Climategate n+1
No, no, no. You have it all wrong. The climate models*, upon which much has been spent, were never meant to be accurate.
I have rated the potential impact in the field as high, but I have to emphasise that this would be a strongly negative impact, as it does not clarify anything but puts up the (false) claim of some big inconsistency, where no consistency was to be expected in the first place.
Except, of course, when used as a basis for public policy and taxpayer funding. Then they’re the Holy Writ.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Dear readers, I wanted to do something special for my hundredth post at this site. I picked out a great topic for discussion. I wrote a post with clever prose, jokes that’d make your stomach ache from laughter and even some insightful commentary. Unfortunately, I can’t post it because I’d get sued.
You see, I wanted to talk about the Cook et al data I recently came into possession of. I wanted to talk about the reaction by Cook et al to me having this data. I can’t though. The University of Queensland has threatened to sue me if I do.
I Amuse Myself
Can we get a retweet? How 'bout it @ElizabethMay? RT @thetimes Tomorrow's Times (Scotland) front page #scotpapers pic.twitter.com/HpPtO3bFyC
— Katewerk (@katewerk) May 15, 2014
The Sound Of Silenced Science
There is no such thing as “climate science”.
I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen.
It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expecting anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years. Under these situation I will be unable to contribute positively to the work of GWPF and consequently therefore I believe it is the best for me to reverse my decision to join its Board at the earliest possible time.
There is only The Cult. Steyn has related commentary. Quite a lot of it, actually.
Y2Kyoto: How To Raise A Well Adjusted Temperature Record
…adjustments to the temperature record are increasing – dramatically. The present is getting warmer, the past is getting cooler, and it has nothing to do with real temperature data – only adjustments to temperature data. The climate reality our government is living in is little more than a self-serving construct.
Y2Kyoto: Cooking The Climate
What Would We Do Without Peer Review?
“Want your, er, highly innovative research to get lots of attention, the sort that keeps those grants coming? You could do worse than start with some kind words from a peer-reviewer whose work is glowingly cited in your own paper. After that, apply for the next batch of grants.”
Mann Overboard
Wait, who?
…skeptics of climate change have filed requests for Mann’s emails under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. (Mann is an influential climatologist whose work has bolstered the case for man-made global warming.) So far, they have lost. And they have lost so badly that media organizations have sat up, taken notice — and filed a brief in the case.
The Virginia Supreme Court is weighing whether a professor’s emails are, as a Prince William County circuit court ruled, “proprietary” and therefore exempt from the state’s FOIA. The lower court ruled that proprietary records are those “owned or in possession of one who manages and controls them.” This has alarmed the media organizations, including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the AP, the Newspaper Association of America, Reuters, Atlantic Media and several others.
The media groups note that the lower court’s ruling “literally writes into the exemption the very definition of a public record in Virginia. … Under the lower court’s definition, no public university record would qualify for release under VFOIA because all university documents are presumably ‘things’ and would be ‘owned or in the possession of’ the university.”
(Emphasis mine.)
Y2Kyoto: About that data
It’s always about the discovery process.
So, forget Steyn’s case – the court victories that count, in terms of the scientific (and political) consequences, are entirely due to Tim Ball. By tenaciously and bravely defending his actions for three long years the mild-mannered septaugenarian has single-handedly proved that the very core of government climate science is junk. Thereby, this instance of ‘science on trial’ is no less significant, in the broadest sociatal context, as the infamous Scope’s Monkey Trial of 1925.
Edit: This seems to be in dispute. Use a load of salt. It was put up on request by Kate, and as I don’t follow the lawsuits, I can’t comment.
Free Mark Steyn!
“If a distinguished scientist is capable of having his professional reputation damaged by a mere Shirley Temple fan, how much worse must the damage be when the scientist is defamed by a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and so-called Nobel Laureate?”
More at Bishop Hill. (link updated)
Y2Kyoto: Hide The Incline
Note that the most recent [polar bear] status table released last week, for 2013, did not include a new total — if you wanted to know if the global total had changed (and if so, by how much), you had to add the figures up yourself. Nowhere on the PBSG website does it now list an official population estimate. What’s that about?
Y2Kyoto: Hide The Decline
So I asked this taxpayer-supported university for some information: given the Texas A&M University System Records Retention Schedule, would they please provide me copies of all “destruction sign-offs (1.2.001)…[and] records disposition logs (1.2.010)”, as well as any related approvals, or submitted record disposition or destruction forms, and/or record storage forms submitted by or approved on behalf of Professor Dessler from July 15, 2012 through January 21, 2014?
The answer came back, “no records”.
So, no requests for permission to delete work-related email by the guy who boasted of deleting what sure sound like the kind of records he needs to ask permission to delete…
The Sound Of Settled Science
One of the Met Office’s most senior experts yesterday made a dramatic intervention in the climate change debate by insisting there is no link between the storms that have battered Britain and global warming.
Mat Collins, a Professor in climate systems at Exeter University, said the storms have been driven by the jet stream – the high-speed current of air that girdles the globe – which has been ‘stuck’ further south than usual.
Professor Collins told The Mail on Sunday: ‘There is no evidence that global warming can cause the jet stream to get stuck in the way it has this winter. If this is due to climate change, it is outside our knowledge.’
His statement carries particular significance because he is an internationally acknowledged expert on climate computer models and forecasts, and his university post is jointly funded by the Met Office.
Prof Collins is also a senior adviser – a ‘co-ordinating lead author’ – for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). His statement appears to contradict Met Office chief scientist Dame Julia Slingo.
Related: Climate change, or weather? This chart explains…
Free Mark Steyn!
Well, the fact that I even have to explain this shows what a cowardly, snivelling, career-safe, intellectually feeble, morally compromised age we inhabit. By rights, Mann v Steyn should be the 21st-century equivalent of the Scopes monkey trial, with believers in free speech, proponents of the scientific method and sympathetic millionaires and billionaires all piling in to Steyn’s defence with op eds, learned papers, and lavish funds to buy the hottest of hotshot lawyers.
Instead, what do I read?
The Sound Of Settled Science
A paper published today in Theoretical and Applied Climatology finds that the data homogenization techniques commonly used to adjust temperature records for moving stations and the urban heat island effect [UHI] can result in a “significant” exaggeration of warming trends in the homogenized record.
According to the authors, “Our analysis shows that “data homogenization for [temperature] stations moved from downtowns to suburbs can lead to a significant overestimate of rising trends of surface air temperature.”
The paper corroborates the prior work of Anthony Watts, Joseph D’Aleo, et al, finding leading meteorological institutions in the USA and around the world have so systematically tampered with instrumental temperature data that it cannot be safely said that there has been any significant net “global warming” in the 20th century.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Emeritus professor Garth Paltridge, former chief research scientist with the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research.
Bear in mind too that no scientist close to the problem and in his right mind, when asked the specific question, would say there is only a very small possibility (that is, less than 5 per cent) that internal ocean behaviour could be a major cause of the warming over the past half-century. He would be particularly careful not to make such a statement now that there has been no significant warming over the most recent fifteen or so years. In the mad scurry to find reasons for the pause, and to find reasons for an obvious failure of the models to simulate the pause, suddenly we are hearing that perhaps the heat of global warming is being “hidden” in the deep ocean. In other words we are being told that some internal oceanic fluctuation may have reduced the upward trend in global temperature. It is therefore more than a little strange that we are not hearing from the IPCC (or at any rate not hearing very loudly) that some natural internal fluctuation of the system may have given rise to most of the earlier upward trend.
In the light of all this, we have at least to consider the possibility that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem–or, what is much the same thing, of seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate problem–in its effort to promote the cause. It is a particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society’s respect for scientific endeavour. Trading reputational capital for short-term political gain isn’t the most sensible way of going about things.
[…]
The trap was set in the late 1970s or thereabouts when the environmental movement first realised that doing something about global warming would play to quite a number of its social agendas. At much the same time, it became accepted wisdom around the corridors of power that government-funded scientists (that is, most scientists) should be required to obtain a goodly fraction of their funds and salaries from external sources–external anyway to their own particular organisation.
The scientists in environmental research laboratories, since they are not normally linked to any particular private industry, were forced to seek funds from other government departments. In turn this forced them to accept the need for advocacy and for the manipulation of public opinion. For that sort of activity, an arm’s-length association with the environmental movement would be a union made in heaven. Among other things it would provide a means by which scientists could distance themselves from responsibility for any public overstatement of the significance of their particular research problem.
The trap was partially sprung in climate research when a number of the relevant scientists began to enjoy the advocacy business. The enjoyment was based on a considerable increase in funding and employment opportunity. The increase was not so much on the hard-science side of things but rather in the emerging fringe institutes and organisations devoted, at least in part, to selling the message of climatic doom. A new and rewarding research lifestyle emerged which involved the giving of advice to all types and levels of government, the broadcasting of unchallengeable opinion to the general public, and easy justification for attendance at international conferences–this last in some luxury by normal scientific experience, and at a frequency previously unheard of.
It’s a humdinger. Send it to every politician and media contact you know.
Y2Kyoto: Hide The Decline
Not just for hockey sticks.
In 1975, the National Academy of Sciences reported 0.5C cooling from 1940 to 1970. @nasa has since "disappeared" it. pic.twitter.com/uGnkaxLdQo
— Steve Goddard (@SteveSGoddard) January 8, 2014
Mann Overboard
Score one for the good guys.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Celebrated Physicist Calls IPCC Summary ‘Deeply Unscientific’
“The way the [Summary for Policymakers released by the IPCC] deals with uncertainties (e.g. claiming something is 95% certain) is shocking and deeply unscientific. For a scientist, this simple fact is sufficient to throw discredit on the whole summary. The SPM gives the wrong idea that one can quantify precisely our confidence in the [climate] model predictions, which is far from being the case.”
Read the whole thing.