UPDATED: By Douglas J. Keenan – special for WUWT
Phil Jones tried to hush my paper. SUNY Albany won’t discuss the investigation my paper initiated. And QUB ignored my three FOI requests for their data.
I used to do mathematical research and financial trading on Wall Street and in the City of London; since 1995, I have been studying independently (for more details, please see my web site). Some of the e-mails leaked in Climategate discuss my work. Following is a comment on that and on something more important.
In 2007, I published a peer-reviewed paper alleging that some important research relied upon by the IPCC (for the treatment of urbanization effects) was fraudulent. The e-mails show that Tom Wigley, one of the most highly-cited climatologists and an extreme warming advocate, thought my paper was “valid”. They also show that Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit, tried to get the journal editor to not publish my paper.
After my paper was published, the State University of New York, where the research was conducted, carried out an investigation. During the investigation, I was not interviewed: contrary to the university’s policies, federal regulations, and natural justice. I was allowed to comment on the report of the investigation, before the report’s release, but I was not allowed to see the report: truly Kafkaesque.
Relatedly, my paper (§2.4) demonstrates that, by 2001, Jones knew there were severe problems with the urbanization research. Yet Jones continued to rely on that research in his work, including in his work for the latest report of the IPCC.
The biggest concern with global warming is, arguably, that warming itself will cause further warming. For example, the polar ice caps reflect sunlight back into space (thereby cooling Earth); if the caps shrink, due to warming, then they will reflect less sunlight, and so Earth will warm further. It is claimed to be possible that Earth warms so much that it reaches what is called a “tipping point”, where the global climate system is seriously and permanently disrupted—like when a glass of water has been tipped over, and the water cannot realistically be put back into the glass.
There is much scientific debate over how much Earth has to warm before it reaches a tipping point. No one knows for sure. About a thousand years ago, though, there was a time known as the “Medieval Warm Period”, when much of Earth appears to have been unusually warm. It is not currently known just how warm the Medieval Warm Period was. Clearly, though, the warmth then was below the tipping point, because Earth’s climate continued without problem.
Suppose that during the Medieval Warm Period, Earth was 1°C warmer than today. That would imply that the tipping point is more than 1°C higher than today’s temperature. For Earth’s temperature to increase 1°C might take roughly a century (at the rate of increase believed to be currently underway). So we would not have to be concerned about an imminent disruption of the climate system. Finding out how warm the Medieval Warm Period was is thus of enormous importance for the study of global warming.
It turns out that global (or at least hemispheric) temperatures are reflected by the climate in western Ireland; for a short explanation of that, see here. Trees grow in western Ireland, of course, and each year, those trees grow an annual ring. Rings that are thick indicate years that were good for the trees; rings that are thin indicate the opposite. If many trees in western Ireland had thick rings in some particular years, then climatic conditions in those years were presumably good. Tree rings have been used in this way to learn about the climate centuries ago.
Queen’s University Belfast has data on tree rings that goes back millennia, in particular, to the Medieval Warm Period. QUB researchers have not analyzed the data (because they lack the expertise to do so). They also refuse to release the data. I have been trying to obtain the data, via the UK Freedom of Information Act, since April 2007. The story is scandalous.
As the above illustrates, the problems in global-warming science are with more than just the few directly involved in Climategate. Indeed, I think it would be unreasonable to suppose such.
Finally, in light of all the slander going around, maybe I should add this: I have received no payment of any kind from any entity for any work that I have done since 1995.
======
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Craig Moore: That was a wink at the end. But now that I think of it, Cougars have won five of the last seven match ups. If I was a CRU Team member, I could create a graph that would “prove” that Cougars are the superior team. And I might be able to get other Cougars to peer review my work. Hmmmmm? I can see it now, one big press release reaffirming that Husky fans are flat earthers and are probably in collusion with Big Oil, Big Tobacco and other Bigs. I wonder if I could find or invent a Cougar publication that would print my conclusions? Oh yeah, and if you don’t send me all your money, you will die. Or at the very least, you might not win another game.
Also, someone should look into the data (or try to get it released) from
Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget Experiment
and
The Earth Radiation Budget Experiment
http://www.ssd.rl.ac.uk/gerb/
http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/erbe/ASDerbe.html
GERB data policy:
ftp://gerb.oma.be/Documents/gerbdatapolicy.pdf
@hunter:
Thanks for pointing out the book burning. That flew right by me. I just saw it as a symbolic thing. Book burning is actually not that uncommon these days with books going out of style. I would hope that this is just a case of books going electronic, but I do worry a bit that people are just not reading altogether. A few years ago I heard about a used book store in town closing down and burning some books it could not unload. It wasn’t some political effort to ban books. They were just disposing of some books nobody wanted.
As for Al Gore, I kind of hate saying this, because I see him as a man of talents that could be put to better use. The problem is he’s been an elitist, cowardly, and hypocritical opportunist. He has some technical knowledge. From what I’ve heard about him, he really did have something to do with helping to create the modern internet, as it became known in the 1990s, in a technical sense. He misstated his role. He did not “create the internet”, as he said in his interview on Larry King. Also, I recently watched an interview with Carl Sagan from 1996 (his last), and he said that Al Gore was scientifically literate. That’s striking since you wouldn’t know it by what Gore has expressed outwardly. He’s had a thing for fossil fuels for as long as I can remember. He hates them. He hates the internal combustion engine. As best I can tell he hates manufacturers, since they pollute. I don’t understand it. These are the things that enable him to live the way he does, and reach as many people as he does. From what I’ve heard his own house is not “green” by “green” standards.
Comedian Dennis Miller had a theory about Gore, and it might be accurate. He said he didn’t think Gore really believed in this stuff, and he was like some character in a pirate movie he brought up (I can’t remember) who would go around to the natives and show them flashy things so they would ooh and ahh at him. It’s sure made him wealthy, and it looks like he hopes it will make him wealthier still. In that sense he’s as unethical as an Enron executive, hoping to get rich on a fantasy.
Douglas Keenan is to be commended for his courage. Two quotes from Voltaire come to mind:
“…the safest course is to do nothing against one’s conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.”
And to all the would-be Keenan’s out there that have not yet stood up:
“Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.”
Re: tallbloke (11:23:18) :
“Someone in this thread quoted Lord Stern as if he was an expert on climate science.
Lol.”
I am at a loss to know why you should think that! I am well aware that Stern knows only what he chooses to read (he majored in maths and is an economist) and that is evidently hightly selective. You should read my posts more carefully. I would have thought it obvious that Stern’s comment was made in blissful ignorance of what’s actually been revealed over the past few weeks. We can hardly imagine him sitting down to read WUWT. I also later make it clear that Stern has vested interests in promoting AGW.
The NCDC has thoroughly “cooked” the basic data that goes into CRUT and GIStemp (The GHCN thermometer selection). Climategate will not be nearing an end until NCDC, NOAA, NASA GISS and the whole lot of hangers on have been opened up and hosed clean…
I’m sorry to hear of your pain at the hands of QUB and SUNY, but not surprised. It’s what happens when folks have power and privacy in which to apply it…
This e-mail links CRU with the Free University of Amsterdam (Dr. Peter Thorne) and
the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Benjamin D. Santander
with the work of Christie and Douglas et al and also mentions Revkin and “political hay”.
Another Smoking Gun and and a further “growth” of ClimateGate?
Who is familiar
From: Ben Santer
To: Peter Thorne
Subject: Re: [Fwd: sorry to take your time up, but really do need a scrub of this singer/christy/etc effort]
Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2007 13:04:05 -0800
Reply-to: santer1@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Cc: Carl Mears , Leopold Haimberger , Karl Taylor , Tom Wigley , Phil Jones , Tom Wigley , Steve Sherwood , John Lanzante , Dian Seidel , Melissa Free , Frank Wentz , Steve Klein
Dear folks,
Thank you very much for all of your emails, and my apologies for the
delay in replying – I’ve been on travel for much of the past week.
Peter, I think you’ve done a nice job in capturing some of my concerns
about the Douglass et al. paper. Our CCSP Report helped to illustrate
that there were large structural uncertainties in both the radiosonde-
and MSU-based estimates of tropospheric temperature change. The
scientific evidence available at the time we were finalizing the CCSP
Report – from Sherwood et al. (2005) and the (then-unpublished) Randel
and Wu paper – strongly suggested that a residual cooling bias existed
in the sonde-based estimates of tropospheric temperature change.
As you may recall, we showed results from both the RATPAC and HadAT2
radiosonde datasets in the CCSP Report and the Santer et al. (2005)
Science paper. From the latter (see, e.g., our Figure 3B and Figures
4C,D), it was clear that there were physically-significant differences
between the simulated temperature trends in the tropical lower
troposphere (over 1979 to 1999) and the trends estimated from RATPAC,
HadAT2, and UAH data. In both the Science paper and the CCSP Report, we
judged that residual biases in the observations provided the most likely
explanation for these model-versus-data trend discrepancies.
Douglass et al. come to a fundamentally different conclusion, and
ascribe model-versus-data differences to model error. They are not
really basing this conclusion on new model data or on new observational
data. The only “new” observational dataset that they use is an early
version of Leo Haimberger’s radiosonde dataset (RAOBCORE v1.2). Leo’s
dataset was under development at the time all of us were working on the
CCSP Report and the Santer et al. Science paper. It was not available
for our assessment in 2005. As Leo has already shared with you, newer
versions of RAOBCORE (v1.3 and v1.4) show amplification of surface
warming in the tropical troposphere, in reasonable agreement with the
model results that we presented in Fig. 3B of our Science paper.
Douglass et al. did not use these newer versions of RAOBCORE v1.2. Nor
did Douglass et al. use any “inconvenient” observational datasets (such
as the NESDIS-based MSU T2 dataset of Zou et al., or the MSU T2 product
of Vinnikov and Grody) showing pronounced tropospheric warming over the
satellite era. Nor did Douglass et al. discuss the “two timescale issue”
that formed an important part of our Science paper (i.e., how could
models and multiple observational datasets show amplification behavior
that was consistent in terms of monthly variability but inconsistent in
terms of decadal trends?) Nor did Douglass et al. fairly portray results
from Peter’s 2007 GRL paper. In my personal opinion, Douglass et al.
have ignored all scientific evidence that is in disagreement with their
view of how the real world should be behaving.
I don’t think it’s a good strategy to submit a response to the Douglass
et al. paper to the International Journal of Climatology (IJC). As Phil
pointed out, IJC has a large backlog, so it might take some time to get
a response published. Furthermore, Douglass et al. probably would be
given the final word.
My suggestion is to submit (to Science) a short “update” of our 2005
paper. This update would only be submitted AFTER publication of the four
new radiosonde-based temperature datasets mentioned by Peter. The update
would involve:
1) Use of all four new radiosonde datasets.
2) Use of the latest versions of the UAH and RSS TLT data, and the
latest versions of the T2 data from UAH, RSS, UMD (Vinnikov and Grody),
and NESDIS (Zou et al.).
3) Use of the T2 data in 2) above AND the UAH and RSS T4 data to
calculate tropical “TFu” temperatures, with all possible combinations of
T4 and T2 datasets (e.g., RSS T4 and UMD T2, UAH T4 and UMD T2, etc.)
4) Calculating synthetic MSU temperatures from all model 20c3m runs
currently available in the IPCC AR4 database. Calculation of synthetic
MSU temperatures would rely on a method suggested by Carl (using
weighting functions that depend on both the surface type [land, ocean]
and the surface pressure at each grid-point) rather than on the static
global-mean weighting function that we used previously. This is probably
several months of work – but at least it will keep me off the streets
and out of trouble.
5) Formal determination of statistical significance of
model-versus-observed trend differences.
6) Brief examination of timescale-dependence of amplification factors.
7) As and both Peter and Melissa suggested, brief examination of
sensitivity of estimated trends to the selected analysis period (e.g.,
use of 1979 to 1999; use of 1979 to 2001 or 2003 [for the small number
of model 20c3m runs ending after 1999]; use of data for the post-NOAA9
period).
This will be a fair bit of effort, but I think it’s worth it. Douglass
et al. will try to make maximum political hay out of their IJC paper –
which has already been sent to Andy Revkin at the New York Times. You
can bet they’ve sent it elsewhere, too. I’m pretty sure that our
colleague JC will portray Douglass et al. as definitive “proof” that all
climate models are fundamentally flawed, UAH data are in amazing
agreement with sonde-based estimates of tropospheric temperature change,
global warming is not a serious problem, etc.
One of the most disturbing aspects of Douglass et al. is its abrupt
dismissal of the finding (by Sherwood et al. and Randel and Wu) of a
residual tropospheric cooling bias in the sonde data. Douglass et al.
base this dismissal on the Christy et al. (2007) JGR paper, and on
Christy’s finding of biases in the night-time sonde data that magically
offset the biases in the day-time data. Does that sound familiar? When
did we last hear about new biases magically offsetting the effect of
recently-discovered biases? As Yogi Berra would say, this is deja vu all
over again….
I hope that one of the papers on the new sonde-based datasets directly
addresses the subject of ‘error compensation’ in the day-time and
night-time sonde data. This would be important to do.
It’s unfortunate that Douglass et al. will probably be published well
before the appearance of the papers on the new radiosonde datasets, and
before an updated comparison of modeled-and observed tropospheric
temperature trends.
I’d be grateful if you could let me know whether you are in agreement
with the response strategy I’ve outlined above, and would like to be
involved with an update of our 2005 Science paper.
With best regards,
Ben
Peter Thorne wrote:
> All,
>
> There are several additional reasons why we may not expect perfect
> agreement between models and obs that are outlined in the attached
> paper.
>
> It speaks in part to the trend uncertainty that Carl alluded to – taking
> differences between linear trend estimates is hard when the underlying
> series is noisy and perhaps non-linear. Work that John and Dian have
> done also shows this. Taking the ratio between two such estimates is
> always going to produce noisy results over relatively short trend
> periods when the signal is small relative to the natural variability.
>
> Also, 1979 as a start date may bias those estimates towards a “bias”, I
> believe (this is unproven) because of endpoint effects due to natural
> variability that tend to damp the ratio of Trop/Surf trends (ENSO
> phasing and El Chichon) for any trend period with this start date. Given
> the N-9 uncertainty a reasonable case could be made for an evaluation of
> the obs that started only after N-9 and this may yield a very different
> picture.
>
> It also shows that the model result really is constrained to perturbed
> physics, at least for HadCM3. Unsurprising as convective adjustment is
> at the heart of most models. Certainly ours anyway. This result was
> cherry-picked and the rest of the paper discarded by Douglass et al.
>
> In addition to this, the state of play on the radiosondes has moved on
> substantially with RAOBCORE 1.4 (accepted I believe, Leo Haimberger
> should be in this – I’m adding him) which shows warming intermediate
> between UAH and RSS and I know of three additional efforts on
> radiosondes all of which strongly imply that the raobs datasets used in
> this paper are substantially under-estimating the warming rate (Steve
> Sherwood x2 and our automated system). So, there’s going to be a whole
> suite of papers hopefully coming out within the next year or so that
> imply we at least cannot rule out from the radiosonde data warming
> consistent even with the absurd “mean of the model runs” criteria that
> is used in this paper.
>
> For info, our latest results imply a true raobs trend for 2LT in the
> tropics somewhere >0.08K/decade (we cannot place a defensible upper
> limit) ruling out most of the datasets used in the Douglass paper and
> ruling in possibility of consistency with models.
>
> Douglass et al also omit the newer MSU studies from the NESDIS group
> which in the absence of a reasonable criteria (a criteria I think we are
> some way away from still) to weed out bad obs datasets should be
> considered. Placing all obs datasets and the likely new raobs datasets
> would pretty much destroy this paper’s main point. There’s been a fair
> bit of cherry picking on the obs side which needs correcting here.
>
> Peter
>
> On Tue, 2007-12-04 at 15:40 -0800, carl mears wrote:
>> Karl — thanks for clarifying what I was trying to say
>>
>> Some further comments…..
>>
>> At 02:53 PM 12/4/2007, Karl Taylor wrote:
>>> Dear all,
>>> 2) unforced variability hasn’t dominated the observations.
>> But on this short time scale, we strongly suspect that it has
>> dominated. For example, the
>> 2 sigma error bars from table 3.4, CCSP for satellite TLT are 0.18 (UAH) or
>> 0.19 (RSS), larger
>> than either group’s trends (0.05, 0.15) for 1979-2004. These were
>> calculated using a “goodness
>> of linear fit” criterion, corrected for autocorrelation. This is a
>> probably a reasonable
>> estimate of the contribution of unforced variability to trend uncertainty.
>>
>>
>>
>>> Douglass et al. have *not* shown that every individual model is in fact
>>> inconsistent with the observations. If the spread of individual model
>>> results is large enough and at least 1 model overlaps the observations,
>>> then one cannot claim that all models are wrong, just that the mean is biased.
>>
>> Given the magnitude of the unforced variability, I would say “the mean
>> *may* be biased.” You can’t prove this
>> with only one universe, as Tom alluded. All we can say is that the
>> observed trend cannot be proven to
>> be inconsistent with the model results, since it is inside their range.
>>
>> It we interesting to see if we can say anything more, when we start culling
>> out the less realistic models,
>> as Ben has suggested.
>>
>> -Carl
>>
>>
>>
>>
—
—————————————————————————-
Benjamin D. Santer
Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
P.O. Box 808, Mail Stop L-103
Livermore, CA 94550, U.S.A.
Tel: (925) 422-2486
FAX: (925) 422-7675
email: santer1@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
—————————————————————————-
From: http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=821&filename=.txt
tokyoboy (19:14:53) :
“This reminds me of the Cold Fusion fiasco twenty years ago.”
Maybe not.
“AFP: Scientists in possible cold fusion breakthrough”
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j2QobOQnlULUZ7oalSRUVjnlHjng
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/03/navy-scientists/
April, enough of your skeptic charts. Cougar Gold is just spilled, sour milk, and, and,….. 😉
I have archived a full recording of the Apple Cup if anybody wishes to see it. Replay, watch every minute closely, and you still get 30-0.
go dawgs!
woof! Woof! WOOF!
Interestingly, according to that Seattle Times article 30 is not only the number of unanswered points that the dawgs hung on the cougs, but it is also both the revised percent by which mayor Nichols would claim Cascade snowpack had fallen and the number of years that Moss estimates that Cascade snowpack has been effectively stable.
If you are interested in more I hear you can get a BS in numerology at WSU.
Eric, I think numerology is an apt description for the revealing belief structure behind climategate. Crossing Dogs and Cats leads to little Cogs in the climate debate. Anybody other than me see the snow depth over at Cheney, Washington last year? That was some snow pack.