Educated Opinions on Climate change - a denouement or a hoax? Part 2.0 29

[jmw]

Well, not a hoax as the original thread was initially careful to consider, and as anticipated there, a new tranche of emails has now been released.
Yes folks, its Climategate 2.0 and better late than never(I was anticipating a second release much earlier as revealed in the original threads).

Now the interesting question is: How clever were the scientists at the time?
I have two scenarios:
(a.i) at Climategate, the scientists could assume whoever leaked the data leaked all they had.
If it caused a serious enquiry then their files would be investigated by outsiders.
Since the leaked data was validated as genuine it all had to be discovered still on the servers.
But if they were intensively investigated that investigation would reveal a lot more damaging material.
So the best winning strategy would be to sanitise anything not leaked and try and explain away was what released and hope for a favourable whitewash (as actually happened).
(b) assume whoever leaked had access to everything. In that case sanitising what wasn't released would reveal, if a searching enquiry were conducted, that they'd sanitised the files but there is option (a.ii)
(a.ii) whoever leaked leaked all they had access to. A serious enquiry would access a lot more damning data.

Hence the question of whether to sanitise or not sanitise has only one winning solution in the event the politicos have to conduct a real enquiry and not a whitewash: sanitise the files.
Of course, the only winning strategy depends on there being a lot of breaks in their favour but the only alternative is to cop a plea and take up voluntary work for Barnardos.

So I'd really like to know if anyone can access their files and see just what exists and what doesn't. It would be very difficult to claim the new files are fabricated and the original files not so any gaps in the official files would be most revealing.

PS what I liked was this from Delingpole:

Here's Jones flaunting his ignorance:

I keep on seeing people saying this same stupid thing. I'm not adept enough (totally inept) with excel to do this now as no-one who knows how to is here.

What you have to do is to take the numbers in column C (the years) and then those in D (the anomalies for each year), plot them and then work out the linear trend. The slope is upwards. I had someone do this in early 2006, and the trend was upwards then. It will be now. Trend won't be statistically significant, but the trend is up.

And here's Cumbrian Lad's comment below:

The fact that a scientist who is in charge of a major global data set claims not to be able to plot two columns in a spreadsheet is dumbfounding. Not only that, but he feels sure that relatively few people around him could either.

The line "I had someone do this in early 2006…, " suggests that it is the sort of menial task he'd leave to a non technical assistant. Now, I've some time for delegation of appropriate tasks, and keeping the best brains thinking, not engaged in mundane tasks, but data analysis is part of the science surely.

He can't plot data in Excel? and we were supposed to take him seriously as a scientist?



JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[GregLocock]

I must admit that there seems to be a Phil Jones problem, alongside the more general problems.

Still his reputation has been cleared by the people on his side, so who are we to argue? Just shut up and get back to work so they can all fly to Durban paid for by your taxes.

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376

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[TGS4]

What this batch of e-mails (as well as the first batch) show is a lot of scientists behaving badly. I'd even go so far as to say unethically.

Maybe this is a topic best left for the ethics forum, but I'll ask it here: if the scientist or engineer or doctor or tax accountant is shown to have acted unethically, is all of their work/research/diagnoses/tax returns automatically considered to be suspect because of the unethical behavior?

 

[msquared48]

What's climate change?

Mike McCann
MMC Engineering

 

[zdas04]

TGS4,
Yes, a life's work can become suspect because of getting caught once. Sad, but true.

If an accountant is shown to be diverting funds from a client, the first thing the police do is audit every penny the guy has control over.

If an engineer is sued for a design, the plaintiff will shine a microscope up every thing he has ever done.

And if a scientist is found adulterating data then every bit of work he's done in his life is now suspect. In climate "science" every single data set has data that has been "normalized". Normalized data is data that has been adjusted for "known anomalies" like the heat island effect. Trouble is that these data sets are so big that climate scientists have found it inconvenient to capture the original data and the only thing in the data sets is adulterated. Now if everyone agreed on the magnitude and direction of the changes then the normalization would be marginal, but they don't. If on top of this discipline-accepted adulteration of the data, some scientist makes non-accepted adulterations to bias the results in a direction then if the world is too lazy to kill him they should at least discredit him for all time.

David

 

[TGS4]

Zdas04 - what you say is absolutely correct for engineers, accountants and doctors. So, why ISN'T this happening with these scientists? The media go apesh!t when a politician tries to evade a FIOA request, but the same action by the scientists renders a "ah - poor science-guy, having to provide evidence to some numbskull who just wants to prove that he is wrong. We applaud him for fighting back against the evil deniers."

For me, it has always been just about the science, and I tried (my apologies to those for whom I was not successful) to avoid ad-hominems. But after this second round of leaked emails, my ethics claxon went off, and I think that the whole lot of them should be discredited, and every paper they wrote should be withdrawn, as should b every paper that referenced these discredited papers. Start all over again. And if you can't, because you lost the unadulterated data, well too bad. If you can't even reproduce your results, then neither can others, which means it was never science to begin with.

One that note - how many of you fellow engineers that publish papers or otherwise contribute to archival journals have been looking at archiving rules for data, etc. I know that since the first climategate emails came out, I have been much more diligent on my paper reviews to avoid any "pal" reviews. (All of this reminds me that I need to email one journal editor to discuss said journal's archiving of data policies).

 

[zdas04]

My answer to your first question is a bit cynical. Anthropogenic Global Warming is about wealth redistribution, not science. The huge winners will be the aggregators of carbon credits--some of these guys will end up as the wealthiest individuals the world has ever seen. Smaller winners will be the scientists who were able to build phenomenal consulting practices shoring up the myth and media slime who become PR hacks and speech writers for the new ruling class. Even the "small" winners will have access to tens and hundreds of millions or your dollars.

The potential prize is unimagined wealth that will make the Oil for Food fiasco look like a penny ante poker game in your mom's basement (and several new billionaires came out of that). So the community of climate scientists has a real incentive to SHOUT that their models have proven beyond all possibility of a doubt that global warming is real and that it is caused by greenhouse gases. 15 years ago every single damn one of them would have agreed with my assertion that "computer models never prove anything, they are useful tools to indicate profitable avenues of investigation, but they don't prove anything". Today the whole industry has circled the wagons around the concept that ONLY computer models can prove hypotheses about complex systems.

I had a chance to read the peer-review comments about an AGW paper a few months back. Every single comment was grammar and punctuation. Nothing about the manipulated data, the misleading scales on the graphs, and the blatant cherry picking of data stations (one of the stations used was actually sitting in the effluent of the HVAC system on a high rise building, measured temperature was 40F higher than the TV reported for a high that day).

Cap and Trade schemes have a real potential to drive the global economy back into the dark ages, with no potential to do good for the planet.

I've never been asked for the underlying data for any paper I've ever written. If I ever am (and the computer I stored it on is still functioning) then I'll be able to produce a raw data set and a dataset with any modifications that seemed to be justified (occasionally instruments fail high or fail low, including these in an analysis is counter productive).

David

 

[rb1957]

maybe we engineers have a greater respect for data ?

 

[JohnRBaker]

For what it's worth, I saw this quote the other day:

"A scientist discovers that which exists. An engineer creates that which never was."

Theodore von Karman


John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[MiketheEngineer]

The Earth goes through "climate changes" every few hundred years - warm to cold - cold to warm.

I believe in the 1500's - there was what they called a mini Ice Age.

So - the question is this normal or something we need to worry about??

 

[dawei87]

I see conspiracy theorists jumping on mined quotes to manufacture controversy out of frustration that the first 'scandal' didn't reveal anything substantial, and that several independent investigations found no serious flaws with the science itself.

Scientists behaved unethically at times. They are human. That's all the emails reveal. If it is about redistributing wealth or whatever other nefarious conspiracy theory people are accusing them of today, where are the emails with references to their Russian overloards, where are the emails lamenting about how they are pressured by Big Government to lie through their teeth, where are the emails boasting about their gravy trains and the Bentleys and Rolexes they are earning by perpetrating this "hoax".

The only thing that climategate truly revealed is that:

1) Scientists are human, sometimes get annoyed and act in a less than perfect manner here or there, but overall are hardworking and concerned about the validity of science

2) There simply is no massive hoax here

 

[zdas04]

Scientists at universities are funded by grants. A Climate Scientist that says "AGW is real and here is my proof" gets a lot of grants. A Climate Scientist who says "AGW is an interesting hypotheses, but my research is inconclusive" gets no grants. Before long he's saying "AGW appears to be real, and I can't find any data that refutes it" and he starts to get grants. After some more time he's saying "AGW is real and here's my model as proof" and he's making a good living.

One of the big names in the field had "proof" that we were entering an ice age in the 1970's. Now he has "proof" that the earth is going to boil from AGW. In both cases his "proof" was adulterated data and manipulated computer models.

The reason that Climategate fizzled is: (1) the sound bytes were too long for the media's attention span; and (2) the media has a vested interest in AGW being real (fear in the population sells papers). A global conspiracy does not require smoke-filled rooms, it just requires a common goal: the future aggregators get really rich, the "scientists" make a great living, and the media sells advertising--yep, AGW is real enough for that.

David

 

[dawei87]

I fail to see how "hide the decline" and "Mike's nature trick" were too long. It fizzled because in context those seemingly damning quotes were completely benign.

That the media and others could gain from AGW being real doesn't mean that it isn't. The media and others gain from scaring people about anything, real or not. There are thousands of real issues in the world that the media (or government, or business owners) can use to scare you with. Why go through the enormous effort (and risk) of perpetrating a fraudulent one?

Like most conspiracy theories, this one is supported only by speculation and gut feelings. There is no proof that scientists that do not support AGW do not get grants or jobs or publications. There are hundreds of scientists who publish inconclusive research, or who research aspects of climatology that have nothing to do with AGW whatsoever. Climate scientists would make far more money in private industry than they could working for public universities or government. People don't become scientists because they want to be rich, they do it because they want to understand nature.

 

[satchmo]

The media also do what they do to fit their ideology.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/...en-warmist-agenda-is-rapidly-unravelling.html

 

[owg]

Thanks to dawei87 and zdas04 for your points of view. I don't know which view is correct but I would like to add to the skeptic's side. Here in Ontario, Canada, we have a provincial government that is heavily into solar panel subsidies. It would be a major embarrassment to this government, and a major loss of income to a new industry, if Global Warming (GW) turns out to be a non-issue. As time goes by, more groups tend to have a vested interest and they will tend to support the new status quo. There is little doubt that GW is gathering momentum, rightly or wrongly.

HAZOP at

http://www.curryhydrocarbons.ca

 

[zdas04]

dawei87,
We've had three or four discussions on this topic in this forum that have each run to over 100 long posts. I went back through and read them a few months back. You know what? I couldn't find a single instance where someone changed their position because of the cogent arguments the other side presented. Not one.

It seems like we all parse each others posts to find the nugget that can be attacked and ignore the rest. The "Deniers" all seem to be talking to each other. The "Anti-Humans" all seem to be talking to each other. This thread is unlikely to be any different.

The Anti-Humans talk about "thousands of scientists all in agreement can't be wrong", retreating glaciers, reduction in Antarctic ice, and increasing sea level.

I keep saying "Models cannot prove anything", and no one has refuted that. Other Deniers question the morality of adulterating data. Others list about the same number of glaciers that are advancing as the number that are retreating. Some talk about the reduction in Antarctic ice as normal calving. Others talk about inconsistent techniques for measuring sea level.

Let the games begin.

David

 

[dawei87]

It would be a major embarrassment to this government, and a major loss of income to a new industry, if Global Warming (GW) turns out to be a non-issue

That may very well be true. But you could make the identical argument for saying it would be a major loss of income and a major embarrassment to the medical industry if cancer turned out to be a non-issue. Or to the security industry if crime turned out to be a non-issue. It doesn't mean we should be skeptical that those things might be hoaxes. That's my only point. Skepticism of the true motives of some messenger perpetrating the issue is fine. But this should not be automatically extended to skepticism of the scientific validity of the issue itself.

We've had three or four discussions on this topic in this forum that have each run to over 100 long posts. I went back through and read them a few months back. You know what? I couldn't find a single instance where someone changed their position because of the cogent arguments the other side presented. Not one.

I've gone back and read some of them too, and have spent a lot of time on other forums discussing the issue. What you say rings true on this forum as well as any other.

What motivates me to post is not to convince those I am talking to, but to try to show those who may be reading from a neutral perspective--who are genuinely unsure--that at least the issue has some legitimacy behind it. In many forums it seems like skeptics dominate and that can create the false impression to those uneducated that there really aren't any counter arguments to the skeptical claims, when in reality there are. Skeptics should not be any more immune from skepticism than the "Anti-Humans" (never heard that one before, not even sure what it means) should.

All of your example claims from both sides seem to be in reference to whether or not the planet is actually warming. I thought everyone had already moved past the point of arguing whether or not there is any warming in the first place (natural or anthropogenic).

 

[cranky108]

While it is true we may not change any thoughts, we can argue the points and require us to reevaluate the data. The truth, most likely, is somewhere in between the two points (or maybe it's just weeds).

It is better we argue the facts here, then at the baliot box. Because the ballot box should be about more important things (not the biggest blow hard).

And it is valid to point out what harm is it if we do or don't do anything (and the risk if we are wrong).

 

[zdas04]

The cancer argument is just more fear of the boogeyman. That is the kind of crap that muddies that water in this discussion. Everybody knows someone who has had cancer. Cancer is not an hypotheses supported by self-serving computer models and adulterated data. NOBODY knows a single individual that has been physically harmed by AGW. Not a single living organism has been harmed by a change in trace elements in the ionosphere (other than the millions who have died because of the ban on R12 making household refrigerators too expensive for much of the third world, which is not AGW but Anti-Human manipulation of the political "leadership").

"Anti-Human" came from Michael Creighton's State of Fear. His contention was that the environmental law firms from PETA to Sierra Club had a membership that simply hated their own race.

There seems to be universal agreement that the climate is changing. Which is good because there never has been a time that it didn't change (I just read on the Weather channel that it has been six years since a Cat 3 hurricane hit the U.S., longest stretch in over 100 years without a Cat 3, boy this "increased volitility" of the weather is tough).

The argument is about the impact of Man. EU is trying impose a $100 Billon tax on the "richest" countries (mostly on the U.S. and China) to pay the "poor" countries for "climate control" (not clear what that means). As a cynic I have to think that if we cave to this nonsense at least $98 Billion of it will be in Swiss (or Grand Cayman) bank accounts within 6 months. The organizers say that without this infusion of capital, global warming will become "catastrophic and irreversible" in 2017. In 2005, the data of irreversiblity was 2012. MODELS NEVER PROVE ANYTHING.

David

 

[dawei87]

Everybody knows someone who has had cancer.

I know cancer is a legitimate issue. That was my point: it is a logical misstep to point to scammers or suspicious officials or whomever and use that as a reason to question for one second the scientific validity of the issue. The two should be completely separate.

"Anti-Human" came from Michael Creighton's State of Fear. His contention was that the environmental law firms from PETA to Sierra Club had a membership that simply hated their own race.

Ah. Thank you for clarifying.

So to stay true to this black/white extremist view of the world, if it makes someone "Anti-Human" to believe that a certain human activity may have inadvertently caused a problem, it must mean that deniers believe humans have never cause any problems for themselves, ever. People concerned about environmental issues are "Anti-Human", so I dub deniers as the "Humans-Can-Never-Do-Wrong" crowd. [/sarcasm]

The argument is about the impact of Man. EU is trying impose a $100 Billon tax on the "richest" countries (mostly on the U.S. and China) to pay the "poor" countries for "climate control"

You almost started to talk about science, then delved into politics. For the record I don't find anything wrong with questioning the effectiveness of a certain policy. Personally I have never spoken in favor of any particular policy. It's an issue that is far murkier (and much less interesting, in my opinion) than the scientific question of attribution.