What about Climategate?

Fergus Pickering

You mean that scientists cheat and lie like the rest of us. So they do and you don't have to be a scientist to catch them at it. So all this stuff about needing a Ph.d. to say' Liar! Liar! Pants on fire!' is crap, isn't it? That being so - LIAR! LIAR! PANTS ON FIRE!

The Orator

Better than the emails, by the way, is the programming code that has been revealed in the data. As bloggers have pointed out the code is so hacked around to give predetermined results that it shows the bias of the coder. In other words make the code ignore inconvenient data to show what I want it to show.

You can claim an email you wrote years ago isn’t accurate saying it was “taken out of context”, but a programmer making notes in the code does so that he/she can document what the code is actually doing at that stage, so that anyone who looks at it later can figure out why this function doesn’t plot past 1960. In this case, it is not allowing all of the temperature data to be plotted. Growing season data (summer months when the new tree rings are formed) past 1960 is thrown out because “these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures”, which implies some post processing routine.

Spin that, spin it to the moon if you want. I’ll believe programmer notes over the word of somebody who stands to gain from suggesting there’s nothing “untowards” about it.

Either the data tells the story of nature or it does not. Data that has been “artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures” is false data, yielding a false result.
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Rhoda Klapp

Bad faith on both sides? Can you remind me of a sceptical scientist caught cheating?

As far as making the data say something false-to-fact, wait a day or two until people have examined the computer code which was published along with the emails. First impressions are that this data is torutred to within an inch of its life to support AGW. To the extent of a fudge factor being removed from past temperature records and added to more recent ones to tilt the slope of the graph in the 20th century.

Can we agree now that the debate is not over, the science not settled?

Dominic Allkins

Alex

While I agree that for many (including yourself) Climate Change is a 'crushingly tedious' the implications of the recent revelations are not.

As a (former) scientist it always gets my antennae twitching when I hear the phrase "the science is settled" or "the scientific consensus is..."

If the recent revelations have shown us anything, it is that the science very clearly isn't settled. There appears to be a prima facie case that data was manipulated and evidence hidden/deleted in order to continue the narrative.

The implications of this are huge. The UK Government (of whatever hue) is committed to raising taxes and spending by billions of pounds to combat 'Climate Change'. Globally this becomes trillions of pounds.

Ask yourself, is it really sensible to base policy on science that has now, at best, been revealed as dubious?

The answer to that question cannot be anything but "No"

That is why you and others in the MSM should be making a noise about this.

Cuffleyburgers

Alex - you cannot be serious! What is tedious about being railroaded into the most expensive political interference in the history of the world on the basis of a faked hockeystick graph, which politely nobody seems to mention, and various series of tampered tree ring evidence manipulated to eliminate any inconvenient truths?

You may find that tedious, but I'm afraid that I find the wholesale destruction of the global economy on the basis of a series of lies which noone seems to have inventigated properly, a wee bit annoying.

Snowman

One can be in favour of reducing waste, switching away from fossil fuels and all that without subscribing to a theory-sum-creed, i.e. a set of not fully proven hypotheses, whose proponents have been found to be secretive, non-cooperative, and capable of ignoring any constructive criticism. Moreover, a theory that, if endorsed with the resultant policy implications, will lead to a massive relocation of resources at a time when the debt burden of most of the countries that have to implement it allows for it the least.

Perversely, one may argue that it serves the West right after the excesses of the recent past, but for the millions that survive on a dollar per day the prospects could be unimaginable. Any transfer of funds to the poorer countries would most likely enrich the few of the governing elite even more, and leave the poor to die in even greater numbers. I’m afraid, your finding the subject tedious says more about you than the theory.

David Williamson

Sorry this whole issue is too tedious for a man of Mr Massie's formidable intellect, but it seems rather important to get right - do we go back to the Dark Ages (as the Islamists and Greens want) or do we continue along the path of technological development (we will need to burn fossil fuels for a while longer, until controlled nuclear fusion works).

ndm

I would have a lot more sympathy for the anti global warming case were it not made by cooks more interested in the politicization of the economics of AGW than in the science.

I think there is little doubt that humans could have had significant impact on the climate. Nature has a big impact. The difficulty is in differentiating the possible from the actual. We are all so used to seeing reasonably accurate weather forecasts that it is easy to forget how hard meteorology is from a technical perspective. In the early days of supercomputers, meteorology was the main use after nuclear weapons and oil. It is hard stuff - and certainly far harder than holding up the ice-shrinkage rate in one summer in the Ross Sea as if it were the tablets of Moses which seems to be the principal scientific technique used by global warming deniers.

Beafeater

ndm:

The thrust of the emails is that it is not the anti-warming "cooks" who are politicizing science, but the warmist cooks. It is the AGW lot who are cooking the books.
The warmist cooks are offering hot sea soup and roast polar bear.

Beer Moth

Well said Doc. Firstly on the use of 'gate' tagged on the arse-end of anything slightly controversial. Very done.

Also on the tedium of all this AGW stuff; yes, no-one is certain about any of it. Which is why it's a bit disturbing to see that the World leadership is 100% sold on it.

Jack Hughes

Check this email from Prof Phil Jones:

"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"

Yes he is fiddling the data to "hide a decline" in temperatures over 20 years.

Ne need to make it up - just google for the emails and even worse, the programs...

ndm

The use of the word "trick" in mathematical sciences does not refer to conjury but refers to the use of a technique that may not be immediately obvious. It is a term of art. Professor Jones writes:

One particular, illegally obtained, email relates to the preparation of a figure for the WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999. This email referred to a “trick” of adding recent instrumental data to the end of temperature reconstructions that were based on proxy data. The requirement for the WMO Statement was for up-to-date evidence showing how temperatures may have changed over the last 1000 years. To produce temperature series that were completely up-to-date (i.e. through to 1999) it was necessary to combine the temperature reconstructions with the instrumental record, because the temperature reconstructions from proxy data ended many years earlier whereas the instrumental record is updated every month. The use of the word “trick” was not intended to imply any deception.

Phil Jones comments further: “One of the three temperature reconstructions was based entirely on a particular set of tree-ring data that shows a strong correlation with temperature from the 19th century through to the mid-20th century, but does not show a realistic trend of temperature after 1960. This is well known and is called the ‘decline’ or ‘divergence’. The use of the term ‘hiding the decline’ was in an email written in haste. CRU has not sought to hide the decline. Indeed, CRU has published a number of articles that both illustrate, and discuss the implications of, this recent tree-ring decline, including the article that is listed in the legend of the WMO Statement figure. It is because of this trend in these tree-ring data that we know does not represent temperature change that I only show this series up to 1960 in the WMO Statement.”

Rhoda Klapp

ndm, surely you don't buy that explanation. The trick is indeed a trick. What he did is to put up a graph of proxy temperature data spliced to real instrumental data presented as all one thing. The correct thing to do would be to put the tree ring data in one colour and the thermometer data in another, so we could see the join. By admitting that he doesn't know why the treering data does ot reflect known recent temperatures, he is de facto admitting that the treering data is not a reliable proxy for temperature at any time in the past. In fact this nullifes the entire graph, except if presented with a caveat on certainty. It's a trick, and to accept a cheat's glib explanation would be like listening to an MP caught troughing dismissing it as nothing to see here. Jones has been caught cheating and probably breaking FOI laws. Do not buy his explanations.

Rhoda Klapp

The real killers are in the code. Here's a quote from someobne looking at a code segemnt trying to see how they prouce climate historical data:

But look at what they are actually doing. They are fudging the numbers by an arbitrary amount to get the result they want. You probably understand this code, but let me see if I can explain it in English for those who don’t.

First, they put together a list of numbers that will be used to calculate the yearly adjustment. The numbers start at zero, get a bit smaller, and then gradually increase. This list is called “valadjust”.

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]

At the end of their calculations, they use valadj to make a yearly adjustment string, yearadj, by interpolating (taking intermediate values) from the values in valadj. This gives a value for each year, by which each year’s data will be adjusted up or down.

densall=densall+yearlyadj

But of course, they’re fudging things, so it won’t come out right the first time. To control the process, they put in a “fudge factor”, a single number that they can use to change the size of all the data adjustments. This is the “fudge factor” referred to in the code, which at the moment is set to 0.75. This is the 0.75 at the end of the line for setting up the valadj values:

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

They are using arbitrary values plus a fudge factor to make the result just what they want … YIKES! Or as Hal said in 2001, I DON’T THINK I CAN DO THAT, DAVE!

RK: That's what we are talking about. A cconscious effort to produce results that say what they are supposed to. To take a fairly unremarkable climate history and make it look like a consistent warming trend. This moves it from science into the realm of advocacy.

Beefeater

Rhoda Klapp:

Brava.