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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Wish there was an ego or condescension filter on WUWT. Wouldn’t that be nice?
[REPLY: It would need to have a check box to exclude moderators. -REP]
Jean Parisot says:
November 26, 2011 at 7:59 pm
“Mac, alot of spectral studies were done using balloons to reduce cost. My guess would be that updwelling spectral data collected against a deep space background would be better then trying to deal with the down dwelling issues.”
Hi Jean!
My questions for you are similar to those for Dr. Wingo.:
What would the hardware package for this device cost and how many devices would be needed? If they are flown on high altitude balloons, how many flights at how many different locations around the world would be needed? What would the average flight cost? What logistical support cost?
How could we ‘dress it up to look like an AGW support package to secure funding from our own taxpayer funds, then make damn sure the data and analyses were unadultered reported honestly?
Mosher;
Here’s a much simplified (but reasonably accurate) portrayel of the “paleo science” without no steenkin’ feesisks.
1. I find a tree that started growing in 1800 AD and by 1850 AD it was 25 feet tall.
2. I find another tree that started growing in 1850, and by 1900 it was 30 feet tall.
3. I find a third tree that started growing in 1900, and by 1950, it was 35 feet tall.
This is proof that the earth is warming as a result of CO2 emissions.
4. I find a fourth tree that started growing in 1950, and by 2000, it was 25 feet tall.
This is proof that tree growth ceased responding to temperature in 1950, and that the earth is warming as a result of CO2 emissions.
Feesiks? We donneed no steenkin’ feesiks.
To avoid being cryptic, I’m looking at you Mosher.
The lastest on Briffa is in an essay by Steve McIntyre at his site:
http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/25/behind-closed-doors-perpetuating-rubbish
davidmhoffer says:
November 26, 2011 at 8:40 pm
Your observations of human nature are spot on. People on The Team are hardcore and play hardcore. That one or more of them has created an “out” for himself by posting Climategate 1 and 2 makes a lot of sense for this kind of personality. However, I think Briffa is a special case for the two reasons that he was treated badly over a long period of time and he objected to The Team’s excesses over a long period of time. Of course, he also fully embraced what The Team was doing. That is how hardcore people are.
One thing is certain. The person who put together Climategate 1 and 2 had a participant’s knowledge of those emails. Two continues One all too well for it to be the work of a computer programmer.
davidmhoffer says:
November 26, 2011 at 9:10 pm
I am not sure whether you intended a parody but it is not a parody. What you have described is basically what The Team did and continues to do. They can sort of justify it because some other idiots did it before they did it.
They make it look serious with some fancy but worthless statistics. But data points and statistics have never yielded science.
As Professor Daly and other eminent scientists explained to The Team, paleoclimatology has not employed scientific method at all. If The Team are to become serious then they must do the empirical research that will yield the physical hypotheses that explain changes in relevant kinds of tree rings in the environments studied and over hundreds of years. Not one member of The Team would even consider the idea.
Hi Dennis,
Rather than flying the sort of ‘experiment’ you suggest aboard ISS, do you think daily flights to 100km aboard a suborbital RLV could be an alternate, or even, better option?
Dave
crosspatch says:
November 26, 2011 at 8:48 pm
“My guess is that it had to be done by an IT staffer or with the assistance of one. I would hope one had to have “root” access in order to obtain these files but I have seen mistakes where all users were placed in a “mail” group of a Unix server that held a mail store owned by “mail” user and “mail” group with group read/write privs.”
This IT setup had to be simple enough to be used by Jones and friends. Who was the manager in charge of this IT setup? Phil Jones. My guess is that a nine-year old could have gained total access to it. By the way, given the skills involved, the culprit was a team.
artwest says:
November 26, 2011 at 8:33 pm
“I’d suspect a hell of a lot less than is p*ssed away by most developed economies in a single hour due to CAGW scaremongering.”
Art,
Believe me, I understand the disgust you sense for all of the taxpayer dollars wasted on the AGW meme. But I’m genuinely asking folks to flesh these ideas out some more and provide estimates here. If these are basic measurement packages that can get the fundamental data needed to really quantify the ‘positive feed back contribution of CO2’, then we ALL should pursue this with unswerving determination! If the ultimate answer is ‘not much – get a real religion’, I’d like to make that happen as soon as possible, before another 15 years of taxpayer treasure is wasted and an ersatz global regulation of CO2 is effected!!!
If this is the foundation atmospheric physics that must be run, let’s get white paper proposals in place to secure funding to make it happen! Dress it up in AGW frippery to get the funding, maintain secure control while you run the experiments, analyse the data and publish the results openly and honestly.
No, I don’t believe they would have operated the server which would, by all indications so far, be an SMTP mail server of some sort running a pop3 daemon. Jones would have had no need to ever log on to the server in that case, he would simply point his mail client at the server and the client would retrieve the mail.
Theo Goodwin says:
November 26, 2011 at 9:38 pm
davidmhoffer says:
November 26, 2011 at 9:10 pm
I am not sure whether you intended a parody but it is not a parody.>>>
Nope. It was intended as a simplified explanation of “paleo science” and how it has been used. I chose 1950 for the suddenly short tree because that is in fact when tree ring data stopped tracking the temperature record. The tree ring studies that were then truncated to “hide the decline” were chopped off (if memory serves me correctly) in 1950 and 1960 respectively.
I do write parodies from time to time, but they are way over the top ridiculous. Oh… I see your point. What they actually did was way over the top ridiculous…
crosspatch says:
November 26, 2011 at 9:50 pm
I meant that Jones was the overseer of the server administrator, not that Jones was the administrator. With Jones as overseer, the server administrator could do whatever he pleased.
Hi Dennis,
Rather than flying the sort of ‘experiment’ you suggest aboard ISS, do you think daily flights to 100km aboard a suborbital RLV could be an alternate, or even, better option?
Dave
Dave old buddy! I do think that a suborbital system like Lynx or Spaceship II or Carmak’s vehicle or even the high altitude balloons would be part of a campaign to gain the data at a series of altitudes that would allow for a parameterization of CO2 absorption based upon physical measurements. However, with that being said, we also need the full data across the atmosphere that you would get from ISS.
To answer another couple of people, to fly an instrument like this on the station for a year would probably cost about $5m dollars and a lot of that is for the data transfer through TDRSS. You also need an identical system on the ground, that is taken to several locations in order to get some good numbers. One of the things that has always bothered me is that there is both a temperature and a pressure relationship to any visible or IR absorber and at no time has the varying altitude of the ground been taken into account. So a really solid campaign would take a year and about $10-$15 m, with most of the ground stuff being used for travel for the sensors.
These flights would be done from different parts of the world as well in order to use very dry climates as well as wet ones as it has been my experience that water vapor changes temps and absorption spectra far more than CO2, but let us let the actual data from the physical sciences tell us what the solution is, not suppositions.
At the end of the day, I don’t care what the answer is, as long as the data is based upon real science and real measurements, not computer models backed up by at the end of the day, nothing more than Hansen’s empirical relationship.
crosspatch says:
November 26, 2011 at 9:50 pm
This IT setup had to be simple enough to be used by Jones and friends.
No, I don’t believe they would have operated the server which would, by all indications so far, be an SMTP mail server of some sort running a pop3 daemon. Jones would have had no need to ever log on to the server in that case, he would simply point his mail client at the server and the client would retrieve the mail.>>>
I wasn’t uncommon in the late 80’s and all through the 90’s for researchers to run their own email servers. It became less common from then on, but it didn’t disappear overnight. Keep in mind that the genesis of the internet was ARPANET which was created for the specific task of allowing electronic communication between researchers at various universities and various US government research agencies working with them. In those days, central IT at most universities had never heard of “email” and had no interest in getting involved with researchers and their compute problems. Central IT in those days was worried about payroll and general ledger and so on.
Researchers of Jones et al vintage would have grown up self sufficient in UNIX administration, including setting up and running email servers. I’m not saying I know they did, just that it would not surprise me in the least that they could and did.
That said, on the whocuddadunnit question, I’l leave you with the first rule of computer security:
If you have physical access, then you have access.
Could have been the janitor!
The real quote:
“Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!!!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqomZQMZQCQ
The oft attributed phrase “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!” is as corrupted and false as Michael Mann’s infamous ‘hockey stick’
“Pheesiks? We ain’t got no pheesiks. We don’t need no pheesiks. I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ pheesiks!!!” I think that tells the whole story, quite well….
Michael Mann has already shown he doesn’t understand statistics. Phil Jones admits to being baffled by Excel. The Team only recently discovered paleontology. Someday they may look at the history of the atmosphere over geologic time. And we know they refuse to ask for outside help. Expecting (radiative and convective transfer of energy) physics is asking too much; their plate is full.
Dennis Ray Wingo, good points all and a tempting experiment. However, isn’t there so much heterogeneity of CO2 content in the atmosphere that you’d come up with all sorts of results, but what would it show for certain except there’s heterogeneity of CO2 content in the atmosphere?
When a Warming Model asked for some results from real physics, Meester Bandito probably just gave her a physic, then changed the oil.
Here is the highly biassed Sydney Morning Herald view of ClimateGate 2.0:
“The IPCC found there was a 66 per cent probability that doubling the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would lead to a temperature rise of between 2 and 4.5 degrees.
The new study funded by the US National Science Foundation estimated the warming at this level of emissions was most likely to be 2.3 degrees, with a 66 per cent probability it would be between 1.7 and 2.6 degrees.
The world’s governments accept that a temperature rise of more than two degrees above pre-industrial levels is likely to have serious consequences, potentially triggering unpredictable tipping points as ice sheets collapse and large amounts of greenhouse gas are released from melting Siberian permafrost.”
“Its publication followed the release on Tuesday of a second cache of hacked emails between senior climate scientists — dubbed “Climategate 2″ by sceptics.
….
Nine inquiries into the initial hacked emails found nothing that undermined the climate science backed by the world’s major scientific academies.”
The SMH is always full of this sort of rubbish. No wonder most the Australian populace has been so effectively brainwashed.
finally….it’s game on….
27 Nov: UK Telegraph: Lobbyists who cleared ‘Climategate’ academics funded by taxpayers and the BBC
A shadowy lobby group which pushes the case that global warming is a real threat is being funded by the taxpayer and assisted by the BBC.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/8469883/Lobbyists-who-cleared-Climategate-academics-funded-by-taxpayers-and-the-BBC.html
BBC sought advice from global warming scientists on economy, drama, music… and even game shows
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2066706/BBC-sought-advice-global-warming-scientists-economy-drama-music–game-shows.html
27 Nov: Uk Daily Mail: Cameron’s green guru reveals his doubts over global warming
Steve Hilton, the Prime Minister’s director of strategy and ‘green guru’, is the latest person to admit to doubts about climate change.
‘I’m not sure I believe in it,’ he announced at a meeting of the Energy Department, prompting one aide to blurt out: ‘Did I just hear that correctly?’
According to one witness, Hilton, 41, the man who coined the slogan ‘Vote Blue and Go Green’ and changed the Tory symbol from a Stalinist style torch to an eco friendly tree, said: ‘Climate change arguments are highly complex.
‘My focus has always been more on using green issues to improve the quality of life.’ …
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2066720/David-Camerons-green-guru-Steve-Hilton-reveals-doubts-global-warming.html
Dennis Ray Wingo says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:57 pm
—————————
Dennis, would your experiment be able to confirm or refute one point in this paper, namely that increasing temperature increases the mean free path of EM radiation, thereby ( my probably erroneous conclusion) introducing a self limiting effect of CO2?
http://www.biocab.org/Mean_Free_Path_Length_Photons.html (paper by Nasif Nahle)
It would be nice to see his conclusion that CO2 has no effect on warming be vindicated by actual experiment.
Some good comments on this thread.
Rattus Norvegicus says: November 26, 2011 at 6:04 pm
“Dude, this is a group of people who study paleoclimates, what did you expect?”
Agreed – CRU is headed up by an environmental scientist.
Crispin in Waterloo says: November 26, 2011 at 7:09 pm
Exactly my thoughts Crispin, but put much better that I could. I think with the impending economic armageddon we should be in a good position to radically cut money to lots of public sector bodies, including academic institutions like CRU and the likes of the Met Office. Academia in particular needs a complete overhaul with the new found free access to information provided by the Internet.
It’s not really a surprise either that recently, the Fairfax family have practically removed themselves totally from the share register of Fairfax Media, home of the Silly Morning Herald….
I didn’t know Micheal Mann was an aussie. Must come from Seedny ; )