The Dog Ate Global Warming
Interpreting climate data can be hard enough. What if some key data have been fiddled?
By Patrick J. Michaels, National Review Online
Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.
Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.
Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.
In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climate Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate.”
Putting together such a record isn’t at all easy. Weather stations weren’t really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.
So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that are required to verify models of global warming aren’t the original records at all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren’t specific about what was done to which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/– 0.2°C in the 20th century.
Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that “+/–” came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”
Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust. In fact, the entire purpose of replication is to “try and find something wrong.” The ultimate objective of science is to do things so well that, indeed, nothing is wrong.
Then the story changed. In June 2009, Georgia Tech’s Peter Webster told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn’t have the data because he wasn’t an “academic.” So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.
Faced with a growing number of such requests, Jones refused them all, saying that there were “confidentiality” agreements regarding the data between CRU and nations that supplied the data. McIntyre’s blog readers then requested those agreements, country by country, but only a handful turned out to exist, mainly from Third World countries and written in very vague language.
It’s worth noting that McKitrick and I had published papers demonstrating that the quality of land-based records is so poor that the warming trend estimated since 1979 (the first year for which we could compare those records to independent data from satellites) may have been overestimated by 50 percent. Webster, who received the CRU data, published studies linking changes in hurricane patterns to warming (while others have found otherwise).
Enter the dog that ate global warming.
Roger Pielke Jr., an esteemed professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, then requested the raw data from Jones. Jones responded:
Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e., quality controlled and homogenized) data.
The statement about “data storage” is balderdash. They got the records from somewhere. The files went onto a computer. All of the original data could easily fit on the 9-inch tape drives common in the mid-1980s. I had all of the world’s surface barometric pressure data on one such tape in 1979.
If we are to believe Jones’s note to the younger Pielke, CRU adjusted the original data and then lost or destroyed them over twenty years ago. The letter to Warwick Hughes may have been an outright lie. After all, Peter Webster received some of the data this year. So the question remains: What was destroyed or lost, when was it destroyed or lost, and why?
All of this is much more than an academic spat. It now appears likely that the U.S. Senate will drop cap-and-trade climate legislation from its docket this fall — whereupon the Obama Environmental Protection Agency is going to step in and issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions. Unlike a law, which can’t be challenged on a scientific basis, a regulation can. If there are no data, there’s no science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer to the question posed above.
— Patrick J. Michaels is a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know.
h/t to WUWT reader Bill Kurdziel
I wish I could say this was a surprise….but it really isn’t.
Science died (at least climate science) sometime in the last decade.
Anthony, I humbly suggest we can do without Back2Bat conspiracy based economic ‘insights’.
Dave Wendt (15:52:19) :
“In browsing thru the DMI temp archive a while back there seemed to me to be a recurring pattern of upspikes in temp coinciding with both of the equinoxes. The upticks show up frequently, if not consistently, and in the case of the vernal equinox they would seem to make some sense, as the Sun is at that point emerging from its Winter slumber. Conversely, at the autumnal equinox the Sun disappears, as it just has, which makes those rises in temp rather counterintuitive, at least in my estimation. Has anyone ever seen a reasonable explanation of these seemingly common jumps in temp at this point in the calendar?”
I dont know as such, but if the north behaves much the same as the south at equinoxes. I would imagine it would have something to do with the gales… you know how the warm air starts dropping down on the pole as it cools rapidly and blasts out and away to lower latitudes. Maybe causing a kinda syphine effect 🙂 but just the mussings o an ignorant farmer im afraid.
One comment I can make without seeing the paper: It appears the study ended in 2007, and particularly involves the thickness near the edges, so that would seem to be a pretty good cherrypick. What has happened since?
“Anthony, I humbly suggest we can do without Back2Bat conspiracy based economic ‘insights’.”
Who said anything about conspiracy?
Ben Bernake admitted the Fed caused the Great Depression. The Great Depression is a major cause of WWII. WWII killed 50 – 80 million people and caused a lot of environmental destruction too.
The PTB know their economic system is unstable and dangerous. It is no stretch to suggest they might inspire a little environmental hysteria as a diversion and as a crude and cruel way to dampen economic growth.
But Philip,
I appreciate the methodical, deliberate approach you guys are taking. It takes all kinds.
But really, I was wise years ago when CO2 was first called a pollutant. I reckon that was sometime between 1994 and 2002.
So, might my insights have a little bit of truth in them?
Finding the records is easy if you have someone at the top with guts. You start by interviewing Jones and work your way down. Anyone who does not know where the original data is gets fired. Data turns up quickly.
Greg Cantrell (14:36:46) :
It is a sad day to be sure. Everybody put your tin hats on. I think the conspiracy theories maybe true.
Hi Greg, Why attribute to Conspiracy what can be attributed to Incompetance?
Occams Razor suggests that Incompetance is much more likely than Conspiracy.
The whole episode of “AGW Science” reeks of small minded academics being puffed up with false authority and set into positions of “Grandiose Expertise” that they are manifestly incapable of transforming into Real Expertise. These are people, for whom, if AGW did not exist, they would have led lives of obscure mediocrity, publishing papers that that would be nothing more than wallpaper in their own offices.
KBK (16:25:52) :
how can Greenland and the Antarctic be accelerating in their melt when the sea level rise is reducing.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_global_sm.jpg
Graeme, quite so. But the historical example of this is Lysneko. Many died due to Lysneko being “small minded ” and ” puffed up with false authority and set into positions of “Grandiose Expertise”
Graeme Rodaughan (17:29:22) :
thats a major factor today ever since we established these Climate Change centers.
Yesterday when the east coast of Australia had a red dust storm the ABC interviewed one such person – a dust expert from a Climate Change organisation. He said that the dust storm was extremely rare and attributed it to climate change.
A quick search of the BOM site showed there was a consistent history of dust storms throughout our country’s history.
It’s getting to the point that according to the media if you work for a CC organisation you are an expert, if not your opinion isn’t worth anything.
If a group of scientists faked data that ended up being used to justify the spending of $billions and millions of job losses, then it`s pretty safe to assume that when the poo-poo hits the fan, the journalists and politicians (the real promoters of AGW) will unite to cover each other`s backsides. The public of course will not believe them, so they will go after these frauds with a vengance.
I predict that when this all crumbles around them, the politicians and journalists will call for serious jail sentances for the scientists they will say “conned and fooled” them into believing AGW was real. We, of course know that the politicians and meida are the real culprits, but they are the ones who control the news and media, and they will deliver the heads of these scientific frauds as a trophey of their fight against those evil doers who conned the world into believing in AGW. The public will demand people be brought to account, and the politicians and media will do just that.
If Jones and Wigley had any brains, they would come clean ASAP, and they would start publicising that many other scientists have for a long time been telling the media and politicians that AGW science is incorrect and the the politicians deliberately chose their data over the other scientists.
That might cover their arhssses to some extent. But from reading the contradictory lies these people have spun, I doubt these two have the intelligence to comprehend the consequences to them.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” PaulH
Indeed, but in our panic stricken world, many economically illiterate scientists see no harm in erring on the side of “prudence”.
The problem is, that as far as economics go, they don’t know what prudence is.
It would be interesting to see an objective critique of the paper posted here at WUWT.
The Antarctic circumpolar vortex is (part of) the mechanism by which heat from mid-lattitudes is transferred to Antarctica where it is lost to space. There is some evidence that the vortex has increased in intensity and this is the cause of Antarctic Peninsula ice melt which has certainly happened.
An increasing vortex is probably caused by a greater temperature differential between the mid-latitudes and the Antarctic proper. We know Antarctica has cooled and this is probably the cause of a warmer Peninsula.
The problem in the Greenland paper is interesting. The study itself and its conclusions seem sound. However it provides no evidence of a trend. But then the author when interviewed launches into wild speculation with no basis in fact.
Scientists say it’s a natural process — in one period the cold waters will have the upper hand, and in the next it’s the other way round. But the rapidly increasing temperatures of the subtropical oceans suggest that the balance could be tilted beyond natural variability, Curry says.
There is no evidence the temperatures of the sub-tropical oceans are rapidly increasing.
The problem is scientists making alarmist statements that have no basis in the science they have performed.
“These are people, for whom, if AGW did not exist, they would have led lives of obscure mediocrity, publishing papers that that would be nothing more than wallpaper in their own offices.”
And that sadly is the truth. Reading the spiteful and childish comments made by members of the self described ‘team’ in response to any challenges to their maunderings reveals how immature and unworthy of respect many of them are.
‘Scientists’ once had the respect and admiration of most people – unfortunately the squabbling ineptitude of climate science has reduced their reputation to rank below that of used car salesmen.
It’s not just ‘climate scientists’ either, the whole sector has been tainted. Where once a ‘white coat’ represented objective and careful research; now it is seen as the ‘dress du jour’ of political activists, bumbling incompetents and preachers of ‘chicken little’ catastrophes.
/rant
Greg, San Diego, CA (14:42:48) :
No messing required. That amount of water freezing has to release its energy somewhere & the deep oceans isn’t it!
DaveE.
George E. Smith (15:33:02) :
“Maybe comparing “climate science” to “ancient astrology” is an insult to ancient astrology.”
Indeed. At least astrology was based on observation. The planets were in alignment. With AGW, it appears the observations are questionable, to say nothing of interpretation.
“The article is based on a recent paper in Nature reporting on laser measurements of elevation, i.e. glacier thickness, in Greenland and the Antarctic. That’s different from sea ice extent.”
I am aware of that. But how can you have both increasing sea ice AND runaway melt of land ice? You can’t have both increasing and decreasing temperatures at the same time. Also, ice is accumulating in inland Antarctica and Greenland. Temperatures for all but the western “arm” of Antarctica are cooling. I am willing to bet it is another joke of a paper (a la Steig’s paper).
Tenuc (15:02:43) :
Unfortunately, Dyson has been dismissed as a senile crank by the fraternity.
DaveE.
While the handling and openness of a global temperature record has severely lacked scientific professionalism, we can safely assume that for most of the world, average temperatures have increased in the last 250 years. That would seem to be a logical conclusion from the retreat of glaciers. Perhaps some would quibble that glaciers do not cover the whole world, but I am willing to accept that typical temperatures have increased since the LIA.
Einstein was a proponent of making things as simple as possible, but not simpler. In other words, it is important to use Occam’s Razor, but just as important to not cut too deeply. If you look at the big AGW picture, which includes truly bizarre and frightening political proposals, it is difficult to chalk it all up to incompetence. Incompetent people spew their incompetence all over the place every day and it doesn’t threaten to destroy western civilization.
With simple errors, an honest scientist will:
a) Correct the errors when new information is provided.
b) Admit that the author did not have enough education on that subject to catch that error first.
A dishonest scientist will:
a) Hide behind authority and refuse to disclose the raw data and methodology.
b) Rely upon other people to adopt a “defense lawyer mentality” to defend and deflect any errors.
‘Scientists’ once had the respect and admiration of most people – unfortunately the squabbling ineptitude of climate science has reduced their reputation to rank below that of used car salesmen. PeterW
I pretty much predicted this too. I referred to it as a “deep plot to discredit science” a while back.
You see, science was all well and good as long as it gave the “right” answers but some in high places don’t like the current answers so science has to be discredited.
From the article;
“What was destroyed or lost, when was it destroyed or lost, and why?”
Thatcher was a control freak and since the 80’s successive British gummints have become even more so. They fear the public and what they are capable of (Poll Tax riots). One reason why there are now police posted around The Houses of Parliament 24 x 7. Another example, there are some 15 million surveilance comeras installed in the UK. Broken communities + broken familes + dumed down society + welfare dependency + information control = Total control. The authorities in the UK are almost there with their goal of their Owellian dream.
“We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”
Isn’t that, in a nutshell, SCIENCE?????
begin
data theory = dup if publish else rewrite then
until
(sorry, an old FORTHer)