SEPP SCIENCE EDITORIAL #21-2010 (July 10, 2010)
By S. Fred Singer, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project
Climategate: The Muir-Russell report: Some initial comments
http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf
In contrast to the Oxburgh report, the Muir-Russell (MR) report is quite substantive (160 pp, incl 8 appendices) and very professionally produced. MR members held some dozen meetings (presumably in Edinburgh), conducted many interviews at UAE, and accepted some 100 submissions (all unpublished). [A very few of these came from recognizable skeptics; none from Douglass, Christy or Singer, although our work is referred to on pp 148-149 — as a threat to Jones?]
I have several major criticisms, mostly connected to the fact that the MR team had no in-house competence in the relevant science (atmospheric physics and meteorology). Prof Geoffrey Boulton is a geologist, Prof Peter Clarke is a particle physicist, and Professor James Norton seems to be a general expert on engineering and business. Sir Muir Russell himself once got a degree in natural philosophy (physics). As far as one can tell, they consulted only supporters of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), i.e., supporters of the IPCC.
As a result, they could not really judge whether Phil Jones (head of the Climate Research Unit at UEA) manipulated the post-1980 temperature data, both by selection of weather stations and by applying certain corrections to individual records. Had they spoken to Joe D’Aleo or to Anthony Watts, they might have gotten a different slant on the CRU’s handling of station data.
The MR Team concentrates much of the report on the ‘hockey stick,’ and on whether the 20th century was the warmest in the past 1000 years (as claimed by Michael Mann and also by IPCC-3, relying mainly on tree-ring data,). But that issue is really irrelevant and a distraction from the main question (which is never addressed): is the warming of the past 50 years mainly anthropogenic (as claimed by IPCC-4) or natural (as asserted by NIPCC and some other IPCC critics)?
In pursuing the question, the Team must realize that the CRU deals only with land data (covering, imperfectly, only 30% of the Earth’s surface) and that sea-surface temperatures (SST) are really more important. Weather stations and trees tend to be land-based.
Also, the Team never bothers to inquire about the atmospheric temperature record from satellites, the only high-quality and truly global record in existence. They seem unaware of the substantial disparity between satellites and the CRU record.
In defense of the MR Team, they consider science to be outside of their charter and within the remit of the Oxburgh team. [See Item 5 on p.10] (Having seen the Oxburgh report, however, some might consider this a joke.) Yet the Team feels empowered to speak with authority about conclusions that depend on climate science. In fact, none of the investigations so far have had a serious look at the crucial science issues.
As a result, the Team doesn’t seem to realize [p.23 and 32] that “hide the decline” and “Mike’s [Michael Mann] ‘trick” refers to a cover-up. Mann’s 1000-yr temperature record (from proxies) suddenly stops at 1980 – not because there are no suitable post-1980 proxy data (as Mann has claimed in e-mails that responded to inquiries), but because they do not show the dramatic temperature rise of Jones’ thermometer data.
This problem recurs again with Fig 6.2 (which is Fig 3.1 from IPCC-4) and involves misuse of the ‘smoothing’ procedure, i.e., replacing annual temperatures with a ‘running average’ of (usually) five years and sometimes longer. [I discussed the matter in some detail in my Science Editorial 8-09 (2-28-2009)]. As can be seen by inspection, there is little rise in temperature between 1980 and 1996, until the ‘super-El-Nino’ of 1998 (which has nothing to do with GH gases or AGW). The satellite record shows more clearly the absence of any significant temperature rise between 1979 and 1997.
It is ironic then that the real post-1980 global temperatures may be closer to the proxy record than to the thermometer record. We will find out when we learn what data Michael Mann discarded.
In this connection, the legal demand for all of Mann’s data by Virginia’s Attorney-General Ken Cuccinelli assumes additional significance. Based on his own statements, one suspects that Jones has deleted some crucial e-mails. It is likely that these may be discovered among Mann’s e-mails, now held by the University of Virginia. It might put a new light on the whole Climategate affair.
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A lot of interesting comments here. I believe it would be folly to use GHCN data for almost anything. Many in the UK believe both the Muir Russell and Oxburgh reports to be little more than politically motivated whitewash. Is anyone surprised that Penn State cleared Michael Mann? The guy brings in mountains of federal grant money year after year. But how soon we forget the Wegman report. Long before Climategate the Wegman report exposed much of the fraud we now quibble about.
If you’ve never read it, give it a look. It’s an eye opener. The PDF can be found here:
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/07142006_wegman_report.pdf
Kirk Myers says:
July 11, 2010 at 7:39 am
The value of Jones pioneering work was not in the calculation but in the original collection, and the concept.
Manipulating temperature data now constitutes “pioneering work”? Only in the minds of AGW true believers, who have seen their pet theory fall into disrepute.
At least Jones, in his BBC interview, had the courage to admit that there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995. Now, with La Nina arriving, the PDO in its negative phase, and the sun in a continuing slumber, global temperatures are headed towards a long-term decline. Another Dalton Minimum or, perhaps, Maunder Grand Minimum, may be on the way. In any event, all of the silly scare stories about runaway man-made global warming will undoubtedly make great cocktail party conversation a decade from now.
The theory of CO2-induced global warming is headed the way of Piltdown Man.
___________________________________________________________________
You are taking it that the Money & Power grabbers do not get their agenda of a global tax in place along with the concept of “Global Governance” by an unelected elite. http://www.sovereignty.net/p/gov/ggunreform.htm
“David Rockefeller praised the major media for their complicity in helping to facilitate the globalist agenda by saying, “We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. . . . It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.” http://www.newswithviews.com/Cappadona/heidi5.htm
This is backed up by this from the 2002 Rockefeller autobiography “Memoirs” where on page 405,” Mr. Rockefeller writes: “For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents… to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as “internationalists and of conspiring with others around the world … If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
Point of detail – I think all the submissions to the Russell review bar one are published on the internet
http://www.cce-review.org/Evidence.php
http://www.amazon.com/Hockey-Stick-Illusion-Climategate-Independent/dp/1906768358
I notice that Amazon finally has The Hockey Stick Illusion in stock. I waited 2 1/2 months after ordering it to finally get a copy. Well worth the wait.
Thanx John Baltutis for the Amazon link. [To see what others thought of the book, click on the link and scroll down a page or two for the customer reviews.]
Anthony, the Hockey Stick Illusion is avalable in the USA:
https://www.stairwaypress.com/bookstore/the-hockey-stick-illusion-climategate-and-the-corruption-of-science/
Thanks Benpal. I’m charging list price, but you get free shipping and a freebie CD of public domain stuff from my PC hard drive… That seems like a fair deal to me. As I already mentioned, if I don’t sell them, my wife will make me eat them.
“Actually, I’d like one, since we can’t yet buy it in the United States. But if we can, I’ll do a book review here. – Anthony”
It should be available via Amazon:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Illusion-Climategate-Corruption-Science-Independent/dp/1906768358/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278888768&sr=8-1
Why the anti-Soviet demeanour? A long history of brilliant science in all maths, biology and physics. Was lucky to spend time in St. Petersburg in ’89 – weeks before ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost.’ The Winter Palace exterior is riddled with gunshot – the people could not have been better.
(In pursuing the question, the Team must realize that the CRU deals only with land data (covering, imperfectly, only 30% of the Earth’s surface) and that sea-surface temperatures (SST) are really more important. Weather stations and trees tend to be land-based.
Also, the Team never bothers to inquire about the atmospheric temperature record from satellites, the only high-quality and truly global record in existence. They seem unaware of the substantial disparity between satellites and the CRU record.)
Quite the contrary, it seems that our good professor isn’t aware of the error corrections shown in the article below.
http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/sap1-1-final-frontmatter.pdf
What if CO2 went on strike. Those molecules have been given a bad reputation. We’ve been picking on them. Now it’s time for them to fight back.
http://www.examiner.com/x-32936-Seminole-County-Environmental-News-Examiner~y2010m1d15-CO2molecule-lobby-plans-to-clear-air-about-global-warming
Jeff Green: “Quite the contrary, it seems that our good professor isn’t aware of the error corrections shown in the article below.”
Mr Green, if you had looked a bit farther than William Connolley’s editing (ahem) of the Wikipedia entries on CAGW, you would know that Fred Singer is very, very well aware of this “report” and points out the dramatic differences between the Executive Summary and what the report actually says:
http://www.sepp.org/Archive/NewSEPP/Data vs Models.htm
“Now, a panel of experts convened by the CCSP [3] and using updated analyses of balloon and satellite data, has essentially confirmed these earlier results [1,2]. As can be seen from Fig. 2, the disparity between observations and model results is both real and substantial. The surface is warming faster than the lower troposphere (LT) in 3 out 4 data sets.
It is puzzling therefore that the Executive Summary of the CCSP [3] report claims agreement (“there is no inconsistency between models and observations at the global scale”) when their own analysis suggests the opposite.”
Of course, when Singer tried to point out the issue with the below entry on Wikipedia, Connelley promptly deleted it:
(http://www.sepp.org/Archive/weekwas/2007/August 25.htm)
Note, however: References 6 and 7 refer to the Press release and Executive Summary (Tom Wigley, lead author), respectively. Inexplicably, these misrepresent the plain results of the Report itself, namely that there is a clear discrepancy in the rate of (low-latitude) temperature increase for the surface compared with higher levels in the atmosphere – which contradicts the expected results from greenhouse models. This can be easily checked by comparing Fig. 5.7E of the Report with Fig. 1.3F; the discrepancy is most clearly shown also in Fig. 5.4G. The inevitable conclusion is that the (human) greenhouse contribution to current warming is of minor importance compared to natural processes.
East Anglia is host to the CRU and London is headquarters for a hefty weekly newsmagazine with worldwide circulation. I am a subscriber for THE ECONOMIST, and found an interesting article in the current edition. I have copied it and am pasting the text only below; being freely available in the internet, it is in the public domain. Perhaps the best nuance is in the cartoon at the head of the article that you can see at the theeconomist.com. In the past, I have noted a strong bias in The Economist’s reporting that favors the concept of AGW. I hope others also will find this British introspection rather interesting, particularly the reference to “groupthink”, selected Yamal tree ring data, and deleted e-mails. ( Story on Pages 76 and 77, my copy of print edition.)
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The controversies in climate science — THE ECONOMIST, July 10th – 16th 2010
Science behind closed doors
Two new reports say the science of climate change is fine, but that some scientists and the institutions they work in need to change their attitudes
Jul 8th 2010
THE winter of 2009 was a rough time for climate science. In November, in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate conference, over 1,000 private e-mails from and to researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), a part of the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Britain, appeared on the internet, presumably after being stolen. At the same time a controversy was bubbling up in India over a claim in the 2007 assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the Himalayas could lose all their glaciers in 25 years, which was wrong. These events seemed to provide evidence of embarrassing incompetence, at the very least.
Explanations were demanded and committees were formed to deliver them. This week two of those committees reported. For the CRU and what became known as “climategate”, an independent panel was created by UEA and chaired by Muir Russell, a former vice-chancellor of the University of Glasgow. The Dutch environmental-assessment agency was asked to look for other errors in the regional analyses of the IPCC’s report. Both the reports conclude that the science of climate is sound and that the professional characters of the scientists involved are unimpeached. But they raise important issues about how to do science in such an argumentative area and under new levels of scrutiny, especially from a largely hostile and sometimes expert blogosphere.
The Dutch agency found a few errors in the relevant chapters of the IPCC’s report, though none amounted to much. It also raised questions about concentrating on bad or worst-case possibilities rather than a range of outcomes. The agency did not say this was a bad thing—policymakers need to have the most critical information flagged up—but it thinks it would be better to explain more clearly what is going on.
Martin Parry, who in 2007 was co-chair of the relevant IPCC working group, says there was not a conscious decision to highlight negative effects, but to highlight important ones, as measured by such things as scale and irreversibility. The important effects are negative ones: this is why people are worried about climate change. A tendency for the IPCC process to produce outputs more worrying, at the margins, than its inputs does not necessarily show bias. It may reflect accurate expert assessment. But the risk that it is a sort of self-reinforcing groupthink merits attention.
Open to criticism
A form of groupthink certainly seems to have been at work in the climategate e-mails. The Russell committee was most exercised by a lack of openness at the CRU, in part explained, but not excused, by a sort of a siege mentality. The committee found that the scientists committed nothing close to fraud. It showed that the data needed to reconstruct CRU’s temperature records were widely available. Informed by a warts-and-all account of peer review from Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, a medical journal, the committee took the researchers’ harsh behaviour towards critics and leniency towards allies not as unduly partial or aggressive, but as part of the “rough and tumble of interaction in an area of science that has become heavily contested.” As an eminent historian of science put it to a naive scientist when the story first broke, “Everything you believe to be true once looked like this.”
But the committee did criticise the researchers for an unwillingness to pass on data to their critics, for failing to specify which weather stations they were using, for keeping quiet IPCC discussions that should have been public, and so on. This flowed through into “clear incitement” to delete files rather than have them surrendered under Britain’s freedom-of-information act. The committee found UEA’s procedures on freedom of information poor.
Rather remarkably, neither the Russell committee or the university has asked Phil Jones, who ran the CRU, whether he actually deleted e-mails with the intention of foiling subsequent requests under the act. The university says it takes very seriously the need to improve its openness. At the same time it has appointed Dr Jones to a new position as director of research at the CRU—“definitely not a demotion”—while abolishing the role of director and integrating the unit more fully into its school of environmental sciences.
In doing this UEA accepts that Dr Jones’s role in one of the most famous aspects of climategate—his “hide the decline” e-mail—was “misleading”, as the Russell report puts it, without deliberately intending to be so. The growth of some trees, as recorded in their rings, tracks temperature from the 19th century to the 1960s, but then ceases to do so: the two records diverge. In a graph prepared for the World Meteorological Organisation in 1999, Dr Jones cut off the divergent part of one set of tree-ring data and spliced on data from thermometers. The scientific literature contained full discussions about the problems of divergence and various ways of dealing with them, but Dr Jones’s chart had no readily accessible explanations or caveats.
The Russell report is thorough, but it will not satisfy all the critics. Nor does it, in some ways, fulfil its remit. One of the enduring mysteries of climategate is who chose the e-mails released onto the internet and why they did so. These e-mails represented just 0.3% of the material on the university’s backup server, from which they were taken. This larger content has still not really been explored.
And then there is the science. An earlier report on climategate from the House of Commons assumed that a subsequent probe by a panel under Lord Oxburgh, a former academic and chairman of Shell, would deal with the science. The Oxburgh report, though, sought to show only that the science was not fraudulent or systematically flawed, not that it was actually reliable. And nor did Sir Muir, with this third report, think judging the science was his job. So, for verdicts as to whether the way that tree-rings from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia were treated by the CRU produced good results, those following the affair will have to look for future developments in journals and elsewhere. The mode of production has been found acceptable, but the product is for others to judge. Science, in the normal run of things, should do that; and if it does so in a more open, blogosphere-inclusive way some good will have come of the affair.
Science and Technology
Dear old Geoffrey Lean, writing in today’s (July 12) UK Telegraph, reports that in his opinion this latest enquiry reduces Climategate to the status of a mere storm in a teacup, leading him to coin a new term that he obviously regards as extremely witty – the term ‘cupgate’. Wow! And this intellectual giant is actually paid to write this nonsense.
In the article Lean perpetuates the old and silly canard that ‘the sceptics are given a free run by the media’, which pretty much summarises his refusal to examine any evidence that will not tell him what he wants to hear. What really exercises me, however, is the empty space that Lean and many other journalists have in their brain and/or character where ethics should be.
Alexander K says:
“In the article Lean perpetuates the old and silly canard that ‘the sceptics are given a free run by the media’, which pretty much summarises his refusal to examine any evidence that will not tell him what he wants to hear. What really exercises me, however, is the empty space that Lean and many other journalists have in their brain and/or character where ethics should be.”
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Journalists as well as certain scientists easily become victims of “groupthink”, a risk mentioned in the article I posted above. However, it requires a correction — to see the cartoon and the article go to economist.com, not theeconomist.com
In today’s Wall St. Journal editorial, Patrick J. Michaels calls the Russell report a “Whitewash.”
Christopher Hanley says:
HADCRUT3 and UAH noticeably diverge between 1980 and 1997 which is mysteriously corrected post 1997:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1980/to:1997/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1997/trend/offset:-0.19/plot/uah/from:1980/to:1997/trend/offset:0.1/plot/uah/from:1997/trend/offset:-0.07
Christopher, tallbloke posted your comment at his blog so that he could respond to it at length. My two replies on tallbloke’s post follow:
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/07/11/divergence-and-reconvergence-of-uah-and-hadcru/#comment-1078
tallbloke: How do you account for the shift in the HADSST2 data…
http://i45.tinypic.com/f3e5vo.png
…that is caused by their merging of two (incompatible) source SST datasets in 1998, which is the likely cause of the change after 1997? Refer to:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/12/met-office-prediction-climate-could.html
HADSST2 is also spatially incomplete, especially in the mid-to-high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere. Refer to:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/07/overview-of-sea-surface-temperature.html
I would suggest you compare HADISST or Reynolds OI.v2 SST data to UAH TLT anomalies. Are the results different?
&&&&&&&&&
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/07/11/divergence-and-reconvergence-of-uah-and-hadcru/#comment-1080
Beat ya:
UAH TLT Ocean vs HADISST:
http://i27.tinypic.com/2rep0gn.jpg
UAH TLT Ocean Minus HADISST:
http://i29.tinypic.com/1qnxut.jpg
The difference appears to represent the exaggerated response of the TLT anomalies