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
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Patrick Davis (19:43:53) : “…Another example, there are some 15 million surveilance comeras installed in the UK…The authorities in the UK are almost there with their goal of their O(r)wellian dream.”
This war will be won or lost in the media. This Big “Brother” is a creation of the media and is their WMD.
Then I was thinking, in a conspiratorial sort of way, about the ‘words of mass destruction’.
The media is to blame because they were the bridge between the scientists and politicians, constantly ramping up the hype. They are all bankrupt on AGW alarmism, possibly criminally negligent if the weather turns decidedly nasty.
If they’ve got no data they’ve got no case. End of AGW hoax.
Media? Once upon a time I was called “scientificist” by an anchor in a TV debate when I was explaining how science works.
Many of them, but not all of them, do think that science can be modified according to the perspectives of the man in power. They use to say, “Those who own the voice, own the power”. They have the voice, they then have the power.
It’s as simple as to severely questioning to honest scientists and smiling to dishonest scientists, or blocking honest scientists from participating in their programs, or to invite to honest scientists for debating in programs where the honest scientist would be a solitary voice on the side of clean science.
University administrators’ preferred tactic:
Build in delays.
Alarmists’ preferred tactic:
Build in menacing delays by promoting endless discordant exchanges about typos, semantics, strawmen, …
Thomas J. Arnold. (14:31:46) :
Is any politician listening? Answer – there came none.
“But answer came there none–
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.”
Lewis Carroll was referring to oysters, but it seems to apply to dogs eating global warming data in this production of “AGW in Wonderland .”
Extraordinary claims are more often than not based upon faith and belief rather than hard evidence.
It’s shocking that the original raw data would be lost. It’s also shocking that they wouldn’t keep meticulous records of their “manipulations” or “adjustments” to the original data to know if they are on track or not. How can you check your scientific work if you don’t keep an audit trail? How can others verify it if you don’t present the data. Shocking isn’t the half of it.
Much like the Pathologists of late who messed up criminal cases with sloppy or fraudulent work the comments and quality of Phil Jones work is now in question. Imagine his entire career going down the drain because of sloppy science work? Not too good.
All science data must have an audit trail with the original data kept intact and all manipulations of it fully documented and justified. Open Public Science.
Were any laws broken by these behaviors of these scientists who lost the data they manipulated and lost the reasons for their manipulations? Certainly they’ve lost the trust they would expect to engender. Isn’t there a duty, such as a fiduciary duty, for those engaged in public science to uphold? What are the consequences if they don’t? I fear we are finding out; mass climate hysteria and a waste of human resources all over the planet?
Due to tilting at climate windmills we end up like the people of Easter Island? Extinct.
There are real threats to Earth, ourselves and things like asteroids that we can actually do something about. While we tilt at climate windmills will ignore the real threats?
Pops (19:06:59) :
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.
“Pops” maybe you are right, the level of incompetence is organized above and beyond reasonable denyablity, and there is a very large bandwagon effect. Hopefully that song is nearly over. I’m finding the undecided and some warmers have turned sceptic. It’s tough to fool all the people all the time.
Good point above. Astrology data is reliable. Just the interpretation is on a par with Climate Science. Make it up as you go along.
I wonder, now that the dog ate raw data, how Jones et al gets the +/– 0.2°C uncertainty range in the “unprecedented” warming, does it come from the dog’s [snip]?
Patrick J. Michaels wrote:
“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.”
Has someone asked Stephen McIntyre?
Do you know the term ‘gobsmacked’?
Definition: flabbergasted, astounded, shocked;
Etymology: from gob ‘mouth’ + smacked ‘clapping hand over in surprise’
Well I am gobsmacked by the combination of monumental stupidity and monumental gall exhibited by the so-called caretakers of climate data such as Phil Jones
OT
It appears that we have a new COLD RECORD for Greenland.
-46 right now this morning, old record -43,9 C for summit, september:
The record low:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/part-2-opdaterede-sol-is-temp-hav-data-d12-e1066-s40.php#post_14837
I still have not seen any official reaction to this little problem, so i cannot guarantee that this record will not somehow be “omitted”.
But it seems to be the real deal, coldest september temp ever measured on Greenland.
temp right now:
http://www.summitcamp.org/status/weather/index?period=day
The records:
http://www.dmi.dk/dmi/index/gronland/ekstremer.htm
K.R. Frank
Dear crosspatch,
you were wondering if sea ice can increase while land ice can reduce.
Well that is you course possible, because as far as I understand it sea ice is very sensitive to sea water currents. Also I have heard that the low in 2007 is related to an unusual wind pattern und the sea ice seems now to partially recover from that.
If you look at the anual mean ice area over several decades I think you can agree that the Artic sea ice is declining as you would expect as a result from a temperature increase up till at least the end of last millenium. NOA seems to be a key factor for the Artic sea ice.
Cheers,
LoN
I find this story quite astonishing.
If the IPCC is using the CRU data as the global standard, surely there should have been put in place a fail-safe mechanism for collecting, collating and storing the data.
What we are hearing is that this appears to be an ad hoc process by the original scientists, who despite being the world’s data centre, do not have an administrator whose job is to handle data requests from third parties, nor a streamlined mechanism for accessing it and supplying it.
At the very least, this is grossly incompetent and poorly planned. Something for the CRU funders to address perhaps?
At worst, it is fingers in the dyke.
I know full well how unscrupulous scientists can be in accessing others’ data and then stealing their research thunder. Which is why MTAs usually prescribe very clearly what the data can be used for. It’s not hard to set that up.
So the questions that should be being asked are these:
1. What do Jones et al have to fear from properly controlled, application limited data sharing exercises?
2. Why are the funders of CRU not funding proper data management functions in a world-leading repository?
3. Why are politicians not kicking up a stink about their great ‘project’ being underpinned by scientific mismanagement and incompetence??
Nothing unusual about the “DMI-spike” in the Arctic. It is all about winds. A stalled low pressure pushed in warm Atlantic air northeast of Greenland. The build up of cold air in this area was temporarily stopped. The temperature will go down in a couple of days.
I too have requested Data from CRU under the F.O.I. Act
This is the first reply;
ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION REGULATIONS 2004 – INFORMATION REQUEST (FOI_09-128; EIR_09-19)
Your request for information received on 14 August 2009 for a “A copy of any digital version of the CRUTEM station data set that has been sent from CRU to Peter Webster and/or any other person at Georgia Tech between January 1, 2007 and June 25, 2009” and “A copy of any instructions or stipulations accompanying the transmission of data to Peter Webster and/or any other person at Georgia Tech between January 1, 2007 and June 25, 2009 limiting its further dissemination or disclosure” has now been considered and it is, unfortunately, not possible to meet your request.
In accordance with Regulation 14 of the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 this letter acts as a Refusal Notice, and I am not obliged to supply this information and the reasons for exemption are as stated below:
Exception Reason
Reg. 12(4)(a) – Information not held Some of the requested information is not held by the University
Reg. 12(4)(b) – Request is manifestly unreasonable Information is available elsewhere
Reg. 12(5)(a) – Adverse effect on international relations Release would damage relations with scientists & institutions from other nations
Reg. 12(5)(f) – Adverse effect on the person providing information Information is covered by a confidentiality agreement
We believe that Regulation 12(4)(b) applies to your request for the data because the requested data is a subset of highly similar data already available in another format from other sources; namely the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN ) , and the Climatic Research Unit . Both sources make the requested information available in a gridded format. We believe, following DEFRA guidance, that it is unreasonable for the University to spend public resources on providing information in a different format to that which is already available.
In regards Regulation 12(5)(a), much of the requested data comes from both individual scientists and institutions from countries around the world. If this information were to be released contrary to the conditions under which this institution received it, it would damage the trust that other national scientists and institutions have in UK-based public sector organisations and would likely result in them becoming reluctant to share information and participate in scientific projects in future. This would damage the ability of the University and other UK institutions to co-operate with meteorological organisations and governments of other countries.
Regulation 12(5)(f) applies to the data requested because the data was received by the University on terms that limits further transmission. We believe that there would be an adverse effect on the institutions that supplied data under those agreements as it would undermine the conditions under which they supplied the data to the Climate Research Unit.
In regards your request for any stipulations accompanying the transmission of the data to academics at Georgia Tech, Regulation 12(4)(a) applies as no such instructions or stipulations are held by the University. Any such conditions were verbal and between the parties involved at that time. All the written agreements that we do hold in relation to the station data within the CRUTEM data set are available on the Climate Research Unit website at: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/availability/
Regulation 12(1)(b) mandates that we consider the public interest in any decision to release or refuse information under Regulation 12(4). In this case, we feel that there is a strong public interest in upholding contract terms governing the use of received information. To not do so would be to potentially risk the loss of access to such data in future as noted above. In regards Regulation 12(4)(b), we believe it is not in the public interest to divert public resources away from other work to provide information that is available elsewhere. Finally in regards Regulation 12(5)(a), we feel that there is a clear public interest in neither damaging nor restricting scientific collaboration between UK-based scientists and institutions with international colleagues.
I should note, however, that the University is commencing work, in concert with the Met Office Hadley Centre, to seek permission from data suppliers in advance of the next update of the CRUTEM database in 2010 in order to provide public access to this data. This work has been announced on the CRU website and further updates on it’s progress will be available there.
I apologise that your request will be met but if you have any further information needs in the future then please contact me.
If you have any queries or concerns, or, if you are dissatisfied with the handling of your request please contact me at:
University of East Anglia
Norwich
NR4 7TJ
Telephone: 0160 393 523
E-mail: foi@uea.ac.uk
I then appealed against the decision on the following grounds;
Regulation 9(1) states
“A public authority shall provide advice and assistance, so far as it would be reasonable to expect the authority to do so, to applicants and prospective applicants”.
In particular I want to know why you think it is unreasonable to ask for the exact dataset, as described in a peer- reviewed published paper, on a subject of great public interest and where the usual scientific convention is that authors must provide sufficient detail to allow others to replicate their work. How can you possibly claim it is “manifestly unreasonable” to send me the same data that you have sent elsewhere without any actionable undertakings from that recipient?
I also require UEA to justify its assertion that disclosure of said information and data, which virtually all Academies of Science and most journals regard as essential, would have an “adverse effect on international relations and would damage relations with scientists & institutions from other nations”. This assertion requires evidence to support it, otherwise it appears to be merely a convenient excuse.
Finally I note that there is an obvious contradiction in your claim that you are trying “to seek permission from data suppliers in advance of the next update of the CRUTEM database in 2010 in order to provide public access to this data” and the fact that you are unable to show anything other than a couple of rather old and ineffectual documents to support your claim that this is a significant problem.
Accordingly I ask that you immediately publish or send me the data for which you cannot substantiate that an actionable restrictive contract exists.
I have had an acknowledgement that my request will now be internally reviewed. If I do not get a positive reply, I will take the appeal to the Information Commissioner.
Personally I believe that this obstrufication by Jones strikes at the heart of the scientific method, in that research work must be reproduceable and testable. My advice to all readers of this Blog is to deluge Jones with F.O.I. (actually Environmental Information Regulation) requests so that he becomes a liability to his employers.
Anyways, folks know whats going on. At some point it becomes like voyeurism, like watching a robbery or rape and closing the curtain just a bit so nobody sees you peeking. Maybe if folks start talking about motives. It is not just profit or politics.
The problem with the theory they are discrediting the scientists is most folks are content to accept what scientists say is fact. Most scientists are honest folks, but they are limited to what they know, which is their specialty, and they need to eat too. The only ones speaking out seem to be the retired scientists.
Thats why a handful of mathematical physcists have been able to hijack climate science with their models using data from many different disciplines, but choosing their own assumptions (free parameters). Enough free parameters and they can model an elephant that flies, or show that sub-primes are good for the economy. If their models give the right answers, they get more government funding. Government controls the data collection and storage. 1+ 1 = 3 so says the models. And much of the science is behind paid for subscription firewalls, and peer review is not the guaranty of good science that folks have been told it is, most get approved without anyone seeing all the data, so long as the conclusions have the right stuff (wink).
What it is all about folks is lowering standards of living in developed nations, preparing the world for a cosmological secular pagan religion (called scientism) encompassing human sacrifice, where humans are sinners against pagan gods like Gaia and must reduce consumption in order to avoid a Green Hell, and platonic philosopher kings ruling the people under one government on behalf of Gaia, and a global currency called the carbon dollar (with a carbon tax), not to mention the neo-malthusians who would like to cull the herd (energy deprivation = starvation and lower life expectancy).
NOW -47 on Greenland. 3 degrees C below cold record for september:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/part-2-opdaterede-sol-is-temp-hav-data-d12-e1066-s40.php#post_14840
Ray (14:50:04) : I can only wonder what the scientists in 100-200 years will say when looking back at the temperature data… “We have this huge hole in the data, what did they think? But luckily, we now have a computer model that can produce data where there were erased data.”
Um, I don’t know how to break this to you… but… GIStemp already does that.
When spicing various series together and “homogenizing it” and doing UHI “correction” it casts about up to 1000 km to get a “reference station” it can use to make up the “missing” temperature data.
Further, in the first application of gridding and boxes (2 degrees lat /long on a side IIRC) in STEP3 it uses any old thermometer it has to make up the temperature for a “box” up to 1200 km away. Even if that thermometer has large spans of “data” that were made up in earlier steps… This is particularly heinous in the case of islands in the sun where the thermometers are nearly universally at airports near the tarmac and THAT temperature is used to represent the ocean temperature over clear water as much as 1200 km more toward the poles… A single thermometer at, oh, Guam or Diego Garcia can have a major impact.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/gistemp-islands-in-the-sun/
There are 2 or 3 different places (prior to the Hadley CRU SST merger in STEP5) that GIStemp fabricates data.
I know that isn’t the word they use for it, but having gone through the whole thing, that is the best term to describe what the program does. Repeatedly. Even when the original data isn’t actually missing it will fabricate a replacement… No, I’m not making that up. For example, in Pisa, the past gets re-written about 1 1/2 C colder than it is in the actual records (thus making the warming look steeper). This is asserted to be an Urban Heat Island correction. Except it goes the wrong way…
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/30/gistemp-a-slice-of-pisa/
Oh, and they use a lot of airports for UHI “correction” treating acres of tarmac as pristine rural locations:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/agw-gistemp-measure-jet-age-airport-growth/
Like this “rural” airport that is used a few hundred times to fabricate new temperatures for “nearby” locations up to 1000km away:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/most-used-rural-airport-for-uhi-adj/
Just because it has a new industrial park going in and is home to a Civil Defense squadron is no reason to think it isn’t rural.
The upshot of all this? If you think you can skip HadCrut and just use GIStemp instead, you are just going from one broken series with no history to a worse series that is more fabricated than collected.
IMHO, the best thing you can do is go to the GHCN data directly from NOAA and completely ignore GIStemp. Most of what it does is complete garbage.
No, that is not hyperbole. The decisions made in the code are mindless at best and malicious at worse. It is all I can do to keep Hanlon’s razor in mind: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” In STEP0 they glue together USHCN and GHCN data with a horrid algorithm that sometimes keeps one, sometimes the other, and sometimes makes a bastard hybrid out of it by gluing together bits that have had chunks starting from about 20 years ago and further back in time “adjusted” by an offset between GHCN and USHCN in the last decade or so. Any recent equipment change, for example, can change all past time… for SOME of the records…
Now the nutty bit is that the GHCN data came from the USHCN in the first place but with a different “modification history”. So sometimes you keep one mod history, sometimes the other, and sometimes a fabrication based and the delta between the two in a recent decade applied to all prior decades. This makes sense how? The reason given is to remove the UHI correction in one series by applying the other. Right… GHCN from NOAA has an “adj” and a non-adjusted set available.
IMHO, you ought to just take the NOAA GHCN data (your choice of UHI adjusted or not) and run with it. Maybe add in the arctic data (which STEP0 also does), but that’s about it. Forget all the “reference station method” fabrication of data where there are none and all the “correcting” that is really distorting based on airport growth.
The bottom line is that for both HadCrut and GIStemp, we have no temperature record that is usable. Best you can do is walk away… just walk away…
Personally I hope the conspiracy theorists are right, cause I prefer to believe that the earth is reasonably stable with regards to its average temperature, because I do know we sentient beings live in a fairly narrow range of temperature galactically speaking, and a change of only 5deg in average could change a lot of stuff which we have no data on at all, obviously. Apart from the Antarctic Ice record, now there is a bunch of data about all sorts of things, CO2 levels among them.
Maybe some of the conflict is about competing for the govt money that is available for the main info suppliers, because to me who lives in the Pacific I know there are Islands that are threatened by rising sea levels. The bad science could be due to the unhealthy state of info competition.
Would it be possible to set up an equivalent project to http://www.surfacestations.org/ which starts to collect the original raw data from as many temperature recording stations around the world as possible and make it available online? A proper peer reviewed reconstruction of temperature past could then be produced.
Data for CO2 levels could also be collected as I understand that accurate records have been kept since 1820 which contradict the IPCC’s reconstruction from ice core samples.
I see no reason why such a project could not apply for funding from a huge variety of sources. If funding were not made available then would help to highlight the fact that such a record does not already exist – something that would surprise even most alarmists. Even without official funding I imagine that the project could be funded from donations provided it had worldwide scope. There are plenty of Chinese billionaires out there who have a great deal to loose if the truth doesn’t come out soon.
I suggest calling this project http://www.realclimatedata.org 🙂
Moderator, I will understand if you think this is too far afield of the topic to be posted, but:
[not offensive in any way, but it my opinion, as you say, too far afield ~ ctm]
SUmmit data only goes back to mar 2004. But still februar temperatures in september. Sunday pronosis: -48 C…
As far as ice loss goes, any putative ice loss belongs more logically to soot, i.e. “black carbon”, and its effect on light absorption by the surface of the ice.
This is a non-issue as the “answer” to the problem is economic and technological advance in Africa and Asia which is not the warmist’s aganda.