I was working on another project related to the CRU emails and came across this email from Dr.Phil Jones. I was stunned, not only because he was dissing another dataset, but mostly because that dissing hit many of the points about problems with the NASA GISS products we’ve covered here on WUWT and at Climate Audit.
Here’s the email with my highlights added. Email addresses have been partially redacted.
The original email can be seen at this link:
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1042&filename=1254850534.txt
Here’s the thing, we’ve seen the problems with CRU’s temperature series in the code already. If Dr. Jones is aware of those problems, and he thinks GISS is inferior, well then, wow, just how bad is GISS?
I thought this statement was quite telling:
Their non-use of a base period (GISS using something very odd and NCDC first differences) means they can use
very short series that we can’t (as they don’t have base periods) but with short series it is impossible to assess for homogeneity.
One thing about GISS that has bothered a lot of people – the base period they use for calculating temperature anomaly is for 1951-1980. See it listed here on the GISTEMP page. No other data sets use that period. Critics (including myself) have said that by using that period, it makes this graph’s trend look steeper than it would if the current 30 year period was used.
In the past couple of years we’ve seen two significant errors with NASA GISS that had to be corrected after they were discovered through the work done here at at WUWT and Climate audit. Public errors have not been found in CRU products during that time, because the data an code have been withheld.
To the credit of NASA GISS, they have been more transparent than CRU on data, stations used, and code.
Here are some of the relevant posts on WUWT where we address issues found with the NASA GISS temperature products:
How bad is the global temperature data?
And now, the most influential station in the GISS record is …
NASA GISS: adjustments galore, rewriting U.S. climate history
Absence makes the chart grow fonder
A comphrehensive comparison of GISS and UAH global Temperature data
Getting crabby – another missing NASA GISS station found, thanks to a TV show
More on NOAA’s FUBAR Honolulu “record highs” ASOS debacle, PLUS finding a long lost GISS station
Weather Station Data: raw or adjusted?
GISS Divergence with satellite temperatures since the start of 2003
Divergence Between GISS and UAH since 1980
GISS’s Gavin Schmidt credits WUWT community with spotting the error
GISS, NOAA, GHCN and the odd Russian temperature anomaly – “It’s all pipes!”
Corrected NASA GISTEMP data has been posted
A new view on GISS data, per Lucia
The Accidental Tourist (aka The GISS World Tour)
Rewriting History, Time and Time Again
Why Does NASA GISS Oppose Satellites?
How not to measure temperature, part 52: Another UFA sighted in Arizona
How not to measure temperature, part 51.
NASA’s Hansen Frees the Code !
Does Hansen’s Error “Matter”? – guest post by Steve McIntyre
1998 no longer the hottest year on record in USA
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
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Sorry – On second reading maybe the paper is by Lovelock and the commentary by a Michael Thompsan, rather Michael Thomas.
Terry Jackson is correct. Essentially, we’re arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
The problem for government in the developed world is how to be able to claim the moral legitimacy to use of force to compel subjects to behave “as required.” Religion / divine right of kings no longer cuts it, that’s been on the way out in the West since the Enlightenment. Nationalism doesn’t sit too well with the agenda of “globalization” and the formation of the European superstate, and un-controlled immigration from the Third World. So, science has to step up to the plate. It’s not the science that’s driving the politics, it’s the other way around, and it’s obvious to me why.
The AGW scam is immune to falsification because it’s not science, it’s a sophisticated method of social control. Even though “Watt’s Up With That?” is on the side with the truth, that’s entirely irrelevant to the issue.
All this should be obvious to anyone who reflects even momentarily. It’s kind of funny, in a perverse kind of way, that they couldn’t come up with anything better.
re
Bruce (00:05:10) :
Pulpable consensus, more like!
I much prefer your line on this.
Another amazing find. That’s two or three data sets now down for the count? CRUTEM3. GISS worse that CRUTEM3. NCDC? What’s the fourth set?
Anthony I’m wondering if you or another already informed individual could do a piece (or link to one if it already exists) about the types and range of modifications to temperature sensor data are that are used in the science papers (assuming they are all known). Also what are “reasonable” and “valid” non-biased (towards any theory) modifications to data due to locations of temperature sensors or urbanization heat island effects.
Also I keep encountering scientists who I have conversations with who claim “there is mountains of evidence”. How much of this “mountain” is really a “mo-hill” since it’s based upon the alleged scientific work by Jones, Mann, et. al.? How many scientific papers must now be invalidated and redone?
Are there really any other lines of evidence other than the Jones, Mann, et. al. cabal? If so what are they and what’s good about them or bad about them?
Thanks for educating us. Keep up the awesome work.
pwl, http://www.PathsToKnowledge.NET.
Dominoes //|||
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100018003/climategate-five-aussie-mps-lead-the-way-by-resigning-in-disgust-over-carbon-tax/
He could equally have said CRUTEM3 is superior. Would that have been a shocker?
The base period can’t change the slope – it just shifts the numbers on the y axis. GISS is different in using 1951-80 because it was the only one developed before 1990, so couldn’t use 1961-90. Once a base period is settled, there’s no real reason to change it, and a lot of cost, since a lot of written and otherwise stored data will need correction.
“John Pate (01:39:11) :
Terry Jackson is correct. Essentially, we’re arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
The problem for government in the developed world is how to be able to claim the moral legitimacy to use of force to compel subjects to behave “as required.” Religion / divine right of kings no longer cuts it, that’s been on the way out in the West since the Enlightenment. Nationalism doesn’t sit too well with the agenda of “globalization” and the formation of the European superstate, and un-controlled immigration from the Third World. So, science has to step up to the plate. It’s not the science that’s driving the politics, it’s the other way around, and it’s obvious to me why.
The AGW scam is immune to falsification because it’s not science, it’s a sophisticated method of social control. Even though “Watt’s Up With That?” is on the side with the truth, that’s entirely irrelevant to the issue.
All this should be obvious to anyone who reflects even momentarily. It’s kind of funny, in a perverse kind of way, that they couldn’t come up with anything better.”
Well if people die, and they will, we may as well fight it. As I have said many times, there is only one way the “elite” will “get the message”. The French had the right idea.
Anthony, Steve M., I’m also wondering about tree rings. The tree ring data shows a “decline” that had to be “hidden” by the alleged scientists of Climategate.
What bothers me about the decline in the tree ring temperature proxy data is that it declined while the overlaid temperature data seems to not have declined.
Does this imply that the is not a linear or valid correlation between the tree ring temperature proxy data and temperature? It sure seems like it.
I mean it would seriously bother me that my proxy for temperature deviated from the readings from thermometers and did so by going downwards!
This decline in the tree ring data suggests that the tree ring temperature proxy data is NOT useful for accessing temperature histories.
In fact I’d even go further and wonder if this “decline” that was so important to “hide” with an overlay “trick” actually completely or substantially falsifies the entire notion of using tree ring data as proxies for temperature.
What does it mean to falsify something in science? When is there enough counter evidence to knock down a former hypothesis or even a respected theory? Einstein did it to Newton, and others are trying to do it to Einstein. What will it really take to knock down the alleged hypothesis of AGW for good?
Thanks again for educating us. Keep up the awesome work.
pwl, http://www.PathsToKnowledge.NET.
What’s up with that?
ps. When do you ever get any sleep? [:)]
Monkton on Alex Jones tv —–http://www.prisonplanet.com/lord-monckton-shut-down-the-un-arrest-the-warmist-criminals.html
Have a listen to Aynsley Kellow as he is interviewed by the ABC Counterpoint radio program in Australia. The ABC is one of the mains stream media in this country that has pointedly refused to cover ClimateGate.
Professor and Head of the School of Government at the University of Tasmania. Expert reviewer for the United Nation’s IPPC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change and Key Vulnerabilities.
I do not think that the ABC reporter was prepared for what Professor Kellow had to say.
He was scathing in his criticism of the hole GlimateGate gang.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2009/2757619.htm
or for the direct audio here:
http://www.abc.net.au/cgi-bin/common/player_launch.pl?s=rn/counterpoint_item&d=rn/counterpoint/audio/items&r=cpt_30112009_1605.ram&w=cpt_30112009_1605.asx&t=Climate%20science:%20The%20leaked%20emails%20-%2030%20November%202009
sorry don’t know how to format this but here is the transcript of a mail I received from Hadley a while ago (doesn’t time fly?) when I was having an exchange with Gavin. It seems that careless use of language is endemic over there..! Sorry for the clumsy format:
Dear Alan,
Thank you for your email.
Your comment #221 in the RealClimate tread was in response to #218.
This particular thread was concerned with the observations of
temperature rise and not with the Hadley Centre climate model. The HC
climate model of course has polar amplification just as every other
climate model does.
The point was the interpolation of existing observational data over the
polar regions. If you look at the raw observations that GISS uses you
can see how little data they are basing an interpolation on. Regardless
of what they consider the correct spatial length scale for observations,
the Arctic sees large regional changes in temperature, which are being
glossed over with a large correlation length. The Had/CRU treatment of
the observations simply states that the error is greater due to lacking
data, something GISS are not honest about. There are no EXTRA
observations that GISS has access to, that Had/CRU does not. Thus there
is no reason to believe GISS’ observations vs Had/CRU observations of
recent global temperature rise when the errors are taken into account.
Kind Regards,
Sarah
Customer Centre, Met Office, FitzRoy Road, Exeter, Devon, EX1 3PB,
United Kingdom. Tel: 0870 900 0100 Fax: 0870 900 5050 Email:
enquiries@metoffice.gov.uk
Video of Gore being harangued by ‘We Are Change’ (a little way in).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwkR3uuZMIM&hl=en_GB&fs=1&]
Can someone please explain to me why Gavin Schmidt wont commit to stating whether climate is a chaotic system? I have asked him on several occasions and got really odd non-commital answers.
Maybe i am a completely daft layman, and i have wasted my time reading Gleicks book on chaos theory, as well as Gribbins “Complexity” and Davies “cosmic code”. All these books by well known scientists seem to imply climate should be treated as a chaotic system.
What i dont understand is that if Schmidt claims the jury is out on the underlying fundamnetals of the science of climate then how is it possible to come to such extreme conclusions?
PS: I am an agnostic on agw and i dont rule out but i certainly dont rule it in, and after hearing Gavin’s “we dont know” answer about whether the climate is chaotic it has reinforced my sceptism.
Am I missing something?
It makes you wonder when you take that whole CRU says they don’t have the raw data anymore since before Phil’s time with his feelings on GISS. By doing that it puts the onus on any investigators to prove when the data went awol and then they even helpfully pointed investigators to find raw data….somewhere else like GISS and Gavin, who might be going down anyway after the CEI lawsuit. To me it sounds like Phil and UEA is about to throw Gav under the bus. We know and probably so does Phil that Hansen is fruitier then a fruit cake. So why not try and toss all the crap on Hansen the scaremonger and his sidekick Gav?
Trouble is, as a method of social control, it just isn’t complicated enough.
The world in the 21st century is actually a world that’s something like, 25% 21st Century, 25% 18th Century, and 50% Dark Ages. Some people worry about finding a WiFI hotspot, some people worry about finding clean water. Some people worry about which city they want to live in, some people worry about which tribe they are part of. The material conditions have corresponding cultural conditions and minds and hearts.
When we get on a plane to fly from London to Sydney, you’re actually flying over great swathes of 18th Century and the Dark Ages along the way. Some places are even older. Some peoples worry about Gaia’s rights. Some people worry about human rights. Some people worry about their national supremacy. Some peoples worry about how their tribe will win over the other tribe, and resort to ethnic cleansing if necessary.
There is no politician alive today who knows solutions to dealing with this degree of social and economic complexity. That is the bad news about “welcoming diversity”. When you really look at what’s out there, it is horrifying. We live in a highly fragmented world of staggering complexity.
This is why even if global warming was 100% true it would be a bad idea to try to fix it with social policies. The unintended consequences from the fallout of trying to mess with the world’s complex cultures would likely be far worse.
Let people be at war with nature if they need to, but don’t encourage them to be at war with each other.
Excellent radio intv on ABC Aus – lasts 20 mins – pulls no punches.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2009/2757619.htm
I’d like to see a study on the effect of emails on the climate.
Gavin has said definitively in the comments on RC that the now famous “aladj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25..” line in the code (FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\briffa_sep98_d.pro) is never used to create a graph that is published. If that is the case it should be noted when brought up (I have brought it up before as it seems like blatant data manipulation – but if it isn’t used anywhere then it isn’t and I take that back). Of course you can still read intentions etc into the chosen numbers, but that is pretty different than if that code generated a published graph and should be made clear.
I understand the code well enough, but I’m not familiar enough with the graphs and the history of them to know if it was ever used. Fwiw it does seem plausible based on the names of the files (there’s _c, _d, _e..). The graph title in the code is “Age-banded MXD from all sites” and later ‘Hugershoff-standardised MXD from all sites’.
His quote, and the link:
“[Response: Not at all. The ‘correction’ was calculated as the PC in an EOF decomposition of the divergence in the associated files (so it isn’t arbitrary). I understand that this was done in order to test the sensitivity of certain calculations to the presence or absence of the post 1960 ‘divergence’, but regardless of why it was done, it does not appear in any paper, nor does it impact any published data set. In no way can this be described as evidence for data manipulation in the sense you mean. This, like the junk that litters any researcher’s hard drive, is just one of those calculations that didn’t go anywhere or add anything particularly useful. That’s the thing with stolen files – they don’t come with context. – gavin]”
http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=2036
Anthony, Steve, Jennifer Marohasy, Tom Quirk,
I found your article Comparing the Four Global Temperature Data Sets (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/19/comparing-the-four-global-temperature-data-sets) and I’m wondering how the comments from Phil Jones (et. al.) in the Climategate emails impact the four temperature data sets (GISS, CRU/Hadley, UAH, and RSS) and this earlier comparison article?
It sure seems amazing that both the CRU/Hadley and GISS surface temperature data sets have been so thoroughly compromised. If they are useless then wow. To me it sure looks like it’s bordering on negligence at best and at worst criminal since vast sums of money due to the political and economic policy shifts based upon these shaky data sets. Be that as it may…
Is it possible to save these two data sets from the corruption? Or has the data sets been so compromised that they are beyond saving even on life support? Should the plug be pulled on them?
It seems to me that ALL the papers published that use any of these “compromised” data sets need to be reviewed and potentially tossed into the dust bin of history of discarded science or corrected. How many papers is that?
Also where exactly can one obtain all of these data sets from? As a systems scientist with a specialty in computer science I’m interested in doing some experiments with the data myself.
Is there a resource that lists where each data set is located and what the problems with each data set are? Much like surface stations dot org maybe we need an open source site dedicated to to making available the latest and best Open Science Data and empowering people to produce analysis and programs to share. The data could be placed in a “source code” revision system that could show the differences between versions from the original sources as they are updated.
Thanks,
pwl, http://www.PathsToKnowledge.NET.
On a more serious note: I don’t feel optimistic about this at all. Many of the Political blogs I try to post on moderate out my comments with links about climategate. I’m too old to post flyers really but I’d be prepared to print out a hundred maybe and push them through every second letterbox.To me personally,I think the New Zealand book-cooking by Salinger and NIWA is the best and most easily understood evidence? Maybe Anthony or someone could come up with a good flyer layout? (This was asked for a few days ago by someone and I’m sure 10% of those here wouldn’t mind printing them up and walking a mile to post them.
In Australian terms this is quite huge
#
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2009/2757619.htm
First crack in mainstream, also from an IPCC reviwers as well.
It has nothing with this.. I see from the widget that CO2 is going down.
Here’s what’s going to happen:
(1) CRU will release a report on the email leak
(2) The mainstream media, who’re waiting for the spin and press releases, rather than doing any actual investigative journalism, will take the CRU marketing line
(3) Everything will be GO for the Racketeeringhagen conference
(4) Shares in Goldman, Morgan Stanley and Al Gore will rise post conference
(5) Post Racketeeringhagen, Lord Rees will release a report
(6) The mainstream media will publish and discuss the report (as they did with Stern), without doing any actual investigative journalism
(7) Apart from us freaks, the public still won’t give a [self-snip].
Nick Stokes (02:16:46) :
Given the amplitude of periodic climate change, only a base period of 1900-1990 can put it in context. 1961-90 is purely arbitrary, soin fact both timesets put a bias.
Its hardly as though there were no periods of warming and cooling prior to 1951
Anthony
I’d been preparing a page on the UK GISS records just before ClimateGate broke, and have now tidied it up. It seems this would be good to put out before Copenhagen. It might help the MSM here too. I’ve now got it online here. If you’d like to put it out but with tweaks, please email me, or just alter it yourself.