It has been one of those days…first the GISS data train wreck in apparently reusing last months temperatures to make this months “hottest October ever” announcement, now we find that the director of The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) may not have the goods for the PhD he goes by. He’s about to become the president of the American Meteorological Society. Interesting times – Anthony
Reprinted from NRO’s Planet Gore
Dr. Pepper, Dr. J, Dr. Karl . . . [Chris Horner]
Well, this testimony, submitted to the House of Representatives is strange, what with “Dr. Tom Karl” – now the lead author of the U.S. government’s Climate Change Science Program assessment being prepared to support EPA regulation of carbon dioxide – having never earned an academic Ph.D.
That’s according to North Carolina State University, that is, which is the school from which I found a Karl resume claiming a Ph.D., earned “1977-78”. I first found this on a Johns Hopkins website but, after asking Karl’s employer NOAA to clarify where the “Dr.” title they serially tout was earned, that CV has been taken down (but not before I saved the file, of course). NOAA wouldn’t answer my question, but only sniffed that if I can point to them claiming Karl has a Ph.D. – as opposed to just promoting him as “Dr. Karl” apparently on the basis of a 2002 honorary doctorate of humane letters – I should tell them.
The thing is, I have just received documents under the Freedom of Information Act showing that Mr. Karl is indeed styled as “Dr. Karl” on the express basis of having earned that 1978 NCSU Ph.D., as a proposed “co-investigator” in an application for a million-dollar-plus federal grant. The grant was awarded. No word yet whether the U.S. mail was involved in the process.
I suppose it’s possible that Hopkins just made this up to get the grant, and wasn’t relying on anything Mr. Karl told them. And the same could be true of NOAA, which reviewed the grant application (as evidenced by a letter in the responsive documents), and then received $100,000 from the proceeds of the grant. Maybe they got together to prepare Mr. Karl’s House testimony without his input, too.
Given the apparent seriousness of these revelations, I’ve got some correspondence underway seeking clarification from Hopkins, NOAA, and Karl. But, this is a busy time, what with – have I mentioned this? – a book coming out today. More later.
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Seems to be a sign of the times:
WSJ: “Inflated Credentials Surface in Executive Suite”
http://www.careerjournal.com/article/SB122652836844922165.html
Joel Shore,
Is radiative forcing the only effect that could be attributed to the Sun? Does even small changes in solar activity affect weather on earth?
You are making unproven assumptions. Are changes in cloud dynamics also orders of magnitude too small? Clouds are also listed as Low LOSU in IPCC AR4. What happens when there are more clouds? Less clouds?
Water vapor is another slippery slope. Does the atmospheric water vapor behave as climate models say it does?
If the sun is basically an incandescent light bulb in space, please explain the various previous periods of warmth much higher than Earth is experiencing today.
Observations trump theory.
I have only once troubled to check the credentials of a job applicant. He had lied. He later became a Member of the European Parliament.
Also note that the dates he lists seem to correspond to the entire time he was in the program (e.g., for the B.S. it is 1969-1973). This is different from my CV where I gave only the conferral dates. So, perhaps the listing for PhD meant he was in a PhD program for that time…but he never stuck it out long enough to get a degree. In that case, I admit that it is a poor way to list it as it is logical for people to believe that you actually obtained the PhD if you list it under education (although as someone reading that CV, I would likely say: “Hmmm…According to this, it took 4 academic years to get his B.A. and only one to get his PhD…That doesn’t seem to make sense” and would probably ask him for clarification).
On the other hand, since there are plenty of other places where Karl did not claim a PhD, there seems to have been no pervasive and consistent attempt to claim it as one presumably would if one was intentionally trying to deceive. Rather, this seems like some sloppiness on his part. I think it is reasonable to ask Karl for an explanation of this; I don’t think it is reasonable to declare him guilty of fraud or deception given the evidence and without having asked him for any explanation.
Joel Shore,
Aren’t you the same guy who recently gave absolutely no benefit of the doubt, in any possible way, to Lord Monckton?
But now you’re bending over backwards being an apologist for Mr. Karl. Take another look at what Karl put on his personal website:
That certainly appears to be deliberate misrepresentation.
If Karl had been awarded an honorary doctorate, why would he put down “1977-78”? An honorary doctorate is awarded at one point in time, not over two years. And if Karl did nothing wrong, why has he deleted that claim from his website? I don’t understand why you are defending Karl’s deception so insistently.
And is DR a real DR?
[snip]
Joel Shore says:
“As to you first statement, if we limited computational models to those things for which the mathematicians have rigorously proved the problem is well-posed, stable, etc., most of our scientific knowledge would be gone.”
Hardly. There’s still good ol’ empiricism :^)
Moreover, we’re not talking about a simple model equation here. Modern climate models are huge, coupled ** systems ** of non-linear equations, so the issues of well-posedness and stability are even more important, in my opinion. That doesn’t include all of the submodels (i.e. parameterizations) which themselves may be solving differential equations for sources of mass and energy which feed back into the main equations.
And I won’t get into the validation, verification, and documentation issues. Take a look at the GISS Model E for an example of a poorly documented code.
Joel Shore says:
“As a practical matter, it is understood that there is chaos in the system, i.e., that there is high sensitivity to the initial conditions. However, it is also shown that when the models are run in an ensemble fashion with perturbed initial conditions, while the exact bumps and wiggles (i.e., the weather and short term climate fluctuations) will be different in each realization, they all do tend to produce the same general change in climate to the greenhouse gas forcing.”
If the equations you’re solving produce chaos, which as you point out is ignored in favor of the predicted long term changes (which are a function of the tuned forcings programmed into the code), why then use a time-marching numerical method based on the non-linear equations of geophysical fluid dynamics? Just create a simple differential equation like
dT/dt = Forcing-Function(t)
You can probably arrive at the same answer with much less work!
JP:
He pointed out, with great irony, that he had a small piece of the (undeserved) prize owing to his status as an IPCC reviewer. He then went on (with even greater irony) to point out that, having pointed out that this minor little error (which grossly overstated SL rise), was by way of earning his piece of the prize. He had me chuckling though the whole article.
I think in your haste to wax ironic, your ironometer was malfunctioning.
(Bloody peasant!)
DR says:
The original statement that I was responding to here was “When someone claims predictive powers for one, while omitting the entity (e.g. the Sun) that drives the system (e.g. the climate), we’re out of the realm of legitimate differences in technique, and into the realm of deliberate fraud.” You have now gotten far afield from what that poster was originally saying and are now essentially arguing that the climate models might be omitting some as yet unknown (or at least not well-understood) process by which solar activity affects climate other than the obvious way of providing the direct radiative input. Well, statements of this sort could be made in any field of science. You can never prove anything in science because it is not deductive…It is inductive.
Having said that, it is rather difficult to explain the rise in temperature that we have seen over the past 30 years or so as being attributable to some change in solar attributes because no such change has been identified in attributes such as the luminosity and cosmic rays (which can be modulated by the sun’s magnetic field).
There has been a fair bit of study of this and the answer seems to be that indeed it does. See here for example: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;310/5749/841
I don’t see your point. First of all, over longer timescales there can be more variation in solar output than are seen over shorter timescales. However, most of the previous periods of warmth are understood as being due in large part to higher levels of CO2.
Not sure what your point is with this statement, which is true…although sort of simplistic (since in the real world, observational data can be erroneous too).
Frank K. says:
If all science based on the work of poorly documented code was eliminated… Well, you get the idea. In comparison to other fields, there are a hell of a lot more groups out there independently coding up climate models…which tends to be a better check on things than trying to check one particular code very carefully.
Better yet, one can look at a whole hierarchy of models, ranging from simple ones like the one you propose (which usually have at least one parameter that must be fed in from observation or from more detailed models) to the most complex ones…which is in fact what has actually been done in the field.
“Well, you get the idea. In comparison to other fields, there are a hell of a lot more groups out there independently coding up climate models…which tends to be a better check on things than trying to check one particular code very carefully.”
I agree that comparing results from independently developed codes is a good way to develop a consensus on the range of modeling issues from core numerics to the parameterizations. And I should say that there are many groups who ARE attempting to document and validate what they do – CAM 3 is a good example. Unfortunately, you also have the no-so-good, like Model E.
evanjones, if you’ve a spare moment, could you indicate which elements of Monckton’s official bio we are meant to take seriously, and which are irony? They seem to be all mixed up together.
Thanks.
I hesitate to add to this tempest in a teapot, but is there any such thing as a Ph. D in education? Ed. D would be more like it.
Remember the old saw: BS means exactly what you think it does; MS means More of the Same, and Ph. D. means Piled Higher and Deeper.
Seriously, though, Ph.D’s with their sexy grants and their graduate student slaveys are part of the problem.
Joel Shore:
“It is true that the models need to be tuned in some way so that in the absence of any forcings, they are in radiative balance, i.e., the radiation in equals that out.”
Perhaps this question is a result of my ignorance, but why do you assume an equilibrium state for the climate system? The fact that the warmest part of the day is several hours after noon, and that the warmest part of the year is one or two months after the summer solstice, indicates that the Earth is never at an equilibrium state at it’s boundary. I could accept that, over some interval, the net radiation received from the sun minus the net radiation expelled from the Earth has to approximate zero, but how do you measure the length of that interval, and more importantly, how do you establish a limit on the discrepancy between influx and outflux at any point in time, or over any small interval, say a year or even a decade?
This reasoning also applies to radiative transfer between elements of the Earth’s climate system. My instinct tells me that the heat transfer (both radiative and otherwise) across the surface of the ocean, for example, is not in equilibrium. I seem to recall a climate scientist arguing that it would take many years for the oceans to show the rise in temperature necesary to respond to the existing increase in CO2 levels. Does this not imply that that equilibrium across the ocean’s boundary is a constraint that can only be imposed over a very long interval? How do you quantify that interval in a climate model?
Frank K.
GISS E the whole group should be fired based on that code alone. No documentation, Odd structure, No revision notes, Version ?? hardly worth the quick review. I must admit I took the easy route and followed your link. What about the data sets?
This is a great blog. I read about it in the “Telegraph.co.uk” and have long been a skeptic of the global warming crisis and the theories surrounding carbon dioxide, the greenhouse effect, etc. As a chemical engineer working for a company that serves oil companies, I’m clearly biased. However, I feel that I have some background a sense for what may or may not be fuzzy science.
If global warming is only a short term trend, it will eventually show itself, and the popular media will be forced to recognize it.
I’m sure that this blog has been around for a long time. I’m a little slow when it comes to these things.
It is a felony to falsify a US gov’t job application. A really big one. Years ago a senior scientist on the Star Wars program got religion one day and started speaking out against it. The gov’t retrieved his records from way way back, and determined he did not have the degrees claimed. They pulled his security clearance, end of problem and his job.
No on in the US claims the title Dr. for an honorary degree. And a whole lot of Ph.D’s decline using the title except amongst their peers. Everyone in the gov’t is supposed to undergo at least a minimal background check, but still folks sneak by once in a while. For some reason, they never know when to stop. One gov’t employee made it to a very senior level job at Dept. of Justice before he was canned. DOJ didn’t prosecute, probably because they were embarassed he was able to bs his way for eight months before anyone got suspicious.
Another employee of a well-known Agency was testifying as an expert witness, and the defense attorney happened to found out his degrees were fake. This of course is the holy grail of cross-examination — ripping into a fake expert witness. There is nothing more satisfying in the practice of law.
Don’t underestimate how sensitive US gov’t agencies are to this sort of misrepresentation. Civil servants can be stupid, lazy, careless, impolite, and clueless, but to lie about a material fact in writing? That is a sin not forgiven. (Each industry has its own mortal sin, in academia it is plagarism, in the car business it is rolling back odometers.)
So NOAA is really interested if Karl misrepresented his credentials, especially his enemies at NOAA.
Joel Shore said:
There has been a fair bit of study of this and the answer seems to be that indeed it does. See here for example: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;310/5749/841
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1140746
Climate models and satellite observations both indicate that the total amount of water in the atmosphere will increase at a rate of 7% per kelvin of surface warming. However, the climate models predict that global precipitation will increase at a much slower rate of 1 to 3% per kelvin. A recent analysis of satellite observations does not support this prediction of a muted response of precipitation to global warming. Rather, the observations suggest that precipitation and total atmospheric water have increased at about the same rate over the past two decades.
Mike Dubrasich (01:32:26) agreed that we shouldn’t fight fire with fire. Instead he suggested ridicule as a way to combat the AGW hoax. Below is my attempt at ridicule.
PMSNBC News Alert
Dateline: Hell, 17 November 2008
Editor’s note: In our ongoing search for sensationalism and stories that promote our socialistic agenda, Keith Obermouth, who came sooooooo close to getting Tim Russert’s old job, has secured an exclusive telephone interview with the Prince Of Darkness Himself. A transcript of that interview is printed below in its entirety (well, maybe we did a little editing, but only to make the story more sensationalistic and disconcerting to our readers, and as always to further our socialistic agenda). Note to the typesetter, please remove the immediately foregoing parenthetical phrase prior to printing.
Obermouth: “Has anthropogenic global warming (AGW) impacted Hell in any way?”
Devil: “Yes and no. No in that man’s impact on the temperature of the earth’s surface is at most miniscule, and to date the temperature of Hell hasn’t risen at all. In fact, over the last year our measurements tell us that Hell, like earth, has become slightly cooler; but that is obviously incorrect because NASA tells us the earth is getting warmer. We’ll have to modify our temperature measuring techniques. Fortunately, that will be easy because when Dr. James Hansen joins us in the near future we’ll use his expertise in this matter.
“This may come as a shock to you, but just as man has little or no impact on the temperature of the earth’s surface, I have little or no impact on natural law. The temperature of the earth’s surface is outside my direct control. Sure, I’d like the surface to be more like home-who wouldn’t? But just because I ‘wish it to be true’ doesn’t ‘make it true’. [Oops, maybe you’d better not print that last comment. Right now the world’s population, and especially many who live in the United States, thinks they can make anything be true just by ‘wishing it to be so’. The last thing I want is to get mankind to change its way of reacting to the real world. When confronted by observable facts, ‘wishful thinking’ and ‘knee-jerk panic reactions’ are two of my better recruitment strategies.]
“Yes in that the fear of AGW is producing early arrivals. Deaths from spoiled food, malnutrition, freezing, etc. are increasing at a rapid rate, and we expect the trend to continue. The situation is similar to the DDT scare, which wasn’t perfect but on the whole was one of my better ideas. We netted several million early arrivals with that one. It would have been perfect, but the law of unintended consequences bit me on the butt. The early arrivals weren’t very good workers because their bodies and souls were racked with disease. Getting them into shape to do my work strained my resources. However, in the case of ‘AGW scare’ arrivals, the outlook is brighter. Malnutrition is much easier to fix than malaria. And the thawing out of frozen bodies is trivial for us to handle.”
Obermouth: “So you think the AGW scare will impact Hell in the future?”
Devil: “Yes, in fact we’re making plans for the future. Like the IPCC, we use computer models and they predict the early arrival of 30,000,000 souls. Our models show that the transition of energy production from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, whatever the Hell those are, will result in the early deaths of 15,000,000 at a minimum and may reach as high as 45,000,000. As a result, we are expediting completion of our new wing to accommodate the expected 30,000,000 early arrivals. However, unlike the IPCC computer models used to predict global temperatures, our models accurately predict the future not the past. Of course there’s a downside to those early arrivals. It’s a well known fact that the longer a person lives the more likely he is to commit a mortal sin. Thus, shortening an individual’s life decreases the probability that he/she will join us in Shangri-La. But as the old saying goes, ‘a burning log in the stove is better than two on the wood pile’.”
Obermouth: “From what you say and given the rhetoric of former Vice President Al Gore, Dr. Hansen of NASA and Dr. Pachauri of the IPCC, I infer they are spokespersons for your organization. Is that correct?”
Devil: “No, and you can believe me on this one. That’s not to say they won’t grace me with their presence at some time in the future. But hey, you insult me by implying I would pick such incompetent boobs. Why just the other day, the organization headed by that idiot Hansen duplicated for October some September 2008 temperatures from Russia; and as a result his mouthpiece, Dr. Pachauri, claimed the earth’s surface was getting hotter faster than anyone expected. When this mishandling of the data became general knowledge, it set our work back several months. It wasn’t fatal to our cause, but it hurt. When I get my hooves on Drs. Hansen and Pachauri, I’ll teach them what for.”
Obermouth: “Are you implying that Al Gore, Dr. Hansen, and Dr. Pachauri are headed to Hell?”
Devil: “Duh. And I was told you were smart. I’ll have to reprimand my call screener. Of course they’re headed to Hell. Do you really think my Political Opponent wants to associate with idiots that do MY work? He’s afraid the global warming alarmist crowd will convince the inhabitants of Heaven that Heaven is heating up and will soon be indistinguishable from Hell. In a secret protocol, I have agreed to take them off His hands when they die in return for which He won’t interfere with their earthly preaching.
“Their arrival in Hell will, however, require that I change both my official name and my headquarters. With all the hot air messieurs Gore, Hansen, and Pachauri will bring to Hell, the temperature here will rise to a level where the walls of Hell will emit sufficient visible light that I’ll be the Prince Of Lightness, not the Prince of Darkness. Then when energy production transitions from fossil fuel to ‘green’ sources, I won’t have enough power to run my personal air conditioner; and like Al Gore, just how much inconvenience can a savior of the world be expected to suffer? As a result, I’ll have to move my headquarters to one of the outer planets.”
Obermouth: “Thank you for your time. I wish you well.”
Devil: “You’re welcome. And by the way, as of today PMSNBC hasn’t named a permanent replacement for Tim Russert. Maybe we can work out a deal–I’m known for that you know. Hold on a second while I check my records. (very short pause) Forget it. I don’t need to waste a deal on you.”