I wonder what "stood to gain a lot" means, really. These guys all had steady jobs with fixed salaries.
I'm not saying there is no unconscious bias/herd mentality.
I just don't believe the money-driven conspiracy. At least, nobody has let me in on it yet.
mt
Raw observational data series must adjusted when instrumentation changes. The step change shown at your link is obviously an artifact. Removing such artifacts (in whichever direction) is a big part of the problem of getting a temperature record from imperfect surface observations. This just shows people doing their jobs.
McArdle knows nothing about these matters and doesn't seem to have consulted anyone who does. Have you?
Normally I don't respond to people who use "Thhpt!" in their argumentation. Do you think that helps?
I stipulate that I have a hard time imaging a circumstance where I would approve of the linked message. Still, we are missing a lot of context.
One thing we do know is that there was a context of harassment. Remember, Mike Mann had been the subject of a congressional investigation just for doing his job as best he could. Whether he erred or not, there's no evidence he produced the original hockey stick in bad faith.
The people who are trying to act as if they had approached matters in the most collegial fashion have a history of doing the subcommunity in question here a good deal of harm. Also they seem to enjoy hanging out with cranks and crackpots.
It may not be justifiable for scientists to respond in this way but it's not beyond understandable. I am not saying "he started it!" is enough, but I am saying that people who got into science because they are quiet and controversy-averse may be ill-suited for this sort of contention and react badly.
My main point about all of this is that it is very peripheral to the actual policy issues or even the main science issues. People trying to leverage a couple of outbursts like this into overthrowing all of climate physics obviously don;t know any climate physics.
Part of the problem is that every government has a hand in it, and that since people don't like to pay taxes, many of the governments involved fund the research by reselling the data to private forecast entities. If they open source it (which I fully agree that they should) that revenue stream dries up, a number of businesses are threatened, and your taxes go up. In any case, AIUI the Climate Research Unit was under contractual obligation to the various contributory agencies (in MANY countries) NOT to reveal the information, so all the FOI requests amounted to nothing more than harassment.
In the end, robust code is more expensive than quick hacks. The purloined code has quick hack flavor, no doubt, and in a few places shows somebody who is stuck in a Fortran mentality where a proper scripting language would have been far superior. Whether it was suitable for purpose for said code to be a quick hack is not something I see being discussed anywhere.
Let's stipulate for argument that it was not at an appropriate level of rigor for the task and consider what it means. What it doesn't mean is dishonesty.
I know lots of scientific programmers who find the idea of having to learn Perl or Python terrifying. Pity, but really these are untrained programmers though trained scientists. Anyway, acquiring trained programmers and training them in science or acquiring trained scientists and training them in programming costs a lot of money, and despite what you may have heard, money is very tight in climate science. That said, riskinbg doing things wrong because it's cheaper doesn't make a lot of sense.
In other words, I agree with the sentiments expressed here for the most part but readers should understand that most of them cannot be achieved on a shoestring.
The loss of credibility in science described in the leader is realistic and not without foundation. Science has problems which need to be addressed. An accusatory and adversarial stance, though, will simply throw the baby out with the bathwater. And the CO2 continues to pile up, with consequences that we can anticipate may be very serious.
Anyway I find it odd that the parent article refers to "our" government. Presumably parent author is British?
Michael Tobis,
Ph.D. Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences 1996 at U Wisconsin-Madison
Some resources for the back story are on my blog; various useful links there for those interested. The upshot of it is a few words got eliminated from the curriculum after much struggle, and a few more were slipped back in at the last minute. Now there is a struggle to take that new batch back out again. This appears to be the final round for several years unless the state legislature steps in, something the Texas legislature is not famous for doing.
Texas is wonderful in many ways but wondrous strange as well.
Note that the biodiversity part has nothing to do with the referenced scientists' recent results. There is no way to measure biodiversity from space as far as I know.
Satellites see dominant species, not diversity. So where does the diversity point come from? A "report" attached to a petition!
Great.
Here's a good way to get a lot of people confused:
make something up
attach it in a "report" to a mailing you control
report it as scientific fact in a journal you control
"The extent and diversity of plant and animal life have both increased substantially during the past half-century."
The scientist responsible for the study is not so quoted. The egregious Oregon petition is so quoted.
The fact that you are left believing that this manipulative restatement of what was originally a manipulative and cynical statement in the first place shows the FP's appproach to the problem. A report attached to a political petition does not constitute a scientific result.
I would be very surprised if biodiversity were increasing. That said, the news here is about satellite data, and satellite data cannot detect diversity. So the conclusion cannot be drawn from the data one way or the other. The FP article is misleading and inappropriate.
F77 is clunky, like editing y9our code with mittens on. F9* is bizarre, like trying to train a monkey to do your typing for you. Anyone who thinks F9* is an improvement over F77 either doesn't know contemporary coding or doesn't know F9*.
I don't really have time to look up chapter and verse for you on this, but I encourage you to pursue it. Look for the planetary atmospheres literature.
As for accretion vs loss, I'd think that the ratio of the density of the atmosphere to the density of the ambient space would tell you something.
Wrong. Planets constantly lose atmosphere; the rate for lighter molecules escaping is much faster, as individual molecules near the top (where they have a collisionless trajectory outbound) are more likely to attain escape velocity.
People interested in this thread should take note of Science Debate 2008. It's an effort to encourage a presidential debate on matters of science and technology. I'm pleased to note that my humble blog was a charter member. At present many influential scientists have signed on.
The entire faculty of the largest atmospheric sciences department in Texa, A & M, with over twnety faculty, uinanimously signed a declaration in support of the IPCC position.
The number of remotely qualified scientists who disagree that humans are responsible for a majority of recently observed warming is really, honestly, negligible.
I am a climatologist, and I have been grinding my teeth about some of the completely unrealistic baseless and vicious things commenters on this topic have said.
However, I have no objection whatsoever to Dyson's tone and only minor objections to some of his arguments. I see nowhere where he has been unreasonable.
1998 and 2005 are the candidates for hottest year on record globally. 1934 and 1998 are the candidates for hottest year on record within the US. The discovered data error apparently moved the balance of evidence for the latter point toward 1934.
I don't think he has disproved it yet; the reason is a bit complicated for this forum. He has found a correlation that is known to be in phase with a known large scale oscillation. That is, they have set this up so there is a known third phenomenon to which his purported cause and effect both correlate.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what "stood to gain a lot" means, really. These guys all had steady jobs with fixed salaries. I'm not saying there is no unconscious bias/herd mentality. I just don't believe the money-driven conspiracy. At least, nobody has let me in on it yet. mt
Raw observational data series must adjusted when instrumentation changes. The step change shown at your link is obviously an artifact. Removing such artifacts (in whichever direction) is a big part of the problem of getting a temperature record from imperfect surface observations. This just shows people doing their jobs.
McArdle knows nothing about these matters and doesn't seem to have consulted anyone who does. Have you?
Normally I don't respond to people who use "Thhpt!" in their argumentation. Do you think that helps?
I stipulate that I have a hard time imaging a circumstance where I would approve of the linked message. Still, we are missing a lot of context. One thing we do know is that there was a context of harassment. Remember, Mike Mann had been the subject of a congressional investigation just for doing his job as best he could. Whether he erred or not, there's no evidence he produced the original hockey stick in bad faith. The people who are trying to act as if they had approached matters in the most collegial fashion have a history of doing the subcommunity in question here a good deal of harm. Also they seem to enjoy hanging out with cranks and crackpots. It may not be justifiable for scientists to respond in this way but it's not beyond understandable. I am not saying "he started it!" is enough, but I am saying that people who got into science because they are quiet and controversy-averse may be ill-suited for this sort of contention and react badly. My main point about all of this is that it is very peripheral to the actual policy issues or even the main science issues. People trying to leverage a couple of outbursts like this into overthrowing all of climate physics obviously don;t know any climate physics.
Parent is stunningly confused. We actually greatly remediated the acid rain and ozone hole problems by regulation.
Michael Tobis, Ph.D.
Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, U Wisconsin-Madison 1996
+1
Michael Tobis,
Ph.D. Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences 1996 at U Wisconsin-Madison
Part of the problem is that every government has a hand in it, and that since people don't like to pay taxes, many of the governments involved fund the research by reselling the data to private forecast entities. If they open source it (which I fully agree that they should) that revenue stream dries up, a number of businesses are threatened, and your taxes go up. In any case, AIUI the Climate Research Unit was under contractual obligation to the various contributory agencies (in MANY countries) NOT to reveal the information, so all the FOI requests amounted to nothing more than harassment.
In the end, robust code is more expensive than quick hacks. The purloined code has quick hack flavor, no doubt, and in a few places shows somebody who is stuck in a Fortran mentality where a proper scripting language would have been far superior. Whether it was suitable for purpose for said code to be a quick hack is not something I see being discussed anywhere.
Let's stipulate for argument that it was not at an appropriate level of rigor for the task and consider what it means. What it doesn't mean is dishonesty.
I know lots of scientific programmers who find the idea of having to learn Perl or Python terrifying. Pity, but really these are untrained programmers though trained scientists. Anyway, acquiring trained programmers and training them in science or acquiring trained scientists and training them in programming costs a lot of money, and despite what you may have heard, money is very tight in climate science. That said, riskinbg doing things wrong because it's cheaper doesn't make a lot of sense. In other words, I agree with the sentiments expressed here for the most part but readers should understand that most of them cannot be achieved on a shoestring.
The loss of credibility in science described in the leader is realistic and not without foundation. Science has problems which need to be addressed. An accusatory and adversarial stance, though, will simply throw the baby out with the bathwater. And the CO2 continues to pile up, with consequences that we can anticipate may be very serious.
Anyway I find it odd that the parent article refers to "our" government. Presumably parent author is British?
Michael Tobis,
Ph.D. Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences 1996 at U Wisconsin-Madison
http://denialdepot.blogspot.com/2009/12/smoking-gun.html
Did y'all just make that up or did somebody else mislead you?
Prof Jones is still a professor. He has temporarily stepped down as head of the Climate Research Unit pending the investigation.
Texas is wonderful in many ways but wondrous strange as well.
So what's so hard about writing a program to read in COBOL and output something that looks like javascript? Good plan!
Satellites see dominant species, not diversity. So where does the diversity point come from? A "report" attached to a petition!
Great.
Here's a good way to get a lot of people confused:
"The extent and diversity of plant and animal life have both increased substantially during the past half-century."
The scientist responsible for the study is not so quoted. The egregious Oregon petition is so quoted.
The fact that you are left believing that this manipulative restatement of what was originally a manipulative and cynical statement in the first place shows the FP's appproach to the problem. A report attached to a political petition does not constitute a scientific result.
I would be very surprised if biodiversity were increasing. That said, the news here is about satellite data, and satellite data cannot detect diversity. So the conclusion cannot be drawn from the data one way or the other. The FP article is misleading and inappropriate.
F77 is clunky, like editing y9our code with mittens on. F9* is bizarre, like trying to train a monkey to do your typing for you. Anyone who thinks F9* is an improvement over F77 either doesn't know contemporary coding or doesn't know F9*.
Groan. You know you and everybody else use "beg the question" wrong, don't you? You did that on purpose just to annoy me.
By reducing everything to a 1-bit decision, don't you think you are making matters worse rather than better?
Reality has a liberal bias, that's all.
I don't really have time to look up chapter and verse for you on this, but I encourage you to pursue it. Look for the planetary atmospheres literature.
As for accretion vs loss, I'd think that the ratio of the density of the atmosphere to the density of the ambient space would tell you something.
Wrong. Planets constantly lose atmosphere; the rate for lighter molecules escaping is much faster, as individual molecules near the top (where they have a collisionless trajectory outbound) are more likely to attain escape velocity.
People interested in this thread should take note of Science Debate 2008. It's an effort to encourage a presidential debate on matters of science and technology. I'm pleased to note that my humble blog was a charter member. At present many influential scientists have signed on.
The entire faculty of the largest atmospheric sciences department in Texa, A & M, with over twnety faculty, uinanimously signed a declaration in support of the IPCC position.
. htm
http://www.met.tamu.edu/climatechange.php
More examples here
http://www.logicalscience.com/consensus/consensus
The number of remotely qualified scientists who disagree that humans are responsible for a majority of recently observed warming is really, honestly, negligible.
I am a climatologist, and I have been grinding my teeth about some of the completely unrealistic baseless and vicious things commenters on this topic have said.
However, I have no objection whatsoever to Dyson's tone and only minor objections to some of his arguments. I see nowhere where he has been unreasonable.
1998 and 2005 are the candidates for hottest year on record globally. 1934 and 1998 are the candidates for hottest year on record within the US. The discovered data error apparently moved the balance of evidence for the latter point toward 1934.
I don't think he has disproved it yet; the reason is a bit complicated for this forum. He has found a correlation that is known to be in phase with a known large scale oscillation. That is, they have set this up so there is a known third phenomenon to which his purported cause and effect both correlate.
I think it's far too early to bank on this one.
True enough. Do you think climate modeling professionals haven't thought of that?
Standard practice is to put microphysics into the model, and extract large scale features. If you think that isn't a rigorous test, try it yourself!
There is some tuning to present day climate, and then it is typically tested against the historical record.