Where the Global Warming Data Is 1011
Several readers noted the latest fallout from the Climate Research Unit's Climategate: the admission by the University of East Anglia that the raw data behind important climate research was discarded in the 1980s, "a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue" according to the Times (UK) article. The Telegraph quotes Phil Jones, beleagured head of the CRU: "Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them." Some of the data behind these other results can likely be found in a new resource that jamie located up at the Real Climate site: a compilation of links to a wide variety of raw data about climate. From the former link: "In the aftermath of the CRU email hack, many people have come to believe that scientists are unfairly restricting access to the raw data relating to the global rise in temperature. ... We have set up a page of data links to sources of temperature and other climate data, codes to process it, model outputs, model codes, reconstructions, paleo-records, the codes involved in reconstructions etc."
Oh, hey, (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Oh, hey, (Score:5, Informative)
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Global Warming [feeddistiller.com] Feed @ Feed Distiller [feeddistiller.com]
Re:Oh, hey, (Score:5, Informative)
I think they're exaggerating the lost of one particular set of data, from one set of researchers, in
one university, compared with thousands of different climate research around the world. So this
case of data mismanagement at one university, isn't going to make much difference to the case
for global warming being caused by humanities energy usage.
Problem is, some of the other sources aren't looking so good, either. [telegraph.co.uk]
Re:Oh, hey, (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/news/all/niwa-confirms-temperature-rise/combining-temperature-data-from-multiple-sites-in-wellington [niwa.co.nz]
Re:Oh, hey, (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oh, hey, (Score:5, Informative)
Except for the fact that this university is the co-ordinating site for many other centers and many of them got their facts and calculations from CRU. So CRU is about to drag a bunch of other universities down with it.
Re:Oh, hey, (Score:4, Insightful)
Except for the fact that this university is the co-ordinating site for many other centers and many of them got their facts and calculations from CRU. So CRU is about to drag a bunch of other universities down with it.
And the IPCC, too, since they kind of acted as the "gatekeeper" for studies that ended up in the IPCC reports.
Re:Oh, hey, (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they're exaggerating the lost of one particular set of data, from one set of researchers, in one university, compared with thousands of different climate research around the world. So this case of data mismanagement at one university, isn't going to make much difference to the case for global warming being caused by humanities energy usage.
How many "lostes" will it take, then?
The real issue that the "climategate" leaks expose is that many of the "scientists" involved are more concerned with promoting their ideology than with finding the facts. It doesn't matter which side of the policy debate you happen to be on - justifying the means because of your support of the ends should never be okay.
Not a chance. Not just one university. (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a nice graph [noaa.gov] of the NOAA's "adjustments". If you subtract these "adjustments" (their term, not mine) from every OMG Global Warming Will Kill Us ALL graph you've ever seen, you get noise. It doesn't matter whether you add the noise back in forward or backward, or substitute it with properly scaled level data from your favorite MP3: the result is the same alarming graph. But if you reverse the timeline on this "adjustment" and feed in your favorite source of noise you get a chart that looks like a precipitous drop in temperature in 1900-1909 that levelled off. Why did they make these adjustments? Was it because their raw data didn't agree with someone else's [ibiblio.org] observations? I find it difficult to believe that NOAA's measurements became increasingly inaccurate over time with a determinable bias and that at the precise moment their instruments became reliable, the temperature increases stopped. That doesn't jive with my understanding of modern technology and error measurement, nor with my understanding of thermodynamics.
In short since the adjustments are the cause for alarm it would be best if they were examined closely. Most especially since several of the presumably credible sources use such similar "adjustments". The cause for alarm does not appear to be in the raw data. If you know of some credible source of uncooked raw data that does show this cause for alarm continuing to the present day (not ending in 1999), I'd love to see it. Be careful though - adding in these "adjustments" and throwing away the raw data appears to be the order of the day. If that raw data isn't out there, this is just the most amazing piece of pseudo-scientific groupthink I've ever seen.
The story now is that they've only lost 5% [strata-sphere.com] of the data, and the rest is good - trust us. This situation is fluid and there will be much more back-and-forth before the truth is finally heard. With the basic facts this dynamic, now is not the time to take bold action on questionable information.
Re:Oh, hey, (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, there are in fact.
"People from over 130 countries contributed to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report over the previous 6 years. These people included more than 2500 scientific expert reviewers, more than 800 contributing authors, and more than 450 lead authors."
No matter how you argue the numbers, there are way too many for a conspiracy.
AGW = ? (Score:3, Interesting)
So does AGW stand for "anthropomorphic global warming" or "anti-global warming"? And would "anti-global warming" mean you are against global warming (meaning you think it's happening) or you are against the theory that global warming is happening?
Found it - with links (Score:4, Informative)
Ah, there it is. [ibiblio.org] ESR is a respected member of the community and I'll take his word for it absent definitive proof.
You can quite clearly see the "fudge factor" (actual code comment) where it was calculated to produce the desired result. Presumably this factor was computed, then munged into the raw data and the code commented out. Here you can see the hockey stick being built in the factory.
There are nice graphs [ibiblio.org] where the "no trend" raw data is added to "a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" to create the results graph we have all seen that has no relation to the raw data but does show what would be an alarming trend if it were not for the fact that it's entirely made up. Since you clearly won't believe me, here's The NOAA's own fudge-factor chart by dataset [noaa.gov] and in total [noaa.gov]. They're from this page [noaa.gov], and here's an official quote on that page from the NOAA:
Here's another nice link. [ibiblio.org] Enjoy.
This is not science, to my understanding of that symbol.
Re:Found it - with links (Score:5, Informative)
ESR is a conspiracy nut. Has been for a while, actually. His comments on this are about as accurate as would be expected - i.e. a bunch of sensationalist BS:
Re:Found it - with links (Score:4, Informative)
I have to ask, who's paying you to write this shit?
There was a fucking senate inquiry into Mann's hockey stick, it was a result of demands by political hacks who thought that debunking the original hockey stick (Nature 1997) would bring down the entire mountain of evidence that supports AGW. Problem is that the senate committe called in the National Acedenies of Science to examine the claims of the political hacks.
Their testimony [nationalacademies.org] (pdf warning), shows that Mann was correct in his conclusions but also gave some minor critisisims about his confidence levels, those critsisims were taken on board and an extended study was published by Mann, et al in the Journal science (ie: the very people who had raised the minor critisisms).
ESR is a respected member of the OSS community and I'll take his word for it absent definitive proof."
Sorry for editing your FUD to reflect reality but I would like other readers who may fall for your (unoriginal) tecno-babble to compare the credentials of ESR (zero publications on climate science) to M. Mann, an internationally recognised climate scientist who has published over sixty papers on the subject in journals such as Nature and Science. Having said that, argument from authority will not impress an eductaed reader anywhere near as much as it seems to impress you.
Both yourself and ESR seem blissfully unaware that when it comes to reproducing scientific studies the source code is about as relevant as the brand of slide rule that a 1960's scientist used. You simply cannot demonstrate that all but the most trivial code is bug free, therfore scientists prefer to reproduce results using the same data and methods with different code. This is a much more robust test and is the reason why the internet is littered with independent source trees that implement the same methods using the same data.
Re:Oh, hey, (Score:5, Informative)
I like how you use the word "deniers" to intentionally reference "Holocaust deniers," as if wanting scientific proof of something is so horrible. I also like how you pretend AGW supporters don't spread propaganda, especially now that we know the AGW movement has been censoring opposing papers. Your post oozes bias.
Meanwhile, the global temperature record has shown no rise in temperature since 1998.
Re:Oh, hey, (Score:5, Informative)
Stop cherry-picking, 1998 was an abnormally warm year due to a number of factors.
'Global warming stopped in 1998'--Only if you flagrantly cherry pick [grist.org]
Re:Oh, hey, (Score:4, Insightful)
Who cares if it's good or bad science? Parties are taking sides for the fun of taking sides. But there is no science yet that can tell us that by spending $100T over 50 years we can lower the global temperature by a tenth of a degree. Those saying we should make sacrifices are irresponsible if they can't assure us of any beneficial outcome.
Re:Oh, hey, (Score:4, Insightful)
Those climate 'scientists', to be responsible, should be telling us not to take a single step until they can generate the scientific models to assure us that if, for example, we invested $100T over 50 years we would lower the temperature even a tenth of a degree.
You're just wrong here, Steve, on two levels.
One is that you're forgetting that "not to decide is to decide." Everyone knows the predictive models are inexact. Even over the past ten years or so, we've seen the best scientific predictions proved wrong -- global warming is getting much worse, much faster, than the consensus belief in 1999.
Waiting for an arbitrary standard of scientific certainty before changing any behavior is an option the world has, one option among many: the "continue as before" option. What we do know is that that leads to disaster. We may not be able to say exactly when which exact magnitude of disaster will arrive, but it is known to be a catastrophe of global proportions.
And we may not be able to know the ideal time to begin acting for optimum return on our economic sacrifice, but it's pretty clearly in the past: beginning global greenhouse-gas reduction efforts ten years ago would have been better than, say, now.
The other level you're wrong at is that it's scientists' job to give us information about our options. Refusing to tell us that the status quo leads to catastrophe until predictive abilities reach an arbitrary threshold of certainty would be a breach of scientific responsibility. And pretty amoral too, it'd take a Guild of Evil Scientist level of inhumanity to know about impending world destruction and swear a pact not to say anything.
Suppose the approaching danger were instead an archipelago of asteroids whose orbit will approximately intersect the earth in a hundred years. The scientists don't know whether the really big rocks will hit the earth but some of the medium-size ones probably will. They don't have any plans for deflecting them or taking earthbound steps to handle the catastrophe. But shouldn't they tell us what they know? And, as fellow human beings, wouldn't they recommend that the world take the best known course of action at the best possible time?
Re:Oh, hey, (Score:5, Informative)
You are entitled to your opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
Re:Oh, hey, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh, hey, (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite the contrary. People are entitled to their own opinion AND entitled to challenge what others claim as facts including but not limited to the quality and veracity of the raw data.
Re:Deniers? (Score:5, Informative)
"Deal with it like an adult, or deal with it like a leftist." HAHAHA I loved that. Priceless. People who want big government to provide everything they need and take care of anything that might make them feel bad and thus, make a parental figure of government, are more juvenile and immature than people who understand why this is a bad idea and are satisfied with the parents they have already outgrown. Whodathunkit?
In all seriousness, whether global warming is real or not, and whether it's caused by human beings or not is immaterial. Regardless of any of that, it will be used to justify the taxation of carbon. Fake global warming will justify this as readily as real global warming so there's no reason for the controversy of the issue to divide people on this one thing. A tax on carbon is a tax on life, seeing how we are carbon-based life forms. This will represent a new era of governmental power and control heretofore unknown to us and found only in the wet dreams of statists and other would-be tyrants.
Re:Deniers? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Deniers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because he's simplifying to the point of being wrong. So are you.
It's called climate change because "global warming" has been so soiled by deliberate misunderstanding that it's problematic to use. "Skeptics" have managed to insert a wedge of "creative" misinterpretation into our popular conscious: they'll note a cooling trend in a specific locale, or a specific time period, and gleefully use that cherry-picked factoid to shoot down the whole theory. It'll get some consideration, too, because the idea that the whole planet can go up in temperature on overage, but Podunk can get two snowy winters, is hard for may laypeople to understand. Skeptics know this, and prey on it.
And a carbon tax isn't "a tax on the basic building blocks of life", it's a tax on emissions of previously-unlocked carbon. This is why things like biofuels aren't being subject to a carbon tax, nor are the production of goods that use non-carbon sources of energy, yet produce something that contains carbon (like, oh, food). It's also why you get credits for locking carbon back up. Of course, people like you and the grandparent devise well, lets not mince words, outright lies about how this stuff works in hopes that people will accept because your lies smell vaguely like truth.
I'm reminded of any number of meetings I've been in where some dickhead vice-president who knows nothing about technology will, for political or budgetary reasons, give his or her creative, oversimplified misundertanding that sounds reasonable enough to other dickheaded VPs and managers, yet is outright wrong. What you're saying it like that.
Re:Deniers? (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, it's bad PR. It's kind of you to admit this so readily -- it saves us time. The moment you are concerned with PR your agenda is no longer a purely scientific one. That is what left you vulnerable to "skeptics".
And rather than educate those laypeople with a more correct message, you'd rather adopt a different name. If that alone doesn't summarize what's wrong with this whole movement, and why many are suspicious of it, I'd be hard pressed to name what does.
Naturally the federal government will get to define "previously-unlocked." I am sure it will be a sensible definition that is logical, true to the science, and fair in every way, one that won't favor any particular interest groups or large financial interests. Because everything else government regulates has turned out this way, right?
Because government has never started with a small, agreeable maneuver that sounded good and was difficult or impossible to politically oppose, and then added more restrictions and complications, incrementally over periods of time. I mean, it's not like they have a track record of doing this, right?
When government sees a new excuse for the levy of a tax or the exercise of power, it is not concerned with whether that excuse accurately reflects the actual science. The excuse need not even have a basis in reality, it only needs to be something that average people will believe. "Any excuse will serve a tyrant."
In those meetings, you spoke up and (politely) corrected those VPs and managers, explaining why their reasoning was oversimplified or wrong, and showed those VPs and managers how their wrong reasoning might be corrected. You did that because as a scientist your primary concern is accurate data and sound reasoning, you recognize that good policies and good decisions are based on these, and all other concerns are subordinate to those two primary concerns. Right?
Re:Deniers? (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you ever tried to have a rational discussion about climate change with someone who's either unaware of willfully ignorant of the science? It's really irritating, much like trying to talk to a Creationist about evolution. No, actually, it's worse, because at least Creationism isn't getting a leg up by way of the media's gross oversimplification. If I were a climate scientist, faced with "Well, how come it's colder in Podunk?" for the umpteenth time and subsuqently forced to try and get across concepts like global average temperatures, precipitation changes, the difference between "weather" and "climate", etc, etc, I'd want to at least start the discussion from a position that's not automatically handicapped.
No. Previously-locked carbon is really easy to define: oil and coal. Trying to extend it to "the building blocks of all life" because that dovetails into a paranoid fantasy about government taxing your body is fearmongering. No, it's worse, it's fearmongering in the service of some of the most powerful economic entities on the planet.
Saying that this will extend into a tax and, thusly, into a control of your precious bodily carbon is pure, unmitigated FUD. Water is also a taxed substance and has been for much longer: have we proxied water bills into mind control yet?
Are you really trying to proxy concern about the stability of the biosphere among scientists into the New World Order? This fails the "follow the money" test on so many levels: not only is politically unpalatable to tax something so ephemeral that governments are being dragged kicking and screaming to it, and not only is the economic incentive more of a disincentive, but the opposing interests have billions of dollars staked in it not happening at all.
You're working from a flawed premise: that everything government does is inherently flawed, wrong and immoral. Even assuming that's the case, who would even be looking at this (or past issues, like ozone depletion, acid rain, mercury toxicity in the food chain, etc)? Our oh-so-altriustic corporations that caused and make money off the problem in the first place? And yes, you can make the "well, government enabled it" standard argument and say the the solution is to sprinkle magic Libertarian pixie dust and make everyone into Randian supermen, but in the real world where we have billions of people who need to coexist in a functioning society with legacy social structures we need solutions that work, not philosophical wankery.
Re:Deniers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you ever tried to have a rational discussion about climate change with someone who's either unaware of willfully ignorant of the science?
I got a better question.
How you ever discussed a climate paper where you had access to both the data and methodology used by its authors?
Re:Science is a process (Score:4, Informative)
Take for example the raw climate data. It's level noise. Unless you add in adjustments like this and this it's completely boring annual measurements that vary but don't trend.
Errm... you do realise the second image you linked doesn't say what Eric S Raymond says it does? It's (a) a correction applied to temperature data from tree trunks to artificially correct the divergence between them and all other temperature measurements, and (b) just an ad-hoc hack that doesn't actually seem to be used for anything. Oh, and (c) the program was designed to plot the data with and without that correction, probably in order to compare them.
Re:Deniers? (Score:4, Insightful)
But by resorting to PR stunts, they've lost much of their credibility as an objective scientist. I now have to look at them, and instead of thinking about what they're saying, try to see through the spin to figure out what they are REALLY saying. I can understand why they're doing it, but it's a bad move; it will come back to bite them. Once it becomes evident they're spinning, even for a 'good cause', every statement they make becomes suspect.
Re:Deniers? (Score:5, Insightful)
It can also be called "oily hucksterism" or "lying" or "spinning" etc.
We're talking about a movement that wants to re-arrange trillions of dollars of productivity by reallocating its output. We're talking about a movement that's prepared to wildly punish western economies that are doing more than any culture in human history to re-invent how they use energy, recycle materials, transport people and goods
Yes, it takes some real PR to make a kid matriculate from elementary school thoroughly in the grips of this new brand of Original Sin, and seeking salvation for it by cutting giant new polluting economies a whole lot of perpetual slack. Guys like Al Gore have cleverly positioned themselves to make billions off of that well-packaged guilt and fear trip, and it's well-nuanced PR that got him there.
RC != CRU (Score:5, Informative)
Pity you didn't follow your own advise. Here is an incomplete list of the factual faults with your "informative" post.
1. The emails were NOT stolen from RC they were stolen from a server at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU).
2.RC's blog is hosted in the US by a company called "webfaction", it has nothing to do with the UAE. Last time I checked the UAE and the US were sperarated by a large body of water.
3.Here is the list of contributing scientists [realclimate.org], you will note all but one of these internationally recognised scientists work for US institutions, none are employed at UAE.
4. Their love of open data sources is hardly "newfound", they put up the list as a reaction to morons who can't use google to find existing data.
"I just can't find the reference just now."
Yes just like you couldn't find existing data without someone compiling a list for you, suspiciously convienient if you ask me...
after seeing all this (Score:5, Funny)
Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is the general creed that conservation and restriction is good, as long as you do it and leave me alone.
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
If I were to be "worked up" it would be because it is not rational to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. And when I'm told, "oh, well, even if the conclusion of AGW is wrong it still means we need to do such and such" then I become immediately suspicious. I don't like handwaving. The data should stand, or fall, on it's own merits.
Re:Why are people not getting worked up enough (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you're saying, "Cut off funding for anyone who questions the official position that this is an urgent global crisis that demands massive government intervention"?
Re:Why are people not getting worked up enough (Score:4, Insightful)
No, he is saying that the question of whether AGW is real has been reasearched for over 100yrs, culimanating with two decades spent on what is probably the largest scientific effort ever undertaken by mankind. He is also saying there is zero eveidence in the scientific litrature to dispute the OBSERVATION that pumping half a trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere over the last 150yrs has already fucked up the climate.
Giving money to the engineers to fix the mess and avoid pumping another half a trillion tons into the atmosphere over the next 40yrs is exactly what every respected scientific institution on the planet has been loudly advocating [nature.com] for at least a decade. Some institutions such as the US National Acedemy of Science (NAS) have been warning their government about the OBSERVED problem since the 1950's
But yes, this is science and they could all be wrong. No matter how unlikely that possibility is you can still use the philosophical point to engage in wishfull thinking and prey that an oppressed genius will emerge from his basement and demonstrate why every physicist since Fourier (circa 1824) has been mistaken about the physical properties of CO2. Regardless of philosophy that position is not rational, let alone scientific.
In short the only people calling for more reasearch on the basic question of whether humans are effecting the climate are vested interest who want to delay action and the ignorant who lap up thier anti-science propoganda.
Re:Why are people not getting worked up enough (Score:5, Insightful)
He is also saying there is zero eveidence in the scientific litrature to dispute the OBSERVATION that pumping half a trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere over the last 150yrs has already fucked up the climate.
That's a conclusion*, not an observation. In the context of scientific research, observations are measurements; while there is a general usage of the word meaning "remark", it's unhelpful to use it in this context.
* Or an assertion without evidence, but I'm giving benefit of the doubt.
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
if global warming is false
Look at pictures of Mount Kilimanjaro [wikipedia.org] today, 20, 30 and 50 years ago. Where have the glaciers gone? Travel to any of the glaciers fields in Europe, North America or Asia. Where have the glaciers gone [wikipedia.org]? Global cooling sure as fuck hasn't caused them to recede drastically.
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
Kilimanjaro has been retreating since the 1800s [nationalgeographic.com].
C02 in the atmosphere has only been shooting up since the 1950s. Pre-industrial C02 levels were about 2.8 parts per 10 000. As opposed to 4 or so now [noaa.gov].
If these things pre-date C02's big increase this indicates a large role for natural climate variations.
This is what many skeptic say.
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Informative)
Kilimanjaro has been retreating since the 1800s [nationalgeographic.com].
Yeah, once the industrial age had got started in earnest.
And in the past 50 years the industrial age has really grown, and so have the consequences.
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
Where have the glaciers gone?
My city of residence was covered by massive glaciers not too long ago by geologic standards. My house is built on a big pile of glacial till. I'm happy my area is warmer now than it was.
It's not a simple matter of true/false, either/or, all or nothing. People to reduce the problem to those terms are making it impossible to have rational discussion.
Yes, climate temperatures fluctuate with or without our influence. Yes, human influence is large enough and pervasive enough to alter those fluctuations. Yes, some areas of the world will benefit from further warming. Yes, some areas of the world are already at the limit of habitation/productivity because of warm temperatures and further warming may ruin them. Yes, it's always better to pollute less and have less man-made impact on the environment if we have a choice about it. Yes, we will someday run out of useful oil reserves. Yes, significantly changing our behavior may cost trillions of dollars and hurt many people. Yes, making those changes may leave us better off politically and financially in the long term.
These things are all true. Some of these facts are in tension with other facts. No simple solutions exist. We need a complex, nuanced solution. Unfortunately in these days of conservative vs. liberal sound-bite-bashing, it's impossible to discuss any complex solutions. The only choices we seem to have are "environmentalists are total frauds, burn all the oil you want" and "the world is about to end unless we impose a fascist state to dictate every detail of our lifestyles".
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:4, Interesting)
Where have the glaciers gone?
My city of residence was covered by massive glaciers not too long ago by geologic standards. My house is built on a big pile of glacial till. I'm happy my area is warmer now than it was.
It's not a simple matter of true/false, either/or, all or nothing. People to reduce the problem to those terms are making it impossible to have rational discussion.
Yes, climate temperatures fluctuate with or without our influence. Yes, human influence is large enough and pervasive enough to alter those fluctuations. Yes, some areas of the world will benefit from further warming. Yes, some areas of the world are already at the limit of habitation/productivity because of warm temperatures and further warming may ruin them. Yes, it's always better to pollute less and have less man-made impact on the environment if we have a choice about it. Yes, we will someday run out of useful oil reserves. Yes, significantly changing our behavior may cost trillions of dollars and hurt many people. Yes, making those changes may leave us better off politically and financially in the long term.
These things are all true. Some of these facts are in tension with other facts. No simple solutions exist. We need a complex, nuanced solution. Unfortunately in these days of conservative vs. liberal sound-bite-bashing, it's impossible to discuss any complex solutions. The only choices we seem to have are "environmentalists are total frauds, burn all the oil you want" and "the world is about to end unless we impose a fascist state to dictate every detail of our lifestyles".
What I don't get, and maybe someone can answer this for me, is why do people care if global warming is man made or not? Even if it isn't man made, continued rising global temperatures will eventually trigger a runaway greenhouse effect that is catastrophic to our survival as a species and we need to do something to stop it or come up with alternatives for our survival. People also seem to forget about our alarming deforestation rates as well. Sure, there have been cool down periods on Earth, but what caused them and do we know for sure that will happen again? Do we want to place the survival of our species on the unknown possibility that there might eventually be another global cool down? As Carl Sagan said, Venus has the same amount of Carbon as Earth, except most of Earth's Carbon is still in the ground... for now...
Personally, I've resigned myself to accept the fact that the shit is going to hit the fan some decades from now. I'm reminded of the many pacific island civilizations that were wiped out because they destroyed their island's ecology. It's pretty clear collectively humans are incapable of any self control when it comes to resource consumption and we will continue these behaviors at the expense of our own survival. The extinct pacific island civilizations were modern humans so they are were as smart as we are today, yet there was still someone who thought it was a good idea to cut down the last tree or eat the last animal. Even if we had solid evidence that energy consumption would lead to catastrophic climate change, I have no doubt that we would ignore it and continue our consumption.
If it's not climate change that does it to us, we still have deforestation, desertification, and a rising global population. With the increase in competition for resources and everyone wanting to get nukes, it's looking like this will be a fun century for us...
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:4, Interesting)
What you do about GW depends on its cause. If you accept GW and all its dire consequences then a reasonable course of action is to look to ways to mitigate some of those consequences, but one should also be looking at ways to slow, stop or reverse GW too. And then it matters what the cause is.
(The cynic in me also says that debating the cause also stalls any action without needing to directly debate the truth of the effect).
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't. There's both natural variation and anthropogenic change. If only there were some framework we could use to examine the system and the data, differentiate natural variation from anthropogenic change, and predict the future impact of anthropogenic change on humans.
On an unrelated note, why is quantification, proper logic, and science so hard for Slashdot users to understand?
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:4, Informative)
If we are at the 1934 levels of average global temperature then why are none of the 1930s in the top ten warmest years? http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/thegreengrok/2008temps [duke.edu]
If global temperatures have been record for the last 150 years why are of the top 10 years from the last dozen years?
Apparently, 2009 is going to make it into the top 10.
http://www.zeenews.com/news581998.html [zeenews.com]
Also, the year 1934 isn't in the global top 10, it is in the U.S. top 10 warmest years.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/1934-hottest-year-on-record.htm [skepticalscience.com]
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:4, Funny)
Where are all of the glaciers from 10,000 years ago? You can't tell me that wasn't man-made warming as well.
Little known fact: Early man burned mammoths for heat and to power industry. Rapid mammoth extinction and major climate change. Coincidence? I think not!
The only thing that saved ice hockey was peak mammoth!
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:4, Insightful)
What remains is serious enough. The _depletion_ of minable resources, coupled with the draining of reserves of arable land, petroleum, potable water, and harvested food stocks all amount to plenty of reasons to stop the population increase that will overwhelm any reasonable ecological efforts by the burgeoning billions of humnity. It's going to take a pretty radical restructuring to run the world's economies without population growth, but Malthus had a point.
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
However we should get correct data. If Global Warming is not an issue, then why are we focusing so much on Carbon. Carbon Trading, Carbon Free Energy, your Carbon Footprint... The only think I have been hearing that is Bad about Carbon Dioxide is it is contributing to Global Warming, and perhaps raising acidity in the oceans.... But the issue is if you are going to make policy to protect the environment you need real facts to make the right choices. Environmental policy is about making the right tradeoffs it isn't about prohibitions it is about measuring what will benefit society the most without the most harm to the environment, and hopefully get to a point where we are doing good enough to allow the earth catchup to what we cause.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hippie.
You say that like its a bad thing. What skew is owed to your view?
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
Your first paragraph seems to indicate that there are those who would actually choose smog over clean air. Many who are concerned with CRU and the validity of certain global warming conclusions such as myself don't doubt that it is happening, or that we can and should be better environmental stewards. I'm just not convinced that the data supports their conclusions. Even if the CRU data is completely valid, it does not necessarily guarantee that their conclusions are correct.
Your second paragraph is a list of environmental problems that are unrelated to smog. algae blooms (which subsequently render the water virtually lifeless so you repeated yourself) are not caused by air pollution. Freshwater algae blooms are usually caused by Phosphorus run off from the soil because it is the nutrient that is limiting algae growth. Saltwater blooms are usually caused by Nitrogen run off because it is the first limiting nutrient in that aquatic environment. Nitrogen can come from the atmosphere, but not in the concentrations necessary to trigger an algae bloom.
Your third paragraph is a second attempt to set up your straw-man. Namely that anyone actually wants to pollute the environment. It also trots out the timeless "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!" meme, Bravo! Every anthropogenic global warming skeptic I've met doesn't doubt the sense of taking care of the environment, only the conclusion that the world wouldn't be warming without us. I'm all for tougher enviromental standards, but there is a point at which I believe we are cutting off our nose to spite our face.
You can feel free to disagree, but I'd prefer it if you'd leave your straw-men and Parental Hysteria at home.
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, there are. There are people who would choose money over clean air any day of the week. All of China has done it for starters. The fact that you find it hard to imagine doesn't make his argument a straw-man.
Personally, I don't really care that much since I have no children to pass the planet on to. So I'm all for saying fuck the planet and exploit the resources (including plants, wildlife, etc.) until there's nothing left of it. The human race isn't immune from natural selection and there's no reason to think that it won't select itself out of existence. Regardless, the planet will always be here (for a few billion years anyway) so our disappearance isn't particularly significant.
I'm fortunate that there are just enough skeptics to prevent any serious environmental change from occurring in my lifetime, thus sparing me what is likely to be a hefty tax or fee increase of some form.
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed there are, whenever smog is free and clean air costs money.
Re:Geopolitical Consequences of Global Warming (Score:5, Insightful)
What then?
Re:Geopolitical Consequences of Global Warming (Score:4, Insightful)
Then we probably shouldn't compound the issue with CO2?
Re:Geopolitical Consequences of Global Warming (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Geopolitical Consequences of Global Warming (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Geopolitical Consequences of Global Warming (Score:5, Insightful)
Every industrialized nation is to blame here.
Yeah and the dirt farmers that burn thousands of acres of forest are completely blameless. People are to blame here. Interestingly enough, there is a solution to the people problem...
The solution, of course, is to set up a global despotic government, just as proposed in the Copenhagen protocol. History has shown that tyrannical leaders can kill 10-15% of their populations, and often suffer no repercussions at all. With the NWO proposed by the Copenhagen treaty the new tyrants could do away with a billion or more people, and solve this problem.
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
But there are many people whose motive is Profit and who don't give a shit if a side effect of their economic activity is to mess up the environment.
(of course they are not confined to the USA, or even 'the west'.)
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:4, Interesting)
Just another day (Score:5, Insightful)
The Parent Isn't a Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
The parent posting isn't a troll. He is saying it like it is. This "incident" involves four scientists. Just four. And I'm trying to figure out the scientific arguments being put forward by the contrarians. Are they saying that data has been suppressed that shows the world hasn't being warming significantly since the 1970's?!! Really? Thirty five years ago, I used to skate on local lakes...they used to freeze regularly. Those lakes haven't frozen solid for since 1977. Glacial retreat has accelerated since the 1970's...this is undeniable. And this isn't part of the retreat since the last ice age. To assert that the recent glacial melting is somehow part of a linear decline that began 10000 years ago is an absurd claim that can easily be refuted by looking at measures of sea level over the past 10000 years.
The assertions of the contrarians about these emails are irrelevant to the scientific discussion about climate change. They do not address in any real or logical way the arguments of climate change scientists. They are thus, a clear example of the use of the "Red Herring Falacy".
Re:The Parent Isn't a Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
To me, those graphs show that over a period of time, we can expect the climate to experience rapid warming, followed by a longer period of cooling, where it gets very very cold, followed again by a rapid warming period. At what stage of that cycle are we currently living in ? The peak of the warming stage. Sure we may have higher CO2 than at similar points in past stages but not outside the realms of statistical possibility. There have been times where the peak was much lower than the average maximum, and now the peak is much higher than the average maximum. None of that precludes the fact that the long term cycle exists and going by past evidence will peak and turn down towards ice age. And if you think humans have the capability to prevent a cycle that runs over the order of 120,000 years from happening, just to suit our interests, then you are the one in denial - denial of just how insignificant we really are.
Basically, if we aren't in a retreat from the last ice age, we are in a decline towards the next ice age. As we seem to be still climbing in both CO2 and temperature, I would go for the former - we are in the last stages of ice age retreat, will soon peak and start dropping towards the worst fucking nightmare, making the global warming scare seem like a sunny day at the beach. Fortunately, CO2 tends to lag temperature meaning that the extra CO2 we have produced will keep us warmer than we would have expected to be when the average temperature drops 3 or 4 degrees. Look at the graphs, specifically the Temp/CO2 graph [climatedata.info]. What happened about 120,000 years ago ? Does that part of the graph look ANYTHING like the current situation ? I say it does, and anybody with working eyes would say the same. But you seem content to blame the warming trend on humans, all evidence to the contrary. What goes up MUST come down. The quicker it goes up, the more rapid the fall when it comes. I would suggest it's a bit too late to be worrying about what we released into the atmosphere, it's done its damage already. If you're suggesting that we can transform the future graph into a straight line at roughly the place where we want it to be, I suggest you see a psychiatrist.
Maybe, just maybe, we could prevent temps from rising too rapidly, but that does not negate the overall trend, where the average is 6 degrees less, and the maximum is roughly 15 degrees less than today. Surely the most important long term aim is to prevent cooling not warming ? The only issue I have with higher CO2 levels is that we can't breathe it, but to protect ourselves there, maybe we shouldn't cut down all the trees, pollute the oceans and burn things just to make money.
Now you tell me, where is that actual recorded data wrong ? It wasn't the result of a flawed model, it hasn't been tweaked to suit my agenda, it has been measured by climate scientists from existing sources. But you still claim we are not "coming out of an ice age" ? It seems to me YOU are the denier, YOU are putting forward red herrings, in fact the red herring argument is itself a red herring, because it draws attention away from the facts. As do all the mouth frothing AGW religious types. They claim the data shows the end of the world is nigh but refuse to accept what the data is showing them. Instead they focus on such a short timescale that it can't be measured on the same scale as the evidenc
Re:Just another day (Score:5, Insightful)
The deliberate coverup in response to an FOI request pretty much blows the climatologists out of the water. Kaboom! Game over. The British press is all over the issue while the American press ignores it, hoping it will go away. It won't.
Money rules BOTH sides of the climate debate. You simply don't get funding unless your outcome favors the people who provide the money. If Microsoft funds an "independent study" and the outcome favors Microsoft products (as it always does), we understand, laugh, and life goes on. Why is this climatology such a mystery? If Rob Enderle, Laura DiDio, and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute opened a climatology division, Slashdot would be challenging them in about 10 minutes. What's taking so long with the climatologists?
The clues are everywhere. Notice how the "cap and trade" money grab is absolutely essential to solving the problem, while consuming less meat or zero population growth are given hardly any consideration at all. Without the money grab and subsidies for the third world, the sense urgency goes right down the toilet. Things we could be doing at zero cost get zero attention. This doesn't prove climatology is a scam, but it sure looks that way.
Meanwhile, we had better hope global warming a scam. During the years since Kyoto, China has become the number 1 generator of CO2. And they have far more growth potential than the US does. So do Brazil, Russia, and India for that matter. I have actually visited Shanghai and have seen the pollution first hand. Complex measurements were not required; coughing in the smog was more than enough for me. If anyone claims China is serious about controlling pollution, it's total BS.
The reality is that Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the BRIC nations) offer to do essentially nothing, while they hide behind the number 2 generator of CO2 - the US. I have news for you folks - the US government is broke. Obama views "cap and trade" as a palatable source of tax revenue that will throw off so much cash, he can distribute it all over the world. Problem is, cap and trade is NOT palatable. The production of CO2 will simply migrate to the countries with the least enforcement or the heaviest subsidies. Obama's Democrats will be "wiped off the map" in large sections of the US if they expect Americans to subsidize [even more] offshoring of jobs. There is a very real possibility that a mismanaged implementation of cap and trade would be both ineffective and indistinguishable from economic suicide. In such a scenario, the Democrats would become a regional party with no real power outside of California and Massachusetts.
Fortunately, we have been saved by Russian hackers. No deal in Copenhagen, no cap and trade. No support in Congress; it's dead with a capital "D". Obama is already looking for excuses to cancel the trip! Perhaps they can mail him his Nobel Peace Prize. The countries that were determined to do nothing will be joined by all the others, so that we can all continue to do nothing on an equitable basis. This may not be the best outcome, but it is infinitely better than a naive Obama getting hoodwinked into picking up the costs of everyone else's pollution controls.
Re:Just another day (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the problem has been researchers who won't let others see their data, except under NDA. You can't effectively attack that which you can't see, so frustrations go astray and lead to attacks on the researchers and their backers.
Those of us who are still skeptical but willing to listen have been asking for the raw data to be released for a very long time, and getting a lot of groups sending back the response, "You can trust us. You don't need to see the data." I can (unhappily) live with that for privately-funded research, but if it's happening at a public university or with public funds, the data should be made available on the basis that public money paid for it, so the public should be able to see it. If it's happening, there are things we can do. If it's not happening, some of the tech coming about as a result of the fear of it happening are still good ideas, like converting coal plants to run on natural gas or moving to alternative hydrocarbon fuel resources.
Openness is all that the honest among us ever asked.
Re:Just another day (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:Just another day (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh I don't know, were you in a coma for the last couple of years ? I just find it really funny that the new stratergy now is to call into question the honesty and ethics of the researchers or basically personal attacks instead of challenging the freaking DATA. Denier still know what data is defined as right ?
The problem is that the DATA is now in question. I don't know where you've been for the past week or so, but it appears that many of the scientists who have been writing reports for policy makers in the UN and various world governments have been manipulating data, cherry picking data, and then destroying data. After that, they have been denying data to those who ask for it who might discredit their "findings". Why would challenging them be considered a personal attack? It's their professional credibility that is in question.
So, I guess the question should be, why are you not challenging credibility of those that changed, destroyed and withheld data?
Damned if they do Damned if they don't (Score:4, Insightful)
If climate scientists refuse to look at proprietary data on the grounds that they can't release it:
"They are cherry picking their data, the met data shows there is no cooling, it's all a fraud!!!"
If instead they decide to agree accept the offer to see it by signing a NDA:
"They don't release the data, they cover it up, it's all a conspiracy!!!!"
Seriously, you will get some scientists that are fine with using proprietary data and some who are not. What the so called skeptics are arguing is that because SOME scientists decided the benefits of using more data outweigh the cons of being unable to disclose it, that means the entire field of climate science is a fraud. Never mind that their findings agree with research done with open data, never mind that you could in principle go sign an NDA yourself if you mistrust the CRU so badly. No it must all be a conspiracy, including the research that were made with open data that achieved the same conclusions.
The more I hear from climate "skeptics" the more the arguments feel similar to those of the evolution skeptics.
Re:Damned if they do Damned if they don't (Score:5, Insightful)
> Seriously, you will get some scientists that are fine with using proprietary data and some who are not.
I don't know what the rules are on your world, but on mine it isn't science if the work can't be peer reviewed, published and duplicated. If you basing results on datasets that can't be released none of that is possible. Seriously, how would you peer review a paper based on data you can't look at? How did 'respected' journals publish papers that they couldn't ask another serious scientist to do a proper review of? Why is work that, even if it COULD in theory be duplicated, in fact never will (and wasn't) be given any weight in the high councils of the world's leaders?
Should a scientist use a closed dataset to help his company decide which research line to pursue? Yes. Decide where to drill for oil? Yes. Publish in the peer reviewed journals? No. Make recommendations to world leaders with trillion dollar consequences? No.
Re:Damned if they do Damned if they don't (Score:5, Informative)
Review and duplication does not require publishing all raw data. It requires publishing the methods used to obtain the raw data, so someone else can do the same thing and come to the same conclusion. For a proprietary dataset, this could mean, "go sign your own NDA and see the proprietary data", or it could mean, "go gather data the same way they did" (e.g. in the case of ice cores or other repeatable climate data samples.
Science has never required full access to the publishing scientist's lab notes, lab equipment, or diaries. That's the domain of historians, patent attorneys, regulators, and corporate spies.
Re:Damned if they do Damned if they don't (Score:5, Insightful)
> Review and duplication does not require publishing all raw data.
No. If you were asked to peer review a paper, would YOU sign off on it without seeing the data that went into it or (usually) the program code that processed the data? Really?
Most of this global warming stuff isn't much more than the data. They take raw data and either process it and make projections or use it to feed a computer model that makes projections. The only part published is the end result which is taken on faith since there isn't much more to work with. The raw data isn't submitted as part of the publication/peer review process and apparently the actual computer code driving the models is equally private. So exactly has been being reviewed all these years? And forget duplicating the 'work.' You would basically be finding your own datasets (often with no way to even know if you are using the same data) and doing everything from scratch. Science has really fallen this far?
Here is a hint. If he says "Trust me" he ain't no scientist he is a salesman/politician.
Re:Damned if they do Damned if they don't (Score:4, Informative)
No, I do it all the time, and it is the correct thing to do.
A scientific review is not a trap for fraud or a re-analysis of the data. It is not adversarial (well, it is not intrinsically adversarial). The idea is that you are helping the person write a better paper, in addition to deciding whether it is good enough to publish. And you assume that they have described their work accurately.
Fraud gets detected sooner or later when people try to replicate the experiment. And, wrong papers get detected that way also.
Reviews are there to remove (not catch!) any visible errors, to make sure that the logic make sense, to make sure that nothing important was forgotten, and to make sure that the experiment was described completely enough so that someone else could replicate it. That's more than enough work for the poor (unpaid) reviewer.
Re:Damned if they do Damned if they don't (Score:5, Insightful)
> Well at least in computer science, this happens all the time.
Climate science isn't computer science. There only a few temp datasets and 'collecting' a new one isn't an option. If you want a century of records you either use an existing set or wait on i/o for about a century.
> In fact, if you think the data was biased, then you're obligated to gather it yourself in attempt
> to get unbiased data. Simply having access to a biased dataset, does not magically make it unbiased.
As the leaked data now makes clear, access to the raw data would have scuttled these idiots. The data was dodgy enough it wouldn't have withstood even the most cursory review. The temp data is full of gaps they averaged over and did even worse to. One if the more referenced tree ring studies ends up being based on a grand total of twelve cores. Twelve samples!
> This is doubly frustrating, because the big allegations against Mann's 98 "hockey stick" paper
> was never about the data gathering. It was about the mathematics presented about analyzing of
> the data. Would have access have made it easier for McIntyre to write the 2005 paper complaining
> about MBH98? Yes, but the fact is that it didn't matter. McIntyre didn't have the all data, yet
> was able to still write detect the bias, write the paper, and get it accepted, shows that it
> obviously wasn't a deal breaker.
Several problems with that statement. One, had source been required for publication there is a very non-zero chance the problems would have been caught in peer review. I'm not an expert but from reading about the case the flaw wasn't exactly obfuscated if you had access to the source. Second, that someone with a LOT of time managed to reverse engineer the thing and blow the whistle doesn't remove the need for science to practice full disclosure. Bad science needs to be discovered and tossed in months, not the years it took to debunk Mann. And Mann still hasn't suffered legally or professionally for either his original misconduct or the obvious coverup he aided and abetted.
If the conclusions of science are to be believable as much of the raw data and the processing it underwent needs to be published. If somebody gets a bad vibe when reading a paper we want the barriers to their sniffing around until they are satisfied to be as low as possible. If the work is really good it will withstand scrutiny and the openness will inspire confidence.
Remember, the climate scientists are making the most extraordinary claims with the most far ranging consequences ever. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not "Trust us, we are Scientists!"
Re:Damned if they do Damned if they don't (Score:5, Insightful)
OK buddy. Link to the actual emails that support your statements or I call complete bullshit.
To review, you state (grammatical errors aside):
- "data was being manipulated"
- "material subject to FOIA was being systematically and deliberately purged"
- "the system was being manipulated to keep out opposing views and get editors removed"
The raw-data (i.e. stolen emails) that you're basing this on are presumably available on some right-wing/skeptic web site. So why don't you cite some specific instances? Specific phrases and paragraphs from specific emails.
Go ahead, make my day.
Re:Damned if they do Damned if they don't (Score:5, Informative)
That's pretty pathetic if you ask me. For example:
"Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)"
Laughable. They are talking about how an already mediocre journal has been taken over by people with a clear agenda, so it has no credibility anymore.
"Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)"
Nope, not a FoI request. Rather, some guy who tried to get access to other people's e-mails because he feared that they were talking behind his back. Got nothing to do with actual science.
"Phil Jones says he has use Mann's "Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series"...to hide the decline". Real Climate says "hiding" was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)"
This is just sheer dishonesty. This "trick" thing has been debunked all over the web.
Science as Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)
Science was the first instance of open source. If someone else can't freely check your data and replicate your experiments you've got nothing. The raw data and source code for the climate models should have been available from day one. The fact that they weren't and that large quantities of data were "lost" throws the conclusions into serious question.
Re:Science as Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not quite right. It's important that your results are reproducible. That requires a full description of how the data was gathered and how it was analysed. That way, someone can go and do their own experiments, collect their own data and conduct their own analysis. Giving out the raw data isn't a bad thing, but it's not necessary and actually doesn't happen that often.
You could make a case that it's in fact bad for people to all work off the same data set or code, as any mistakes (or even deliberate fraud) will then be common to all analyses.
Re:Science as Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I feel that when you are an activist, not just a scientist, and pressuring for major policy changes based on your research, you should be held to a higher standard.
If you're going to stand up, proclaim the end of the world, and tell everybody that they need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to avert it... you have a moral obligation to publish your data.
Re:Science as Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)
"You could make a case that it's in fact bad for people to all work off the same data set or code, as any mistakes (or even deliberate fraud) will then be common to all analyses."
And that deliberate fraud issue, sadly, appears to be the case. How many good models were scrapped because the cooked data made them give obviously bogus results? How much good new data was discarded because it didn't match with the "approved" data. A huge amount of work is scrapped, or is about to be.
My dissertation was on non-linear modeling. If I had cooked the data like this bunch I'd have been in the dumpster with my data. Although I did not have to show every bit of input data, it was required to be traceable all the way from the raw input through any smoothing, transforming, and normalizing to get to the input of the model. Anything less and there would be no Ph.D. after my name.
So it's been less than a week, but why are these guys still employed?
Re:Science as Open Source (Score:5, Informative)
If you go look at the CRU mails and responses, the data wasn't "lost". They don't have a copy of it: the original data is still at other institutions.
The CRU work is based on collecting sets of measurements from around the world, and producing a gridded temperature dataset from this. They've
been doing this for decades. When they started, disk space was very expensive, and once they had finished they deleted the copy they had (the originals still being available at national archives).
Secondly a lot of the data was given under Non-disclosure agreements. A number of National Met Services are under an obligation to minimise their costs (ie taxes) by acting commercially and selling "added services" beyond simple weather forecasts (e.g. see met.ie [www.met.ie]: data for the last 3 years is on the web, beyond that you pay). Frequently this data is available free of charge for academic use, but you're not allowed pass it on to third parties. They simply cannot put it up on the website.
This is basically a non-problem scientifically: you are able to get similar datasets elsewhere for free, and can measure and do experiments yourself ...
this is the preferred method scientifically, as it checks for systematic error in technique.
SOP for Min-Truth (Score:3, Insightful)
Translating Freely:
We cooked the data to show what we wanted it to show, then erased the originals to ensure that our version of the truth is the only version.
Those guys really took the lessons from the Ministry of Truth to heart. Way to inspire confidence guys. Way to convince the non-scientific public that there is a reason to quietly submit to a carbon version of a water command empire.
Why is Mr Jones still employed?
My A*& will be sore (Score:5, Interesting)
Ponds and Fleishman said they successfully created cold fusion and they are now bus boys at Chili's. What I'm saying is that if the scientific community subjected the CRU to even the most basic scrutiny they would either be forced to prove their conclusions or sent packing.
Imagine for a moment someone spent thirty years recording data in any field then compiled a report based on their interpretation of the data only to delete all of the raw data. What reasonable person on this planet would say, "No problem, I trust you." Bull$#%@.
This isn't Republican or Democrat, American or European, this is the very basis of what Slashdot is founded on, that is don't give me bull$%#@ show me the data and your source, and most of all don't patronize me!
This world is going in the crapper unless we call everyone's BS.
"When the scientific principal is replaced by conventional wisdom or worse peer pressure, what prevents us from returning to the dark ages?"
William David Howell Sr.
First Hand Knowledge? (Score:5, Interesting)
Outside of the science, all I know is that the climate zone in my local area has changed. Plants which you could not grow before, you can grow now. I hear from Innuit that there are plants and animals in the North which they have not seen before. I know that tornadoes dot the German Rhine where no tornadoes were seen before, I know hurricanes on the Eastern seaboard are behaving differently, I know that Crete was so dry when I saw it that I couldn't imagine olive trees growing there without irrigation, 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, and 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.
Everything else is told to me by strangers. Maybe the arctic is intact, maybe the rainforests never actually existed. Maybe Mt. Kilamajaro doesn't exist, maybe it's all a mind control plot. All plausible answers I suppose from people telling me that climate change is a myth.
Has anyone here seen a rainforest? Have you seen the clearcutting? Maybe none of this is real. Right now, the temperature where I am is 6 Celcius. Is my thermometer tampered with by some global warming co-conspirators? If I wrote it down, would somebody question it 100 years from now? Maybe the celcius scale has been tampered with.
Re:First Hand Knowledge? (Score:4, Funny)
Has anyone here seen a rainforest? Have you seen the clearcutting?
Yes, the one in British Columbia. It's not a jungle, but it is a rain forest. And I saw where it stopped. And I saw the giant trees that the wind threw down because the forest isn't there to soften the wind anymore.
Where's the beef? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the _results_ from the lab in question match up with other independent results, what possible grounds to laymen have to presume the data was deliberately changed? Unless they assume that all independent labs falsified their data in concert, which would be a hell of a conspiracy.
What really bothers me about the complaints around the emails is that none of them (as I understand it) come close to proving that findings were deliberately falsified to point to one conclusion over another. All of the emails were either innocuous or, at worst, ambiguous.
And what have some skeptics done with ambiguous data? They have manipulated it to fit their pre-existing theories. Which is very close to the sort of bad behavior they are charging the lab with now.
Re:Falsified conclusions (Score:4, Insightful)
The text you quote says
"Show the Briffa et al reconstruction through to its end; don't stop in 1960. Then comment and deal with the "divergence problem" if you need to. Don't cover up the divergence by truncating this graphic. This was done in IPCC TAR; this was misleading (comment ID #: 309-18)"
Whoever wrote that described truncating the graphic as 'misleading', not fradulent or sinister. The author also implicitly agreed with the premise of questioning the data, at least, by suggesting that the data in question be commented on for clarification.
The divergence problem itself is explained here [blogspot.com] - in short, tree-ring data used is used as a proxy for temperature but data for North America 'diverges' from other readings around the middle of the 20th century. And though I have no idea how reliable that blog is, it seems like it is the same issue referred to in this [economist.com] article in The Economist, where that (sober and well informed) newspaper states
Hence the eagerness with which bloggers fell on one of the stolen e-mails, sent in 1999 by Phil Jones, the CRU's director: "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) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." Trickery associated with Dr Mann was catnip to the sceptics. But Dr Jones has clarified that "The word trick was used here colloquially as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward." The "hiding" concerned the decision to leave out a set of tree-ring-growth data that had stopped reflecting local temperature changes. That alteration in growth pattern is strange, and unexplained, but eliminating it is not sinister.
Got anything else?
By definition, this is no longer Science. (Score:5, Insightful)
We have this quote from TFA:
By deleting the raw data, no one can ever reproduce or review the process by which raw data became tested theory.
This is not the act of a scientist; in fact, this would make you fail in the Elementary School Science Fair of your choice. The sad truth seems to be that, while Science concerns itself with discovering truth, these scientists have concerned themselves only with discovering funding and prestige.
Climate change theory must now reside with such things as Cold Fusion and Duke Nukem Forever.
Climate skeptics caught manipulating temp data (Score:5, Informative)
There's been another breaking climate scandal. Some big name climate skeptics have been busted big time manipulating temperature data and lying about it.
They've manipulated the data to make it look like it was cooling when it was really warming, and the Drudge Report and blogger Anthony Watts have been caught up in the lies, and have tried to blame it on some New Zealand climate researchers:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/11/new_zealand_climate_science_co.php?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=channellink [scienceblogs.com]
http://hot-topic.co.nz/nz-sceptics-lie-about-temp-records-try-to-smear-top-scientist/ [hot-topic.co.nz]
"As long as its green, I'm not quite sure about this moralistic issue."
- Quote about writing "scientific studies" for the tobacco industry by Frederick Seitz, the author of that cover letter for that petition of 30000 questionable signatures against the science of climate change.
Still no nefarious behavior from where I sit (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Still no nefarious behavior from where I sit (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at the larger picture (Score:5, Informative)
During 2001 the IPCC made a number of predictions as to what would happen as a result of the climate change. At the time their results were widely mocked and ignored by the "climate change deniers" circles.
It now turns out that the actual effects measured today are _worse_ than what was predicted. For example, the rise of the ocean level is 80% greater.
I think people should concentrate on the larger picture -- the predicted effects are happening. The whole CRU emails issue is peanuts and only diverts the attention from the real issue, even if we assume that everything that is being claimed there is true.
Political Agendas (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems there's a concerted campaign by certain political groups - especially USA political groups - to push the meme that this is a "scandal". But there is no scandal because the stolen emails don't invalidate the science.
They can't attack the science, so they attack the scientists. The science has been peer reviewed, independently verified, and the predictions made by CRU have already come to pass. The science is robust. So all they can do is attack the scientists.
This is a smear campaign, conducted by political screechers with a clearly visible agenda.
Re:Political Agendas (Score:5, Insightful)
They can't attack the science, so they attack the scientists.
This statement is utterly false.
Read climate audit. Read about the divergence problem. Read about unreproducible graphs. Read about bizarre weightings. Read about manipulated data from now "lost" raw data. Read about white noise input yielding "increasing temperatures" as output.
There is much to attack in this "science".
Examining their cited data (Score:4, Interesting)
Following their link I noticed that there was no link to raw data for stratospheric temperatures but there was a link to processed data.
I followed the link to the processed data in the hopes that there would be some explanation as to why only processed data was available. I discovered that the processed data wasnt available either, instead the link only pointed to a page with GIF files (graphs.)
Essentially, Real Climate just lied to us about the stratospheric data. Not only is the raw data unavailable, the processed data isnt available either even tho it claims it is available and claims to link to it.
I then clicked around most of the "raw" sites linked to and almost all are fairly devoid of data.
Mr. Jones, the public may buy your bullshit because they might think a GIF file with a graph is relevant "data" but I do not. Mr. Jones, RELEASE YOUR FUCKING RAW DATA.
Re:Climate change was NO issue in the 80s (Score:5, Insightful)
Which was more or less addressed because we stopped pumping ozone-destroying chemicals into the atmosphere. Anti-AGCC people always being up "well, the ozone layer didn't turn out to be a problem" line, forgetting that the reason it's not a problem is that we legislated CFCs and such out of existence. Acid rain similar: it's less of an issue because we did something to fix it. AGCC is, unfortunately, much harder to quick-fix
The reason this stuff gets whipped up isn't the "Bilderberger manipulators" but a media that's addicted to thirty-second soundbites. Respectable scientists aren't the ones running feature pieces about how the Maldives will disappear or we could be looking at another prarie dustbowl: that's the media's need to parley anything and everything into a alarmist pablum* deal because reprinting the IPCC studies directly does not sell advertising space for used car dealers and mattress stores. At best, we get grade-six science textbook diagrams and selective quoting, and even that's pushing what the media thinks people can digest before the sports scores.
And this, of course, leads to simplistic retorts like "It's the sun!" or "Climate is cyclical!" because the sum of the data isn't commonly presented. Do you think that all the hundreds of people who hold Ph.D's on this stuff wouldn't notice the big, hot ball in the sky, or haven't done core extractions? Do you really think that they've overlooked things that obvious and just handed right-wing soapboxers such an easy mark? Really?
* Yes, this includes, notably, Al Gore. On one hand, he's done a good job getting the memo out. On the other, he's a lightning rod because people a) they hate anything Rush Limbaugh tells them to and b) he's simplified the science to the point where people who don't know better can poke holes in it and think they're right.
Re:Climate change was NO issue in the 80s (Score:5, Informative)
I don't remember the cooling theory in the 70s, but I remember the ozone hole from the 80s pretty well. In my home state of Tasmania it was a bit of an issue, as it should have been in all the southern places of the world. There were scares about sunburn and skin cancer (which is still an issue), and cool satellite images of a blobby shape over Antarctica. There's a pretty solid link between UV radiation and cancer, and given the ozone layer's role in blocking UV, it was the beginnings of a real problem.
And then the whole world moved away from chloro-fluorocarbons as a propellant, giving the ozone layer time to rebuild through normal processes. It's mostly better now, and is a good example of the whole planet solving an environmental problem before it got any worse.
It's odd that you should use it in the opposite way - as an unfounded scare. You're completely wrong on that one. And the lines of code referred to in your link were apparently commented out, based on tree rings and used to produce a poster, not a scientific graph. The whole case is shaky for both sides - no-one is looking good right now. One side has stupidly lost its data (either wilful stupidity or an attempt to hide the truth) while the other is trawling for any word or email to take out of context (lay-people cannot read a few emails and somehow gain all the knowledge and context of an entire field of science).
No-one looks good right now, and as I've said, your post has its own problems. Perhaps you might like to reconsider your absolute certainty.
Re:Correlation does NOT mean causation (Score:5, Insightful)
No one disagrees that the earth's climate varies a great deal over any long period of time you care to look at. The question is, if the world is warming at the moment (and over a scale of tens of years, it is), then is this due to man-made causes, and is it happening far faster then it could due purely to natural causes? Furthermore, if the temperature is pushed up, will the effects become decidedly non-linear, in that the processes that regulate climate will themselves change and some (quite different ) equilibrium become the norm? The modeling and experimentation suggests that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere will have a warming effect, though how CO2 interacts with the various climate regulatory and feedback processes is extremely complicated and there's a great deal of work to do. The further question of altering the equilibrium state of the climate (which could be utterly disastrous for civilization, and a great many current species of life on this planet) is even trickier to answer, but there's plenty of good evidence to suggest this could happen (including in the geological record, so we know it is possible).
I am not a climate scientist, but I do know that in my own field it takes about 10 to 15 years to get really useful at anything. Therefore I am loath to make some quick contrary claim to someone who has spent many years thinking about something. Nearly everyone I have encountered who dismisses AGW is either pretty ignorant about doing science (that's fine, I am sure they are good at other things - it's unrealistic to believe scientific literacy could be universal), or are just plainly unable to contemplate or accept the changes required in the organisation of human affairs (even though these changes would also happen in the absence of global warming), or are just full of anti-environmental politics for various delusional reasons of their won.
Re:Correlation does NOT mean causation (Score:4, Informative)
Let's assume your numbers are correct, and that we have the highly simplified situation that you describe, with a simple absorption-reradiation day-night cycle.
Now, take a 100-year period. What difference between energy absorption and radiation do we need to induce in order to make the air temperature increase by 1 degree C, assuming no change in albedo? That's simple - it's the total energy required (1273 J/m3) divided by the time period (3e9 seconds), which is roughly 0.4e-6 W/m3 or, in other words, half a billionth of the incident energy. That's an order of magnitude which puts the effect in the "plausible, but needs verifying" range for me, and not something to be dismissed out of hand.
Actually they don't. At least, not in that graph. It's an optical illusion. Open the image in an image editor and draw vertical lines; you'll see that the peaks of CO2 and temperature match perfectly, which tells us nothing about causation whatsoever.
That's right. Assume we are heating the planet by adding carbon dioxide; it's made worse by the extra water vapour chucked into the atmosphere by the excess heat.
That's irrelevant. We're not producing energy. The argument is that we've artificially increased the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 30%ish.
It's 25%ish we (might be able to) influence as opposed to 70%ish we can't. I don't view that as "minimal".
The human-driven change in methane levels has had one third the effect of human-driven changes in carbon dioxide levels. Yes, methane can *potentially* be really nasty, but comparatively it hasn't been - yet. Insert your standard "methane sink going critical" apocalyptic scare story here; there are more than enough to go around.
That avenue's a bust [realclimate.org], unfortunately.
That tells us very little. All we know there is that something changed. The equatorial temperature *appears to have* increased, with a corresponding drop at the poles. What we definitely do know is that a chaotic system underwent dramatic change, which is not exactly surprising in itself.
Not really, given a) the above, and b) a sound physical hypothesis for man-made warning.