Note: I spent the day with the BEST team yesterday at Lawrence Livermore Berkeley Laboratories and I’ll have a report on it soon, but here in the meantime is what Fred Singer has to say about it, via Climate Realists. – Anthony
By Dr. Fred Singer
The e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia in November 2009 produced what is popularly called “Climategate.” They exposed the thoroughly unethical behavior of a group of climate scientists, mainly in the UK and US, involved in producing the global surface temperature record used and relied on by governments.
Not only did these climate scientists hide their raw data and their methodology of selection and adjustment of temperature data, but they fought hard against all attempts by independent outside scientists to replicate their results. They also undermined the peer-review system and tried to make it impossible for skeptical scientists to publish their work in scientific journals. There is voluminous evidence in the e-mails to this effect. In the process, they damaged not only the science enterprise — full publication of data and methods, replication of results, open debate, etc — but they also undermined the public credibility of all scientists.
However, the most serious revelation from the e-mails is that they tried to “hide the decline” in temperatures, using various “tricks” in order to keep alive a myth of rising temperatures in support of the dogma of anthropogenic global warming. There have now been a number of investigations of the activities of this group, mainly in the UK. These have all turned out to be complete whitewashes, aimed to exonerate the scientists involved. None of these investigations has even attempted to learn how and in what way the data might have been manipulated.
Much of this is described in the “Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the corruption of science” by A. W. Montford. Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo and others have made a commendable effort to show how data might have been altered. But an independent effort to reconstruct the global temperature results of the past century really demands a dedicated project with proper resources.
The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) Project aims to do what needs to be done: That is, to develop an independent analysis of the data from land stations, which would include many more stations than had been considered by the Global Historic Climatology Network. The Project is in the hands of a group of recognized scientists, who are not at all “climate skeptics” — which should enhance their credibility. The Project is mainly directed by physicists, chaired by Professor Richard Muller (UC Berkeley), with a steering group that includes Professor Judith Curry (Georgia Tech) and Arthur Rosenfeld (UC Santa Barbara and Georgia Tech).
I applaud and support what is being done by the Project — a very difficult but important undertaking. I personally have little faith in the quality of the surface data, having been exposed to the revealing work by Anthony Watts and others. However, I have an open mind on the issue and look forward to seeing the results of the Project in their forthcoming publications.
As far as I know, no government or industry funds are involved — at least at this stage. According to the Project’s website www.berkeleyearth.org, support comes mostly from a group of charitable foundations.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Atmospheric physicist S. Fred Singer is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and former director of the US weather satellite service. He is a Senior Fellow of the Independent Institute and the Heartland Institute. He is the author or co-author of Unstoppable Global Warming [2007], Nature not Human Activity Rules the Climate [2008], and Climate Change Reconsidered [2009].
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“”””” walt man says:
February 19, 2011 at 2:02 pm
Andrew30 says: February 19, 2011 at 1:35 pm
…
Walt, you might want to look at the infection in the code that caused the graph to rise.
The code (FOI2009/FOIA/documents/harris-tree/briffa_sep98_e.pro) did Exactly what the author intended. It drove the MWP down and the industrial era up.
Lets look at a bit more of that code:
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
;
;filter_cru,5.,/nan,tsin=yyy+yearlyadj,tslow=tslow
;oplot,timey,tslow,thick=5,color=20
;
filter_cru,5.,/nan,tsin=yyy,tslow=tslow
oplot,timey,tslow,thick=5,color=21
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
Does not this line give a yearly adjustment value interpolated from the 20 year points?
filter_cru,5.,/nan,tsin=yyy,tslow=tslow oplot,timey,tslow,thick=5,color=21
Does not this line plot data derived from yyy
;filter_cru,5.,/nan,tsin=yyy+yearlyadj,tslow=tslow
;oplot,timey,tslow,thick=5,color=20
The smoking gun line!!!!
Does not his line plot data derived from yyy+yearlyadj The FUDGED FIGURE
BUT…………
IT’S COMMENTED OUT!!
Well Walt Man, I’m not into writing code; but I’m surrounded by people who do. And the code they write ultimately has to be burned into a ROM on a chip, to get the chip to do what it is supposed to do (It’s an Optical Navigation digital camera)
There’s not a single byte of code that those guys leave in to take up valuable real estate; and also to increase the probability of making mistakes, that are hard to find in debugging.
So the fact that some skullduggery code was COMMENTED OUT to me merely indicates that it was placed there so it could be used whenever it wqs needed; after all, commenting out code, is simply adding a switch to turn it on or off.
So the very existence of the code; commented out or not; shows an intent to use it when required; and then return the switch to the off position.
And evidently much of the raw data was “lost” or erased, so how could anyone now go back and prove whether the commented out code was ever used or not.
You don’t have to actually catch sight of the skunk, to know that one passed by.
As for the BEST project; if they start witha position statement, that acknowledges that there is a whole science of sampled data theory, and climate data recording so far pays no heed to that discipline; then they might be able to accomplish something; but I’m not going to hold my breath.
I have no confidence whatsoever, that the US Congress can fix the 2500 pages of the Obama-care, medical Industry take over.
I’d accept that if they start with a single sheet of paper that says on both sides:- “This page intentionally left blank.” they might be able to produce an environment for improvements in medical care.
Same thing with the climate data; changing the base data period, and base time frame, isn’t going to make much out of mush.
Simon Hopkinson says:
February 21, 2011 at 9:39 am
“How can we criticise the “opposition” for their round and vehement defence of lousy practices if we turn a blind eye to the same within our own ranks?”
Let me say at the beginning Simon that this comment is not aimed at you particularly, but at this whole comment thread. Your comment just happened to be the last straw.
Can I request that we all lighten up and give it a rest. Dr. Singer’s statement that has generated all this sanctimony was obviously not a masterpiece of accuracy or logical wizardry and I have no intent to argue it one way or the other, just to point out that it is not greatly relevant to the post in general, which, in itself appears to be a largely unedited attempt to endorse the BEST project. In the end that endorsement is not exactly ringing and by the time the project produces any results this post, like most of the information in the world today will have disappeared down the memory hole.
The notion that the alarmist community is going to use this faux pas as a bludgeon in future argumentation misses two rather obvious difficulties. First the alarmist side has never seemed to require any actual errors from the skeptical community to maintain the torrential flood of propaganda they produce on a daily basis. Second, for them to leap on this particular blurb and use it effectively against the skeptical argument would require them to embrace the alternative interpretation offered by the commenters most critical of Singer’s assertion i.e. that Mike’s “trick” was deployed to conceal the complete worthlessness of the proxy data. I may have missed something, but I can’t recall that argument ever being one they were eager to make.
The various talking heads that are out front for CAGW have been filling the world with misstatements and outright lies for decades without their supporting blogs ever uttering even a whimper of anxiety about the potential damage to their credibility, but it seems that when any of those, who ought to be seen as our allies in what is indeed a life or death struggle, commits so much as a typo the comment thread degenerates almost immediately into an orgy of cannibalistic sanctimony. There is a need to support scientific standards, but we also need to recognize that purity in science is a laudatory goal which is never achieved, least of all in “climate science” which is the most bastardized field in all of human enquiry.
The skeptical side of this controversy has been on the defensive from the beginning, largely because of huge deficits in financial support and media access, but also because the other side never allows these principled niceties to interfere with their message. They have continually shown themselves to be capable of screwing themselves right into the floor in order to spin facts that challenge their meme. That no matter how erroneous the argument or egregious the behavior of their comrades they will be supported and defended at all costs. I don’t suggest we should embrace a similar modus operandi for ourselves, only a little reasonability in the face of fairly inconsequential diversions from our own assumed truths.
CAGW does indeed present an existential threat to humanity’s future, not from any fantastical cascade of climate catastrophes, but from the real present, ongoing, and future disasters being produced as the intended and unintended consequences of the nearly insane solutions which have been implemented, are being implemented, and are proposed for future implementation to solve a problem which is not likely to be as damaging as any of a couple dozen real harms which have been shuffled to the back burner so that resources can be focussed on a computer generated illusion.
If the coal train of carbon demonization is to ever be really derailed we need to keep all the allies we have and recruit as many more as possible. That incredibly important effort will not be advanced by continually deploying into circular firing squads on the delusional expectation that it will force our opponents to cede us the moral high ground.
rant off
Good summary Fred. I find only one word, “at”, a bit troubling. You say,
Do you really believe that the credibility of a group of scientists is enhanced by none of the group being skeptics? (I presume you mean “skeptics of the prevailing theories of climate” — I don’t think anyone seriously understands “climate skeptics” to refer to people skeptical of climate itself, and only hardline AGW apologists use the term to refer to those who repudiate 20th century warming trends altogether).
I don’t.
Indeed, since skepticism is an essential part of any work of science of any sort of integrity, any group that puts up their failure to be skeptics as some sort of validation in their work is clearly less interested in actual credibility but in acceptance within some cabal.
I sincerely hope you don’t mean this at all.
I hope what you meant to say was
I.e., their credibility is “enhanced” by the fact that individuals in the group take a variety of different views about the prevailing theories of climate science. I would agree that such a group has more credibility than one that lines up uniformly on one side of this question.
If Fred Singer and Judith Curry are involved, then I will be satisfied with the end results as I know they will insist the studies are conducted using the scientific method.