When the CRU emails first made it into news stories, there was immediate reaction from the head of CRU, Dr. Phil Jones over this passage in an email:
From a yahoo.com news story:
In one leaked e-mail, the research center’s director, Phil Jones, writes to colleagues about graphs showing climate statistics over the last millennium. He alludes to a technique used by a fellow scientist to “hide the decline” in recent global temperatures. Some evidence appears to show a halt in a rise of global temperatures from about 1960, but is contradicted by other evidence which appears to show a rise in temperatures is continuing.
Jones wrote that, in compiling new data, he had “just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline,” according to a leaked e-mail, which the author confirmed was genuine.
Dr. Jones responded.
However, Jones denied manipulating evidence and insisted his comment had been taken out of context. “The word ‘trick’ was used here colloquially, as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward,” he said in a statement Saturday.
Ok fine, but how Dr. Jones, do you explain this?
There’s a file of code also in the collection of emails and documents from CRU. A commenter named Neal on climate audit writes:
People are talking about the emails being smoking guns but I find the remarks in the code and the code more of a smoking gun. The code is so hacked around to give predetermined results that it shows the bias of the coder. In other words make the code ignore inconvenient data to show what I want it to show. The code after a quick scan is quite a mess. Anyone with any pride would be to ashamed of to let it out public viewing. As examples [of] bias take a look at the following remarks from the MANN code files:
Here’s the code with the comments left by the programmer:
function mkp2correlation,indts,depts,remts,t,filter=filter,refperiod=refperiod,$
datathresh=datathresh
;
; THIS WORKS WITH REMTS BEING A 2D ARRAY (nseries,ntime) OF MULTIPLE TIMESERIES
; WHOSE INFLUENCE IS TO BE REMOVED. UNFORTUNATELY THE IDL5.4 p_correlate
; FAILS WITH >1 SERIES TO HOLD CONSTANT, SO I HAVE TO REMOVE THEIR INFLUENCE
; FROM BOTH INDTS AND DEPTS USING MULTIPLE LINEAR REGRESSION AND THEN USE THE
; USUAL correlate FUNCTION ON THE RESIDUALS.
;
pro maps12,yrstart,doinfill=doinfill
;
; Plots 24 yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD reconstructions
; of growing season temperatures. Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.
;
and later the same programming comment again in another routine:
; ; Plots (1 at a time) yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD ; reconstructions ; of growing season temperatures. Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually ; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to ; the real temperatures.
You can claim an email you wrote years ago isn’t accurate saying it was “taken out of context”, but a programmer making notes in the code does so that he/she can document what the code is actually doing at that stage, so that anyone who looks at it later can figure out why this function doesn’t plot past 1960. In this case, it is not allowing all of the temperature data to be plotted. Growing season data (summer months when the new tree rings are formed) past 1960 is thrown out because “these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures”, which implies some post processing routine.
Spin that, spin it to the moon if you want. I’ll believe programmer notes over the word of somebody who stands to gain from suggesting there’s nothing “untowards” about it.
Either the data tells the story of nature or it does not. Data that has been “artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures” is false data, yielding a false result.
For more details, see Mike’s Nature Trick
UPDATE: By way of verification….
The source files with the comments that are the topic of this thread are in this folder of the FOI2009.zip file
/documents/osborn-tree6/mann/oldprog
in the files
maps12.pro
maps15.pro
maps24.pro
These first two files are dated 1/18/2000, and the map24 file on 11/10/1999 so it fits timeline-wise with Dr. Jones email where he mentions “Mike’s Nature trick” which is dated 11/16/1999, six days later.
UPDATE2: Commenter Eric at the Climate Audit Mirror site writes:
================
From documents\harris-tree\recon_esper.pro:
; Computes regressions on full, high and low pass Esper et al. (2002) series,
; anomalies against full NH temperatures and other series.
; CALIBRATES IT AGAINST THE LAND-ONLY TEMPERATURES NORTH OF 20 N
;
; Specify period over which to compute the regressions (stop in 1960 to avoid
; the decline
;
Note the wording here “avoid the decline” versus “hide the decline” in the famous email.
===============
I’ll give Dr. Jones and CRU the benefit of the doubt, maybe these are not “untowards” issues, but these things scream for rational explanations. Having transparency and being able to replicate all this years ago would have gone a long way towards either correcting problems and/or assuaging concerns.
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UKIP (20:52:30) :
No resignations or sackings yet then?
None yet. But maybe some sweaty underarms.
BCC (22:38:30) :
You can only dump on Mann, Jones, Briffa et al. for so long. It’s lots of fun
Nah. Watching them dump on themselves is the fun.
Mike McMillan (22:39:30) :
Well, gotta get back to buffing Wal-mart’s wide aisles.
I got elbow grease. They hiring?
Just wondering, when exactly were the climate models first determined to be “robust” and by whom?
Because that’s really ate at me ever sine I frist read that claim.
Looking now at all things in totality that claim of robustness is just about as big a whopper that’s possible.
So from who did it orginate?
CORRECTION: The “we scientists” part is extremely pungent given the fact that, empirically speaking, some of the first individuals to cave INTO the Third Reich….were the scientists.
So “into” not “in”.
Sorry about that.
Cheers.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
It seems few are looking at the CRU documents… all interest seems to be on the emails. This is a shame – many of the documents offer just as damning evidence as the emails.
Consider “circ_inconsistency.doc”, attributed to Nathan P. Gillet of CRU, dated 3 May 2005, and titled, “Inconsistency between simulated and observed Northern Hemisphere circulation changes.” It clearly states that the eight (8) “state-of-the-art” coupled climate models relied upon for the IPCC 4th Assessment Report fail to match observed data:
(emphasis added by this blogger)
Eric Barnes (21:13:17) :
Revkin’s headline: ‘Cyber-Terrorism’
He knows how it was done? I wasn’t aware that that was found out yet. What if it was people that work at CRU and all they did was violate office policy?
Let’s look at the facts as they are revealed Mr. Revkin before we start playing the terrorism card.
Or is your headline different than your opinion??
Speaking as a programmer I cannot see anything wrong with that code. It is clearly documented to stop people making changes that will give incorrect results.
I think people should think these posts through a little more carefully because this post makes this blog look embarrassing.
“Just wondering, when exactly were the climate models first determined to be “robust” and by whom?”
The same people who programmed them, probaby.
I am a software engineer and have also done quite a bit of looking at the code. I would be cautious about jumping to conclusions as to what the comments mean. My cautious interpretation is the comments mean what they say – they stop at 1940 (in some files) or 1960 in others – because there is a divergence problem as indicated in the file named declineseries.pdf – from memory I believe that the tree ring density diverges about 1960 and the ring widths about 1940. There are some indications that the analysis code was used to try different approaches – e.g. 20 year or 40 year or 50 year smoothing, which suggests looking for ways to “spot the trend”. But I would not yet draw that conclusion.
From a s/w engineering perspective, the code is very ugly. Few descriptive comments and some really bad coding practices, like extensively duplicating blocks of code in numerous files with only small changes. How the heck will they accurately incorporate changes across multiple files in the future? Just a real mess.
Other questions, not answered in the release files, are “How was this code verified and validated?” Does the code due what ever it was intended to do? Does it also do that accurately?
The comments in the HARRY_README file are pretty wild, however. So wild that I haven’t really figured quite what to think about that just yet. There are other comments in the source files that mention data that was lost (cloud data) and which they recreate or try to re-create based on other data or sensor inputs. The HARRY_README though is rather wild.
That warmists’ claim of 20th century as the “warmest ever” continues to amaze me.
1. Viking settlements in Greenland – proof positive it was warmer back then – even though CO2 was fairly low without Exxon and Shell pumping out CO2 from those evil refineries. If CO2 causes warming, then absence of CO2 must cause cooling. Cannot have a valid control system otherwise.
2. Prehistoric man’s body found in melting glacier in the Alps in 1991 – one must wonder how he had the strength (after being shot with an arrow, causing a mortal wound) to dig a hole down through that glacier so he could die underneath it. Or perhaps he died, was covered by snow, and that snow gradually became a glacier? It was warm enough 5,300 years ago in that pass that no glacier existed. Nah, couldn’t be. The warmists told us that it was WAY colder back then…
Maybe it is just me…I have lots of time to think about these things as I run my Wal-Mart floor waxer…actually it’s called a rotary buffer…
REPLY: LOL! – Anthony
Hands up everyone that wants to chip in to buy the CRU crew (that does sound weird, no?) some T-shirts?
http://www.zazzle.com.au/i_reject_your_reality_substitute_my_own_t_shirt-235174364570624210
Shame Mythbusters beat them to that trademark slogan.
“Well, perhaps that is a place to start. According to John Dally we know that trees don’t grow on 70% of the earth’s surface (oceans), they don’t grow in deserts or at high elevations. The 15% of the earth’s surface where trees do grow are in those locations where they may also impacted by lack of light (other trees), lack of water (draught), to the extent – that temperature can not be isolated as a cause for growth during any period. It is a false measure.”
And Yamal is an arctic wasteland where trees grow for about 15% of the year.
15% of 15% is just over 2%!
How much of a representative sample of the earth’s climate is that?
See these program headers and code from the hacked material:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/manndeclinecode.jpg
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/cutat1960.jpg
Their programs you can set ON/OFF to cut the decline off temperature series for 1960…! Yes HARD to explain.
The worry for the Team, shown up in the emails, is that the late 20th century warming has two differences from the early 20th century warming. Firstly tree rings responded to early warming but not to the second (at least in theNorthern hemisphere – they did in the Southern) .
http://www.climatedata.info/Proxy/Proxy/treerings_introduction.html
…secondly, the late century warming is only over land.
http://www.climatedata.info/Temperature/reconstructions.html
This suggests that the recent warming may not be genuine.
As if code comments and colluding to avoid FOI requests and data sharing isn’t enough to call into question their political agenda, it appears someone at CRU is on the Earth Government mailing list.
The Earth Government main site is here.
But of course they are just scientists with no agenda.
Found via the Anelegantchaos.org search engine.
Further on the CRU documents – has anyone checked out the tellingly titled “Extreme2100.pdf”? All looks suspiciously like cherry-picked “Yamal ‘extreme’ tree rings”, to a mere ignoramus like myself.
Meanwhile, Seth Borenstein keeps croaking in his swamp, oblivious to all:
Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before…. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice…. The world’s oceans have risen by about an inch and a half… Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 of a degree warmer than the dozen years leading up to 1997…. Even the gloomiest climate models back in the 1990s didn’t forecast results quite this bad so fast.
In conclusion, Seth quotes several people with the same environmental disorder:
“The message on the science is that we know a lot more than we did in 1997 and it’s all negative,” said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. “Things are much worse than the models predicted.”
Wow! It’s worse than we thought! The sky didn’t fall according to models. Therefore, we need plug our ears and lie as often and loud as we can! Maybe, finally, the Heaven would hear us and fall?
Editors of the Associated Press! The whole world is laughing at you! People are e-mailing Seth’s articles to each other as funny stories! Boot Borenstein if you want to restore some modicum of credibility.
Second program i showed was.
\FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\pl_decline_nerc
artwest (20:54:26) : A poster called Asimov has quoted extracts from the “HARRY_READ_ME.txt” file – deeply shocking stuff:
Asimov’s very plausible suggestion is that Harry is a programmer trying, and often failing, to make sense of the garbage data which he’s been lumbered with.
A note or two for non-programmers:
A “READ_ME” file is something programmers leave for each other (and sometimes for their future self when they return in a year or two to something they once shoved their brains through, but have now thankfully purged… then got assigned it again…)
The idea behind a README file is to tell you all the things that someone (or maybe a prior you) wasted a few hours or days learning. All the silly, stupid, vapid things; and sometimes the really neat but hard to figure out tricks. And sometimes just the nuts and bolts of “how do I make this go”.
So when a README file says things like “Why is the error message showing my squared number has gone negative?” they may be leaving a note for themselves on a future date, or for a fellow programmer a cube or two over to give them a clue. (“Whack them with the clue stick.”)
When it says things like “Don’t run this past 1960 because someone needs to artificially fit a wooden leg” it means “This is a stupid thing, that we cut it off here, but that bozo over there couldn’t make it work right so he’s just going to fudge the last bit and glue it on.” It’s a note to say: Your part is done, but you must go whack that bozo with the clue stick… and don’t worry that it’s broken after 1960, that’s his monkey to spank.
I really do feel for Harry Readme. I, too, found myself swimming in a ‘bucket of warm spit’ program with GIStemp. My guess is that a Ph.D. somebody with poor programming skills got Harry brought into the group to try and figure out why Mr. Clueless could not make code go. And Harry had to try and give Mr. Clueless clue, but the Clue Stick started to get worn out having been whacked so much…
Messy minds write messy code. Minds subject to deception write deceptive code. Sloppy imprecise minds write sloppy imprecise code. And Harry and I have had to try and mop up the slop.
So you find some arcane, messy, deceptive, sloppy, imprecise, and broken bit of code and FINALLY figure out what it was supposed to do and maybe what it REALLY does, and you put a note in the README file. So no other poor soul will ever need to stick their mind into THAT bit of code where the sun don’t shine ever again… and move on to the next bit of dreck…
So if the HARRY README says something is “corrected” in quotes, he is saying “I don’t buy it, but it’s the word they used. Don’t worry if the code looks like it’s just corrupting the data, Mr. Clueless says it is ‘corrected’ so let it go… I know, and you know, it isn’t, but he’s the guy writing the spec.”
And if he says [ artificially adjusted ] without quotes he is saying “Mr. Clueless is just going to make it up and stick it in here artificially” and you do not need to worry about how, or why, or validity.
And when it says [ look closer to real temperatures ] with no quotes it means exactly that: All that matters is how it looks, so don’t expect any code to try and create this from actual data, it’s a hand job making things look nice AND it has to look closer to real data but does not actually have to BE real data; so don’t waste time looking for data or code that deals with it.
My take on all this is that the Ph.Ds at GISS and UEA / CRU took a FORTRAN class once in the 1980s but are lousy programmers writing crappy code. It’s not their day job, it’s just a “neat trick” they learned to exploit. And their code shows it.
They are like the guy who can build a patio deck, but all the nails are over driven, and a few are bent over. There are hammer dings in the wood where they missed some times. The ends of the wood are not sawn well, the deck was made with green wood with knots in it (that has shrunk as it dried…) and they did not bother to varnish the thing, so it doesn’t weather well. Oh, and they used iron nails instead of stainless, so there are lots of ‘rust and iron stains’. Finally, they just used 4×4 posts for the foundation. Who needs concrete piers anyway…
Then Harry got brought in a few years later to tell them why the floor creaks and a couple of boards have come loose. And Harry has discovered he need to explain dry rot, varnish, redwood vs pine, stainless nails, …
IMHO, they need to have real carpenters build their deck for them… and they certainly ought not to invite the world economy over for a party on top of their present deck full of dry rot … I don’t think it would hold up, and when it collapses, the “guests” are going to be hurt, and very angry…
And Harry seems to know this too.
The newspaper translation from English/German/English gave ‘Team’ as ‘Guild’. The http://www.public.iastate.edu site defines Medieval Guilds as:
* exclusive, regimented organizations;
* created in part to preserve the rights and privileges of their members; and
* separate and distinct from the civic governments, but since the functions and purposes of guild and civic government overlapped, it was not always easy to tell them apart, especially since many well-to-do guildsmen were prominent in civic government.
I suggest we refer to “The Guild” rather than the “The Team” from now on.
This is starting to be noticed at the BBC.
On this morning’s Radio 4 Today program at about 0735am there was a five minute slot with Former Chancellor Nigel Lawson and a Prof Watson. It was reasonably well balanced – surprising given that the presenter James Naughtie usually tries to work Global Warming into everything he can.
Lawson is calling for an enquiry into the University and its handling.
The Today program is the BBC’s prime radio current affairs slot and is “required listening” for most commentators and politicians – it can set the agenda for what is happening in British Politics.
An earlier piece win the program from Roger Harrabin failed to mention it.
It will be very interesting to see what happens from here.
No wonder Mann never wanted his source code nor his science Open Sourced so that many eyes can gaze upon his obvious attempts at fabrication (allegedly – assuming the files are genuine which they seem to be).
It’s a new programming language: “Smoking Gun!” and he apparently used it to shot himself in his own foot.
Had quick look at The TIme website – major comment piece on their home page from Nigel Lawson – http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6927598.ece
.
Regards the Copenhagen Agreement, Einstein said of its findings that the participants were: “playing a risky game with reality”.
Einstein was actually talking about the Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Mechanics, which was debated in Copenhagen back in about 1927 – but his remark neatly sums up the forthcoming conference too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation
.
.