With apologies to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, here’s a a comment worth repeating from the Hit and Misses thread.
What I find interesting about the entire email corpus is the focus on the minutia of the statistics and the different proxies. In none of the emails from the core team members do we see any physics of radiation. It seems that if it were your role to “prove” the positive feedback of CO2 you would want to actually do some physics of radiative and convective transfer of energy in the atmosphere. This is where the rubber meets the road.
It seems that the entire consensus group have taken an assumption (positive feedback of CO2 increase) and are going deeper and deeper into the details of the proxies in order to show what the results of their assumption are.
I think that this is why as a discipline, more and more physicists are dismissing AGW.
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Dude, this is a group of people who study paleoclimates, what did you expect? I expect that you would have had a lot more discussion of physics if the emails of a modeling group had been stolen.
Given an atmosphere of infinite thickness …
Love the peekture
This is where I point out that they have trouble with Excel.
o/t but the MSM’s refusal to expose the public to the contents of Climategate II emails is nothing short of a disgrace:
25 Nov: UK Telegraph: Geoffrey Lean: Climategate II: the scientists fight back
The first Climategate made scientists dive for cover, refusing to comment. This time, they held a press conference.
Yet the public response seems to have been nothing more than a yawn. The emails dropped out of the news within a couple of days. And Google’s record of trends for searches and news coverage of Climategate, which went through the roof two years ago have scarcely registered a blip…
And the science itself remains sound, based on a wide variety of sources and studies and so far not invalidated by anything that has emerged from either Climategate…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/8915689/Climategate-II-the-scientists-fight-back.html
btw if u open the Telegraph link, u will find a pic with the caption:
More signs of a warming planet? The vanishing glaciers of the Himalayas Photo: EPA
truly mindboggling…
Dude…I expect some basic science with the study of paleoclimate…like, “does this meet the bounds of physics?”
Who is that picture of?
Mr Mann – Mr Schmidt – Mr Black???
There’s also no discussion of what the alleged “warming” means and what might be causing it. Nor any admission that the CO2-LWR radiation effect is logarithmic and declining with each additional increment.
No, the entire focus of this paleoclimate reconstruction group is clearly to show that “something” indicates “unprecedented” warming.
Not the slightest curiosity about what part is attributable to multidecadal processes (ENSO, AO, PDO, AMO, solar radiation, etc.), volcanoes, land-use change, yadda, yadda, yadda.
But, of course, the real focus is to “make the MWP disappear” so that “unprecedented” can be established in the last 1000 years. As if that period had any real meaning.
Snake-oil salesmen, one and all.
GeologyJim’s got it right. The trend from the LIA hasn’t changed, and it appears to be influenced not by CO2, but by the AMO.
pat says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:13 pm
………………….
I judge how well the interview came across – by the comments 🙂
The Calamatologist, Dr. Phil Jones, might soon join the AGW dismissing physicists.
Rattus Norvegicus says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:04 pm
There is still no proof that any e-mails were stolen from anyone.
I have a question please.
Last night I went to the site linked from WUWT (& Jo Nova) that provides a database on the email (1&2) and also read some replies from the author of this searchable d/base to requests from J Nova’s readers.
The author, who I was able to read about him last night on his website, but not now, does not hold the Lavoisier Group (Australia) in high regard. http://www.lavoisier.com.au/index.php
Unless I am confusing the searchable d/bases Q: Why is this?
The one green tree on EcoGuy’s searchable d/base website seems to be an iconic image used elsewhere.
Now that Hulme has started the walking back, I expect Jones to follow.
Jimmy Haigh says:
“There is still no proof that any e-mails were stolen from anyone.”
There’s not even a bit of evidence, much less any proof.
It’s prety clear that the whistleblower didn’t leak every email in Climategate 1.0 [like a common hacker would]. No doubt he withheld any emails that might identify him. Or maybe he held back some seriously illegal emails for personal protection, blackmailing others to keep them quiet.
Besides, what was “stolen”? Is anything missing? Or did the taxpaying public simply get to see some of what they paid for?
Kim2000:
The Mann of La Bristle Cone.
Rattus Norvegicus says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:04 pm
Dude, this is a group of people who study paleoclimates, what did you expect? I expect that you would have had a lot more discussion of physics if the emails of a modeling group had been stolen. ” ]
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Soooooooo…. Paleontology – ” paleoclimates” doesn’t / don’t need /require physics? AND modelers do?
I think you have this bassaskwards 🙂
With the passphrase protected data, could you have password protected folders within password protected folder?
Think of it like an advent calendar, were someone supplies a password every now and again.
Thanks Anthony, there go any future contracts for me……
🙂
I have spent most of my Thanksgiving holiday reading the Climategate II emails and the lack of experimental physics is what has struck me the most about what I have read. Your retort may be that these guys are paleoclimatologists so what else would they be studying. The problem is that they are not simply paleoclimatologists, they are writing entire chapters of the IPCC reports on climate, which they then use as “proof” of warming when journalists ask them about controversies generated by the skeptic community. These guys are leading the consensus of climate scientists around the world in the pro-AGW world and there is not one single experimental physicist among them!
I have been very fortunate in my career to have worked both the scientific end and the engineering end of science. In the 1990’s as a student one of our payloads was a camera that would have measured the knee of the absorption curves (the 3db point) of gasses such as water vapor in the atmosphere. We set up a dual path experiment whereby scientists at the NASA Marshall Spaceflight center would use a spectrometer to measure the incoming wavelengths while our camera would look at the MSFC site to get the outgoing measurement. This would set up a bi-directional path to measure the extinction coefficients for water vapor absorption of energy in selected bands in the visible spectrum.
If I wanted to “prove” AGW, there are ways to do it today and do it experimentally. Why are these experiments not being undertaken? The USAF in the 1940’s and 1950’s literally drove the technology of infrared and visible spectrometers in their famous “upper atmospheric research” flights in B29’s and other jets during that period. They took increasingly detailed spectrograms, down to where they could eventually measure the gaussian of an individual CO2 absorption feature at different altitudes. Now I am given to understand that this data has been incorporated into MODTRAN and other codes, but why not go back to the original data, then do a similar set of experiments today and measure how the gaussian (or Lorentz depending on whether or not the line is saturated) function has changed for CO2.
Now on Realclimate and in some papers I have read where if the CO2 concentrations increase, the altitude of the CO2 line desaturation increases, and thus temperatures should increase in the atmosphere up to that point. Now Christy, Spencer and others have not seen this increase in the satellite data but we have the technology today to measure the altitudes where this desaturation occurs and determine (by going back into the history files to the USAF studies) to see if there are any definitive changes from the atmosphere as they recorded it in the 1950’s. I did read one paper where Nimbus IV IRIG sensor was measured against a recent (1998) mission but after digging into it the error bars were so large as to make the results meaningless.
We now have inexpensive LCD tunable filters that are capable of wavelength resolution down to the 0.1 nanometer scale. We could easily fly one of those on the ISS using the downward facing scientific window designed for this purpose and do an experiment and get results of far better quantitive and qualitative value than our simple student experiment of the 1990’s.
We could repeat the USAF studies using a similar filter to get qualitative data on exactly what altitude does CO2 principle line desaturation happens. The physics text books on quantum mechanical optics provides all of the theoretical basis for determining the temperature and pressure coefficients for when this should occur (indeed these formulas were derived from the USAF studies!).
It was John Christy and his interest in old satellite data that got me interested in this subject when I worked down the hall from him in 1988 at UAH. Today we have far too much computer modeling and far too little experimental physics, which is where this should be decided, not in the bit splicing of proxies a thousand years old that frankly seems, especially after reading the climategate II emails, much like the world of alchemists a thousand years ago, getting money from the King to research how to turn lead into gold, or in this case, how to influence the development of a global civilization.
Climate science is far too important to our future to leave it in the hands of climate scientists, its time to bring in the adults, the experimental physicists who can give real answers.
dp says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:51 pm………..
The Mann of La Bristle Cone.” ]
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Ahhhh a “desperado” 🙂
Rattus Norvegicus says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:04 pm
And that would be computer wizards not physicists, try again, ……..
I would not have described the manipulators of the temperature records as a group of paloeclimate researchers, though some of them may have done that too. The public output of substance from the CRU is processed temperatures series, flogged as proof that man-made emissons of CO2 are strongly affecting temperatures, amplified by compliant and apparently, based on the Climategate 2 files, co-conspiratorial media.
It is patently obvious from three perspectives that they do not believe the AGW meme themselves: the way they try to prevent people from seeing how they derive their ‘outputs’, the way they speak to each other expressing what appear to be perfectly genuine unease that they will get caught misrepresenting natural variation as man-made, and lastly, the patently unscientific manner in which they interact in public places such as R/C and SkS with scientists who call them out for their inadequacies, misrepresentations, errors, lack of compliance with publishing standards, misunderstandings and misbehaviour.
The ‘Team’ is not into paleoclimates, they are into protecting their income and grants, their positions in the UN/IPCC AGW promoting processes and their reputations as ‘processors of the globe’s temperature data’.
All this is shown by their private and public behaviour. To me it seems the emails were stolen and also that they are legitimately supposed to be obtainable using the FOIA which they conspired to evade (not ‘avoid’ which as a very different legal implication).
The sum of evidence shows some interesting things. They were probably not doing much at all to the incoming temperature data, by which I mean they were charging for things not done – somewhat like not emitting CO2 and being paid for it. They were at pains to hide this fact. The data was processed in meaningless ways using defective programmes they threw together and did not understand and which were seamfully (as opposed to seamlessly) stitched together to give an ever-rising global temperature trend. That their work at the CRU was useless is not really the main point. It is rather, the deliberate hiding, suppression and where possible vilification of information and sources that contradicted their pre-supposed conclusions. Having no meaningful reply to legitimate, well-earned, valid and biting criticism of their collected works, we see in private and public a wholesale resorting to schoolyard bullying encouraging others to ‘pile on the rabbit’ – rabbits of their careful choice (so as not to raise too much notice).
What an extraordinary waste of time and public money. I think we deserve better than that.
Solution? Easy. Cut…..off…..the…..money. Stop giving them contracts. Stop publishing crap science without data and methods. Stop making it worth their while to get out of bed in the morning to lift a hand against those who are are willing to follow the scientific method without fear, favour or pre-conception.
Jimmy Haigh says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:39 pm
Rattus Norvegicus says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:04 pm
There is still no proof that any e-mails were stolen from anyone>>>
Sorry folks, but this is a red herring. The answer I use is this:
Rattus, I don’t care if the emails were stolen, found in a dumpster, or just fell out of the sky. The only things I care about are if a) they are authentic and b) what they say. Given no one has stuck up their hand and claimed the emails were forged, we can move on to what they say.
So Rattus, do you have what it takes to discuss what they say? Or shall you just whine like a petulant child that it isn’t fair that the emails are now public knowledge?
part of the problem is that the physics has been ‘settled’ for years…and now the only problem is to educate, persuade people and policy makers what the issue is. For example, train people in climate change using software like this:
http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/projects/cmip/cmip_abstracts/wigley03.pdf
Mike Hulme was starting this in 97
“We too here have plans to exploit SCENGEN (and MAGICC) in a
training/educational context. I ran a pilot seminar here for UNEP before
Christmas on scenario construction, although this was using the new
WINDOWS/Unix versions of both MAGICC and SCENGEN (MAGICC 2 and SCENGEN 2;
IPCC 1995 compatible) we have re-written. Also, I have just submitted a
proposal (called SPARCCS) to ENRICH in DGXII for a support package for
regional climate change scenarios. This would be a 2-year project with
emissions people, as well as MAGICC, SCENGEN and our new global historic
climatology. I think we have a good chance of funding.”
0853426848.txt
The paleo stuff was a late comer, but was icing on the cake….or so they thought
CO2 absorbs energy from all directions, and re-radiates that energy in all directions. The main difference between CO2 and other gases, besides the absorption spectrum, is that CO2 has a slightly higher specific heat than the other components of air. Physically this means that it takes MORE energy to raise the temperature of the air a given amount if more CO2 is present.
In planetary physics this makes CO2 a (mild) form of thermal ballast, reducing fluctuations.
‘Greenhouse’ gases only work in greenhouses – structures designed to inhibit convection.