How IPCC scientists interfere with publication of inconvenient scientific results
By David H. Douglass, Professor of Physics, University of Rochester, New York, and John R. Christy, Distinguished Professor, Atmospheric Science, University of Alabama at Huntsville
- In this article, reprinted from The American Thinker, two eminent Professors reveal just one of the many seamy stories that emerge from the Climategate emails. A prejudiced journal editor conspires with senior IPCC scientists to delay and discredit a paper by four distinguished scientists demonstrating that a central part of the IPCC’s scientific argument is erroneous.
The Climategate emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England have revealed how the normal conventions of the peer-review process appear to have been compromised by a Team of “global warming” scientists, with the willing cooperation of the editor of the International Journal of Climatology, Glenn McGregor.
The Team spent nearly a year preparing and publishing a paper that attempted to rebut a previously published paper in that journal by Douglass, Christy, Pearson and Singer. Our paper, reviewed and accepted in the traditional manner, had shown that the IPCC models that predicted significant “global warming” in fact largely disagreed with the observational data.
We will let the reader judge whether this team effort, revealed in dozens of emails and taking nearly a year, involves inappropriate behavior including (a) unusual cooperation between authors and editor, (b) misstatement of known facts, (c) character assassination, (d) avoidance of traditional scientific give-and-take, (e) using confidential information, (f) misrepresentation (or misunderstanding) of the scientific question posed by us in our paper, (g) withholding data, and more.
The team is a group of a number of climate scientists who frequently collaborate and publish papers which often supports the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. For present purposes, leading members of the Team include Ben Santer, Phil Jones, Timothy Osborn, and Tom Wigley, with lesser roles for several others.
Introduction
We submitted our paper to the International Journal of Climate on 31 May 2007. The paper was accepted four and a half months later, on 11 October. The page-proofs were accepted on 1 November. The paper was published online on 5 December. However, we had to wait very nearly a year after online publication, until 15 November 2008, for publication of the print version of the paper.
Ben Santer and 17 members of the Team subsequently published a paper intended to refute ours. It was submitted to the International Journal of Climate on 25 March 2008. It was revised on 18 July, accepted two days later, published online on 10 October, and published in print on 15 November, little more than a month after online publication.
This story uses various of the Climategate emails and our own personal knowledge of events and issues. References will be made to items in an appendix that are arranged chronologically. Each of the emails has an index number which comes from a compilation at http://www.eastangliaemails.com/index.php
2. The story
Our record of this story begins when Andrew Revkin, a reporter for the New York Times, sent three Team members an email dated 30 Nov 2007, to which he attached the page-proofs of our paper, which we had not sent to him. His email to the Team is dated just one week before the online publication of our paper. The subject of Revkin’s email,
“Sorry to take your time up, but really do need a scrub of Singer/Christy/etc effort”, implies that there had been prior correspondence between Revkin and the Team.
Carl Mears, a Team member, quickly responded with an email dated 4 December 2007 to fellow Team members Jones, Santer, Thorne, Sherwood, Lanzante, Taylor, Seidel, Free and Wentz Santer replies to all of these:
“I’m forwarding this to you in confidence. We all knew that some journal, somewhere, would eventually publish this stuff. Turns out that it was the International Journal of Climatology.”
Santer knew this because he had reviewed and rejected our paper when it had been previously submitted to another journal. Phil Jones, then director of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia, and now stood down pending an investigation of the Climategate affair, responded to Santer:
“It sure does! Have read briefly – the surface arguments are wrong. I know editors have difficulty finding reviewers, but letting this one pass is awful – and the International Journal of Climatology was improving.”
This exchange provides the first reference to the International Journal of Climatology.
The next day, 5 December 2007, the day on which our paper appeared on-line, Santer sent a email to Peter Thorne with copies to Carl Mears, Leopold Haimberger, Karl Taylor, Tom Wigley, Phil Jones, Steve Sherwood, John Lanzante, Dian Seidel, Melissa Free, Frank Wentz, and Steve Klein. Santer says:
“Peter, I think you’ve done a nice job in capturing some of my concerns about the Douglass et al. paper… 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. As Phil [Jones] pointed out, the Journal 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.”
The most critical point throughout these emails is the goal of preventing us from providing what is considered normal in the peer-reviewed literature: an opportunity to respond to their critique, or as they put it, “be given the final word.” One wonders if there is ever a “final word” in science, as the authors here seem to imply.
The next day, 6 December 2007, Melissa Free responded with a cautious note, evidently because she had presented a paper with Lanzante and Seidel at the American Meteorological Society’s 18th conference on Climate Variability and Change, acknowledging the existence of the discrepancy between observations and models – the basic conclusion of our paper:
“What about the implications of a real model-observation difference for upper-air trends? Is this really so dire?”
Santer responded on 6 December 2007 with his key reason for attacking our paper:
“What is dire is Douglass et al.’s wilful neglect of any observational datasets that do not support their arguments.”
This “wilful neglect” of “observational datasets” refers to the absence of two balloon datasets RAOBCORE v1.3 and v1.4. We had explained in addendum to our paper that these datasets were faulty.
A further email from Jones, dated 6 Dec 2007, discusses options for beating us into print. Wigley, a former head of the Climatic Research Unit, enters the story on 10 Dec 2007 to accuse us of “fraud”, adding that under “normal circumstances” this would “cause him [Professor David Douglass] to lose his job”.
We remind the reader that our paper went through traditional, anonymous peer-review with several revisions to satisfy the reviewers and without communicating outside proper channels with the editor and reviewers.
Tim Osborn, a colleague of Jones at the Climatic Research Unit and a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Climate, then inserted himself into the process, declaring a bias on the issue. He said that Professor Douglass’ previous papers “appear to have serious problems”.
Santer responded on 12 December 2007 with gratitude for the “heads-up”, again making the claim that our paper had ignored certain balloon datasets, when in fact our paper had not used these datasets because they were known to be faulty.
The same day, an unsigned report appeared on the Team’s propaganda website, RealClimate.org, attacking us especially about not using the RAOBCORE 1.4 balloon dataset.
This prompted us to submit a one-page Addendum to the International Journal of Climatology on 3 January 2008 to explain two issues: first, the reason for not using RAOBCORE 1.4 and secondly, the experimental design to show why using the full spread of model results to compare with observations (as Santer i. would do) would lead to wrong conclusions about the relationship between trends in the upper air temperature vs. the surface. A copy of the addendum may be found at http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/.)
Osborn wrote to Santer and Jones on 10 January 2008 to discuss the “downside” of the normal comment-reply process in which we should be given an “opportunity to have a response.” He explained that he has contacted the editor of the International Journal of Climatology, Glenn McGregor, to “see what he can do”. According to Osborn, McGregor “promises to do everything he can to achieve a quick turn-around.” He also wrote:
“… (and please treat this in confidence, which is why I emailed to you and Phil only) that he [McGregor] may be able to hold back the hardcopy (i.e. the print/paper version) appearance of Douglass et al., possibly so that any accepted Santer et al. comment could appear alongside it. He [McGregor] also intends to “correct the scientific record” and to identify “in advance reviewers who are both suitable and available”, perhaps including “someone on the email list you’ve been using”. Given the bias of Osborn and McGregor as expressed in the emails, one could wonder what it means to be a “suitable” reviewer of the Santer paper.
Santer responded with his conditions, highlighting his intent to have the “last word”:
“1. Our paper should be regarded as an independent contribution, not as a comment on Douglass et al. … 2. If the International Journal of Climatology agrees to 1, then Douglass et al. should have the opportunity to respond to our contribution, and we should be given the chance to reply. Any response and reply should be published side-by-side, in the same issue of the Journal. I’d be grateful if you and Phil could provide me with some guidance on 1 and 2, and on whether you think we should submit to the Journal. Feel free to forward my email to Glenn McGregor.”
This Osborn email and the response by Santer essentially lay out the publication strategy apparently agreed to by Santer, Jones, Osborn and editor McGregor. Santer accepts Osborn as a conduit and defines the conditions (having the “last word”). This is exactly what he seeks to deny to us, even though it was we who had published the original paper in this sequence in the Journal, and should, under customary academic procedures, have been entitled to have the last word alongside any rebuttal of our paper that the Journal published.
We were never informed of this process, even though it specifically addressed our paper, nor were we contacted for an explanation on any point raised in these negotiations. Santer’s allegations regarding our paper and his conditions for publication of his response to it were simply accepted by the Journal’s editor. If our results had indeed been so obviously and demonstrably in error, why would anyone have feared a response by us?
The same day, 10 January 2008, Jones told the Team (Wigley, K. Taylor, Lanzante, Mears, Bader, Zwiers, Wentz, Haimberger, Free, MacCracken, Jones, Sherwood, Klein, Solomon, Thorne, Osborn, Schmidt, and Hack) a “secret” he had learned from Osborn: that one of the recipients on the Santer email list was one of the original reviewers of our paper – a reviewer who had not rejected it:
“The problem! The person who said they would leave it to the editor’s discretion is on your email list! I don’t know who it is – Tim does – maybe they have told you? I don’t want to put pressure on Tim. He doesn’t know I’m sending this. It isn’t me by the way – nor Tim! Tim said it was someone who hasn’t contributed to the discussion – which does narrow the possibilities down!”
Does Santer start wondering who the original reviewer is? Does Osborn reveal this part of McGregor’s secret?
Then, on the matter of paying for expensive color plots, Jones adds, “I’m sure I can lean on Glenn [McGregor] to evidently deal with the costs.” Obviously, no such assistance had been offered to us when we had published our original paper.
The final approval of the strategy (Santer’s conditions) to deny us an opportunity to respond in the normal way is acknowledged by Osborn to Santer and Jones on 11 January 2008. Osborn writes that McGregor, as editor is “prepared to treat it as a new submission rather than a comment on Douglass et al.” and “my [McGregor’s] offer of a quick turnaround time etc. still stands.” Osborn also reminds Santer and Jones of the potential impropriety of this situation:
“… the only thing I didn’t want to make more generally known was the suggestion that print publication of Douglass et al. might be delayed… all other aspects of this discussion are unrestricted.”
Santer now informed the Team that the strategy had been agreed to. We were never notified of these machinations, and it is clear that Santer’s story of the situation was never investigated independently. In this long email, the issue of radiosonde errors is discussed, together with the fact that one dataset, RAOBCORE v1.4, is missing from our paper.
To explain briefly, Sakamoto and Christy (accepted in 2008 and published in 2009) looked closely at the ERA-40 Reanlayses on which RAOBCORE v1.3 and v1.4 were based, and demonstrated that a spurious warming shift occurred in 1991 (a problem with a satellite channel: HIRS 11) which was then assimilated into RAOBCORE, producing spurious positive trends in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere.
Sakamoto and Christy had been working on this since 2006 when they had first met, and so were aware of the problems at that time. Later, on 27 May 2008, Sherwood – a member of the Team – comments on this evidence during the deliberations on Santer’s publication, so the Team was aware of the problem too. Even though McGregor had sent Santer our Addendum explaining the RAOBCORE problems as early as 10 April 2008, their published paper contains the statement:
“Although DCPS07 had access to all three RAOBCORE versions, they presented results from v1.2 only.”
Another interesting comment here is that Santer does “not” want to “show the most recent radiosonde [balloon] results” from the Hadley Center and Sherwood’s IUK. In short, he was withholding data that did not support his view, probably because these two datasets, extended out in time, provide even stronger evidence in favor of our conclusion. The final version of Santer’s paper cuts off these datasets in 1999.
Professor Douglass became concerned that McGregor had not responded after receiving the Addendum sent on 3 January 2008. The Professor wrote on 1 April 2008 to ask about the status of the Addendum. On 10 April 2008 McGregor responded that he had had “great difficulty locating your Addendum”, and Douglass responded with the International Journal of Climatology’s file number acknowledging receipt of the Addendum on 3 January, and attached the Addendum again. That very day, McGregor sent the Addendum to Santer to “learn your views.” Santer was afforded the opportunity to comment on our Addendum, but we never heard about it from McGregor again.
On 24 April 2008 McGregor informed Santer that he had received one set of comments and, though he “… would normally wait for all comments to come in before providing them to you, I thought in this case I would give you a head start in your preparation of revisions”.
That day, Santer informed the Team of the situation. Ws there ever any possibility that Santer’s paper could have been rejected, given the many favors already extended to this submission? McGregor now knew, because he had the Addendum, what the main point of our response to Santer et al. might be, yet evidently dropped the Addendum from consideration. At this point, we were unaware of any response by Santer to our Addendum, as we were dealing with the RealClimate.org blog on this matter.
Santer was worried about the lack of “urgency” in receiving the remaining reviews and, on 5 May 2008, complained to McGregor. He reminded McGregor that Osborn had agreed to the strategy that the “process would be handled as expeditiously as possible”. McGregor replied that he hoped that the further comments would come within “2 weeks”. The following day, Osborn wrote to McGregor that Santer’s 90-page article was much more than anticipated, implying that Santer was being rather demanding considering how much had been done to aid him. One wonders why it should take 10 months and 90 pages to show that any paper contained a “serious flaw”, and why Santer et al. needed to be protected from a response by us.
A paper by Thorne now appeared in Nature Geosciences which referenced the as-yet-unpublished paper by Santer et al. (including Thorne). On 26 May 2008, Professor Douglass wrote to Thorne asking for a copy and was told the following day that Thorne could not supply the paper because Santer was the lead author author.
Professor Douglass replied that day, repeating his request for a copy of the paper and reminding Thorne of Nature’s publication-ethics policy on the availability of data and materials:
“An inherent principle of publication is that others should be able to replicate and build upon the authors’ published claims. Therefore, a condition of publication in a Nature journal is that authors are required to make materials, data and associated protocols available …”
At the same time Professor Douglass asked Santer for a copy of the paper. Santer responded by saying, “I see no conceivable reason why I should now send you an advance copy of my International Journal of Climatology paper.” From the emails, we now know that the Santer et al. manucsript had not been accepted at this point, even though it had been cited in a Nature Geosciences article. What is very curious is that in the email Santer claims Professor Douglass “… did not have the professional courtesy to provide me with any advance information about your 2007 International Journal of Climate paper …”.
In fact, Santer had been a reviewer of this paper when it had been submitted earlier, so he had in possession of the material (only slightly changed) for at least a year. Additionally, Santer received a copy of the page-proofs of our paper about a week before it even appeared online.
In further email exchanges the following day, 28 May 2008, Santer and his co-authors discussed the uncomfortable situation of having a citation in Nature Geosciences and being unable to provide the paper to the public before “a final decision on the paper has been reached”. Santer stated they should “resubmit our revised manuscript to the Journal as soon as possible”, implying that Professor Douglass’ point about the ethics policies of Nature, which required cited literature to be made available, might put Santer et al. in jeopardy.
On 10 July 2008, Santer wrote to Jones that the two subsequent reviews were in but reviewer 2 was “somewhat crankier”. Santer indicated that McGregor has told him that he will not resend the coming revised manuscript to the “crankier” reviewer. This was another apparent effort by McGregor to accommodate Santer.
Conclusion
On 21 July 2008, Santer heard that his paper had been formally accepted and expressed his sincere gratitude to Osborn for “all your help with the tricky job of brokering the submission of the paper to the International Journal of Climatology”. Osborn responds, “I’m not sure that I did all that much.”
On 10 October 2008, Santer et al’s paper was published on-line. Thirty-six days later Santer et al. appeared in print immediately following our own paper, even though we had waited more than 11 months for our paper to appear in print. The strategy of delaying our paper and not allowing us to have a simultaneous response to Santer et al. published had been achieved.
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Joel Shore
Frankly, I have no idea why you brought my comment to OMB into the picture other than perhaps your general desire for “outing” individuals here who post views you do not like by bringing in facets from their life outside of this venue.
Of course you are right – much better to simply delete contentious posts than try to engage in open debate a la RC
The title of this thread and/or of the reprinted article would have had more bite with this title:
You Shouldn’t Have Wished for “Context”
OR
“Out of Context”? NOT
This all comes down to the scientific bodies and journals. They can only sell their credibility when it is worth something. At some point they have to make an about face, because even if the case for AGW is not destroyed – they need respect from scientists and the wider community. The reason why the UN etc. gives funding to these bodies is because they have credibility. If they go down with the consensus then who will give them funding for the next government projects? In my view the best interests of the UN and Governments is diverging from the best interests of the journals and scientific bodies. They need scientific credibility or they have no value. I doubt any scientists reading these blogs believes the science is as settled as the scientific bodies claim. I would suspect these bodies are silently changing their criteria, to allow them to be slowly convinced by the weight of evidence, and hoping they don’t get caught in the legal crossfire (or at least point to changes in methodology that would prevent it happening in future). Although the UK met office seems particularly suicidal….
@ur momisugly PaulH (17:26:17) : – The Council of Europe member states are to launch an inquiry in January 2010 on the influence of the pharmaceutical companies on the global swine flu campaign, focussing especially on the extent of the pharma industry’s in fluence on WHO, according to reports in the German media.
http://subrosa-blonde.blogspot.com/2009/12/who-to-be-investigated-by-council-of.html
Roger Knights (06:17:45)
i doubt the conspiracy theory of AGW. It is a subjective theory that can’t be defended with facts, so the data has to be fabricated using a broad selection. When its pointed out, as it so often is, the statisitcians and mathemeticians that formulate them have to go into chains and chains of abstruse reasoning to prove that things are otherwise thean they are. When the tropospheric temperature shows not a warming trend then the trend is adjusted to get the 0.6C they are looking for. In the case of orbital drift of satellites, the data was so faked in the wrong direction that it defies any sort of peer review standard. They adjusted the data in the opposite direction. Of course Hansen was delighted that sonde balloons were lowered as they could show higher temperatures and a warming trend. However, the example that isn’t paid attention to is stratospheric cooling ideology, which isn’t happening either.
http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t4/tlsglhmam_5.1
takes the data to the latest figure. As is seen there’s no cooling trend, even a slight warming trend over the last decade.
Otherwise, the satellite meeasurements are as phony as the land based selections, although its easy to understand the pressure the team were under to produce from the magic hat a warming trend over the last 30-40 years whilst downgrading the warming trends of the decades prior to that. The subject of the beginning point however – 1850 is another matter – it was the lowest point of the entire holocene, so isn’t really a starting point. Even iof the team try to erase the MWP, then what of the Holocene Optimum? OK none of this deals with the present anomalies between temperature measurements and models 10 years ago which predicted relentless warming. The fact that it didn’t materialise shows that the IPCC models failed. To simplify matter you’d need only two models. One based on natural variability with all known factors (whether from *sceptics* or from AGW) and one based on whats considered to co2 hypothesis – since that is considred by the IPCC to be the most dominant climtic factor. If the divergence falls on the side of natural variability (oceans heat content, solar activity, troposhere and stratosphere temps) and diverged significantly from raw data from the 1850-present raw data then there might be a case to be made for co2 being a forcing. Then you would need to explain why c02 was a forcing, where the physics are not at all compelling, and at that point it would be necessary to look at hitherto unexamined factors.
the fact that Christy & Douglas were dealt with in a galling way however leads one to think that the peer review process isn’t impartial. Neither was the way Briffa was browbeaten by Mann and Jones such a good example of unbiased peer review, as its clear that Briffa was the superior of the team dealing with tree proxies. No wonder Briffa isn’t being invoked in th eclimategate scandal. Some of those emails with Briffa are quite revealing: It shows how the peer process was subjectively arrived at.
Joel,
I’m curious how your example above, the dice roll (not role) experiment is an apt analogy? Single die rolls fit to a uniform distribution with each value equally probable and rolls outside the range impossible. The phenomenon the DCPS papare is describing, however, is not known to be a uniform distribution. Furthermore, as noted by a previous poster, the die roll example is a discrete distribution in which the probability that a single roll is not within the SD of the mean is identically equal to 1. I’m sure you realized these two points given the authority in which you made your claims, correct?
I’m also concerned about your statement that “internal variability averages out.” While true with random signals, not explicitly true otherwise.
You may be correct in the general assertion (I have not read deep enough to come to any conclusions other than these), but repeatedly making the “doubly wrong” claim sounds a bit hyperbolic and, quite frankly, exposes your clear bias. Arguing the merits of statistical analyses when making such obvious errors also seems a bit… disingenuous.
Mark
Hello Joel,
so, you have come back, but unfortunately, not far enough.
phlogistan (and everybody):
Here’s an on-topic book, Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion, on the dark side of modern science, by Daniel Greenberg,
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Money-Politics-Political-Triumph/dp/0226306356/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261504566&sr=1-1
Here are quotes from reviews on Amazon:
“Science, in the abstract, is supposed to be nonpolitical, even to transcend politics entirely. In truth, though, science is always conditioned by political reality–and by money.
So writes journalist Daniel Greenberg in this wide-ranging indictment of the way in which science is conducted in the United States. Although funding for scientific research has been readily available since the end of World War II, he maintains, research bureaucrats have transformed the enterprise into “a clever, well-financed claimant for money” and the successful quest for that funding into a condition of employment and advancement. Given that climate, Greenberg suggests, basic research has suffered, so that many diseases go unconquered, while more politically glamorous investigations are rewarded. Increasingly corporatized–industry, he writes, accounts for two-thirds of all research and development dollars spent, and its “profit-seeking values” are radiating throughout the culture–scientific research is insufficiently policed and criticized, watched over only by the inmates. In the rush for funding, Greenberg argues, science becomes increasingly subject to ethical lapses, with scientists too easily endorsing dubious causes such as the so-called Star Wars missile-defense system and too readily putting human subjects in danger.”
“Debunking science industry and policy myths left and right, Greenberg combines archival research and interviews with scientists and politicians in the know to explore why and how research has happened in the postwar U.S. “[B]ecause the politics of science is registered in money awarded or denied… [m]oney will serve as a diagnostic tool for our study,” says Greenberg. He goes on to describe the sycophancy, backbends and, sometimes, dishonesty practiced by researchers, and the willingness of some government scientists to keep their mouths shut when it behooves their bosses. A disturbing, compelling and well-researched conspiracy story of the “I knew it!” variety.”
“Frontiers of Illusion: Science, Technology, and the Politics of Progress by Daniel Sarewitz, is an excellent counterpart to Greenberg …. If science is corrupt on the one hand, it is also over-sold on the other, a point that Sarewitz addresses very methodically.”
“I’m one of those who believes that we have far more to gain from good science than we have to lose. Nonetheless, Greenberg’s book brought me up short. This is a dramatic, readable, well-documented, and shocking exposé of the dirty back-door means by which much support for science research is secured in this country. Greenberg cites example after example of how undeserving or questionable projects are funded while, presumably, more promising work goes begging because it lacks powerful patrons. Greenberg also argues that the whole system is corrupt because universities depend on grant overhead for operating budgets, while congressmen and -women want money for their districts, and various scientific disciplines want to increase their clout and standing. Greenberg clearly is very angry, and his anger stems from genuine outrage that an enterprise such as science, which is so important, and so powerful, has participated in making itself an often-sleazy political tool. I hope university administrators and all the federal officials responsible for science funding will read this book–the fault lies less with scientists individually than with the ways in which universities, the federal government, and scientific organizations see their self-interest.”
“The chapter on the National Science Foundation (NSF) and its claim a few years ago that the country faced a shortage of tens of thousands of scientists is illustrative. Greenberg shows this lobbying effort for increased funds as a knowingly false issue pushed by a merger of institutional and academic interests. Greenberg quotes a US Office of Management & Budget Report which had this to say about scientists: “They are the quintessential special interest group…” He has much to say on the inflated claims of many projects. Although he specifically mentions the aborted Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), it is clear he views more recent projects such as the Human Genome Project, and cloning, in the same light.”
As Global Warming takes a long walk off a short peer.
This is simply disgusting. Where this about something else, Nuclear Energy, Medicine, Genetically Modified crops, these people would be in jail. Criminals is what they are.
Reader says:
Mark T says:
Good God, folks. An analogy is an analogy. All because you can find irrelevant ways in which the analogy is not exactly the same as the system being studied does not mean it is not a good analogy for the purpose at hand. Yes, the die case has only discrete values…and that has the advantage of making the silliness of using standard error to predict the likely range for a single die role more readily apparent. However, even if one is dealing with a continuous distribution, it is still silly to use the standard error to predict the likely range of a single realization.
As for the distribution issue, again that is a red herring. If you want, consider throwing two dies. In that case, a simulation will predict an expected value of 7 and you would get a standard error that is very small if you averaged the simulation over enough realizations. In this case, 7 is a value that can actually be realized in a single roll of two dies and the distribution of different values is no longer uniform but more bell-shaped. Yet, the same problem would still occur: Any particular realization for rolling two dies only has a 1 in 6 chance of getting a 7 even though one could easily run the simulation enough times to say that the expected value was, say, 7.000 with a standard error of 0.001.
If you want a continuous case, choose a random number from a Gaussian distribution with mean zero and standard deviation 1. Again, you could run the simulation millions of time and get an expected value of, say, 0.000 with a standard error of 0.001 but when you actually looked at any particular realization, it would almost always fall outside of this range.
Paul Penrose asks If it was as easy as you say to refute the original Christy et al paper, then why did it take Santer 90 pages?
Of course it didn’t Paul. You shouldn’t take anything you read in American Thinker at face value. Here is the source of that number
From: Tim Osborn
To: g.mcgregor@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Re: JOC-08-0098 – International Journal of Climatology
Date: Tue May 6 09:19:06 2008
Hi Glenn — I hope the slow reviewer is not one that I suggested! Sorry if it is. I’m not sure what Ben Santer expects you to do about it at this stage; I guess you didn’t expect such a lengthy article… I’ve not seen it, but Phil Jones told me it ran to around 90 pages! Hope all’s well in NZ.
Tim
Did Osborn say it was ninety pages? No, he said he had been told it was 90 pages. Was it 90 pages? No – I’ve read it, in the print version it was around 20 pages including 2 pages of references. Would you have learned this from Christy and Douglass’s screed? No you would not, they repeat the 90 page hearsay knowing it to be false. Par for the course as the article is a clearly partial interpretation of the mails and one which is largely unsupported by the texts themselves.
For example, here is the key claim …. The most critical point throughout these emails is the goal of preventing DCPS from providing what is considered normal in the peer-reviewed literature: an opportunity to respond to their critique, or as they put it, “be given the final word.”
And yet here is the mail from Ben Santer to colleague Tim Osborn discussing one way of submitting the paper
1) Our paper should be regarded as an independent contribution, not as a comment on Douglass et al. …
2) If IJC agrees to 1), then Douglass et al. should have the opportunity to respond to our contribution, and we should be given the chance to reply. Any response and reply should be published side-by-side, in the same issue of IJC.
So we are going to brutally remove the right of Douglass et al to respond by er, suggesting that they should be given the right to respond. That’ll teach them!
It seems a theme of ‘ClimateGate’ … I am offered a rich roast dinner of conspiracy, with trimmings of data deletion, silencing of dissent, result manipulation, but when I sit down to eat all I get is a thin watery soup of paranoia and allegations completely unsupported by the actual texts.
phlogiston:
People around here seem very good at jumping on irrelevant points. I didn’t claim that the models were perfect representations of reality. What I said is that to the extent the the models do represent the climate system, a single run of the model corresponds to a single possible trajectory for the climate system.
Averaging over several different runs with perturbed initial conditions (or several different models) does not get you a better representation of the climate…It actually averages over an important aspect of climate, which is its internal variability. It does likely get you a better representation of the FORCED COMPONENT of the response, which is why climate scientists find useful to do such averaging…but that is a different story. And, as I pointed out, the IPCC is clearly not foolish enough to believe that the averaging over different models gives one so much confidence in the forced component that one can claim that the standard error is a good measure for the uncertainty in it. If they thought this, then they could in no way justify giving such a wide range for the likely value for the equilibrium climate sensitivity. It is not I or the IPCC who is putting too much faith in the models…It is Douglass and Christy et al. (Or, more precisely, they are attacking a “strawman” representation of the certainty in the climate models which is demonstrably much higher than the level of certainty that the IPCC is putting in them.)
You suspect wrongly. For one thing, standard error is only appropriate as a measure of the likely error in the true expectation value for a quantity if the errors are known to be statistically-random. There is no reason to believe that this is true for the IPCC climate models and, as I have pointed out above, it is in fact clear that the IPCC itself does not believe this to be the case at least for the climate sensitivity value.
But, even more to the point, the standard error is a measure of the likely error in the EXPECTATION VALUE only. It is not a measure of how things are likely to deviate in any specific realization. And, the dice rolling analogy makes this fact painfully obvious, which is why it is such a useful analogy.
You are talking nonsense here. The climate models are not based on “linear type equations”…and they in fact exhibit chaotic behavior, which is why one can run the same model with slightly perturbed initial conditions and get different results for the detailed evolution of the climate system. This is also true, by the way, for the numerical weather prediction models…and in fact these models are now run for “ensemble” modes precisely in order to see how far out in the future one can go before the weather forecast is dominated by the slight changes in initial conditions…and hence the weather forecast is no longer reliable.
This chronology missed the real first step, the email from S. Fred Singer, one of the authors, inviting me to consider covering the paper as an exclusive. As I always do with any paper, by anyone, I sent it around for vetting (shorthand: “scrubbing”). Here’s Fred’s note confirming this (he sent this to me today)
I have researched past e-mails and will send you copies
This is the earliest one to Revkin on Nov 29, 2007. You are in the clear
Let me know if you need more help
Best for 2010 — and good luck on yr new gig Fred
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:26:42 -0500
To: anrevk@nytimes.com, revkin@gmail.com
From: “S. Fred Singer”
Subject: Fwd: Hoover Energy Task Force
Andy
I’d like to discuss with you doing a possible exclusive story with wide-ranging implications:
1. With the impending publication of our new peer-reviewed paper, we will soon go public about the ‘smoking gun’ against AGW. See attached and read my blog below, addressed o the AGU:
http://science-sepp.blogspot.com/2007/09/contribution-to-agu-panel-drafting.html
I will lecture on this to the MIT Club (Washington) on Dec 11 and to a conference on Energy and Climate on Dec 20 at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome.
2. The implications are many — and some peak around mid-December:
a] the Bali conference, following the IPCC Synthesis report, building to a crescendo
b] the release of the AGU Statement, which will likely echo the IPCC
c] the release of the NIPCC report (countering the IPCC)
d] my letter on AGW in the Dec issue of SciAm
But the major implications are to ongoing legislation, court rulings and administrative procedures, and to national energy policy (below).
Let me know of yr interest
Best Fred
****************************
Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:00:05 -0500
To: jschlesi@lehman.com
From: “S. Fred Singer”
Subject: Hoover Energy Task Force
Cc: rmw@theadvisorygroup.com, eddavid@media.mit.edu
Jim
Different groups are grappling with energy policy: NCEP, NPC, Chamber of Commerce, Lehman Brothers, Hoover, to name a few. I am concerned that they are all missing a crucial dimension and would like to meet with you to discuss what might be done.
For example, last week, before I left Hoover to return to Virginia, Geo Shultz asked me for a briefing on climate science.
I tried to convince him that the current warming is natural — not anthropogenic. I may have succeeded — not sure.
Anyway, I’d like you to see my presentation to the AGU panel
http://science-sepp.blogspot.com/2007/09/contribution-to-agu-panel-drafting.html
The implications for energy policy are fairly obvious.
Best Fred
PS I am attaching a draft press release about a peer-reviewed research paper we are just publishing
***************************************************************************
S. Fred Singer, President
Science & Environmental Policy Project
1600 S. Eads St, #712-S
Arlington, VA 22202-2907
Tel: 703/920-2744
http ://www.sepp.org
Read about what is really causing warming
Unstoppable Global Warming : Every 1500 Years
(Natural climate cycles as seen in the geological record)
by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery
Rowman & Littlefield (2007) 260 pp. $25.00 plus $5 S&H
On New York Times Best-seller list
S. Fred Singer, PhD, President
Science & Environmental Policy Project
1600 S. Eads St, #712-S
Arlington, VA 22202-2907
Tel: 703/920-2744
http :// http://www.sepp.org
**************
“The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses
to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism
is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.”
Thomas H. Huxley
************
“If the facts change, I’ll change my opinion. What do you do, sir? ” J. M. Keynes
************
2 attachments — Download all attachments
DCPS-proofs_IJC07.pdf
269K View Download
IJC Draft Press Release SFS.doc
27K View as HTML Open as a Google document Download
With the impending publication of our new peer-reviewed paper, we will soon go public about the ’smoking gun’ against AGW.
Ho hum, another day, another smoking gun/nail in the coffin. S. Fred could never be accused of false modesty, that’s for sure …
http://science-sepp.blogspot.com/2007/12/press-release-dec-10-2007.html
Joel Shore (12:43:15) :
Yes, and an analogy has to fit the circumstance in which it is used.
Um, it is not “irrelevant” when it is the only way in which the example works.
No, it was a silly example that has no bearing on the problem at hand. In your example you will always reject a valid hypothesis.
Which is still equally invalid as an analogy.
Immaterial to the comment I made, for sure, and does not in any way validate your flawed analogy from before, which was what I referred to. Had you actually used this analogy instead, I would not have commented.
Mark
For those interested in how minor an issue the calculation of the variance of the model ensembles is, here is more background: arxiv.org/pdf/0905.0445 Joel Shore’s argument is simply chaff to distract from numerous important differences in the approaches. The RAOB 1.4 data selection, the time period selected, the selection of autocorrelation coefficients, and the general attempt by Santer et al to imply a broader range of statistical uncertainty in the radiosonde measurements.
It’s pretty clear from Santer’s email what is goal was. It can be read here: http://www.climate-gate.org/cru/mail/1200010023.txt
Mr Revkin: you said “As I always do with any paper, by anyone, I sent it around for vetting”. Can you give an example where you sent a paper by any of the Osborn, Mann, Jones, Wigley, etc. for vetting by any skeptic? Just one example will do.
Joel Shore:
“The climate models are not based on “linear type equations”…and they in fact exhibit chaotic behavior”
If the climate models are so good at representing chaotic / nonlinear behaviour, its odd that they all seem to predict rather linear-looking continuous warming, which is contrary to both the (highly oscillatory) climate history and to what is actually happening at present.
High sensitivity to initial conditions does not necessarily imply and is not sufficient to indicate actual bifurcation leading to a non-equilibrium / non-linear chaotic regime.
I wouldn’t worry too much. Joel is just playing around with absurd probability to justify failed climatic models. They were not random – just erroneous. Some of the gross errors were quietly suppressed in fact, as data diverged from them. For want of the ones i’ve noticed over the years, Lord Monckton did a fairly good synopsis
http://ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20070226_monckton.pdf
Dear Phil Clarke
If the following is for you “thin watery soup” I would love to see your rich roast dinner!
* Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)
* Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)
* Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709). Analysis of impact here. Wow!
* Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as “cheering news”.(1075403821)
* Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)
* Phil Jones says he has use Mann’s “Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series”…to hide the decline”. Real Climate says “hiding” was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)
* Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)
* Mann thinks he will contact BBC’s Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article. (1255352257)
* Kevin Trenberth says they can’t account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can’t.(1255352257)
* Tom Wigley says that Lindzen and Choi’s paper is crap.(1257532857)
* Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)
* Ben Santer says (presumably jokingly!) he’s “tempted, very tempted, to beat the crap” out of sceptic Pat Michaels. (1255100876)
* Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to ‘”contain” the putative Medieval Warm Period’. (1054736277)
* Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.(1257546975)
* Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it’s insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre’s sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many “good”
scientists condemn it.(1254756944)
* Briffa is funding Russian dendro Shiyatov, who asks him to send money to personal bank account so as to avoid tax, thereby retaining money for research.(0826209667)
* Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)
* Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)
* Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be “hiding behind them”.(1106338806)
* Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”. Thinks he may have been quoted out of context. (1206628118)
* Mann launches RealClimate to the scientific community.(1102687002)
* Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case). (1228330629)
* Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says he needs to word things diplomatically. (1140554230)
* Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the “increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage” he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems. (1024334440)
* Overpeck tells Team to write emails as if they would be made public. Discussion of what to do with McIntyre finding an error in Kaufman paper. Kaufman’s admits error and wants to correct. Appears interested in Climate Audit findings. (1252164302)
* Jones calls Pielke Snr a prat.(1233249393)
* Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather [why?data?] and has threatened to resign from RMS.(1237496573)
* Reaction to McIntyre’s 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper’s editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. (1106322460) [Note to readers – Saiers was subsequently ousted]
* Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged.(1132094873)
* Jones says he’s found a way around releasing AR4 review comments to David Holland.(1210367056)
* Wigley says Keenan’s fraud accusation against Wang is correct. (1188557698)
* Jones calls for Wahl and Ammann to try to change the received date on their alleged refutation of McIntyre [presumably so it can get into AR4] (1189722851)
* Mann tells Jones that he is on board and that they are working towards a common goal.(0926010576)
* Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn’t be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don’t want in the hands of those who might distort it.(1059664704)
* Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data”. [This appears to be the politics leading the science] Briffa says it was just as warm a thousand years ago.(0938018124)
* Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information Commissioner [!](1219239172)
* Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.(1254259645)
* Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick . This back in 2004.(1096382684)
* Funkhouser says he’s pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn’t think it’s productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has. (0843161829)
* Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible. (1254108338)
* Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.(1089318616)
* Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.(1255553034)
* Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.(1249503274)
* David Parker discussing the possibility of changing the reference period for global temperature index. Thinks this shouldn’t be done because it confuses people and because it will make things look less warm. (1105019698)
* Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it (1054756929)
* Ben Santer, referring to McIntyre says he hopes Mr “I’m not entirely there in the head” will not be at the AGU. (1233249393)
* Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics. (1107454306)
And this list does not even include the “hide the decline” email! (Unless I missed it).
For Eric the Skeptic: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/science/earth/18CLIM.html
Thank you, that is a well-balanced article.
Joel Shore:
The goal of publishing such papers [DCPS] seems to be to issue press releases that then go beyond what is even claimed (on the basis of some quite blatant errors) in the original paper to make overarching statements about climate change…
Heh, yes, that’s exactly what the ipcc does: 4AR – press releases to Public claiming “smoking gun” upcoming proving AGW, followed weeks later by SPM4 which releases alleged smoking gun conclusions without underlying paper, 4AR, which itself only appears a good 3 months later and has no validly scientific smoking guns in regard to what they first wanted to suggest to the Public.
No one does this in conducting real Science.
Now that’s a series of real smoking guns pointing right back at ipcc “science”.
Andy Revkin (13:17:54) :
This chronology missed the real first step, the email from S. Fred Singer, one of the authors, inviting me to consider covering the paper as an exclusive. As I always do with any paper, by anyone, I sent it around for vetting (shorthand: “scrubbing”). Here’s Fred’s note confirming this (he sent this to me today)
———–
I’m intrigued by this “shorthand”; “scrubbing” for “vetting”, where the shorthand is actually two letters longer than the word it replaces. In fairness, in the original it was only “scrub”, which is two letters shorter than “vetting”.
Well, obviously it’s not a very efficient shorthand, so maybe it’s jargon, but is it journalistic jargon or climate scientist jargon? And how do the twain happen to meet? And what are the connotations of “scrub” other than “clean” or “erase”?