Huh? Why would it just be skeptics who would be interested in evidence of serious flaws in the science? I'm amazed by paragraph 6 of an article that begins:
The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.
Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.
Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.
The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.
Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.
And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.Everyone should perceive flaws! To talk about "sceptics" as the ones who will "seize" upon "evidence" of flaws is unwittingly to make global warming into a matter of religion and not science. It's not the skeptics who look bad. "Seize" sounds willful, but science should motivate us to grab at evidence. It's the nonskeptics who look bad. It's not science to be a true believer who wants to ignore new evidence. It's not science to support a man who has the job of being a scientist but doesn't adhere to the methods of science.
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266 comments:
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You couldn't be more wrong. This has been a subject of intense research for several decades. Your comment is an insult to the theoreticians who have worked out the differential equations to model the feedbacks and the observationalists who have provided the date to get the equations right.
The entire denialist case rests on refusing to listen to the answers that scientists have provided. Skeptics are right to ask about feedbacks when they see the argument from basic physics. But denialism rests entirely on denying that answers have been given.
The Professor is correct that it is important to question orthodoxy. In this case, it's questioning of "science" – a strange sort of science that merged with a political movement and turned into a quasi-religious worship of an Earth with only minimal human impact upon it.
But what about the other orthodoxies out there?
Let's consider the question of TORTURE.
Why is it that the Rightists demand that everyone take a logical look at climate change, but will discourage the public from taking a logical (and morally comprehensive) look at torture.
The Rightist line on torture is that it cannot be questioned. Terrorist suspects must be tortured; that's it, no discussion, no thought or consideration of the consequences or the morality of it, and no logic allowed.
If you question it, you are ostracized by the Right. You are labeled as one who is on the side of the terrorists.
No skeptics allowed!
Let's face facts:
The people on the Right are fucking pathetic wimps when taking a skeptical approach to big global narratives.
They'll encourage skepticism when it supports their political purposes and their preconceived notion, but they'll discourage skepticism when it is inconvenient.
Of course, NASA is probably in on the conspiracy, right?
Jim Hansen?
Your comment is an insult to the theoreticians who have worked out the differential equations to model the feedbacks and the observationalists who have provided the date to get the equations right.
Wow, you're catching on.
Julius, this is not a matter of right and left. It's right and wrong.
Torture and mistreatment of prisoners is wrong in all cases, every time.
So is lying about the weather to defraud the world's governments into enacting severe policies.
American Power tracked-back with, 'Phil 'Hide the Decline' Jones Admits Faked Data'.
One item in the article floored me--Dr. Phil Jone's friends and colleagues said, in effect, he's a great scientist, he just doesn't keep records very well:
According to Mr Harrabin, colleagues of Professor Jones said ‘his office is piled high with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the raw data to a central database and then let the pieces of paper go because he never realised that 20 years later he would be held to account over them’.
Oh! And here I thought keeping accurate records, and being able to explain them periodically, was part of being "good" in physical sciences. But then, I'm so stupid, I don't have enough degrees to know how naive that was.
@jrshipley - No need to get all emotional defending your precious theoreticians. I'm just pointing out that the warmist climate models have not accurately modeled the climate so far. Their dire predictions simply haven't come true.
Therefore, I have no desire to spend trillions based on the future predictions.
Yuck. I hate threads like this. Pretty much every post here is clueless (obviously, I don't mean _yours_). There are competent scientists on both sides of this issues. There are currently more on the side of AGW.
Here is a very interesting survey that supports this:
http://coast.gkss.de/staff/storch/pdf/CliSci2008.pdf
This one interview doesn't prove anything, but it is interesting that one of the most strident of the true believers sounds so humble.
downtownlad --
"By the way, here is the latest graph on the Arctic Sea Ice Extent. You can track it daily if you want to see global warming in action."
No, and by your own standards. Daily variances do not 'climate' make according to AGW proponents.
Unless of course, when you watch it in winter and see the ice growing, you call it AGC.
Skyler:
Greenhouse effect? Hee hee! .
There you go. A basic tenet of science, akin to gravity, is rejected by deniers. This is not a point of controversy, Skyler and even your industry-funded scientist deniers accept the existence of the greenhouse effect.
Skyler, this demonstrates that you don't know what you're talking about. Seriously, you should study up before speaking out.
Your comment is an insult to the theoreticians who have worked out the differential equations to model the feedbacks and the observationalists who have provided the date to get the equations right.
In other words, they don't know what the differential equations are until they get the data.
Welcome to curve-fitting 101.
You start by pulling an equation out of your ass. Add parameters. Use data to solve for parameters.
Behold, it fits the data!
Predictive value, zero.
jrshipley --
"The entire denialist case rests on refusing to listen to the answers that scientists have provided."
Nope. Not a denialist. The world is warming just like it has before. I want to see the data and algorithms they use to *prove* this time is due to human actions. Simple as that.
If you cannot replicate the process, it is not science. Simple as that.
wv: mightho - "Didn't work for AGC. For AGW it mightho."
pauly --
"So trace elements can't be enormously disruptive of complex systems? If you really believe that, I've got some polonium-210 for you to sprinkle on your salad."
I was unaware that plants could process polonium-210 into a food product.
Your disingenuousness shows in your choice of examples.
I hate this thread. Pretty much nobody is making any sense, on either side (of course, I don't mean _your_ post). Many competent scientists doubt the AGW theory. Even more competent scientists accept it.
A fascinating survey:
http://coast.gkss.de/staff/storch/pdf/CliSci2008.pdf
It is Wrong that the science is settled. It is Wrong that the whole thing is one big hoax. People saying either of these two pretty much disqualify themselves IMHO.
This is an interesting interview, but doesn't prove anything, but it is pretty remarkable that such an important strident true believer now sounds so humble.
Seriously, you should study up before speaking out.
I don't have a need to study the works of liars and frauds.
If there is a green house effect or not makes no difference because the concept will again be used by liars such as yourself to claim something that isn't true.
That's why I laugh at claims of a green house effect. Sure, you can show it in a lab, you can do lots of things. But no one has shown that it is happening now to any extent further than what has been happening for eons.
So why don't you get some integrity before you start speaking out?
jrshipley: Data collection is messy and difficult, but an enormous effort has gone into gathering and analyzing data. This effort has been detailed in scores of peer reviewed papers and it confirms the argument from basic physics that more greenhouse gasses = more greenhouse effect.
Except that "enormous effort" was never detailed, and never peer-reviewed. The ClimateGate emails and HARRY_READ_ME.txt file document all the shenanigans that went on with the data, well beyond the substitution of actual data for tree-ring proxies in the hockey stick graph (which DTL & AL will defend to their dying day, not understanding that having to use real data invalidates the proxies) -- these guys ignored urban heat island effects, arbitrarily adjusted values up and down, and then "smoothed" the hell out of them. We had an expression at MIT about practices like this -- "torture the data until it confesses". It's pretty obvious that's what happened here.
Julius Ray Hoffman -- happy to discuss torture with you and your side, if you'd only quit lying by saying that the waterboarding our guys did is equivalent to what was done in the Spanish Inquisition, etc. It wasn't -- Mark Thiessen's been doing fantastic work in this area, but all your side does is try to shout him down and shut him up, because he has the facts on his side.
Hmmm, come to think of it, that's consistent behavior from the left -- shout down the people who want to talk about what's really happening. Too bad you've lost the media monopoly, and that tactic won't work anymore.
"It is Wrong that the whole thing is one big hoax."
No, it is a scam.
The intent is different.
This is great (via Instapundit): What did Phil Jones actually admit?
Some key quotes:
Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?
Here Jones noted that the trend from 2002 to 2009 is negative (-0.12C per decade), but not statistically significant. He had noted earlier in the interview:
Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
He admits that the trend is negative, contra to what DTL was arguing earlier in this thread -- not that there was statistically insignificant increase in temps.
Read the whole thing, as they say. It contains a wealth of links, including research on the Medieval Warm Period and how horrible the surface station data is. It concludes, Claims about global monthly and annual rankings, and that the last decade was the warmest ever, can be dismissed as folly.
Nice rhetorical trick - this is the central failure of global warmism and you try to wave it away like it's nothing.
Nicely put, Maguro.
And on the foundations of this rhetorical trick, all the various economies of the world should be put, not into the hands of these ever-so capable climate scientists, but their cheerleaders.
NOAA's first name is "National". So who funds them? Will their money be appropriated if they don't sing in the key of AGW?
I'm sure they're impartial.
@pauly if you really do have some Polonium-210 there are some people down at the FBI and DOE who would dearly like to talk to you. Please send contact information.
Before my wife and I left for our luncheon date with our friends I was wondering what was keeping AlphaLiberal and dtl and other frothing-at-the-mouth types away from the thread. (I considered, but rejected, the possibility that they were at church.)
The answer seems to be that they were waiting to get their talking points from somewhere. (Purely out of curiousity, where do you guys go to download the BS you dump into Althouse threads?
Anyway, Alpha, I plan to check out that Scientific American article after I get my work done. But, basically, don't you get that the article is essentially a non sequitor? AGW is premised on a computer model. The model has failed to predict global temperatures for the past 15 years. This is called "broken."
DTL said:
Sorry Ann, but you are being a complete asshole here and acting in a completely disgusting manner.
Restating the odious/obvious: Link
wv: "buggrair" is it even possible to do that? I mean the ozone hole is too big!
For those who ask about the motive to fudge the data, the implication is that money is the only possible motive for that. What was the motive for all those scientists who thought that eugenics was settled science, that non-Europeans were inferior; that it was proved by the accomplishments of modern Europeans throughout history. The answer is that they believed they were right, and any evidence that indicated they were not was ignored or ridiculed. They believed they were on a noble mission to improve the human race. I think it is the same with the Warmist Alarmists. They are on a noble mission to save the planet earth. Some have mentioned Lysenko, what was his motive. He thought he was right. If he was wrong, the development of New Soviet Man was a false doctrine; an idea he could not tolerate. My point here is that money is not the only motive for fudging scientific data. BTW, the oil companies are spending gobs of money on so called Green Energy projects. They plan to benefit no matter which way the world goes. I doubt they are wasting stockholder funds paying people to lie about science—maybe you’ve heard of class-action lawsuits?
Many competent scientists doubt the AGW theory. Even more competent scientists accept it.
Possibly right as far as it goes, MikeR, but there is a subclass of the "even more" who can be characterized as "I don't really believe it, but if I don't publicly support it then I'll never see a penny of grant money ever again."
At any rate, as far as climate scientists are concerned (as opposed to, say, biologists who need grant money), my impression is that most take the position that we are in a general warming cycle following an unusually cold period (the Little Ice Age) that ended in the Northern Hemisphere circa 1850. It is impossible that mankind has not contributed to the climate change, but the anthropogenic effect is minimal next to the contribution of the sun.
That seems like a reasonable position by reasonable people. It definitely does not justify huge scams, like "carbon credits," and Cap and Trade, which are designed to transfer wealth to the already wealthy.
DTL/Opus/jrshipley:
Or how many 'climate scientists' actually participated in the IPCC AR4 peer review process - that is, actually commented on the sections having to do with human causation?
Answer that fucknuts.
Julius Ray Hoffman obviously belongs to the sect that think the more curse words spewed, the stronger their argument.
When you read the Mail Online interview with Jones he didn't make much of an admission regarding the falsity of global warming. He talks about no statistically significant warming over the last 15 years and then turns around and talks about what he regards as the undeniable global warming trend. The last 15 years is to him is a "blip."
He also doesn't concede a Medieval Warm Period warmer than today--only its possibility.
Much as I would like to see someone of stature drive a stake into the heart of global warming, I don't think this interview with Jones does it. The only really positive thing he says is that there has been no global warming for the last 15 years.
I wonder what Al Gore says about that. The last time I saw him he was standing on an industrial high lift trying to reach the top of a chart display of soaring temperature.
In any case this story is certainly not going to stop Obama from using executive orders to tax carbon dioxide. Higher electricity bills here we come.
(quoted by Alpha Liberal) If you're on the climate sceptics side, you have to have really good evidence for your case because if you're wrong then the consequences for all of us and all our children and whoever comes after is hugely influenced.
While I'm open to persuasion on the validity of AGW, which I think has taken a serious hit in the past few months, I think the sentiment in the above quote is complete balderdash and about as far from "spot on" as you can get.
You and other alarmists seem to think the cost of reining in our CO2 emissions would only be felt be "greedy" oil and coal companies. I haven't seen you write this but others take this fallacy further and claim, perhaps disingenuously, that other areas of the economy will benefit, with (in Obama's fatuous words) "millions of green jobs."
The fact is, if we ratchet down our use of fossil fuels as abruptly as the alarmists have insisted we must, the most notable result will be an immense increase in global poverty and starvation.
I want to get us away from fossil fuels as much as the next guy, because I hate the local pollution they cause. But despite all our fondest wishes, the alternatives are, for the most part, commercially unviable because they are too expensive and lack the density of energy of fossil fuels. Nuclear power is perhaps the exception, but that opens up another whole area of both political controversy and environmental risk, not to mention high initial costs.
No, the burden of proof is not on the skeptics. It is on those who believe we must remake the modern global economy from the ground up, and are willing to accept the massive dislocations that will result, along with an almost infinite increase in the power of governments, which would be required to engineer such a dramatic shift. It should scare the crap out of anybody, environmentalists included. That it doesn't can only be chalked up to zealotry or a failure of imagination.
Oligonicella said...
"Opus One Media -- You first, Bucky Boy. Don't require from others what you don't do."
OK asshole. Bachelors and Masters from Michigan State. PhD from Columbia, Post Doc at Iowa, Member Soviet Academy of Sciences, First American member of the All Union Society for Science and Medicine, NASA nomination for Rolex Award for Science and the Humanities...
Your turn. Praying Mantis...yeah right..praying for a brain.
AlpahTard: "More evidence of global warming: The northwest passage has thawed, allowing shipping last year for the first time in human history."
In all of human history eh? LOL.
You and DTL are SUCH Libtards. Thank you for the entertainment.
Not a hoax but a fraud.
WV - inerpol - you know you are in trouble when they are on the job.
Jrshipley...You are full of blarney misquoting faked data as facts that prove your argument. You are declaring facts in evidence that have never been proven by anyone but are propaganda of delusions in science argot.. You Lie!
Opus One Media - i can see you are making appeals to authority. Science doesn't work like that idiot.
Julius Libtard: Why is it that the Rightists demand that everyone take a logical look at climate change, but will discourage the public from taking a logical (and morally comprehensive) look at torture.
Liar. I encourage everyone to take a logical and morally comprehensive look at torture. Hell, I've even argue the morality of allowing thousands of innocents tobe murdered because you don't want to stain your soul with blood. I've taken the moral argument to you and your kind, and you guys run away.
The Rightist line on torture is that it cannot be questioned.
Another lie. We've never said it cannot be questioned.
Terrorist suspects must be tortured; that's it, no discussion, no thought or consideration of the consequences or the morality of it, and no logic allowed.
More lies. You've completely misrepresented the oppositon, out of ingorance or malice.
Go fuck yourself. Libtard Weasel.
Julius Ray Hoffman and Opus One Media, Former Law Student...
what is it with these triple-named douchebags?
"So trace elements can't be enormously disruptive of complex systems?"
Not when they are something as benign and useful as CO2.
"More evidence of global warming: The northwest passage has thawed, allowing shipping last year for the first time in human history."
According to some accounts the Northwest Passage was open in WWII.
Also not many years later nuclear subs surfaced at the North Pole in open water.
The ice cap may be melting but it's hardly the first time, even in our lifetimes.
So trace elements can't be enormously disruptive of complex systems? If you really believe that, I've got some polonium-210 for you to sprinkle on your salad.
If Polonium is bad for humans, it proves that CO2 is bad for the environment. QED.
Won't someone think of the poor trees! Who knows what harm all that CO2 might do to our vegetation?
The Cold Fusion debacle a few years ago is another great example of why process can be important. The claim was that cold fusion had occurred, yet no one was able to reproduce cold fusion following instructions, so called, from CF creators. If CF actually happened, no one knows how in fact or was it simply bad science?
Except Cold Fusion is good science and is regularly replicated.
Cold Fusion papers
I just returned home and scanned the comments here. It is totally baffling that Warmists cannot even admit that the whole arguement has NEVER been about whether the weather has for some decades warmed, followed by some decades in stasis, followed by some decades of cooling. You are correct that that it is known that warming happened from 1978 to 1998, and that stasis was happening from 1998 to 2008, and that cooling has hit fast this year. Can't you see that this means your arguments, and Dr Jones' arguments, are totally false when they conclude that the irrelevant amounts of the beneficial gas CO2 in the air has ever been a corelation with those temperature changes, even if the "Theory" is that such corelation is possible as a proof of causation. That is what the data faking men of climate science have spent all the billions of dollars in Research Grants doing: replacing actual facts disproving their pet "CO2 is the warming culprit" theory with made up data showing that their theory has been prooved and settled beyond discussion. That is part insanity and part criminal conspiracy.
Heh indeedy!
MS: Yep, new Cold Fusion plants generating electricity with zero pollution and running forever are coming on line faster than MSNBC can count! Get a life or get treatment for your stupidity!
Julius claims that folks on the right don't question torture...
I'm a right-winger, and I never got the memo that I was supposed to endorse torture. I definitely don't.
I don't much like McCain, but I agree with him--and President Obama--about stepping back from waterboarding and anything else that seems to me to be torture.
Now, it happens to be true that I haven't taken time to acquaint myself with every detail of this subject--so I haven't offered comments on it, because I think I should know a subject better before I do so.
But count me as a right-winger against torture. Against the death penalty too, fwiw. I don't like giving any government too much power. And while I'm dismayed by conservatives who aren't with me on this, I'm not alone, either.
I was a skeptic towards global warming alarmist claims and I am still a skeptic - but skeptical about all the right-wingers reacting to the discrediting of some data - who now puff their chests and say overpopulation and steadily mounting CO2 levels are absolutely no problem.
I don't know.
Human overpopulation is definitely a problem and THAT is what is the main driver of CO2 generation. Long before "AGW" or just GW is a problem - we will have more Mathusian traps like Haiti created. We will see nations with critical water and in some cases food shortages from too many people. We may see a lethal new flu epidemic, finally. From too many people living near too many animals and then the disease spreading like wildfire based on speed of global air travel and massive person to person transmission in 3rd World megacities.
We do expect tens of thousands of species to go extinct in the nest 30 years from too many people, habitat loss, deforestation, overfishing.
We have 193 nations, with some 60 dependent on 30-80% of their food coming from only about 1 dozen other nations that are still net food exporters.
My problem with the whole "warming" biz, is that it has sucked up all the oxygen from direr threats related to human overpopulation.
Opus, above somewhere, refers us to a Wikipedia article. I found this gem: "During the previous interglacial about 120,000 years ago, sea level was for a short time about 6 m higher than today, as evidenced by wave-cut notches along cliffs in the Bahamas."
What that tells me, without the benefit of a PHD, or a MS, or even a BA, is that ocean levels rise and fall without any assist from humans.
Viking settlers grew hay in Greenland a thousand years ago. We have historical records that prove that. So it was warmer in Greenland then than it is now. What caused that? The CRU and the warmist response to this challenge to their dogma is to make the Medieval Warm Period 'disappear'. Did they learn how to deal with opposition from General Galtieri and the Argentinian Junta?
What caused the Chicago glacier to melt into Lake Michigan at the end of the last Ice Age?
The earth is unstable. Continents slide about, crashing into each other and raising mountains. Mountains erode and glaciers come and go. The earth is unevenly heated by the sun, resulting in the phenoma called 'weather'. A variety of natural forces are in play which affect the reception of solar energy, causing changes in 'climate'. This has gone on from the time of creation, whenever that was.
Do humans affect any of this? Can humans affect any of this? In some things, certainly. The peasant and his goats have turned vast areas of the earth into vegetation free zones. Have we cut down forests? Guilty. Driven some species into extinction? Guilty. Changed the climate/weather? Not proven. Not at all.
And the pity of it is, good science will be rejected along with the bad science. Scientist who lie and manipulate data to prove their theories poison all of science.
Someone above wanted us to roll in a big gun with academic credentials to reply to their big academic guns. O.K. Dr. Richard Lindzen of M.I.T. An actual scientist who actually works with weather. Zounds!! Of course, you will say he is paid by Big Oil. And I'll say that your guys are paid by Al Gore.
David - stop trying to make so much sense. The warmists have their agenda. Decrease our GDP by 25-50%.
Also the overwhelming political reality is that Americans don't care about AGW as long as unemployment is the major issue.
My uneducated guess is sunspots, which go in 11-year cycles and generate warm weather. Since 1998, almost no sunspots have been observed, indicating that the sudden plateau of temp climbing since then is cause & effect. But the Maunder Minimum and sunspot theory is never, absolutely never taken into consideration by the giant minds at the IRCC who plan on taxing us for breathing, except for Chinese & Indian breaths, something pertaining to yoga?
Hilariously at Copenhagen in December, POTUS Obambi showed up the last day to proclaim a glorious resolution to the problem of third-world developing countries like Brazil, South Af, China & India. The four said they had schedule conflicts & couldn't see the mini-Won [the Indians actually said the PM was on the way to the airport!] until the US Sherlocks snooped and sniffed around to find the four holdouts in camera coordinating their refusal strategy!
Obama was invited to [literally!] pull up a chair and observe another Copenhagen defeat as great and humiliating as his Chicago in '16 bid.
So much for being a kinder and gentler superpower!
OOM --
You realize without a name, you've simply listed things, but I'll take you at face value.
A man of your learning must truly understand that science requires documentation. As Viscount Monckton stated just today, "In effect, the temperature record of the CRU is little better than a fabrication — much like the four assessment reports of the IPCC."
You disagree with him I assume. I don't. My agreement is based on 35+ years as a data analyst. The data and what was done with it (as demonstrated by the zip I downloaded the day after it was available) is reprehensible. It also is not science.
As for the snark on my moniker, surely you could come up with something better. Something along the lines of "Opus One Media, yeah - one off-key tool." You know, take the pieces and use them to make the snark a little more oblique.
this is the moral parallel to a court of law where the case is argued but the judge announces that it is all well and good but his Tarot cards tell him to rule for the defendant. the plaintiff objects that he has all the facts on his side and the judge asks not to be confused by fact, this is a matter of my opinion.
fact v. opinion. and i'm rather surprised that Ann would waffle into that position. disappointed as well.
Oligonicella said...
"OOM A man of your learning must truly understand that science requires documentation."
Don't let the pile of books, papers, abstracts etc. trip you up as you walk across your version of the flat earth.
i think that it is noble for some to carry a denial cause to the extreme that you seem to be hellbent on doing. You remind me somewhat of that long ago Pope confronted by Galileo's heliocentrism.
I remember a few decades ago when Lucy made the rounds of the museums. There were a certain number of fools who protested and cited all the thermodynamic laws as "proof" that God was a trickster and that the fossil record was merely a hoax.
Your arguments remind me of that level of pseudo-scientific "thought" [sic] and as a self proclaimed statistician (so you say but I'll take you on face value) the day you let your wierd world views get in the way of all data and you let a small portion of data which 1. you clearly don't understand and 2. you seem to be told what to understand is that day, that perfect day, when your grasp of science turns into the realm of the mystics.
Beware false science as you would beware false prophets.
>>So trace elements can't be enormously disruptive of complex systems?
Strawman. Commenter was discussing scale not complexity.
Don't let the pile of books, papers, abstracts etc. trip you up as you walk across your version of the flat earth.
Yep, there are books, papers, abstracts, reports, etc., all over the place. Not much raw data. In fact I find it amazing that you can claim the credentials you've claimed earlier in this thread, and not have grasped the significance of CRU's "losing" the raw data.
In fact, I find it even more amazing that you don't seem to be aware of the criteria laid down in the first part of Richard Feynman's famous 1974 commencement address to Cal Tech. Where is the discussion of alternative hypotheses? Where did the CRU describe ways in which their own conclusions might be mistaken? Instead we have evidence that weather sensors from higher latitudes and higher altitudes were used to establish a baseline, then left out of the data used to prove warming.
Why was that, do you think? Could it be because data from higher latitudes and higher altiudes would show colder temperatures, and potentially ruin the case for global warming?
Beware false science as you would beware false prophets.
Ah, but that's the point, isn't it? Professor Jones is, if not the originator of the theory of anthropogenic global warming, then one of its strongest advocates. Now he has been forced to admit that (1) he cannot reproduce his original raw data, much less justify the "adjustments" he made to it; and (2) the model has failed to predict observed climate over the past 15 years. The model is broken, the theory has been falsified. QED
So the proper scientific response to what we've been learning about AGW are the following questions:
(1) Is the earth warming at all? The answer is probably on the order of "compared to what"? Compared to the Medieval Warm Period, almost certainly not, but compared to the Little Ice Age, certainly so. (But why take an abnormally cold period as the baseline?)
(2) If the earth is warming, is this necessarily bad? There needs to be a tradeoff between extended growing seasons in higher latitudes and the negative effects (like the beach vacation homes of rich limousine liberals being washed away). No one wants to do the tradeoff. Again, why is that, do you think?
(3) If the earth is warming, to what extent do emissions from power plants and internal combustion engines contribute to it relative to the sun's output and to deforestation (particularly by slash and burn)? I've seen one study that suggests that slash and burn in Brazil alone contributes several times as much atmospheric CO2 as all of the industrial sources of the Western Hemisphere combined. Of course it was a study which, like the IPCC reports and the studies generated by the East Anglia CRU, didn't really expose its data so, like the IPCC reports and the CRU's studies, one should examine the data collected and the mathematical analysis behind it.
(4) If the earth is warming, what sort of timelines do we have to make a response? If it's "already too late," as some of the more hysterical advocates of AGW assert, then why change at all? If we're looking at ocean rise (the primary negative effect that the MSM seems focused on) then a loss of beachfront measured in single digit centimeters per decade suggests that we have time to adjust.
(5) If the earth is warming, and we have time, then how do we ameliorate the effects of warming? So far the only responses from AGW advocates are variants of "throw money at it," e.g., through subsidies for "green" technologies (but which technologies get subsidized seems to be more related to political clout than to effectiveness), carbon credits (though so far all of the studies I've read indicate that carbon credits have little or no effect on atmospheric CO2), and Cap and Trade (which seems to be little more than a scam to impoverish already poor West Virginia to bail out New York and California).
I haven't read through all the comments yet, so my apologies if this has been covered.
I do not know whether the earth is warming nor whether mankind is involved. What I do know, as a scientist, is I have been upset for sometime how climate scientists have been going about this; ginning up data (e.g. splicing temperature data onto tree ring data), hiding data, and belittling honest concerns from other scientist as to the interpretation of the data. They have squandered the public's trust and that is something you can't get back. If it turns out that AGW is something we need to address they have made the problem much more difficult. And they have given all scientists a black eye. A pox on their house.
Opus drags a stinking dead cat into the discussion: "...as you walk across your version of the flat earth."
Nobody believed the earth was flat, Opus. The Hebrews knew it was round. The Greeks knew it was round. Dante knew it was round, as any person well educated enough to have read The Divine Comedy knows. And the Pope who disciplined Galileo knew it was round. Their error was that they thought all the heavenly bodies revolved around the earth, which is an understandable error. Nobody thought the earth was flat. Stop saying stupid stuff.
And, BTW, Galileo wasn't in trouble for heliocentrism, which had been proposed by Copernicus at a much earlier date. He was in trouble for his rude, intemperate mocking of the Pope. The Pope had no problem with Copernicus or the theory of heliocentrism. In fact, Copernicus dedicated his book to the Pope.
jrshipley,
1. CO2 is not pollution, it is a necessary ingredient for life.
2. Anybody with 1 year of college level physics can calculate the sensitivity of the doubling of CO2. Its about 1 degree C. That isn't the issue as nobody disagrees.
3. Scientist have been working on feedback for decades and still don't know the sign. The assumption that it is positive lacks support in spite of the hand waiving by some scientist. Maybe there's some mysterious positive feedback.
4. Like APS, the "scores of support for the AWG hypotheses" is decided by the boards of such organizations. It is not based on a survey of its members. These types of statements are inherently non scientific as they are the logical fallacy appeal to authority.
5. Peer review is only one check on the validity of a paper and a rather dismal one at that. It is just another appeal to authority. If you had any understanding of the history of science you wouldn't make this argument. Do yourself a favor and study the scientific consensus of Eugenics. There is no need for a conspiracy as the herd mentality of the human race is well documented and adequate to explain the climate change hysteria.
6. Statistically significant refers to the fact that all measurements have errors. If I were to say the temperature was 50 degrees plus or minus 1 degree then I would be saying that the temperature was somewhere between 49 and 51 degrees. All values between 49 and 51 degrees have an equal probability of being the correct value. 50 degrees is just the mean of the error and is no more likely of being the correct value then 49 or 51 (or any other value). When Jones says the warming trends over the different periods are not statistically significant he is admitting that the assertion of "unprecedented warming" was a lie.
7. "Those peer reviewed articles explaining how the data was analyzed" is an assumption not based in reality as Steve McIntyre has demonstrated over and over again. Replication is essential to the advancement of science. The leading lights in climate research have actively stonewalled this essential part of science as evidenced by the CRU emails.
I think the 'skeptics' need to be given wide praise and respect, for they are the only ones who actually held true to scientific principles - they are the Galileo and Copernicus of our day. They were villified, dismissed, and attacked personally, yet in the end, they were the only ones who submitted theories to the appropriate level of skeptical study.
Don't let the pile of books, papers, abstracts etc. trip you up as you walk across your version of the flat earth.
This takes the "appeal to authority" to new depths of inanity.
The existence of a "pile of books, papers, abstracts, etc." proves nothing. If you're persuaded by the mere existence of this "pile," good luck next time you buy a used car.
Did you even read the article to which Ann linked? Phil Jones is one of the main contributors to the "pile." He is a leading climate scientist, quoted throughout the IPCC reports. And he's acknowledging in an interview a number of facts that should undermine one's confidence that he and his coterie have the science right, if words mean anything.
But if instead of words, you rely on piles...again, good luck not getting fleeced repeatedly by people who actually use their brains.
What a relief!
Thank goodness climate-change skeptics aren't merely engaging in hollow rationales for the maintainance of a patently unsustainable consumerist lifestyle ... or acting (naively or otherwise) to further the agenda of a petroleum industry that can feel the twin nooses of scarcity & innovation slowly but surely closing around its throat, an industry already well-known for its greenwashing & PR-manipulating ways.
Yes, surely one must be both a True Believer & divorced from the realm of critical thinking to buy into the noxious conspiracy that has been perpetrated upon humanity by millions of thermometers worldwide for the last decade, fooling us into thinking that it was the warmest decade on record ... & worse, the arctic ice is in on the fraud! It keeps shrinking by the year, to the point where the Northwest Passage is no longer a myth but a reality - & the entire region may be open ocean in another decade or two.
Not to mention the detected major releases of methane (a far more potent greenhouse-gas than CO2) that are now rising from beneath the rapidly-disintegrating permafrost in places like Alaska & Siberia ... who knew that methane had a liberal bias?
Exactly how Al Gore pulled it all off, however, remains a mystery to this very day. Perhaps The Daily Mail (being the renowned watchword for trustworthy journalism & ethical integrity that it is) can some day discover the answer to this enigma.
AL
Nice try with your RealClimate piece (and note that RC is a site discussed in those emails that is devoted to proving AGW, and is controlled by friends of the scam artists behind AGW, such as Mann, Jones, etc. - remember when they were talking about controlling adverse information through deletions on that forum?)
In any case, you start with Step 1, which is somewhat true, and then the article proceeds through Step 6 getting more and more fanciful. I seem to remember Step 5 (or was it 6) that was recently statistically refuted at a 95% confidence level (which is far higher than the confidence level of the studies that you seem enamored with).
I think that the most humorous part of the entire exercise was the QED at the end. They started with one weak point, threw in five ever weaker hypotheses, and concluded with QED. Except that only one or two of the points could be proven, and the rest of them are highly debatable hypotheses based on little, if any, real science.
The entire denialist case rests on refusing to listen to the answers that scientists have provided. Skeptics are right to ask about feedbacks when they see the argument from basic physics. But denialism rests entirely on denying that answers have been given.
Well, there is also the fact that the answers given cannot be repeated. The massaging of the data is not documented (at least outside the Hockey Team). What stations were dropped, and why was not documented. Why raw data was adjusted was not documented. And a lot of those adjustments are highly questionable right now (e.g. Darwin Zero, the former USSR, etc.)
There is a saying in computer science: GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). Seems applicable here.
Some of you may be aware that the article misrepresents what Jones says. Other here may be aware of the significance of statistical significance. If you want to read more try here:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/daily_mail_caught_in_another_l.php
Thermometers? Obviously leftist - they keep saying temperatures are steadily rising worldwide (the one major exception, ironically enough, is North America). Arctic ice? Both leftist & plainly suicidal - at the rate it's shrinking it'll be a memory in 20 years or so. When it's finally gone, the open ocean where it used to be will absorb far more solar energy than the ice did, ergo the ocean is a leftist too. Methane? Bubbling out of the arctic tundra faster every year ... & even more leftist than CO2!
"Sorry Ann, but you are being a complete asshole here and acting in a completely disgusting manner."
After searching in vain for my previous comment here - one which contained nothing obscene or threatening, but simply trashed the "skepticism" that chooses to willfully deny a reasonable climate model backed up by massive amounts of scientific data in favor of oil-company-funded FUD, I'm strongly inclined to agree.
Citing The Daily Mail - long synonymous with yellow journalism - to support your case doesn't do much to weaken that inclination. It's pretty well a default assumption that they misquoted him.
PS - they misquoted him.
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