Twenty years ago today: The infamous “hockey stick” graph that crystalized global warming and ignited the climate wars was published, and became known as MBH98. The science in it was so bad, it is credited with spawning the modern climate skeptic movement.
Michael E. Mann writes in the formerly Scientific American:
Two decades ago this week a pair of colleagues and I published the original “hockey stick” graph in Nature, which happened to coincide with the Earth Day 1998 observances. The graph showed Earth’s temperature, relatively stable for 500 years, had spiked upward during the 20th century. A year later we would extend the graph back in time to A.D. 1000, demonstrating this rise was unprecedented over at least the past millennium—as far back as we could go with the data we had.
Although I didn’t realize it at the time, publishing the hockey stick would change my life in a fundamental way. I was thrust suddenly into the spotlight. Nearly every major newspaper and television news networkcovered our study. The widespread attention was exhilarating, if not intimidating for a science nerd with little or no experience—or frankly, inclination at the time—in communicating with the public.
Nothing in my training as a scientist could have prepared me for the very public battles I would soon face. The hockey stick told a simple story: There is something unprecedented about the warming we are experiencing today and, by implication, it has something to do with us and our profligate burning of fossil fuels. The story was a threat to companies that profited from fossil fuels, and government officials doing their bidding, all of whom opposed efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As the vulnerable junior first author of the article (I was a postdoctoral researcher), I found myself in the crosshairs of industry-funded attack dogs looking to discredit the iconic symbol of the human impact on our climate…by discrediting me personally.
In my 2013 book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, I gave a name to this modus operandi of science critics: the Serengeti strategy. The term describes how industry special interests and their facilitators single out individual researchers to attack, in much the same way lions of the Serengeti single out an individual zebra from the herd. In numbers there is strength; individuals are far more vulnerable.
The purpose of this strategy, still in force today, is twofold: to undermine the credibility of the science community, thus impairing scientists as messengers and communicators; and to discourage other researchers from raising their heads above the parapet and engaging in public discourse over policy-relevant science. If the aggressors are successful, as I have argued before, we all lose out—in the form of policies that favor special interests over our interests.
Read the rest of Dr. Mann’s “poor me” pleading here (or not)
In the meantime, Climategate happened in November 2009, along with “Mike’s Nature Trick”
So far one of the most circulated e-mails from the CRU hack is the following from Phil Jones to the original hockey stick authors – Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes.
From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) xxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK
The e-mail is about WMO statement on the status of the global climate in 1999 -report, or more specifically, about its cover image.
Back in December 2004 John Finn asked about “the divergence” in Myth vs. Fact Regarding the “Hockey Stick” -thread of RealClimate.org.
Whatever the reason for the divergence, it would seem to suggest that the practice of grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record – as I believe was done in the case of the ‘hockey stick’ – is dubious to say the least.
Mike’s response speaks for itself.
No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstrution. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum.
But there is an interesting twist here: grafting the thermometer onto a reconstruction is not actually the original “Mike’s Nature trick”! Mann did not fully graft the thermometer on a reconstruction, but he stopped the smoothed series in their end years. The trick is more sophisticated, and was uncovered by UC over here.
When smoothing these time series, the Team had a problem: actual reconstructions “diverge” from the instrumental series in the last part of 20th century. For instance, in the original hockey stick (ending 1980) the last 30-40 years of data points slightly downwards. In order to smooth those time series one needs to “pad” the series beyond the end time, and no matter what method one uses, this leads to a smoothed graph pointing downwards in the end whereas the smoothed instrumental series is pointing upwards — a divergence. So Mann’s solution was to use the instrumental record for padding, which changes the smoothed series to point upwards as clearly seen in UC’s figure (violet original, green without “Mike’s Nature trick”).
TGIF-magazine has already asked Jones about the e-mail, and he denied misleading anyone but did remember grafting.
“No, that’s completely wrong. In the sense that they’re talking about two different things here. They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered – but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years.”
Jones told TGIF he had no idea what me meant by using the words “hide the decline”.
“That was an email from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?”
Maybe it helps Dr. Jones’s recollection of the exact context, if he inspects UC’s figure carefully. We here at CA are more than pleased to be able to help such nice persons in these matters.
There is not a little irony that Mann’s claim to fame comes from denying climate change. The quality of Mann can be seen in not how AGW sceptics view him but as show in the leaked e-mails how his own side view him. Hence way he will be first under the bus come to day , one that can not be to soon, the rats in the sack seek to save themselves at any cost .
The violet curve is clearly moving up at the end, not going down as the head post says.
Willis,
thanks for the link to you’re “okole…”.
It’s the first time I have seen such a clear demonstration of Climategate in action.
As you may know, I’m not a scientist, nor even particularly well educated, but even I can identify, without reference to your excellent explanations, that Phil Jones et al were (and presumably still are) twisting the FOIA, Data Protection Act etc. until they scream.
At one point I think Phil Jones refers to being forced to adopt a more formal tone in his communications. I’m sorry, but my expectation from my past employment is that anything communicated relative to work remains formal, clear and professional. In my ignorance, I understood the scientific community to conform to that expectation as members are so highly educated, however, it seems not, which entirely discredits science itself.
And whilst I am largely uneducated, it doesn’t mean I’m not familiar with process and communication. I was a police officer and it was almost beaten into each and every one of us that communications, from the notebooks we used to record information on, through the raising of initial crime reports, to the actual report itself, often long and complicated documents, must be concise, clear and truthful because one day casual language, processes and lies would be publicly announced in a court room.
Climate Audit seems to have been the climate communities courtroom. Had this been a criminal case, and those emails been produced in evidence, I’m certain the question of attempting to pervert the course of justice would have been raised. Ducking, diving, and colluding with others to withhold, and even delete data germane to an investigation is considered a crime in the UK, almost as serious as the original crime.
It seems you have spent more than 12 unpaid years pursuing this matter, that’s a huge chunk of anyone’s life. The climate community in general, both alarmists and sceptics, owe you and your fellow sceptics a huge debt of gratitude. You have received scant praise for your efforts to hold these peoples feet to the fire but there are innumerable knowledgeable commenter’s over the years of WUWT (and CA etc.) who have benefited from your diligence.
Thank you.
HotScot.
PS. My thoughts are with Toronto today.
ALLAN MACRAE April 24, 2018 at 1:35 am
Scientists opposed to Kyoto have now been vindicated. As a result of a Material Complaint filed by Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph and Steven McIntyre, Nature issued a Corrigendum in July 2004, a correction of Mann’s hockey stick. It acknowledged extensive errors in the description of the Mann data set, and conceded that key steps in the computations were left out and conflicted with the descriptions in the original paper.”
Not the corrigendum that I read!
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/shared/articles/MBH98-corrigendum04.pdf
Some history of the Piltdown Mann saga:
We knew MBH98 was biased, false nonsense the moment it was published – because it eliminated the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age from the climate record. It took Steve McIntyre’s tireless and highly competent work to decipher the mechanism of this Big Lie, which was fabricated to support the now-defunct Kyoto Protocol.
These warmist clowns have a well-earned reputation for NEGATIVE CREDIBILITY. ALL their very-scary predictions of the past decades have FAILED TO MATERIALIZE – THE WARMISTS HAVE A PERFECT NEGATIVE PREDICTIVE TRACK RECORD.
The practical solution? Assume the climate clowns are lying all the time – probabilistically, you will be correct – and you will save yourself a lot of time.
Regards, Allan
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/03/climate-science-fraud-at-albany-university/#comment-126075
[excerpt]
Too right Leif,
Here is further evidence of this deplorable behaviour from the warmist camp, excerpted from an article I wrote circa 2005 and published in E&E:
“Mann eliminated from the climate record both the Medieval Warm Period, a period from about 900 to 1500 AD when global temperatures were generally warmer than today, and also the Little Ice Age from about 1500 to 1800 AD, when temperatures were colder. Mann’s conclusion contradicted hundreds of previous studies on this subject, but was adopted without question by Kyoto advocates.
In the April 2003 issue of Energy and Environment, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and co-authors wrote a review of over 250 research papers that concluded that the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age were true climatic anomalies with world-wide imprints – contradicting Mann’s hockey stick and undermining the basis of Kyoto. Soon et al were then attacked in EOS, the journal of the American Geophysical Union.
In the July 2003 issue of GSA Today, University of Ottawa geology professor Jan Veizer and Israeli astrophysicist Nir Shaviv concluded that temperatures over the past 500 million years correlate with changes in cosmic ray intensity as Earth moves in and out of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. The geologic record showed no correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and temperatures, even though prehistoric CO2 levels were often many times today’s levels. Veizer and Shaviv also received “special attention” from EOS.
In both cases, the attacks were unprofessional – first, these critiques should have been launched in the journals that published the original papers, not in EOS. Also, the victims of these attacks were not given advanced notice, nor were they were given the opportunity to respond in the same issue. In both cases the victims had to wait months for their rebuttals to be published, while the specious attacks were circulated by the pro-Kyoto camp.
Scientists opposed to Kyoto have now been vindicated. As a result of a Material Complaint filed by Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph and Steven McIntyre, Nature issued a Corrigendum in July 2004, a correction of Mann’s hockey stick. It acknowledged extensive errors in the description of the Mann data set, and conceded that key steps in the computations were left out and conflicted with the descriptions in the original paper.”
**************************
Later, the Wegman committee issued a scathing condemnation of the Mann hockey stick conclusions.
We knew Mann’ hockey stick was wrong all along, but it took Steve McIntyre to show us exactly how it was wrong.
However, it took years for Steve to uncover the truth. Meanwhile, the warmist camp has hatched many new alarmist falsehoods.
Detailed rebuttals a la McIntyre take much longer to prepare than it takes the warmists to fabricate new scary stories.
Better to just assume that everything that comes from the warmist camp is self-serving, alarmist and false. Recent history has shown that there is a 99% probability that you will be correct in this assumption, nine times out of ten.
*****************************
To Kristi Silber: You seem like well educated person and willing to learn about the “Hockey Stick”. You must go back to the beginning. The IPPC could not explain what caused the Mid-evil Warm Period. So they came up with an answer, the Hockey Stick”. During a Senate hearing an email from one of IPPC lead scientist to another scientist surfaced stating “we must get rid of the “MWP”. Next thing you know it was gone. If that doesn’t raise your interest of what going on nothing will. At top top of the page you will find a reference link. Find out about the “who’s doing what and why”. Or you can be just lazy.
“Nothing in my training as a scientist could have prepared me for the very public battles I would soon face. The hockey stick told a simple story: There is something unprecedented about the warming we are experiencing today ”
Nothing in your training as a scientist prepared you to torture the data to get the story that you wanted everyone to hear. Pretty sure that you were told not to.
To Kristi Silber: I just an old construction worker. Been working outside in this weather/climate all my life. If you go back to the “Hockey” Stick” beginning you should go back to the beginning “Why Co2 is Bad” I believe it has to do with the “UN”,”coal miners”, “nuclear power”, “research funds” and the UK.
Good luck, have fun.
I note with no surprise that amongst all the discussion in this thread there has yet to be any real discussion of “numbers” by which I mean the actual data that Mann eventually and reluctantly made available. The first part of Kristi’s contribution of 23rd April,10.50pm perhaps indicates why this is so. Quote
” Willis,
I have read your smooth operator story. First I want to commend you on your work. I wish I had the understanding of math and statistics that you do.” End quote.
I have no idea how much understanding of math and statistics the Kristi has, but will assume that he knows what principal components are, and why authors addressing complex data sets use them, and more especially at the practical level that he can manipulate a spread sheet (or statistical software) to handle substantial arrays of data and carry out computations on these arrays.
On this assumption I recommend that Kristi collects the Mann data set (112 columns and up to 583 rows, if my memory from nearly 20 years ago is correct) and does some processing. First, though, we should I think decide to accept at face value the numbers that Mann used in his construction of his famous plot. We need to accept that each of the data columns is a parameter that Mann genuinely believes (or at least believed) to be a valid measure of the “climate” existing at the sites of the columns, and thus is a proper and reliable contributor to the sum of knowledge on the Northern Hemisphere temperature – or proxy for temperature – for the years that are included in the investigation. If that is not so there’s no point in going any further. As a starting point, and without other sources of information, one would expect (or hope) that the data columns have roughly equal weight. If a column’s weight is deemed to be very small relative to that of others why include it at all?
You will note plenty of oddities in this large block of data. For example some data values that are in different columns are recorded as being exactly the same as some others – to 6 or more digits!. Some data are not directly related to temperatures (precipitation for example), and other data come from the Southern Hemisphere. Many are labelled as being principal components themselves. This sort of thing can legitimately raise a few eyebrows regarding the validity and appropriateness of the data, though apparently not the those of the reviewers of the MBH98 paper. The striking variety of data means that the sizes variances of the recorded numbers are on hugely different scales, so that simple averaging across columns would be a nonsensical operation.
Thus, to proceed at all with analysis it is necessary to normalise all the columns to mean zero, variance one, noting that because of varying column lengths averaging across normalised columns could still be a somewhat questionable procedure, but it is still vastly preferable to other simple homogenisation techniques.
Now, at last, you should be able to go ahead with some straightforward analytical work. This would naturally begin with graphical analysis, since Mann’s earth-shaking conclusions were based on plots.
So, Kristi, you are now able to make some fact-backed statements about what Mann’s data can tell us, rather than relying on what others have to say about it, including Mann.
I’ll not spoil the pleasure and fun of doing this work, except to say that whatever you do, you will find no hint whatsoever of an overwhelming hockey stick sitting disguised in the data. Why? Because there isn’t one.
I did all this nearly 20 years ago, when Steve McKintyre kindly sent me Mann’s original data. The stats content is minimal, so any misgivings you may have on that score regarding your knowledge are unnecessary, and it is very obvious that you are not stupid!!
I wish you well on your voyage of discovery.
robinedwards36,
Thank you for the courteous post. Interesting idea. The problem is, I also know enough to realize that simply graphing data is not necessarily going to get me anywhere. The PCA was used to pull out patterns in the data, no? These patterns might correspond to influences of latitude, altitude, precipitation, and, of course, temperature. The interaction of these factors is why looking at graphs of raw data is not informative. Graphs are usually meant to represent a result visually, not in order to get a result (except sometimes in an exploratory fashion, such as validating statistical assumptions). I’m sure there are exceptions.
The data set is only valuable to one who knows what it means and how it was used. There could be whole rows and columns that weren’t part of the analysis. It’s impossible to know without seeing the computer code what was included in Mann’s paper.
Variants of the ‘hockey stick’ shape have been reproduced again and again since Mann’s. Whether he did it right or not, he got a good (but not perfect) estimate of reality.
“…it is very obvious that you are not stupid!!” That’s very nice to hear. I know I’m not, but it’s hard to say what others see. Thank you!
“I wish you well on your voyage of discovery.”
Likewise, whatever that voyage may be. Let life be filled with discovery!
Let’s remember that date and create a “Bad Science Day”. “Mangled Data Day” might be an alternative.
The big irony is that at the time this Mann-termed “iconic” (also note his use of another religious term “observances” in connection with Earth Day) graph was published, it was the end of the warming period and the beginning of the dreaded “Pause” that extended ~2 decades and appears to be about to resume again despite being marinated in warm night sea air in the Karlization “hide the decline” of the instrumental series. The hockey stick blade has been bent back flat and is now a scythe.
Call me old fashioned but the most recent global anomoly in Hadcrut4 was for Feb 2018 at 0.523 whilst in Feb 1998 it was 0.763 ie 0.24 cooler now than 20 years ago.
What an ironic fact for a Hockey Stick to contend with.
son of mulder – “…for Feb 2018 at 0.523 whilst in Feb 1998 it was 0.763…”
What do you think was the reason for that?
“Michael E. Mann writes in the formerly Scientific American” ha ha
I like Mikey’s self description as “science nerd with little or no experience”. I think that should precede Michael Mann’s name every time it is mentioned.
This one graph effectively rewrote human history. MWP and LIA were shown to be figments of civilizations history. Anybody who studied history and assumed these were events that had any impacts were shown to be charlatans promulgating falsehoods.
Yeah, I can see that being an problem for 20% of scientists.
The magazine is the “Politically Correct American”
Meanwhile, in the UK…
New Scientist just did a feature on the Science of the Patriarchy.
Be grateful for what you still have.
“Politically Correct Anti-American”
Anti-Scientific Anti-American
Didn’t Phil Jones tell someone (perhaps Don Keiller) that he wouldn’t give out data because the requester was only looking for errors?
Perhaps this is relevant.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/climatechange/7385584/Row-over-leaked-climate-emails-may-undermine-reputation-of-science.html
It was Warwick Hughes, and the entire story is here. Phil famously said:
w.
I’d love to see Kristi try to defend this statement.
Thanks Willis
I’d been racking my brain trying to remember the detail.
MarkW –
I have no reason to, since I’m not defending them. The handling of data was disorganized and unprofessional.
At the same time, I can understand their motives. It would be a rotten position to have to give what you’ve worked so hard on to someone who really does only want it in order to find any possible weaknesses and gnaw on them until the whole study is discredited, whether justly or not.
Among the emails demanding data:
“1. raw monthly station temperature time series as contributed to Jones/CRU from various global meteorological organizations, together with metadata.
2. corrected and correct monthly station temperature time series used to generate trends together with a list of all corrections;
3. The results of all homogeneity testing.
4. Station documentation for each station along the lines as set out in TR022 and TR027 but updated and expanded to include all current stations. That is a start, more is required, for example, all station intercomparisons must be listed and those that influenced decisions should be ranked.
5. A list of stations used to generate trends, that have not reported in 2004.
6. Expanding on 5, a list should be supplied for each year back to 1995, of all stations that ceased reporting each year.”
This is not the kind of thing used in experimental replication. You want to replicate it, you start from scratch. Otherwise you could just incorporate the same mistakes. This is the kind of this one would use to “locate” errors without knowing what the original team did precisely.
Antagonistic science is corrosive to quality and standards. There is much discussion in the “climategate” emails about the duty of scientists to uphold the quality and “purity” of science, and to them that meant rebuttals in the published literature. It also meant putting an end to a biased peer review process that was allowing poor-quality science to get published. They dwell on quality, and also mention an ad hominem attack on the field got published, something that should have been edited out during peer review.
So, I don’t defend how CRU handled it; I think they were wrong, but I sure don’t side with the skeptics, who have themselves been unprofessional.
Kristi, you really stepped in it, this time. You could not be more wrong.
1. The data does not belong to Jones, Mann, etc. They did not pay for it.
Just the opposite, in fact. They’ve been paid for it. The taxpayers paid for it, and the taxpayers also paid Jones, Mann, et al for stewardship services. They have no ethical right to hold that data hostage!
2. It is not “a rotten position to have to give what you’ve worked so hard on to someone who really does only want it in order to find any possible weaknesses and gnaw on them until the whole study is discredited.” That’s what real scientists do.
If you are confident that you didn’t botch your work, then you have nothing to fear from other scientists going over it with a fine-toothed comb, looking for mistakes. It doesn’t matter whether they’re friendly or hostile.
http://magazine.amstat.org/blog/2011/07/01/trust-your-science/
For my one little published paper in the field, I archived all the data, plus all the computer source code, and I wrote up instructions to make it as easy as possible for anyone to replicate what I did, and I put it all into a .zip file on a public archive.
It’s been there over five years. So far, nobody has found any errors. But if anyone were to find an error in my work, although I would not enjoy learning that I’d made a mistake, I would nevertheless be grateful to the person who found it. I would sincerely thank him or her, regardless of whether he was friendly or hostile.
I don’t need to hide my code and data to prevent hostile people from finding errors in it. It stands on its own.
That’s not a boast, and that’s not unusual. It’s simply a statement of what every scientist should be able to say.
3. Temperature measurement data is not the results of “experiments,” and you can’t “start from scratch” and make a new batch. The station data, which Jones, Mann et al were so desperate to keep out of the hands of skeptics, is irreplaceable.
Yet the whole “hockey team” (and even the UEA Information Compliance Manager!) were willing to break the law to keep that data out of the hands of skeptics, and Jones even told Mann that he contemplated destroying that irreplaceable data to keep it out of the hands of skeptics.
4. You apparently have no idea what “replication” entails. It means being able to reproduce every step of the process. That includes any measurements or experiments which can be redone, but it also includes every calculation.
Science cannot be advanced by hiding your errors! Any scientist worth his salt will be willing to show his work, and subject it to critical scrutiny by anyone and everyone.
If researchers won’t expose the data and code they use to scrutiny by other scientists, including hostile ones, then their work cannot be trusted.
Dave,
“If researchers won’t expose the data and code they use to scrutiny by other scientists, including hostile ones, then their” so-called work is not science.
I actually wouldn’t go quite that far, Chimp. There are situations — e.g., military research, or confidential product research — in which real scientific research is done, and sometimes done very well, but circumstances prevent widespread exposure of the work to scrutiny by other scientists. It’s still science, though it is obviously less trustworthy than science which is subjected to scrutiny by all comers.
OTOH — and this is probably what you meant — if there are no circumstances which prevent researchers from exposing their work to such scrutiny, yet they nevertheless try to prevent such scrutiny, then it certainly means they and their work cannot be trusted.
To recap the bidding:
Willis Eschenbach April 24, 2018 at 12:49 pm
MarkW April 24, 2018 at 4:08 pm
Kristi Silber April 26, 2018 at 5:46 pm
“A rotten position”??? Kristi, that’s what science is about. You seem unfamiliar with the scientific process. It works as follows.
Someone puts their scientific ideas out in the open, along with all of the logic, data, observations, computer code, and everything necessary to understand and more important, to replicate their work.
Then other people try to find errors in their work, in the logic, the data, etc. And they see if they can replicate the work.
If the other people can replicate the work and they cannot find any errors in the logic, the data, the math, the computer code, etc., then the result is tentatively accepted as solid science. Otherwise, it goes in the scrapheap.
So having people try “to find any possible weaknesses” is not “a rotten position”. To the absolute contrary, it is an essential part of the adversarial system that is the heart of science. It is the only way that science advances.
One corollary of this is that science depends on total transparency. If someone like Phil Jones won’t reveal their data, the whole process comes to a halt because there is no way to tell if what Phil did is valid or not. And that is why, in my FOIA request, I asked for the underlying data to see if I could replicate what he’d done.
And that is why what Phil Jones did with both Warwick Hughes and myself was so wrong. He deliberately was hiding his data, using a bogus excuse that you and others seem to find acceptable. OF COURSE the people getting his data would try to find something wrong with it, that’s their job as honest scientists. It is how science progresses, e.g. by Wegner finding something wrong with the ideas about immobile tectonic plates.
Finally, you ask “Why do you insult me?”. My apologies if I have been too harsh, but I’m trying to wake you up to the fact that you truly do not understand what you are talking about. I’m a reformed cowboy, and the reform wasn’t as complete as I might have hoped, so sometimes I err on the side of brutal honesty.
But the fact is, you don’t even seem to get how science works, and I don’t know any touchy-feely way to break through to you so that you’ll notice it.
For example, I (and others of course) write scientific posts here, and guess what happens?
PEOPLE DO THEIR VERY BEST TO FIND ANY POSSIBLE WEAKNESSES IN MY WORK!
And far from me being in a “rotten position” because of that, I am extremely lucky that people do that. It has kept me from endless weeks or months of following a blind alley based on some error, some weakness, some logical misstep, some foolish assumption that I unknowingly made.
That’s how science works …
Best regards,
w.
Willis wrote, ““A rotten position”??? Kristi, that’s what science is about. …
PEOPLE DO THEIR VERY BEST TO FIND ANY POSSIBLE WEAKNESSES IN MY WORK!
And far from me being in a “rotten position” because of that, I am extremely lucky that people do that. It has kept me from endless weeks or months of following a blind alley based on some error, some weakness, some logical misstep, some foolish assumption that I unknowingly made.
That’s how science works …”
Exactly!
Kristi wrote on April 26, 2018 at 3:53 pm, “MULTIPLE PEOPLE FROM CLIMATEAUDIT WERE MAKING FOIA REQUESTS AT THE SAME TIME, AND THERE IS NO JUSTIFICATION FOR THAT. CRU FELT IT WAS HARASSMENT.”
And Kristi wrote on April 26, 2018 at 8:51 pm, “The emails suggest to me that the scientists were feeling harassed by data requests, including by multiple people who knew each other. One researcher even conjectures that McIntyre was trying to distract him from his research.”
The reason they had so many data requests is that they had been stonewalling requests for the data for years. Look at the chronology:
On Feb. 2, 2005, Phil Jones wrote, “…don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs [McIntyre & McKitrick] have been after the CRU station data for years.”
Note the word “years” (plural), back in early 2005 — so we know that Jones knows that McIntyre & McKitrick had been asking for the CRU station data at least since the beginning of 2003.
Here’s Phil Jones, Dec 3 , 2008, telling the UEA’s Information Compliance Manager, Mr. David Palmer, about how he has been deleting material subject to FOI request.
Here’s Palmer, on July 27, 2009 (to Jones, Osborn, and probably others), “I have 42 requests with virtually the same wording as below:
‘Pursuant to the Environmental Information Regulations, I hereby make an EIR/FOI request for the following information in respect to any confidentiality agreements affecting CRUTEM station data involving station data in [insert country names] …
I have a further 3 requests asking for the actual data that was sent to Georgia Tech plus one asking for station data from some islands in the Pacific …
I have another 5 requests that include more than just the ‘standard’ request above.'”
Note that by this time Jones el al have been stonewalling requests for the station data for over 5½ years!!!
BTW, Palmer understood the purpose of all those FOI requests, because in his email he quoted from the Climate Audit web site:
“However, the inquiries are not really vexatious. We’re just trying to find out which countries these supposed confidentiality agreements apply to. Then we could FOI the rest.”
The problem is that Jones, Palmer et al were refusing to release the station data. Back in 2005 Jones had threatened to destroy the data, rather than hand it over, but instead they just invented fake excuses for not handing it over.
They claimed that they could not release the data because they had confidentiality agreements with some of the countries which supplied that data. But they also even refused to say which countries required such agreements.
That’s probably because it was all lies. There probably were never any such agreements, in the first place. The UEA people — Jones, Palmer, Osborn, etc. — are just dishonest, and they were flouting the law.
The reason they had so many FOIA requests by 2009 is that for many years they’d been brazenly refusing to obey the law and comply with FOIA requests, for years.
And Kristi also wrote on April 26, 2018 at 8:51 pm, “The hockey stick graph drew tons of attention when it got on the cover of IPCC.”
It wasn’t the IPCC, it was the cover of this 1999 WMO Climate Report.
Dave Burton,
One more response
1) I never argued, and would not argue that the data belonged to Jones, et al. I agree that “They have no ethical right to hold that data hostage!” But neither do they have a right to break the previous agreements with others in order to satisfy those demanding the data. I don’t know why CRU didn’t provide the identity of the countries it belonged to, and refuse to conjecture. 90% of the data were available.
2. “It is not “a rotten position to have to give what you’ve worked so hard on to someone who really does only want it in order to find any possible weaknesses and gnaw on them until the whole study is discredited.” That’s what real scientists do.”
What “real scientists do” depends on the norms of the field at a point in time, and is different from what ideal scientists do. The field of climate science, I believe, responded defensively to the skeptic movement, rather than proactively. One result was wanting to keep information from them because they knew from experience what it would be used for. (This can be seen in the emails.) The scientific community didn’t know what to do – this wasn’t the way things had been done. They made mistakes, and it backfired.
“3. Temperature measurement data is not the results of “experiments,” and you can’t “start from scratch” and make a new batch. ”
You could start from scratch with the raw data.
The handling of climate data is a very complex process itself, with different datasets, station histories, systematic biases, UHI effects, errors, missing data, etc. Each step of making the data usable requires work (and therefore time and money), knowledge and expertise in knowing where to make adjustments, doing so and validating them.
It is scientifically constructive to share the resulting dataset with those who genuinely wish to advance science. So we must ask, does this apply to the people who wanted the data? Do the subsequent publications suggest meaningful alternatives or new insights? Have here been any studies using the data that advanced our knowledge of climate? Any suggestions for ways to deal more appropriately with the data? Or are the publications all about the mistakes, and do they suggest anywhere (in the publication or not) that these mistakes show climate science in general is not to be trusted? I have neither seen nor heard of ANYTHING that justifies saying that, That I would consider anti-science.
Others may have a legal right to the data, but that doesn’t mean they have an ethical right to it. The “we paid for it with our taxes” idea doesn’t work because it is a multi-national effort.
I’M NOT ARGUING THAT CRU DIDN’T ACT POORLY. THEY DID. JONES MAY HAVE ACTED ILLEGALLY. I HONESTLY DON’T KNOW, I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE OTHERS’ WORD FOR IT, AND I’M NOT GOING TO JUDGE WHAT I CAN’T ASSESS. IT’S IN THE PAST.
(Intellectual property rights can apply even when one is working for someone else. Depends on the contract. My uncle, a physicist at NOAA, got a patent a few years back for a device that will help NOAA and others collect aerosol data. It’s his patent, not NOAA’s, and he can profit from the production of the device.)
3. Yet the whole “hockey team” (and even the UEA Information Compliance Manager!) were willing to break the law to keep that data out of the hands of skeptics, and Jones even told Mann that he contemplated destroying that irreplaceable data to keep it out of the hands of skeptics.
I don’t believe there is any evidence that all these people were willing to break the law. Some were willing to do what they could legally to be uncooperative, maybe We don’t know all the conversations that went on about this. Jones talked about deleting a file. Talking about doing something is not illegal or unethical. Do you REALLY believe he would have destroyed irreplaceable data just to keep it out of the hands of skeptics? It so, there is no point in discussing anything with you, if you can’t even imagine that these people are anything but criminal, immoral monsters willing to do anything to be right; you would see them that way regardless of the evidence.
Kristi Silber, read your own comment. If Jones was not doing something hinky, why, pray tell was he so loathe to have anyone else check his work?
Tom Halla April 29, 2018 at 8:00 pm
Curiously, Tom, while I thought that was the reason while it was all going on, the Climategate emails revealed the real reason he wouldn’t give us the data …
He couldn’t. He’d lost it. Strange but true. He couldn’t give it to me because he couldn’t find it.
I was thinking that the data would have been in a flat rectangular file, with rows being years, and columns being stations … but noooo. It was scattered irretrievably among dozens and dozens of folders, with duplicate data, new and old data, folders with identical names, and every kind of data mis-management that could be imagined.
Read the “Harry Read Me” file that was released along with the emails, and you’ll get a sense of just how lost they were and how lost their data was … and Jones didn’t want to admit that. In fact, he went to extraordinary lengths of lying to avoid admitting that simple fact.
If that’s not stranger than fiction, I don’t know what is.
Of course, Kristi, who probably never read the “Harry Read Me” file, will likely be along to assure us that I’m wrong, wrong, wrong, and Jones was an honest scientist and a poor victim of circumstance …
w.
In other words: they were grossly negligent, incompetent and so convinced about their “findings” that they didn’t care about correct management. Now they are wondering why nobody trusts the words of such a bunch of narcisstic egomaniacs. Steyn is right. Absolutely. A disgrace to their profession. No grand jury woud buy that crap. They are liars.
At 09:41 AM 2/2/2005, Phil Jones wrote (and I quoted), “[to] Mike [Mann], … And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs [McIntyre & McKitrick] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone…”
Kristi wrote, “I can understand their motives. … Among the emails demanding data: “1. raw monthly station temperature time series as contributed to Jones/CRU from various global meteorological organizations, together with metadata….” … This is not the kind of thing used in experimental replication. You want to replicate it, you start from scratch.”
I ungrammatically replied, “3. Temperature measurement data is not the results of “experiments,” and you can’t “start from scratch” and make a new batch.”
Kristi replied, “You could start from scratch with the raw data.”
Huh? Kristi, what do you think “the CRU station data” that “the two MMs [had] been after for years” is?
Willis wrote, “Read the “Harry Read Me” file that was released along with the emails, and you’ll get a sense of just how lost they were and how lost their data was…”
Here’s the link:
http://sealevel.info/FOIA/2009/FOIA/documents/HARRY_READ_ME.txt
It appears to be the work-log/diary of a Mr. Ian (Harry) Harris, over about a four year period, ending just before the November, 2009 Climategate I bombshell.
It does convey a distinct impression of the CRU team of distinguished climate scientists…
http://sealevel.info/the_uea_cru_science_team.png
Willis, which two countries had actually had made the CRU sign confidentiality agreements concerning their measurement data? Is the text of those agreements known?
Damn the years go by fast.
Did the CRU ever produce the “accidently deleted” raw temperature data that they promised to “reproduce” with in 3 years of the British Inquiry?The “Blinder well played” inquiry.
I recall the difficulty attempting to reproduce the CRU/IPCC description of past temperatures, included the fact that no one seemed to know which sets of “raw” data were used.
As for the Mann, he has been a blessing to sceptical viewers of the C.A.G.W fantasy.
No fiction writer could have credibly invented Mike Mann, as a character, yet he is still calling newcomers attention to the festering mess that is UN IPCC “science”.
Kristi, you seem to think that Mann and the others were exonerated by the “investigations”. There is a most excellent, detailed, and referenced analysis of why this is not the case here. H/T to Lucia for publishing this most interesting analysis.
Regards,
w.
Willis, I’d rather read the originals that that “analysis.” I don’t agree with it. It’s just repeating the same fictions, with no trust in the investigations.
Kristi Silber April 27, 2018 at 10:45 pm
Kristi, it’s not an “analysis”, it is an analysis, and a good one.
Unlike you, I read all of the “investigations”, which were laughable, at the time. I know what the investigators did and didn’t ask. I know that the people doing some of the investigations where best friends with those that they investigated.
To quote Shakespeare, regarding your insistence on ignoring facts, I have to say “This disease is beyond my practice” …
Come back when you have read both the analysis and the investigation reports, as I and others who were actually involved in the occurrences have done. If you find anything in the analysis that is not true, please let us know. Until you’ve done that, you’re just flapping your lips and protecting liars and cheats.
In the meantime, a quote for you about the Muir Russell investigation:
SOURCE See also here
Here’s another:
SOURCE
That’s what you are calling an “investigation”, where Muir Russell didn’t even ask if the people had done what they confessed to doing in the emails. If that’s an investigation in your eyes, then you should open them.
You’re way over your head here, Kristi. You keep defending the indefensible, all the while falsely claiming that you’re not defending anyone … pull the other leg, it’s got bells on it.
w.
Willis,
From the analysis:
“What Jones was doing when he spoke of “hide[ing] the decline” was attempting to gloss over the divergence problem and the decline in temperatures that would be shown by continuing to use tree proxies when extrapolating temperatures as shown in a paper written by Keith Briffa of University of East Anglia [UEA] who was part of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU).”
Error 1: Repeating the false skeptic claims.
No, it wasn’t “glossing over the problem,” it was removing a part of the record that was incorrect and replacing it with one that was. They had discussed the problem elsewhere.
“III. Mike’s Nature Trick
“Understanding this requires a knowledge of statistics, and the ability to compare Mann’s work in his Nature paper with what Jones was doing for the WMO. In light of my limited knowledge of statistics, I am punting on this. See, for instance, https://climateaudit.org/2011/03/29/keiths-science-trick-mikes-nature-trick-and-phils-combo/”
Now the writer sends people to the site with which Mann has had so much trouble. This is a sign of an obviously biased report, and I don’t trust it. I don’t want to read it because it might clutter my mind with errors. I prefer original accounts to rehashed ones, annotated to tell you how to think about something, like this was (as I stated in another post):
https://newzealandclimatechange.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/climategate-2-and-corruption-of-peer-review/
Think how you’d respond if I sent you links to Union of Concerned Scientist
You may have read all the reports, but as you say, you were involved. You can’t see the event from a distance because you were there, on one side. Sure, there are things the investigations didn’t ask – there always are! But it seems to me there is a fair bit of detail in the report I’ve been reading, as far as accusations and salient responses. It doesn’t let Jones off the hook, as you point out – so how could it be so tainted and corrupt?
It is far easier to pick apart someone else’s work that to do something original. Part of being a good scientist is creativity: the ability to think of alternatives. Einstein’s desire was not to show that Newton was wrong, he developed a new, more precise way of seeing the world; the rest was incidental. And even though Newton was wrong, his laws still provisionally apply and are useful in the everyday world.
I think there may be something fishy about what Mann did to create the hockey stick, but I don’t know and don’t really care. It could have been a mistake, it could have been intentional, but ultimately the same basic pattern has been repeated many times, so it must have been generally right, not a fluke created by an algorithm.
Jones was uncooperative. I’ve long thought he was not shiny clean in his ethics. He may have done something illegal, but I’m not positive; that would have to be worked out in the courts: the timing, the reasons, and how exceptions to the FOIA may have applied. I can understand his reasoning, but I think he was mistaken in doing what he did.
I can understand your reasoning and still think you are wrong, too. Some of our disagreement apparently boils down to different philosophies about how science is and should be conducted. Where did you get your ideas about it? It’s interesting that they are the same as Dave Burton’s, and I wonder if it’s a skeptic phenomenon. Science through antipathy. It’s a misunderstanding of the process, I believe.
(from Nov. 20, 2009, speaking about the emails)
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/
“It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because DIFFERENT GROUPS GO ABOUT TRYING TO FIND THE BEST APPROXIMATIONS OF THE TRUTH, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.” (my emphasis)
Willis,
Followed your link https://climateaudit.org/2010/07/22/blatant-misrepresentation-by-muir-russell-panel/
{email}
“29th May 2008: ―Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise”.
{CA explanation}
“As hundreds, if not thousands of people, know, David Holland had submitted an FOI request (denoted by UEA as 08-31) on May 27, 2008, only two days prior to the “delete any emails” request, a request which covered the correspondence between Eugene Wahl and Keith Briffa that Fred Pearce described as “back-channel communications that were a direct subversion” of IPCC policies of openness and transparency.””
Jones is telling them to delete emails bout AR4. Holland had no legal right to access to anything related to the IPCC except incidentally, if his name was in an email, too – his request was under the Data Protection Act. But as soon as CRU realized that people could get emails just by demanding anything with their name in it, they thought it prudent to delete certain subsets. AR4 was evidently one of them, and maybe that is actually out of professional integrity – that information is not theirs to give, it’s an international project.
Jones also deleted all emails with the names of skeptics in them, pursuant to the Holland request. He doesn’t want to hand them over. And why should he? Would you not feel violated if you had to hand over emails you thought were private, to have them shown to the world? You know how easy it is to cherry-pick and misinterpret. They did, too.
I don’t know what all CRU did. I don’t know what all the investigations did. I have not read the full story and even then I wouldn’t know the full story, But based on the links you’ve given me and the things you’ve said, I’ve no reason to buy your story, either. The evidence you’ve supplied me is almost all secondary: it’s interpretations of evidence rather than the evidence itself. This is a very common tact in skeptic arguments, and I think it demonstrates a lack of respect for impartiality. This is something that is part of the education of scientists, and laymen may not have that background.
I am not clear on the timeline of the whole thing, but it’s not important enough to me to go into it.
I don’t buy anyone’s story right now. I just don’t know, and I think that’s the most honest thing most people can say about it.
I don’t really care, either. It’s past. The scientific community learned a lot, and is better for it. Transparency matters. Things are changing, and it’s in the spirit of cooperation, professionalism, and quality of science. That’s what I see echoed in the literature.
Now if skeptics would stop their strategy of pointedly (and erroneously) discrediting science they don’t like, they might begin to be welcome participants in the discussion.
(If the hockey stick shape can be generated from noise, how come it was reproduced by so many others afterwards?)
Dave Burton,
You can interpret the evidence as you want, but that doesn’t make it the truth. You may be right, you may be wrong, I don’t presume to know. I see evidence both pro and con. There were animosity, distrust, agenda and lack of professionalism on both sides.
At any rate, I’m sick of the whole subject. I’m sick of “climategate” being used as an excuse not to trust the scientific community, and to say that it shows the depth of corruption in climate science. Some of the emails themselves show a strong dedication to scientific quality and integrity – those, however, are not excerpted for the skeptic crowd…
“There is some personal judgment involved in deciding whether to rebut.
Correcting bad science is the first concern. Responding to unfair
personal criticisms is next. Third is the possible misrepresentation of
the results by persons with ideological or political agendas. On the
basis of these I think the Baliunas paper should be rebutted by persons
with appropriate expertise….I refereed a virtually identical paper for
J. Climate, recommending rejection. All the other referees recommended
rejection too. The paper is truly appalling — but somehow it must have
been poorly reviewed by GRL and slipped through the net. I have no
reason to believe that this was anything more than chance. Nevertheless,
my judgment is that the science is so bad that a response is necessary.”
http://sealevel.info/FOIA/1051156418.txt
“Firstly both Danny and Tom have complained to de Freitas {the editor suspected of circumventing standard peer review procedures} about
his editorial decision, which does not uphold the principles of good
science….
“Ignoring bad science eventually reinforces the apparent ‘truth’ of
that bad science in the public mind, if it is not corrected. As
importantly, the ‘bad science’ published by CR is used by the
sceptics’ lobbies to ‘prove’ that there is no need for concern over
climate change. Since the IPCC makes it quite clear that there are
substantial grounds for concern about climate change, is it not
partially the responsibility of climate science to make sure only
satisfactorily peer-reviewed science appears in scientific
publications? – and to refute any inadequately reviewed and wrong
articles that do make their way through the peer review process?
“I can understand the weariness which the ongoing sceptics’
onslaught would induce in anyone, scientist or not. But that’s no
excuse for ignoring bad science. It won’t go away, and the more
we ignore it the more traction it will gain in the minds of the general
public, and the UNFCCC negotiators. If science doesn’t uphold the
purity of science, who will?”
http://sealevel.info/FOIA/1051230500.txt
As I see it, the above quotes show a few things about at least some of the scientists communicating in the emails: they are talking not about the messages of the skeptic papers, but about the quality and “purity” of the science. It is about the duty they feel to respond to poor science and to substandard publication practices. They believe this is how some skeptic articles are getting published (two emails actually list errors in papers they can see in the publications). They are tired of the “onslaught” from skeptics and having to devote time to rebutting poor science. And it shows how professional science is done: a rebuttal is written, shown to the authors of the criticized publication for comment, and then published in the professional literature.
Why aren’t these included in the excerpts skeptics gather and interpret? Because they show a different picture, one that doesn’t support the ideas they wish to spread.
More…
“I know about what Matthews has done…. He uses a statistical emulation method that can never account for
the full range of uncertainties. I would not trust it outside the
calibration zone — so I doubt that it can work well for (e.g.)
stabilization cases. As far as I know it has not been peer reviewed.
Furthermore, unless he has illegally got hold of the TAR version of the
model, what he has done can only be an emulation of the SAR version.
“Personally, I regard this as junk science (i.e., not science at all).
“Matthews is doing the community a considerable disservice.
“Tom.
“PS Re CR, I do not know the best way to handle the specifics of the
editoring. Hans von Storch is partly to blame — he encourages the
publication of crap science ‘in order to stimulate debate’. One approach
is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their
journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation
under the guise of refereed work.”
(Tom Wigley)
….
“P.S. On the CR issue, I agree that a rebuttal seems to be the only method
> of addressing the problem (I communicated this to Mike yesterday morning),
> and I wonder if a review of the refereeing policy is in order. The only way
> I can think of would be for all papers to go through two Editors rather
> than one, the former to have overall responsibility, the latter to provide
> a second opinion on a paper and reviewers’ comments prior to publication.”
(Tim Carter)
http://sealevel.info/FOIA/1051190249.txt
Highlights:
—Point out specific problem with a paper
—It is “doing the community a considerable disservice” to publish “junk” science
—Want to improve the peer review process
TAKE-HOME MESSAGE: There is plenty of evidence that at least some of the scientists involved are truly concerned about the integrity and quality of science, and it is this that is the issue, not the desire to quash messages they don’t like. They found a problem in the peer review process associated with the journal, Climate Research, and they want to fix it. Skeptics claim CRU wanted to silence skeptical research, but they don’t consider the idea that some of that research may really be poor quality, not meeting normal professional standards for publication (from what I’ve seen of, for example, Soon’s work, I can easily imagine that’s the case).
My posting of alternative ideas has been considered “defending wrong or criminal practices” rather than simply pointing out that there are ways of looking at the emails as a whole. Too much in the emails has been intentionally ignored or misinterpreted in the drive to portray CRU as a den of iniquity, and climate science as full of corruption. Such obvious bias makes me far more skeptical of the claims of skeptics in general, but I try to consider them with an open mind, anyway.
Then again, people tell me I’m too blind and corrupt to see things as they are; if that’s true, I should just give up trying to think for myself. Should I do as I’m told, then, and mindlessly go along with the skeptics? Become another zombie, echoing all the same arguments, right or wrong? Or become a mindless alarmist, claiming that skeptics are just dumb, have nothing to say that’s worth listening to? Should I leave the site if I have different opinions, as some suggest? Or shut up until I know everything there is to know, including how I should interpret what a third person wrote?
I really ought to stop coming to this site. It’s a phenomenal waste of my time conversing with most of the people here – some of them tell me so. I’m obviously not good at conveying the message I wish to convey; I don’t think anyone has ever demonstrated that they even hear or understand it.
Kristi Silber April 26, 2018 at 1:37 am
Kristi, a bully is someone who imposes their will through threats of violence. You know, like “Give me your lunch money or I’ll punch you in the nose”.
However, no one can threaten anyone with web-based violence. How would this work:
“Give me your lunch money or I’ll call you names” …
Your claim that you have been bullied is a joke. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
I’ve given you a raft of links. Which one is that from? Something I wrote? The Climategate emails? The comments on the emails?
Talk about having the stick by the wrong end! We don’t “attribute political motives to scientists”, they’ve done a great job of that themselves, no need for us to do so.
Remember back in 1988 how this all got started? By James Hansen secretly turning off the air conditioning and opening the windows of the room of the Senate Committee room where he was due to testify … and you accuse me and others of injecting politics into the science???
I have not only read them as typed, I lived them. You appear to be deliberately blind to anything that disagrees with your world view. You don’t get it. Phil Jones lied to my face, as is clearly proven by the emails. He is convicted by his own words, and you find him pure as the driven snow … say what?
Kristi, the UK Parliamentary Committee said that Phil Jones’s actions, inter alia trying to illegally wriggle out from actually responding to my FOIA request, would have been subject to a criminal charge if the Statute of Limitations had not elapsed … and you still think somehow skeptics are just making things up …
Jones resigned in disgrace from his post at UAE and you still claim that nothing untoward occurred???
Sigh …
Hogwash. You obviously care a whole lot what I think about you, or you wouldn’t spend so much time harping on it. What I think is that you made up your mind a while back, and you are totally blind to any facts that might change your mind.
w.
Willis Eschenbach – They felt that they should warn the planet about what they saw in the data. I think most people think that that was how they thought of themselves.
You were close to it. It seems they wanted to do research and not be obliged to debate? They were still in the data interpretation stage? because why wouldn’t they use the ideas of their critics in what they wrote up?
Thanks, meteorologist. I am very aware that they felt compelled to “warn the planet”. It’s part of what is known as “Noble Cause Corruption”, where you justify whatever you do because your cause is so noble. They saw themselves as saving the world … and based on that they have lied, cheated, and stolen.
w.
meteorologist in research ,
The emails suggest to me that the scientists were feeling harassed by data requests, including by multiple people who knew each other. One researcher even conjectures that McIntyre was trying to distract him from his research. They also knew that their data would be used against them, rightly or wrongly. It’s not hard to abuse some data sets.
Emails can be interpreted multiple ways, obviously., especially when one doesn’t know the full circumstances or conversations.
It wasn’t simply a matter of not wanting to debate. It was a matter of being tired of having to rebut poor science and defend themselves from accusations of scientific error, fraud and corruption. Writing and publishing takes time. I imagine that to them there was no real debate because the skeptics’ position was in general scientifically weak, and a debate would consist mostly of defending one’s actions, words and science. Verbal debates require practice and preparation. Scientists do science, they don’t generally perform for the public or lobby Congress or write books for laymen trying to tear down the opposition (exceptions, I know).
“And it seems to me, now that I’ve read your side of it, that people need to work much harder with everyone, and every qualified opinion. ”
YES! Scientists should work together, not just try to tear each other down – that’s not a constructive use of time and resources. The hockey stick graph drew tons of attention when it got on the cover of IPCC, and that’s when people started trying to destroy it, not when it was first published 6 years earlier. McKitrick, an economist, wrote an article condemning the statistics based on assumptions he made about what was done, and published it on ClimateAudit – along with a bit of commentary. Maybe some version made it to the journals, I don’t know. The battle is primarily driven by policy and politics, not science, and in my judgement it is the skeptics that don’t seem to see much need to separate the two. They are convinced that mainstream science is agenda-driven. I don’t see that at all.
Kristi Silber April 26, 2018 at 8:51 pm
Kristi, you’ve totally misunderstood the timing of the FOIA requests. For quite a while, there was just my request, and then maybe one other from David Holland. You likely have never heard of him. I had him as my houseguest last week, like me he’s mentioned in the Climategate emails, and is a most interesting man … as I said, I was in the middle of this nonsense, and I know the players.
I was regularly reporting the sequential lies that Phil Jones and the FOIA person were feeding me on Steve McIntyre’s climateaudit.org website. Their lies just went on and on. And after a while, when it became obvious that I was just being fed lie after lie after lie, a bunch of other people reading the website decided to file FOIA requests.
In part we were forced to do so, because an FOIA request needs to be specific. Phil Jones had lied saying that there were secrecy contracts with some countries which had provided him with data … but he wouldn’t say what countries. Since we couldn’t make a blanket request for the alleged contracts, and Phil wouldn’t tell us what the countries were, we were forced to have each person write a request for the putative secrecy contracts for a different country.
Note that all of this could have been avoided had Phil Jones simply sent me the data when I first asked for it. Not, please note, when I filed the FOIA request. I would not have had to file the FOIA request if Phil had been an honest scientist and sent me the data when I politely asked for it.
Were we trying to “distract” some researcher from his work? Nonsense. WE WERE TRYING TO GET AN HONEST ANSWER TO A SIMPLE REQUEST FOR DATA. Your claim is fatuous nonsense, you’ve swallowed the researcher’s claim without investigating it. A bunch of people filed FOIA requests for a simple reason—because Phil Jones et al. were lying and evading my one FOIA request, and we hoped to bring them to their senses.
Finally, would their data be “used against them”? Again, that’s a joke. I asked for the data for a simple scientific reason—because without it I couldn’t tell whether Phil Jones was just making things up. Transparency is central to science, and the crazy idea that you shouldn’t give your data to someone who is trying to find errors in it is absolutely antithetical to science. That’s what scientists do, try to find errors in other people’s work.
Here’s what I’ve recommended—give your data, your code, and everything underlying your claim to your worst scientific opponent, the guy who doesn’t believe you at all. Why?
Because if they can’t find something wrong with it, then you’re in good shape … but under no circumstances can a scientist legitimately refuse data to someone because they will try to find errors in it. That’s how science progresses, by Barry Marshall finding errors in the claims that ulcers are caused by worry …
Like I’ve said more than once, you appear to be totally clueless about what actually happened and why … instead, it seems you blindly believe the nonsense that the scientists were putting out to fool folks like you into believing that they were the victims in the case, when in fact they were the criminals.
Regards,
w.
Willis,
“it seems you blindly believe the nonsense that the scientists were putting out to fool folks like you into believing that they were the victims in the case, when in fact they were the criminals.”
How could the scientists put out nonsense to fool folks when they thought they were emailing privately? That doesn’t make sense.
I got the timing wrong, OK – but on the other hand, you don’t know how many others were making requests when you were. And bombarding them with requests wasn’t judicious if you wanted their cooperation.
Science is not about looking for flaws. That’s part of it, sure, but for the most part that’s handled by the peer review process. Those who do nothing but try to find flaws in another group’s work are not scientists – especially if they publish it in a blog.
Replication is fine, but do it from the ground up. Don’t expect anyone to give you their computer code – that’s intellectual property.
Why do you not believe part of the data belonged to another country? That has been investigated, of course. CRU couldn’t give you all the data because it wasn’t their to give. And you know what? He was under no legal obligation to tell you who had it. I sure wouldn’t have wanted to.
Science should not be an adversarial process.
Core contrarians aren’t just fellow scientists, they are the enemy. They have made themselves the enemy to mainstream science not through their ideas, but through their lack of professionalism, and their public attacks on scientific institutions, motives and integrity. And through their influence on the public, they are delaying action, making things worse.
So why should anyone want to cooperate with you?
“Here’s what I’ve recommended—give your data, your code, and everything underlying your claim to your worst scientific opponent, the guy who doesn’t believe you at all.”
Do you have any idea how much work goes into that?
Don’t you understand that people will find problems that don’t exist? That there is thought and reasoning and steps that aren’t reported in the literature?
Read an article. Evaluate it. If you find errors, write a rebuttal. That’s how science is done.
Either that or replicate the experiment from the ground up. Replication is not just to find out if the scientist made a mistake, but also to see if the results were just a statistical anomaly.
Anything else is a waste of time an resources. Your idea of science creates animosity rather than cooperation. Don’t you see? You don’t pick a study you don’t like and try to find error with it.
“…under no circumstances can a scientist legitimately refuse data to someone because they will try to find errors in it. That’s how science progresses, ” NO. That’s how disrespect progresses. You are saying, “I think you’re hiding something or doing something wrong. I don’t know what, but I’m going to find it.”
“Like I’ve said more than once, you appear to be totally clueless about what actually happened and why … instead, it seems you blindly believe the nonsense that the scientists were putting out to fool folks like you into believing that they were the victims in the case, when in fact they were the criminals.”
That’s such total BS. I make mistakes, and you are welcome to correct them; I haven’t read every single email in it’s proper position and I refuse to read anything that has parts emphasized. But blindly believing, my asss.
The criminals were the ones who hacked the emails. Who would that have been? Do you wonder?
And yes, the people whose emails were hacked were definitely victims.
It’s strange, I can’t help but like you for some reason, even though I think you are wrong-headed.
Kristi Silber April 27, 2018 at 6:13 pm
I didn’t “want their cooperation”. Cooperation with the FOIA process is REQUIRED BY LAW. It’s not optional. Read the damn law, do your homework, stop making childish allegations and claims.
Oh, dear heavens, the amount of your ignorance is stunning. The review process is a very mild check to see if there is anything obviously wrong, and whether the references are all there, that kind of thing. The review process is not how the errors in the incorrect idea of immobile tectonic plates was discovered. Einstein discovered the flaw in Newtons work, despite several generations of reviewers giving it a pass. You truly have no clue about the peer-review process. Have you ever published a peer-reviewed paper? My guess is no, otherwise you wouldn’t say such dumb things about the process.
I didn’t ask Phil for his computer code, I asked him for his data. Please try to follow the story.
Again, you totally misunderstand the FOIA process. He WAS under a legal obligation. In addition, he FLAT OUT LIED when he claimed that a whole bunch of data was covered under contract. At the end of the day there were two contracts out of all of the countries of the world.
Again I say, you are in a deep hole and rather than actually doing your homework, you just keep finding new incorrect claims to jump on.
Go away and do your damn homework. Correcting you over and over on this basic stuff has grown tiresome. I’m done with you.
w.
Willis,
“Oh, dear heavens, the amount of your ignorance is stunning. The review process is a very mild check to see if there is anything obviously wrong, and whether the references are all there, that kind of thing. The review process is not how the errors in the incorrect idea of immobile tectonic plates was discovered. Einstein discovered the flaw in Newtons work, despite several generations of reviewers giving it a pass.”
No, that is not how science works. YOU don’t get it. You think plate tectonics was discovered by trying to find holes in someone else’s research? Do you think it was “proved” because it furthered a political agenda? No. Experiments may be exactly replicated in some fields – health, pharmacology, medical, safety – but usually there’s something new, some new twist. It’s not perfectly replicated. It’s expanded, or focuses on one area, or it’s repeated in a new setting or with a new species. It is productive of new information as well as overlapping with the old. Science gradually finds the errors, as things don’t add up.
There is at least one journal that makes the review process transparent to the public, and I think that’s a good thing. Peer review is important. It’s not taken lightly – not by good reviewers, anyway. It’s part of one’s professional duty and it’s a learning experience. Some are better than others, of course, or see things that others don’t. I’m not saying it’s perfect; it’s well-known that errors get through, but by and large they don’t invalidate the work. (The recent post about over half are “false results” was misleading .)
Peer review, ideally, encompasses the reasoning, clarity and structure of the language, the experimental design and statistical analyses, and the conclusions reached. If errors get through, there are rebuttals after publication. But NO, one doesn’t repeat an experiment looking for errors. That is showing distrust in the scientific process. It’s wasteful. But the most important point is that if that’s what science did, there would be tribalism, scientists against scientists. That is what has become of the scientific community, and it’s counterproductive.
It’s much better to have science friendly and make a few mistakes than angry, distrustful, uncooperative, destructive and making new mistakes (just because McKitrick said he found flaws in the hockey stick doesn’t mean they were there!).
The American Petroleum Institute started a propaganda campaign just after the first Hockey Stick.
Pay close attention, now: I AM NOT DEFENDING ANYONE. I’M PRESENTING AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW. I cannot read Jones’s mind – maybe he is a liar. But when it comes to choosing whom to believe, I go with the investigators. They were not involved, they had distance from the subject.
I suppose you’ve read this? You think it’s corrupt?
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/387/38702.htm
The woman who wrote bout another woman’s decades-long efforts to fight for her maps of the tectonic theory/great rift/atlantic rift presence – not even the entire plate theory, merely to get her ideas aknowledged that there WERE mountain ranges below the surface would disagree stringly with your blase hand-waving. Scientific theory changes ARE FOUND tooth and nail and with more emotions and power and appointments and bureaucratic strategies and publications than military conflicts.
Kristi: The more you deny you are blindly defending the conspirators because of their positions in authority and their support for the faith positions you espouse, the more your arguments become emotionally based.
I wrote,“…by this time [2009] Jones el al have been stonewalling requests for the station data for over 5½ years!!!… Back in 2005 Jones had threatened to destroy the data, rather than hand it over, but instead they just invented fake excuses for not handing it over. / They claimed that they could not release the data because they had confidentiality agreements with some of the countries which supplied that data. But they also even refused to say which countries required such agreements. / That’s probably because it was all lies. There probably were never any such agreements, in the first place.”
Kristi wrote [that she doesn’t know what science is and doesn’t want to; that she thinks the American Statistical Association, the Royal Society & the International Council for Science don’t know their business; and/or perhaps that we just haven’t figured out how to communicate with her]
Willis wrote, “At the end of the day there were two contracts out of all of the countries of the world.”
Really! I didn’t know that, Willis. I’ve long suspected that there were no such agreements, at all.
Which two countries actually had made the CRU sign confidentiality agreements concerning their measurement data?
Was the text of those agreements ever discovered?
Dave Burton,
I’m sorry I haven’t gotten to your posts. I have been reading links you send. Many of the general arguments overlap with those I’ve been having with Willis, but there are individual cases too numerous to address now..
“Kristi wrote [that she doesn’t know what science is and doesn’t want to; that she thinks the American Statistical Association, the Royal Society & the International Council for Science don’t know their business; and/or perhaps that we just haven’t figured out how to communicate with her]”
This is pretty messed up. If that’s what you think, you have no chance of ever understanding me. And if you can’t understand me, you have no right to interpret what I’m saying. Or it’s just a straight-out insult. How insipid.
The ASA discussion of reproducibility and replication. was interesting
“[R]eproducibility meant releasing data and code such that others may regenerate your results on their own systems…
“….Without open code and data, we cannot resolve differences in output between independent methods or independent implementations of even purportedly identical methods”
>>>So the purpose of this is comparison between two codes in the process of evaluating output.
“Replication Standard in 1995: ‘[T]hat sufficient information exists with which to understand, evaluate, and BUILD UPON a prior work if a third party could replicate the results WITHOUT ANY ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FORM THE AUTHOR.’
>>>The data are now posted, so this should be a standard considered met.
“Reproducibility is a more general term, implying both replication and the regeneration of findings with AT LEAST SOME INDEPENDENCE FROM THE CODE AND/OR DATA associated with the original publication. Both refer to the analysis that occurs after publication.”
>>>This means that NEW SCIENCE is being done, it’s not just a repeat of the old experiment. This is NECESSARY in replication/reproduction, or the same errors can be made (or others made up). Then you take the output of the conflicting research and try to figure out what’s different. It could be an error, or it could be something interesting.
The standards of data and code sharing are evolving in climate science toward more transparency. It’s a process. Things were different before the internet, and science is still catching up.
But at any rate, I stand by my assertion that science is not about trying to tear apart the research one doesn’t like. Scientists make mistakes, that’s a given, but it is counterproductive to make it one’s goal to police someone’s work unless you have good reason to believe they are doing something wrong.
I can understand wanting the data for the surface stations if one suspects they are poorly sited. But if one is then going to publish something about it, one should make it scientific – not just a chart of how many stations are poorly sited, but what that actually means for the data. It turns out it meant much less than it appeared from the descriptive paper; the second paper about the station data was more scientific.
There is a lot of pseudo-science published on the internet that is cluttering the playing field with erroneous ideas. Monckton’s feedback, for example. The public is being misled.
I’m sorry, I know I haven’t responded to your links, except in my head – I’ve got my arguments, but it’s too much right now. I’m just rambling at this point. It’s hard absorbing all this additional information on top of what I’ve been pursuing, and then trying to write about it with clarity in multiple conversations.
Kristi wrote, “I can understand wanting the data for the surface stations if one suspects they are poorly sited.”
No. The temperature measurement data is necessary for any sort of analysis of the temperature data.
The purpose of Phil Jones and the UEA CRU holding that data hostage, and even contemplating killing it, was to prevent other scientists from analyzing it. It was to stop scientific research from being done.
But those enemies of science and their supporters nevertheless have the supreme chutzpah to accuse the very scientists whose research they were impeding of being “anti-science.”
They sought to block other scientists from doing research using the data because they knew or feared that their own analyses were not bullet-proof, and would not withstand scrutiny.
“… and based on that they have lied, cheated, and stolen.”
I hadn’t heard about that part. But this isn’t science to me, this is people arrogant enough to think they can get away with not doing the work of science.
I understand that it’s a field with many complexities and uncertainties and chaotic back-and-forth oscillations, however you want to call it. And it seems to me, now that I’ve read your side of it, that people need to work much harder with everyone, and every qualified opinion. I’m not sure that the conclusions will be any more reliable, because it’s so early in the warming.
No, Willis, I don’t care what you think of me. I may have at one point, but not anymore. If I answer you, it’s for the benefit of others to see what I mean.
“Kristi, a bully is someone who imposes their will through threats of violence. You know, like “Give me your lunch money or I’ll punch you in the nose”.”
That’s a very narrow definition. So, if you aren’t a bully, what are you? An a-hole? Why do you insult me?
“If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
Does it look like I can’t?
“I’ve given you a raft of links. Which one is that from? Something I wrote? The Climategate emails? The comments on the emails?”
https://newzealandclimatechange.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/climategate-2-and-corruption-of-peer-review/
Immediately after the first link, which mentions NOTHING about policy, the interpreter tells the audience, “The first point to note is their concern is as much about the impact upon policy as it is about the science. This will become important for setting the context for the progressive process in which they eventually seek to destroy the career of the offending editor.”
Yes, this sets the stage, doesn’t it? The narrator has told the audience how to interpret what follows. Yep, they want the editor out! That’s because the editor is not doing the job, is being unprofessional, and the standards of scientific publication are being compromised. In one of the “climategate” emails, the writer is so frustrated that he lists half a dozen errors in a paper that just got published.
I’M FIGHTING BIAS, PROPAGANDA, ERRONEOUS ASSUMPTIONS, MISINTERPRETATIONS. I READILY ADMIT THEY EXIST ON BOTH SIDES. I CHOOSE THIS FORUM BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE IS DISCUSSING IT.
I don’t defend Jones or the others regarding the data-sharing. I have said it was not professional. Jones lied, yes. I have long believed that Jones wasn’t the epitome of ethical purity, that is not news to me. I have long had a distaste for Mann, too. However, I am not going to take from this the message that science in general is corrupt or unreliable – not even if some publications were intentionally kept out of the IPCC. This is because i believe in the genuine respect the majority of climate scientists have for good science. This is a BELIEF. It’s personal. It doesn’t mean I am not open to other views, or that I can’t understand them. However, underlying it all is a conviction that propaganda has had a major impact on the mindset of skeptics, just as alarmism has influenced CAGWers. I’m sick of seeing bias promoted and nurtured at WUWT through titles and text that misrepresent articles, and insulting, snide and jeering annotation.
I’m sure there’s more I could say in response, but I have better things to do.
Willis
PS Thanks for correcting me on the hockey stick/WMO report. I didn’t know it was publicized widely by 1999.
Wilis:
“136. Conclusion 1 The focus on Professor Jones and CRU has been largely misplaced. On the accusations relating to Professor Jones’s refusal to share raw data and computer codes, we consider that his actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community. We have suggested that the community consider becoming more transparent by publishing raw data and detailed methodologies. On accusations relating to Freedom of Information, we consider that much of the responsibility should lie with UEA, not CRU.”
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/387/38708.htm
Shortly after the “hockey stick” came out and was gaining public attention I decided to look into it with an open mind (since I had no opinion on it one way or the other). Back then many universities had pretty open web pages and you could find ongoing research papers and discussions among the researchers. I, almost immediately came upon a statement by one of the hockey stick/warming proponents to the effect: “I have been accused of ignoring data which contradicts my findings. The theory is so obviously true that ignoring such data is justified.” As soon as I read that I knew It was pseudo-science and have been skeptical ever since. Reading the warming papers and examining every claim carefully. Everything I encounter from then warming crew validates my skepticism.
So there was no abrupt warning? Just a gradual trend up until now? Or do you think it hasn’t warmed?
meteorologist in research asked Jim, “So there was no abrupt warning?”
There have been several warming episodes, but not particularly “abrupt,” and only weakly correlated with CO2 levels.
For instance, in these two graphs, over the fifty years covered by the 1895–1946 graph CO2 rose by only 15 ppmv (5.3%), but over the fifty years covered by the 1957–2008 graph CO2 rose by 70 ppmv (22.5% = more than 4× the CO2 forcing) — yet the two graphs are so similar that you probably cannot guess which is which:
http://www.sealevel.info/1895-1946_1957-2008_temperature-compare.png
Compare those small temperature shifts with the Greenland ice core records, which indicate that in the past Greenland has experienced some truly abrupt persistent temperature shifts, as rapid as several degrees per decade — and all of it natural.
That’s at least ten times as rapid as the “warming spurt” which we experienced in the 1980s and 1990s, and the similar one which we experienced in the 1920s and 1930s.
A 2014 paper by LLNL’s Ben Santer, et al sought to subtract out the effects of ENSO and the Pinatubo (1991) & El Chichón (1982) volcanic aerosols, from measured (satellite) temperature data, to find the underlying temperature trends. This graph is “Fig. 1c” from that paper; the black line is averaged CMIP5 models, the blue & red are measured temperatures:
http://sealevel.info/Santer_2014-02_fig2_graphC_1_133pct.png
Two things stand out:
1. The models run hot. The CMIP5 computer models (the black line), which are tuned with the assumption that at least 100% of 20th century warming is anthropogenic, and an average ECS climate sensitivity of about 3.0°C per doubling of CO2, show a lot more warming than the satellites. The models predict about 0.20°C/decade warming over the 34-year measurement period, but the satellites measured only about half that. And,
2. The “pause” in global warming began around 1993. The measured warming is all in the first 14 years (1979-1993). Their graph (with corrections to compensate for both ENSO and volcanic forcings) shows no noticeable warming since then.
Note, too, that although the Santer graph still showed an average of about 0.1°C per decade of warming, that’s partially because it started in 1979, at the chilly end of an extended cooling period in the northern hemisphere. If it had started in 1950, when CO2 levels first really took off, the per-decade warming trend would have been even less.
daveburton – It looks like we were unlucky to have natural warming before 1946. There was no influence from human activities before 1946?
Large temperature swings in Greenland were probably due to the AMOC. If the Gulf Stream shuts down will England blame it on the Sun?
daveburton – “Note, too, that although the Santer graph still showed an average of about 0.1°C per decade of warming,…”
I haven’t read about the accuracy of the thermometers in these studies. I know that large, expensive temperature readouts that were used in military weather stations were never expected to be accurate within 0.5 degrees F. And they had weather maintenance crews performing monthly checks.
Mathematical methods can smooth out data and etc., but I’ve always wondered what the thinking was about a change of a tenth of a degree.
I wouldn’t say “unlucky,” m.i.r. That assumes warming is bad.
There used to be a consensus that just the opposite is true. Warming was considered to be good, and warm periods were called climate optimums. I’ve seen no evidence that current temperatures are above optimal.
The current climate is certainly better than some of the cold spells that the Earth has endured. E.g.,
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22eighteen+hundred+and+froze+to+death%22
https://www.google.com/search?q=Thames+%22frost+fair%22
https://www.atmos.washington.edu/2001Q2/211/groupE/andy.html
daveburton April 27, 2018 at 2:07 pm
Indeed the two leading apostles of AGW in the early 20th century, Arrhenius and Callendar, considered man-made warming beneficial.
This is for Ms. Silber:
One Albert Einstein stated, unambiguously, regarding his then-new theories, “No amount of experimentation can prove me right. A single experiment can prove me wrong.”
Apparently he had no problem with “outsiders” investigating, probing, and perhaps even finding an error in his predictions. One almost gets the sense that he welcomed such testing, in hopes of advancing even farther.
Sir Isaac Newton is claimed to have stated, “If I have seen further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”
Somehow, that looks like real science to this Deplorable observer.
My regards to all,
Vlad (who, as a consultant within my field [of science], is PAID to poke holes in, and find problems with, other specialists’ work … … … )
Vlad,
For goodness sakes, I’m not saying don’t experiment.
What is your field of science?
Climate science is like mine, ecology. It’s messy, complex, uncertain, stochastic, dynamic, full of feedbacks and interactions. It’s more profitable to create than destroy – errors will surface and be eliminated in the process.
See my post to Willis,
Kristi Silber April 27, 2018 at 10:19 pm
Ms. Silber:
Suffice it to say that I’ve read the vast majority of your posts; from what I have gleaned, you have a very poor understanding of science, and the process. Your statement, “For goodness sakes (sic), I’m not saying don’t experiment.” is a complete non-sequitur.
I do soft-rock petroleum geophysics. This means that I’m geologically adept. It also means that I’m in a field which has been doing ‘paleoclimatology’ (as one small aspect of the overall picture) for nigh unto three centuries. These newbies who “created” a new field about three decades ago have very little expertise in scientific endeavors, other than their vaunted “models”, which are incapable of describing a coupled, non-linear, dynamic system, yet these “models” are the foundation for the whole CAGW hypothesis.
As is the subject of this post, Mann et al eliminated known time frames that were ‘warmer’ than now. He did not provide any calibration data for how his “trees” responded only to changes in temperature, he hid methodology, and so on. As shown above, if one is so certain, one puts everything out there, so that others can and will investigate. If the thesis is a step forward, all is well. If it is a blind alley, it is best we find out quickly, so that we do not waste effort chasing after unicorn flatulance, as it were.
Thomas Edison stated, “I did NOT fail to create a viable electric light bulb 10,000 times. I successfully found 10,000 ways NOT TO MAKE a light bulb.” We need to know when research is viable, and pursue it, and when it is not viable, and discard it.
You, for whatever reason, completely accept that human-produced carbon dioxide is causing a change in average global temperatures. You are welcome to continue this belief, however, the geological record is quite compelling that this hypothesis is completely wrong. I cannot produce them here, as they are the intellectual property of one Mr. Bill Illis (who regularly posts and comments), but he has produced the most amazing chart of CO2 vs. Temperature for the past 750 million years. If you have not seen it, someone here (a mod, or Anthony, or perhaps even Bill himself) may be able to access and post it or send it to you.
A brief summary of what it shows: temperature and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have no relationship to each other. For example, during the Cryogenian Period, atmospheric carbon dioxide was present in amounts measured in percents (between 4 and 13, according to multiple versions of Gradstein, Ogg, and Ogg, “Geologic Time Scale”, the latest one produced in 2016), yet the Earth was in the state popularly known as “Snowball Earth” (hence the name Cryogenian). At the same time, one of the life forms living in what open ocean existed during the glacial pulses, were stromatolites, who, despite the cool ocean water, rich in dissolved CO2, were able to create calcium carbonate-based structures. Stromatolites still thrive near Australia today, so it would seem that whatever has happened geologically since then, life continues in spite of what atmospheric carbon dioxide does.
You are most welcome to your beliefs; I believe differently, and I have a basis for believing what I do. The ” … single experiment … ” which disproves carbon dioxide’s role in changing or controlling atmospheric temperatures has been completed multiple times (Vostok, EPICA), and in many ways. If you do not accept what multiple lines of inquiry have provided, that is your choice.
Warmest regards,
Vlad (yes,a pseudonym bestowed upon me by one Mr. “Harry TwinOtter”, who at one time posted here, and continues to post at JoNova; I think he was trying to insult me after an exchange in which I skewered him)
Vlad,
“from what I have gleaned, you have a very poor understanding of science, and the process.”
My understanding is from my field. I should preface my statements with that from now on, I guess, but it appears to me that climate science is very similar. I imagine the science in your field is quite different. In fact, I hypothesize that there is a higher proportion of skeptics in some “scientific” fields because their methods and ways of seeing science is so different. Geologists and engineers seem well-represented among skeptics compared to biologists, for example (based on experience as well as the figures from the old skeptic petition with 31,000 people on it).
I have a poor understanding of the science used in your profession, OK, I can accept that. But I don’t accept that my understanding of the scientific process is generally poor. You don’t even tell me what’s “poor” about it.
I’ve heard countless arguments about the past. The past is informative, but it’s a mistake to believe that it’s a window on the present or that it will show us what to expect, or that conditions in the past show that everything will be fine. It doesn’t matter if temp and CO2 weren’t always correlated in the past, or if CO2 lagged temperature change; that is not evidence that CO2 can’t affect temperature; it’s not even evidence that it didn’t. Just as correlation is not causation, a lack of correlation doesn’t mean something isn’t a factor, only that it’s not the primary one. The whole point is that our circumstances are unique in the history of the world: the actions of a single species are creating global conditions that have never been experienced before by that species (even in the MWP).
I can say this, too: “You are most welcome to your beliefs; I believe differently, and I have a basis for believing what I do…If you do not accept what multiple lines of inquiry have provided, that is your choice.”
Kristi Silber April 29, 2018 at 7:49 pm
You still don’t get it. When Jones said that he couldn’t give me the data because of the confidentiality agreements, I said OK, fine, give me the data that is not covered.
He refused to do that.
You’re still laboring under the delusion that Jones et al. were honorable men. They were not. They began planning how to avoid the FOIA requests before the first one ever came in. The story about confidentiality agreements, and their subsequent refusal to supply the names of the countries involved, were just another couple of their unending pathetic bogus excuses invented to not comply with a legal request for the data.
And yet you continue to avoid that simple conclusion … they were crooks, Kristi, and but for the Statute of Limitations they would have been held to account. But you want to excuse everything they did … I do gotta say, though, you are just as good at inventing pathetic bogus excuses as they were, perhaps even better …
Sadly,
w.
For Ms. Silber:
Suppose we start with this: the original thesis of Mann et al, was that the annual growth rings of trees are solely a reflection of the temperature of the environment in which they live (or lived), hence the coining of the term ‘treemometers’ on this site.
Do you, as an ecologist, support this belief, unconditionally? Since I do not want you ‘ … wasting … ‘ any more time here at WUWT than necessary, a simple “yes” or “no” will suffice.
As to your ‘poor’ understanding of science, I’ll start with the statement you made at post on 28 April 2018, at 1642 hours (PDT, I believe). You made this statement, directly above a graph you also supplied:
“(If the hockey stick shape can be generated from noise, how come it was reproduced by so many others afterwards?)”
The lack of understanding in this one statement absolutely floors me! Random noise, fed into the algorithm, produces the same shape as Mann’s original, and you see nothing wrong with this? The algorithm ONLY produces ‘hockey sticks’, it is NOT producing an accurate analysis of anything, even if one allows that a tree ring is/can be an accurate descriptor of ambient temperature.
Then there’s this statement:
” I imagine the science in your field is quite different. ”
Not from what I can tell. The methodologies, standards, reporting, and accountability requirements are the same for me (geology), Physics, Chemistry, Biology … you name it. We do not have “different” kinds of science, subject to arbitrary and fluid standards. The name of the field can be changed, but the same criteria apply across the board to those who practice within their fields. If you practice within a field that allows one to “feel” their constraints, then it becomes clear that you have a very poor understanding of what science is, and how to practice it.
We move onto this gem:
” The past is informative, but it’s a mistake to believe that it’s a window on the present or that it will show us what to expect, or that conditions in the past show that everything will be fine. It doesn’t matter if temp and CO2 weren’t always correlated in the past, or if CO2 lagged temperature change; that is not evidence that CO2 can’t affect temperature; it’s not even evidence that it didn’t.”
Let me get this straight: we find at least one time ( ” … one experiment … ” ) where temperature and CO2 are dissociate, and this is NOT ” … evidence that CO2 can’t affect temperature;” Sorry, yes it is. Anytime the two are going in opposite directions, or if one lags the other (as you yourself stated), then we have a piece of the puzzle that says, CO2 does not control temperature. It didn’t back then, and it doesn’t now.
Since you also believe that, “The past is informative, but it’s a mistake to believe that it’s a window on the present … “. Thanks, you just invalidated the entire field of Geology as a discipline. The past tells us many things, among them that climate has always changed, and always will change, and we have evidence that the hypothesis of ‘changing CO2 concentration is having any measurable effect on present-day global temperatures’ is completely false. The change we see today is neither exceptional, nor outside of the variation of the past (and you yourself mentioned the MWP, so apparently you accept that there was one, even though Mann did everything in his power to eliminate it).
“… it’s not even evidence that it didn’t.” The two parameters are opposite, yet this is NOT evidence that CO2 wasn’t affecting temperatures? Your lack of understanding grows.
Then we have this one:
” Just as correlation is not causation, a lack of correlation doesn’t mean something isn’t a factor, only that it’s not the primary one. ” Precisely; this is what us “skeptics” and “den1ers” have been saying. CO2 is NOT a primary controller of global climate (the past shows us this quite clearly), and you’ve just admitted that there are other ‘factors’ that can, and do, overwhelm anything CO2 might be doing.
And you wonder why I consider your understanding of science to be so poor? Correlation is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition, for causality. When or if I find two parameters with a correlation, it then becomes necessary to establish causality. If there is more than a single instance that the two parameters are NOT correlated, then the causality becomes suspect. In the case of CO2 drives temperature, the multitudes of evidence, not just a single instance, points to the conclusion that the two have no relationship to each other.
You are, as far as I’m concerned, welcome to languish in the state of fear of mythical hobgoblins (h/t, H. L. Mencken), but your fears are not founded upon any sound science. My “partners in crime” and I will continue to enjoy how much greener the Earth is, thanks to the plant food carbon dioxide, and its increasing abundance within our atmosphere.
Regards to all,
Vlad
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