There is a lot of money to be made if we restructure our societal infrastructure, for example toward an regionally focused system of energy production based in solar, wind, wave power, etc. Isn’t this a good thing? Doesn’t our country support innovation and growth? It seems to me the primary threat of change is to the powers that be in oil, coal, etc.
Sometimes I think the scientists are being used by the politicians, then I rember the politicians are being used equally by the scientists. Finally you realize, there isn’t much difference.
I hope the polarbears don’t figure out how to work the system.
A blogger identified as hpx, over at the well named SaveCapitalism blog started messing around with the GHCN temperature dataset. The GHCN data is apparently 95% used in the recently implicated east Anglia university dataset by professor Phil Climategate Jones. His post was extremely interesting because it has to do with the GHCN overstatement of Antarctic Warming. It’s important to me because we need to verify that the datasets Ryan is using are of good quality for publication and reliance on previous work isn’t always enough. In this case, however, instead of temp records, I found a box of old socks.
Before getting into it, I’d like to say that hpx did a great job. He grabbed hundreds of records and their duplicates, compiled them into a database, sorted for what he needed and plotted the results. He found a trend of 4C/century in the Antarctic as calculated from the ‘adjusted’ value added data. I’ve been able to verify this value to within a couple of tenths of a degree, using some slightly different methods.Check out his post at this link.
This email from Phil Clmiategate Jones describes which data is in CRU.
Almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same
> as in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) archive used
> by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center
And that is the key– almost all. If they used the GHCN Antarctic stations, there is a teenie tiny problem. Of course as with anything in science these days, the devil is in the detail.
First, each GHCN station can have multiple records. These records are taken at different times and simply recorded with the others so for each station the data might look like this one from the Antarctic.
Roman M, has a blog. We don’t know about it much, because he’s only put a couple of posts up. It’s ann odd coincidence that the ‘hackers’ knew enough about CA to put the same link on Roman’s blog that they left here. It’s a bit of an arcane detail that not many of us know.
Apparently like myself, Roman has spent the day buried in GHCN data and code.
I’ve been messing with the Antarctic all day. No results yet but an article was sent to me by email today on Climategate. Despite the fact that ‘there is nothing in the emials’, it appears that they have magically eroded public trust. Don’t worry about the university though, “independent” investigations will confirm that its reputation will remain intact.
Last night, Prof Trevor Davies, pro-vice chancellor at UEA, said he believed the university would emerge with its reputation intact, after launching an independent review into how it handles data and responds to FOI requests.
I’ve got to put this little quote up, I mean how untrue can it be and still make the press.
Prof Davies said: “I hope the people of Norfolk and Norwich accept our commitment to the highest quality research and transparency. And I hope that as we are weathering this storm that the local community will support us.”
If nothing else comes out of the emails, Phil Jones got caught colluding with other government employees to block FOIA. As transparent as ink. The comment which is so interesting is here:
The university believes it has been targeted as part of a co-ordinated campaign by climate change sceptics.
There you go folks, now I’m part of the conspiracy. Keep in mind that it doesn’t matter that we have hundreds of documents pointing out (in no uncertain terms) the globalization agenda of the UN and IPCC. You get a tinfoil hat for even thinking about that. However, receive some unintended emails and blog about it, CONSPIRACY!!
Today the Associated Press has finally come out with an opinion on the Climategate emails. It ain’t the most honest thing you will read today.
but the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.
The AP studied all the e-mails for context, with five reporters reading and rereading them — about 1 million words in total.
An exhaustive review by five reporters? They must have been panting after this one. I hope the bubble heads didn’t sprain their brains reading about RegEM or multivariate regression. Two days ago, I saw a Chicago reporter doing a report on new Burt Rutan toy spaceplane, they apparently didn’t have video footage so they showed a shot of the space shuttle landing. The ‘reporter’ kept asking the crew if that was the new Burt Rutan plane or the space shuttle – nobody answered. She eventually decided it was the original spaceship 1.
That’s not the point though. This story is done with intent, these people are liars in my opinion and have prostrated themselves yet again for a liberal government agenda. Their bias could not be more obvious. Beware the government media complex – Mike Savage
Well, I’d like to thank Dr. Keen for stopping by and explaining some of our questions. This thread which pertains to the Alaska temperature record.
Those few Alaska graphs can sure stir up a lot of conversation! I posted them on ICECAP as an illustration of how original station data can differ from “processed” or “value added” data released by various agencies.
For those who wonder what the original data came from, I went straight to the source, of course, namely NCDC collection of co-op and NWS station observations at: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/climatedata.html#monthly
You, too, can download the same data, but it might cost you.
The nine stations are the only long-term ones in the GHCN grid box that’s shown; I have no idea what area the IPCC used. Seems like the IPCC may not know either.
As for my secret code, you can dowload that too – just open Excel and find the AVERAGE, STDEV, COUNT, and SUM funcions. That’s as fancy as my codes got. I have no fudge factors, except for arithmetic offsets between overlapping stations that were used to make combined time series. Some time series were normalized (departure divided by standard deviation), and some weren’t. The full report is a 70 or so page tech report for the National Park Service. A nice summary of the work (and the purpose of the study) was published by NPS at: http://www.nps.gov/akso/AKParkScience/symposium2006/sousanes.pdf
The lesson I learned from this is that one should use original source data (like NCDC co-op data) rather than processed, or possibly processed (sometimes you don’t know) data from sources like USHCN, GHCN, GISS (not an issue with CRU, since they won’t release it).
I haven’t visited this blog before, and although it looks pretty good, I probably won’t be checking back to reply very often. Nothing wrong, mind you, it’s just a matter of available time.
Meanwhile, I need to go read my official NWS issue MMTS max-min thermometer now – I’m the co-op observer for Coal Creek Canyon, Colorado, elevation 8950 feet. Check it out – we get some cool numbers here. Such as, every one of the past five years has been colder than the coldest of the previous five years.
cheers, Richard Keen
Climate analyst and data maker (observer)
Does anyone thing the IPCC or UN is capable of unbiased review of the climategate emails when they cannot allow a simple question. It was a simple question too, and several people jumped in to stop him. How did they know they were supposed to stop questions about climategate?
Ok, my current responsibilities are delayed again. THIS is CLIMATEGATE folks. There is only one outsider with the experience in climatology to put everything into context. I’ve been at this for just over a year, however, Steve McIntyre just LIT THE FIRE of Climategate in a way that hasn’t been done before.
An actual debate from BBC, it’s nice to see a real discussion on the news once in a while. Well considering it’s been 20 years since I’ve seen one, perhaps I should say a long while.
A short analysis by Kenneth Fritsch on differences between land surface temperature datasets. I’m extremely busy tonight and have not been able to verify anything here, but am familiar with the quality of Ken’s work. I’m sure he’ll stop by to answer questions from time to time.
Also, reader Ian has an interesting reply with an email from Ed Cook. I want to discuss more in the future but am way too busy today. It shows the fear of doing what’s right in climatology– rather shockingly. It’s comment #52 here.
————
Guest post Kenneth Fritch,
For those of you who are looking for a complete refutation of global warming, I will disappoint. My point in this whole exercise is more subtle. I wanted to determine whether we could compare temperature series for regions of the globe and over certain time periods where the temperature difference would show statistically significant differences. As far as we know these temperature series are constructed using much of the same raw and perhaps adjusted data. These series, while used separately, like to advertise the fact that they closely follow one on another. I would think that to show statistically significant differences between sets would place uncertainty on all sets as we do not have an independent and absolute standard for comparison. Even smallish differences would place doubts.
To that end, I compared the data sets described below and measured the normalized differences over several global regions and mainly two time periods. I used CRUTEM3+HadSST2 and GISS 1200 km and GISS 250 km for temperature data sets of land and sea for comparisons from the link:
One topic is my least favorite in climate science because it relies on subjective views of the economy. Some claim to have objective quantified views but often in economics their views are often driven by the view that socialism and government control of economy will provide the necessary result. In the end, it’s just ideology from people who don’t worry about meeting payroll or selling to a new customer. There are too many smart people around for my views to dominate this thread tho.
So here’s what I propose for this thread, we assume that AGW is real and dangerous, what would the best strategy be to prevent warming? What will be the effects of the mitigation on industry, technology growth, and what effects will it have on government policy?
Also do the methods put forth from Copenhagen have any chance of achieving these goals?
It’s basically – What would you do were it all true?
