Educated Opinions on Climate change - a denouement or a hoax? 25

[cswilson]

My link above should have been:

http://www.chiefio.wordpress.com

Apologies to all.

 

[NomLaser]

Does this say what I think it says?


Email:839635440.txt
“From: John Daly
To: n.nicholls@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Re: Climatic warming in Tasmania
Date: Fri, 09 Aug 1996 20:04:00 +1100
Cc: Ed Cook , NNU-NB@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, k.briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, Mike Barbetti , zetterberg@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, rjf@xxxxxxxxx.xxx

Dear Neville,

You mentioned to me some time ago that in your view, the 11-year solar cycle did not influence temperature. There have been numerous attempts by academics to establish a correlation, but each has been shot down on some ground or other. I remember Barrie Pittock was especially dismissive of attempts to correlate solar cycle with temperature.

Have you tried this approach?

Load “Mathematica” into your PC and run the following set of instructions -

data = ReadList[ "c:sydney.txt", Number]
dataElements = Length[data]
X = ListPlot[ data, PlotJoined-> True];
fourierTrans = Fourier[data];
ListPlot[Abs[fourierTrans], PlotJoined -> True];

fitfun1 = Fit[data,{1,x,x^2,x^3,Sin[11 2 Pi x/dataElements],
Cos[11 2 Pi x/dataElements]},x];
fittable = Table[N[fitfun1], {x, dataElements}];
Y = ListPlot[fittable, PlotJoined -> True];
Show[X, Y]

The reference to “c:sydney.txt” is a suggested pathname for the following set of data – which is Sydney’s annual mean temperature.

16.8 16.5 16.8 17 17 16.7 17.1 17.4 17.9 17.4 17.2 17.1 16.9 17 17.2 17.2 17.4
17.6 17.6 17.6 16.7 17.1 16.8 17.4 16.8 17.3 17.8 17.5 17.1 17.2 17.6 17.3 17.1
16.9 16.9 17.3 17.3 17.3 17.6 17.5 17.4 17.2 17.1 17.3 17.2 17.2 16.9 17.5 17.4
17.2 17 17.5 17.4 17.5 17.7 18.3 17.8 17.4 17.2 17.4 18.3 17.3 18 18.1 18 17.5
17.3 18 17 18.2 17.4 17.6 17.5 17.4 17.1 17.4 17.3 17.5 17.7 18 17.8 18 17.4
17.8 16.8 17.5 17.4 17.6 17.6 17.2 17.4 17.9 17.9 17.6 17.7 17.8 17.7 17.6 17.8
18.3 18 17.6 17.8 17.8 17.8 18.1 17.9 17.5 17.8 18.3 18 17.7 17.3 17.5 18.5 17.4
17.8 17.7 17.8 17.7 18 18.5 18.2 17.8 18.1 17.5 17.8 17.8 18 18.6 18.1 18.1
18.6

So Far so good.

“Mathematica” first plots out the data itself (see Atachment 1)

The first part of the instruction set lets “mathematica” do a Fourier Transform on the data, ie. searching out the periodicities, if there are any. The result is shown on Attachment 2.

The transform result shows a sharp spike at the 11 year point (I wonder what is significant about 11 years?). The second part of the instructions now acts upon this observed spike (the Cos 11 bit), to extract it’s waveform from the rest of the noise. The result is shown as a waveform in attachment 3, the waves having an 11-year period, with the long-term Sydney warming easily evident.

Attachment 4 shows the original Sydney data overlaid against the 11-year periodicity.

It would appear that the solar cycle does indeed affect temperature.

(I tried the same run on the CRU global temperature set. Even though CRU must be highly smoothed by the time all the averages are worked out, the 11-year pulse is still there, albeit about half the size of Sydneys).

Stay cool.

John Daly

 

[owg]

I wonder why the climatologists did not smooth down the 1998 temperature. I suppose it was too good to be true when it appeared. The best approach would be to smooth it down now, and get the best of both worlds.

HAZOP at

http://www.curryhydrocarbons.ca

 

[rb1957]

if you smooth everything flat, you've got nothing to talk about, nothing to frighten the masses with, nothing to use as leverage to extract your fortune from others, ...

something else i notice in the media ... surprise, surprise, on the eve of a climate meeting (= boondoddle) there's a report that things are getting worse (CO2 increasing, climate destablising, the end of the world as we know it, ...)

these guys will never quit. they're in a win-win ... if things "improve" (not sure how to measure that ...) then "see, i told you so ..."; if things get "worse" then "i told you so, you wouldn't let me do enough when we had time ...".

 

[cranky108]

Maybe it's time some universitys clean house. Throw the bums out.

Or maybe we should make a big deal of the universits that don't.

 

[NomLaser]

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/24/cei-files-notice-of-intent-to-sue-nasa-giss/

CEI Files Notice of Intent to Sue NASA GISS

Today, on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, I filed three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), for those bodies’ refusal – for nearly three years – to provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

The information sought is directly relevant to the exploding “ClimateGate” scandal revealing document destruction, coordinated efforts in the U.S. and UK to avoid complying with both countries’ freedom of information laws, and apparent and widespread intent to defraud at the highest levels of international climate science bodies. Numerous informed commenters had alleged such behavior for years, all of which appears to be affirmed by leaked emails, computer codes and other data from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK’s East Anglia University.

All of that material and that sought for years by CEI go to the heart of the scientific claims and campaign underpinning the Kyoto Protocol, its planned successor treaty, “cap-and-trade” legislation and the EPA’s threatened regulatory campaign to impose similar measures through the back door.

CEI sought the following documents, among others, NASA’s failure to provide which within thirty days will prompt CEI to file suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia:

- internal discussions about NASA’s quiet correction of its false historical U.S. temperature records after two Canadian researchers discovered a key statistical error, specifically discussion about whether and why to correct certain records, how to do so, the impact or wisdom or potential (or real) fallout therefrom or reaction to doing so (requested August 2007);

- internal discussions relating to the emails sent to James Hansen and/or Reto A. Ruedy from Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre calling their attention to the errors in NASA/GISS online temperature data (August 2007);

- those relating to the content, importance or propriety of workday-hour posts or entries by GISS/NASA employee Gavin A. Schmidt on the weblog or “blog” RealClimate, which is owned by the advocacy Environmental Media Services and was started as an effort to defend the debunked “Hockey Stick” that is so central to the CRU files. RealClimate.org is implicated in the leaked files, expressly offered as a tool to be used “in any way you think would be helpful” to a certain advocacy campaign, including an assertion of Schmidt’s active involvement in, e.g., delaying and/or screening out unhelpful input by “skeptics” attempting to comment on claims made on the website.

This and the related political activism engaged in are inappropriate behavior for a taxpayer-funded employee, particularly on taxpayer time. These documents were requested in January 2007 and NASA/GISS have refused to date to comply with their legal obligation to produce responsive documents.

 

[NomLaser]

Some possible good news from Congress

Congress May Probe Leaked Global Warming E-Mails

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/11/24/taking_liberties/entry5761180.shtml

A few days after leaked e-mail messages appeared on the Internet, the U.S. Congress may probe whether prominent scientists who are advocates of global warming theories misrepresented the truth about climate change.

Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, said on Monday the leaked correspondence suggested researchers "cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not," according to a transcript of a radio interview posted on his Web site. Aides for Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, are also looking into the disclosure.

The leaked documents (see our previous coverage) come from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in eastern England. In global warming circles, the CRU wields outsize influence: it claims the world's largest temperature data set, and its work and mathematical models were incorporated into the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report. That report, in turn, is what the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged it "relies on most heavily" when concluding that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and should be regulated.

Last week's leaked e-mails range from innocuous to embarrassing and, critics believe, scandalous. They show that some of the field's most prominent scientists were so wedded to theories of man-made global warming that they ridiculed dissenters who asked for copies of their data ("have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots"), cheered the deaths of skeptical journalists, and plotted how to keep researchers who reached different conclusions from publishing in peer-reviewed journals.

One e-mail message, apparently from CRU director Phil Jones, references the U.K.'s Freedom of Information Act when asking another researcher to delete correspondence that might be disclosed in response to public records law: "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise." Another, also apparently from Jones: global warming skeptics "have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone." (Jones was a contributing author to the chapter of the U.N.'s IPCC report titled "Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes.")

In addition to e-mail messages, the roughly 3,600 leaked documents posted on sites including Wikileaks.org and EastAngliaEmails.com include computer code and a description of how an unfortunate programmer named "Harry" -- possibly the CRU's Ian "Harry" Harris -- was tasked with resuscitating and updating a key temperature database that proved to be problematic. Some excerpts from what appear to be his notes, emphasis added:

I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective - since we're using an off-the-shelf product that isn't documented sufficiently to say that. Why this wasn't coded up in Fortran I don't know - time pressures perhaps? Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn't enough time to write a gridding procedure? Of course, it's too late for me to fix it too. Meh.

I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight... So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!

One thing that's unsettling is that many of the assigned WMo codes for Canadian stations do not return any hits with a web search. Usually the country's met office, or at least the Weather Underground, show up – but for these stations, nothing at all. Makes me wonder if these are long-discontinued, or were even invented somewhere other than Canada!

Knowing how long it takes to debug this suite - the experiment endeth here. The option (like all the anomdtb options) is totally undocumented so we'll never know what we lost. 22. Right, time to stop pussyfooting around the niceties of Tim's labyrinthine software suites - let's have a go at producing CRU TS 3.0! since failing to do that will be the definitive failure of the entire project.

Ulp! I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can't get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections - to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations?...


As the leaked messages, and especially the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, found their way around technical circles, two things happened: first, programmers unaffiliated with East Anglia started taking a close look at the quality of the CRU's code, and second, they began to feel sympathetic for anyone who had to spend three years (including working weekends) trying to make sense of code that appeared to be undocumented and buggy, while representing the core of CRU's climate model.

One programmer highlighted the error of relying on computer code that, if it generates an error message, continues as if nothing untoward ever occurred. Another debugged the code by pointing out why the output of a calculation that should always generate a positive number was incorrectly generating a negative one. A third concluded: "I feel for this guy. He's obviously spent years trying to get data from undocumented and completely messy sources."

Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"

It's not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia's network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.)

For its part, the University of East Anglia has posted a statement calling the disclosure "mischievous" and saying it is aiding the police in an investigation.

The statement also quotes Jones, CRU's director, explaining his November 1999 e-mail, which said: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." Jones said that the word trick was used "colloquially as in a clever thing to do" and that it "is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward."

Also unclear is the ultimate impact of the leak, which came before next month's Copenhagen summit and Democratic plans for cap and trade legislation.

On one hand, over at RealClimate.org, Gavin Schmidt, a modeler for the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been downplaying the leak. Schmidt wrote: "There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research ... no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords."

On the other, groups like the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, the target of repeated derision in the leaked e-mails, have said: "We have argued for many years that much of the scientific case for global warming alarmism was weak and some of it was phony. It now looks like a lot of it may be phony."

ScienceMag.org published an article noting that deleting e-mail messages to hide them from a FOI request is a crime in the United Kingdom. George Monbiot, a U.K. activist and journalist who previously called for dramatic action to deal with global warming, wrote: "It's no use pretending that this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging."

Complicating matters for congressional Republicans who'd like to hold hearings is that East Anglia, of course, is a U.K. university. The GOP may intend to press the Obama administration for details on how the EPA came to rely on the CRU's predictions, and whether the recent disclosure will change the agency's position. Another approach lies in e-mail messages discussing grants from the U.S. Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to East Anglia; one says: "We need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip Roger didn't make and also the fees/equipment/computer money we haven't spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious."

The irony of this situation is that most of us expect science to be conducted in the open, without unpublished secret data, hidden agendas, and computer programs of dubious reliability. East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit might have avoided this snafu by publicly disclosing as much as possible at every step of the way.

 

[davefitz]

what a catfight!

Q: How many scientists does it take to determine if it is getting hotter outside?

 

[jmw]

The two options are:
a) an external hacker. This means that any subsequent releases (apparently only about half the amount hacked has so far been released) will not through up anything much more or less dramatic; i.e. this is representative of what the second half will contain.
b) an inside job, a leak. This may mean that whoever did it is much more familiar with the material and may have graded it so as to create an ever increasing drama as new material is released. In this case we might assume the bulk is neutral, with some moderate scandals exposed and we have that now. What is next released in the run up to Copenhagen will be increasingly scandalous even though ech new release may contain less material.

Me? I suspect and hope it is the latter.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[NomLaser]

Option C

C. After the FOI request was declined, an insider leaked the info to shed light on the on-goings at CRU. The info was gathered prior to the FOI request decision in case they had to release info. This could be info that they didn't want to share or it was info that they were willing to share. Either way it would have been stored in a central location and just a copy and paste to a thumb-drive. I find it hard to believe that this was stuff that they wanted to let get out.

This is all speculation of course but it does sound more plausible than anything else.

 

[GregLocock]

"On one hand, over at RealClimate.org, Gavin Schmidt, a modeler for the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been downplaying the leak. Schmidt wrote: "There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research ... no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords." "

Straw man argument. What there is evidence of is deliberate suppression of data and distortion of analysis. Gavin needs to explain that away.

Cheers

Greg Locock

SIGlease see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.

 

[NomLaser]

This is too funny not to share...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmPSUMBrJoI

 

[owg]

The "Copenhagen Diagnosis" was released today. Download it from

http://www.ccrc.unsw.edu.au/Copenhagen/Copenhagen_Diagnosis_LOW.pdf

Interesting bits include - page 45/46, the hockey stick is back. Also page 51 says "Many indicators are currently tracking near or above the worst case projections from the
IPCC AR4 set of model simulations." No mention that one of the many indicators isn't temperature. I was rather hoping for an update to IPCC AR4 Fig. TS26 Update,(see attachment Slide 45) but it does not support the IPCC case at all well.

HAZOP at www.curryhydrocarbons.ca

 

[jmw]

Seems like the scandal is more widespread.
It is not just 2 or 3 scientists.
This link shows that New Zealand data was manipulated to show a warming trend that was not there:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/...ells-a-different-story-than-the-official-one/

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[jmw]

Or perhaps not.

Dr Jim Salinger (who no longer works for NIWA) started this graph in the 1980s when he was
at CRU (Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK) and it has been updated
with the most recent data. It’s published on NIWA’s website at:

(

http://www.climatescience.org.nz/images/PDFs/global_warming_nz2.pdf)

All roads appear to lead to the University of East Anglia.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[jmw]

In the case of Dr Jim Salinger, he was fired for talking to the media. (Something our NASA hockey stick bloke can get away with).
Some nice comments here:

http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/face-niwa-sacked-being-too-public-2673255

Especially:

"It's not as though I'm doing bad science, it's not as though I'm not performing and so I'm really astounded".

and of course:
{quote]His work now is to make room for over 30 years of scientific papers - the quality of which is not in question.[/quote]
Well, it is now.
As a consequence: will he have to repay the nobel prize share? will he lose his pension? will he go to jail as was called for for climate change deniers? will he have to hand back any awards?

Who will step up and defend the official temperature record for New Zealand?
I'd suggest the CRU should lose its status as custodian of global temperature data (they shouldn't just "lose" raw data not should they manipulate it. In fact, the only responsibility they should have had was custodianship and analysis. The whole game of global warming should have been confined to clients for their data. In other words the custodianship of climate data and support or advocacy of a particular therory are a conflict of interest.



JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[owg]

I have been thinking about a plot that is fairly common in the GW literature. I read that it was just the choice of the Anomaly scale that made it work. So I gave it a try. First popular version.

HAZOP at www.curryhydrocarbons.ca

 

[owg]

Now here is the version with the longer Anomaly scale

HAZOP at www.curryhydrocarbons.ca

 

[NomLaser]

Appearances can be deceiving. Most people would never look at the graph long enough to gather that there is a scale difference between the graphs.

It's a shame that this info from East Anglia wasn't released about 6 months ago. It's too close to Copenhagen to cause any changes in discussion and possible signing of the treaty.

 

[controlnovice]

Climate Change is a religion: No proof of God, No proof of Climate Change.

But yet there is blind faith.


From "The McLaughlin Group"
Buchannan, "It's not been warming since '98. Secondly, there's no known proof it's because of man and there's no known proof it's a great danger."

However, Clift felt inclined to responded, rather emphatically. She said she believes U.S. policy should be proactive toward the issue. Her view is arguably indicative of the mainstream media's sentiment on the debate, and she equated it to blind faith when she told Buchanan there's no proof there's a God either, which didn't mean global warming wasn't a danger.

"It's no known proof there's God, either. How much proof do you need, Pat?" Clift replied.

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