Now after a week we see that this story truly had legs. Some are calling it the “This is the worst scientific scandal of our generation.”
And the below cartoon tells the story succinctly.
The fall out is that the CRU will be releasing all of its Climate data. They have circled the wagons around their Dr Phil Jones, the key player in ClimateGate, but parliament is calling for an investigation. Penn State is calling for an investigation of Dr Mann, the perpetrator of the Hockey Stick story. New Zealand’s temperature data is showing the same kinds of ?manipulation? as CRU’s and the US GISS/NCDC data.
So the impacts of this controversy are spreading and heightening. Those who still support the AGW scientists are becoming more an more strident with weaker and even more weak arguments, when they can muster any arguments.
It has gotten so bad that some blogs (read that Real Climate), that traditionally limited comments from skeptics, have dramatically opened their commenting policy, and some which were faily open, but managed by “true believers” have started to limit comments. (Read that: I have been banned from one blog.)
I have not included links as there are just too many of them. If you are interested in following the history take a look at my blog for the past week plus of public information. There is at this point no more complete reference. It is: http://globalwarmingclearinghouse.blogspot.com/
Corrupting the scientific process is the fault of the left and is one of the more odious things they have done recently to degrade society. I think the story not only has legs on its own but its worse then what it looks to be on the surface. This incident really brings into question the whole process of science when there is a political and or economic issue at hand. Scientists in this story are engaged in a conspiracy to fix the science by manipulating what gets published and peer reviewed. I also have no doubt that these scientists are pressuring their graduate students to toe the party line and would be less likely to award a Ph.D to a candidate they thought would not to them be a team player.
Ah well….corrupting science is a time honored tradition following the money. Why do you make such global statements about the left? There is plenty of evidence on other issues about science and money which do not involve the mythical left and what “it” believes.
It also seems a bit premature to jump into guilty as charged.
On a note of pure speculation it will be interesting if Obama uses the coming announcement on Afghanistan to break his no new tax pledge for families earning under $250,000 or individuals earning under $200,000. This is a tough one for him since on the one hand he has a golden moment to appeal to patriotism to justify a tax hike. But then on the other hand if he brings up the need for a tax hike to fund the war he is admitting that we don’t have enough money to pay for healthcare which he wantd to do. These offsetting forces are causing a dilemma for the Whitehouse.
The outgoing whitehouse offerered an assessment of the situation in Afghanistan. I can understand the administration wanting their own people to make an additional assessment and plan a strategy which is what they did with General McCrystal. But they got this plan several months ago and it really does not look like they plan on implmenting this plan. Vietnamization failed in vietnam and is not likely going to work in Afghanistan.
Nixon was forced to resign. I wonder who and how many will resign as a result of this? Hundreds should, but most will probably will slip away unscathed.
A lot of the links on your website are to that Helogenic website. Lots of irony here with advocates of the sun based theory for global warming complaining about the peer review process and manipulating statistics.
Regarding “manipulated” data. Do you think seasonally and hedonically adjusted economic data is “manipulated”?
And here’s a realworld chance to put you views on data “manipulation” into practice. Maybe you can help out. We’re looking at the cost effectiveness of changes to maintenance procedures in the repair of Chinook helicopter engines. The data includes a history of every Chinook engine ever produced going back to the 1960s. Every removal, every inspection, every engine lost through combat damage, crash damage or simple washout. At each observation the record shows the accumulated flying hours and a reason code (“001” thru “999”) for removal. But guess what? Sometimes the data doesn’t square with known physical laws. For example, removal records with no matching installation record preceding it, so you end up with 3 or more engines per bird. Erroneous “default” instrument readings on the “time on wing” clock if the engine is not removed correctly. “Time on wing” readings that do not agree with instrument readings for subcomponents inside the engines or with the bird itself. And the biggest problem of all, how to handle “censored” data (i.e., engines in the field that have not yet failed under the new procedures). This censoring problem is similar to the kinds of problems that medical science faces when they follow a study group through time and lose touch with many of the test participants. Now compared to the problems and complexity of climate science, this little engineering problem is almost trivial, but it captures a lot of the same kinds of data issues. You simply cannot use the raw data. You have to cross-check it with other proxy data points. Sometimes you have to throw out data points. And you ALWAYS have to account for engines for which you do not yet have failure data, but you know that the engine survived for at least “x” number of hours. You usually do this by imposing some kind of hazard rate function (e.g., a Weibull distribution) on the data. Now you could submit an FOIA request for Chinook engine helicopter flying hour data, and you might have reasonable chance of getting the FOIA approved if you could show some legitimate need to know. But I can promise you that you won’t get the raw data, which is only shared within a very small circle (e.g., Honeywell).
The point is that when I read a lot of the emails and papers describing the temperature data “manipulation” it strikes me that raw data should not be released to the general public…although as it turns out much of it already was publicly available outslide of CRU. Raw data should always be made available to peers; but not every interested amateur with some “R” program can be called a peer.
My background is ILS. I have been interested in maintenance strategies. I have some recent experience with CBM Plus which sounds like the genesis of your Chinnok engine studies.
What I have determined over many years of investigation is: there is risk in anything that has human interaction.
As a result I agree with a recent INCOSE tome, not on my home PC which stated the obviuos: reliability is human influenced, how a thing is used determines its faiulure rate and how it is used is partly independent of how it was designed (which has human error as well), how it was built and how it is maintained (all with human interference).
Therefore, a density function is needed to describe the human and environmental variability in the use etc which effects the maintenance requirements, and other support issues.
If you have a lot of time to read you might review: dau.mil can link to both CBM Plus and System Design for Operational Effectiveness work done over the past 7 or 8 years.
Raw data should always be made available to peers; but not every interested amateur with some “R” program can be called a peer.
I would rather let the guy with his “R” have all the data. What are you afraid of? From your point of view I don’t see the need since if the Scientists are keeping their peers out of peer reviewed journals for not toeing the line they certainly should be able to silence an amateur with his “R” program.
I’m pretty sure that the global warming “Scientists” are fudging their results and manipulating their “raw data” and preliminary results. My experience with data and models is that when you do a statistical process the results don’t always fit the way you might want it to in a model and you really have no choice but to move the numbers to a pattern that fits. But this is not science, its an example where the needs of the mathematical model trumps science.
corrupting science is a time honored tradition following the money.
This is done for both good and ill, but mostly for good since most technological advancement has been done by science following the money.
But we need to expand our monitoring of forces corrupting science to the social structures that evolve around academic scientists working at our universities. This fixing journals to exclude legitimate disagreement is disgusting and where there’s smoke there’s usually fire and the fire is further corruption in areas such as awarding grants and mentoring of graduate students.
I figured that ILSM meant you were in ILS manager.
Actually, the research is on the switch from IRON to a single sustainment standard (known in the Army as NMP). NMP is proving to be very costly and one of the alternatives is CBM. I don’t think the data and modeling are quite up to the demands of a condition based strategy, but no question that this is where DoD (and the OEMs) want to go.
So should Nature publish “research” done by the Discovery Institute? Calling yourself a peer does not make you a peer. I think that a lot of sturm and drang is coming from amateurs on the outside wanting to be in the inside. Peer envy.
Regarding “manipulated” data. Do you think seasonally and hedonically adjusted economic data is “manipulated”?
Yes. And maybe the raw data should be sent out to people with R to see if the adjustment is reasonable. These scientists if they were on the up and up would not be so concerned with controlling everything and anything going into journals. Its obvioius that they don’t want to be contradicted. They’re holding on to tight.
Please. When I put up a graph of data with no adjustment at all, you get upset and claim that what I’m doing (apparently some form of manipulation) requires a lot of skill.
From the evidence, you get upset when the results are not the ones you want to hear, regardless of what was done to the data to get those results. If you want some credibility, be consistent.
2slugs, there you go again, trying to shift to a subject of meaningless value. Does raw data, especially manually collected raw data, need to be processed? Of course. Who ever said it didn’t?
How about this scenario? As data errors are identified the programs are changed to adjust them. This was done primarily by Jr “Team” members (grad sudents) who had little knowledge of the original program and the skills to code. As Cantab has highlighted, a zealous student in trying to please his advisor Prof, and make his own thesis fit the accepted norm the Pof’s reality as shown in the Prof’s accepted papers, the student makes a change to the program that makes that data fit the norm (cooler to higher temps.) The actual reason for the change is not documented, and because the Grad sudent’s paper was peer reviwed by like minded scientists it really does not get a thorough scientific review. His paper is accepted. His changes are accepted. And the newest version of the “processed” data is accepted as the new valid data set.
Some of the changes were inadvertent, and some of were studied. Then comes along the stasis and cooling after 1998, and the “processed” data becomes seriously questioned. At the same time, 1998, Mann writes his paper creating the original Hockey Stick, and soon after the cooling/statis causes outsiders to question his methods. Wagons get circled, and further obfuscation and outright conspiracies to restrict access are implemented. These conspiracies include limiting acces to the raw, “processed” data and any data used in the new supporting papers required to keep the farce going.
Someone finally gets totally fed up with the farce and releases a working file. ClimateGate is the result.
Now that’s my theory.
As I said last week. The three legs of this stool has not been thorougly reviewed, but they will be officially and unofficially. The Climatology picture will not be pretty.
Regrettably this will bleed over to other sciences, and should be a lesson to Economists. They, to me, are functioning in many of the same ways, over reliance on unproven, unvalidate, and unverified models, as the climate scientists.
Why are you commenting on Heliogenic??? He runs another reference blog with fewer links and updated less frequently than mine.
You do it through selective subsetting. Your skill is in your searching. Your graphs show that raising taxes is good for economic growth and all good things are as associated with democrats and all the bad things with republicans. The unlikelihood that an unbiased person would come up with the chain of one sided results like you get is what hangs you.
Anyway, to me this is not about your graphs but rather corruption in acedemia.
Dan, this shonky science has the world about to invest 3+% of its GDP on a theory that has never been proven, and now seems that what evidence there was is seriously flawed. Other than that, why worry about biased science?
What amazes me is that everything these foolish scientists claimed the skeptical community was doing was exactly what they were doing. That goes even to getting paid by the “oil companies”, their first claim/line of defense. Their second line was to claim no “peer” reviewed papers, when they controlled/influenced the review process. their third line was to have their lap dog press ridicule the questioning/questioners.
For many years they have controlled the AGW message. We have seen only their side of the argument. We have made our decisions based upon that one-sided view. Feel secure with those decisions? Especially knowing the actual costs about to be exacted, and the apparent quality of the science?
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press Writer Ali Akbar Dareini, Associated Press Writer – 19 mins ago
TEHRAN, Iran – Iran approved plans Sunday to build 10 new uranium enrichment facilities, a dramatic expansion in defiance of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, days after it demanded Tehran stop construction on one plant and halt all enrichment activities.
Bomb, bomb immediately. I am sure that is what Cheyney, wise man, would do. Obama will duck the issue and hem and haw, etc., etc. Bad policy.
My experience with data and models is that when you do a statistical process the results don’t always fit the way you might want it to in a model and you really have no choice but to move the numbers to a pattern that fits.
(1) Except that’s not what we’re talking about. Go read the papers that describe the supposed “manipulation.” The point was that known laws of thermodynamics tell us that something had to have happened to the heat from the sun given that we knew how much solar energy was received. Energy doesn’t just disappear, it’s conserved. The point of the “manipulations” was because NOT correcting would have resulted in something that was impossible given known laws of physics. So you either “manipulated” the data or you threw out physics going back to Lord Kelvin.
(2) Raw economic data is available, but you’re probably not going to get it unless you’re engaged in real research. Just being an amateur hack won’t cut it. And it shouldn’t cut it. There are already enough of those bogus “shadow stat” websites floating around that spread economic confusion among the innocent. For example, very few people would know enough ARIMA X12 to understand the technical parameters. Ditto with European Union economic data; very few people understand TRAMO SEATS and how to set the diagnostic parameters. There’s a lot of art to those econometric models.
(3) Of course, climate science is not econometrics. Climate science assumes that basic laws of physics are true, but the parameters for the equations are unknown. There’s a difference between hypothesis testing and estimating parameters assuming structural models are true. Time series models do not play the same role in science that they do in econometrics.
ZURICH — Voters in Switzerland approved a referendum Sunday to ban the construction of new minarets on mosques, defying appeals from the government to reject the proposal and raising the specter of a Muslim backlash against Swiss interests around the world.
2slugs said: “The point of the “manipulations” was because NOT correcting would have resulted in something that was impossible given known laws of physics. So you either “manipulated” the data or you threw out physics going back to Lord Kelvin. ” With all due respect, BS!!!!!????
Physics had little to nothing to do with the data manipulation. Lowering early data while raising later data is not physics. Moreovcer, using really shonky, made up statistics routines makes the results questionable at best. Read the Wegman report.
If we don’t bomb, then Israel will have to, and then all the anti-Semites will come out in force and really stir the pot. Can’t just sit by and let Iran go nuclear.
Some time ago 2slugs claimed the Medieval Warm period was a Northern Hemisphere phenomenon. Below is a good pictorial view of the graphs from reports that show otherwise.
I don’t know if I’d call it a “good” pictorial view. It’s a little hard to read the graphs in any detail. But what I actually said was that there was no firm evidence that the Medieval Warming Period extended to other parts of the globe. And some evidence clearly shows that it didn’t. For example, at one point it was claimed that warmer weather contributed to the rise of the Inca. Except that the Inca didn’t really come around until the Medieval Warming Period was in its death throes.
But it’s funny how you can get all whipped up about the integrity of modern instrument readings of temperature change, but yet you are quite willing to accept some very suspect botanical data. There isn’t even a solid consensus on just what constitutes the Medieval Warming Period. I’ve seen where you put it deep into the 14th century, but yet we know from storage costs of medieval granaries (I actually studied those in college) that cold, wet weather was already setting into northern Europe by the late 13th century which lead to large scale famine in the early 14th.
Lowering early data while raising later data is not physics. Moreovcer, using really shonky, made up statistics routines makes the results questionable at best.
I have. It’s misapplied. To begin with, it relies heavily upon the M&M paper that was pretty much demolished for committing some serious math errors. Second, the Wegman paper is largely concerned with very long run temperature data. The Wegman argument is very strange because it criticizes the use of proxies for long term data, but then essentially relies upon the same data for claiming there is no reason to worry. The whole structure of the argument is confused. Third, the paper is about time series analysis, not climate science. Wegman has no expertise in cllimate science. Fourth, I’m not entirely convinced that he understands time series analysis. For example, several times he refers to the old Box-Jenkins model. Now one of my colleagues studied under Box when he was a grad student, and that was ages ago. The Box-Jenkins methodology is a dinosaur and is considered ad hoc. Fifth, he talked about possible “feedback” effects and then he goes on to discuss ARIMA models. Well, excuse me but an ARIMA model is a univariate model, so if you suspect there are feedback effects, then you really ought to be using a Vector ARIMA model. Sixth, several weeks ago I did a quick “toy” Vector ARIMA model that made no exogeniety assumptions (i.e., nonstructural). The feedback effects showed that CO2 concentrations preceded temperature increases for the current period. The Wegman paper might impress someone who is not familiar with time series analysis. It doesn’t impress me.
A critical non scientific issue is how much do we care about the future? About the longest anyone does serious business plans is 30 years (typically in extractive industries) Government plans on a shorter cycle although reports are generated that talk longer term. Much beyond 30-40 years and the folks making the decision will be dead or demented when the results are seen. (There will be some exceptions but by using the life expectancy, and soaring rates of dimentia beyond age 80). So it boils down to what do folks feel they owe their children or grandchildren? The climate change folks are talking measures out 40 years which is at the limit of the time horizon for most. So here we have folks using scientific issues to avoid confronting the moral issue because they know that that one does not admit of a resolution. One can note this by the vastly different discount rates various studies use to evaluate future benfits and costs. If we cant agree on a consistent discount rate, then we can’t agree on anything in the economic space. But your discount rate assumption ends up being somewhat driven by your feeling of what we owe the future (or the future owes us).
2slugs, said: “…that cold, wet weather was already setting into northern Europe“. BTW, actually I get all worked up about scientists who manipulate science for a political agenda. Scientists who claim what they are douing is science then not allowing anyone but selected identical thinkers to review and test. that’s not science.
Remember! You have been shown only one side of this story. You are making decisions on that one sided view.
2slugs said: “To begin with, it relies heavily upon the M&M paper that was pretty much demolished for committing some serious math errors. ”
Sometimes I am just amazed at the ignorance demonstrated by some here. Wegman, in this paper relied on the Mann et al Hockey Stick paper not M&M. Unless you are calling M&M the Mann paper. He was comminssioned to review the validity of the Mann approach. He demolished it!
I would like to see the demolishment of the M&M report that was not done by the “Team”. Gotta link?
Just one of the interesting portions of the paper was its description of the incestuousness of the Dendro Peer review process. Each being a co-author, student, co-researcher, etc of the other. In other words the he described “Team” concept which leads us to the “Group Think” shown.
As far as Trenberth, he shows a terrific example of this “Group Think” concept. Basing some of his analysis on the HadCruV3 dataset (where have we heard of this dataset before?) showing the temps and the CO2 line, he questions why the total energy flow does not match this conceptual chart.
He also asked the basic question in the emails why don’t we know the reaon for the temps falling?
So to summarize. Trenberth, being a member of the “Team”, is questioning why their theory is not coming true. What I found interesting in his paper is the answe may have been there in front of him The TSI has gone down. Do we know what the range of natural variability is in TSI? No! So the total percentage of loss is that a large percentage of natural variability or not? Is it really, just the Sun? His paper if rethought might actually show that.
But he started from a poor theory re: the feedbacks, using what is now known to be bad data, and came to a perhaps wrong conclusion re: his understanding of them.
He did not question the data nor the theory. That is what is wrong with his paper.
“Regarding “manipulated” data. Do you think seasonally and hedonically adjusted economic data is “manipulated”? “
Nothing wrong with that, but usually others can reproduce the original results (I can X12 series at my work computer).
Back to AGW. What you are avoiding is the issue of what to do if you have a proxy that starts out with a good R^2 relative to what you want to indirectly measure, but after adding several decades the R^2 falls precipitously. If you are in the natural sciences what do you do? Write your regression equation to use only the time period that maximizes R^2 while ignoring the rest of the data. Then backcast the equation on the data and slap on the directly measured data for the last 49 years and you get a hockey stick.
2slugs, I would love to hear your commentary on what changed around 1960 that tree rings no longer became a good proxy for temperature, but for the thousand years prior they are perfect (meaning I don’t need to put error bars on my graphs) proxies?
Jay, you mean to ask 2slugs, what caused the divergence? My own theory: The treering data picking tools broke down when the data became more readily available to natural scientists. This whole proxy has been rife with problems from the early days when the NAS recommended that established proxies no longer be used after Mann’s 98 HS Report was demolished by M&M and Wegman. From that point forward the proxy wars began, bleeding over into the members of the “Team” from the Global Temp measurement community.
Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. I don’t put a lot of credence in any tree ring data, except that it might give us a sense of the rough order of magnitude. But my biggest gripe with tree ring data is that it’s essentially irrelevant. Whether temperatures were warmer may or may not be true, but either way it’s not terribly relevant to global warming today. The question before us is whether or not CO2 leads to higher global temperatures. Looking at ancient tree rings doesn’t really help us understand the physics of global warming.
So the next time someone says we have had “unprecedented warming” in the 20th century I can tell them 2slugs said STFU, because the stable tree ring data for the prior 1000 years is unreliable?
If so how sure are we that the coefficient on the CO2 variable is as high as scientist think it is. And piggy backing off of CoRevs last comment, how much of the relationship runs in the direction the AGW alarmists want us to believe 1 ton of CO2 = X degrees warmer, when it very well could be true that 0.01 degrees warmer increases atmospheric absorbtion of CO2 by Y tons. I’m no experts on the physics, I just always wondered why the physicists never passed on the data to statisticians for analysis. I think we are beginning to see why.
It’s time for a Climategate update: Phil Jones, Ya’no tha guy in all the CRU emails has temporarily resigned while he is being investigated by his Univ. Michael mann is also under investigation by Penn State. And the leader of the Liberal Party in Australia has been voted out of his leadership position. Sen Inhofe, has called for a US Senate investigation. His request may not be followed up by the Dem leadership in the committee. There have been calls for legal investigations, and NASA’s GISS has been notified it is being sued.
The bodies are beginning to fall. The science may be next.
Copenhagen? What agreements will be made that have a chance of being implemented? If implemented how long before the long knives take out the failed politician?
Sometimes I am just amazed at the ignorance demonstrated by some here. Wegman, in this paper relied on the Mann et al Hockey Stick paper not M&M. Unless you are calling M&M the Mann paper. He was comminssioned to review the validity of the Mann approach. He demolished it!
Go back and reread the Wegman paper. His frequently cites M&M. And it was later learned that he collaborated with M&M when working on it. Wegman’s study was commissioned by a congress critter and the tasker was to review Mann’s findings in the light of M&M’s critique from 2003. Wegman said that M&M’s criticisms were well founded and the National Academy of Sciences said that M&M made a few valid points, but that M&M overstated the case. BTW, the Academy also said that Mann overstated the case in the sense that the data prior to the Little Ice Age is basically crap, so you can’t push claims either way. You can’t say that the 1990s were the warmest decade in a 1000 years, as Mann claimed; but then again you can’t claim that the Medieval Warming Period was as warm or warmer than today.
Do we know what the range of natural variability is in TSI? No! So the total percentage of loss is that a large percentage of natural variability or not? Is it really, just the Sun? His paper if rethought might actually show that.
You are misunderstanding what Trenberth means by natural variability. And that’s really Wegman’s problem as well. As I’ve said before, this isn’t an exercise in time series analysis where you can just sweep up residuals into some error term. Trenberth’s point is that in physics natural variability means measurement errors, not unexplained randomness. His point is that given known laws of physics, there has to be some kind of physical explanation. Looking at a time series chart and seeing “natural variability” is to misunderstand what’s going on. There has to be a physical explanation for unexplained deviations. Trenberth’s argument is that existing measuring tools are not good enough to explain what must have happened to the difference between heat received by the sun and heat radiated away from earth. Something had to have happened to that heat. It didn’t just vanish. We don’t know where it went, but we do know that it was conserved somewhere, somehow. Given that we don’t have any good instruments to explain this, his Plan B was to use proxies and adjustments to correct and reconcile. It’s either that or dismiss Lord Kelvin.
ClimateGate update
Now after a week we see that this story truly had legs. Some are calling it the “This is the worst scientific scandal of our generation.”
And the below cartoon tells the story succinctly.
The fall out is that the CRU will be releasing all of its Climate data. They have circled the wagons around their Dr Phil Jones, the key player in ClimateGate, but parliament is calling for an investigation. Penn State is calling for an investigation of Dr Mann, the perpetrator of the Hockey Stick story. New Zealand’s temperature data is showing the same kinds of ?manipulation? as CRU’s and the US GISS/NCDC data.
So the impacts of this controversy are spreading and heightening. Those who still support the AGW scientists are becoming more an more strident with weaker and even more weak arguments, when they can muster any arguments.
It has gotten so bad that some blogs (read that Real Climate), that traditionally limited comments from skeptics, have dramatically opened their commenting policy, and some which were faily open, but managed by “true believers” have started to limit comments. (Read that: I have been banned from one blog.)
I have not included links as there are just too many of them. If you are interested in following the history take a look at my blog for the past week plus of public information. There is at this point no more complete reference. It is: http://globalwarmingclearinghouse.blogspot.com/
No, I am not trying to gain hits!!!
CoRev,
Corrupting the scientific process is the fault of the left and is one of the more odious things they have done recently to degrade society. I think the story not only has legs on its own but its worse then what it looks to be on the surface. This incident really brings into question the whole process of science when there is a political and or economic issue at hand. Scientists in this story are engaged in a conspiracy to fix the science by manipulating what gets published and peer reviewed. I also have no doubt that these scientists are pressuring their graduate students to toe the party line and would be less likely to award a Ph.D to a candidate they thought would not to them be a team player.
Ah well….corrupting science is a time honored tradition following the money. Why do you make such global statements about the left? There is plenty of evidence on other issues about science and money which do not involve the mythical left and what “it” believes.
It also seems a bit premature to jump into guilty as charged.
On a note of pure speculation it will be interesting if Obama uses the coming announcement on Afghanistan to break his no new tax pledge for families earning under $250,000 or individuals earning under $200,000. This is a tough one for him since on the one hand he has a golden moment to appeal to patriotism to justify a tax hike. But then on the other hand if he brings up the need for a tax hike to fund the war he is admitting that we don’t have enough money to pay for healthcare which he wantd to do. These offsetting forces are causing a dilemma for the Whitehouse.
The outgoing whitehouse offerered an assessment of the situation in Afghanistan. I can understand the administration wanting their own people to make an additional assessment and plan a strategy which is what they did with General McCrystal. But they got this plan several months ago and it really does not look like they plan on implmenting this plan. Vietnamization failed in vietnam and is not likely going to work in Afghanistan.
Nixon was forced to resign. I wonder who and how many will resign as a result of this? Hundreds should, but most will probably will slip away unscathed.
Getting fed up with Islam, where it doesn’t belong (in the Alps that is).
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091129/ap_on_re_eu/eu_switzerland_minaret_ban;_ylt=AtuoWMN_VPJNZWhpgPrMFdes0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTN1NHFla2lzBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMDkxMTI5L2V1X3N3aXR6ZXJsYW5kX21pbmFyZXRfYmFuBGNjb2RlA21vc3Rwb3B1bGFyBGNwb3MDNwRwb3MDNARwdANob21lX2Nva2UEc2VjA3luX2hlYWRsaW5lX2xpc3QEc2xrA3Byb2plY3Rpb25zdw—
How much should we spend to defang Islam? As much as it takes, IMO.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/11/hidden-cost-of-war.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MishsGlobalEconomicTrendAnalysis+%28Mish%27s+Global+Economic+Trend+Analysis%29
CoRev,
A lot of the links on your website are to that Helogenic website. Lots of irony here with advocates of the sun based theory for global warming complaining about the peer review process and manipulating statistics.
Regarding “manipulated” data. Do you think seasonally and hedonically adjusted economic data is “manipulated”?
And here’s a realworld chance to put you views on data “manipulation” into practice. Maybe you can help out. We’re looking at the cost effectiveness of changes to maintenance procedures in the repair of Chinook helicopter engines. The data includes a history of every Chinook engine ever produced going back to the 1960s. Every removal, every inspection, every engine lost through combat damage, crash damage or simple washout. At each observation the record shows the accumulated flying hours and a reason code (“001” thru “999”) for removal. But guess what? Sometimes the data doesn’t square with known physical laws. For example, removal records with no matching installation record preceding it, so you end up with 3 or more engines per bird. Erroneous “default” instrument readings on the “time on wing” clock if the engine is not removed correctly. “Time on wing” readings that do not agree with instrument readings for subcomponents inside the engines or with the bird itself. And the biggest problem of all, how to handle “censored” data (i.e., engines in the field that have not yet failed under the new procedures). This censoring problem is similar to the kinds of problems that medical science faces when they follow a study group through time and lose touch with many of the test participants. Now compared to the problems and complexity of climate science, this little engineering problem is almost trivial, but it captures a lot of the same kinds of data issues. You simply cannot use the raw data. You have to cross-check it with other proxy data points. Sometimes you have to throw out data points. And you ALWAYS have to account for engines for which you do not yet have failure data, but you know that the engine survived for at least “x” number of hours. You usually do this by imposing some kind of hazard rate function (e.g., a Weibull distribution) on the data. Now you could submit an FOIA request for Chinook engine helicopter flying hour data, and you might have reasonable chance of getting the FOIA approved if you could show some legitimate need to know. But I can promise you that you won’t get the raw data, which is only shared within a very small circle (e.g., Honeywell).
The point is that when I read a lot of the emails and papers describing the temperature data “manipulation” it strikes me that raw data should not be released to the general public…although as it turns out much of it already was publicly available outslide of CRU. Raw data should always be made available to peers; but not every interested amateur with some “R” program can be called a peer.
2Slugs,
Interesting points.
My background is ILS. I have been interested in maintenance strategies. I have some recent experience with CBM Plus which sounds like the genesis of your Chinnok engine studies.
What I have determined over many years of investigation is: there is risk in anything that has human interaction.
As a result I agree with a recent INCOSE tome, not on my home PC which stated the obviuos: reliability is human influenced, how a thing is used determines its faiulure rate and how it is used is partly independent of how it was designed (which has human error as well), how it was built and how it is maintained (all with human interference).
Therefore, a density function is needed to describe the human and environmental variability in the use etc which effects the maintenance requirements, and other support issues.
If you have a lot of time to read you might review: dau.mil can link to both CBM Plus and System Design for Operational Effectiveness work done over the past 7 or 8 years.
Pretty cool stuff.
ilsm
Slubs,
Raw data should always be made available to peers; but not every interested amateur with some “R” program can be called a peer.
I would rather let the guy with his “R” have all the data. What are you afraid of? From your point of view I don’t see the need since if the Scientists are keeping their peers out of peer reviewed journals for not toeing the line they certainly should be able to silence an amateur with his “R” program.
I’m pretty sure that the global warming “Scientists” are fudging their results and manipulating their “raw data” and preliminary results. My experience with data and models is that when you do a statistical process the results don’t always fit the way you might want it to in a model and you really have no choice but to move the numbers to a pattern that fits. But this is not science, its an example where the needs of the mathematical model trumps science.
Rdan,
corrupting science is a time honored tradition following the money.
This is done for both good and ill, but mostly for good since most technological advancement has been done by science following the money.
But we need to expand our monitoring of forces corrupting science to the social structures that evolve around academic scientists working at our universities. This fixing journals to exclude legitimate disagreement is disgusting and where there’s smoke there’s usually fire and the fire is further corruption in areas such as awarding grants and mentoring of graduate students.
ILSM,
I figured that ILSM meant you were in ILS manager.
Actually, the research is on the switch from IRON to a single sustainment standard (known in the Army as NMP). NMP is proving to be very costly and one of the alternatives is CBM. I don’t think the data and modeling are quite up to the demands of a condition based strategy, but no question that this is where DoD (and the OEMs) want to go.
Cantab,
So should Nature publish “research” done by the Discovery Institute? Calling yourself a peer does not make you a peer. I think that a lot of sturm and drang is coming from amateurs on the outside wanting to be in the inside. Peer envy.
Regarding “manipulated” data. Do you think seasonally and hedonically adjusted economic data is “manipulated”?
Yes. And maybe the raw data should be sent out to people with R to see if the adjustment is reasonable. These scientists if they were on the up and up would not be so concerned with controlling everything and anything going into journals. Its obvioius that they don’t want to be contradicted. They’re holding on to tight.
Cantab,
Please. When I put up a graph of data with no adjustment at all, you get upset and claim that what I’m doing (apparently some form of manipulation) requires a lot of skill.
From the evidence, you get upset when the results are not the ones you want to hear, regardless of what was done to the data to get those results. If you want some credibility, be consistent.
2slugs, there you go again, trying to shift to a subject of meaningless value. Does raw data, especially manually collected raw data, need to be processed? Of course. Who ever said it didn’t?
How about this scenario? As data errors are identified the programs are changed to adjust them. This was done primarily by Jr “Team” members (grad sudents) who had little knowledge of the original program and the skills to code. As Cantab has highlighted, a zealous student in trying to please his advisor Prof, and make his own thesis fit the accepted norm the Pof’s reality as shown in the Prof’s accepted papers, the student makes a change to the program that makes that data fit the norm (cooler to higher temps.) The actual reason for the change is not documented, and because the Grad sudent’s paper was peer reviwed by like minded scientists it really does not get a thorough scientific review. His paper is accepted. His changes are accepted. And the newest version of the “processed” data is accepted as the new valid data set.
Some of the changes were inadvertent, and some of were studied. Then comes along the stasis and cooling after 1998, and the “processed” data becomes seriously questioned. At the same time, 1998, Mann writes his paper creating the original Hockey Stick, and soon after the cooling/statis causes outsiders to question his methods. Wagons get circled, and further obfuscation and outright conspiracies to restrict access are implemented. These conspiracies include limiting acces to the raw, “processed” data and any data used in the new supporting papers required to keep the farce going.
Someone finally gets totally fed up with the farce and releases a working file. ClimateGate is the result.
Now that’s my theory.
As I said last week. The three legs of this stool has not been thorougly reviewed, but they will be officially and unofficially. The Climatology picture will not be pretty.
Regrettably this will bleed over to other sciences, and should be a lesson to Economists. They, to me, are functioning in many of the same ways, over reliance on unproven, unvalidate, and unverified models, as the climate scientists.
Why are you commenting on Heliogenic??? He runs another reference blog with fewer links and updated less frequently than mine.
You do it through selective subsetting. Your skill is in your searching. Your graphs show that raising taxes is good for economic growth and all good things are as associated with democrats and all the bad things with republicans. The unlikelihood that an unbiased person would come up with the chain of one sided results like you get is what hangs you.
Anyway, to me this is not about your graphs but rather corruption in acedemia.
Dan, this shonky science has the world about to invest 3+% of its GDP on a theory that has never been proven, and now seems that what evidence there was is seriously flawed. Other than that, why worry about biased science?
What amazes me is that everything these foolish scientists claimed the skeptical community was doing was exactly what they were doing. That goes even to getting paid by the “oil companies”, their first claim/line of defense. Their second line was to claim no “peer” reviewed papers, when they controlled/influenced the review process. their third line was to have their lap dog press ridicule the questioning/questioners.
For many years they have controlled the AGW message. We have seen only their side of the argument. We have made our decisions based upon that one-sided view. Feel secure with those decisions? Especially knowing the actual costs about to be exacted, and the apparent quality of the science?
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press Writer Ali Akbar Dareini, Associated Press Writer – 19 mins ago
TEHRAN, Iran – Iran approved plans Sunday to build 10 new uranium enrichment facilities, a dramatic expansion in defiance of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, days after it demanded Tehran stop construction on one plant and halt all enrichment activities.
Bomb, bomb immediately. I am sure that is what Cheyney, wise man, would do. Obama will duck the issue and hem and haw, etc., etc. Bad policy.
Cantab and CoRev,
My experience with data and models is that when you do a statistical process the results don’t always fit the way you might want it to in a model and you really have no choice but to move the numbers to a pattern that fits.
(1) Except that’s not what we’re talking about. Go read the papers that describe the supposed “manipulation.” The point was that known laws of thermodynamics tell us that something had to have happened to the heat from the sun given that we knew how much solar energy was received. Energy doesn’t just disappear, it’s conserved. The point of the “manipulations” was because NOT correcting would have resulted in something that was impossible given known laws of physics. So you either “manipulated” the data or you threw out physics going back to Lord Kelvin.
(2) Raw economic data is available, but you’re probably not going to get it unless you’re engaged in real research. Just being an amateur hack won’t cut it. And it shouldn’t cut it. There are already enough of those bogus “shadow stat” websites floating around that spread economic confusion among the innocent. For example, very few people would know enough ARIMA X12 to understand the technical parameters. Ditto with European Union economic data; very few people understand TRAMO SEATS and how to set the diagnostic parameters. There’s a lot of art to those econometric models.
(3) Of course, climate science is not econometrics. Climate science assumes that basic laws of physics are true, but the parameters for the equations are unknown. There’s a difference between hypothesis testing and estimating parameters assuming structural models are true. Time series models do not play the same role in science that they do in econometrics.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125947451116668259.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLTopStories
ZURICH — Voters in Switzerland approved a referendum Sunday to ban the construction of new minarets on mosques, defying appeals from the government to reject the proposal and raising the specter of a Muslim backlash against Swiss interests around the world.
Maybe the ricola guy could share the minarets:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dDFIHfTFqg&feature=related
And the Swiss muslims could share traditional swiss culture.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAKeH47L61w
2slugs said: “The point of the “manipulations” was because NOT correcting would have resulted in something that was impossible given known laws of physics. So you either “manipulated” the data or you threw out physics going back to Lord Kelvin. ” With all due respect, BS!!!!!????
Physics had little to nothing to do with the data manipulation. Lowering early data while raising later data is not physics. Moreovcer, using really shonky, made up statistics routines makes the results questionable at best. Read the Wegman report.
Sheesh, 2slugs. How wrong can you be?
If we don’t bomb, then Israel will have to, and then all the anti-Semites will come out in force and really stir the pot. Can’t just sit by and let Iran go nuclear.
Good summation:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html
Some time ago 2slugs claimed the Medieval Warm period was a Northern Hemisphere phenomenon. Below is a good pictorial view of the graphs from reports that show otherwise.
CoRev,
I don’t know if I’d call it a “good” pictorial view. It’s a little hard to read the graphs in any detail. But what I actually said was that there was no firm evidence that the Medieval Warming Period extended to other parts of the globe. And some evidence clearly shows that it didn’t. For example, at one point it was claimed that warmer weather contributed to the rise of the Inca. Except that the Inca didn’t really come around until the Medieval Warming Period was in its death throes.
But it’s funny how you can get all whipped up about the integrity of modern instrument readings of temperature change, but yet you are quite willing to accept some very suspect botanical data. There isn’t even a solid consensus on just what constitutes the Medieval Warming Period. I’ve seen where you put it deep into the 14th century, but yet we know from storage costs of medieval granaries (I actually studied those in college) that cold, wet weather was already setting into northern Europe by the late 13th century which lead to large scale famine in the early 14th.
CoRev,
Lowering early data while raising later data is not physics. Moreovcer, using really shonky, made up statistics routines makes the results questionable at best.
So tell us where this paper is wrong?
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/EnergyDiagnostics09final.pdf
Read the Wegman report
I have. It’s misapplied. To begin with, it relies heavily upon the M&M paper that was pretty much demolished for committing some serious math errors. Second, the Wegman paper is largely concerned with very long run temperature data. The Wegman argument is very strange because it criticizes the use of proxies for long term data, but then essentially relies upon the same data for claiming there is no reason to worry. The whole structure of the argument is confused. Third, the paper is about time series analysis, not climate science. Wegman has no expertise in cllimate science. Fourth, I’m not entirely convinced that he understands time series analysis. For example, several times he refers to the old Box-Jenkins model. Now one of my colleagues studied under Box when he was a grad student, and that was ages ago. The Box-Jenkins methodology is a dinosaur and is considered ad hoc. Fifth, he talked about possible “feedback” effects and then he goes on to discuss ARIMA models. Well, excuse me but an ARIMA model is a univariate model, so if you suspect there are feedback effects, then you really ought to be using a Vector ARIMA model. Sixth, several weeks ago I did a quick “toy” Vector ARIMA model that made no exogeniety assumptions (i.e., nonstructural). The feedback effects showed that CO2 concentrations preceded temperature increases for the current period. The Wegman paper might impress someone who is not familiar with time series analysis. It doesn’t impress me.
A critical non scientific issue is how much do we care about the future? About the longest anyone does serious business plans is 30 years (typically in extractive industries) Government plans on a shorter cycle although reports are generated that talk longer term. Much beyond 30-40 years and the folks making the decision will be dead or demented when the results are seen. (There will be some exceptions but by using the life expectancy, and soaring rates of dimentia beyond age 80). So it boils down to what do folks feel they owe their children or grandchildren? The climate change folks are talking measures out 40 years which is at the limit of the time horizon for most.
So here we have folks using scientific issues to avoid confronting the moral issue because they know that that one does not admit of a resolution. One can note this by the vastly different discount rates various studies use to evaluate future benfits and costs. If we cant agree on a consistent discount rate, then we can’t agree on anything in the economic space. But your discount rate assumption ends up being somewhat driven by your feeling of what we owe the future (or the future owes us).
2slugs, said: “…that cold, wet weather was already setting into northern Europe“. BTW, actually I get all worked up about scientists who manipulate science for a political agenda. Scientists who claim what they are douing is science then not allowing anyone but selected identical thinkers to review and test. that’s not science.
Remember! You have been shown only one side of this story. You are making decisions on that one sided view.
2slugs said: “To begin with, it relies heavily upon the M&M paper that was pretty much demolished for committing some serious math errors. ”
Sometimes I am just amazed at the ignorance demonstrated by some here. Wegman, in this paper relied on the Mann et al Hockey Stick paper not M&M. Unless you are calling M&M the Mann paper. He was comminssioned to review the validity of the Mann approach. He demolished it!
I would like to see the demolishment of the M&M report that was not done by the “Team”. Gotta link?
Just one of the interesting portions of the paper was its description of the incestuousness of the Dendro Peer review process. Each being a co-author, student, co-researcher, etc of the other. In other words the he described “Team” concept which leads us to the “Group Think” shown.
As far as Trenberth, he shows a terrific example of this “Group Think” concept. Basing some of his analysis on the HadCruV3 dataset (where have we heard of this dataset before?) showing the temps and the CO2 line, he questions why the total energy flow does not match this conceptual chart.
He also asked the basic question in the emails why don’t we know the reaon for the temps falling?
So to summarize. Trenberth, being a member of the “Team”, is questioning why their theory is not coming true. What I found interesting in his paper is the answe may have been there in front of him The TSI has gone down. Do we know what the range of natural variability is in TSI? No! So the total percentage of loss is that a large percentage of natural variability or not? Is it really, just the Sun? His paper if rethought might actually show that.
But he started from a poor theory re: the feedbacks, using what is now known to be bad data, and came to a perhaps wrong conclusion re: his understanding of them.
He did not question the data nor the theory. That is what is wrong with his paper.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikes-letter/open-letter-president-obama-michael-moore
2slugs:
“Regarding “manipulated” data. Do you think seasonally and hedonically adjusted economic data is “manipulated”? “
Nothing wrong with that, but usually others can reproduce the original results (I can X12 series at my work computer).
Back to AGW. What you are avoiding is the issue of what to do if you have a proxy that starts out with a good R^2 relative to what you want to indirectly measure, but after adding several decades the R^2 falls precipitously. If you are in the natural sciences what do you do? Write your regression equation to use only the time period that maximizes R^2 while ignoring the rest of the data. Then backcast the equation on the data and slap on the directly measured data for the last 49 years and you get a hockey stick.
2slugs, I would love to hear your commentary on what changed around 1960 that tree rings no longer became a good proxy for temperature, but for the thousand years prior they are perfect (meaning I don’t need to put error bars on my graphs) proxies?
Jay, you mean to ask 2slugs, what caused the divergence? My own theory: The treering data picking tools broke down when the data became more readily available to natural scientists. This whole proxy has been rife with problems from the early days when the NAS recommended that established proxies no longer be used after Mann’s 98 HS Report was demolished by M&M and Wegman. From that point forward the proxy wars began, bleeding over into the members of the “Team” from the Global Temp measurement community.
Jay,
Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. I don’t put a lot of credence in any tree ring data, except that it might give us a sense of the rough order of magnitude. But my biggest gripe with tree ring data is that it’s essentially irrelevant. Whether temperatures were warmer may or may not be true, but either way it’s not terribly relevant to global warming today. The question before us is whether or not CO2 leads to higher global temperatures. Looking at ancient tree rings doesn’t really help us understand the physics of global warming.
2slugs, of course CO2 and the other GHGs lead to higher temps. The real question is how and how much?
So the next time someone says we have had “unprecedented warming” in the 20th century I can tell them 2slugs said STFU, because the stable tree ring data for the prior 1000 years is unreliable?
If so how sure are we that the coefficient on the CO2 variable is as high as scientist think it is. And piggy backing off of CoRevs last comment, how much of the relationship runs in the direction the AGW alarmists want us to believe 1 ton of CO2 = X degrees warmer, when it very well could be true that 0.01 degrees warmer increases atmospheric absorbtion of CO2 by Y tons. I’m no experts on the physics, I just always wondered why the physicists never passed on the data to statisticians for analysis. I think we are beginning to see why.
It’s time for a Climategate update: Phil Jones, Ya’no tha guy in all the CRU emails has temporarily resigned while he is being investigated by his Univ. Michael mann is also under investigation by Penn State. And the leader of the Liberal Party in Australia has been voted out of his leadership position. Sen Inhofe, has called for a US Senate investigation. His request may not be followed up by the Dem leadership in the committee. There have been calls for legal investigations, and NASA’s GISS has been notified it is being sued.
The bodies are beginning to fall. The science may be next.
Copenhagen? What agreements will be made that have a chance of being implemented? If implemented how long before the long knives take out the failed politician?
CoRev
Sometimes I am just amazed at the ignorance demonstrated by some here. Wegman, in this paper relied on the Mann et al Hockey Stick paper not M&M. Unless you are calling M&M the Mann paper. He was comminssioned to review the validity of the Mann approach. He demolished it!
Go back and reread the Wegman paper. His frequently cites M&M. And it was later learned that he collaborated with M&M when working on it. Wegman’s study was commissioned by a congress critter and the tasker was to review Mann’s findings in the light of M&M’s critique from 2003. Wegman said that M&M’s criticisms were well founded and the National Academy of Sciences said that M&M made a few valid points, but that M&M overstated the case. BTW, the Academy also said that Mann overstated the case in the sense that the data prior to the Little Ice Age is basically crap, so you can’t push claims either way. You can’t say that the 1990s were the warmest decade in a 1000 years, as Mann claimed; but then again you can’t claim that the Medieval Warming Period was as warm or warmer than today.
Do we know what the range of natural variability is in TSI? No! So the total percentage of loss is that a large percentage of natural variability or not? Is it really, just the Sun? His paper if rethought might actually show that.
You are misunderstanding what Trenberth means by natural variability. And that’s really Wegman’s problem as well. As I’ve said before, this isn’t an exercise in time series analysis where you can just sweep up residuals into some error term. Trenberth’s point is that in physics natural variability means measurement errors, not unexplained randomness. His point is that given known laws of physics, there has to be some kind of physical explanation. Looking at a time series chart and seeing “natural variability” is to misunderstand what’s going on. There has to be a physical explanation for unexplained deviations. Trenberth’s argument is that existing measuring tools are not good enough to explain what must have happened to the difference between heat received by the sun and heat radiated away from earth. Something had to have happened to that heat. It didn’t just vanish. We don’t know where it went, but we do know that it was conserved somewhere, somehow. Given that we don’t have any good instruments to explain this, his Plan B was to use proxies and adjustments to correct and reconcile. It’s either that or dismiss Lord Kelvin.