Tag: AGW/CC

Climategate: a prediction

This time, it’s bound to be right. But when did the scientific method become: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

Copenhagen climate conference: Met Office predict 2010 will be warmest on record. A new forecast for 2010 predicted it will be almost 1F (0.6C) higher than the long term average of 57F (14C) across the globe as a result of natural weather patterns and global warming…. However skeptics point out that the Met Office said 2007 would be the warmest on record, but it was not in the top five.

A “new forecast”? One that unexpectedly predicts record heat, no less? How very timely! I have little doubt that there was a “scientific” debate at Met Office that went something like this:

Scientist #1: “We need to do something to distract the press from that $%*#($% Jones and his leaked emails.”

Scientist #2: “Well, the PR boffins said they have almost two thousand signatures on the integrity statement.”

Scientist #3: (sarcastically) “Yeah, $*%”&*($# brilliant! ‘You think we’re fabricating the data already, so we’re going to throw more data you won’t believe at you.'”

Scientist #1: “Nine out of ten scientists believe that scientists have integrity… hmmmm, that wasn’t the best idea.”

Scientist #2: “Well, they did the falling polar bears… yeah, we really need a new PR agency.”

Scientist #1: “So, what do we do?”

Scientist #3: “We tell them that next year is going to be the Ecopolypse. Hell on Earth. The hottest on record. If they’re not scared any more, then we need to crank it up to eleven. New York under water. Polar bears stalking the streets of London. Artic beach vacations.”

Scientist #2: “But models say that it’s going to be relatively cool!”

Scientist #3: “So what? When have our models ever been right? Our climate models suck so completely that Tiger hit on them at the last British Open. It’s a no-lose proposition. Sure, we’ll probably get it wrong and then we’ll have to hope the media will cover our asses. But they’ve been solid on the CRU leak, and if we get it right, we’re @*%#(%^* gold!”

Scientist #1: “Actually, if I run Mike’s Nature trick on the latest GISS numbers, it could be 0.2F hotter next year.”

Scientist #3: “&*%* that 0.2F! We need one whole $*%$&(#$*%&$*% degree. It’s got to be simple enough that every idiot dumb enough to take this $*%! literally will do a linear extrapolation and panic when they realize that in a century, it will be 100 degrees hotter!”

Scientist #2: “You really think we can get away with it?”

Scientist #3: “Why not? We did in 2007.”

The doubts mount

Even the warm-mongering faithful are beginning to experience doubts:

I can imagine a sort of selection bias in the grant process. I cannot imagine hundreds of scientists thinking, well, I put ten years into getting my PhD–time to spend the rest of my life faking data in order to get some grant money! One, yes. All of them, no….

To me, the worry is the subtler kind of bias that we indisputably know has led to scientific errors in the past.That is the actual worrying question about CRU, and GISS, and the other scientists working on paleoclimate reconstruction: that they may all be calibrating their findings to each other. That when you get a number that looks like CRU, you don’t look so hard to figure out whether it’s incorrect as you do when you get a number that doesn’t look like CRU–and maybe you adjust the numbers you have to look more like the other “known” datasets. There is always a way to find what you’re expecting to find if you look hard enough.

While I lack the sort of naive faith in human nature possessed by this so-called libertarian who voted for Obama because she believed his hype, I do think that in the majority of cases outside the CRU and company’s little circle of fraud, the bad science is most likely the result of the Millekanian process she cites Richard Feynman explaining combined with an insufficient understanding of physics, chemistry, and statistics on the part of climate scientists.

As an economics writer, I witness the complete ineptitude of scientists opining outside their field on a regular basis; indeed, I recently published a book that chronicles the astonishing amount of ineptitude of scientists opining inside their field. Given that so many scientists still refuse to accept the law of supply and demand, which has been around for more than 230 years, or the economic calculation problem, which dates back to 1920, it should come as no surprise that it will take more than 10 years of colder temperatures to convince them that they are incorrect about anthropogenic global warming/climate change.

The amusing thing is that the dear little muddle-headed white coats still think that appealing to their own authority is going to convince anyone of anything any more. They have clearly failed to understand that their corruption and fraud has cost them the larger part of their credibility in the eyes of the public. If the scientific community wants to begin working to regain the public’s respect, then it needs to return to a) using the scientific method, b) showing their work, and c) making all of the relevant information, especially the raw data, available to the public.

As it stands, the arm-twisting and politics behind the signed statement only makes the division between professional scientist and actual science appear even greater.

The Met Office has embarked on an urgent exercise to bolster the reputation of climate-change science after the furore over stolen e-mails. More than 1,700 scientists have agreed to sign a statement defending the “professional integrity” of global warming research. They were responding to a round-robin request from the Met Office, which has spent four days collecting signatures. The initiative is a sign of how worried it is that e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia are fuelling scepticism about man-made global warming at a critical moment in talks on carbon emissions.

One scientist said that he felt under pressure to sign the circular or risk losing work. The Met Office admitted that many of the signatories did not work on climate change.

Who does public relations for these blithering blunderers? And why do they think that the opinion of government-funded scientists who are obviously not in any position to discern the integrity or lack of integrity of other government-funded scientists is of any significance to anyone anyhow?

Secret Copenhagen

Wait, it’s a SCAM? I always enjoy the part when the treacherous politicians discover that their betrayals were for someone else’s benefit:

The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN’s role in all future climate change negotiations. The document is also being interpreted by developing countries as setting unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.

The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as “the circle of commitment” – but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark – has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week. A confidential analysis of the text by developing countries also seen by the Guardian shows deep unease over details of the text. In particular, it is understood to:

• Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement;

• Divide poor countries further by creating a new category of developing countries called “the most vulnerable”;

• Weaken the UN’s role in handling climate finance;

• Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes.

You really have to be obtuse to fail to realize that the AGW/CC scare is nothing more than the same device that Marius used to secure his primacy over Rome more than two thousand years ago. I can understand that the unthinking public and the credulous scienthologists would fall for it, but you’d think that politicians, at least, would know better.

Predictable consequences

Carbon dioxide is “a dangerous pollutant“:

Officials gather in Copenhagen this week for an international climate summit, but business leaders are focusing even more on Washington, where the Obama administration is expected as early as Monday to formally declare carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant.

Consider the following chain of logic:

1) Environmentalists and progressives believe there are too many people on the planet, having frequently declared this to be the case.

2) The U.S. government is reportedly going to declare carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant.

3) Carbon dioxide is emitted by people who happen to breathe oxygen.

Now, are you really going to be surprised when progressives begin pushing for governments to forcibly reduce the number of mobile planet-threatening, pollution-producing factories known as “human beings”? After all, this hardly promises to be the first time it has been determined that slaughtering large quantities of people would be a necessary step in the construction of a desired societal vision.

Of course, most will deem this to be paranoia or a logical extreme. The problem is that history is very clear on the fact that the logical extreme is not infrequently an accurate predictor.

UPDATE – The Wall Street Journal on peer-review:

The Guardian even solicits “reader leaders” (to go with the extraterritorial editorial–ha ha, what wits), although if you scroll down on the page, you will see that a good many of the submissions have been “removed by a moderator.” That is what scientists call peer review.

Peer review is nothing more or less than editing. It’s not objective. It’s not even science. In fact, it’s almost the complete opposite of science, because it is entirely subjective.

Climategate grows

Now that Jon Stewart has weighed in, all hopes for a media stonewall on Climategate have disappeared. Scientists Hide Global Warming Data. I won’t be surprised if we see some so-called scientists going to jail over this; they have certainly stolen enough taxpayer money under false pretenses to justify long sentences.

Also, Copenhagen should be all the more interesting now that it has been reported that Denmark is the center of a carbon-trading tax scam. Denmark is the centre of a comprehensive tax scam involving CO2 quotas, in which the cheats exploit a so-called ‘VAT carrousel’, reports Ekstra Bladet newspaper. Police and authorities in several European countries are investigating scams worth billions of kroner, which all originate in the Danish quota register. The CO2 quotas are traded in other EU countries. And the fraud may be of massive proportions.

That shouldn’t be a big surprise considering that it was apparently my old friends at Enron who originally came up with the idea of cap-and-trade. Of course, this scam is still several orders of magnitude smaller than the scam that is the AGW/CC/GG industry. The fact that Australia voted down a proposed carbon trading scheme is the first indication that the charlatans are on the defensive.

NO evidence for global warming

Perhaps in part due to my respect for actual science, I find most scientists to be contemptible. But this news exceeds even my cynically low expectations of the charlatans. Is throwing out the original data really the scientific norm these days? Because I can testify that game developers, engineers, and computer programmers are all significantly more rigorous about protecting and saving their legacy information.

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years. The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation….

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Hang on… until yesterday, weren’t the CRU scientists claiming they weren’t providing the data because they had obtained it from various governmental organizations who held the rights to it and they had no permission to release it to the public? Was Real Climate deceived by the CRU or was Real Climate lying when they wrote the following on November 23, 2009: “CRU data accessibility. From the date of the first FOI request to CRU (in 2007), it has been made abundantly clear that the main impediment to releasing the whole CRU archive is the small % of it that was given to CRU on the understanding it wouldn’t be passed on to third parties.”

This is more than a smoking howitzer, it’s a meganuke that would – in a rational world of genuine science – blow away the AGW/CC charade permanently. It also proves that scientists should always be regarded as shady con men unless and until the scientific evidence they produce in support of their hypotheses indicates otherwise. Needless to say, all of “the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data” should immediately join the original data in the trash Every so-called “scientist” at the CRU who was involved with this fraud should be immediately fired. And those who stole taxpayer money on the basis of the scam should be prosecuted, along with those who junked the data if they did so – as suggested in the CRU emails – in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

Score yet another one for the scientific skeptic. Never place any trust in an expert who can’t explain himself to your satisfaction. Especially when he’s asking you for money.

“Hopelessly compromised”

The mainstream European media is finally getting around to covering Climategate and reaching the obvious conclusion: this is “the worst scientific scandal of our generation”.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre’s demolition of the “hockey stick”, he excoriated the way in which this same “tightly knit group” of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to “peer review” each other’s papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.

Being merely human, scientists merit no more inherent trust than anyone else… and rather less than most when their careers and wallets are on the line. Most scientists are useless, venal government-funded worker bees attempting to get along by trading on the accomplishments and reputations of the relatively small number of genuinely innovative scientists who have utilized the scientific method to make positive contributions to Mankind.

As for peer review, it is little more than an editorial charade that transforms science into a political exercise and should be eliminated entirely. As one observer inaccurately but aptly commented, Einstein began his career in science at the post office, not Princeton. (It was actually the patent office, but the point stands.) Science is too important to be left to scientists.

UPDATE – Even the NYT has been forced to cover the story outside of its usual self-appointed role as defense attorney:

“This whole concept of, ‘We’re the experts, trust us,’ has clearly gone by the wayside with these e-mails,” said Judith Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology.

That is a succinct summary, yes.

A crack in the denial

Even a credulous, skeptic-smearing Warmist is capable of seeing that the response from the CRU-defending camp has not been even remotely credible:

Pretending that this isn’t a real crisis isn’t going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We’ll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again.

The amazing thing, of course, is that this guy still believes that science is on the side of the AGW/CC charlatans and that the fabrication, fraud, and deceit are on the skeptical side. But now that the smoking howitzer has been found, it should be relatively easy to unearth and expose the many other dishonest actions of the so-called “climate scientists”.

The problem faced by true believers like this guy is that grasping reality and refusing to permit non-science to replace genuine science will destroy the entire AGW/CC industry.

More climate fraud

This time, it’s in New Zealand:

The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there. The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre. In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend…. But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result.

Worldwide fears? More like worldwide conclusions. I’m not at all surprised. The strong probability is that it has ALL been more or less faked, so the more closely the climate data is examined, the more likely it is that some amount of fraud is going to be detected. This is why no “scientific consensus” that does not involve genuinely observable and replicable science should ever be considered science. Today’s scientists held a position of public respect that relied on the successes of their predecessors but they have been shown to be unworthy of it with their stupid and shabby attempts to pass of non-science as science.

Science is not, and never will be, “what scientists happen to believe now”. That’s merely opinion, and often it’s not even informed, educated, or honest opinion.

Incredibly, the snake-oil salesmen are still trying to sell their con job to the public: “Tuesday’s report said no credible science supports an alternative hypothesis for the warming trend. Each year this decade has been among the top 10 warmest years since instrumental records began, the scientists said. ‘The science is quite decisive,’ said Michael Mann, a professor at Penn State University. ‘There is a very robust consensus about the reality of climate change and the need to confront it quickly.'”

That, by the way, is the very Michael Mann who created the “hockey stick” fraud. And unless instrumental records only began ten years ago, each year this decade has NOT been among the top ten warmest years on record. The hottest ten years according NASA’s GISS are:

  1. 1934
  2. 1998
  3. 1921
  4. 2006
  5. 1931
  6. 1999
  7. 1953
  8. 1990
  9. 1938
  10. 1939

The smoking howitzer

As bad as they are, the hacked CRU emails are actually turning out to be less damning than the comments made by the unfortunate programmer who was saddled with the responsibility for trying to transform the morass of data collected by the climatologists into something that was actually coherent and usable.

This is not good — the existing program produces a serious error when it’s run on what is supposed to be the old, working data. Harry presses on, finding a solution to that bug, going through many more issues as he tried to recreate the results of these runs for the data from 1901 to 1995. Finally he gives up. He has spoken to someone about what should be done:

AGREED APPROACH for cloud (5 Oct 06).
For 1901 to 1995 – stay with published data. No clear way to replicate process as undocumented.
For 1996 to 2002:
1. convert sun database to pseudo-cloud using the f77 programs;
2. anomalise wrt 96-00 with anomdtb.f;
3. grid using quick_interp_tdm.pro (which will use 6190 norms);
4. calculate (mean9600 – mean6190) for monthly grids, using the published cru_ts_2.0 cloud data;
5. add to gridded data from step 3.
This should approximate the correction needed.

Catch that? They couldn’t recreate the results, so they’re going back to their published data for the first 95 years of the 20th century. Only …

Next problem — which database to use? The one with the normals included is not appropriate (the conversion progs do not look for that line so obviously are not intended to be used on +norm databases).

They still don’t know what to use for the next several years. Harry gives up; it’s easier to write new codes.

22. Right, time to stop pussyfooting around the niceties of Tim’s labyrinthine software suites – let’s have a go at producing CRU TS 3.0! since failing to do that will be the definitive failure of the entire project.

This kind of thing is as fascinating as a soap opera, but I want to know how it comes out. Near the bottom of the file, I find:

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

The file peters out, no conclusions. I hope they find this poor guy, and he didn’t hang himself in his rooms or something, because this file is a summary of three years of trying to get this data working. Unsuccessfully. I think there’s a good reason the CRU didn’t want to give their data to people trying to replicate their work. It’s in such a mess that they can’t replicate their own results.

The appearance of these comments is particularly interesting in how it shows that the so-called “scientists” involved in the Great Global Warming Scam are not only committing blatant scientific fraud, they’re technologically incompetent to boot. Compare this fiasco with the emulator scene, where old and outdated software from decades ago, which is almost surely more complex than mere temperature data sets, is reliably supported by each new generation of hardware… at zero cost to the taxpayer or anyone else! The AGW/CC “scientists” are contemptible on several levels; only the completely clueless or totally corrupt would permit these dishonest bumblers any input whatsoever on globally significant matters of climate, economy, or government.