is probably also on that tape. It is very possible that I could not recreate the work I did even 10-15 years ago. I now use new models, better data, etc.
At some level, we as scientists trust one another to not fudge things and the peer review process should take care of most of that. Should raw data be requested via legal means, I would presume that this data would be presented if it were available. Since reproducibility is a cornerstone of the scientific process, if one research comes up with some bizarre result (think cold fusion) and it can't be reproduced, it's tossed out. In this case we have just one of hundreds of sources which is called into question. This does not change anything scientifically, and probably won't change much politically in the long run.
Another thing to consider: Scientists often keep their data hidden from the rest of the world until they get the big publications out since it would be career suicide to let someone else scoop you on your own hard work and data acquisition. I don't think there is a standard grace period for when you suddenly make the data available. It probably depends on the project and the granting agency rules. The truth is, the rawest of the raw data is often discarded, and there is no ulterior motive involved. On the other hand, you are foolish if you toss any data form recent research as you may need to go back to it at some point in time and redo calculations. This happened to me once and had I not had the data available from a tape backup, I could not have gone back and done a calculation that was being requested of me from reviewers, and my paper would not have been published.
Let's review... The hacked emails look bad, but they were obtained illegally and were never meant for public consumption - these emails were never "peer reviewed" so to speak. As far as I'm concerned, they are irrelevant, as tempting as it is to see some giant conspiracy in them.
Concerning the data that was tossed out: This was probably due to something as humdrum as cleaning out a room to make space for new equipment or office space or something similar. I remember in the 90s when I was working at a R1 university our group needed more space for new hardware, and we got money to convert a storage room to a cold room where we could stick our hardware. There were rows and rows of old 9-track tape (probably the same kind of tape that was tossed out from the climate research group in question). Nobody claimed them, nobody wanted them, so we threw them out (not before unravelling one and playing with it first though). Had someone actually wanted to retrieve data off of those 9-track tapes, they probably would have been unsuccessful anyway since magnetic tape degrades with time and tar files don't have any error correction built in.
So even if these tapes from the 80s were still around they would likely be useless. Unless some sort of data migration plan had been in place, they were probably destined to decay.
Concerning the paper records, they would likely be just fine assuming they didn't get eaten away from the acid assuming it wasn't acid-free paper. But those were tossed too.
So, to review: Some asshole gets into the private email system of a university, does who-knows-what to it (we don't know for sure whether the emails were filtered, cherrypicked, manipulated, etc.) and releases it to the world. The text of the email appears to contain some language which could be interpreted as a bit dodgy, but honestly if you think science is all fun and games and doesn't involve egos, power struggles, rivalries, and colossal asshattery, well, surprise, it does. Now we have the data loss issue, which is easily explained and is likely due to cleaning up stored crap to make room for office space (I am guessing but that is not an unreasonable scenario).
Meanwhile, hundreds of other independent studies from dozens of different sources of instrumentation and other proxies shows over and over and over again that climate is warming and it's anthropogenic in nature due to greenhouse gas emissions. Is anyone arguing that humans are NOT responsible for 280 ppm going to, what is it now, 385 ppm of CO2 over the past 150 years? Is anyone arguing that CO2 is NOT a greenhouse gas and that all else being equal, a shift in the earth's radiative equilibrium temperature upward would NOT be expected with this increase?
As an atmospheric scientist it's crazy for me to think that anyone would even need to mess with climate data as it doesn't need to be massaged to show the obvious. The fact that there is interdecadal variability (things have flattened out a bit over the past few years) is really nothing too shocking and fits well within the range of predictions.
So wake me up in 20 years an let me know how this whole "conspiracy" worked out. If we're back to temperatures from the 1960s well, I'll eat my hat or whatever serves as headwear in the 2030s.
I'm not sure what you mean by "passively" eat - eating is eating.
Fish have mercury in them, some more than others, from pollution and the way the food chain works. Eating fish containing mercury can be dangerous if you eat too much.
A meteorology BS requires as much math as a Physics BS, so your snarky comment indicates you are ignorant of what kind of math is required for a meteorology degree (pick up a copy of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences and tell me there is no heavy math involved).
Three semesters of calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, statistics are required for a MET BS in our program - which gives our majors a free math minor at my institution.
Re:And to celebrate, it issued the command:
on
Unix Turns 40
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Bah. Your command would fail. You need to escape the splat just like the semicolon:
find my_lawn -name kids\* -exec rm -f {} \;
However -exec is slow. Try:
find my_lawn -name kids\* | xargs rm -rvf
Verbose for your kid-removing satisfaction.
Oh, and happy birthday, UNIX! Without you my career would have undoubtedly been less interesting.
I have a fully up-to-date Fedora 10 box (64 bit Intel dual core) and I have terrible issues with sound. I have a Creative soundblaster Audigy 4 (emu10k2.5). I have all sorts of issues with dropouts while watching video with pulseaudio. The only solution I've found is to uninstall pulseaudio, which sucks, because it's kind of cool. It's been suggested that Jack might help on top of pulseaudio... but I am lost in a maze of sound drivers and layers (jack/pulseaudio/alsa/oss/and good ol'/dev/snd). All I want is stable audio and the ability to record 96 kHz / 24 bit, which my soundcard can do, but which I can't get to work with Audacity - I get 24 bit padded to 16 bit.
I've posted to forums etc. on these issues and apparently the problems are known and being worked on. It seems to me I had the best luck with sound with RedHat 5 or thereabouts when there just wasn't as much complexity. I keep hoping the next upgrade will fix sound. I am probably going to do a fresh install of Fedora 11 when it comes out and cross my fingers.
The older generation always scoffs at the younger generation. There is always a large component of kids-these-days to these types of arguments. That being said, as a 40 year old college professor who's been doing this for 8 years, I do see a shift in the behavior of students, primarily the average-to-below-average student. The bright students who are motivated and mature don't seem to suffer from the problems I'm about to describe. One big problem is that many students simply are unwilling to do more than a fixed amount of work that they don't want to do. In college they place aspects of their lives which are not academic at a higher priority and get annoyed when their performance reflects this. I see more and more of this. The main things are: socializing, work, and family. It's not that I didn't have those thing when I was in college, it's just that academics always came first. Many students simply refuse to dedicate the time they need to do well; it's not that they're dumb.
A lot of students really do have the precious-snowflake chip on their shoulders. A junior faculty member in my department who has only been teaching for a couple of years and who is very student-focused told a student who was struggling in one of his classes that her main reason for not doing well was that she was not working hard enough (and he was right). How did she take it? She went to the dean and filed a complaint against the professor. This same student is always passing notes and talking to another student in one of my classes. I have confronted them in class and they will shoot me dirty looks, shut up for a while, and start back up again the next class. The professor I mentioned above has spent hours and hours with another student trying to help her with the subject material and to show her appreciation, she accused him of "destroying her passion" for her major.
The precious-snowflake syndrome is strongly tied to the immaturity problem which plagues a lot of college students. I think students are simply putting off growing up, and I am regularly dealing with high-school crap in, for example, sophomore-level science classes (courses in the students' major even!) which I simply never had to deal with before.
When I am in one of my more cynical moods, I take great pleasure in the idea that these kids are in for a really rude awakening after they graduate in the current economic climate. Maybe it will be the splash of cold water in the face that they need to grow the f*ck up and realize that the world does not exist solely for their own entertainment, and that simply gracing me with their presence in class does not get them an automatic B.
That's what I came here to say. All this means is when searching for new artificial ice nuclei (silver iodide being the most popular right now due to its hexagonal crystal structure) they can expand into new crystal structure candidates rather than just hexagonal.
It does not mean they will find something which is effective as AgI, it simply gives cloud physicists another class of crystal structures to explore.
Somebody mentioned barometer already, but what I did in one of my meteorology classes a few years ago was build a water barometer out of clear rigid plastic pipe. A mercury barometer is so short because the density of mercury is so high; water is less dense but safer... and for a hundred bucks or so of materials (pipe segments, glue, clamps, fittings etc.) you can build one in the stairwell where people will see it and ask lots of questions. You can also teach about the idea of saturation vapor pressure and boiling water at room temperature when you "activate" it. (Submitter, email me if you want more details of what we did and what I'd do differently if I did it again.) Ours was up for a few weeks and it worked quite well.
Slashdot Mirror
The article mentions "modulations" over and over again as if they are some sort of evil force messing with your head.
Roughly speaking, modulations are changes in the energy at the sidebands of the carrier where the information is carried. Old cell phones were pure frequency modulation, the digital ones use a different scheme. But from you're brain's perspective, it shouldn't mean more than a slight change in the total energy being radiate at 2.4 GHz or whatever. The idea that your brain is affected by "modulations" seems extremely specious.
The fact that you're warming up your brain slightly when you hold the cell phone to your ear for a long time might have some sort of long term effect, I dunno, but I'm not too afraid of modulations.
I know I always go to Gentleman's Quarterly for my journal articles regarding the dangers of electromagnetic radiation exposure.
Why don't they just call it "women only" and be done with it.
Hurr durr.
Nice projection. You, Chemisor, will not believe any temperature data any more. The rest of the world will make up its own mind. Belief has no place in science anyway. That belongs to religion.
People like you have an influence through the political process, but you have no influence in the realm of scientific research. You can pick and choose what to believe. We scientists will continue to do research and publish our results using established scientific guidelines accepted by scientists all around the world, and our results will be made public. You, Chemisor, have the option of ignoring these results, cherrypicking the bits which fit your worldview, or trying to take a step back and analyzing the data like a scientist and drawing a rational conclusion. We cannot do this for you. Good luck.
Well stated. The thing is, most everyday people do not understand how science and research is done and hence they filter everything through the lens of their own non-science-understanding experiences. They leap to extraordinary conclusions based upon sketchy data or anecdotal evidence. Unless you've published and been through the peer review process and have actually collected data and done exhaustive literature review etc., it's easy to think that research results could be easily manipulated like an accountant cooking the books. The big difference is that in science, there is a global "community" of scientists scrutinizing your output, somewhat like the open-source many-eyes model that just about everyone here praises.
As researcher in meteorology the CRU stuff has been an obvious source of hallway chatter between myself and my colleagues. If you could summarize our conclusions, it's mostly that (a) this looks band, but will blow over (b) we scientists just want to be left alone to do science and finally (c) most people just don't understand anything about the scientific process. Few of us are good at relating what we do to the general public or handling the press. When you peek behind the curtain and ask us to explain ourselves, don't expect a slick press release. Many of us want to scurry away to our dark labs and put our hands over our ears and work on the plodding, grudging, often infinitesimally satisfying world of scientific discovery.
Either that, or THE CONSPIRACY GOES DEEPER THAN I EVER IMAGINED POSSIBLE!!!!
I have open sourced my code (http://hdftools.sourceforge.net) but it's so nichey that nobody but a few people would find it useful. So there are only a few eyes. The many-eyes advantage goes away for tiny niche projects, unfortunately.
You obviously aren't submitting articles to the same journals I am. Were it so easy to publish if all it took was not being a "poseur."
Based upon your logic, all experimental science involving measurements should be highly suspect or discarded where the measurements cannot be reproduced exactly. This would involve all experimental science conducted before say 1950 or so. Toss it out, the original objects being study have turned to dust, hence those experiments are worthless!
There is a lot of inherent trust involved in science. Sure, some rogue could cook data, but that would eventually work itself out when other scientists came up with alternate hypothesis which called the rogue study into question. It really is survival of the fittest when it comes to scientific hypotheses. Nothing is sacred.
Reproducibility exists within the countless other observational datasets involving climate change, although perhaps not with their exact observations. So what. Just because their exact raw data isn't available doesn't negate their science. Should all scientific data ever collected be kept forever? What you neglect to appreciate or understand is that new experiments are being conducted all of the time. It's not as if the entire basis for anthropogenic climate change rested on some data collected a handful of scientists in the 1980s.
Mewl and puke about it all you want, I don't care. It sucks, it's a black eye for climate research, but this too shall pass and the rabbling masses will find something else to distract their attention before long while we continue to head to the inevitable 500 ppm CO2 by the time I shed this mortal coil...
Well, then I have had horrible luck then with both 9-track and DAT tapes. Just sitting on a shelf in my office for 10 years and half of them have read errors.
SDLT tape seems much more reliable, I haven't had any problems with that, but I've only been using it for 5 or so years.
I would be interested to know real experiences of people who, today, are reading data successfully (or unsuccessfully) from 9-track tape which was written in the 80s.
I would agree with you here. If statistics was improperly applied it could lead to faulty conclusions.
I don't think very fancy statistics have been applied to most climate data. Running averages, 10 year averages, weighted averages etc... most of it is just time series data. Often times the "raw" data is superimposed on the smoothed data anyway. Where I would be more concerned is the way proxies are used to infer things like temperature. Oxygen isotope analysis and dendrochronology can both be applied incorrectly - any climate proxy could. To me, the statistics is the easy part.
Concerning models, it's the assumptions that go into the model and the parameterizations that are the source of most consternation, not the pretty maps that come out from the model data. I can't stress the usefulness of ensemble data, since there is robustness when you have many different models running many different scenarios. Of course, most of the models share the same basic physical assumptions, so there is always the chance that an updated parameterization common to all the models could trend the model forecast envelope upwards or downwards.
A euphemism for what?
Maybe I completely misread your post, but are you really suggesting that only climatologists could spot bugs in climatologists' code?
Bugs of the programming sort, no, I would heartily welcome pure computer scientists to go nuts and look for programmer errors.
Bugs of the procedural/physically flawed reasoning stuff, very likely yes, because a computer programmer would likely not understand the science or parameterizations behind the code.
How would you know if I was choosing the wrong constants or using a flawed physical approach if you didn't have a background in the science? The code could be "perfect" from a programmer's perspective but be giving bad answers. That is what my point was.
My point was, raw data may be some proprietary binary file that can only be read by some manufacturer's expensive code. So in order to make this data available for public consumption, it would need to be converted, and already you've lost the raw data. I would expect all the original raw data would be archived, but that doesn't mean it will be useful to many people.
If I gave you the model code I used you would likely find it useless. If you were auditing the code for errors it would take someone with a very high level of meteorological education (PhD with years of experience and who has read all the relevant literature) as well as a lot of programming and computer experience. Very few people in this world have that combination of skills and knowledge. At some level, you just have to accept that even though the peer reviewed process is flawed and the scientific process is not infallible, it works pretty damned well (the fact that you can read this on a computer screen should underscore that point - your grandparents likely sat in front of radios powered by vacuum tubes at some point in their lives, and their grandparents may have made use of the telegraph).
Climate change is being held to a different standard (expectations of every piece of "raw data" ever collected being made publicly available) because it's so controversial and because everyone and their pet wombat has an opinion about it (opinions mean nothing in science). Thankfully there are enough people who understand both politics and science who are making (slow) headway towards tackling this issue.
It is going to get worse, much worse.
Cuttings indeed. Well when presented like that it looks bad. And I would agree it looks like unethical activity is going on. But I come back to the original question: Is climate changing, and are humans responsible? The answer is still yes to both. Is it going to get worse? The answer is still, with a very high confidence level, yes. The basics of greenhouse warming do not magically go away because of asshole egotistical scientists.
It's not as if people who already thought climate change was bunk are going to feel any more strongly that way, and it's not as if scientists such as myself are going to suddenly burn all our textbooks and journal articles.
The truth is, seeing a dip in temperatures over the past decade would be A REALLY KICKASS RESULT because it would imply perhaps something weird (AND INTERESTING) was going on, and this would prompt MORE research. I don't think people who are outside of the research world really understand the power of novel results in science. The tree ring data you showed is only one source of data and it's not global. If it's true, it's an interesting result that should be explained. I really don't understand why anyone would want to try to hide this kind of result. If the science is sound, it will pass the peer review process and make someone famous, at least for a short while.
In my area I use models which are open source (WRF, CM1) for modeling thunderstorms.
The source code is freely available. Yes, I would agree this is always best, and most (but not all) cloud model codes I am familiar with are open or available. Some researchers keep their innovations closed in order to keep an upper hand. I would imagine, however, were they asked to produce the code because of a strange result they would do so.
Good luck making heads or tails out of model source code though :) Well, it's usually not that bad, but the amount of code and knobs to twiddle via parameterizations is mind boggling. This is not nefarious, it's just the nature of modeling work. You do the best you can.
A big improvement in IPCC 4 vs 3 is that model ensembles were used. Dozens of different models each run dozens of times and then statistics were applied to these models. This really gives us a lot more confidence in the predictions. There is still a lot of uncertainty, but it's bounded within very high confidence levels. Much better than just looking at individual simulations.
"Raw data" - what does this exactly mean? Atmospheric scientists studying climate have multiple sources of data in multiple data formats. We don't save every bit when we collect our research, and stuff does get tossed out for various reasons. Heck, I have model-generated data from 10 years ago that it sitting on tape somewhere, but when it goes, it's gone. The model code is probably also on that tape. It is very possible that I could not recreate the work I did even 10-15 years ago. I now use new models, better data, etc.
At some level, we as scientists trust one another to not fudge things and the peer review process should take care of most of that. Should raw data be requested via legal means, I would presume that this data would be presented if it were available. Since reproducibility is a cornerstone of the scientific process, if one research comes up with some bizarre result (think cold fusion) and it can't be reproduced, it's tossed out. In this case we have just one of hundreds of sources which is called into question. This does not change anything scientifically, and probably won't change much politically in the long run.
Another thing to consider: Scientists often keep their data hidden from the rest of the world until they get the big publications out since it would be career suicide to let someone else scoop you on your own hard work and data acquisition. I don't think there is a standard grace period for when you suddenly make the data available. It probably depends on the project and the granting agency rules. The truth is, the rawest of the raw data is often discarded, and there is no ulterior motive involved. On the other hand, you are foolish if you toss any data form recent research as you may need to go back to it at some point in time and redo calculations. This happened to me once and had I not had the data available from a tape backup, I could not have gone back and done a calculation that was being requested of me from reviewers, and my paper would not have been published.
Let's review... The hacked emails look bad, but they were obtained illegally and were never meant for public consumption - these emails were never "peer reviewed" so to speak. As far as I'm concerned, they are irrelevant, as tempting as it is to see some giant conspiracy in them.
Concerning the data that was tossed out: This was probably due to something as humdrum as cleaning out a room to make space for new equipment or office space or something similar. I remember in the 90s when I was working at a R1 university our group needed more space for new hardware, and we got money to convert a storage room to a cold room where we could stick our hardware. There were rows and rows of old 9-track tape (probably the same kind of tape that was tossed out from the climate research group in question). Nobody claimed them, nobody wanted them, so we threw them out (not before unravelling one and playing with it first though). Had someone actually wanted to retrieve data off of those 9-track tapes, they probably would have been unsuccessful anyway since magnetic tape degrades with time and tar files don't have any error correction built in.
So even if these tapes from the 80s were still around they would likely be useless. Unless some sort of data migration plan had been in place, they were probably destined to decay.
Concerning the paper records, they would likely be just fine assuming they didn't get eaten away from the acid assuming it wasn't acid-free paper. But those were tossed too.
So, to review: Some asshole gets into the private email system of a university, does who-knows-what to it (we don't know for sure whether the emails were filtered, cherrypicked, manipulated, etc.) and releases it to the world. The text of the email appears to contain some language which could be interpreted as a bit dodgy, but honestly if you think science is all fun and games and doesn't involve egos, power struggles, rivalries, and colossal asshattery, well, surprise, it does. Now we have the data loss issue, which is easily explained and is likely due to cleaning up stored crap to make room for office space (I am guessing but that is not an unreasonable scenario).
Meanwhile, hundreds of other independent studies from dozens of different sources of instrumentation and other proxies shows over and over and over again that climate is warming and it's anthropogenic in nature due to greenhouse gas emissions. Is anyone arguing that humans are NOT responsible for 280 ppm going to, what is it now, 385 ppm of CO2 over the past 150 years? Is anyone arguing that CO2 is NOT a greenhouse gas and that all else being equal, a shift in the earth's radiative equilibrium temperature upward would NOT be expected with this increase?
As an atmospheric scientist it's crazy for me to think that anyone would even need to mess with climate data as it doesn't need to be massaged to show the obvious. The fact that there is interdecadal variability (things have flattened out a bit over the past few years) is really nothing too shocking and fits well within the range of predictions.
So wake me up in 20 years an let me know how this whole "conspiracy" worked out. If we're back to temperatures from the 1960s well, I'll eat my hat or whatever serves as headwear in the 2030s.
I'm not sure what you mean by "passively" eat - eating is eating.
Fish have mercury in them, some more than others, from pollution and the way the food chain works. Eating fish containing mercury can be dangerous if you eat too much.
http://www.epa.gov/fishadvisories/advice/
I'd worry more about mercury intake rather than eating the wrong kind of fish.
A meteorology BS requires as much math as a Physics BS, so your snarky comment indicates you are ignorant of what kind of math is required for a meteorology degree (pick up a copy of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences and tell me there is no heavy math involved).
Three semesters of calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, statistics are required for a MET BS in our program - which gives our majors a free math minor at my institution.
Bah. Your command would fail. You need to escape the splat just like the semicolon:
find my_lawn -name kids\* -exec rm -f {} \;
However -exec is slow. Try:
find my_lawn -name kids\* | xargs rm -rvf
Verbose for your kid-removing satisfaction.
Oh, and happy birthday, UNIX! Without you my career would have undoubtedly been less interesting.
Today's Jerkcity seems apropos:
http://jerkcity.com/jerkcity3820.gif
I have a fully up-to-date Fedora 10 box (64 bit Intel dual core) and I have terrible issues with sound. I have a Creative soundblaster Audigy 4 (emu10k2.5). I have all sorts of issues with dropouts while watching video with pulseaudio. The only solution I've found is to uninstall pulseaudio, which sucks, because it's kind of cool. It's been suggested that Jack might help on top of pulseaudio... but I am lost in a maze of sound drivers and layers (jack/pulseaudio/alsa/oss/and good ol' /dev/snd). All I want is stable audio and the ability to record 96 kHz / 24 bit, which my soundcard can do, but which I can't get to work with Audacity - I get 24 bit padded to 16 bit.
I've posted to forums etc. on these issues and apparently the problems are known and being worked on. It seems to me I had the best luck with sound with RedHat 5 or thereabouts when there just wasn't as much complexity. I keep hoping the next upgrade will fix sound. I am probably going to do a fresh install of Fedora 11 when it comes out and cross my fingers.
The older generation always scoffs at the younger generation. There is always a large component of kids-these-days to these types of arguments. That being said, as a 40 year old college professor who's been doing this for 8 years, I do see a shift in the behavior of students, primarily the average-to-below-average student. The bright students who are motivated and mature don't seem to suffer from the problems I'm about to describe. One big problem is that many students simply are unwilling to do more than a fixed amount of work that they don't want to do. In college they place aspects of their lives which are not academic at a higher priority and get annoyed when their performance reflects this. I see more and more of this. The main things are: socializing, work, and family. It's not that I didn't have those thing when I was in college, it's just that academics always came first. Many students simply refuse to dedicate the time they need to do well; it's not that they're dumb.
A lot of students really do have the precious-snowflake chip on their shoulders. A junior faculty member in my department who has only been teaching for a couple of years and who is very student-focused told a student who was struggling in one of his classes that her main reason for not doing well was that she was not working hard enough (and he was right). How did she take it? She went to the dean and filed a complaint against the professor. This same student is always passing notes and talking to another student in one of my classes. I have confronted them in class and they will shoot me dirty looks, shut up for a while, and start back up again the next class. The professor I mentioned above has spent hours and hours with another student trying to help her with the subject material and to show her appreciation, she accused him of "destroying her passion" for her major.
The precious-snowflake syndrome is strongly tied to the immaturity problem which plagues a lot of college students. I think students are simply putting off growing up, and I am regularly dealing with high-school crap in, for example, sophomore-level science classes (courses in the students' major even!) which I simply never had to deal with before.
When I am in one of my more cynical moods, I take great pleasure in the idea that these kids are in for a really rude awakening after they graduate in the current economic climate. Maybe it will be the splash of cold water in the face that they need to grow the f*ck up and realize that the world does not exist solely for their own entertainment, and that simply gracing me with their presence in class does not get them an automatic B.
That's what I came here to say. All this means is when searching for new artificial ice nuclei (silver iodide being the most popular right now due to its hexagonal crystal structure) they can expand into new crystal structure candidates rather than just hexagonal.
It does not mean they will find something which is effective as AgI, it simply gives cloud physicists another class of crystal structures to explore.
You must visit here a lot. If not, you'd fit right in.
Off to warm up the EL34s...
Somebody mentioned barometer already, but what I did in one of my meteorology classes a few years ago was build a water barometer out of clear rigid plastic pipe. A mercury barometer is so short because the density of mercury is so high; water is less dense but safer... and for a hundred bucks or so of materials (pipe segments, glue, clamps, fittings etc.) you can build one in the stairwell where people will see it and ask lots of questions. You can also teach about the idea of saturation vapor pressure and boiling water at room temperature when you "activate" it. (Submitter, email me if you want more details of what we did and what I'd do differently if I did it again.) Ours was up for a few weeks and it worked quite well.