James Hansen on the Warmest Year Brouhaha 743
Jamie writes "In response to earlier reports, Dr. James Hansen, top climate scientist with NASA, has issued a statement on the recent global warming data correction. He points out 'the effect on global temperature was of order one-thousandth of a degree, so the corrected and uncorrected curves are indistinguishable.' In a second email he shows maps of U.S. temperatures relative to the world in 1934 and 1998, explains why the error occurred (it was not, as reported, a 'Y2K bug') and, in response to errors by 'Fox, Washington Times, and their like,' attacks the 'deceit' of those who 'are not stupid [but] seek to create a brouhaha and muddy the waters in the climate change story.'"
Goalposts. (Score:2, Interesting)
Since pollution is suppose to be one of the climate changing factors. Did we pollute less in 1934 than we did in 1998? And did the nature of the pollution change?
Not global warming. Global climate change. (Score:5, Interesting)
The nice thing about it is that the majority of us will live to see the changes. We are in for some interesting times over the next 30-50 years.
Isn't this the expected response (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Honestly... (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it possible that conservatives have been too quick to support the captains of industry?
Those (in leadership positions) who desire to shift away from political gay/abortion/Jesus activism and towards things like helping the poor and conserving the environment are mostly told to STFU & get back on message. "They" don't want to split the consideral political capital that's built up behind the religious conservative bloc.
Religion has always influenced politics, but IMO, in the last 30 years, politics has been corrupting religion.
Re:Goalposts. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The bigger issue (Score:1, Interesting)
Until then, there is too much doubt because the raw data is restricted to a privileged few. I for one don't doubt that global warming is happening, but considering other planets are also warming, I doubt mankind is the cause. Oh, I'm sure that we're a contributor and at least a tiny fraction is due to us, but is our contribution 90% of the increase, or
Remember, in the distant past the Earth was MUCH warmer than it is right now. It's happened before naturally, and is likely to occur again naturally.
Re:The scientist doth protest too much (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Hansen muddied the waters himself (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't pick sides in the global warming "debate" because I don't judge myself knowledgeable enough on the subject to do so since it's not my area of research (unlike legions of bloggers who presumably are qualified to do so). If the climatologists tell me they think it's gonna get warmer, well they are in a better position to judge than me.
What I do see (and find incredibly frustrating as a scientist) is the following:
1) He refused to show what his analysis was. There is no way I'd get away with publishing a paper doing that. You can't simply take some input data, perform a magical transform on it and publish the results without saying what you did. That's not a meaningful result. The error may be small, but if he *had* published his method, then it would have been found sooner and this whole debacle could have been avoided.
2) When someone reverse-engineered his analysis (from the input and output) and it was found to be wrong the attack wing of the "pro"-climate change campaign proactively launched into a hysterical (and unjustified) assault on the person who found the flaw, despite NASA agreeing that the flaw was there and changing the published results, which is a complete own-goal given that this is how their opponents accuse them of behaving.
3) Now he's sent off a bunch of e-mails where he comes over as a petulant child. You can't politicise your research and then whinge because when it's wrong you get into a political slapfight.
None of these things promote rational debate.
It's not a religion folks: If it's wrong, you've not lost anything, if it's right we're in trouble, and either way the oil is finite.
Re:The bigger issue (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, beach erosion; how is that bad at all; except for the idiots who build houses or hotels on beaches? Isn't that simply a natural process? I think beaches communities should reverse development, and build back the dunes between the towns and the water. Screw the beach front hotels; it's bad for the environment, and we can still enjoy the beach without having a house or hotel on it!
As for your comment about west nile virus, hell, we had malaria here too; but back before you or I were born, we defeated it. DDT being a big help there; amongst other things. West Nile is not a biggie. If we can stop malaria in Cuba and the South, we can stop it here when it gets warmer. People can adapt.
Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid (Score:5, Interesting)
Data quality is a major issue with global warming. If the numbers aren't right, we don't really know what's going on. This is just one more case of obfuscation hiding error and the AGW proponents falling back to the nearest trench line and adopting the same shoddy tactics of delay, deny, and obfuscate on data quality issues.
This is not how real science is done and that's why so many people who know and love the scientific method and its fruits have a growing unease about the whole AGW enterprise. Can you blame them?
The US is reputed to have one of the best temp sensor networks in the world and I believe has the only organized effort to go to original sources and check stations. Yet instead of calling for a review of all the data and figuring out, for real, how bad the problem is, what we get is a political effort to firewall the contamination and an implied "let's not bother" checking the rest. Real science is "trust but verify". Climate science seems to have a strain of something else going on.
Educating the press (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, the real problem here is why isn't Slashdot up in arms about closed sourced climate modeling and data correction algorithms? Sorry, couldn't resist.
In the process for setting myself up for an observance error arguement, why is the three NOAA monitoring stations I know about are in the three hottest sections of my city? All three of them are well within 100 feet of buildings, with one over red brick walkway, one over a concrete pad next to one of our airports and the last one is attached to the tower of the other.
Re:typical mud-slinging (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The bigger issue (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Global plant biomass up 6% since the 1970s due to more CO2, and longer growing seasons. A big win on dozens of fronts, but two bear particular mention:
Plant biomass can go up as a whole, but the effect of CO2 fertilization is strongly limited by water and nutrient availability, which in many regions will go down. Longer growing seasons do not occur everywhere, but only in places that don't get too hot or too dry.
3) Increased crop yields, contributing to making the famines that used to regularly afflict India, China, etc. a thing of the past.
Increased crop yields have far more to do with agricultural practices than CO2 fertilization or climate change. Furthermore, even when crop yield goes up, nutritional content often goes down: the planets are bigger but not as good for you.
4) Decreased mortality. Deaths increase from a one degree drop in temperature at around four times the rate of a one degree rise in temperature.
That contradicts other studies I've read, but now I have to do some hunting for them.
5) Extra calamari! Squids get bigger and grow faster in warmer oceans.
Ocean acidification, ecosystem stress, forced migration
6) Fewer typhoons/hurricanes/etc., due to increase in wind shear making them less likely to form.
The studies I've read indicate that hurricane numbers stay constant or increase, not decrease, and that hurricane strength may increase.
7) Better beer! There's no water more pure than that from melting ice caps.
Your one sided story neglects all the other negative impacts of climate change (sea level rise, drought, flooding, heat waves, abrupt threshold responses in the climate system), etc., and also neglects the difference between the climate change which has occurred so far, and the much larger change which is predicted to occur in the future.
Re:The bigger issue (Score:2, Interesting)
I have seen reports of a disease called "white plague" that is responsible for the death of coral in the Caribbean. Other studies blame wastes that are pumped into the ocean without treatment.
Still other studies in the Pacific indicate that the earth is losing coral at the rate of 1% per year, and at this time Pacific coral is 50% of what it was before. OK, that means this started about 50 years ago?
I don't want to start a flame war here...but lumping everything as a product of Global Warming is
isn't productive when you don't also explore other causes and/or cures. It has become such a political movement that people are closing their minds to any other cause or solution.
Re:The bigger issue (Score:1, Interesting)
And that's the problem. People aren't used to this and unrealistically expect it to be simple and easy (and expect scientists to make it so if it isn't). It's trivial to ask the question "why should it be this difficult?", but it is often the norm in scientific work for it to take almost as much effort as it did the first time in order to duplicate someone else's work. You have to validate as much of the process for yourself as is practical anyway.
If you want to bake a cake, it's fine to say the ingredients and recipe should be easier to obtain or better specified by another chef, but it's quite another matter to imply that someone else should bake it for you or do the work to package it into a "just add water" recipe. Usually you have to do it from scratch to really understand it and test it out. It isn't always easy. Tough.
Re:The bigger issue (Score:3, Interesting)
>If the papers reported on c02science.org are of sound methodology, transparent process, and apparent intellectual rigour,
>which they appear in general to be to me, why should the source of their funding matter?
Are you claiming to be a top climatologist? A lot of people can write a paper that
looks scientific. Only a good scientist can figure out whether the paper is worth
what its printed on.
I'll give you a personal example. I once worked for a small medical device company
owned by an ex surgeon. He was trying to sell patented technologies to very large
and rich pharmaceutical firms. He needed to show that the technologies were scientifically
tested to standards which the FDA accepts. He hired me (an MIT trained scientist) to
perform experiments and prove that these technologies were valid. This process is
called "validating" by the FDA.
I had a predecessor who had left on poor terms. So I had an inkling something
might be weird. I kept trying to replicate my predecessors results and couldn't.
My boss was becoming increasingly agitated that I wasn't successful making his
technology work. I was certainly trying. I was working my ass off. At one point
in a meeting, my boss told me to change the protocol of the experiment in a subtle
way. I instantly recognized that it would guarantee a positive result, but that
it wouldn't mean anything about the safety of the underlying technology. It
would be fraud. And in fact, it would be very hard for someone to detect that
it was fraud. Only someone who had been working on the technology for 60 hours
a week for 6 months would be able to understand what it meant.
I refused to make the change in protocol, and started looking for anotehr job that
day. The boss and I didn't speak after that. People's lives are at stake
with medical devices and I couldn't be a party to fraud. This was a big deal.
Global warming is somewhat similar and its even more complex. You might consider
putting your faith in trained scientists instead of paid hacks. Or don't and
become a scientist yourself!
Re:This man's career (Score:3, Interesting)
When they open up that published reserach so that it can be fully reviewed, we could actually argue points instead of insinuating. Until then, though, we should consider why such disclosure wouldn't be made and, from that, assume there to be an agenda at play, be it his own, his supervisor's, or the administration's.
Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, it does. Let me explain. To model something, you need quality data. To have quality data, you need to have good data correction algorithms to adjust for variation. When the scientists will not produce the source code, then the data correction algorithm is closed-sourced, which has material effect on the climate model.
Without the source code or the algorithms used, we don't see the methodology, just a pat on the head explanation. We cannot verify or repeat the process. Since we are feeding this data into climate models and building 'better' models based off of this data, then the climate models should come into question. By close-sourcing a data correction algorithm, I am obfuscating how 'good' is my data, feeding possibly bad data into climate models and screwing over every other scientist working with my data. How many climate models were built on the bad data because of this error? How many years of work has to be reworked? In one fell swoop, NASA has set back climatology by several years, assuming the current produced data has any validity.
Personally, if I was working with this data with my climate models and 'improving' the models with it, I would be upset. Anything I had written would come into question. If it didn't, I would worry about the academic community. People should be tar and feathering Hansen.
Re:Not global warming. Global climate change. (Score:3, Interesting)
There is this shocking, general belief that populations are exploding.
The truth is different: in countries as diverse as China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Iran (yes, Iran), and Mexico plus all of Europe, birth rates are below replacement levels. In Russia, there were four deaths for every birth last year. Even in India, the birth rate has collapsed, even if it is still well above replacement.
Sure, populations are still expanding globally: but this is a function of life expectancies rising fast in
developing nations. But where birth rates have fallen below replacement levels we are now seeing DECLINING populations. Japan's total population has fallen, and it's working age population is shrinking at an alarming rate. In China, the result of the one child policy in 1979 has also led to an enormous drop off in births. (And one that is compounding now: there are fewer women of child bearing age, having fewer babies.)
Look up the UN population data - they have been consistently revising down "peak" population for 15 years. Read Fewer by Ben Wattenberg. It is amazing to discover that there will probably be fewer humans - by choice - in a 100 years than there are now.
Re:Not global warming. Global climate change. (Score:3, Interesting)
And, more people are demanding more as "all boats rise". Consumption is skyrocketing even though population is merely growing. What do people do who don't have kids? They consume...
Re:Not global warming. Global climate change. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, if we made everyone fabulously wealthy (i.e. as wealthy as the US, Western Europe, Japan), population growth would stall entirely, since that's what happened when the US, Western Europe, and Japan all became fabulously wealthy. The problem is, making everyone fabulously wealthy (i.e. "economic development" or "globalization") will...lead to a shortage of resources. It's not population growth that's the issue.
Population growth these days is simply self-perpetuating poverty, and poverty doesn't put up much of a fight for resources. (Okay, maybe that means all the poor countries starve to death, but at least the rest of us don't have to go to war. Even if it is North Korea--sure, they have nuclear bombs, but if they actually use them instead of just making vague threats about it, they're not getting any more food aid.) It's development that's the issue. Poor countries don't want to stay poor, but rich people somehow want to pay the same price for gasoline even when poor countries are getting rich enough to afford some and increase demand.