As predicted, Gavin Schmidt did not respond, but I did get a nice letter from Dr. Reto Ruedy after Gavin forwarded the complaint. To his credit, Dr. Ruedy has now corrected the issue that I highlighted here. I appreciate his response. Some email addresses were redacted to prevent autospamming – Anthony
From: Ruedy, Reto A. (GISS-611.0)[TRINNOVIM, LLC]
Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2012 9:17 AM
To: Anthony
Cc: Sato, Makiko (GISS-611.0)[GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER] ; Schmidt, Gavin A. (GISS-6110) ; HANSEN, JAMES E. (GISS-6110)
Subject: RE: courtesy note
Dear Mr. Watts,
The page with the figure you mention in your email has been created manually until recently and no data have been displayed in the past on that page for periods that partially lie in the future.
However, when I automated the creation of that page there was one program – the one that finds the US annual means – that missed the feature not to produce such means.
That oversight – which had no effect until this month – has been corrected and you should only see on our temperature web site estimates for periods that lie completely in the past. The 2012 US mean anomaly estimate will not be shown in that display before January 2013.
Thank you very much for notifying us. We appreciate and as far as I know always responded to any notification of an actual or suspected error on our web page. If I ever failed to respond to any of your emails to GISS, please forward them to me – I could not find any in my mailbox.
I am familiar with and appreciate your work examining the quality of temperature reports and want to thank you for that effort.
Best regards,
Reto Ruedy
—–Original Message—–
From: Schmidt, Gavin A. (GISS-6110)
Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2012 8:09 PM
To: Ruedy, Reto A. (GISS-611.0)[TRINNOVIM, LLC]
Cc: Sato, Makiko (GISS-611.0)[GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER]
Subject: FW: courtesy note
something definitely odd with the 2012 number in Fig.D.gif – and I wonder why it’s being calculated at all? We only have 7 months so far for an annual mean…
Gavin
=============
Gavin Schmidt
NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies
2880 Broadway
New York, NY 10025
Tel: (212) xxxxx
Email: Gavin.A.Schmidt@xxxx
URL: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/gschmidt.html
________________________________________
From: Anthony
Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2012 3:44 PM
To: Schmidt, Gavin A. (GISS-6110)
Subject: courtesy note
Dear Dr. Schmidt,
I doubt you’ll credit me when you fix this, or even acknowledge receipt of this message, but I’m informing you of the error anyway.
Best Regards,
Anthony Watts
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I have always found Reto to be very quick and open when he has responded to queries I have.
davidmhoffer says:
August 22, 2012 at 10:38 am
“Which leads to the obvious question. Are there additional errors that are no so obvious embedded in the automation that we have not yet detected?”
I migrate data professionally, and one of my warnings to customers about automating data modifications is that you need to do a lot of testing, the worst kind of error is the undetected error.
Dr Ruedy is a man. Well done Sir. That is how you respond to errors. Gavin, Mann, Jones et al, look and learn.
4 marks for graciousness.
Reto Ruedy looks like a ‘class act’.
Problem identified, fixed, and acknowledged. Nice.
It’s a refreshing change from the “deny, denigrate, insult, and attack” that often happens in such things.
If there were more folks like that (on both sides) willing to recognize what the other has to offer; there would be a lot more progress and a lot less pointless rock tossing.
Boy, that courteous response makes your original email look a bit snide and petty.
REPLY: Gavin’s reputation precedes him. Never had a cross word with Reto though, probably never will. Next time I see a problem with GISS, I’ll just bypass Gavin altoether and deal directly with Reto – Anthony
This is good. I keep reminding myself that GISS isn’t full of Hansens. Inside every one of these warmist agencies there are genuine scientists and thinkers looking on and frowning at the extremists in charge. Think of NASA’s 49. Retired people can talk without threat to their livelihood but there are plenty of others watching and waiting. I believe the same is true for the MSM. Some of them fully understand what is going on and are biding their time (at least I hope so). We get shown the surface layer of alarmism but underneath that there is growing discord. That’s the way I see it.
You got a good and helpful response, Anthony, and a correction in place. Every bit helps. 🙂
Dr. Reudy’s award appears to be a well-deserved recognition of a scientist “down in the ranks” rather than the the organizations leader, i.e,. Hansen.or his alter ego, Gavin Schmidt. Reudy’s response to Anthony was prompt and respectful.
“estimates” !!! First time I’ve seen GISS, or any of the other usual suspects, publicly acknowledge what their temperature numbers actually are. So how do you estimate (v) to 100th of a degree?
Just wait until ‘the Team ‘ harewhat Ruedy, has done , how long before he does a 180 and says there was no error and even if there had been one he would never take advice from a ‘fossil fuel funded climate change denier ‘. The Team never forgives nor forgets .
REPLY: Gavin’s reputation precedes him. Never had a cross word with Reto though, probably never will. Next time I see a problem with GISS, I’ll just bypass Gavin altoether and deal directly with Reto – Anthony
================
This deserves repeating, 😉
I’d suggest cc’ing Gavin but directing the email to Reto. Gavin does care about the quality of his products, but he’s obviously not the one who maintains the software.
I guess Dr. Ruedy isn’t going to be invited to the next hockey-team Christmas party. [snip]
Excuse me, but that “courtesy note” was anything but and Gavin Schmidt was right to not reply to you.
Regardless of what you think of the man, if you are going to inform him of something “as a courtesy”, then you’re obliged, at least initially, to BE COURTEOUS.
It’s not enough simply frame a rude message with “Dear Dr Schmidt” and “Best Regards”.
Implying off the bat that he would be not acknowledge or credit you is RUDE; not to mention giving absolutely now info in the message except for a link to your blog – one that includes “climate-fail-giss” right in the URL
Your messages to the mailing list routinely include substantial info; if you truly intended to be “courteous”, at least a modicum of info should have been included, preferably at the start of the e-mail instead of the implication of presupposed ingratitude.
If you wanted to link to something, it should have been the problematic GISS page not your own analysis of their “climate fail”
@ur momisugly D Marshall on August 23, 2012 at 7:49 am:
By normal rules of courtesy you are correct, but not in this case.
I would not describe the initial email as rude, perhaps surly, but understandable given the history. Reflecting that, Anthony stated his expectations and reported the problem, simultaneously pointing out he had already blogged about it. If he was being absolutely polite he would have emailed before blogging to give them a chance to fix it beforehand, although they should have already noticed the problem before the post.
In this case, given the history, for Anthony to be as courteous as you suggest, if done consistently, given how relatively often these things crop up, to Gavin it may well have sounded like a little kid continually tugging on the sleeve of someone painting a wall, “Excuse me, mister, but you missed another spot”. Which may well have exacerbated the already-contentious tension between them.
For the situation, the wording of Anthony’s missive was well measured, considerate with the expected tone, but without what could be interpreted as an insulting manner (neither too harsh nor too polite).
Of course, for all we know they could just be communicating in a “friendly” style like two guys who are frequently in competition might do:
“Hey d**che bag, I know you’re not gonna thank me but I’m telling you now, you screwed up again!”
“You got that right, s***head, I ain’t ever gonna thank you for anything!”
Now imagine Gavin and Anthony sharing a pitcher of beer at a bar, talking like that…
Why a complaint? Would it not have been simpler and less contentious to say something like “I brought to their attention a problem with one of the graphs on their site?”
REPLY: It’s a complaint, because they didn’t have any quality control in place nor caught it themselves, you bunny bonehead. Sheesh. If the situation was reversed, you’d release a snark horde on me. – Anthony
Why was the complaint directed at Gavin Schmidt in the 1st place? Looking around the GISS site, I would think any of the following would have been a better choice as their names are featured far more prominently:
\
Featured in the banner at the bottom of every page
NASA official: James Hansen
Website curator: Robert B Schmunk
From the contacts area on http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
James Hansen, Reto Reudy, Makiko Sato, Ken Lo.
Even on http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/references.html, Schmidt’s name is nowhere to be found.