From IEEE Spectrum – How to Fix the Climate-Change Panel
Questions for climate modeler and IPCC insider Kevin E. Trenberth
New Zealander Kevin E. Trenberth has been a lead author in the last three climate assessments produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and he shared in the 2007 Nobel Prize awarded to the IPCC. He is head of the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. IEEE Spectrum Contributing Editor William Sweet interviewed Trenberth about the impact of the theft last year of climate scientists’ e-mails from the University of East Anglia and proposals for reforming the IPCC.
IEEE Spectrum: You were a lead coauthor with Phil Jones of East Anglia of a key chapter in the latest IPCC assessment, and messages of yours were among the hacked e-mails that aroused such consternation.
Kevin E. Trenberth: One cherry-picked message saying we can’t account for current global warming and that this is a travesty went viral and got more than 100 000 hits online. But it was quite clear from the context that I was not questioning the link between anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions and warming, or even suggesting that recent temperatures are unusual in terms of short-term variability.
Spectrum: It seems to me the most damaging thing about the disclosed e-mails was not the issue of fraud or scientific misconduct but the perception of a bunker mentality among climate scientists. If they really know what they’re doing, why do they seem so defensive?
The full interview at IEEE Spectrum
h/t to WUWT reader Mark Hirst
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Trenberth: …Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded.
😮
It’s a travesty that we didn’t notice the missing heat escaping to space.
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The Interview is the normal rubbish, but the comments show the way the wind is blowing, IEEE members are not happy. A Royal Society type climbdown coming soon (I know it was not much of one but one small step on the right path).
Wow. “Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded”.
Has the scientific method just been redefined?
It’s over buddies!….we know already bosses now forgot about all of you “climaterians”, now they are hiring biologists for the new tale of “Bio-diversity” for the ASAP procurement of a Brave New World Progressive Governance Agenda.
Good data just has to be prepared for presentation (for example, choosing scales so it’s easy to see the effects being described, and eliminating parts of the curve where the instruments are being calibrated, etc.) You can disregard all data that does not contain error bars. “Massaging data” is slang for taking ambiguous results and making them look better than they really are. The “hide the decline” maneuver with the first versions of the hockey-stick graph is an excellent example of this, as is carefully selecting the proxies used to construct that hockey-stick graph. Another good example of massaging data would be the attempts to find the high-altitude atmospheric hot spots predicted by AGW climate models by looking at the change wind speed with height while ignoring (because they do not show the expected hot spots) the actual high-altitude temperature records collected by weather balloons.
People are skeptic about their septic science… it stinks!
Juaraj V.
Yes, that statement jumped out at me right away. I suspect it might generate another 100000 hits… lol
MikeEE
Trenberth answers like a politician, not a scientist.
Ah yes, I dropped my IEEE membership a couple of years ago too. I do not suffer fools gladly.
It’s a travesty that they have to massage their data.
I hope by fixing the IPCC he means neutering.
In answer to the question at the end of the quotation above:
This is rubbish. Any fair reading of the emails betrays the kind of desperation characteristic of a group that knows its position is indefensible and so is willing to take any kind of action whatever, regardless of law or ethics, to suppress dissent. The brittleness and incoherence of the IPCC’s CO2-driven AGW theory is well-known to Mann, Briffa, Jones, Trenberth, Santer and the rest, as it is to any intelligent person who looks into the matter carefully — witness, most recently, Dr. Curry.
“Error bars” forsooth! He’s clearly been spending far too much time with Santer.
What would be the reaction if a big pharma company admitted to massaging data in a clinical trial to hide or minimize unacceptable side effects in a new drug?
Trenberth slips around the really interesting phrase in that email of his where he stated that the data must be wrong. If data are wrong, no amount of “massage” would correct them. In effect if the data are wrong, then “massaging” the data to “correct” it would mean that the “new” data is fictitious. It isn’t data properly at all. The absolute and only recourse would be to collect new data, if that were possible. With a historic time series like temperature measurements which cannot be recollected, the “Team”‘s emphasis on proxies becomes more meaningful. Proxies are a desperate effort to replace “bad” data with numbers that behave as they “should.”
Wow just wow!
From the comments to the IEEE interview
“A lot of measurements are actually driven by facts. One of the key facts is Earth was not fit for human dwelling until a lot of carbon has been captured in the fossils. Hence we need to understand what would happen if all this carbon captured in fossil fuels is released back to the atmosphere. I hope everybody is curious to find out….. of course the fossil fuel industry wont care.”
That’s a justification for carbon control I had not seen before.!
Trenberth: “What looks like defensiveness to the uninitiated can just be part of the normal process of doing science and scientific interaction. Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded. When they talk about error bars, referring to uncertainty limits, it sounds to the general public like they’re just talking about errors.”
Wow! Trenberth certainly has a knack of shooting himself in the foot. No wonder people doubt the IPCC cargo cult school of climate science.
It’s like playing a prize fish – the fight continues. If the IPCC / AGW fish are landed it’s a hard blow to the head(s) for me – no catch and release here.
Followed by their emergent re-incarnation, the biodiversivists (is there such a word?), and then the politicians. Here in the bankrupt UK we are committed to spending obscene billions on climate change measures over the next 4+ years. That’s to mitigate a 0.8 degree C rise by 40 years time.
“Mark Twang says:
October 29, 2010 at 10:01 am
What would be the reaction if a big pharma company admitted to massaging data in a clinical trial to hide or minimize unacceptable side effects in a new drug?”
Little to nothing as they do it all the time. In some cases they don’t even do studies.
I think the good DR. should get his head out of his A$$ and look around planet EARTH. He might see that life has been moving along just fine, Like it has been for Eons!
“Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded”.
Really… Well, let me run this one by you and see how it sits:
“Bridge engineers almost always have to massage their designs, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded”.
Would you drive across that bridge?
How about: “My banker almost always has to massage my checking account numbers, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded”.
Wish I was such a banker and could get away with that!
Data collected in natural sciences is messy. Anthony’s Surface Stations revelations are not an isolated problem. What is at the core of the IPCC/AGW problem isn’t just that the data is messy though. Its how they have tried to cover up the issue, to attribute far too much certainty in the models and other derivative products of these data, and to try to foist a radical realignment of human civilization around their products.
Trenberth’s “The whole IPCC process is intrinsically conservative” comment is a very good illustration of the problem. The IPCC is very far from conservative, but does perhaps show just how radical folks like Trenberth really are.
Trenberth describes Climategate as “one cherry-picked message”, but I say–by all means, let’s SEE THE REST!
Open up that email server and let’s inspect ALL of the communications. That would be a fitting thing to do a year after the initial revelations.
Very economical with the truth “100,000 hits online” just like his work out by factors of 1000.
It is simply impossible for a 100 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration to cause any kind of climate change.
The climate models have been hard wired using ‘radiative forcing constants’ to ‘predict’ global warming where none exists.
Bernie Madoff got a 150 year jail sentence, Trenberth & Co. should not get any less.