Brilliant!

Eric Worrall, Watts Up With That

“If the science is settled, why do we need research scientists to continue inquiring into the settled science?” [ The Australian Attorney General George] Brandis said on Tuesday.

“Wouldn’t it be a much more useful allocation of taxpayers’ money and research capacity within CSIRO to allocate its resources to an area where the science isn’t settled?”

[...] In my opinion George Brandis is spot on – government climate scientists are caught in a political pincer of their own making.

If climate science is settled enough to make confident predictions, why do we need so many climate researchers? If climate science is not settled, why do climate scientists keep pretending it is?

You don’t have to be a climate scientist, to smell the “inconsistency”.

Update (original posted about a year ago):

 A new space race: satellites could test the world's climate vows

Scientists from the United States, Japan, and China are racing to perfect satellite technology that could one day measure greenhouse gas emissions from space, potentially transforming the winner into the world's first climate cop.

Monitoring a single country's net emissions from above could not only become an important tool to establish whether it had met its promises to slow global warming, a point of contention at climate talks in Paris, but also help emitters to pinpoint the sources of greenhouse gases more quickly and cheaply.

[...]

The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), launched its first satellite to measure atmospheric CO2 in July last year.

The challenge now is to convert the images - which pick up carbon concentrations in the form of yellow, orange, and red blobs - into emissions data, said Steven Pawson, chief of the Global Modelling and Assimilation Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Orange and yellow, orange, and red blobs, huh? But, notice: they didn't include a satellite image of these blobs, which you would think they would....

.... except...maybe the satellite doesn't show what they want it to show...like perhaps it shows that southern African and South America are major CO2 sources, and are greater sources than those evil northern capitalist polluters in the US, Europe, and China.

See my previous post from last year:

------------

I just want to park this article somewhere for future reference. As a background: NASA sent up a satellite which can map CO2 emissions. I'm sure everyone on the team and in the science community expected a result showing North America, Europe and China as BAD!!! and places like Africa and the Amazon rain forest as GOOD!!!

However, the satellite showed pretty much the exact opposite: the Amazon and other verdant areas, it turns out, send out massive amounts of atmospheric CO2, much more than do the developed world.

NASA/JPL image from CO2 Satellite

A post on Watts Up With That asks the question: what's next? and posits that there are three options:

1) The satellite will continue to operate well, with clean, reliable data being transmitted to the world.

2) NASA will try to fudge the data by averaging and massaging it to oblivion.

3) The satellite will suffer a catastrophic failure and be decommissioned.

As the author, Ronald D Voisin, says, if the data is taken seriously then certain facts have to be faced. such as:

Insect and microbial emissions, each at 10X all anthropogenic emission, dominate in these lush forested areas while the historically mildly warming oceans are also net CO₂ contributors. And, anthropogenic emission is essentially irrelevant to atmospheric CO₂ concentration at an approximately 2% contribution to the natural flux.

I just want to park this article somewhere for future reference. As a background: NASA sent up a satellite which can map CO2 emissions. I'm sure everyone on the team and in the science community expected a result showing North America, Europe and China as BAD!!! and places like Africa and the Amazon rain forest as GOOD!!!

However, the satellite showed pretty much the exact opposite: the Amazon and other verdant areas, it turns out, send out massive amounts of atmospheric CO2, much more than do the developed world.

NASA/JPL image from CO2 Satellite

A post on Watts Up With That asks the question: what's next? and posits that there are three options:

1) The satellite will continue to operate well, with clean, reliable data being transmitted to the world.

2) NASA will try to fudge the data by averaging and massaging it to oblivion.

3) The satellite will suffer a catastrophic failure and be decommissioned.

As the author, Ronald D Voisin, says, if the data is taken seriously then certain facts have to be faced. such as:

Insect and microbial emissions, each at 10X all anthropogenic emission, dominate in these lush forested areas while the historically mildly warming oceans are also net CO₂ contributors. And, anthropogenic emission is essentially irrelevant to atmospheric CO₂ concentration at an approximately 2% contribution to the natural flux.

This one's too good not to share. 

This is science!

From Watts Up With That:

Claim: simulated satellite data back to 1860 proves global warming caused by humans

This is just nuts, sorry, I just don’t have any other words for it. 

The study took three decades of satellite data and used that to fake data going back to 1860, then used the fake data to show the alarming increase in temperature today when compared to their old, made-up data.

There were two major summits for Europe last week.

The heads of state of the European Union met last week to try to hammer out an EU and euro-saving agreement. Loaded with mountains of debt and slow growth, the community faces serious threats of a major recession or depression.

Meanwhile, far down south in Durban, South Africa these same heads of state sent bureaucrats down to a climate summit, where they agreed to hamstring their economies and take on more debt, and thus hasten the coming major recession or depression.

Who's to blame for this mess?

Britain and the US and the whole g*& d*&^ Anglo world, of course!!!

Lovely.

China Threatens Massive Venting of Super Greenhouse Gases in Attempt to Extort Billions as UNFCCC Meeting Approaches - MarketWatch

In the run-up to the international climate negotiations in Durban later this month, China has responded to efforts to ban the trading of widely discredited HFC-23 offsets by threatening to release huge amounts of the potent industrial chemical into the atmosphere unless other nations pay what amounts to a climate ransom.

Keep in mind that the money they are extorting would come from their pocket, since we are deficit spending on their dime. They would certainly gain on the interest payments, though.

I've been having a little fun with climate data. Mr Motl has been posting some basic analyses of data released as HadCRUT3. I've done something similar, but focused on the United States. Here is a graph of mean temperature by month and year:



There really seems to be very little trend there to me. Maybe 1/2 of a degree in the past century or so. Nothing to get hot under the collar about?

What is interesting to me is that the summer months seem much less volatile year to year than the winter months. Why would that be? I don't know.

I've been coding in Matlab, which is my wont. I have used the code I posted a little over a year ago. I think it works very well.

Note that the data set I am using is one upon which the IPCC is based, and was produced by the Hadley / Met Office. They are the "climate-gate" folks, as I recall.

Ann says: if I had to guess about the greater variability in winter, I would guess it had something to do with the pacific oscillations and el nino events. Warming and cooling cycles in the oceans might change winter weather more than summer.

Something else caused by Climate Change: insanity.

Now I'm changing my life again. Today, underneath the solar panels, there's a new set of deadbolt locks on all my doors. There's a new Honda GX390 portable power generator in my garage, ready to provide backup electricity. And last week I bought a starter kit to raise tomatoes and lettuce behind barred basement windows.

I'm not a survivalist or an "end times" enthusiast. When it comes to climate change, I'm just a realist.

Does the Washington Post think this guy's thoughts are rational? Very sad.

California just put a noose around it's neck and jumped off a cliff--Prop 23 failed which means AB32 will go into effect, requiring a 30% reduction in CO2 in 10 years--when we already have relatively clean energy in the state (much is natural gas, little is coal, and nuclear and renewables are sizable.) There's only one place it can come from and that is a slashing of the state's economic activity.

And, in the end, the only reason it will cut global emissions is by making Californians (that is to say: those Californians that are too poor or too stubborn to move) much, much poorer, and thus less able to buy stuff, travel, drive, or, you know, eat.

To a large extent, the decreased economic output of California will not change global CO2 by one ppm. All it will do is encourage relocation to places--like China or Utah (where Adobe, eBay, Oracle and Twitter have all recently moved)--which are less nice when it comes to pollution (not to mention regulations and taxes). Ironically, it might just increase global CO2.

The UK Met office has a temperature observation data set that you can download here. I am not sure, but I believe that this is in response to the recent Climate-Gate controversy. In any case, check out the "Questions About the Dataset." I will highlight the juicy parts:

1. Is the data that you are providing the “value-added” or the “underlying” data?

The data that we are providing is the database used to produce the global temperature series. Some of these data are the original underlying observations and some are observations adjusted to account for non climatic influences, for example changes in observations methods or site location.

The database consists of the “value added” product that has been quality controlled and adjusted to account for identified non-climatic influences. It is the station subset of this value-added product that we have released. Adjustments were only applied to a subset of the stations so in many cases the data provided are the underlying data minus any obviously erroneous values removed by quality control. The Met Office do not hold information as to adjustments that were applied and so cannot advise as to which stations are underlying data only and which contain adjustments.

2. What about the underlying data?

Underlying data are held by the National Meterological Services and other data providers and such data have in many cases been released for research purposes under specific licences that govern their usage and distribution.

It is important to distinguish between the data released by the NMSs and the truly raw data. e.g. the temperature readings noted by the observer. The data may have been adjusted to take account of non climatic influences, for example changes in observations methods, and in some cases this adjustment may not have been recorded so it may not be possible to recreate the original data as recorded by the observer.

3. Why is there no comprehensive copy of the underlying data?

The data set of temperatures, which are provided as a gridded product back to 1850 was largely compiled in the 1980s when it was technically difficult and expensive to keep multiple copies of the database.

For IT infrastructure of the time this was an exceedingly large database and multiple copies could not be kept at a reasonable cost. There is no question that anything untoward or unacceptable in terms of best practices at the time occurred.

This is really much of the controversy in a nutshell. The original data has been adjusted, and no record of those adjustments exist. We are supposed to spend trillions of dollars on this basis? I wouldn't claim that there was anything untoward done here, but to say this is acceptable "in terms of best practices at the time" is a bit hard to swallow. In what other field of science would such a process be acceptable, and considered "best practice?"

Imagine testing a new blood pressure drug. The drug is administered in a test population, then follow up blood pressure readings are taken. Next, each reading is adjusted in some non-specific way to account for vague external factors, e.g. stress on the patient. These adjustments are then discarded along with the original data. Statistical analyses are run on the adjusted data and a manuscript is written and submitted to a journal for publication. Good luck with that.

In criminal trials, if evidence has been tainted, it is appropriate to throw it out. This can happen even in the most severe criminal cases, regardless of the consequences to the prosecution's case, and regardless of the intent of the police. The same should be done here. Tainted evidence is essentially worthless.

Ann says: Just think how small an error could be, and yet still throw one station, or if the error is more systematic, the whole data set out of whack. We just adjusted our clocks for daylight savings, what used to be 7AM is now 6AM, and the temperature difference between those to times can be several degrees--it's just when the sun is coming up this time of year. Imagine if a station starts reporting the old 7AM temperature in a way that makes it look like the 6AM temperature is a couple of degrees warmer. Voila, global warming! The simplest thing such as time of day for the recording can vastly change the outcome of these records.

These are very complicated datasets, with an enormous number of variables that need to be controlled: station siting, time of day, frequency of recording, growth of heat islands, etc. The fact that the researchers are basically saying "trust us!" at the same time they are screaming that the sky is falling, and at the same time they are being daily shown to be incompetents, doesn't exactly promote a belief in their science and theories.

Related to a climate statistics post here.

function [tau,mu]=roman3(x,h,w);
% Finds tau and mu to minimize the sum of squares
% \sum_n \sum_m h(m,n)*(x(m,n)-tau(n)-mu(m))^2,
% subject to the constraint \sum_m w(m)*mu(m)=0. Here x and h are MxN,
% and w is Mx1. Normally, one would have non-negative h, positive w, and
% \sum_m w(m)=1. Upon return, tau will be 1xN, mu will be Mx1.
% The method uses a Lagrange multiplier (lambda) and Gaussian elimination.
% The matrix h must not contain an all-zero row or column.

[M,N]=size(x); % x and h have M rows, N columns
A=zeros(M+N+1,M+N+1); % A will contain the linear system matrix
A(1:N,1:N+M)=[diag(sum(h,1)) h']; % dL/dtau, N equations
A(N+1:N+M,:)=[h diag(sum(h,2)) -w/2]; % dL/dmu, M equations
A(end,N+1:N+M)=w'; % dL/dlambda, one equation (the constraint)
b=[sum(h.*x,1)'; sum(h.*x,2); 0]; % b is the "right hand side"
y=A\b; % solve Ay=b for y, using Gaussian elim.
tau=y(1:N)';
mu=y(N+1:N+M); % note the multiplier lambda is always zero
return

Ann says: Man, you beat me to it. That's just what I was thinking!

I've been trying to find the evidence for the widely-accepted theory of anthropogenic global warming. This is the part of the climate change debate that is supposed to be really settled. Even skeptics admit that humans are having an effect, they only argue about the scale of that effect.

As far as I can tell the evidence amounts to co-incidence--that is, two things happening at the same time. Here is the argument in a nutshell:

1. The greenhouse effect is real.
   
2. Greenhouse gasses cause the greenhouse effect.
   
3. Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas.
   
4. Humans produce carbon dioxide.
   
5. Ergo, humans, by releasing CO2, are causing the warming.

I'd point out that coincidence does not mean causality.

The more that comes out about the science of global warming, the more convinced I am that climate science is at its heart non-rigorous, lazy, and sloppy. Or, that climate science relates to hard science about the way that brie relates to parmesan.

I've seen a number of posts out there referring to this bit of code in the CRU program
briffa_sep98_d.pro as a smoking gun, because of the comment within the code that says "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!"

;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,'Oooops!'
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
;
;filter_cru,5.,/nan,tsin=yyy+yearlyadj,tslow=tslow
;oplot,timey,tslow,thick=5,color=20
;

However, if you look closely at the code, this isn't really the case. You can see that there are 3 variables created: "yrloc," "valadj" and "yearlyadj." The first two are used only to calculate the third. However, the third variable is not used at all. You can see that the line

;filter_cru,5.,/nan,tsin=yyy+yearlyadj,tslow=tslow

begins with a semi-colon, and thus has been commented out, so is not an active part of the program.

There are no other references to these 3 variables in the code. So the bottom line is that this seems like much ado about nothing. The adjustment is calculated, but not applied anywhere.

Ann says: Isn't this a subroutine, though? Three variables get defined: yrloc, valadj and yearlyadj. Maybe they get used elsewhere.

A few days ago, there was an interesting post at "Watt's Up With That?" called "The Steel Greenhouse." The subject of the post was a two-layer atmospheric variation of the standard Kiehl & Trenberth energy transfer accounting that describes the greenhouse effect. I had previously created a "Global Warming Calculator" for the original K&T model, so I decided to do a similar thing for this new two-layer model. You can see the results here: "Global Warming Calculator - II." The only tricky part was coming up with closed form formulas for the steady-state levels of radiation from the various levels. If you use the "view source" feature of your browser, you can see that the formulas within the java script are pretty long.

It was just for fun. See here and here for previous related posts.

I've spent quite a bit of time today going around the web looking into the hacked data coming out of a major British climate research agency. Someone broke into their computer system and downloaded more than 61MB of zipped emails, data and computer programs. The University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) is one of the premier pro-warming climate research agencies in the world, with much of their research showing up in places like the IPCC reports. It has also long been the target of skeptics who have been using the British equivalent of Freedom of Information requests to try to get a look at the underlying data they use in their research. That's a fundamental tenet of science--that data should be shared so that others can verify your research--the CRU isn't a big fan of that idea.

So far, most people have focused on things like the head of CRU seeming to describe in an e-mail how he massages data to get the right result. In one memorable e-mail he talks how to overlay different data sets to "hide the decline" in temperatures. Another e-mail, I believe by the same guy, talks about how inconvenient a blip of warming was in the 1940's and how they have to massage it downwards a bit in order to hide it better.

Other bloggers are focusing on the efforts the e-mails show to hide data and to do an end-run around freedom of information requests--including sitting down with the government officials in order to show them why it is important to understand that the requests are coming from skeptics and should therefore be blocked. If these allegations can be proved, then there is actually a possibility of criminal prosecution, because interfering with an FOIA is actually a criminal offense.

Still other bloggers are looking into what appears to be pressure being exerted on peer-reviewed journals to make sure that skeptics don't get published and don't get a voice in the IPCC reports.

Lot of people are following this.

Gateway Pundit (also here) has a good overview post with lots of links.

Climate Depot is tracking links. (Also here).

As always, Watts Up With That is tracking it with a number of blog posts.

This post over on The Air Vent has a list of MSM reports on the hack. Including Fox, UK's Guardian, NPR, UK's Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal, BBC, Nature, the New Scientist and NRO.

People are going to be pouring over the information from this hack for a long time, and the next few days should continue to be entertaining, and hopefully enlightening.

Update: A great list of links is available here.

A comment from a reader of the NY Times blog article "Lobbyists Flock to Climate Issue:"

I am so happy so many lobbyists are working on climate change problem. Hope these lobbyists possitive to work on this issue. Climate change issue is so important, it needs many people work on it. I see a slight of light raising from horizen line of earth. Making a roadmap of our future, a beautiful, full of hope roadmap!! Thanks for those lobbyists who are working on climate change issue.
— [Name], Japan

Indeed, if our educational system were serious about producing more lobbyists, there is no telling what we might accomplish. We need to set a Strategic National Education Policy right now that encourages young people to become lobbyists. Otherwise, we will have to import more and more lobbyists from places like China. We cannot afford that kind of lobbyist gap!

I'll take this opportunity to link to the Huffington Post, since another may never come.

Mr. Gore has stated, regarding climate change, that "the science is in." Well, he is absolutely right about that, except for one tiny thing. It is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind.

However, I'm not sure I agree with him when he says:

Carbon dioxide cannot absorb an unlimited amount of infrared radiation. Why not? Because it only absorbs heat along limited bandwidths, and is already absorbing just about everything it can. That is why plotted on a graph, C02's ability to capture heat follows a logarithmic curve.

Typical comment from the Huff-Po community:

Why is this right wing denier being given voice here? The science is in. The great majority of those who have the scientific credentials needed to understand the predicament we have created have spoken. Now we must listen and act. To delay is dangerous folly. I have a four year old grandson and another grandchild on the way. We must repair what we have broken so that they and all the world's children will be able to have a future.

Diversity of opinion is not to be tolerated!

This post reminded me of this post, which upon second reading seems to be in need of more detail.

Again, suppose you have temperature data T(x,t) over space x and time t, say the range of t is the period [1860,2000] . Suppose you have come up with a correction component g(x)=1/30*∫T(x,t)dt, where the integral is over the sub-period [1960,1990]. You create "anomaly data" T₁(x,t)=T(x,t)-g(x), so that ∫T₁(x,t)dt=0 for all x, again where the integral is over [1960,1990]. Finally, you perform a regression analysis to estimate the trend in the spatial average T_avg,1(t)=∫T₁(x,t)dx, where this integral is over the surface of the Earth, which we assume has total area 1.0 in some system of units. Suppose the slope of your regression line indicates an average rate of increase of 0.6 degrees per 100 years. This, I believe, is a simplified version of what climatologists have done.

Now T_avg,1(t)=∫T₁(x,t)dx = ∫(T(x,t)-g(x))dx =
T_avg(t)-g_avg. So correcting with g(x) just subtracts a constant g_avg (independent of time and space) from the spatial average of your original data. Clearly, this will not affect the slope of your regression line. Apparently, the "corrections" you have done do nothing at all.

So what's the point?

I've looked for this in the past, without luck.

The Big Fig Newton


Today stumbled across it, posted in a blog's comments.

You should read that blog post too. I've thought for a long time that the smoothing of data by climatologists make the significance of their results look much stronger than they really are. Now it looks like a statistician is pointing that out. Why in the world did it take so long for an expert to speak up? If it was obvious to a non-expert like me, it should have been obvious to them.

If the climatologist results are significant, then it shouldn't be necessary to smooth the data. The fact they the do smooth makes me skeptical about their results.

Now if only someone would explain the need to correct the data for "anomalies."

I agree with this post at Climate-Skeptic:

...years from now, folks who would like to see meaningful reductions in man's negative impacts on the environment are going to look back on the global warming charade as a disaster for their movement -- not just in terms of credibility, but in terms of lost focus on real, meaningful improvements.

He's right. In particular he points to the emphasis on China's carbon emissions, rather than on its pollution and other environmental hazards, that latter being more readily solvable.

The argument is similar to Bjørn Lomborg's and his Copenhagen Consensus, that, that we should be focusing on solving problems in a way that gives us the most "bang for the buck." This general approach to addressing global health problems seems sensible to me.

I'm not sure what's driving the obsession with Global Warming; i.e. why it has become such a high priority. But I suspect that if the USA and Western European nations were still polluting to the extent that China is, we wouldn't be hearing about Global Warming at all.