Guest post by Christopher Horner, Planet Gore at National Review Online
One thing about “ClimateGate” nagging at the back of my mind is the absence of any discussion by ringleader Phil Jones (or others) of the remarkable, shocking discovery that Jones now claims he had that his precedessor destroyed the raw data in the 1980s.
That is the data that scientists have for years been seeking from Jones under the UK’s freedom of information law. Against numerous such requests he offered equally numerous excuses for refusing access culminating with the September 2009 claim — when it looked like he’d been cornered and had no excuses not to provide it to Prof. Ross McKitrick who met all of his long-stated qualifications — that in fact he’d lost it.
First, it does seem odd that Jones would so firmly and crisply articulate his many, very specific excuses for so many years about why he could not provide something that in fact they had, as he now tells it, lost. His refusals all clearly imply that a belief that he had it.
But where are the emails putting out the word, oh, snap, you guys aren’t gonna believe this?
Among all that has been revealed, there does not appear to be one. Let alone a chain discussing the importance of not at long last actually having the raw, how this loss might relate to the scores of emails they wrote about whether to release the data and how to avoid releasing the data and how they’d rather destroy it (I don’t know, “pretend to have lost it”) than give it to the folks who seem to be on to them.
This seems like a big email, and a chain of discussions that would pervade that which has been revealed. It doesn’t.
To the contrary, we have numerous emails from Jones explaining how turning over the raw data is one option, but he’d much rather destroy it than let the intrepid start pawing over it which could only lead, as he admits in one email, to figuring out what CRU et al did to said raw data in order to come up with their alarming claims.
So there is a reasonable conclusion, and it is not that the data was lost or destroyed twenty years ago.
But who knows, maybe Jones wrote James Hansen at NASA, or Gavin Schmidt — for so long a taxpayer-funded activist for Environmental Media Services’ RealClimate.blog and now implicated as a major player in these emails (Capo number 6 according to this analysis). Those should turn up when the courts help NASA figure out how to come into compliance with their legal obligations and provide me similar data and correspondence that they have been, similarly and by chance, refusing me for over two years.
Christopher C. Horner Senior Fellow Competitive Enterprise Institute 1899 L. St, NW 12th Floor Washington, DC, 20036 +1.202.331.2260 (O)
Author of the newly released: Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed http://www.amazon.com/Red-Hot-Lies-Alarmists-Misinformed/dp/1596985380/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231180047&sr=8-1
Author of The New York Times Bestselling The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism) http://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-Global-Warming-Environmentalism/dp/1596985011
What do you mean by “raw data”?
Assumptions people. First regarding backups, they are not kept ad infinitum. There is typically a tape rotation, for example, a weeks worth, a monthly, quarterly, annual and maybe prior annual. Most companies/institutions do not have 9,000 backup tapes in contracted off-site storage somewhere (~25 years worth @ur momisugly 1 tape a day). When they are through whatever defined rotation, the backup tapes are then over-written.
Second, the deletion was described as a conscious decision to get rid of the data beacuse it was no longer needed. If that is the case, it would most likely have been moved to a storage region that was not backed up, if not outright deleted. Contrary to popular belief, some people actually choose to not back up ALL of their data, especially that which is no longer considered mission critical.
Third, there was a post linked here about only 5% of the original station data being deleted from the database based a Jones statement made in 2008. Now not being privy to the database, there just may be original station data and adjusted station data in there. All it would take is a flag on the record to mark something as original data vs. adjusted data in order for you to make that statement truthful. Without access to the actual database, there is no way to know that.
I agree that at some point, there were paper copies of the data, that subsequent versions of the database were made from, but that does not guarantee that they exist today, or even existed a year or two ago. The fact is data, even important data, is lost or destroyed all the time. And people will recreate said data to the best of their ability when necessary, or use whatever proxies they can (like previously scrubbed and adjusted data) in place of raw data.
I think all that “Climategate” has really proved to this point is that
1. Scientists are not always competent with the electronic storage and archival of data. (Most probably are competent.)
2. Scientists are not always competent in creating new statistical techniques, and they themselves know it, and will admit/ridicule each other for it behind closed doors.
3. One scientist (Jones) tried to cover up something that he didn’t want to reveal. (Maybe that some of the original data was destroyed long ago and that today’s data is really a splice of previously adjusted data and raw data. Warning: I have no proof of this.) We don’t know if anyone other than Jones actually deleted any emails. Only that they were asked to and that in the emails released, Mann did not object to it. We can only infer or assume the others may have complied. But they may not have.
4. 99.9% of the emails show tasteless humor, poor judgement, ignorance, back-biting, etc… Nothing that would allow you on the preponderance of evidence to make a convincing case for a vast conspiracy to manufacture global warming. At best, conspiracy to keep skeptics from potentially proving them wrong. And, they may truly feel that they have the world’s best intentions at heart in doing it.
5. People say/write really dumb things when they think no one else will ever see it.
George E. Smith (14:53:34) :
“Where is the proof that petroleum is a fossil fuel rather than simply a liquid mineral. Is tar a fossil fuel; are the La Brea Tarpits simply the result of too many mastodons, Sabre toothed tigers, and dire wolves standing in the same place for too long, until they begin devouring themselves; and not just as food”.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/12/is_there_an_endless_supply_of.html
http://comments.americanthinker.com/read/1/491758.html
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2006/11/abiotic-oil-a-note-from-louis-hissink/
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2008/02/evidence-for-abiogenic-oil-from-a-new-paper-published-in-the-journal-science/
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/09/abiotic-oil-part-3/
http://www.kth.se/aktuellt/1.43372?l=en_uk
http://www.gasresources.net/Introduction.htm
http://www.gasresources.net/toc_Plagiarism.htm
There may be another possible mechanism for the loss of the raw data (among other data), based on what I have seen with another important file from a U.S. source, v2.mean (ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2/v2.mean.Z). v2.mean is updated “all the time” to quote Steve McIntyre (http://www.climateaudit.org/?page_id=1686). There does not appear to be any attempt at version control. Consequently, it may be virtually impossible to replicate anything that is published, because the particular version of v2.mean that may have been used probably would no longer be available publicly and may no longer be available or identifiable by NOAA. It would not surprise me that the “master metadata” file and similar/supporting CRU files were kept/updated in the same manner. Thus, whenever a file would have been updated/processed, the original may have been simply overwritten. It looks like part of what Harry may have been doing (see Harry_READ_ME.txt) is, among other things, trying to replicate prior results and failing to do so.
Thus, there may not be an “audit trail” that would permit recreation of exactly what original raw data was used and/or how it may have been changed over the years with additions and/or deletions of stations (see the interesting history of station additions and deletions at http://chiefio.wordpress.com/).
Phil Jones: “Almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same as in the GHCN archive … http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/ghcn-monthly/index.php and http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ghcn/ghcngrid.html (1255298593.txt)”.
Justin,
You need to ask a specific question. In that chart, increases in temp *precede* increases in CO2, they do not rise “in step”, this is a long debunked Gore deceit.
The rest of it is a general appeal to the authority of the IPCC and a hockey stick graph that has been debunked by the National Academy of Science.
What part of it did you find convincing?
Great point! I too have gone through this stuff, and can confirm there is not a single clue to that disappearance in the 80s.
Now I’m 99.999% percent sure that it is hidden somewhere! Or, that it has been deleted in the last days? It can’t be! If this is true, isn’t there something called crime against humanity?
Ecotretas
Jeff (15:57:36) :
Today they would not delete them to save space because space is cheap. However, in the 1980’s space was expensive, and therefore it is entirely possible that someone might remove the original data once the felt the value-added data had been properly vetted.
Fraud is not a pre-requisite for this to have happened. Only the lack of foresight that someone else might question this data down the road, or that literally a $1 trillion decision might ride on it some day. CAGW was not mainstream at this time, and it was at a time when space was at a premium. In 1980 a 26 MB hard drive cost ~$5K. So eliminating a large file/database actually meant real dollar savings, roughly $200/MB plus the cost of backup storage.
This is where one might find a path to the raw data!
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35233_Did_Climate_Scientists_Destroy_Data_A-_No.
The Met Office was formed by Captain Robert FitzRoy, who was Captain of The Beagle when it took Charles Darwin to South America and the Galapagos islands. He was quite mad in the end, but an extraordinary Captain, and an outstanding Mapmaker and Surveyor. He made meticulous notes and records of everything he did, and the idea that the Met Office gave the raw weather data to Phil “Cheers” Jones is plain barmy. Access to it or copies yes, but the original stuff gathered over 200 years – no chance.
Getting the government (Met Office) to admit it though might be a different story. Hear the sound of shredders anyone?
MSM doesn’t want to report this story either…even tho it ties in nicely with the climategate fraud!
1 Dec: NASA scientist avoids jail in procurement case
Schoeberl was the chief scientist of Goddard’s earth sciences division, which conducts climate research, and the project scientist for the Aura mission to study the Earth’s ozone layer, air quality and climate. Schoeberl’s position enabled him to guide funds budgeted for the Aura mission.
According to the plea agreement, in mid-2004 Schoeberl began inquiring about ways to direct work to his wife Barbara’s company, Animated Earth, a small business that develops and distributes Earth Today, an exhibit displaying near-real-time earth science data. The couple previously had collaborated on a host of projects and presentations for NASA and court documents indicate that the relationship was well-known at the agency…
Between fiscal 2006 and fiscal 2008, Animated Earth was awarded more than $190,000 in NASA contracts, all without competition, according to data on USASpending.gov, a federal Web site that aggregates date on contract spending…
http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=44150&dcn=todaysnews
No Sunspots for Al Gore and the warmists. The current solar minimum will be extended past its two year run just for you.
AKM (16:17:57) :
“What do you mean by ‘raw data’?”
Here’s a generic sample provided by the NOAA: the B-91 record from a surface station. Often these forms the data is hand written as it’s copied from the mercury thermometer, etc., then signed and dated: click
I recall someone mentioning that certain successive years at stations have mysteriously disappeared from the files or record books. With the raw data missing, there goes the Little Green Footballs attempt to excuse the CRU clique.
“These scientists feel the public doesn’t have a right to know the basis for their climate-change predictions”
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/12/these-scientists-feel-public-doesnt.html
I haven’t read all comments here but what occurs to me is if the raw data was destroyed 20 years ago then do we presume that Jones and the Team have never seen the raw data?
Given that all sorts of other excuses were used before we were told the raw data was destroyed does that not mean they never even looked for the raw data at any time in the past 20 years! Do they even know what was done to it to produce the amended data?
And who amended the data? Presumably it was done based on assumptions current in the 1980’s and earlier. When exactly was it done?
This is like a historian never bothering to look at the original evidence and documents but instead compiling his own interpretation through the filter of other writings. Scholarship it is not.
With respect to the questions of The Good Locust, I would like to add that most of these questions are anwerable, but I wouldn’t know by whom. The part about
C14 is (I think) especially important though, because it may give us a good idea of how long CO2 persists in the atmosphere. There have been studies (proposed at least), that intended to use C14 and Cesium 137 as markers to locate sediments from 1963 [the peak bomb test fallout year], and possibly (potentially) other things, like tree rings and ice cores. My impression is that the C14 “spike” didn’t last too long.
I suspect that the plant C13/C12 ratio changes with temperature, so it might well change with coal source, for example.
But supposing only 3 percent or so of the CO2 was from burning fossil fuels, how could we tell, from the isotope ratios?
In spite of the Hockey Team’s tribalism, there really might be some truth in some of what they were peddling; I would certainly like to know. The problem is that I think too much of it looks like CRUd, so the temptation is strong, to generalize….
“VITTER, INHOFE ASK NASA IG ABOUT AGENCY’S POSSIBLE OBSTRUCTION OF FOIA REQUESTS”
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/12/heating-up.html
All of the data that was released was collated to comply with an FOI request and was going to have to be released anyway. NOT! These files were extracted from the servers and purged and were awaiting permission to delete to avoid the FOI request when the whistleblower ftp’d them to Russia. What is in the other 60meg and when is is going to be revealed.
When a major AGW player gives a speech perhaps. Al Gore, did you just cancel and book yourself in for facial plastic surgery disguise operations maybe.
{self snip]
““to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers”
Right. How dare those horrible deniers demand to see the raw data and statistical jiggery-pokery that goes into the released “adjusted” data! Insolent peasants! They aren’t even climatologists!
Loved the interview on Fox Business nightly biz report with two “doubters” and the moderator… not a single AGW advocate in site… “Go get ’em Chris”! indeed!
TheGoodLocust (13:57:08) :
Unrelated to this post, but I have a question, the pro-AGW people point to the isotopic composition of the atmosphere to say the source of the extra CO2 is man.
The CO2 isotope method “has issues”. See:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/the-trouble-with-c12-c13-ratios/
I have a couple of problems with this, but the main one is that they say the CO2 increases would result from oil/coal since the C12/13 ratio is similar to plants and the atmosphere is getting closer to that ratio.
That is from the “Given these conclusions what assumptions can we draw?” approach to science so favored by the AGW crowd…
Your list of questions is sound. The answers are largely “nobody knows for sure but we can make up a plausible sounding story that makes it look like it must be people… but don’t look too close… because we don’t really know.”
Tipping point tipped, polls get busted
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/the-tipping-point-tipped/
Yes, and then you provide the methods of how you manipulated the data and perhaps a graph so we can compare your result with the results we are getting
See how it works?
With all the complaining about the emails taken out of context,
I would think more of you people would have read them.
Jones said in the emails and interviews:
1. he accidently destroyed it recently
2. he would rather destroy it than hand it over
3. some of it was destroyed
4. it was destroyed when they moved
and on and on
How can the man in charge say all these different things had/have happened?
My question is this:
If it was destroyed in 1980 when they moved,
how could Jones make the statement in an email
that he would destroy it before he would hand it over?
Justin wrote:
“I am so sorry that is is so far O/T, but this is from the BBC. What is wrong with this? Am I missing something? Have the warmists been right all along?”
The BBC narrated presentation shows ice age cycles caused by solar system orbital cycles and how CO2 follows along with temperature except suddenly it looks like it doubles from its highest natural level in almost a billion years.
(1) They describe CO2 as amplifying the heating despite the fact that it has varied only from 180ppm to 280ppm and the fact that this fails to cause T runaway instead of mere cycles. What they fail to mention is that methane also tracks the T chart and would be expected to have much greater influence than CO2. O2, N2 and Ar have little greenhouse effects since they are single atoms or dimers that lack a lot of ways to vibrate. CO2 and O3 are a straight line of three atoms and so can vibrate out of that straight line and thus absorb lots of IR radiation. Methane is much more complex and can vibrate in myriad ways to absorb IR like crazy. They don’t mention methane because burning fossil fuels does not release methane but in fact converts any of it to CO2.
(2) Their vertical axis scale makes the eye think CO2 level has suddenly doubled from a big value to a huge value. If you plot CO2 as a % of the atmosphere you’ll get the same graph. If you then set the vertical scale to cover 0% to 100% the eye will see only a horizontal straight line, with no perceptible upturn at the end. CO2 has increased from 0.03% to 0.037%. What ever influence CO2 increase has had on modern T will require upwards of twice as much additional CO2 to cause the same influence again since there is a logarithmic relation involved. What an honest graph would show is that T swings like crazy between ice ages while a pie chart of the composition of the atmosphere stays exactly the same to the eye.
(3) They claim that ice age cycles are amplified by CO2. That’s unlikely since CO2 lags T more than it leads, on by 800 years. It could lag and yet still have an influence, blah, blah, blah…. Fine. But it’s not CO2 they are speaking of that causes excess warming. It’s CO2 causing somewhat higher T and then that higher T being greatly amplified by non-CO2 positive feedbacks. Those positive feedbacks are completely theoretical. Lindzen tried to measure them for real using satellite data. He found negative feedback. He also neglected to explain why he failed to use the updated satellite data that others use. The new version likely results in mere neutral feedback instead of positive. But with no positive feedback, CO2 is a complete joke of a greenhouse gas. CO2 is not unique in any way here. Any warming for any reason is effected by feedbacks. So their argument is that T releases CO2 from cold water, ice, permafrost etc. which then causes a tiny greenhouse increase in T which is then highly amplified by mysterious forces which overwhelm negative feedbacks completely…until the sun cools off a bit and we plunge into another ice age. This is a hand-waving argument that has been hard-coded into their computer models. As hand-waving arguments go it’s a pretty crappy one since it’s much harder on a science-fair level to come up with positive feedback ideas than negative ones.
(4) The eye is very easy to fool with slick presentation and the voice of authority backed up by many scientific societies. The problem here is that those authorities have failed in their duty to discount the voice of skepticism by using actual science. I’m not talking hand-waving arguments in a vacuum (like proofs that CO2 can’t be a greenhouse gas were the earth atmosphere a ball of rubber instead of full of convection currents) but the few skeptical points that pierce to the core of the issue that HAVE NOT BEEN ADDRESSED. Namely that feedback may be neutral or negative instead of positive, that long-running thermometer records fail to show any recent upturn in a natural warming trend of 350 years, that so many non-urban and even many urban temperature stations fail to track the Global Average charts, that Hockey Sticks are almost all broken and without them there would have been no alarm in the first place, and that warming itself and especially CO2 plant fertilization is likely a good instead of bad thing. I’ve left out many I am likely not familiar with. You are making the mistake of allowing a slick presentation to completely cloud your mind away from the very issues that is trying to be debated by serious skeptics. An example of slick presentation is on the new NOAA Climate.gov web site:
http://i46.tinypic.com/2akb9j.jpg
Al Gore made a whole movie that relied on such illusion. Sophisticated instead of simple use of illusion would be very dangerous without the peer-review process to block their use as actual arguments in academia and policy matters! Thank god for peer review.
Excellent point TerrySkinner
If the raw data was destroyed when they moved in 1980,
before Jones was even working there,
what did Jones work from?
I could not have been the raw data, at least according to Jones.
Justin (14:57:34) :…from the BBC. What is wrong with this? Am I missing something? Have the warmists been right all along? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2009/copenhagen/8386319.stm
Richard Black wriggling IMO. Note he says “800,000 years”, well that just happens to represent the ice core records. IMO there is more bad science here, namely the “consensus” that the ice core CO2 measurements are correct. There are many reasons from the practical issues of drilling, extracting, transporting, storing and testing ice cores, to suspect the levels are too low. Jaworowski has a lot to say about this, and is hated by the orthodoxy.