From Fox News, word that the Met Office has circulated a proposal that intends to completely start over with raw surface temperature data in a transparent process.
Here’s the proposal from the Met Office metoffice_proposal_022410 (PDF). Unfortunately it is not searchable, as they still seem to be living in the typewriter age, having photoscanned the printed document.
I’d feel better about it though if they hadn’t used the word “robust”. Every time I see that word in the context of climate data it makes me laugh. It seems though they already have concluded the effort will find no new information. Given that they are apparently only interested in ending the controversy over transparency, and because GHCN (source for GISS and HadCRUT) originates at NCDC with it’s own set of problems and it is controlled by one man, Dr. Thomas Peterson, it means that we’ll have our work cut out for us again. In my opinion, this proposal is CYA and does not address the basic weaknesses of the data collection.
Britain’s Weather Office Proposes Climate-Gate Do-Over
By George Russell.
At a meeting on Monday of about 150 climate scientists, representatives of Britain’s weather office quietly proposed that the world’s climatologists start all over again to produce a new trove of global temperature data that is open to public scrutiny and “rigorous” peer review.
After the firestorm of criticism called Climate-gate, the British government’s official Meteorological Office apparently has decided to wave a white flag and surrender.
At a meeting on Monday of about 150 climate scientists in the quiet Turkish seaside resort of Antalya, representatives of the weather office (known in Britain as the Met Office) quietly proposed that the world’s climate scientists start all over again on a “grand challenge” to produce a new, common trove of global temperature data that is open to public scrutiny and “rigorous” peer review.
In other words, conduct investigations into modern global warming in a way that the Met Office bureaucrats hope will end the mammoth controversy over world temperature data they collected that has been stirred up by their secretive and erratic ways.
The executive summary of the Met Office proposal to the World Meteorological Organization’s Committee for Climatology was obtained by Fox News. In it, the Met Office defends its controversial historical record of temperature readings, along with similar data collected in the U.S., as a “robust indicator of global change.” But it admits that “further development” of the record is required “in particular to better assess the risks posed by changes in extremes of climate.”
As a result, the proposal says, “we feel that it is timely to propose an international effort to reanalyze surface temperature data in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which has the responsibility for global observing and monitoring systems for weather and climate.”
The new effort, the proposal says, would provide:
–“verifiable datasets starting from a common databank of unrestricted data”
–“methods that are fully documented in the peer reviewed literature and open to scrutiny;”
–“a set of independent assessments of surface temperature produced by independent groups using independent methods,”
–“comprehensive audit trails to deliver confidence in the results;”
–“robust assessment of uncertainties associated with observational error, temporal and geographical in homogeneities.”
Click here to read the executive summary.
The Met Office proposal asserts that “we do not anticipate any substantial changes in the resulting global and continental-scale … trends” as a result of the new round of data collection. But, the proposal adds, “this effort will ensure that the data sets are completely robust and that all methods are transparent.”
Despite the bravado, those precautions and benefits are almost a point-by-point surrender by the Met Office to the accusations that have been leveled at its Hadley Climate Centre in East Anglia, which had stonewalled climate skeptics who demanded to know more about its scientific methods. (An inquiry established that the institution had flouted British freedom of information laws in refusing to come up with the data.)
When initially contacted by Fox News to discuss the proposal, its likely cost, how long it would take to complete, and its relationship to the Climate-gate scandal, the Met Office declared that no press officers were available to answer questions. After a follow-up call, the Office said it would answer soon, but did not specify when. At the time of publication, Fox News had not heard back.
The Hadley stonewall began to crumble after a gusher of leaked e-mails revealed climate scientists, including the center’s chief, Phil Jones, discussing how to keep controversial climate data out of the hands of the skeptics, keep opposing scientific viewpoints out of peer-reviewed scientific journals, and bemoaning that their climate models failed to account for more than a decade of stagnation in global temperatures. Jones later revealed that key temperature datasets used in Hadley’s predictions had been lost, and could not be retrieved for verification.
Jones stepped down temporarily after the British government announced an ostensibly independent inquiry into the still-growing scandal, but that only fanned the flames, as skeptics pointed out ties between several panel members and the Hadley Centre. In an interview two weeks ago, Jones also admitted that there has been no “statistically significant” global warming in the past 15 years.
The Met Office’s shift in position could be a major embarrassment for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who as recently as last month declared that climate skeptics were “flat-earthers” and “anti-science” for refusing to accept that man-made activity was a major cause of global warming. Brown faces a tough election battle for his government, perhaps as early as May.
It is also a likely blow to Rajendra Pachauri, head of the United Nations backed International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose most recent report, published in 2007, has been exposed by skeptics as rife with scientific errors, larded with un-reviewed and non-scientific source materials, and other failings.
As details of the report’s sloppiness emerged, the ranks of skepticism have swelled to include larger numbers of the scientific community, including weather specialists who worked on the sprawling IPCC report. Calls for Pachauri’s resignation have come from organizations as normally opposed as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the British chapter of Greenpeace. So far, he has refused to step down.
The Met Office proposes that the new international effort to recalibrate temperature data start at a “workshop”‘ hosted by Hadley. The Met Office would invite “key players” to start the “agreed community challenge” of creating the new datasets.
Then, in a last defense of its old ways, the Met proposals argues says that its old datasets “are adequate for answering the pressing 20th Century questions of whether climate is changing and if so how. But they are fundamentally ill-conditioned to answer 21st Century questions such as how extremes are changing and therefore what adaptation and mitigation decisions should be taken.”
Those “21st Century questions” are not small and they are very far from cheap. At Copenhagen, wealthy nations were being asked to spend trillions of dollars on answering them, a deal that only fell through when China, India, and other near-developed nations refused to join the mammoth climate-control deal.
The question after the Met Office’s shift in stance may be whether environmentalists eager to move those mountains of cash are also ready to stand down until the 21st century questions get 21st century answers.
=========================
h/t to Dr. Richard North, EU Referendum
Yes, the word ‘robust’ has been forever tainted for me too.
Others I cannot hear without associating them with AGW are ‘rigorous’ and ‘unequivocal’.
You can also be sure there is either obfuscation or mendacity afoot when you hear a politician/AGWer use the words ‘clear’ or ‘clearly’.
Copner (10:02:47) :
If the raw data is available to everyone without restriction
If the metadata is available to everyone without restriction
If all processing code is made available with restriction
Then people will have the ability to:
1. Create their own series.
2. Audit the work of others.
3. Improve the work of others.
Things to watch for:
1. Raw data that really isnt raw, but adjusted before it is sent into MET.
2. Pre-selection of raw data. Countries have many many sources. One needs to be assurred that the data supplied is in fact a random sample or complete sample of all the data available. I can pick stations in the US from 1880 to present that show cooling.
there’s more, but that’s the biggest two.
“When initially contacted by Fox News to discuss the proposal, its likely cost, how long it would take to complete, and its relationship to the Climate-gate scandal, the Met Office declared that no press officers were available to answer questions”
Does it not strike anyone else as slightly odd that “how long?” and “how much?” were not available as immediate answers? Or indeed had (I presume) not been mentioned in the original release? [Or is it just the cynic in me that says ‘how long?” is “until our pensions come through” and “how much” is an excuse to ask for money which they won’t get and thus provide the necessary delay to get to that pension date?!]
Other than that, however much some of us might trust them as far we can throw them after all they’ve pulled in the past, fact is it seems like they’re giving us everything we’ve asked for. Start with the raw data and then document everything you do to it. And think how unimaginable that would have been only a few short months ago. So, cut them no slack, but let’s try and do what we can to help speed this along, because I for one would like to know the truth behind those “adjustments”.
I wonder what “Harry” is doing for the next 10 years… *grin*
These are excellent ideas:
Parallel analyses of the same source data can and should be done: it both helps verify the work and may answer questions that have been raised time and again by many here.
And if the process is meant to counter loss of confidence in the integrity of the science, then reasonable requests for inclusion should be honored… and if they’re not, skeptics who have a high profile after the recent controversy should be in the media asking why.
Phil. 10:59:02
They always have been, unfortunately there are restrictions on access to some of them by the originating weather bureaux. That is why the Met Office is doing this via the WMO. Just because you’re granted the right to use some data, e.g. CRU, doesn’t give you the right to disseminate it (or even to keep it beyond the duration of the study).
…which of course is why Phil Jones was briefing his freedom of information officer on why they shouldn’t release information to this bunch of fault-finding nitpickers because “they only want to try and find something wrong with it”. And why he was telling IPCC people to delete their emails. Absolutely, the only reason data wasn’t released was permissions – nobody was brazenly flouting the freedom of information law at all…
They should just implement #1 and make all data available with comments about the source and what is known about its history.
And even #1 specifies access to an “agreed databank” rather than access to all surface gathered observations. Granted the latter may be hard to organize.
The other three steps are not clear. But it looks as if they will lead to a new international bureaucracy which will evolve into another IPCC. That is what bureaucracies do.
Just organize the original data. Scientists – amateur and professional – will do the rest.
The way I interpret it (but it may just be wishful thinking on my part), they are proposing something similar to the system set up for ARGO (http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/) where the raw data is collected and posted online and several different groups of researchers are tasked with the data analysis.
If that’s the case, they should go further and bid out the data collection and storage part of the system to qualified data processing organizations and not to some group of academics that are totally ignorant of and could care less about data accuracy, data integrity, data backup, system reliability, system security, etc. All you have to do is look at the botched job the CRU has done the first go-round to justify keeping it out of academia. However, I have no argument with some university DP departments. There are a few competent ones; you just have to dig them out of the morass created by the majority.
Following the raw data collection phase, I would hope that several independent, competing groups would be tasked with and funded for analyzing, correcting and adjusting the individual station records, with all code/calculations, intermediate data and results posted on-line.
Concurrent with the data collection and station data analysis, several groups should be tasked and funded to perform physical audits of each weather station similar to those done by Anthony’s SurfaceStations.Org web site with a full report for each station posted on-line, to include any and all available station meta-data. This will also require the development of some form of non-subjective grading system for station siting and hardware reliability, repeatability, accuracy and calibration.
While the above steps may solve the problem of recovering and verifying the historical climate data, they do nothing to fix the system for use in the 21st century. For the future, we can either upgrade the current system by slowly attacking each station and each problem, or perhaps a better, less expensive approach would be to design and build self powered, self contained ARGO type devices that would be inexpensive and capable of being both manually sited and air-dropped in to remote locations. Perhaps they should even hire the original ARGO team to design and monitor a totally new system of weather stations. From what I have seen, the only money spent on climate research so far that has done anything other that provide jobs for the handicapped, has been spent on the ARGO system.
“the Met proposals argues says that its old datasets “are adequate for answering the pressing 20th Century questions”
It’s a relief if that means they’re going to stop trying to answer stupid 21st Century questions.
JonesII – Peer review doesn’t require Scotland Yard, it requires Arkham Asylum.
“It could just be a put up job, rather along the lines of British comedy series Yes Minister when Civil Servant Sir Humphry Appleby says to the Minister, “Never hold a Public Enquiry unless you know the outcome beforehand!”.”
I offer this interpretation of the nuanced language of the Met Office proposal; which coming from a public body should never be taken at face value. It appears that they are going to take action to enhance their assessment, but with a built-in assumption that there is still a substantial risk i.e. ” further development of the record is required in particular to better assess the risks posed by changes in extremes of climate”. No suggestion that one outcome might be that there is no risk and therefore no need for continuing funding.
The other bullet points are also reinforcing the same sense that something is going to be done and in a fully open and accountable manner. The trigger words and phrases flow like warm honey:
– verifiable datasets … unrestricted data
– methods fully documented … peer reviewed literature … open to scrutiny
– independent assessments … independent groups … independent methods
– comprehensive audit trails …. confidence in the results
The last point is a classic piece of civil service speak:
– robust assessment of uncertainties associated with observational error, temporal and geographical inhomogeneities
In other words it doesn’t matter what issues are thrown up by going over the data again, the spin on the data will be even stronger; strong enough to deflect the critics again.
Reading between the lines of the Met Office lines, we can see the that the main intention might also be to prolong the the study, so that ‘in the fullness of time and the due course of events’ people get tired of it and it drops off the horizon.
Have Fox spiked this story? link Britain’s Weather Office Proposes Climate-Gate Do-Over comes up with “No content item selected” on Fox.
Also bit concerned no date, time etc on the PDF
Phil. (11:06:00) :
Kate (10:27:14) :
“…As far as I am aware none of your statement is true, so what you know isn’t very reliable.”
Not true? Not reliable?
Oh, dear. Try this, for a start…
***************************************************************************
How the Met Office blocked questions on its own man’s role in the “hockey stick” climate row
The Meteorological Office is blocking public scrutiny of the central role played by its top climate scientist in a highly controversial report by the beleaguered United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Professor John Mitchell, the Met Office’s Director of Climate Science, shared responsibility for the most worrying headline in the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning IPCC report – that the Earth is now hotter than at any time in the past 1,300 years. And he approved the inclusion in the report of the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a steep 20th Century rise.
By the time the 2007 report was being written, the graph had been heavily criticised by climate sceptics who had shown it minimised the ‘medieval warm period’ around 1000AD, when the Vikings established farming settlements in Greenland.
In fact, according to some scientists, the planet was then as warm, or even warmer, than it is today. Early drafts of the report were fiercely contested by official IPCC reviewers, who cited other scientific papers stating that the 1,300-year claim and the graph were inaccurate.
But the final version, approved by Prof Mitchell, the relevant chapter’s review editor, swept aside these concerns.
Now, the Met Office is refusing to disclose Prof Mitchell’s working papers and correspondence with his IPCC colleagues in response to requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act.
The block has been endorsed in writing by Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth – whose department has responsibility for the Met Office.
Documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveal that the Met Office’s stonewalling was part of a co-ordinated, legally questionable strategy by climate change academics linked with the IPCC to block access to outsiders.
Last month, the Information Commissioner ruled that scientists from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia – the source of the leaked ‘Warmergate’ emails – acted unlawfully in refusing FOI requests to share their data.
Some of the FOI requests made to them came from the same person who has made requests to the Met Office.
He is David Holland, an electrical engineer familiar with advanced statistics who has written several papers questioning orthodox thinking on global warming.
The Met Office’s first response to Mr Holland was a claim that Prof Mitchell’s records had been ‘deleted’ from its computers.
Later, officials admitted they did exist after all, but could not be disclosed because they were ‘personal’, and had nothing to do with the professor’s Met Office job.
Finally, they conceded that this too was misleading because Prof Mitchell had been paid by the Met Office for his IPCC work and had received Government expenses to travel to IPCC meetings.
The Met Office had even boasted of his role in a Press release when the report first came out.
But disclosure, they added, was still rejected on the grounds it would ‘inhibit the free and frank provision of advice or the free and frank provision of views’.
It would also ‘prejudice Britain’s relationship with an international organisation’ and thus be contrary to UK interests.
In a written response justifying the refusal dated August 20, 2008, Mr Ainsworth – then MoD Minister of State – used exactly the same language.
Mr Holland also filed a request for the papers kept by Sir Brian Hoskins of Reading University, who was the review editor of a different chapter of the IPCC report.
When this too was refused, Mr Holland used the Data Protection Act to obtain a copy of an email from Sir Brian to the university’s information officer.
The email, dated July 17, 2008 – when Mr Holland was also trying to get material from the Met Office and the CRU – provides clear evidence of a co-ordinated effort to hide data. Sir Brian wrote:
‘I have made enquiries and found that both the Met Office/MOD and UEA are resisting the FOI requests made by Holland. The latter are very relevant to us, as UK universities should speak with the same voice on this. I gather that they are using academic freedom as their reason.’
At the CRU, as the Warmergate emails reveal, its director, Dr Phil Jones (who is currently suspended), wrote to an American colleague: “We are still getting FOI requests as well as Reading. All our FOI officers have been in discussions and are now using the same exceptions – not to respond.”
Last night Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the affair further undermined the credibility of the IPCC and those associated with it. He said: “It’s of critical importance that data such as this should be open. More importantly, the questions being raised about the hockey stick mean that we may have to reassess the climate history of the past 2,000 years. The attempt to make the medieval warm period disappear is being seriously weakened, and the claim that now is the warmest time for 1,300 years is no longer based on reliable evidence.”
Despite repeated requests, the MoD and Met Office failed to comment
***************************************************************************
…Happy now?
Amateur Hour’s over!
In a political world, open science is the only science.
Maybe they could just start with some of the online work already done. I bet you could pay the groups a paltry few million and get in completed quickly.
Yeah for open science.
Didn’t they declare an intention to do this in December? They said they expected it to take three years.
I can’t help wondering whether the timing of this announcement has anything to do with the ending of the Climategate Petition on the No.10 Downing street website which closes tomorrow. (http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/UEACRU/)
“To meet future needs to better understand the risks of dangerous climate change and to adapt to the effects of global warming, further development of these datasets is required, in particular to better assess the risks posed by changes in extremes of climate. This will require robust and transparent surface temperature datasets at finer temporal fidelity than current products.”
Can someone interpret for me what they mean by “to better assess the risk posed by changes in extremes of climate?”
if the Met office is serious about having a rethink and starting again it will only have credability if the leading skeptic scientists are included such as Plimer and Carter in Australia , Lindzen and Singer in the US etc etc, assuming they would agree to be involved.
“At a meeting on Monday of about 150 climate scientists in the quiet Turkish seaside resort of Antalya, representatives of the weather office (known in Britain as the Met Office)” of course they couldn’t have the discussion in their own country, it had to be at a quiet foreign resort. I assumed they walked using the chunnel to get over the Channel.
steven mosher (11:39:44) :
I am very concerned with the state of data in the US from 1882 to 1914 for the West Coast. The records have that ‘patchwork’ look to them. They are in dire need of review with referees present. This is not the only period that looks tainted, but is the most grevious.
Pete Ballard (12:25:19) :
The ‘risks’ to climate are the intended ‘remedies’ that are on the table to correct for a perceived condition that might not exist at all.
The question is: You are in a vehicle going down hill that you don’t know how it works. A curve is approaching. You have 3 pedals on the floor and only 1 chance at applying correction. To which pedal will you now stick your foot into? Pedal 1, 2, 3 or will you try to ride it out?
“Then, in a last defense of its old ways, the Met proposals argues says that its old datasets “are adequate for answering the pressing 20th Century questions of whether climate is changing and if so how.”
The 21st Century shows no statistical warming, but that’s what they’ll review, just leave the 20th Century warming as is.
I posted this info. quite a while ago at Climate Audit, but for anyone interested here, almost all of the old station records are available in book form at large university libraries in the Gov’t Docs section as Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections Vol. 79, 90, and 105. From 1941 on, they are available as World Weather Records from the U.S. Dept. of Commerce in 10 year increments. The Vol. 79 is the only one I know of which is available online, and it is scanned in at archive.org. All the corrections are in the errata and stations notes of each volume.
If you read Warwick Hughes, he has put the books containing the stations used by CRU online at his website. They are TR022 and TR027.
A coherent online collation of all records would certainly be appreciated, but I suspect there are records being added all the time as old collections are uncovered and digitized.
In addition to the suggestions above regarding making any code open source, I’d like to see:
1. A database of scanned images of original records. Most of the old records are going to need to be transcribed into an electronic format and this will provide a cross check on the accuracy of that transcription.
2. A set of database of temperature data, starting with original un-modified, and then going through whatever steps are required to produce the ‘final’ data. This allows researchers to examine the consequences of alternative treatments of the data (eg. due to site shifts, changes in instrumentation, etc)
3. A database of site information to assist with analysing site changes and the impact on that site’s records.
This provides close to full transparency. The original data and all manipulations will be open for scrutiny and open for researching alternative analyses.
For data that can not be released publicly due to non-disclosure agreements, these can be documented as such and negotiations can be undertaken to see what CAN be released. eg. Maybe those countries will allow the release of records up to 1970 (say), but want to keep the data after that point on a for-sale basis as a source of income. Even there, they may be open to providing summary data to the public in the spirit of cooperation.
Phil., where’d ya go, Phil.? Yoo-Hoo, Phi-i-i-i-l!!
Kate (12:05:47) put the ball right back in your court. Too bad you’re not around to return the serve.
It’s the cause of temp change that’s important not necessarily the change itself.
The planetary systems controlling this are many and complex and we don’t understand their interaction yet, that plainly comes across from this whole mess. The Met Office really hasn’t got a clue for all their computer power. History, geology, climateology, oceanology, solar and planetary interaction to name but a few all come into it, even a thick uneducated layman like me can work that out from reading all the arguments from both sides. The science is certainly not past dispute. It’s only just beginning.