On Jo Nova’s site, the cat is set amongst the pigeons:
A team of skeptical scientists, citizens, and an Australian Senator have lodged a formal request with the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) to have the BOM and CSIRO audited.
The BOM claim their adjustments are “neutral” yet Ken Stewart showed that the trend in the raw figures for our whole continent has been adjusted up by 40%. The stakes are high. Australians could have to pay something in the order of $870 million dollars thanks to the Kyoto protocol, and the first four years of the Emissions Trading Scheme was expected to cost Australian industry (and hence Australian shareholders and consumers) nearly $50 billion dollars.
Given the stakes, the Australian people deserve to know they are getting transparent, high quality data from the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). The small cost of the audit is nothing in comparison with the money at stake for all Australians. We need the full explanations of why individual stations have been adjusted repeatedly and non-randomly, and why adjustments were made decades after the measurements were taken. We need an audit of surface stations. (Are Australian stations as badly manipulated and poorly sited as the US stations? Who knows?)
The NZ equivalent to the Australian BOM is under an official review
The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition found adjustments that were even more inexplicable (0.006 degrees was adjusted up to 0.9 degrees). They decided to push legally and the response was a litany of excuses — until finally The National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) was forced to disavow it’s own National Temperature Records, and belatedly pretend that it had never been intended for public consumption. But here’s the thing that bites: NZ signed the Kyoto protocol, arguably based very much on the NZ temperature record, and their nation owes somewhere from half a billion to several billion dollars worth of carbon credits (depending on the price of carbon in 2012). Hence there is quite a direct link from the damage caused by using one unsubstantiated data set based on a single student’s report that no one can find or replicate that will cost the nation a stack of money. NIWA is now potentially open to class actions. (Ironically, the Australian BOM has the job of “ratifying” the reviewed NZ temperature record.)
Thanks to work by Ken Stewart, Chris Gillham, Andrew Barnham, Tony Cox, James Doogue, David Stockwell, as well as Cory Bernardi, Federal Senator for South Australia.
Copied below is the cover note of our request.
Click on the image to download the full PDF (3.3 Mb)
Read more here
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Latimer Alder says:
February 16, 2011 at 11:35 pm
@eadler
This shows that the criticisms of the original Hockey Stick paper by McIntyre et al were quite immaterial.
Immaterial?? Funny definition of ‘immaterial’ you are using.
They showed that an ‘iconic’ paper, used by the IPCC as its poster child, that effectively catapaulted an obscure student into a primary place in climatology, and that had passed the much-lauded peer-review, used a deeply flawed statistical method.
And that the results is claimed to have obtained were actually an artefact of the method, not the data. Any old numbers put into the method produced a hockey stick.
The conspirators then out every possible obstacle in McIntyre’s way to prevent their scientific and statistical failure from being made public. Interested readers can learn the whole sorry saga – complete with documented references – in ‘The Hockey Stick Illusion’ by AW Montford. An excellent book – and a far better yarn than the dry subject matter would suggest.
Rather than being immaterial, McIntyre’s work showed that;
At least one climatologist failed to use the best aviailable statistical methids. Indeed a method that was so flawed as to be useless for his purpose.
Despite this fundamental flaw, the paper passed ‘peer-review’ and was published to great fanfare and acclaim.
Nobody in climatology subsequently noticed these flaws, until McIntyre tried to reproduce the results some years later
The authors refused to allow him access to their original data – contrary to the principles of openness and reproducibility that underpin good science.
I will be charitable and call their actions ‘misbehaviour’. And, along with many other factors, this misbehavior reinforced my sceptical views about climatology and climatologists.
True scientists with a solid experimental case and strong arguments would not need to behave in this shoddy way. And a good review process would have turfed the work out before publication..not ten years after it had polluted the science.
Far from being immaterial, McIntyre’s work revealed deep and fundamental problems with the ‘science’ of climatology. As a ‘science’, it stinks!
Sorry but McIntyre’s work was entirely wrong. He used centered PCA incorrectly and got a different result from Mann and Bradley, because he used the wrong criterion to pick the number of PCA’s to approximate the data. When the proper number of PCA’s is used, it is found that using non centered PCA’s as Mann and Bradley did, or using the customary centered PCA method get the same results.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/false-claims-by-mcintyre-and-mckitrick-regarding-the-mann-et-al-1998reconstruction/
From the link above it is clear that McIntyre’s mistake has been known for over 6 years by now. Maybe it is time that you faced reality, and recognized that McIntyre was mistaken in his claim about the role of non-centered PCA in creating a false Hockey Stick.
Alexander K says:
February 17, 2011 at 2:44 am
One of the truly great things about Anthony’s light touch on moderation gives most of us some real entertainment when posters such as EAdler’s attempt to justify the unjustfiable. ‘Adler’ is German for ‘eagle’, but for some reason I keep getting a mental picture of a turkey whenever I see his name above a post…
Alexander,
If people have factual or logical arguments to make, they don’t have to resort to insults to persuade reasonable people of that their position is correct.
eadler says:
“If people have factual or logical arguments to make, they don’t have to resort to insults to persuade reasonable people of that their position is correct.”
I have made numerous factual, logical arguments showing eadler that CAGW is not happening. Conclusion: eadler is not reasonable. QED
eadler also says:
“Maybe it is time that you faced reality, and recognized that McIntyre was mistaken in his claim about the role of non-centered PCA in creating a false Hockey Stick.”
McIntyre & McKittrick were correct. I can prove it: since they debunked Mann’s Hokey Stick, the UN/IPCC has not dared to use it in their publications. Instead, they use the lame spaghetti graph, which lacks the visual impact of the Mann Hokey Stick.
The IPCC would have lost whatever remaining credibility it had if it continued using Mann’s debunked chart. And the IPCC loved Mann’s phony chart! The IPCC would never have stopped using it if they had not been forced to drop it due to Steve McIntyre’s work.
When McIntyre showed how Mann had hidden the specific [“censored“] data that would have destroyed the hockey stick shape, Man’s dishonesty was revealed to the whole world.
And to this day, thirteen years after the hockey stick first made its appearance, MBH98/99 have never publicly archived their data, methodologies and metadata. They are climate charlatans, exposed by Steve McIntyre as being devious and dishonest frauds, and they deliberately ignore the scientific method. When eric adler attacks McIntyre it is based on adler’s psychological projection — the stock in trade of the cognitive dissonance afflicted.
Hot off the press!
Australia’s Chief Scientist, Penny Sackett, has resigned.
http://www.itwire.com/science-news/energy/45277-australias-first-chief-scientist-resigns
There’s no need to audit the BOM if they are conforming to the party line of adjusting figures upwards.
The New Zealand audit found nothing amiss.
The adjustments of temperature had been questioned by the skeptics who called for the audit. The reasons for the adjustments were endorsed by the auditors, who said that the original raw data was available to the public.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC1012/S00050/niwa-releases-review-of-nz-temperature-trends.htm
At each of the seven locations there have been changes in specific climate station location over time. When you create a long time series by adding information from each of these station locations together, you have to make adjustments to account for these changes.
There have been various changes in location etc over time at each of the seven locations making up the seven station series. In order to create a long time series at each location, it is necessary to merge temperature records from a number of specific sites have been merged together to form a long time series. When merging different temperature records like this, it is necessary to adjust for climatic differences from place to place or significant biases would be introduced. Adjustments may also be needed even if the site does not physically move, because changes in exposure or instrumentation at a given site can also bias the temperature measurements.
Why do you need to adjust the raw data?
Long time series of climate data often have artificial discontinuities – caused, for example, by station relocations, changes in instrumentation, or changes in observing practice – which can distort, or even hide, the true climatic signal. Therefore, all climatic studies and data sets should be based on homogeneity-adjusted data.
That is what NIWA climatologists have done in the seven station series, and the seven individual station review documents outline the adjustments.
The raw (original) climate station data have not been changed and are freely available on the NIWA climate database, which means that the NIWA seven station series can be easily reproduced.
REPLY: Very soon, adjustments, like “snow”, will be a thing of the past. – Anthony
Smokey says:
February 17, 2011 at 10:12 am
Since I don’t want to take up space repeating the above post, I will just answer the points that were made.
1) The fact that I disagree with Smokey is not proof that I am not reasonable.
2) McIntyre made many errors in his critique of the Hockey Stick, paper, including improper use of the Principal Component Analysis. His claim that the Hockey Stick was an artifact of non centered PCA was wrong, and proper use of centered PCA, and even omission of the PCA step gave a graph similar to the original Hockey Stick.
3) The fact that a different graph is used for the earth’s temperature graph is not due to McIntyre’s criticisms, but rather due to research that has been done since using additional proxy data. The graph is still a Hockey Stick with more noise during the MWP than the original. The conclusions are still the same.
4)Finally the original MBH data is archived at this publically available web site:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/metadata/noaa-recon-6276.html
REPLY: Mr. Adler, I call bullshit on you and #2 in particular. You really are blind to inconvenient facts.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/20/mikes-nature-trick/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/01/mirror-posting-yad06-the-most-influential-tree-in-the-world/
Deny that – Anthony
“eadler says:
February 19, 2011 at 11:29 am”
Oh dear Eadler, quoting NIWA. You are scraping the bottom of the barrel now.