Sunday Basket O’ Questions
by Noni Mausa
Sunday Basket O’ Questions
1. The Climate Change memos have opened up some interesting questions. Like, who are the thieves, and when will we see them in court? And if the thieves are shown to be employees of Big Oil or Big Coal, are the Bigs profiting from this crime? The proceeds of crime can be seized by the government — I will be interested to see how the amount of extra profit might be measured, and how a fungible asset is seized.
A criminal conviction might not be necessary, either. Wiki tells us: “In civil forfeiture cases, the US Government sues the item of property, not the person; the owner is effectively a third party claimant. Once the government establishes probable cause that the property is subject to forfeiture, the owner must prove on a “preponderance of the evidence” that it is not. The owner need not be judged guilty of any crime.”
If the data thieves don’t end up in court, then does this mean e-mail archives in general are fair game for worldwide publication?
We’ve been told that there is no real privacy on the Internet — what if it’s true? “If you could read anyone’s complete email archives, completely safe from legal punishment, which archives would those be?” The question is bound to bring a dreamy expression to the thoughtful person’s face. It’s even rather Biblical: Luke 12:3 “Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.” Hackers, start your engines.
2. A financial “bubble” is usually thought of as a thin skin of substance surrounding … nothing. But no real-world bubble surrounds nothing — if there was nothing inside, it would be a droplet, not a bubble.
So what inflates a financial bubble? And when the bubble collapses, what happens to the “filler?”
3. The missing phrase in discussing taxes is “for what?” High taxes in themselves are no burden. Low taxes in themselves are no comfort. Arguing tax size without addressing its use is like knitting with only one needle.
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Update: Russia and the KGB? Curiouser and curiouser.
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by Noni Mausa
Noni, if it is another country’s intelligence service that released the Climategate info, then what do you think the recourse might be?
There are reports that a subset of the emails had been released to one or more UK newspapers as early as Sept or Oct. So these emails appear to have been available for many weeks before they actually hit the internet.
Regardless, both sides of this story are not very clean ethically. Which brings up another thought about damages. If the temps are found to have been to be manipulated high, or that the scientists deliberately selected for highs, then should they not also be sued by those already damaged?
On the second point, recall that the internet was portrayed as building a global village. Well in a village no one has any privacy. Street corner cameras are like the busybodies keeping track of everyones comings and goings. The busybodies knew everyones business and gossiped about it a lot. Privacy is an artifact of a large anonymous city. Well we wanted a village and got the unintended consequence of the village.
CoRev,
I work with simulation models and I know to make them work you sometimes you have to ignore the exact results you get from statistical methods and smooth the data according to the way you think it ought to be rather then the way it is. It’s hard to get the global warmists to admit they do this too. I know they do although I don’t have proof. The emails for me show the scientists are willing to fudge results and smother results they don’t like. What bugs me the most about these guys is that if you were to ask me about why I adjusted my numbers I would give you a straight answer and it would be clear that I was not trying to fix the results. It seems the global scientists as a cultural defect lack the same candor.
3. The missing phrase in discussing taxes is “for what?” High taxes in themselves are no burden. Low taxes in themselves are no comfort. Arguing tax size without addressing its use is like knitting with only one needle.
This is wrong thinking since tax is always a burden or cost and the real question is the benefit worth the cost. Also arguing tax size and addressing its use without addressing who benefits and who does not not is still knitting with only one needle (not letting circular needles spoil the metaphor).
Taxes well-used are balanced so far in the other direction that the “burden” is one you would gladly embrace rather than deal with the loss of what it bought. When I am curled up in bed at 4 AM listening to the snow plows go past, I do not pine and whine over the tax dollars that paid for them. When I go to the clinic and see all the people waiting for their appointments, I don’t tot up the room and say to myself, “Bah! There’s $3,200 I won’t see again soon!”
Funny how the words “village” and “tribal” have done a complete flip in the past few years. At one time we thought of the cosy, interconnected village, you know the kind it takes to raise a child? and the interconnected, responsible tribe of people who all knew each other and (at least theoretically) were accountable to them. It’s been the crazy American right that flipped “tribal” for me, into an image of self-absorbed fierce loyalty to the group transcending reason, charity or even attention to the eventual effects of their immediate aims.
Noni
It is perfectly rational to tot up the cost versus benefit of a tax, as Cantab suggests. Where it gets tough is defining the specific benefit that would justify the tax. Does someone else’s Medicare benefit me? I think it does because in an equitable society people have access to health care. I am a real fan of equitable benefits generally available to everyone for that reason. Others, however, want a quid pro quo direct personal benefit. So, no Medicare for them, no benefit, and get your filthy paws off my bank account. When you put it that way, sounds like what we need in America from time to time is a return to a notion of the common good. It would be nice. Of course, then we wouldn’t have anything to argue about here. 😉 NO
I’d suggest the correct metaphor for a bubble is that a gas is mistaken for a liquid. It works on multiple levels.
Nancy,
Sounds like what we need in America from time to time is a return to a notion of the common good. It would be nice.
Individualism summed up is the common good.
“Many of you are too young to remember, but in 1975 our government pushed “the coming ice age.”…..
“In 1974, the National Science Board announced: “During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end…leading into the next ice age.”
http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/03/climate-science-gore-intelligent-technology-sutton.html
“What are the global warming grunts going to do now that the Apostles of the Holy Church of Climatology have been busted for cooking the “truth” (I believe the exact word they used was “tricking” us) so that we the sheeple would step-n-fetch to their Chicken Little crap? “
http://townhall.com/columnists/DougGiles/2009/12/05/it%E2%80%99s_got_to_suck_to_be_a_climavangelist!
noni
i think you may be biting the wrong leg on this. if it was exxon who had been hacked and we saw them fudging the data we would be justly outraged and grateful for the hack.
climate science is too robust to depend on what came out of east anglia. aside from the aid and comfort it gives to the denialists, including out silly congress, this is no big deal. certainly not a reason to shoot the messenger.
hasn’t usually worked out that way. in fact it’s only the maunderings of a third rate writer out of russia that has given the idea any popularity at all.
human evolution, as such, began when we learned how to cooperate. there are of course dangers in cooperation, but the answer is not and never has been radical individualism… except maybe in Hollywood westerns designed to appeal to the eight year old in all of us.
nancy
you are right, but unlikely to persuade the cantabs of the world. with medicare, or single payer medical care a sufficient answer is that it’s insurance. we don’t pay in “in order to” benefit the less fortunate. we pay in in case we become the less fortunate.
of course you may right point out that also is unlikely to persuade the cantabs of the world who really think they are rugged individualists and get nothing from the rest of us but what they pay cash for.
Cantab
I realize you don’t realize you are merely repeating Noni’s point. Only the word “burden” throws you off.
There is a legitimate issue in making sure your taxes buy something worth the cost. You won’t always be the prime, or immediate, beneficiary. But the benefits of living in a society are such that in the first place what benefits someone else indirectly benefits you, and your turn to be the prime beneficiary will come. It’s called politics.
And while it might be useful to argue with you about any specific tax/benefit, it is tedious and stupid to argue that “taxes” are a “burden” and somehow a cosmic injustice.
As long as you think it’s fair to tax people to support “defense,” you have to accept the fact that they may want to tax themselves and you to defend themselves and you from things like catastrophic illness, or impoverished old age, or temporary unemployment. These are all ways that people work together to solve problems that individuals cannot solve on their own. And your silly protestations that rugged individualism will take care of everythign are just the latest version of “me”ism which has been recognzed as the religion of the devil for as long as people have lived in social groups larger than one.
Eh??!!??? Dale shows his ignorance once again with this: “…climate science is too robust to depend on what came out of east anglia.” Leessee, the basic temp data, the source of much of the dendro-paleological data, and archive for much of the worldwide raw temp data. So if AGW/CC is about warming? Then E Anglia has a robust position re: maintiaaning that data, If the short term paleo-dendro proxy data and several of the scientists wh have analyzed it is are associated with E Anglia, then E Anglia has a robust position re: Climate Change/AGW.
So, no Dale. Climategate has severely, negatively altered the value of climate science, and made climate scientists far less robust than before.
Science is NOT destroying data, smearing peers or, using tricks to hide evidence. If it’s not science, it’s fraud. But, by all means let us instead think about how to shut up the criminals who exposed fraud. In the US I believe our whistleblower statutes are more relevant than wikipedia.
BTW…NASA apparently likes to play with data to ‘hide the decline’
NASA was caught with its thermometers down when James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, announced that 1998 was the country’s hottest year on record, with 2006 the third hottest.
NASA and Goddard were forced to correct the record in 2007 to show that 1934, decades before the advent of the SUV, was in fact the warmest. In fact, the new numbers showed that four of the country’s 10 warmest years were in the 1930s.
Hansen, who began the climate scare some two decades ago, was caught fudging the numbers again in declaring October 2008 the warmest on record. This despite the fact that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
Scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on that October’s readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running. Was Hansen, like his CRU counterpart Michael Mann, trying to “hide the decline” in temperatures?
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=514429
co-rev
i guess ignorance is in the mind of the beholder. tell your story to the Russians dealing with melting permafrost.
you see, what “robust” means is that data is coming in from all over the place that confirms the hypothesis, and one or two sources of bad data do not affect the final result.
Most of us having no experience in a real village did not consider the full extent of what a village meant, both good and bad. I more think that the whole issue will prove an excellent example of the law of be careful what you ask for you might get it! (or the law of unintended consequences). We asked for a village and we got it.
jeffery
you must have a really low opinion of “science” if you think that every scientist in the world is going to change his mind because of what one NASA dude says. wanting to believe something so bad you close your eyes to the facts, and refuse to learn the science, is not good mental hygiene.
And, yet you still believe every catastrophic story that is printed by the press. Yes, the temps are rising! Yes, soem areas may even release soem ore methane than before, but where’s the evidence that it is catastrophic? Esxpecially when the temps are in question?
Dale, we have all been duped by only seeing one side of the story. Only in the next few years will we see the rest of that story. Only in the next few years will the furor drop. But, I am concerned that the damage is already done to the youngsters.
There wll be a small remainder that stay believers in AGW, but there will be many more who will question science and scientists. That is the tragedy.
Dale said : “you see, what “robust” means is that data is coming in from all over the place that confirms the hypothesis” I am interestied to know just which hypothesis is being confirmed?
Dale, we have all been duped by only seeing one side of the story. Only in the next few years will we see the rest of that story. Only in the next few years will the furor drop. But, I am concerned that the damage is already done to the youngsters.
There wll be a small remainder that stay believers in AGW, but there will be many more who will question science and scientists. That is the tragedy.
Ummm…So you say EVERY scientist believes in AGW? Cite please and, use the definition of the scientific method. Since NASA supplied the temperature datasets for many researchers it might be relevant.![[*]](http://physics.ucr.edu/physapps/local/share/lib/latex2html/icons.gif/foot_motif.gif)
belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence, does not determine whether a scientific theory is adopted or discarded.
The great advantage of the scientific method is that it is unprejudiced: one does not have to believe a given researcher, one can redo the experiment and determine whether his/her results are true or false. The conclusions will hold irrespective of the state of mind, or the religious persuasion, or the state of consciousness of the investigator and/or the subject of the investigation. Faith, defined as
A theory is accepted not based on the prestige or convincing powers of the proponent, but on the results obtained through observations and/or experiments which anyone can reproduce: the results obtained using the scientific method are repeatable. In fact, most experiments and observations are repeated many times (certain experiments are not repeated independently but are repeated as parts of other experiments). If the original claims are not verified the origin of such discrepancies is hunted down and exhaustively studied.
http://physics.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/Notes_www/node6.html#SECTION02121000000000000000
Coberly,
If one of your points is that regardless of what the emails say on global warming they don’t prove that temperatures are not rising then I agree with you. But what is not in question is that several of the Scientists in the emails acted unethically and the sum total or their work product can’t be considered the product of ethithical scientists following the the scientific method.
Cantab they are trying to explain exactly what you are saying here, they are using ‘trick’ in exactly the same way you are using ‘ignore the exact results’ and ‘smooth the data’, it is people like CoRev who have the visual and cognitive defect that apparently doesn’t allow them to understand how Kuhnian Normal Science operates on a day to day basis.
This whole episode is an illustration of why you can’t explain science to absolutists who start from a position of revealed knowledge and work backwards to their conclusion.
Your comment seems to sum up as “Okay for me because I am on the side of the angels, but bad for them”.
Extreme individualism summed up is anarchy. Or sociopathy.
No man is an island.
Hmmmmmm if the benefit is worth the cost.(which we no doubt have determined is exactly the case with many taxes)……………..then it is a purchase and not a burden. Great job of refuting your own point cantab.
How dare you accuse Noni of wrong thinking when you cant even think your way around burdens, costs and benefits.
That was waaaaaaaay too easy.
One group in the UK, whether or not they are relied upon by an office of the UN are not the “Apostles of the Holy Church of Climatology”. That is just a wingnut construct. There are climate scientests around the world not directly associated with this particular group.
Individualism summed up is the common good.
Yes, but only when you define common good as “However it is after you sum up the individualism”
Thats the modern American conservative trick. Assume WE are the best and then assume however we got here is the only way to get here.
cantab
well i guess i agree with that, though i don’t know that the emails show unethical science. not that they don’t. i just don’t know that they do. meanwhile, as Bruce points out,there are lots of other scientists.
jeffery
i agree with the long last part of your letter. as to “every scientist” i’ll leave the burden on you to prove there are any credible climate scientists who doubt man made global warming. it happens that i am rather close to someone who goes out and does research that demonstrates global warming by a measure that does not depend on anybody’s “temperature data.”
Problem Jeffery
If scientist A goes out and does his temp measurements around the globe and comes up with data points. How does scientist B reproduce it? Does he use his own measurement method and go out on different days or does he just sit back and say to scientist A “Those numbers are wrong” ?
If scientist B wants to do his own set of new data points he can but they will NOT be in anything remotely close to the exact same conditions. The data by definition cannot be reproducible in this instance. Measurements on a tuesday in Jan will be different from measurements on a thursday in march. Does he then simply use scientist A data points and apply them to his own new model? Does this model assume the same basics as scientist A? What coefficient does he assign to CO2 absorption? Does he even factor in CO2? If he doesnt, what scientific evidence does he have that CO2 shouldnt be in the model?
Your asking for something completely unreasonable in this case. One CANNOT do a reproducible experiment like one can in some fields.
~! gold star !~
Actually, what I was thinking is that those who crow over the theft and release of these private letters, will likely sing a different tune when their heroes’ letters are dug out and posted just as widely. My knitting needles click a little quicker, for instance, anticipating the Cheney archives.
Bruce, stick to your subject(s). On this one you are totally wrong.
CoRev
i have been behaving myself today mostly. “you are totally wrong” is not an argument. nor, i humbly suggest, are you in a position to know.
Greg
well, likely one cannot go back and remeasure the temperatures at the same time and place, but when different folk in different places get the same trends, and when other evidence … melting glaciers, melting permafrost, migration of species, etc… confirms the trend, one has the equivalent of “reproducible.”
Dale, you just do not understand the importance of what these scientists had published over the past 1 – 1 1/2 decades. Their work is the core support for the AGW theory. It is determined not only to be developed unethically, but to have been in some ways falsified. Therefore, the support is seriously diminshed, as much of the material from many of the other climate scientists wa
s based upon their seminal work.
You really should read the most recent materials.
Greg, you are completely wrong on the approach. Climate is based upon long term (temporal and spacial) looks at weather data. So climatology is the study of those changes.
In one sense you are correct, one can not replicat weather.
Folks, read this article. It is one of the best basic explantions of what the “Team” was doing to the data, and how it was applied.
American Thinker: Understanding Climategate’s Hidden Decline
Noni, a weak argument. Is it just annoyance at being wrong?
Noni, a weak argument. Is it just annoyance at being wrong? The evidence is overwhelming at just how badly these ?scientists? acted.
The actual prooof? The UK Met Office is recalculating all its world temperature records. It will take three years, and it is promised to be an “open” process. Here’s hoping.
I hope at least the anarchists show up at Copenhagen.
Dale said: “… but when different folk in different places get the same trends,…” same trends of what? Reprodiciable in climate science is to use the same data, programs, slection methods, any other decison making methods and then getting identical results. The data, progams, and all theothers info was not made available. Therefore, not reproducable, since the basics were not availabe for outside confirmation.
You see making all those things avaliable to outside verifiers to replicate your work and then having it verified/replicated is the core of the scientific method. All else is personal opinion, and definitely not science.
Some old geezers’ medicare certainly benefits a young person.
The last emergency I had on the basketball court I ended up sharing a room with an 80 odd year old man.
He had many more trips to the hospital and most of the beds were there were filled (for) folks on medicare.
Which pays the bills fairly regularly not like us young folk who take the risk and hope there is a bed there when needed about .001% of my time.
Medicare contributes to the funding of health care, which when needed is a public benefit.
Medicaid may also be such a financer of health care that makes it better available to the corporate insured, the self insured and the indigent.
That would have been Jerry Ford……………..
Cantab,
Bruce is right. That’s exactly what the climate scientists have been saying. And they made no secret of this in some of the published literature. Raw data is usually next to useless and frequently dangerous. And it’s not just because of bad or missing data. You have to adjust because instrument readings have a tendency to drift, they can vary by longitude and latitude, or altitude. Data may have to be seasonally adjusted, and this usually means that you have to graft different data sets onto one another after adjusting for the different base periods used to establish seasonality parameters. And when you deseasonalize you also have to detrend, but how you detrend can emphasize or de-emphasize turning points. You have to do this kind of stuff even if you do it honestly. Anyone who works with real world data knows that no two equally skilled time series analysts would always arrive at the same model. You’re always trading off one problem in the data against another.
CoRev,
That was an extraordinarily dishonest article. First, the chart that they showed in the 1990 IPCC was not the established view. Not by a long shot. The 1990 chart was notional based on some intuitions about temperatures in northern Europe. The text of the 1990 report even said that it was not intended to represent a definite opinion on the medieval warming period. In fact, the 1990 report noted that evidence at the time suggested temperatures were colder than normal in east Asia. Second, the long run temperature record going back to 1000 might be interesting to historians, but it is a secondary issue with regard to manmade global warming. The fact that temperatures may or may not have been higher a 1000 years ago due to natural forces is not terribly relevant to whether temperatures are increasing today due to manmade greenhouse gases. The entire “hockey stick” debate has never been central to the issue of man induced global warming. It’s pretty much of a sideshow. It’s probably important to those scientists that study medieval temperatures, but it is irrelevant to the issue of global warming.
CoRev,
No, you are wrong. You are confusing climate science with data gathering and data analysis. Climate science is based on physics. Climate science is not an exercise in time series analysis. Scientists use data measurements to estimate parameters in the physical models.
***Cantab they are trying to explain exactly what you are saying here, they are using ‘trick’ in exactly the same way you are using ‘ignore the exact results’ and ‘smooth the data’,***
Ahem, No … You need to read the email in question. Here’s the header and first few sentances:
From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
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. …
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7810
These dudes are not talking about a cute data analysis technique. It’s hard not to conclude that they are discussing dressing up a chart for presentation to the public. Their chart and a chart without the ‘trick’ are at the link.
Frankly, durrent “climate science” looks to me to be entirely too much like “technical stock market analysis” which appears to consist mostly of otherwise intelligent people devoting a lot of effort to attempting to tease patterns out of white noise.
Bruce,
My point is that when you start smoothing statistics results you are leaving hard fact based science behind and replacing it with expert or at least informed opinion. I have not been digging into their models so maybe they are telling us that they do this up front, but I have not heard it from them. So it seems to me they should be a little more humble with their results and all this in your face we have the science fact guys behind us ought to go too.
On my being on the side of the angels, yes I am. I don’t fudge results and have never been pressured to. The global warming scientists are in the fish bowl and have made Faustian deal in accepting money from people that want certain results. They are pressured by peers with political bias. These are facts and its the responsability of the universities they’re associated with the insist they maintain the highest ethical standards. I actually thing that all the global warming scientists should be required attent ethics classes that insist on independence.
Slugs,
There’s a lot a asymmetrical pressure in this game. What happens if your expert judgment produces a results that makes global warming look managable and no big deal. How do you think your going to do next grant time? What’s the chance of getting published in the journals controlled by the science nazis who were the subject of emailgate.
There is nothing about individualism the excludes voluntary cooperation.
2slugs, nice descrition of how to clean up raw data for processing. Now explain the process for selecting sites. Explain the removal of decades long data to be replaced by higher valued measurement data. The when finished with all that, exolain why alder data is repeatedly modified to be lower, and later data raised. Once you fininsed with explaining that about the measurement dats, let’s atart workin on Biffa’s magical tree, and Mann’s selection routines that generated data outputs that always resuted in hockey stick graphs.
After reviewing and explaining all those minor nuances to data processing in the climatology sciences we can get down to the S/W codes that do all that procressing. But of course after doing all that we need to get/develop the methods used to splice the different datasets.
Now that we are getting close to having a working dataset, we can try to replicate their original results. No replication? Then we start over, item by item. Over and over and over, until we get close to the original results. But, being close is not relicating the approach. It is just doing what they have been doing. Manipulating the data to fit a preconceived picture. Your kind of science.
So, you and Bruce can try to explain away the ethical issues, but you both know you are just spreading BS.
***Individualism summed up is the common good.***
A society where everybody does what he or she damn well pleases is what Thomas Hobbes called the “natural state”
“The life of man in the natural state is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
2slugs, for heavens sake do some basic research. Climatology is the study of climate, scientifically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of time,[1] and is a branch of the atmospheric sciences.
Need I quote your previous about time series data analysis? Lessee, we have been talking about 150-160 years of temp data. 150-160 years = time. Temperature data is actually multiple series. Nearly all the Paleo-climatology is done on time series. So, we can safely say that the Climategate scientists were doing time series analysis, and not very well when they were not fudging the data.
What the heck was that about?
2slugs said: “ …whether temperatures are increasing today due to manmade greenhouse gases.” Who other than you have made that argument? You are arguing with yourself, even again.
You call the article dishonest with a statement like that? You actually repeat what the article was saying re: this was the start of the deception for lowering then eliminating the MWP and the LIA. And above all, you forget who were the authors of that section of AR1.
Couldn’t find the last post re the Knox case but here, just as I predicted, Hillary is shoving her nose into the matter making it a foreign policy issue. Obviously you can’t convict an American of anything outside the US. Americans are exempt from world justice. The “get away with anything” empire.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6744602/Meredith-Kercher-trial-Hillary-Clinton-to-meet-senator-campaigning-for-Amanda-Knox.html
The US richly deserves to be slapped down time and again by the rest of the world for its insufferable insolence.
By the year 2050 according to U.S. Census population projects the population of the United States will be around 43 percent larger then it is today.
The population bomb is ticking while our politicians and their scientists dither over carbon.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/downloadablefiles.html
Comments at the top of posts frighten and confuse me.
It is certainly true that there is no privacy on the internet. There could well be poorly configured systems out there bouncing around packets from day zero, and they’re certainly not encrypted.
Even presuming encryption, once you have the data (getting it is not the problem), it’s just a matter of time until the contents are sussed out.
What privacy there is comes from the sheer quantity of data and how much of it might potentially be interesting. It’s the crime vs punishment issue (not saying that the internet is full of crime, although it probably has about as much as any other social system worth examining). People take actions, but most of it is done away from sight. The problem on the internet is that the data potentially never goes away, even if it is transient (IMs, etc), it’s recorded somewhere and generally logged for some period of time, which means that it existed on some type of magnetic media, which means that you can potentially recover that log and examine the information. It’s the world’s greatest paper trail.
I still haven’t looked at these emails. I’m not a climate scientist, but I am a critical thinker, so even if two people were colluding to create misleading data (and adjusting data is not necessarily an indication of that), I wouldn’t most likely jump to the conclusion that there was a global conspiracy to clean up the atmosphere of pollutants (and if there was, would I care?)
“Nature trick” probably refers to a journal published technique (presumably in the journal Nature) by Michael Hughes. Maybe one of these: http://www.ecrc.ucl.ac.uk/index.php/content/view/36/95/1/1/
Let’s see……
1) There is no ACO2 global warming:
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11732
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11767
2) Yet……… the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce today an “endangerment” finding on carbon and other greenhouse gasses, which would allow the Obama administration to impose restrictions on carbon emmissions even if “cap and trade” cannot get passed through Congress. http://spectator.org/blog/2009/12/07/epa-ruling-paves-way-for-regul
See, it isn’t about climate. It’s about power. Same with health care. I can’t believe you guys just willingly submit to this.
Sammy,
I can’t believe you guys just willingly submit to this.
If you submit the liberals will say you’re a fine fellow — this does it for some people.
Greg,
It may be a trick of modern American conservatives, but it certainly didn’t start with them. Voltaire parodied Pope’s “what is is right” with his “best of all possible worlds”. Divine Right was just a way of validating the current order of things. The taboo on shedding the blood of kings was another. When Moses had backsliders speared or forced to drink the molten remains of the Golden Calf, you can bet everybody got the message – know your place or die.
But yeah, these new kids are pretty good at the trick. Doublethink, and historical revisionism, too.
VT,
Holy Sh*t! Something we can agree on……Amazing!
sammy,
I think you’re confused. The concern back in the 1970s about global cooling was based on something quite different and in fact actually assumed that CO2 emissions would counteract the effects of global cooling. Back in the 1960s and 1970s the air was extemely dirty and the concern was that particles in the atmosphere would radiate solar energy back into space. I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember this or not, but it was not uncommon for televised sports events to be so blocked out with smog and particulate matter in the air that you could not see the game. CO2 in the atmosphere was seen as a life saver because the greenhouse effect counteracted this trend. The cooling effect of particulates in the atmosphere may have been overstated in the 1970s, but what they were talking about was a different phenomenon and it did not conflict with today’s theory of greenhouse gases leading to global warming. The difference is that back then it was thought that one effect outweighed the other.
CoRev,
Actually Gulledge says essentially the same thing. As does the NRC.
The article was dishonest because it failed to note that the authors of AR1 characterized their own chart as a cartoon version of history. Their point in 1990 was that MWP was a stylized fact surrounded by conflicting information. There was next to no data to support the belief in a MWP.
VtCodger,
Ummm…no. Sorry, but you’ve got it wrong. It’s pretty clear from the context that they are using the word “trick” to mean a handy-dandy transformation mechanism in the same way that a mathematician might refer to Euler’s formula as a neat “trick” for solving certain kinds of differential equations. Or the way a time series analyst might teach a naive software user some neat math “tricks” for equating exponential smoothing factors to base periods. The “trick” was hardly some well hidden secret.
CoRev,
Explain the removal of decades long data to be replaced by higher valued measurement data. The when finished with all that, exolain why alder data is repeatedly modified to be lower, and later data raised. Once you fininsed with explaining that about the measurement dats, let’s atart workin on Biffa’s magical tree, and Mann’s selection routines that generated data outputs that always resuted in hockey stick graphs.
That’s only half the problem. I think everyone agrees that Mann’s 98 and 99 methodology was flawed in the way he weighted principal component data by improperly centering the weights. That is a problem. But you also have to finish the job by doing a sensitivity analysis to see if the error makes much difference. And as it turns out it was all much ado about nothing. M&M’s critique of Mann’s centering technique is correct…Mann’s approach did introduce bias. But several studies have demonstrated that rerunning Mann’s data using the correct weighting procedure gives very similar results.
Now that we are getting close to having a working dataset, we can try to replicate their original results.
I’m assuming you are referring here to the baseline instrumental temperature readings that Mann (as well as M&M) used to calibrate their proxy variables. If that’s what you mean, then you’re clinging to some might thin threads. Sensitivity analyses on Mann’s corrected procedures show that the results are pretty robust to any plausible range of data refinements. I’m afraid that you’re laboring under the delusion that somehow the Met Office’s recalculation is going to completely upend global warming. You’re kidding yourself.
Cantab
it’s not clear to me that you would even know when you were fudging data. Even here you are making a hideous logical error “some, therefore all.” Trust me, the climate data is bigger than a few idiots trying to gild the lily.
Cantab
“voluntary cooperation” will not work on the national scale. people will always find a reason why “they” should not have to pay a tax for some social need.
So what inflates a financial bubble? And when the bubble collapses, what happens to the “filler?”
what inflates it is people wanting to make a huge profit in the worst way
the “filler” goes away with the people who made a huge profit in the worst way.
Jim,
You sound like someone with an inferiority complex.
CoRev,
You said:
Climatology is the study of climate, scientifically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of time
and before that you said:
Climate is based upon long term (temporal and spacial) looks at weather data.
You seem to think that those two statements mean the same thing. They don’t. Climate science is very interested in the latter, not so interested in the former. The difference is the spatial element. It’s another vector. The spatial element is supposed to help understand the geophysics of climate change on regions and that regional understanding should inform a more global understanding.
The objective is not to just gather historical temperatures for the sake of gathering historical temperatures. The MWP is not in and of itself important, unless you’re a medieval historian by profession. The central problem is that we would like to have data temperature and other climate data (e.g., rainfall, ocean currents, etc.) to help us gauge the climate’s response to CO2 changes. The physics of global warming is well understood; what’s not well understood are the model parameters. Since we don’t have reliable instrument readings that are more than 150 years, we have to settle for proxy data. The point of the instrument and proxy data is to help us better estimate model parameters. In other words, temperatue and proxy data gathering plays a supporting role in understanding model parameters, but the central role is in the geophysics.
Jim,
Hillary is shoving her nose into the matter making it a foreign policy issue.
I’m hardly a Hillary Clinton fan, but this is just a gross mischaracterization. Yesterday on Meet the Press she was asked about the Knox case and she said that she really hadn’t spent anytime looking into the issue. It just wasn’t something that was on her radar. I taker her at her word on that. She then said that Sen. Cantwell had asked to speak to her about the Foxy Knoxy case and Clinton said that she would listen to Sen. Cantwell’s concerns. And that’s about all there was to the story.
2slugs said: “ The “trick” was hardly some well hidden secret.” Exactly! The trick was to replace ~50 years of treering data with measurement data. Why? The treering data was diverging from the measurements. So, since we have our story supported with the treerings until 1960, and the same story is better supported by the other data let’s use that other data. That is blatant cherry picking.
It was not a simple math trick!
How does one falsify a theory when most of the support is cherry picked? When your own data is falsifying your theory what do we do? Change data! Now that’s science.
Anyone consider that the treering data was perhaps only coincidentally following the measured data? Oh wait! We still have that ole magic tree. What was it 2slugs 5 or 6 sigma out? How do we define an outlier? We don’t when it supports the story we want.
2slugs you completely missed the point or are deliberately ignoring it. I was trying to explain how replicating the original study outputs is impossible without all the original data, processes, and selection methods used. Even then it is unlikely to be identical. Without them the relicator is forced to guess and try to match the original results, which is not science.
Theories can never be proven. They can only be falsified. Successful replication will support the theory, only until it is falsified with future data scientific information. Over time a supported theory is accepted as probably true, but not proven.
You also made this claim: “ But several studies have demonstrated that rerunning Mann’s data using the correct weighting procedure gives very similar results.” Rerunning Mann’s 98 data? The same data the the NSC recommended not ever be used? You did know that?
Wrong again 2slugs. Try reading this 1974 CIA report. http://omniclimate.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/world-exclusive-cia-1974-document-reveals-emptiness-of-agw-scares-closes-debate-on-global-cooling-consensus-and-more/
Its a pretty good summary of what the scientific thinking was in the 70s. More importantly it shows that the same arguments were used as today.
2slugs, you have been really, really reaching at straws. You actually believe those two satements of mine were significantly different? Sheesh!
Moreover, this is one of those HUH!!!!?? statements: “The physics of global warming is well understood; what’s not well understood are the model parameters.” Lessee, since we fully understand the physics of climate then you are saying the models are not using them? Or are not using them correctly disproving your first statement, or totally misunderstanding the physics?
We’ve had this discussion over the value of the models. When the IPCC is forced to run 20+ different models, average their results and then print a report with significant error bars, definitely proves how well the physics of climate science is understood. If the physics wee wellunderstood, then one model would suffice. Multiple runs with different parameter settings would be the normal response for testing sensitivities. But, using 20+ different models, tells us the physics is far from well understood.
Please use the mickey Mouse straws, they are more colorful, than the ones you are currently using. I’m sorry for being so snarky, but these past several comments have been so far off the wall to amaze.
CoRev,
Mann’s results were replicated by the NRC. The fact that M&M weren’t able to replicate it does not mean others weren’t.
CoRev,
2slugs, you have been really, really reaching at straws. You actually believe those two satements of mine were significantly different? Sheesh!
Yes, they are very different. The NRC authors make quite a point emphasizing the difference.
The basic physics that drives global warming is nothing new and is based on earth’s energy budget. If we know how much energy is received by the earth and we know how much is radiated out, then the difference didn’t just disappear. That’s the basic physics that I’m talking about. How that energy is distributed is not known and that is what climate science tries to explain.
Care to provide a link? M&M did replicate his results. Who wouldn’t have using his methods/codes?
CoRev,
It just occurred to me that it is highly unlikely that you would have used the words “temporal and spacial” [sic] all on your own. Those are words that are used very narrowly in the climate science literature. There is a reason why they say “temporal and spatial” and not just “temporal.” Temporal data is one dimiensional time series data that does not account for more local effects. For example, a strictly temporal look at climate data would not recognize a cooling effect in southeast Asian tropical regions that was offset by a warming in North America. This would reduce climate science to just a useless exercise in time series analysis. A lot of climate science literature devotes a lot of electrons to maintaining the importance of a “temporal and spatial” model…you usually see the word “eigenvectors” alongside that phrase as well, but that’s another story. So I seriously doubt that you just used the phrase “temporal and spatial” all on your own. It’s more likely that you came across the phrase somewhere and thought it sounded good but you really didn’t understand that it is quite different than just plain old “temporal.”
2slugs, huh? If that’s the physics you are relying upon, then yes that’s been well understood. Its meaningless for understanding climate, as you note: “ How that energy is distributed is not known and that is what climate science tries to explain. ” Sigh!!!! Well understood, huh?
The NRC report was a sad circling of the wagons around a fellow scientist being attacked by that outsider. I wonder what they would say today?
corev
i can’t say you are deliberately missing the point. but you have a constitutional inability to see the point. there are thousands of research papers that (tend to) confirm global warming. they neither depend on reproducing the results now in question, nor do they need to.
even in a perfectly well controlled physics experiment you can’t go back and reproduce everything exactly, including the time at which the experiment was done. this is an extreme point meant to convey the idea that a a confirming experiment, and more important thousands of confirming “experiments” do not have to exactly replicate some prior, questionable, work. Even Gregor Mendel is supposed to have fudged some of his numbers. Are we therefore to throw out the science of genetics?
Cantab
are you volunteering to get off?
Dale, can’t be more speicific? “there are thousands of research papers that (tend to) confirm global warming.” Either they do or do not confirm the globe is warming Global warming is a theory of ….? Or this planet, the Earth, has warmed and cooled? Can’t you make a more specific point?
I asked you in another thread which theory to which you were referring? I am still waiting for that answer, so that your position(s) is understandable.
Starting off a comment with this kind of personal attack: “i can’t say you are deliberately missing the point. but you have a constitutional inability to see the point.” does not strengthen your point.
2slugs, you do realize you just reworded my first definition? Remember making this statement: “Climate science is based on physics. ” and then this one: “If we know how much energy is received by the earth and we know how much is radiated out, then the difference didn’t just disappear. That’s the basic physics that I’m talking about.” Basic is right!
I asked the other day if you wanted to discuss TSI? But, that is not the “basic” issue. We are not a black body and do not radiate all of the received energy back in any specific period. So maybe some of that physic might be a little less defined. Y’ano, the physics of climate.
I will repeat, even again, the message of Climategate. We have been shown only one side of the discussion. That side appears to have been exagerated, and/or fudged. We all have been making decisions based on only that information supporting that one side.
* grin*
2slugs, if you had just followed the link (climate) in the second attempt to define it for you, then the whole thing may have been clearer for you. Sheesh! Keep splitting those hairs.
Whidh is why lawyers say never write anything down. Since putting it on the internet is equivalent to writing the same applies. In the old days every so often a letter leaked from the intended recipient to others, and sometimes a duel resulted, or a politician got defeated. Now in one sense in 200 years it will be interesting to see what historians make of our email will they be able to devine our thinking as well as todays historians have the founding fathers?? (Ignoring little technical questions of whether or not any machine will exist that can read the data)
Nice job, Noni! Got us talkin, Eh?