Quite a bit different from their November 24th statement, which you can read here. For those that still think Climategate has no significant impact on climate science, this revelation tells another story.
Met Office to re-examine 160 years of climate data
The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.
The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world. This assessment is the basis for next week’s climate change talks in Copenhagen aimed at cutting CO2 emissions.
The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics.
The Met Office works closely with the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which is being investigated after e-mails written by its director, Phil Jones, appeared to show an attempt to manipulate temperature data and block alternative scientific views.
The Met Office’s published data showing a warming trend draws heavily on CRU analysis. CRU supplied all the land temperature data to the Met Office, which added this to its own analysis of sea temperature data.
Since the stolen e-mails were published, the chief executive of the Met Office has written to national meteorological offices in 188 countries asking their permission to release the raw data that they collected from their weather stations.
The Met Office is confident that its analysis will eventually be shown to be correct. However, it says it wants to create a new and fully open method of analysing temperature data.
The development will add to fears that influential sceptics in other countries, including the US and Australia, are using the controversy to put pressure on leaders to resist making ambitious deals for cutting CO2.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change admitted yesterday that it needed to consider the full implications of the e-mails and whether they cast doubt on any of the evidence for man-made global warming.
========
“influential sceptics in other countries” I wonder who that could be?
I applaud the open process though.
What about this?
From: John Daly
To: n.nicholls@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Re: Climatic warming in Tasmania
Date: Fri, 09 Aug 1996 20:04:00 +1100
Cc: Ed Cook , NNU-NB@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, k.briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, Mike Barbetti , zetterberg@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, rjf@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Dear Neville,
You mentioned to me some time ago that in your view, the 11-year solar cycle
did not influence temperature. There have been numerous attempts by
academics to establish a correlation, but each has been shot down on some
ground or other. I remember Barrie Pittock was especially dismissive of
attempts to correlate solar cycle with temperature.
Have you tried this approach?
Load “Mathematica” into your PC and run the following set of instructions –
data = ReadList[ “c:sydney.txt”, Number]
dataElements = Length[data]
X = ListPlot[ data, PlotJoined-> True];
fourierTrans = Fourier[data];
ListPlot[Abs[fourierTrans], PlotJoined -> True];
fitfun1 = Fit[data,{1,x,x^2,x^3,Sin[11 2 Pi x/dataElements],
Cos[11 2 Pi x/dataElements]},x];
fittable = Table[N[fitfun1], {x, dataElements}];
Y = ListPlot[fittable, PlotJoined -> True];
Show[X, Y]
The reference to “c:sydney.txt” is a suggested pathname for the following
set of data – which is Sydney’s annual mean temperature.
16.8 16.5 16.8 17 17 16.7 17.1 17.4 17.9 17.4 17.2 17.1 16.9 17 17.2 17.2 17.4
17.6 17.6 17.6 16.7 17.1 16.8 17.4 16.8 17.3 17.8 17.5 17.1 17.2 17.6 17.3 17.1
16.9 16.9 17.3 17.3 17.3 17.6 17.5 17.4 17.2 17.1 17.3 17.2 17.2 16.9 17.5 17.4
17.2 17 17.5 17.4 17.5 17.7 18.3 17.8 17.4 17.2 17.4 18.3 17.3 18 18.1 18 17.5
17.3 18 17 18.2 17.4 17.6 17.5 17.4 17.1 17.4 17.3 17.5 17.7 18 17.8 18 17.4
17.8 16.8 17.5 17.4 17.6 17.6 17.2 17.4 17.9 17.9 17.6 17.7 17.8 17.7 17.6 17.8
18.3 18 17.6 17.8 17.8 17.8 18.1 17.9 17.5 17.8 18.3 18 17.7 17.3 17.5 18.5 17.4
17.8 17.7 17.8 17.7 18 18.5 18.2 17.8 18.1 17.5 17.8 17.8 18 18.6 18.1 18.1
18.6
So Far so good.
“Mathematica” first plots out the data itself (see Atachment 1)
The first part of the instruction set lets “mathematica” do a Fourier Transform
on the data, ie. searching out the periodicities, if there are any. The result is
shown on Attachment 2.
The transform result shows a sharp spike at the 11 year point (I wonder
what is significant about 11 years?). The second part of the instructions
now acts upon this observed spike (the Cos 11 bit), to extract it’s
waveform from the rest of the noise. The result is shown as a waveform
in attachment 3, the waves having an 11-year period, with the long-term
Sydney warming easily evident.
Attachment 4 shows the original Sydney data overlaid against the 11-year
periodicity.
It would appear that the solar cycle does indeed affect temperature.
[b](I tried the same run on the CRU global temperature set. Even though [u]CRU
must be highly smoothed[/u] by the time all the averages are worked out, the
11-year pulse is still there, [u]albeit about half the size of Sydneys).[/u/[/b]
Stay cool.
John Daly
The 5 stages of grief: 1) Denial, 2) Anger, 3) Bargaining, 4) Depression and 5) Acceptance.
I suspect the UK Met is at stage 3: “Just give me three more years…..”
An excellent column on climate change by George Will in the Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/04/AR2009120403073.html
Most of the sceptics debating on televised media have not done so convincingly. They have to focus on the following facts:
1. CRU refused to release the data, they were hiding it. thus
2. CRU continuously violated FOIA laws. We have a right to see it.
3. CRU deleteed and destryoed data
4. CRU manipulated the data to enhance the warming trend.
5. Solid evidence of criminal activity.
Period
That’s all. Why can’t sceptics drive that across? What bozos!
Gordon Brown is a twit. It’s ignorant politicians that should be against the law, not oil.
One of the best ClimateGate articles so far is a long one in the 20091214 Weekly Standard (cover page of that issue is priceless):
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/300ubchn.asp
Titled ”Scientists Behaving Badly” (no kidding), the closing statement in that piece about the AGW religion is a keeper:
”But even before Climategate, the campaign was beginning to resemble a Broadway musical that had run too long, with sagging box office and declining enthusiasm from a dwindling audience. Someone needs to break the bad news to the players that it’s closing time for the climate horror show.”
Turn out the lights, the party’s over for AGW. . . . At least if there is any reservoir of common sense left in the world, it should be.
Why don’t they just release the raw data. We can use Amazon EC2 to host a temporary compute cloud (only .10 dollar per hour per cpu) and use open code to crunch it however climatologists want and see what kind of graphs we get.
I think the folks at UK Met are quite smart. 3 years is about the time it will take to realize whether we are entering a new cooling period (due to the sun’s lack of sunspots) or another warming phase related to natural weather variability. if it warms, they will say the data was correct all along and climate change theory was always right. If it cools, they can “discover” that the data was wrong, blame it on some designated scapegoats and save the institution’s reputation by claiming the some rogue scientists acted on their own.
Just a theory.
bill (05:47:22),
“Thank you for costing the uk probably £500,000 +”
Are you actually unaware that this catastrophic AGW scare is part and parcel of a coordinated attempt to impose enormous new taxes on the citizens of the West, and to funnel those monies through the opaque and unaccountable UN?
Can’t you see the constant drumbeat of alarmism throughout the lock-step media and the pronouncements of government entities, which stand to gain by deliberately scaring the populace with their tall tales of cities sunk under an encroaching ocean, of disappearing polar ice cover, of dying polar bears, of the seas turning to acid, of increased hurricanes and other weather disasters?
All of these scenarios are bogus. Every one of them have been debunked. Can’t you see that it is all part of a fabricated scare story, designed to give impetus to the creation of treaties leading to a world government? A world government that gives an equal vote to each of the UN General Assembly’s 130+ countries. How do you think the majority of the UN’s countries will vote, when the question concerns how the world’s wealth must be redistributed? Compare your half-million pound expense with the $Trillions already proposed to save us from this fake climate scare. And compare your £0.5 million CRU expense with the £13.7 million that has already been funneled to Phil Jones alone, by entities with a heavy AGW agenda. And similar largess has been spread around to other scientists promoting the AGW scare.
There is nothing unusual going on with the climate. Nothing. The current climate is very benign compared with the geologic past. And now that the behind-the-scenes machinations of the secretive CRU and Penn State scientists have been exposed to the light of day, we can see why their clique is filled with hatred directed at anyone who dares to question their invented conclusions based on cherry-picked data.
Their position has been extremely lucrative for them, and their enhanced status sends them all over the world on expense paid first class trips to sell their alarming story. Their hatred, expressed in the emails of anyone questioning their conclusions, is because those questions are a threat to their rock star-like life style; they were once nerds, now they are heroes saving humanity. But they know it is all based on a lie.
The suppressed data challenges these scientists’ false claim that a change in a tiny and entirely beneficial trace gas, essential to all life on Earth, will cause runaway global warming and climate catastrophe. They have subverted the public’s trust in science to sell their provably false story: as the trace of atmospheric CO2 has risen over the past decade, the planet’s temperature has declined. Over 95% of the increase in CO2 comes from natural sources, not from human activity. Yet they imply, through selective release of data, that human activity is responsible for 100% of the increase.
The leaked emails that we have seen are just the tip of the iceberg. Rather than wail about the expense of fixing the CRU’s deliberately corrupted data set, you should be cheering about the fact that this organized climate scam has been exposed. Now it will be a little more difficult for the “democratic” UN countries to vote to equalize the world’s wealth at our expense, based on the CO2 = Catastrophic AGW fraud.
Re the Met Office and their commercial situation – the government has been talking of selling them off for years [and touted again only about 8 weeks ago] – no one is going to touch them with a barge pole with this hanging over it.
And yes, all those organisations that have a trading relationship with them will be back-pedalling too.
Success has many fathers, whilst failure is an orphan.
Same applies to UEA – if I had them as a partner/supplier, I’d be talking to my lawyers about unwinding.
They only have their reputation to trade on and that has gone up the creek in a global way. Who’s going to view a relationship with them as ‘a good PR move’ now?
I feel desperately sorry for their students.
“The Met Office’s published data showing a warming trend draws heavily on CRU analysis.” “The Met Office is confident that its analysis will eventually be shown to be correct.”
3 more years of funding and “proving” they are right, praying El Nino comes back strong.
These are sick people, arrogant, and twisted.
Let Steve McIntyre do the audit.
P Gosselin (06:30:23) :
“That’s all. Why can’t sceptics drive that across? What bozos!”
I think they are far too close to it – they’re down in the weeds rather than talking about the big scandal and what it means.
I’ve just been listening to Any Answers [phone in response to panel discussion Any Questions] on BBC Radio 4.
The callers were 50/50 – ‘if they’re so confident of their data, why do they use the language/tactics they did?’, ‘I haven’t read the emails – I’m a scientist and the deniers are wrong’ and ‘the IPCC are the experts – look at all those peer-reviewed papers’.
The R4 audience is typically intelligent, interested in high quality facts/debate and likes to think of themselves as well informed.
Ya know…
It strikes me (that was the gong sound you just heard) that this reexamination might just work if something like the following were undertaken at the same time…
With poorly sited or badly maintained equipment, find a place as close as possible to the present location that meets standards, and place new equipment there. Compare the two results over a year’s time – that ought to give at least a ballpark idea of an “adjustment” that might stand the light of day.
In the case of UHI, siting in several places outside the Urban area and averaging them to the existing sites could be used.
I’m especially thinking of the Tucson site at the UofA atmospherics department. I know of several areas near there that meet requirements…and I don’t even live in Tucson.
Yeah, probably missing some fine points here but it’s a start…and would be pretty cost effective too…(and bring many sites to specs.
Mike
If no sites are within say a half-mile or mile then several
Huge thread to wake up to this am! Lots of thoughts roiling through my head in response to numerous postings.
First, this one. If the reanalysis is truly “open,” it doesn’t matter who does it, and this can only be a good thing.
Second, for all of those concerned about all the “adjustments” that have to be made in doing this leaving open the door for doubts about the final product, it seems to me that it should be possible to impose some controls by making the adjustments “fit” the satellite data, and work backwards using the same adjustments in the past. A lot of concern is that the agencies (CRU, GISS) have made adjustments that cool the past, and warm the present. Well, make the adjustments just for the last 30 years, and then stick with them consistently for older data.
As for adjustments, why are we adjusting for UHI in the first place? That should not be done to the baseline temperature record. Establish what temperatures have been, regardless of source. Then try to to explain them. At that point, UHI becomes relevant. That takes UHI out of hands of the data collectors, and makes it a separate research issue. That way, we don’t have to listen to “UHI is already accounted for.” Instead, it becomes something for the specialists to argue about in the literature. Of course, to do it, the data will have to be open, and available, so anyone can have at it, and see if they can quantify UHI.
It might be interesting to have a dialog about what “adjustments” are really appropriate to establish the baseline temperature record. Shooting from the hip, these come immediately to mind:
Missing data
Station moves
Equipment changes
Uneven record length (would include station dropout)
Handling of geographic placement (includes infilling for areas with spotty or no coverage)
Handling of “averaging” and uncertainty
More?
I ran these on Audit Commanders Benford’s Law test. First and last digit fail. Makes you wonder.
November 2009 UAH Global Temperature Update +0.50 deg. C
December 2nd, 2009
YR MON GLOBE NH SH TROPICS
2009 1 +0.304 +0.443 +0.165 -0.036
2009 2 +0.347 +0.678 +0.016 +0.051
2009 3 +0.206 +0.310 +0.103 -0.149
2009 4 +0.090 +0.124 +0.056 -0.014
2009 5 +0.045 +0.046 +0.044 -0.166
2009 6 +0.003 +0.031 -0.025 -0.003
2009 7 +0.411 +0.212 +0.610 +0.427
2009 8 +0.229 +0.282 +0.177 +0.456
2009 9 +0.422 +0.549 +0.294 +0.511
2009 10 +0.286 +0.274 +0.297 +0.326
2009 11 +0.496 +0.418 +0.575 +0.493
MET office intends to realise all data next week.
Here is the seasonal temperature deviation for Central England, 10 year moving average 1650-2010 with the first & last 10 year redacted.
http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/CET.gif
woodfortrees (Paul Clark) (04:55:20)
In general, I still can’t see the case for casting doubt on HADCRUT3, not only because it matches so well with other series, but because nothing in the “files” indicates anything bad having been done to it.
Hi Paul, good to see you post on this thread. In one of the VRU emails, Phil Jones says both HADcrut and GISS are based on the same data, but that GISS is inferior because of add hoc UHI adjustments.
Given the awful state of both CRU and GISS code, why would we have confidence in either? The fact tht they both broadly agree could be down to behind the scenes recognition of the value of mutual support and commonality of purpose rather than sound methodology and genuinely reinforcing independent results could it not?
From the link above:
Wrong city, wrong country. The Nobel Peace prize was never awarded in Sweden. It is awarded every year in Oslo, Norway on December 10.
The weather forecast for Oslo December 10. is 2C and rain. But it is marked “uncertain”, and the following days will be much colder. With some luck, the cold arrives earlier.
I believe this is an attempt to quell the resistance to the Copenhagen Treaty which is the means to finance a new unelected global government & give tyrants the power to control every aspect of our lives.
If they can sign a deal at Copenhagen, we will have no political recourse to reverse what will be a fascist global regime.
They plan to introduce Codex Alimentarius at the end of the year which will mean the prohibition of vitamins & supplements & global control of the food chain by the same people who brought you CLIMATEGATE & SWINE FLU.
It’s Orwellian how these people have redefined things we need to live as TOXINS!
By their own calculations this will mean the death of millions of people worldwide & in my opinion this is the unseen agenda, the missing step in reason, that people have mentioned.
New World Order. Global Fascist Government. An orchestrated collapse of western industrial society & food shortages, the aim being massive population reduction.
This is why Obama has decided to attend Copenhagen.
And those in control of the UN will try to drive this through because without it, it all stops.
This is much bigger than some vain & greedy scientists.
The big lie of AGW could not have been maintained without the support of very powerful corporate & financial interests.
How else could the obedience of the media & politicians that we have witnessed have been enforced?
Does anyone believe they are all rallying to support the reputations of Phil & Mike?
This is why we must rise up & refuse to accept this coup d’etat.
Furthermore, the UN must be dismantled & those responsible be investigated & brought to justice.
Similarly, those who have conspired in our national governments need to be held accountable for their actions.
The people need to stop waiting for ‘authority’ to make it better.
Authority didn’t question this bogus science or expose the criminal manipulation of data, YOU DID!
The pyramidal power structure has shown itself to work actively against truth & justice & the needs & interests of the people.
We need to learn that lesson NOW & remove the means by which power corrupts our planet.
The way people have united over this to reveal the truth has inspired me & I sincerely thank all of you who have worked so hard & long, despite the personal attacks & worse you have endured.
People, we need to have faith in ourselves & wake up to how we have been so manipulated & deceived by those we trusted.
STOP COPENHAGEN.
STOP CODEX ALIMENTARIUS.
MASS PEACEFUL PROTEST.
MASS NON PAYMENT OF TAXES.
MASS CONSUMER, BANK & WORK BOYCOTTS.
& lets show those responsible for these crimes against humanity the real meaning of NEW WORLD ORDER.
:o)
Martin Brumby (03:39:38) :
Before anyone gets too excited about what the Met Office may or may not do, check out this fabulous link:-
http://www.ftconferences.com/event/pdfs/63/cBrochure/0_Environmental%20Brochure%20Final.pdf?PHPSESSID=e280bb6ed503688
From the link:
Wines
Organic Pinot Blanc Jean Baltenweck Ribeauille, Alsace, France 2005
Organic Casa de la Ermita Crianza, Spain 2004
Where possible, all ingredients have been sourced within the UK
But, but, surely they could have had English wine, with it being so hot and all?
Isn’t this a bit like letting Enron do their own audit to show the extent of their profitability trend?
And I like their goal of being able to “state with absolute confidence”. That is a theological goal, not a scientific goal.
Gordon ‘climate-change sceptics are flat-earthers’ Brown has made such a success of the British economy that the Treasury is looking for government assets to sell, including the Met Office (VT Group ‘would buy Met Office’ http://www.defencemanagement.com/news_story.asp?id=11332 ). The CRU debacle will not have enhanced the Met Office’s standing and I expect they are trying to distance themselves from the mess.
“How do they know that they analysis will take three years? Why not two? Why not four?”
Because the world will have ended by then, and the whole question will be moot.
Seriously, a barrage of e-mail to MPs, Congresspersons, etc. pointing out that since such horrors as Cap’n Trade (my new nickname for Al Gore) rest on the ‘settled science’ hawked by the IPCC report, and since radical unsettling has taken place, such political exercises should be put on hold pending a review of the data
From E.M. Smith:
10) Stop re-writing the past for UHI. It’s a hack, and a bad one at that.
11) Don’t use a ‘one size fits all’ UHI. For example, for each site that is an airport, have a flag for ‘first airport use’ and for ‘last airport use’ and for each year in between have a ’size’ parameter. The airport heat island effect is different at a grass field in 1920 than it is at London Gatwick. For cities, having a single population number is bogus. Take the old census records and put in a population by year table. Right now there is one size for Chicago, what it is now. That is not accurate for 1880…
12) Pay attention to micro climate drivers, such as altitude, distance to the sea, latitude, etc. when using ‘reference stations’ for fill in. Don’t do silly things like adjust Pisa the wrong way by looking at the Alps. When doing UHI, have a simple sanity check to prevent adjusting UHI the wrong way. (GIStemp does this in a significant fraction of the records… 1/4? )
I just asked about this in a previous post. Shouldn’t we develop a baseline methodology using the “raw” data first without any adjustments for UHI? It seems to me that all the questions regarding the quantification and adjusting for UHI make this a research issue to be hashed out separate from developing a baseline temperature record. No matter how “they” do it, it could probably be done differently, and we need to know that, and what difference it makes. But once “they” do it, and it becomes part of the published temperature data set, it takes UHI off the table as it were (“it has already been accounted for). UHI and land use/land cover changes are huge issues here. We need a good, open, source of “raw” (maybe adjusted for missing data, equipment changes, etc.) that is not already adjusted for the controversial issues. Once that is available, let ‘er rip, i.e. let everybody go after trying to quantify the impact of these on the “raw” data.
“The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change admitted yesterday that it needed to consider the full implications of the e-mails and whether they cast doubt on any of the evidence for man-made global warming.”
That might be the best under statement of all time.
“Any” evidence to make one think about “doubt”.
Anyone with more than two functioning synaptic junctions could figure that one out.
So much for the IPCC objectivity.