CRU

The Climate Peer-Review Process: Hopelessly Broken

by Iain Murray on April 1, 2010 · 1 comment

in Environment, Global Warming, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

The Climategate scandal showed how several of the world’s top climate scientists were hell bent on keeping “skeptical” views out of the scientific literature and in particular, the IPCC reports.  If you wanted an illustration of how this actually worked in practice, then economist Ross McKitrick has a doozy for you.

Ross realized that one of the IPCC’s central claims, one that could be regarded as foundational, was fabricated and provably false.  He wrote a paper demonstrating this and proceeded to be given the run-around by every climatic journal he submitted it to, despite mostly positive reviews.  In the end he had to publish it in a statistical journal, where it will likely be ignored by the climate science clique community.

Ross concludes:

In the aftermath of Climategate a lot of scientists working on global warming-related topics are upset that their field has apparently lost credibility with the public. The public seems to believe that climatology is beset with cliquish gatekeeping, wagon-circling, biased peer-review, faulty data and statistical incompetence. In response to these perceptions, some scientists are casting around, in op-eds and weblogs, for ideas on how to hit back at their critics. I would like to suggest that the climate science community consider instead whether the public might actually have a point.

Read the whole thing by downloading Ross’s paper here (PDF link).

Roger Pielke Jr agrees with Ross here, noting:

This is exactly the situation that has occurred in the context of disaster losses that I have documented on numerous occasions. In the case of disaster losses, not only did the IPCC make stuff up, but when challenged, went so far as to issue a press release emphasizing the accuracy of its made up stuff.

no_consensus_scr

Cartoon from Cartoons By Josh.

Climategate Whitewash

by Iain Murray on March 31, 2010 · 11 comments

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

The UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has issued its report into the so-called Climategate scandal.  As might be expected, it’s pretty much a whitewash, except as detailed below.  Only one MP dissented from its conclusions.  There seem to me to be some serious errors and omissions in the reports, but I’m not the only one.  For instance, Fred Pearce of New Scientist and The Guardian has some pretty serious things to say in his story, Hacked climate email inquiry cleared Jones but serious questions remain:

in their rush to judgment before parliament is dissolved for the general election, Phil Willis and his team avoided examining more complex charges, including those raised by the Guardian in its investigations in February.

Even so, they sometimes get confused. The MPs accept Jones’s claim that CRU’s habit of keeping secret much of its data, methodology and computer codes was “standard practice” among climate scientists. Yet they also note that Nasa scientists doing similar work are much more open. Not so standard, then.

And whatever standard practice may be, surely as one of climate science’s senior figures, Jones should take some responsibility for its misdemeanours? Jones has worked for the CRU for more than 20 years and been its director for six. The MPs found there a “culture of withholding information” in which “information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure.” It found this “unacceptable”. Doesn’t its director take responsibility?

The MPs kept their criticism for the university. Its “failure to grasp fully the potential damage [from] non-disclosure of FOIA requests was regrettable”.

Also possibly illegal, it might have added.

While Pearce is good on this point – essentially that Phil Jones fostered a culture of anti-scientific secrecy and collusion as head of the CRU – he is less good on the meaning of the “trick” by which jones aspired to “hide the decline” in one particular temperature series.  Bishop Hill is right on the money here:

Mike’s Nature Trick (66) – The committee’s
conclusions are eyewatering:

66. Critics of CRU have suggested that Professor Jones’s use of the
words “hide the decline” is evidence that he was part of a conspiracy to
hide evidence that did not fit his view that recent global warming is
predominantly caused by human activity. That he has published
papers—including a paper in Nature—dealing with this aspect of the
science clearly refutes this allegation. In our view, it was shorthand
for the practice of discarding data known to be erroneous. We expect
that this is a matter the Scientific Appraisal Panel will address.

I’m struggling to say something polite about this.  By way of an
illustration, can you imagine the reaction if a scientist reported in
the safety literature that there was a critical flaw in the design of a
nuclear power station, but told policymakers that everything was fine?
Do the committee really think it’s fine to hide important information
from policymakers so long as you report it in the literature?
Astonishing.

Indeed.  Did anything good come out of the report?  Well, as Roger Pielke Jr points out, a broad reading of the report reveals an indictment of the state of climate science:

Reputation does not, however, rest solely on the quality of work as it
should. It also depends on perception. It is self-evident that the
disclosure of the CRU e-mails has damaged the reputation of UK climate
science and, as views on global warming have become polarised, any
deviation from the highest scientific standards will be pounced on. As
we explained in chapter 2, the practices and methods of climate science
are a key issue. If the practices of CRU are found to be in line with
the rest of climate science, the question would arise whether climate
science methods of operation need to change. In this event we would
recommend that the scientific community should consider changing those
practices to ensure greater transparency. . .

. . . A great
responsibility rests on the shoulders of climate science: to provide the
planet’s decision makers with the knowledge they need to secure our
future. The challenge that this poses is extensive and some of these
decisions risk our standard of living. When the prices to pay are so
large, the knowledge on which these kinds of decisions are taken had
better be right. The science must be irreproachable.

And, as Climategate and the multiple subsequent revelations about the shoddiness of the IPCC’s science have shown, the science is in no way irreproachable as it stands.  Yet in the end, Prof. Frank Furedi is right about what the Committee meant in this segment:

In other words, the CRU’s real failing was to dent the authority of the
climate-change morality tale, with its idea that, with the end of the
world fast approaching, there is an urgent need to monitor people’s
behaviour and lower their horizons. A cynic might conclude that when
moral entrepreneurs say that the ‘prices to pay are so large’, their
investigations into public controversies will inevitably have a
perfunctory character, since there is allegedly a higher, more pressing
truth to be defended.

Which is exactly what happened here.

Climategate Op-Ed in Detroit News

by Daniel Compton on December 23, 2009 · 1 comment

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming, International, Regulation, Zeitgeist

Here is my op-ed published in the Detroit News on December 23.

Climategate: What e-mail really means

Daniel Compton

By now, most people are aware of the scandal surrounding the leak of thousands of e-mails and other documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). Among these is an e-mail exchange involving several of the world’s leading climate scientists, dated October of 2009, in which the admission is made that even their best models cannot account for the last decade of temperature data. “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” said Kevin Trenberth, one of the world’s preeminent climate scientists and lead author of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC reports.

Significantly for public policy, the admission implies that efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions — including the EPA’s endangerment finding, all forms of cap-and-trade-style legislation, and any possible resolution to emerge from the recently convened Copenhagen conference –have no basis in science .

Trenberth’s statement is compelling on its own, but the subsequent discussion is even more illuminating. Later in the same e-mail thread, fellow climate scientist Tom Wigley replies that he does not agree with Trenberth’s assertion. Trenberth then responds to Wigley, clarifying and expounding upon his earlier claims:

“How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!”

This comment requires some scientific translation for its significance to be fully understood. The “energy budget” is the total energy gains and losses incurred by the Earth. The overwhelming majority of the energy entering the Earth comes from the Sun. Some of that energy is reflected back out into space by the atmosphere, clouds, and the Earth’s surface, while the remaining energy is absorbed, and is later reradiated as heat. The amount of energy the Earth gains is approximately equal to the amount it loses, which is why global temperatures remain relatively stable from day to day.

We have fairly good estimates of how much energy is entering the Earth, and we know from the laws of thermodynamics that energy cannot cease to exist, so “balancing the energy budget” simply entails accounting for where all that energy is going. “Global warming” refers to the condition in which the Earth as a system is taking on slightly more energy than it is losing for a sustained period, causing it to heat up over time. Therefore, it is highly significant when one of the world’s leading climate scientists asserts that we are “no where close to knowing where energy is going” and “not close to balancing the energy budget”.

In this context, “geoengineering” refers to any deliberate effort to affect net energy gains or losses to achieve a desired result, such as a cooler planet. The energy income of the planet is approximately static, and also well beyond our control, so affecting net energy flow necessarily involves changing systemic energy losses.

Greater atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide (CO2), can reduce energy loss, so reducing CO2 emissions is one method of geoengineering. Indeed, Trenberth, in a letter published in the February 2009 issue of Physics Today defined “geoengineering” to include all efforts to “reduce emissions … or reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.” Therefore, using his own definition of “geoengineering,” Trenberth’s remark could be interpreted thus:

The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration to reduce emissions … or reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not!

All policy actions that would be required under the EPA endangerment finding, cap-and-trade legislation, and any global climate treaty amount to attempts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Thus, by his own admission, Kevin Trenberth appears convinced that all these efforts are quite hopeless indeed.

Daniel Compton is a research associate at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and contributor to OpenMarket.org

ClimateGate gets even more bizarre

by Fran Smith on December 3, 2009 · 3 comments

in Environment, Global Warming, International

ClimateGate is serious.  When prominent climate scientists fudge results, refuse FOIA requests, take steps to restrict publication of dissident views, etc., it’s serious business, especially when their global temperature records were used by policymakers to call for a transformation of modern economies.

However, there is some humor in ClimateGate.  Here’s some odd stuff a commenter on the website Climate Audit picked up as a result of checking out the file HARRY_READ_ME.txt – one of the hacked files.  The “Harry” file tells the tortured story of a programmer at CRU struggling to make sense of inconsistent, missing, and incompatible data files and seemingly to try to replicate them.  Many of those files had earlier been compiled by someone named “Tim,” who seems to have really made a mess of things.  According to the commenter, this “Tim” seems to be Tim Mitchell – who worked at the Climactic Research Unit at University of East Anglia when he was a Ph.D. student and then received his degree.  At the time, he also was a member of — no joke — South Park Evangelical Church, as he notes in his religious writings on climate change and religion.

Here’s an example:

The government urges us to reduce our energy usage so that we may indulge ourselves in other ways, but we have a higher motive for reducing waste (1 Timothy 6.17-19). Although I have yet to see any evidence that climate change is a sign of Christ’s imminent return, human pollution is clearly another of the birth pangs of creation, as it eagerly awaits being delivered from the bondage of corruption (Romans. 19-22).

That does make me a little uncomfortable about this guy being in charge of global temperature records to show we’re destroying the earth.  Can’t check out his academic/research papers at CRU.  Surprisingly, they’ve been taken down.

LibertyWeek 71: The Politics of Booze

by Richard Morrison on November 30, 2009

in CEI Projects, Podcast

Your hosts Richard Morrison and Jeremy Lott welcome guests Gregory Conko and Garrett Peck to Episode 71 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with an update on the latest in the Climate-Gate scandal and the impact of nanny state policies in New York City, then move on to Monsanto’s antitrust worries and finish with an interview with Garrett Peck, the author of The Prohibition Hangover: Alcohol in America from Demon Rum to Cult Cabernet (buy your copy here).

Why Hiding Computer Code Is Lethal to Climate Science

by Marlo Lewis on November 25, 2009 · 1 comment

in Environment, Global Warming

This post is a follow up to my previous on why Climategate is the real war on science.

My earlier post commented on Willis Eschenbach’s excellent column on Anthony Watts’s blog (WUWT). Here I want to reproduce a comment Eschenbach posted in the back and forth on WUWT. In it, he explains why hiding computer code is lethal in a field, like climate science, where results hinge on statistical methods and mathematical techniques.  Eschenbach’s comment follows.

Willis Eschenbach (17:15:51):

Part of the difficulty with climate science is that, unlike all other physical sciences, it does not study things — instead it studies averages.

This is because climate by definition is the average of weather over a suitably long period of time (typically taken as a minimum of 30 years).

As a result, much of the study that goes on, and the papers that are written, deal almost exclusively with mathematics and statistics. This is the reason that access to the computer codes is so critical.

It’s simple in the physical sciences to describe an experiment, e.g. “I took three grams of carbon and subjected them to a pressure of 50,000KPa and a temperature of 500C. Unfortunately, the experiment did not succeed, I could not replace the diamond I had lost from my wife’s wedding ring.” Anyone can reproduce that experiment (and get the same results).

But when you say “I took the raw temperature data, variance-adjusted it, averaged it, gridded it, area-adjusted it, extrapolated results to data-free areas within 250 km, and made a global temperature record”, that’s far from enough information. In order to determine what was done, we need far more detailed information in climate science, because in general we are describing intricate mathematical operations. These are often very hard to describe clearly in spoken or written language.

And even a crystal-clear description is not enough. Despite what he says he has done, if the scientist has inadvertently used an improper procedure (e.g. the uncentered principal components analysis used in Mann’s Hockeystick), we’ll never be able to determine that the answer is demonstrably wrong unless we have the actual code that he used. Otherwise, we could spend years trying to guess where he went wrong, but we would never be able to show that he went wrong as science demands.

This is why the insistence of scientists that their computer codes are sacrosanct private secret documents best kept under Hermetic seal in a clandestine vault is lethal to good science. Without the codes, we can’t tell if what has been done is correct and free from hidden mathematical error. Of course, this may be unconnected with the reason that Jones et. al are hiding their codes …

Given that climate science is not the study of things but of the averages of things, and that as a result math and statistics are central to climate science, the findings of the Wegman Report are now seen to be even more insightful, trenchant, and valid. They said:

It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility. Overall, our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.

And presciently, that was written thee years ago, well before we got the CRU emails …

The Heart of Climategate–the “fudge factor”

by Julie Walsh on November 25, 2009 · 2 comments

in Environment, Global Warming

You can download the entire zip file of the uncovered emails and documents here but it is 61mb of text. The searchable files are here. A good list of the worst emails discovered so far is here. Here’s a very funny video on the whole mess. But here is the best article, by Marc Sheppard, that shows that all the data and wherever it has been used–Kyoto and IPCC–has to be thrown out. The data has been massaged, corrupted, manipulated, and abused beyond recognition:

One can only imagine the angst suffered daily by the co-conspirators, who knew full well that the “Documents” sub-folder of the CRU FOI2009 file contained more than enough probative program source code to unmask CRU’s phantom methodology.

In fact, there are hundreds of IDL and FORTRAN source files buried in dozens of subordinate sub-folders. And many do properly analyze and chart maximum latewood density (MXD), the growth parameter commonly utilized by CRU scientists as a temperature proxy, from raw or legitimately normalized data. Ah, but many do so much more.

Skimming through the often spaghetti-like code, the number of programs which subject the data to a mixed-bag of transformative and filtering routines is simply staggering. Granted, many of these “alterations” run from benign smoothing algorithms (e.g. omitting rogue outliers) to moderate infilling mechanisms (e.g. estimating missing station data from that of those closely surrounding). But many others fall into the precarious range between highly questionable (removing MXD data which demonstrate poor correlations with local temperature) to downright fraudulent (replacing MXD data entirely with measured data to reverse a disorderly trend-line).

In fact, workarounds for the post-1960 “divergence problem”, as described by both RealClimate and Climate Audit, can be found throughout the source code. So much so that perhaps the most ubiquitous programmer’s comment (REM) I ran across warns that the particular module “Uses ‘corrected’ MXD – but shouldn’t usually plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures.”

What exactly is meant by “corrected” MXD, you ask? Outstanding question — and the answer appears amorphous from program to program. Indeed, while some employ one or two of the aforementioned “corrections,” others throw everything but the kitchen sink at the raw data prior to output.

For instance, in subfolder “osborn-tree6mannoldprog” there’s a program (Calibrate_mxd.pro) that calibrates the MXD data against available local instrumental summer (growing season) temperatures between 1911-1990, then merges that data into a new file. That file is then digested and further modified by another program (Pl_calibmxd1.pro) which creates calibration statistics for the MXD against the stored temperature and “estimates” (infills) figures where such temperature readings were not available. The file created by that program is modified once again by Pl_Decline.pro, which “corrects it” – as described by the author — by “identifying and “artificially” removing “the decline.”

But oddly enough – the series doesn’t begin its “decline adjustment” in 1960 — the supposed year of the enigmatic “divergence.” In fact, all data between 1930 and 1994 are subject to “correction.”

And such games are by no means unique to the folder attributed to Michael Mann.

A Clear and Present Rearranger

In 2 other programs, briffa_Sep98_d.pro and briffa_Sep98_e.pro, the “correction” is bolder by far. The programmer (Keith Briffa?) entitled the “adjustment” routine “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” And he/she wasn’t kidding. Now, IDL is not a native language of mine, but its syntax is similar enough to others I’m familiar with, so please bear with me while I get a tad techie on you.

Here’s the “fudge factor” (notice the brash SOB actually called it that in his REM statement):

yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]

valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor

These 2 lines of code establish a 20 element array (yrloc) comprised of the year 1400 (base year but not sure why needed here) and 19 years between 1904 and 1994 in half-decade increments. Then the corresponding “fudge factor” (from the valadj matrix) is applied to each interval. As you can see, not only are temperatures biased to the upside later in the century (though certainly prior to 1960) but a few mid-century intervals are being biased slightly lower. That, coupled with the post-1930 restatement we encountered earlier, would imply that in addition to an embarrassing false decline experienced with their MXD after 1960 (or earlier), CRU’s “divergence problem” also includes a minor false incline after 1930.

And the former apparently wasn’t a particularly well-guarded secret, although the actual adjustment period remained buried beneath the surface.

Plotting programs such as data4alps.pro print this reminder to the user prior to rendering the chart:

“IMPORTANT NOTE: The data after 1960 should not be used. The tree-ring density records tend to show a decline after 1960 relative to the summer temperature in many high-latitude locations. In this data set this ‘decline’ has been artificially removed in an ad-hoc way, and this means that data after 1960 no longer represent tree-ring density variations, but have been modified to look more like the observed temperatures.”

Others, such as mxdgrid2ascii.pro, issue this warning:

“NOTE: recent decline in tree-ring density has been ARTIFICIALLY REMOVED to facilitate calibration. THEREFORE, post-1960 values will be much closer to observed temperatures then (sic) they should be which will incorrectly imply the reconstruction is more skilful than it actually is. See Osborn et al. (2004).’

Care to offer another explanation, Dr. Jones?

Gotcha

Clamoring alarmists can and will spin this until they’re dizzy. The ever-clueless mainstream media can and will ignore this until it’s forced upon them as front-page news, and then most will join the alarmists on the denial merry-go-round.

But here’s what’s undeniable: If a divergence exists between measured temperatures and those derived from dendrochronological data after (circa) 1960 then discarding only the post-1960 figures is disingenuous to say the least. The very existence of a divergence betrays a potential serious flaw in the process by which temperatures are reconstructed from tree-ring density. If it’s bogus beyond a set threshold, then any honest men of science would instinctively question its integrity prior to that boundary. And only the lowliest would apply a hack in order to produce a desired result.

And to do so without declaring as such in a footnote on every chart in every report in every study in every book in every classroom on every website that such a corrupt process is relied upon is not just a crime against science, it’s a crime against mankind.

Indeed, miners of the CRU folder have unearthed dozens of email threads and supporting documents revealing much to loathe about this cadre of hucksters and their vile intentions. This veritable goldmine has given us tales ranging from evidence destruction to spitting on the Freedom of Information Act on both sides of the Atlantic. But the now irrefutable evidence that alarmists have indeed been cooking the data for at least a decade may just be the most important strike in human history.

Advocates of the global governance/financial redistribution sought by the United Nations at Copenhagen in two weeks and the expanded domestic governance/financial redistribution sought by Liberal politicians both substantiate their drastic proposals with the pending climate emergency predicted in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Kyoto, Waxman-Markey, Kerry-Boxer, EPA regulation of the very substances of life – all bad policy concepts enabled solely by IPCC reports. And the IPCC, in turn, bases those reports largely on the data and charts provided by the research scientists at CRU – largely from tree ring data — who just happen to be editors and lead authors of that same U.N. panel.

Bottom line: CRU’s evidence is now irrevocably tainted. As such — all assumptions based on that evidence must now be reevaluated and readjudicated. And all policy based on those counterfeit assumptions must also be re-examined.

Gotcha. We’ve known they’ve been lying all along, and now we can prove it. It’s time to bring sanity back to this debate.

It’s time for the First IPCC Reassessment Report.

Chris Horner Calls for Investigation of ‘ClimateGate’

by Richard Morrison on November 23, 2009 · 2 comments

in Video, Zeitgeist

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qrkpp1Bf5zc 285 234]