CIA Teams Up With Scientists To Monitor Climate 417
MikeChino writes "The CIA has just joined up with climate researchers to re-launch a data-sharing initiative that will use spy satellites and other CIA asets to help scientists figure out what climate change is doing to cloud cover, forests, deserts, and more. The collaboration is an extension of the Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis program, which President Bush canceled in 2001, and it will use reconnaissance satellites to track ice floes moving through the Arctic basin, creating data that could be used for ice forecasts." Even though the program is "basically free" in terms of CIA involvement, the Times notes: "Controversy has often dogged the use of federal intelligence gear for environmental monitoring. In October, days after the CIA opened a small unit to assess the security implications of climate change, Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said the agency should be fighting terrorists, 'not spying on sea lions.'"
Re:Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming .. (Score:1, Informative)
Either he's genuinely too stupid to understand how climate change is a national security issue, or he's grandstanding.
Color me stupid, if you like, while I color you wrong.
Climate change is not in any way a national security issue unless all issues are national security issues, at which point the term has basically zero meaning.
Re:Climate change is a security threat (Score:1, Informative)
While we are at it, it is important to look at what scientists do claim, and you will not find anywhere a scientific consensus that CO2 is going to cause some kind of global calamity. What you will find is consensus that CO2 does affect the global temperature. What you will not find is a consensus on how much it affects the global temperature. Global warming has become a kind of a scare in the mind of the public that is detached from the scientific reality.
Re:Climate change is a security threat (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong. Climate sensitivity is expressed as the temperature increase due to a doubling of CO2. Modern estimates [wesleyan.edu] assign a maximum likelihood value of 2.9C, with a 95% confidence that it's less than 4.9C but greater than 1.7C.
Re:Climate change is a security threat (Score:3, Informative)
No, the onus is on the scientists to provide evidence to support their claims, as it always is.
That's what thousands of articles in peer-reviewed journals are -- which, like it or not, is the standard for science in this modern world.
The ball is in your court.
Re:Climate change is a security threat (Score:5, Informative)
Ah, I see you've been hitting the full "Amateur Denier Circuit". One by one!
1) oppressing scientists who disagree with them
By "oppressing", you mean "badmouthing them in -private- emails, and arguing against their papers (which they think are unsound) in public review". Contrast with, say, the Bush administration actively blocking global warming materials from being mentioned in reports and threatening to fire scientists who go public.
2) ignoring data that doesn't suit their agenda (such as ignoring 75% of the temperature recording stations in Russia)
Your "science" in this case comes from a Russian equivalent of the Heritage Foundation -- the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis. As with most amateurs, they don't know what the heck they're talking about (and failed to get several papers past peer review because of it).
Contrary to what most amateur deniers believe, the MET office's dataset is NOT simply an average of the readings of all land stations. Why? Because of precisely something that the deniers criticize the surface stations for -- they're not all good! In fact, some of them are run-down pieces of junk. Deniers love to post pictures of these, naively assuming that they're all just averaged in.
The process of building up a climate dataset from such sources has a number of steps. First off, you need to figure out just how closely temperatures are correlated over various distances. I.e., if you're in a heat wave in NYC, you're probably also in a heat wave in Philadelphia, but not necessarily in Los Angeles. Secondly, for each datapoint, you analyze that region with its correlation factor and look for discontinuities in your station record. You also look in abrupt changes in station readings to detect faults or changes in the station's surrounding that affect its accuracy or introduce various biases. Bad stations are either eliminated or detrended. Most importantly, this is all done in an automated manner.
After all of this, you do numerous studies to make sure that you're eliminating such errors properly. For example, one approach involves keeping a reference network of closely monitored stations in ideal conditions and comparing the results you get on the reference network to those you get on the broader network. Another involves comparing the results from windy days to those of calm days to see whether the data is being contaminated by the urban heat island effect (which varies with wind). And so forth.
In short, the elimination of a large number of stations is *part of the process*. But what you need to know is that it's done in a fully automated manner that has been subjected to extensive peer-review.
blatantly alter data to show the outcome they desire (such as the one scientist who's email showed that he added X amount to the recorded temperatures to show an upward trend)
You're referring to this:
"From: Phil Jones ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
To: ray bradley
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray."
First off, check the date. You're arguing about something that's a *decade old*. Secondly, "Mike's nature trick" and "the decline" are about a dendrochronological anomaly in which the data series after 1961 deviated from the instrumental record. The
Re:Climate change is a security threat (Score:5, Informative)
And where did I present a conspiracy theory?
The notion that the overwhelming majority of the world's climate scientists are lying for some nefarious reason sure fits the definition.
Also, isn't the vast majority of official temperatures all distributed by the same group in the UK that was proven to have manipulated the data?
Re, "manipulated": See my other reply, below. Nothing even remotely close to that occurred, and if you knew anything about the process in which the dataset was assembled rather than listening to Russian economic thinktanks, you'd know that.
Re, datasets: No. The CRU's is just one of the three most widely used datasets. NASA's and NOAA's are the other two. And there are a number of lesser-used datasets. And they're all assembled in different ways, and often from different data sources.
There's also documentation of the temperatures being collected in all sorts of places that don't fit the guidelines for where they should be placed - such as some that have been found placed directly under the vent from a buildings furnace.
Which is why you automatically eliminate bad stations, something you were just criticizing the CRU for doing, re. Russia.
But hey, why bother actually truly looking at the facts
I can tell you ascribe to that philosophy to a tee.
Go read a peer-reviewed paper. For once. Follow it with a few thousand more. Then come back here and talk.
Re:Climate change is a security threat (Score:3, Informative)
You summarized one of my points as "The earth's temperature is warmer than it has been in the past" but in fact what worries scientists is the rate of the warming, which is probably higher than at any point in the last 1000 years. Scientists are concerned about the abrupt nature of these changes, not the absolute temperature.
It's based on the fact that global circulation models account for temperatures after 1970, which can't be explained by any other process like increasing solar illumination, magnetic effects, etc. Those GCMs have been validated in multiple ways, by correctly predicting climate response to volcanic eruptions [ecolo.org], by comparison to independent paleoclimate data and modern temperature records (which are independent because GCMs are dynamical models, not empirical models.) As I've explained [slashdot.org], GCMs are able to reproduce strange features of modern warming like the cooling stratosphere which can't be explained using other hypotheses.
Nonsense. [realclimate.org] I've already [dumbscientist.com] been over this. ENSO variation isn't important to the long term climate.
Very close. Modern estimates [wesleyan.edu] assign a maximum likelihood value of 2.9C, with a 95% confidence that it's less than 4.9C but greater than 1.7C.
Of course. What's troubling is that our estimates of the long-term feedback effects are known to be too small to account for the Milankovitch glaciation cycles.
Yes, I've already had to explain [dumbscientist.com] that I'm aware of how important clouds are. But why do you say clouds aren't being considered? In fact, all models [realclimate.org] take clouds into account. I've previously linked to a new paper [sciencemag.org] describing recent improvements to models of clouds.
Yeah, it's a worry about the future of human civilization.
Re:Climate change is a security threat (Score:3, Informative)
That's what thousands of articles in peer-reviewed journals are -- which, like it or not, is the standard for science in this modern world.
The ball is in your court.
Were those the same journals that were threatened (and complied) that if they were to publish sceptic's arguments that the scientists would publish their findings elsewhere?
Yeah, that's not how peer review is supposed to work.
Re:Climate change is a security threat (Score:2, Informative)
I've read a couple of the papers that Mann was all worked up about.
And you know what, those papers were garbage. Freshman f***up garbage. As term papers, they would have earned an undergraduate a grade south of a "C-" at any respected university.
The papers in question are:
1) "Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years", Soon, W., Baliunas, S. (2003)
2) "Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature", McLean, J. D., C. R. de Freitas, and R. M. Carter
Google them up, download them and read them.
If you cannot identify "showstopper" blunders in each paper (they both contain whopper errors), then you have no business participating in this discussion.
Re:Climate change is a security threat (Score:5, Informative)
He was just trying to help you understand how climate models work. I'll repeat: global circulation models allow for short-term variability due to weather. That's the whole point of taking an ensemble [www.ipcc.ch] (see chapter 8) with varying initial conditions and parameterizations. For example, here are individual realizations [realclimate.org] of a climate model. Notice that the short-term fluctuations are severe and unpredictable, but the long term trend is robust and predictable.
Re:Climate change is a security threat (Score:4, Informative)
The effect of decreasing the resolution of the models has been extensively studied. It provides a modest increase in model "skill" but runs enormously slower. They've chosen instead to run at a course resolution but create an ensemble of many runs which actually works better than decreasing the resolution.
Notice in the first sentence of the first paragraph of section 2 that they used the DOE PCM described in Washington et al (2000).
Some of the GCMs have publicly available code, which is indexed here [realclimate.org].