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
Brendan H (01:57:26) :
Roger Knights: “There’s likely to be embarrassing material in them that will titillate the public, and whet their blood-lust for more.”
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“Titillation is one thing, conspiracy another. To get a Watergate situation, you need actual scientific wrongdoing, strong evidence of fraud and collusion, and to date there’s been none of that, nor any reason to suspect any more such evidence in future.”
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The Team stands accused of that and more. Look at some of the bills of particulars that others here have posted, and several newspaper columnists too. Argue with them. I’m convinced.
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RK “The dam is cracking, the increased waterflow will widen the cracks…”
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“At the beginning of 2009 a former NASA administrator came out in opposition to AGW, causing enormous excitement among sceptics. As one poster opined: “We are finally witnessing the last gasps of a dying theory.”
The death of AGW has been regularly predicted for a good while now. Certainly, this email leak is a more serious matter than the views of a retired scientist, and is a setback to climate science, but beware of confirmation bias. My suggestion is that celebration is premature, and may well lead to serious disappointment.”
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I wasn’t among those who made such claims. I’m not inclined to such over-optimism. I can tell that this is different–I can smell blood. A brick has been removed from the wall that protected the team, and it will be much easier to pry out further bricks as a result. Now there is justification for congressional hearings examining the machinations of the IPCC and its failure to behave fairly. For instance, NASA scientist Vincent Gray has complained that he submitted over 1100 comments to the IPCC, all of which were ignored. The IPCC might soon have to justify those refusals. No doubt there are dozens of other scientists whose skeptical contributions were ignored, or whose drafts were high-handedly revised. The IPCC will have to justify those as well. It won’t come out looking good. Thereafter, its endorsement of alarmist findings won’t carry nearly as much weight among the innocent public and opinion-leaders as heretofore.
This is like the moment Nixon’s taping system was revealed. Until Buttersworth revealed that to the committee, it looked as though Nixon would be able to wiggle out of the affair. After that, the pursuit went into high gear. I was watching at the time and realized instantly, “Now they’ve got him. He can run, but he can’t hide.” I have a similar feeling about this business. Until now the Team was Teflon: accusations slid off them, because of their presumptive objectivity and high-mindedness. Now they are under a cloud of suspicion, subject to subpoena and testimony under oath; they won’t be able to keep their misdeeds concealed from all but their victims. They’re on the run.
As Monbiat has said, persons like you who don’t/won’t realize the dreadfulness of this situation for your side are living in a fool’s paradise.
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RK: “Over the next few years, the warmists will be in retreat and on the defensive, despite occasional blips.”
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“You’re assuming that the CRU emails have disconfirmed AGW.”
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On the contrary, I’ve made several posts in the past few days stating that I think the effect of the Team’s fiddling with the measured temperature data is likely minor, and that the overall shape of the blade of the hockey stick won’t be changed much. (I’ve also said repeatedly that there are likely innocent explanations for much of the awkward material in the e-mails.) So I don’t think that AGW has been disproved.
I see what’s happened as the first step in a lengthy process of objectively and scientifically reexamining the data and reasoning behind warmism, after the Team and the IPCC and peer review have had their halos removed. Their prestige, plus their power and willingness to enforce groupthink by any means necessary, will no longer be factors. Doubters will feel safe to speak out.
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“But the current crop of climate scientists remain convinced that their science is correct. Whatever happens in the political sphere will not affect the scientific findings, nor, for that matter, the actual climate.”
That’s naive. Academic and social “politics” already taints their judgment. Until now climate science has been politicized, in the sense that the Team’s paradigm was “enforced” by their mafia tactics and by madly warmist funding agencies, journal editors, and journalists. In such an environment, “Reason comes running / Eager to ratify.”
Once de-politicalization occurs and marginalized voices can be heard and harkened to without penalty, and non-warmist research can get funded, opinions among climate scientists are likely to shift substantially.
Of course, for many it will be too awkward to change, because they are so complicit in the shiftiness of warmism’s history. They will hang tough, like the tiny crew of post-Watergate Nixon loyalists.
PS: I should have said above that the main outcome of Climategate, IMO, is that the Team is no longer trustworthy in the public eye, and that a cloud of suspicion has fallen over peer review, the IPCC, and the consensus, which seems to have been engineered or manufactured. This is where the real damage has occurred, on an intangible level. Therefore, a re-do of the case for CAWG, under neutral scientific auspices, is needed. Plus more transparency, etc.
Ron, you are like an atheist that prays on his deathbed.
You claim to be skeptical of/offended by the antics of the CRU scientists, because that is the popular bandwagon to be on right now. But just in case, you still leave yourself an out with this ridiculous statement:
“Virtually all scientists accept that temperatures today are higher that they would have been had there been no man-made CO2 in the atmosphere; what they cannot agree on is by how much.”
Well I am a well respected scientist, and you are officially fired as my spokesman. Bro, the laws of thermodynamics which say that there is no such thing as a perpetual energy machine. So NO amount of CO2 is going to create the net positive feedback loops that this whole inane theory rests on. Even if you foolishly look at the Earth as a closed system. Add in solar variability, orbital precessing of the Earth around the sun and moon around Earth, our 5000K inner core, cosmic radiation, the -200+K temps of the space around us, and atmospheric exhaust as we hurtle through space at 6 figure speeds, and the utter ridiculousness of the proposition that a 0.008% increase in anthropogenic CO2 over 100 years is creating some significant climate change becomes obvious. All these complex non-linear influences, yet there is some direct straight-line correlation between CO2 and temperature. Sure…and Sea Monkeys have an ordered society and pose for pictures just like on the box too.
Playing both sides so that you can quickly jump to the side that’s winning is just as much a distortion of science as anything these CRU jokers have done. At least they were willing to go down with their ship. Claiming belief in two directly contradictory ideas, so that you can be popular in any room, is a great if you are a salesman or WalMart greeter, but scientifically it is more offensive than blatant lying…
The one question I have is:
If this computer model is so great why hasn’t it been adapted to the stock market? They could make trillions regardless of which the market goes.
And that answers the question about the value of the model. If it was one tenth as good as they claim they could have made a fortune off of the market. To my knowledge NO ONE has made a model that can follow/predict the stock market. And think about how much simpler that would be. Think of all the recorded, stored, hour-by-hour data on the market and the associated perturbers/influencers’ going back hundreds of years.
CO-Two Guy. Nice analogy but wrong.
Have a look at our web site (www.climatedata.info) and you will see that I am not jumping on a band-wagon. The way we present the output from the GCMs in relation to temperature and precipitation (often forgotten) could be considered sceptic. The fact that our own calculations show some lower troposphere warming would be considered ‘warmist’. I have often quoted the figures we present on polar bears, sea level rise and tropical storms as evidence that we are not on the verge of a catastrophe. In short our site is one of the few truly independent sources of information.
CO2 has an absorbtion spectrum from about 14 to 18 microns, well within the range of the earth’s long-wave radiation of 5 to 50 microns. It is widely accepted that without CO2 the earth’s temperature would be around 30C lower than it is today. CO2 has risen from 280 ppm pre-industrial to almost 400 ppm today. This has raised temperatures and as I say it is generally accepted by warmist and informed sceptics. See for example:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567423917025400.html
@ur momisugly Mick (23:33:20) :
“What I don’t understand that they had 20 odd years to calibrate/homogenise the process between different instruments, methods and countries.
Before they want to take over the world…”
I get the impression Hansen and Jones don’t like each other ONE BIT, but they are roped together by the need to perpetuate this lie. As long as their graphs looked similar, they were OK to publicly agree with each other while stabbing each other in the back amongst their little clique. What they could NOT do is publicly denounce each other (even the slightest bit), because by doing so they would have to admit there is no consensus and the flow of funding would be brought into question.
I think this led to them to not really share with each other to create this homogeneity that you are referring to. I think of it as a kind of a competition to see who could make the scariest and yet most plausible looking hoax. I would imagine whoever came out on top of that competition got the most funding or something.
Roger Knights: “Now there is justification for congressional hearings examining the machinations of the IPCC and its failure to behave fairly. For instance, NASA scientist Vincent Gray has complained that he submitted over 1100 comments to the IPCC, all of which were ignored.”
The mere existence of grievance proves nothing. A large number of comments by one commentator might indicate an in-depth knowledge of many areas of climate science. On the other hand, it may just indicate bloviating on a grand scale.
“Thereafter, its endorsement of alarmist findings won’t carry nearly as much weight among the innocent public and opinion-leaders as heretofore.”
Unless you are arguing that the mere fact of justification is its own proof, as long as the IPCC can justify its choices, there is no a priori reason to conclude that such justification is damaging to its conclusions.
“Once de-politicalization occurs…”
The release of the CRU emails was a political act. Any subsequent investigations will be political acts. The only way to “de-politicise” the science is to wait for a few hundred years.
“…the Team’s paradigm was “enforced” by their mafia tactics and by madly warmist funding agencies, journal editors, and journalists.”
One could equally argue that the dominance of climate science by warmers is an effect rather than a cause of the science.
“…and marginalized voices can be heard and harkened to without penalty, and non-warmist research can get funded, opinions among climate scientists are likely to shift substantially.”
So-called marginalised voices have been heard all along. All the big-name sceptics are well known by anyone who has taken an interest in the field. Importantly, most of the big names date from at least the 90s. This suggests that there are few if any unknown sceptics of any substance in climate science.
Ultimately, whatever investigations are held, the issue will be decided by the science. If climate scientists have confidence in their research, any assumptions about shifting opinions due to external circumstances are still very speculative.
Give it up Brendan H …
AGW may or may not be real – but at this point in time, it’s quite obvious that we can’t just take the word of Phil Jones et al as definitive on anything on the subject. And neither can we now trust any scientific paper (which could be thousands) that made use of their dataset as axiomatic because the evidence is as clear as day that they fudged and manipulated it to show a predetermined result.
And then they somehow lost all the raw data – and Phil Jones is on record as saying he would rather delete these files than make them available to non-members of his little cult for replication.
Then we have clear evidence of collusion to stonewall skeptics when they seek data, to tar and feather the reputations of skeptics simply for being skeptics, and to pervert the peer review process so skeptics’ findings that go against the “consensus” would not get published in scientific journals via threats and calumniation.
Which makes it even more egregious when they turn around to cite skeptics’ papers non-appearance in peer-reviewed journals as evidence that they are right.
Worse is that they perverted the peer review process so that only people in the same clique, who would not be so bothersome as to ask for things raw data, details of methods and all the other stuff that have underpinned the scientific method for so many centuries would be peer-reviewing their work. In other words, they made it a rubber-stamp operation.
It’s all in there – if it were one or two e-mails your appeals for caution would be more apt. But it is much more than one or two, or even twenty, isn’t it? This attempt to convince people here to continue to trust your idols over their “lying eyes” “until an investigation” is not very convincing, IMO.
Warmists have been trying to append secrecy and demonizing skeptics to the scientific method. Now that the curtain has been drawn, I guess we’re finding out why.
Graham Knight: “This attempt to convince people here to continue to trust your idols over their “lying eyes” “until an investigation” is not very convincing, IMO.”
I’m merely suggesting that people adopt a sceptical attitude to these emails, ie withhold judgement until the evidence is clearer.
For many climate sceptics, the ideal outcome from this episode would be the general discrediting of AGW, the jailing of the leading perpetrators and a return to the status quo ante. That’s not going to happen; there’s too much converging evidence from too many disciplines for a scandal to overturn the entire theory. At best there may be some sacrificial heads.
In that case, the risk for climate sceptics in this episode is that the “truther” element could swamp the more moderate element, and climate scepticism could become irrevocably identified with anti-science movements such as creationism.
Climate sceptics have an opportunity to provide a “teachable moment” and show how scepticism properly operates. That means a sifting of the evidence, not just a cranking up of long-established talking points.