More dirty pool by NCDC's Karl, Menne, and Peterson

I’ve mentioned more than once in the past how the Tom Karl managed National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) team has taken to using my data without my permission. They even ignored my letter sent direct to Tom Karl. I’d written to him to explain how Menne et al took that data, against my protestations of it being incomplete and not yet quality controlled, but planned on using it to write a paper refuting my work anyway. This was done before I could even get the surfacestations project survey completed. The goal of course was to preemptively refute what I and the volunteers had exposed: the pathetic condition of the USHCN climate observation network in the USA where only 1 in 10 stations meet the NOAA’s basic 100 foot exposure rule.

When you are faced with budget killing criticisms, I guess in their view playing dirty pool doesn’t seem so bad. Dr. Roger Pielke Senior voiced some similar criticisms of this amateurish behavior on the part of NCDC, Karl, and Menne, saying it amounted to professional discourtesy. Even NCDC GHCN guru Tom Peterson got into the act early on, writing a ghost authored “talking points” memo about the surfacestations project. Dr. Pielke weighed in on that too. Forgetting to clear his PDF editor document properties, Peterson was promptly busted for writing a ghost paper:

Here is a screencap:

Remember, these are the same people who use photoshopped flooded houses in government reports:

Image above taken directly from the NCDC authored CCSP report.

Recently, there was a grand meeting in Exeter to “reinvent” the surface data in the wake of Climategate. Many big names were invited, including the NCDC team. Of course people like Dr. Roger Pielke, who has been publishing on surfacestations metadata issues and myself were not invited. But, some of our work made it to the meeting.

Have a look at Menne’s powerpoint presentation here. Here’s a backup location in case it disappears down a rabbit hole: 7_1Wed_exeter-menne

I was a bit taken aback by the cover image (left, from NCDC’s Exter presentation), because it was straight from our surfacestations project (right, click image for gallery), but there was no attribution that I could find.

Russ Steele, the volunteer who took the photo of the Colfax, CA USHCN station,  writes to me to say:

I was shocked twice, once when discovering a photo that I had take was on the cover of a scientific brochure, and shocked again when I discovered that professionals who value their reputations and demand credit for their academic work did not provide a credit line for the photo. Do these professionals not have scruples?

Is it really so hard for NCDC to follow the terms of service rules? They can read, apparently.

Q: I’d like to use some of the photographs and data on this website, can I do that, and what credits/citations must I give?

A: For mass media publications or for scientific research the policy is simple. A citation should be given both to the website/project designer and to the person doing the site survey. Our Rules page outlines the license terms user have made when submitting surveys and photos. Each station should have a site survey form which indicates the photographer by name.

A sample photo credit/citation would look like this: Photo courtesy of Anthony Watts, www.surfacestations.org and [photographer name in survey form]

But I wasn’t the only one to notice….Verity Jones writes:

Don’t mention it – you’re welcome!

By Verity Jones and KevinUK

There’s a lot of information available from the climate bun feast in Exeter at the beginning of September about restructuring climate science and developing a new climate databank and process (Climate Perestroika?) . In the new spirit of embracing openness and transparency (Climate Glasnost?), it is all on the web, but it is frustratingly like watching silent movies – you get the picture but the detail is lost with the sound. However, there are a few bits that are refreshingly familiar….First, the name of their new website (www.surfacetemperatures.org). It is so similar that I originally misread it, mistaking it for Anthony Watts’ www.surfacestations.org.  NOAA/ NCDC even used a picture from the Surface Stations Gallery for the title slide of a presentation (as quickly spotted by Anthony himself):

Colfax General View of Site (Photo: Russ Steele; Link: http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=300)

This graph seemed really familiar too…

It is of course so much more scientific looking than my version. And I thought I just had a quirky way of looking at data

They’ve come up with some nice new ways – non-gridded, non-anomalised ways – of presenting the temperature trends of individual stations on maps too…

Oh wait, that is familiar as well…

And there is more.  Kevin has been working on the GHCNV3 Beta data release (ghcn-v3-beta-part-1-a-first-look-at-station-inventory-data) and, gratifyingly it seems as if many of the stations with ‘problems’ as uncovered by bloggers such as Willis Eschenbach (Darwin), and posts here (Edson, Guam) are now ‘fixed’.

Say, you don’t think….?  No, no way, they couldn’t have been reading this small sceptic blog surely.  It is probably just that great minds think alike, as they say, (but fools…)

But then, one of Dr Menne’s conclusions, reported by Dr. Roger Pielke Senior (here) was:

“Critiques of surface temperature data and processing methods are increasingly coming from non traditional scientific sources (non peer reviewed) and the issue raised may be too numerous and too frequent for a small group of traditional scientists to address” Lessons learnt from US Historical Climate Network and Global Historical Climate Network most recent homogenisation cycle – Matt Menne

And climate blogs are mentioned…

Steven Mosher’s blog is mentioned TWICE and Zeke Hausfather is even lauded with a whole slide summarising his posts (on Slide 34).

It is good to see the efforts of bloggers (what Matt Menne calls ‘non traditional scientific sources’)  have had some impact, even if it is not acknowledged. Well this is climate science I suppose so never mind. It’s always good to be in the company of people like Roger Pielke Snr who also didn’t get an invite to the Exeter workshop!

Imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, but sometimes that’s all you get, not even an acknowledgment. However we like to be polite, so on behalf of many unsung heroes of the skeptical blogging community – THANK YOU for knowing a good idea when you see it on the web (Please keep looking!) We enjoy showing you new ways of doing things and delivering you new challenges.

Skeptic Blogs – Keeping Climate Scientists on their Toes Since 2005*

(*Climate Audit was started on Jan 31, 2005)