The scientific process will probably ultimately work, but it doesn't always take the most direct route to the truth. I had heard accusations that the hockey stick graph was garbage, but I dismissed such claims as anti-scientific oil company propaganda. But after the climate gate emails came out I started looking at stuff a little closer. The disturbing thing is not the hockey stick graph itself, but the fact that they're STILL defending it. The hockey stick graph uses tree ring data that gives false temperatures for the last 50 years, but they're still trying to get us to believe that the temperatures those rings give from 1000 years ago are not false. Their analysis of evidence is so biased that they can't even see that that is absurd. The only excuse they seem to give on realclimate is that only some of the tree rings give false temperatures for the last 50 years. But if that's the case, and they knew some of the trees were giving false data, then why on earth would they use those known defective trees in their calculations? It's been reported that they used those defective trees because if they didn't, then the medieval warm period wouldn't be flattened out enough.
The climate crisis promoters have a tough job. Not only do they have to prove that the globe is warming, they have to prove that the warming is caused by humans. And then they still have to prove that the temperatures are significantly higher than they were at other times in the past. If the temperatures have gone from what they were when we started measuring them in the middle of the little ice age, and risen just up to normal, that would be global warming, and maybe even man made global warming, but nothing to worry about. The hockey stick graph and others like it are critical to their case that temperatures now are especially high. But it's very hard to accurately determine what the temperatures were a thousand years ago. In fact I doubt if it's even possible. Boreholes, sediments, and tree rings seem like very iffy measurement techniques. If we hadn't caught them sending emails about how they needed to crush the medieval warm period, then maybe we could put a little more weight to those past temperature reconstructions of theirs.
If I ran Windows, I'd look for some way to implement it that could be implemented on every Windows machine, in case I needed to regenerate on, for example, a work computer where I couldn't install arbitrary executables. Under Windows, something implemented in Javascript might be the way to go. It might also have the advantage of leaving no command history. But then it could leave something in your browser cache. Maybe you could temporarily turn off the cache.
If you can install executables, something like cygwin may enable you to execute this command unaltered. You might also consider booting a linux CD with no partitions mounted and swap disabled to prevent traces being left on your hard drive. Something like Damn Small Linux would probably boot fairly quickly. I'm not sure if it would have all the tools though. You might have to go with Knoppix.
There seems to be a bug in the moderation filter. The only way I can get it to display only the comments, and all the comments, above a certain threshold, is to use the classic discussion system and select nested along with my threshold. Nested is the key.
For places that require password changes I'd suggest to take a very long base password with a month appended and hash it, then convert the hex hash into printable characters. Maybe something like this: echo -n "LongUnchangingBasePasswordSiteNameJan2009" | sha512sum | xxd -r -p | tr -cd [:print:] This has the advantage of being highly secure and easily memorable, but someone shoulder surfing your password wouldn't be able to figure out what your password is next month. People more familiar with windows could suggest a command available on that system. Be careful to do this on a computer where the command will not be stored in a command history.
I'm planning to go all lower case with my passwords though. I'll have to make my passwords 50% longer, but I think they'll be easier to type and almost as easy to remember as totally random ones. In fact my error rate with the totally random ones is an issue with shoulder surfing because I make mistakes and have to retype it so often, giving shoulder surfers repeated sightings, and because the numbers and symbols and shifts slow me down.
In related news it has been discovered that the contents of textbooks, which often sell for $200 or more, are largely made up of information and ideas developed by previous authors. The previous textbook authors are starting to complain that they aren't getting any royalties from new textbooks and are now calling new textbook authors "seagoing murdering thieves" (pirates). Others are wondering why books mostly inspired by previous works, have more than a hundred year copyright, when the Constitution only authorizes copyrights for limited times, not a trillion years.
The court found that Microsoft were the criminals. They looted the pockets of their customers. Their intellectual property was developed with ill-gotten gains.
I've been hit by moderator abuse. I've gotten two undeserved flamebait mods. A comment isn't flamebait just because it tends to start a flame war. Many legitimate comments will stimulate heated debate. A comment is only flamebait if its purpose is to start a flame war rather than an honest debate.
Opening Windows would have enabled the creation of good compatibility layers in the other OSes. The main advantage of Linux and other open OSes is that they're open, not that they're particularly superior to Windows technically, at least not in any way that couldn't be fixed if it were open. And open source desktop *nix is practically dead anyway, or at least it hasn't really come alive yet enough to have the necessary third party software support.
maybe that would happen if we get a communist government that punishes successful corporations. sane people realize the benefits of letting companies sell products on their own terms and allowing people to reject their products and shop around for alternatives
Microsoft wasn't just a successful corporation, they broke antitrust fair trade laws. The nature of operating system software hinders the ability of people to shop around for the best alternative. For example if you need a piece of application software that is only written for Windows, then it may make it hard or impractical to use Linux, even if you think Linux is better. That gives Microsoft a huge UNFAIR advantage. Their domination of the market and the value of their intellectual property are ill-gotten gains. I believe that if half the computer users out there were equally familiar with Linux as the other half were familiar with Windows, and an equal amount of drivers and software were available for Linux, Windows would quickly be driven down by Linux to a niche like OSX.
When Microsoft was convicted of monopoly abuse, the judge should have forced Microsoft to release the source code of XP under the BSD license and thereby restore true competition to the operating system market.
To determine if the temperature has risen you have to take into account various other things, like what type of enclosure the thermometer is in and what time of day the readings were taken. The older enclosures were warmer, so if the station switched to a newer cooler enclosure, it's easy to see a cooling trend in the data even if the real trend is upward.
However, I think that most of the global warming research is accessible to anyone who knows statistics and takes the time to learn the various important details.
And it doesn't take a whole lot of education to realize that tree ring data that doesn't match recent temperatures can't be trusted to match temperatures a thousand years ago. The fact that a large portion of the climate science community has and continues to defend tree ring reconstruction of past climate, is a severe blow to their credibility.
Their attitude about turning over data(a) makes their claims about data(b) highly suspect. If someone else has copies of their data then they should have no problem getting another copy and handing it over to us. If they can't get copies of the data, then that would be exactly why they should have kept copies of it. It's not hard to foresee the value of backing up the data you've built your reputation on.
Maybe there is warming. We've had ice ages and it warmed up after them, so it could be happening. We might even be causing a large part of it. But the question is whether it's anything to worry about. I don't think so at this time. Especially now that all the data are cast into doubt.
There does appear to be a conspiracy though. The emails talk of the CRU coordinating with other universities and government agencies to keep the data from getting out. That fits the definition of a conspiracy. But while the pursuit of grant money may play some role, I don't think the grant money or new world government conspiracies play a major role. I think these guys are just committed environmentalists who are willing to fudge the numbers a little to make their case look stronger. There's a quote of one of them floating around from Discover(y?) Magazine where he says that in promoting global warming "each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective, and being honest.".
My impression of the hockey stick issue is that the tree ring data barely corresponds to any of the temperature record. The divergence is particularly insidious because if these trees are diverging from the distant past high temperatures the way they are in the near past, the effect would be exactly what the deceivers would want, namely the flattening out of the medieval warm period. Making it look like it's suddenly hotter than it has been in a long time, even if it's really not.
The instrumental data is NOT in question, if you doubt it, I'm sure you can find microfilms of temperature reports in newspapers going back to the 1800s.
Your confidence is puzzling. Indeed the instrumental record is in question. It's very odd that it was only in the last couple years that the keepers of our climate data even bothered to check the quality of the measurement sites for problems like placement above asphalt. In fact the keepers of the data never did check it. It took skeptics to do a nationwide survey of the sites by volunteers. And they found the vast majority of sites were poorly situated. They say these problems don't affect the numbers much, but I find it hard to believe that you can build up a city of asphalt around a temperature station and not have that affect the trend very much. Going back to old newspapers won't tell you much if the city has grown up bigger and hotter over the decades.
It's hard to know what the truth about global warming is. On one side you have conspiracy theorists who will see a conspiracy in anything and spread any garbage information. On the other you have probably well meaning scientists caught red handed in a widespread conspiracy to deceive the public. Nothing can be believed on either side. The result seems to be great for companies like Exxon, because it only takes a little doubt to kill interest in spending trillions to halt global warming.
Most trees are known to not be suitable temperature proxies. Selection methods are used to filter out the trees that won't give good data. If your selection method leaves enough bad data in your graph that the final graph diverges seriously from the true values, then your selection method needs to be refined to remove the bad trees, or the graph shouldn't be made at all. Either way, "the trees that diverged shouldn't have been included in the graph".
You need evidence of "fixed" peer review, and evidence of "ignorance".
No, they need evidence that global warming is a problem that we can and should spend trillions of dollars to alleviate. These emails have seriously damaged the credibility of the entire climate research community. If they don't have any credibility, then they can't bring ANY evidence to the debate. If they only have a little credibility, then the evidence they bring will have very little persuasive power.
So they said they would delete the data rather than give it up. And the said they would hide behind non-disclosure agreements so they wouldn't have to give up the data. And they said they got other universities and government agencies to go along with hiding the data. But you think we should still give them the benefit of the doubt and believe their story that they just accidentally lost the data.
If the tree rings don't match the temps lately then there's no reason to believe that they matched way back before we were using thermometers. If some of the trees match the temp lately and only some of the trees diverge, then the trees that diverge shouldn't have been included in the graph. It appears that the best explanation for the inclusion of these divergent trees in the graph was to deceive.
Outside of the science, all I know is that the climate zone in my local area has changed.
Maybe it's a little warmer now that we're coming out of the little ice age. Some areas get much hotter while some get cooler. Or maybe you're just imagining it.
Plants which you could not grow before, you can grow now.
From less than a one degree temp rise? Now I'm leaning more towards it being your imagination.
I hear from Innuit that there are plants and animals in the North which they have not seen before.
Things change and evolve. Invasive species move in even if the temperature doesn't change.
I know that tornadoes dot the German Rhine where no tornadoes were seen before, I know hurricanes on the Eastern seaboard are behaving differently
Those could be signs of cooling as easily as warming. Or it could be warming in those areas and cooling in others.
I know that Crete was so dry when I saw it that I couldn't imagine olive trees growing there without irrigation
This could be naturally caused global warming or it could be one area getting drier while another gets wetter.
I know that our highways are a half kilometer wide and countless kilometers long, with thousands upon thousands of idling cars sitting on them, ten times a week for as long as I've been alive
But you don't know if that will have a major effect or a minor effect.
I know that sea captains don't want to traverse the Indian ocean because the almanacs are no longer reasonable guides to chart how long a given voyage from one port to the next might take.
Do you really know that? Did someone tell you that? Did they do a survey of a large number of sea captains? Or is this anecdotal evidence you've collected from a local legend spread among a few sea captains you know personally? Were the almanacs really more reliable in the old days? People's recollections of such things tends to be very poor.
Maybe the arctic is intact
Maybe it is. Or maybe they're exaggerating. Or maybe it's not our fault. Or maybe it is our fault, but it's no big deal.
maybe the rainforests never actually existed. Maybe Mt. Kilamajaro doesn't exist
So you think it's crazy to doubt what we're told about global warming, by a radical special interest group, that has been caught red handed trying to deceive us, even though it is very difficult to check their work?
maybe it's all a mind control plot
No reasonable person could question that it is. And they seem to have had quite an influence on your mind.
Who cares what some scientists are scheming or emailing each other? The facts will remain long after they've been and gone.
A few dozen scammers can create a lot of bogus results. These emails reveal corruption not just at one place but spread across the climate research community, from journals to multiple universities to government agencies. How do you know what the facts are? Do you just trust who they came from? Does that still seem wise to you?
trying to argue that either climate change isn't happening, or that it is but it isn't us, just makes you all look like a bunch of ignorant arse-hats, and I'm fucking sick of listening to your drivel.
Now that you put it like that, I feel so stupid. I realize now that I must be wrong to doubt. After all it's the consensus in the peer reviewed journals:)
Maybe it's a little warmer now than it was in that exceptionally cold period 150 years ago. But it was almost as hot or hotter a thousand years ago, and it was hotter during many periods in the past. And it's cooler now, so I don't see the need to rush into expensive fixes real soon. Especially not until the data and calculations are unhidden.
Moderating parent troll is moderation abuse. Some are in denial when they think this scandal only impacts a few climate scientists. It significantly impacts many other entirely different fields of science, so of course it seriously impacts the credibility of ALL climate research. NIWA made a partial explanation of the adjustments they made to the data in New Zealand, but they haven't committed to releasing an explanation of all their calculations. Furthermore their glacier melting graph looks a little misleading. The glacier melting in that graph doesn't look significant, especially if you realize most of the down part of the graph was only a couple years. According to the graph, the glaciers grew considerably for periods not long ago when global warming should have been melting them. It makes me wonder if the whole glaciers and arctic melting, and sea level rise are fake also. There may not be any global warming at all, or maybe little more than minor natural fluctuations.
Why should our good men and (and a few women) have to die to 'help' these people?
Because they're good men. Because they care about people. Often good men even want to help bad people in hopes they will become good someday. And even if most of the people are bad, at least some of them are good people who deserve our help. And because they remember how many good men died to help us.
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The scientific process will probably ultimately work, but it doesn't always take the most direct route to the truth. I had heard accusations that the hockey stick graph was garbage, but I dismissed such claims as anti-scientific oil company propaganda. But after the climate gate emails came out I started looking at stuff a little closer. The disturbing thing is not the hockey stick graph itself, but the fact that they're STILL defending it. The hockey stick graph uses tree ring data that gives false temperatures for the last 50 years, but they're still trying to get us to believe that the temperatures those rings give from 1000 years ago are not false. Their analysis of evidence is so biased that they can't even see that that is absurd. The only excuse they seem to give on realclimate is that only some of the tree rings give false temperatures for the last 50 years. But if that's the case, and they knew some of the trees were giving false data, then why on earth would they use those known defective trees in their calculations? It's been reported that they used those defective trees because if they didn't, then the medieval warm period wouldn't be flattened out enough.
The climate crisis promoters have a tough job. Not only do they have to prove that the globe is warming, they have to prove that the warming is caused by humans. And then they still have to prove that the temperatures are significantly higher than they were at other times in the past. If the temperatures have gone from what they were when we started measuring them in the middle of the little ice age, and risen just up to normal, that would be global warming, and maybe even man made global warming, but nothing to worry about. The hockey stick graph and others like it are critical to their case that temperatures now are especially high. But it's very hard to accurately determine what the temperatures were a thousand years ago. In fact I doubt if it's even possible. Boreholes, sediments, and tree rings seem like very iffy measurement techniques. If we hadn't caught them sending emails about how they needed to crush the medieval warm period, then maybe we could put a little more weight to those past temperature reconstructions of theirs.
If I ran Windows, I'd look for some way to implement it that could be implemented on every Windows machine, in case I needed to regenerate on, for example, a work computer where I couldn't install arbitrary executables. Under Windows, something implemented in Javascript might be the way to go. It might also have the advantage of leaving no command history. But then it could leave something in your browser cache. Maybe you could temporarily turn off the cache.
If you can install executables, something like cygwin may enable you to execute this command unaltered. You might also consider booting a linux CD with no partitions mounted and swap disabled to prevent traces being left on your hard drive. Something like Damn Small Linux would probably boot fairly quickly. I'm not sure if it would have all the tools though. You might have to go with Knoppix.
There seems to be a bug in the moderation filter. The only way I can get it to display only the comments, and all the comments, above a certain threshold, is to use the classic discussion system and select nested along with my threshold. Nested is the key.
For places that require password changes I'd suggest to take a very long base password with a month appended and hash it, then convert the hex hash into printable characters. Maybe something like this:
echo -n "LongUnchangingBasePasswordSiteNameJan2009" | sha512sum | xxd -r -p | tr -cd [:print:]
This has the advantage of being highly secure and easily memorable, but someone shoulder surfing your password wouldn't be able to figure out what your password is next month. People more familiar with windows could suggest a command available on that system. Be careful to do this on a computer where the command will not be stored in a command history.
I'm planning to go all lower case with my passwords though. I'll have to make my passwords 50% longer, but I think they'll be easier to type and almost as easy to remember as totally random ones. In fact my error rate with the totally random ones is an issue with shoulder surfing because I make mistakes and have to retype it so often, giving shoulder surfers repeated sightings, and because the numbers and symbols and shifts slow me down.
In related news it has been discovered that the contents of textbooks, which often sell for $200 or more, are largely made up of information and ideas developed by previous authors. The previous textbook authors are starting to complain that they aren't getting any royalties from new textbooks and are now calling new textbook authors "seagoing murdering thieves" (pirates). Others are wondering why books mostly inspired by previous works, have more than a hundred year copyright, when the Constitution only authorizes copyrights for limited times, not a trillion years.
It's flaws could probably be fixed. If not then at least it could be run in something like a chrooted virtual machine, only more tightly integrated.
The court found that Microsoft were the criminals. They looted the pockets of their customers. Their intellectual property was developed with ill-gotten gains.
I've been hit by moderator abuse. I've gotten two undeserved flamebait mods. A comment isn't flamebait just because it tends to start a flame war. Many legitimate comments will stimulate heated debate. A comment is only flamebait if its purpose is to start a flame war rather than an honest debate.
Opening Windows would have enabled the creation of good compatibility layers in the other OSes. The main advantage of Linux and other open OSes is that they're open, not that they're particularly superior to Windows technically, at least not in any way that couldn't be fixed if it were open. And open source desktop *nix is practically dead anyway, or at least it hasn't really come alive yet enough to have the necessary third party software support.
Microsoft wasn't just a successful corporation, they broke antitrust fair trade laws. The nature of operating system software hinders the ability of people to shop around for the best alternative. For example if you need a piece of application software that is only written for Windows, then it may make it hard or impractical to use Linux, even if you think Linux is better. That gives Microsoft a huge UNFAIR advantage. Their domination of the market and the value of their intellectual property are ill-gotten gains. I believe that if half the computer users out there were equally familiar with Linux as the other half were familiar with Windows, and an equal amount of drivers and software were available for Linux, Windows would quickly be driven down by Linux to a niche like OSX.
It probably could have been cleaned up fairly well, excepting a few bad features.
When Microsoft was convicted of monopoly abuse, the judge should have forced Microsoft to release the source code of XP under the BSD license and thereby restore true competition to the operating system market.
I would expect business software like that is the type that would run well under wine.
To determine if the temperature has risen you have to take into account various other things, like what type of enclosure the thermometer is in and what time of day the readings were taken. The older enclosures were warmer, so if the station switched to a newer cooler enclosure, it's easy to see a cooling trend in the data even if the real trend is upward.
However, I think that most of the global warming research is accessible to anyone who knows statistics and takes the time to learn the various important details.
And it doesn't take a whole lot of education to realize that tree ring data that doesn't match recent temperatures can't be trusted to match temperatures a thousand years ago. The fact that a large portion of the climate science community has and continues to defend tree ring reconstruction of past climate, is a severe blow to their credibility.
Their attitude about turning over data(a) makes their claims about data(b) highly suspect. If someone else has copies of their data then they should have no problem getting another copy and handing it over to us. If they can't get copies of the data, then that would be exactly why they should have kept copies of it. It's not hard to foresee the value of backing up the data you've built your reputation on.
There does appear to be a conspiracy though. The emails talk of the CRU coordinating with other universities and government agencies to keep the data from getting out. That fits the definition of a conspiracy. But while the pursuit of grant money may play some role, I don't think the grant money or new world government conspiracies play a major role. I think these guys are just committed environmentalists who are willing to fudge the numbers a little to make their case look stronger. There's a quote of one of them floating around from Discover(y?) Magazine where he says that in promoting global warming "each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective, and being honest.".
There are some good summaries and convenient links to the emails here: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html#comments
My impression of the hockey stick issue is that the tree ring data barely corresponds to any of the temperature record. The divergence is particularly insidious because if these trees are diverging from the distant past high temperatures the way they are in the near past, the effect would be exactly what the deceivers would want, namely the flattening out of the medieval warm period. Making it look like it's suddenly hotter than it has been in a long time, even if it's really not.
Your confidence is puzzling. Indeed the instrumental record is in question. It's very odd that it was only in the last couple years that the keepers of our climate data even bothered to check the quality of the measurement sites for problems like placement above asphalt. In fact the keepers of the data never did check it. It took skeptics to do a nationwide survey of the sites by volunteers. And they found the vast majority of sites were poorly situated. They say these problems don't affect the numbers much, but I find it hard to believe that you can build up a city of asphalt around a temperature station and not have that affect the trend very much. Going back to old newspapers won't tell you much if the city has grown up bigger and hotter over the decades.
It's hard to know what the truth about global warming is. On one side you have conspiracy theorists who will see a conspiracy in anything and spread any garbage information. On the other you have probably well meaning scientists caught red handed in a widespread conspiracy to deceive the public. Nothing can be believed on either side. The result seems to be great for companies like Exxon, because it only takes a little doubt to kill interest in spending trillions to halt global warming.
Most trees are known to not be suitable temperature proxies. Selection methods are used to filter out the trees that won't give good data. If your selection method leaves enough bad data in your graph that the final graph diverges seriously from the true values, then your selection method needs to be refined to remove the bad trees, or the graph shouldn't be made at all. Either way, "the trees that diverged shouldn't have been included in the graph".
No, they need evidence that global warming is a problem that we can and should spend trillions of dollars to alleviate. These emails have seriously damaged the credibility of the entire climate research community. If they don't have any credibility, then they can't bring ANY evidence to the debate. If they only have a little credibility, then the evidence they bring will have very little persuasive power.
So they said they would delete the data rather than give it up. And the said they would hide behind non-disclosure agreements so they wouldn't have to give up the data. And they said they got other universities and government agencies to go along with hiding the data. But you think we should still give them the benefit of the doubt and believe their story that they just accidentally lost the data.
If the tree rings don't match the temps lately then there's no reason to believe that they matched way back before we were using thermometers. If some of the trees match the temp lately and only some of the trees diverge, then the trees that diverge shouldn't have been included in the graph. It appears that the best explanation for the inclusion of these divergent trees in the graph was to deceive.
Maybe it's a little warmer now that we're coming out of the little ice age. Some areas get much hotter while some get cooler. Or maybe you're just imagining it.
From less than a one degree temp rise? Now I'm leaning more towards it being your imagination.
Things change and evolve. Invasive species move in even if the temperature doesn't change.
Those could be signs of cooling as easily as warming. Or it could be warming in those areas and cooling in others.
This could be naturally caused global warming or it could be one area getting drier while another gets wetter.
But you don't know if that will have a major effect or a minor effect.
Do you really know that? Did someone tell you that? Did they do a survey of a large number of sea captains? Or is this anecdotal evidence you've collected from a local legend spread among a few sea captains you know personally? Were the almanacs really more reliable in the old days? People's recollections of such things tends to be very poor.
Maybe it is. Or maybe they're exaggerating. Or maybe it's not our fault. Or maybe it is our fault, but it's no big deal.
So you think it's crazy to doubt what we're told about global warming, by a radical special interest group, that has been caught red handed trying to deceive us, even though it is very difficult to check their work?
No reasonable person could question that it is. And they seem to have had quite an influence on your mind.
It's been more than a week and I haven't heard of them denying a single one of the emails.
A few dozen scammers can create a lot of bogus results. These emails reveal corruption not just at one place but spread across the climate research community, from journals to multiple universities to government agencies. How do you know what the facts are? Do you just trust who they came from? Does that still seem wise to you?
Now that you put it like that, I feel so stupid. I realize now that I must be wrong to doubt. After all it's the consensus in the peer reviewed journals:)
Maybe it's a little warmer now than it was in that exceptionally cold period 150 years ago. But it was almost as hot or hotter a thousand years ago, and it was hotter during many periods in the past. And it's cooler now, so I don't see the need to rush into expensive fixes real soon. Especially not until the data and calculations are unhidden.
Moderating parent troll is moderation abuse. Some are in denial when they think this scandal only impacts a few climate scientists. It significantly impacts many other entirely different fields of science, so of course it seriously impacts the credibility of ALL climate research. NIWA made a partial explanation of the adjustments they made to the data in New Zealand, but they haven't committed to releasing an explanation of all their calculations. Furthermore their glacier melting graph looks a little misleading. The glacier melting in that graph doesn't look significant, especially if you realize most of the down part of the graph was only a couple years. According to the graph, the glaciers grew considerably for periods not long ago when global warming should have been melting them. It makes me wonder if the whole glaciers and arctic melting, and sea level rise are fake also. There may not be any global warming at all, or maybe little more than minor natural fluctuations.
Because they're good men. Because they care about people. Often good men even want to help bad people in hopes they will become good someday. And even if most of the people are bad, at least some of them are good people who deserve our help. And because they remember how many good men died to help us.