Guess John Cook’s Title — Contest

John Cook (of the inaccurately named Skeptical Science blog) sent me a link to a new survey.  The survey has been discussed around the internet for the last couple of days because John was involved in the last Lewandowsky paper which combined poor methodology with libelous remarks directed at the “subjects” being “studied” to justify the authors pre-determined conclusion personal attacks.  Lucia’s blog has an interesting discussion on the survey.  She decided that she would not to link the new survey at all.  It is an understandable decision as we can be certain that this new survey will result in another propaganda piece attacking those of us who live in reality.

I am so certain of the pending result, that before providing the link at this blog, you will be mirandized — Skeptical Science style:

• You have the right to remain silent.
• Anything you say WILL be misrepresented to your detriment in the court of public opinion.
• You have the right to consult an attorney before the survey and to have an attorney present during questioning now or in the future.
• If you cannot afford an attorney, you are on your own.
• If you decide to answer any questions now, without an attorney present, you will still have the right to stop answering at any time until you talk to an attorney.
• Knowing and understanding your rights as I have explained them to you, are you willing to answer John’s questions without an attorney present?

Survey link here: http://survey.gci.uq.edu.au/survey.php?c=A5YD100J37CL

I will not take the survey myself, because of my certainty of the authors biased motivations but it still might be fun to guess their conclusions so I think we will have a contest. Guess the title of John’s new paper! After the paper is released, I will categorize the results of our contest and we will vote on the best guesses for both creativity and closest match.   To guess right, we need to find some clues!!

First, a clue as to where the survey conclusions are going on the first page:

Please read each title and abstract then estimate the level of endorsement that is expressed in that paper for anthropogenic global warming (e.g., that human activity is causing global warming).

It is hard for me to understand how you “rate” a scientific paper based on its acknowledgment of a completely uncontested fact like CO2 based temperature change.    It seems a bit like rating a paper on its acknowledgment that the sky is blue.  Fortunately there is more detail to work with on the survey page:

Survey of Peer-Reviewed Scientific Research

Below are listed the titles and abstracts (summary) of 10 randomly selected scientific papers; mouseover each title to read the abstract (summary). Please read each title and abstract then select from the drop down to categorize each abstract. Your rating should be based on the abstract text. Your submission will be anonymous. The drop down indicates indicates the level of endorsement within the abstract for the proposition that human activity (i.e., anthropogenic greenhouse gases) is causing global warming (e.g., the increase in temperature).

Note: AGW is Anthropogenic Global Warming or human-caused global warming.

Options are:

1. Explicit Endorsement with Quantification: abstract explicitly states that humans are causing more than half of global warming.
2. Explicit Endorsement without Quantification: abstract explicitly states humans are causing global warming or refers to anthropogenic global warming/climate change as a given fact.
3. Implicit Endorsement: abstract implies humans are causing global warming. E.g., research assumes greenhouse gases cause warming without explicitly stating humans are the cause.
4. Neutral: abstract doesn’t address or mention issue of what’s causing global warming.
5. Implicit Rejection: abstract implies humans have had a minimal impact on global warming without saying so explicitly. E.g., proposing a natural mechanism is the main cause of global warming.
6. Explicit Rejection without Quantification: abstract explicitly minimizes or rejects that humans are causing global warming.
7. Explicit Rejection with Quantification: abstract explicitly states that humans are causing less than half of global warming.

NOTE: These papers have been rated by the scientists who authored the papers. After submission, you may view a comparison of your ratings with the ratings by the authors of each paper.  –MY RED

In order to compose a title, we have to guess the results he will find.  A reader at Lucias noted that the abstracts the reader sees are “randomized” based on the proxy address you are using and that repeated abstracts at different proxy addresses are common.  That suggests a low pre-selected paper count which is confirmed by the additional fact that the survey answers can be compared to the authors own answers.  Of course not every author would participate in the study, they can only have a small set of abstracts. It is also possible that in order to gain cooperation, some authors were aware of the intent of the survey.  This may have been justified in John Cook’s mind, since they are oft represented by his Skeptical Science blog as unimpeachable.

So here is what I am guessing will happen.  Some skeptics will give low ratings for the papers because their obviously biased support of catastrophic warming and the pervasive poor level of science in climate change.  Those who are advocates for climate catastrophe science (including the authors) will be biased toward giving 1′s (top ratings) for their endorsement but will slide on papers which are less extremist in the abstract.  We already know that the Climate Science field is comprised nearly universally of politically left advocates, so the authors your answers are compared to will be biased in the same direction as the advocate blogging crowd.

The opening page of the survey notes a “proven consensus” paper coming out, so adding to that conclusion is unlikely to be the point.

This survey mirrors a paper, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, to be published soon in Environmental Research Letters, that analysed over 12,000 climate papers published between 1991 to 2011.

Additionally, those who link from skeptic blogs or from advocate blogs will probably be sorted by their links (I am guessing).  So with that little bit of guesswork, here are some of my predicted titles:

Skeptics Deny Science Literature

Motivated Denial of Scientific Literature

Skeptics are so stupid!  — I am formally registering the exclamation point as an integral part of the title.

Skeptics Reject Scientific Consensus

Scientific Rejection, A Manipulated Manifestation of Morons.

It is possible that those taking the survey will be unsorted, but I doubt it.  That does lead to a whole slew of other potentially winning titles! 

 

 

 

Dana’s Planet

UPDATE: Nic Lewis left this interesting comment down below -

Actually, in Chapter 9 of AR4 WG1, dealing with observationally-constrained estimates of climate sensitivity, the IPCC only discuss medians and modes. Not a mean in sight! And it refers to the mode as the “best estimate”. Nor does Figure 9.20 (where the estimated PDFs for climate sensitivity from Forest 2006 and other studies are shown, labelled EQUILIBRIUM climate sensitivity) mark the means. And Forest 2006 itself only reported the mode.

So I’m not being either misleading on any count, or misrepresenting anything. But Dana is both misrepresenting my study and being misleading. What a surprise.

—

 

Skeptical Science has another silly post up which attempts to pick at the edges of Nic Lewis’s climate sensitivity paper.  They titled the critique “Climate Sensitivity Single Study Syndrome, Nic Lewis Edition”  We all know that Skeptical Science is filled with those who are certain that oil money is brown and corrupts minds, while government money is green and makes scientists infallible.  I normally ignore the site but WUWT pointed me to it and sometimes SS is a bit of fun:

It’s most important not to fall into the trap of thinking that any single study will overturn a vast body of scientific evidence, derived from many different sources of data (or as Andrew Revkin calls this, single-study syndrome).

It isn’t the quote which caught my attention but Dana’s ankle-biting point here forgets much more important quotes from much smarter people.

“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”– Albert Einstein

Nic’s study found a best probability climate sensitivity of 1.6C/doubling CO2, now there should be nothing inherently wrong with that number but the know-nothings at Skeptical Science realize that it falls below their preferred sky-is-falling-so-we-need-to-empower-the-UN-and-stop-capitalism goals.     In other words, 1.6C would mean that there is no immediate doom on which to base their already ridiculously self-destructive political intent on.  Shame that eh?  So we get a bunch of emotion from their crowd.

Unfortunately for Dana (and the rest of the crowd there), there is a large body of evidence which has been piling up against these high climate sensitivity models.   MMH10 for instance, showed that the mean of the primary climate models is running statistically outside of observation, Lucia has done a number of posts to that effect.   Recently Roy Spencer put up a post showing the same problem.

From Dr. Roy Spencer, experiment vs observation:

This is one of my favorite plots from MMH10, which shows the same thing as Dr. Spencer with a bit of added stats.

MMH10 also has this plot:

Then there is this one from Chad Herman that incorporates surface temperature measurements:

Although surface temperatures are closer to the models than lower troposphere, again and again, the shotgun of government funded model simulations runs high against observation.  It is only in politicized forms of science where actual observations that contradict theory are rubbed out.  You would think the models would move instead.  Chucking unloved temperature proxies out in paleoclimate is another great example of theory trumping observation.

Anyway, there is hardly only one avenue of data which supports Nic’s lower sensitivity as Dana’s article implies.   The claim is so off the wall that it leaves one wondering why they would pull the wool over their readers eyes.  What caught my attention though was just how hard Dana was working away at Nic’s ankle bone.  I’m taking the whole paragraph this time, because it is that funny:

Even though Lewis refers specifically to “equilibrium climate sensitivity,” The methodology used by Lewis is also not even necessarily an estimate of equilibrium sensitivity, but rather of effective climate sensitivity, which is a somewhat different parameter.  The two may hypothetically be the same if all energy changes in the global climate system are accounted for (and to their credit, Forest and Lewis do include estimates of ocean heat content, including for the deep oceans), and if climate feedbacks remain constant.  However, recent research by Armour et al. (2012) suggests that the latter may not be the case.

I literally laughed out loud when I read this paragraph.  So the argument becomes first, don’t trust a single paper, then if you do trust it, don’t forget that climate sensitivity may change based on unknown and unmodeled factors which SS has just spent like 5 years telling us don’t exist. I do happen to agree that climate sensitivity is not a fixed number, so does everyone else, but Nic was estimating equilibrium sensitivity on this planet ….today… How this potential change in future sensitivity refutes Nic’s work can only be understood on Dana’s planet but it sure sounded foreboding.

After this paragraph, Dana moved on to some paleo-studies demonstrating high sensitivity from proxies which only a silly person would give the same credibility as present day measured data.    To finish it all off, Dana then humorously attacked Nic’s accuracy in claiming agreement with Aldrin et al.

One significant issue in Lewis’ paper (in his abstract, in fact) is that in trying to show that his result is not an outlier, he claims that Aldrin et al. (2012) arrived at the same most likely climate sensitivity estimate of 1.6°C, calling his result “identical to those from Aldrin et al. (2012).”  However, this is simply a misrepresentation of their paper.

This is what Nic claimed in the abstract:

Employing the improved methodology, preferred 90% bounds of 1.2–2.2 K for ECS are 20 then derived (mode and median 1.6 K). The mode is identical to those from Aldrin et al.  (2012) and (using the same, HadCRUT4, observational dataset) Ring et al. (2012).

Now you would think even a math novice would recognize the “mode and median” claim and realize that they must be something different.   Unfortunately Dana did not, and proceeded to stomp around and stuck his foot firmly within a dark area.  In his defense, perhaps Dana was tired and wasn’t reading as carefully as one would expect when critiquing a peer reviewed paper.  The claim WAS all the way to the bottom of the abstract after all, and advocacy is tiring work.  Tom Curtis pointed out the error in the comments last night at 4am but the post remains uncorrected.

I think the alarmist advocate crowd is in full Gaian prayer mode that temperatures will skyrocket soon.   It is the either the data or the climate models at this point, someone must move. In the meantime, it is entertaining watching the advocates squirm.

The State of Paleoclimate Understanding

In the huge amount of justified complaints made here about what I think of paleo-reconstructions, one detail is probably lost in the chaff.

I really wish I knew what historic temperatures were.  You can’t read that much paleoclimate information and not want to know.   Steve McIntyre clearly inspired my reading, and unfortunately the inspiration came through a wholly skeptical lens.  In time it has turned out that the skeptical perspective of the statistics and  data in paleoclimate were 100% justified.

With data so noisy, yet so full of potential revelations, scientists are also justified in their interest.  As time has passed, I’ve grown to understand that there isn’t really any known solid way to divine the history of climate.  We have enough clues to see past warmth and plenty of clues to show deep past ice ages, yet the trivial level of understanding of past temperature is quite distant from the equivocation-ridden certainty of present day scientific publications.

Ed Cook was no small player in the paleoclimate field.  His own words have a ton of meaning for those who have enough understanding of the pervasive nuance in the field:

  the results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bit about <100 year extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know fuck-all about what the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know with certainty that we know fuck-all).

This statement is an absolute scientific truth to my understanding.   There are multiple sentiments in it which have very solid meaning in interpreting these hockey stick plots.   First, and most interesting for those of us who actually want to know the truth, dendros seem to have discovered a way to see short term climate variation a very long time ago.   Variations on a scale of <100 years are also important because they give us some partial understanding of climate.   Unfortunately, Ed and I disagree as to the certainty of the meaning of even these short term variations.

That known correlation in itself is extremely cool. Skeptics of dendro question the linearity of these fluctuations with respect to temperature, but the short-term fluctuations themselves are highly correlated in local regions.  We can say that whatever was happening in climate to those regions, is measurable, and good plant growth years in one location were good plant growth years.  Not exactly known temperature “climate”, but growth climate is still a very cool thing.

Ed Cook knows the difference between short and long term variations, and after performing tree ring standardizations as I have, you get an understanding of why the long term signals (trends) in dendro hockeysticks are not likely represented by the data.  The math and physics simply don’t allow it.  Long term temperature trends derrived from tree rings, are necessarily quite meaningless.

Paleoclimate is noisy, and little is truly known in my opinion.   Better data is required, and despite the every-month premature conclusions from the experts, we shouldn’t lose site of the fact that once we discover the right proxy (or proxy combination), the math will not be the issue and finally we will know a true piece of our distant climate history.

Whatever we find out, that day when we finally know, will be an interesting day for me.

Happy Feet – Filtermatics

Something interesting at WUWT happened today.  This isn’t a typical issue as of late and requires a bit of math skill.   A post by Willis Eschenbach brought up some old memories of days where skeptic blogs like this one, were math centric.  Fortunately the math which Willis discusses this time, is relatively lightweight stuff, and it happens to involve the fortuitous filtering activities of Mannian filter-matics.

I highlighted an email on the topic a few weeks ago here which contains a quote that I thing belongs in Willis’s article.   Michael Mann has long been interested in filtering methods which promote the “Cause”,  I have to say that Willis’s example puts a spotlight on how awkward the team has been at promoting fortuitous filters.

5 PM 10/14/2003 -0400, Michael E. Mann wrote:

Dear All,
To those I thought might be interested, I’ve provided an example for discussion of
smoothing conventions.  Its based on a simple matlab script which I’ve written (and
attached) that uses any one of 3 possible boundary constraints [minimum norm, minimum
slope, and minimum roughness] on the ‘late’ end of a time series (it uses the default
‘minimum norm’ constraint on the ‘early’ end of the series). Warming: you needs some
matlab toolboxes for this to run…
The routines uses a simple butterworth lowpass filter, and applies the 3 lowest order
constraints in the following way:
1) minimum norm: sets mean equal to zero beyond the available data (often the default
constraint in smoothing routines)
2) minimum slope: reflects the data in x (but not y) after the last available data
point. This tends to impose a local minimum or maximum at the edge of the data.
3) minimum roughness: reflects the data in both x and y (the latter w.r.t. to the y
value of the last available data point) after the last available data point. This tends
     to impose a point of inflection at the edge of the data—this is most likely to
     preserve a trend late in the series and is mathematically similar, though not identical,
     to the more ad hoc approach of padding the series with a continuation of the trend over
     the past 1/2 filter width.
The routine returns the mean square error of the smooth with respect to the raw data. It
is reasonable to argue that the minimum mse solution is the preferable one.  In the
particular example I have chosen (attached), a 40 year lowpass filtering of the CRU NH
annual mean series 1856-2003, the preference is indicated for the “minimum roughness”
solution as indicated in the plot (though the minimum slope solution is a close 2nd)…
By the way, you may notice that the smooth is effected beyond a single filter width of
the boundary. That’s because of spectral leakage, which is unavoidable (though minimized
by e.g. multiple-taper methods).
I’m hoping this provides some food for thought/discussion, esp. for purposes of IPCC…
mike

It never seems to end, and the “happy” filtering nonsense started being noticed by Willis Eschenbach some time ago.

Cryosphere – Sea Ice Video

I wanted to see the 2012 ice loss in the Arctic so I updated the video’s.    The first video is full length, the second is just a clip of more recent years.   I repeated the result for the Antarctic which has seen increases in sea ice.

.

.

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Cryosphere at the Air Vent

All data provided by NSIDC gridded satellite. Compilation by me so errors are mine.  All Y axis units Km^2.

Priceless Entertainment from SKS

John Cook continued his path of self destruction at “Skeptical Science”.   I’ve often wondered if the blog title was meant as a sarcasm.  Today, we know neither word can apply accurately to their work in any other sense.  When others noticed that Richard Betts of the met office Climate Impacts was accidentally included in their recent paper’s SI, John tried to play it off as just raw data on that list in a tweet on Dr. Betts twitter account.  Interesting considering the title of the comment section in the SI was “Excerpt Espousing Conspiracy Theory”, and the fact that Richard Betts, wasn’t identified as Dr. Betts in the SI or by any other means that would associate him with the met office.   Is it possible that they didn’t know the famous scientist?

In reply, Dr. Betts noted to Cook that the column title to his comment was pretty clear.   Cook didn’t back off, instead he doubled down in full Real Climate fashion today at “Skeptical Science” blog.  (H/T Barry Woods)

The Supplementary Material is “raw data”

As well as the Recursive Fury paper, we also published Supplementary Material containing excerpts from blog posts and some comments relevant to the various observed recursive theories. In the paper, we characterise this as “raw data” – all the comments that we encountered that are relevant to the different theories. In contrast, the “processed data” are the excerpted quotes featured in the final paper, where we match the various recursive theories to the conspiracist criteria outlined above.

One misrepresentation of Recursive Fury is that we accuse Professor Richard Betts of the Met Office of being a conspiracy theorist because one of his quotes appears in our raw data. This inclusion of a relevant comment in the raw data of a Supplementary Material document was reported in hyperventilating fashion by one blogger as a spectacular carcrash. However, there is no mention of Professor Betts in our final paper and we are certainly not claiming that he is a conspiracy theorist. To claim otherwise is to ignore what we say about the online supplement in the paper itself. The presence of the comment in the supplementary material just attests to the thoroughness of our daily Google search.

Nevertheless, I can see how this misunderstanding arose. The Supplementary Material features the heading “Excerpt Espousing Conspiracy Theory” referring to the excerpted quotes that we pasted into the spreadsheet. In hindsight, the heading should have been  ”Excerpt relevant to a recursive theory”, because the criterion for inclusion was simply whether or not they referred to one of the hypotheses. The analysis of conspiracist ideation occurred after that, and involved the criteria mentioned at the outset.

In this context, it is important to point out that one reason we made the raw data available is for other scholars to be able to cast an alternative interpretative light on the public discourse relating to LOG12. As we note explicitly in the abstract, it is possible that alternative scholarly interpretations can be put forward, and the peer-reviewed literature is the appropriate forum for such analysis.

 

If that explanation holds water, one has to wonder, whom else from mainstream climate science was included in the SI? 

NOBODY?!!

It is obvious to any non-plant life that Dr. Betts was clearly picked up with the rest of us by accident, and the authors including Cook look like the complete incompetent idiots they are.  Their unscientific advocacy is plain as day.  As with all AGW advocates, logic does not override emotion and Skeptical Science type Skeptics simply cannot make mistakes.  It hurts their self-image.

A friendly note to Cook,   The boat is sinking!!!  Stop drilling holes.  Nope, Nope, strike that.    KEEP GOING!!  The entertainment is priceless.

 

Lewandowsky – Strike Three!! What a riot!

UPDATE:  Bishop Hill has more to say on the matter:Lewandowsky and Cook in spectacular carcrash

I woke up today still laughing.  Others chiming in:

Geoff Chambers Commentary

Cook & Lew label senior Met Office climatologist a ‘conspiracy theorist’

WUWT Tom Fuller

The Blackboard

—-

H/T Reader Skiphil again… Update: Barry Woods or Geoff Chambers seem to have found the quote.

So the good docktor finally got his contribution to scientific understanding past the rigorous peer review of Frontiers of Psychology.   I have to say, I’m actually pleased with his improved and only moderately distorted reference to me.

Conspiracist ideation is arguably also exhibited on climate blogs, for example when expressing the belief that climate scientists “colluded with government officials to ignore the law”(Condon,2009)

The new entry was in reference to an email I sent to the editor regarding the avoidance of FOIA by UEA scientists, where I pointed out that Jones stated:

When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school – the head of school and a few others) became very supportive.

But this post isn’t about me.  Lewandowsky has placed a comment in his supplementary information from the excellent bishop Hill blog, authored by fellow conspiracy theorist Richard Betts:

The thing I don’t understand is, why didn’t they just make a post on sceptic blogs themselves, rather than approaching blog owners. They could have posted as a Discussion topic here at Bishop Hill without even asking the host, and I very much doubt that the Bish would have removed it. Climate Audit also has very light-touch moderation and I doubt whether Steve McIntyre would have removed such an unsolicited post. Same probably goes for many of the sceptic blogs, in my experience. So it does appear to that they didn’t try very hard to solicit views from the climate sceptic community.

 Unfortunately for Lewandowsky, this is Richard Betts:

Current activities

Richard is Head of the Climate Impacts strategic area, which includes climate impacts research and also the climate change consultancy unit.

The Met Office’s main role in climate impacts research is to facilitate a more integrated approach to the assessment of climate change impacts, in collaboration with specialists across the wider academic community. A large part of our impacts research, therefore, involves examining the interactions between different impacts areas, such as agriculture, natural ecosystems, water resources, glaciers, urban areas and human health.

Richard leads the impacts theme of the JULES community land surface modelling programme. This collaborative project forms part of UK-wide efforts to assess impacts in an internally-consistent manner.

The Met Office’s climate change consultancy area works directly with end-users in a wide range of sectors, to ensure climate change information is used effectively for decision-making. This end-user contact also informs our research direction to keep it relevant to user needs.

Career background

• BSc (Physics), University of Bristol, 1991.
• MSc (Meteorology and Applied Climatology), University of Birmingham, 1992.
• PhD (Meteorology), University of Reading, 1998\

This absolutely made my day.   What a riot Lewandowsky has been.   I literally laughed to tears that he would pick up this comment and label the head of the Met Office Climate Impacts as well as a lead author for the IPCC a conspiracy theorist.

Look out Lewie, they are all around you!!!

Real Dangers of Dissent

Well folks, some of you were wondering why nobody touched the publication of that CG3 password, I have been contacted by a UEA law firm regarding the recently released Climategate password.  Some even asked for FOIA to come clean as to their identity.   I have pointed out repeatedly that an angry activist lawyer can make a mess out of any law, and the UEA has plenty of them.  When the police came out with the statement that the statute of limitations had run out, I pointed out that each release could be considered separately by any lawyer.

Anyone with access to the recent password must be exceedingly careful in its use.  These emails were not released publicly by someone else so legally they are hot potatoes.    The UEA law firm did attach the standard “this email is confidential” bullcrap on the bottom, but it seems more prudent to head off any problems with a public release so I choose to ignore it. A lot of bloggers received the password so I doubt very much it will stay private for long.  It won’t be here that it comes out.

Dear Sir

We understand from a blog post made by you on 12 March 2013 that you have either
received an unsolicited email from someone going by the name of ‘Mr FOIA’ or that this has
been forwarded to you. The email from Mr FOIA provides a password to access a
substantial number of documents. It is our understanding from the blog postings which we
have seen that the password does work and that the information can be accessed. We do
not know what information has been made available in this way but have a very real concern
that it may include ‘personal data’. This is data which, under the Data Protection Act 1998,
might enable the identification of a living individual and which is strictly regulated under the
provisions of the Act. Unlike previous releases, and from what we understand from the
publication of Mr FOIA’s email, the information appears to have been left entirely unredacted
or filtered in any way.

The information contained in these document is likely to have been illegally obtained from
the University’s servers in October 2009. The on-going dissemination of any ‘personal data’
obtained in this way would amount to a further criminal offence. Given that the sharing of
the password would enable any third party to access any of the documents there is a very
real danger that personal data will be disclosed in breach of the Data Protection Act.
The University has no desire to stifle debate around climate change but the University must
take steps where information has been obtained illegally and to protect employees and
students at the University as well as third parties from unnecessary harm arising from the
unregulated and widespread disclosure of personal data.

Accordingly, please confirm by return:

•

That you will not publish the password with which you have been provided nor the
information it protects
That you will forward a copy of this notice to any person to whom you have supplied
the password
That you will not publish any ‘personal data’.

•

•

If you are in doubt about what is meant by ‘personal data’ then please follow the attached
link to the Data Protection Act. Please note in particular the provisions of section 17, 21 and
55. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/29/contents

Interestingly, “personal data includes” one’s political opinions among other things.

In this Act “sensitive personal data” means personal data consisting of information as to—
(a)the racial or ethnic origin of the data subject,
(b)his political opinions,
(c)his religious beliefs or other beliefs of a similar nature,
(d)whether he is a member of a trade union (within the meaning of the M1Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992),
(e)his physical or mental health or condition,
(f)his sexual life,
(g)the commission or alleged commission by him of any offence, or
(h)any proceedings for any offence committed or alleged to have been committed by him, the disposal of such proceedings or the sentence of any court in such proceedings.

I recommend extreme care in release of any of these emails. To date I have only re-published emails from CG1 and CG2, there is a reason for that.

Loser of the Month — That’s all Folks!

I have been enjoying climate blogs recently again.   Joe Romm provided a bit of entertainment on March 8 with his delightfully uncritical eye to the new Marcott, Shakun, Clark and Mix hockeystick.   The paper, which unfortunately was the wishful extension of a thesis (some pun intended), that was debunked by Steve McIntyre before most of us had read the SI.  By debunked, I mean really, really trashed.   I have seen some weak engineering work but wow, this paper was special.   Jean S even noted that there was no blade on the stick in the original thesis but the publication picked up by the press had a dad-would-be-proud blade on it.

So Joe Romm used his considerable intellectual prowess to take the previously non-uptick curve, and accepted its global warming doom result with the full clarity of passion that any scientific mind could project. His title was –  Bombshell: Recent Warming Is ‘Amazing And Atypical’ And Poised To Destroy Stable Climate That Enabled Civilization

I really wouldn’t have noticed except for the fact that Mr. Pete commented on it at Climate Audit.

So was the fake blade of the rewritten thesis enough for Joe Romm’s advocacy?  Oh hell no—

He pasted an even bigger fake-er blade on the end!!!  Gotta love it.

Unfortunately, we have decided to change the setting on the thermostat from “Very Stable, Don’t Adjust” to “Hell and High Water.” It is the single most self-destructive act humanity has ever undertaken  –  Dr. Joe Romm

So for that bit of scientific wizardry, I hereby appoint Dr. Romm the highly regarded honor of the Air Vent – Loser of the month.

Parsing Emails

So I spent several hours today writing scripts which parse the emails.   I was hoping for continuations of some of the more interesting conversations we are familiar with but so far have found little more than a group of advocates for catastrophic climate change, doing what they do.  They fully believe that the fact that proxy data doesn’t match temperature, in no way calls into question the randomly selected proxy data. Some question whether it is it ok to paste data on the end of a series.  Still there are others who advocates of more study, stating that the “act-now” advocates are not honest scientists.   Again, I’m reminded of the organized and funded attacks against anyone who notices the problems with their work.  It is really shocking to read how they followed through with attacks against those who don’t fall in line.  Mann in particular, is thin skinned and his angry attacks on other advocates not pushing his version of history, pressure those with little backbone to play both sides of the fence.

If you want the meaning of the emails, you have to be able to read and CG1 and 2 have most everything we need to know in them so far.   Beyond a three word “hide the decline”, the average public has no interest.  So far, I have found no new pithy quote with the kind of clarity that CG1 revealed. I did find a large number of emails which we have covered in topic before.   Some have new replies but I’ve noticed nothing which was tremendously interesting.

There were so many nuances in these emails.  Remember this email from Michael Mann (my bold):

Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 17:08:49 -0400
To:
Subject: Re: smoothing
Bcc: >
correction ’1)’ should read:
’1) minimum norm: sets padded values equal to mean of available data beyond the
available data (often the default constraint in smoothing routines)’
sorry for the confusion,
mike
At 05:05 PM 10/14/2003 -0400, Michael E. Mann wrote:

Dear All,
To those I thought might be interested, I’ve provided an example for discussion of
smoothing conventions.  Its based on a simple matlab script which I’ve written (and
attached) that uses any one of 3 possible boundary constraints [minimum norm, minimum
slope, and minimum roughness] on the ‘late’ end of a time series (it uses the default
‘minimum norm’ constraint on the ‘early’ end of the series). Warming: you needs some
matlab toolboxes for this to run…
The routines uses a simple butterworth lowpass filter, and applies the 3 lowest order
constraints in the following way:
1) minimum norm: sets mean equal to zero beyond the available data (often the default
constraint in smoothing routines)
2) minimum slope: reflects the data in x (but not y) after the last available data
point. This tends to impose a local minimum or maximum at the edge of the data.
3) minimum roughness: reflects the data in both x and y (the latter w.r.t. to the y
value of the last available data point) after the last available data point. This tends
     to impose a point of inflection at the edge of the data—this is most likely to
     preserve a trend late in the series and is mathematically similar, though not identical,
     to the more ad hoc approach of padding the series with a continuation of the trend over
     the past 1/2 filter width.
The routine returns the mean square error of the smooth with respect to the raw data. It
is reasonable to argue that the minimum mse solution is the preferable one.  In the
particular example I have chosen (attached), a 40 year lowpass filtering of the CRU NH
annual mean series 1856-2003, the preference is indicated for the “minimum roughness”
solution as indicated in the plot (though the minimum slope solution is a close 2nd)…
By the way, you may notice that the smooth is effected beyond a single filter width of
the boundary. That’s because of spectral leakage, which is unavoidable (though minimized
by e.g. multiple-taper methods).
I’m hoping this provides some food for thought/discussion, esp. for purposes of IPCC…
mike

After reading from these same people, how well funded “right-wing” skeptics with ties to industry are so biased, to read that reflection of a trend at the end of  a hockey stick “might” be proper science is a little difficult to swallow.  Don’t forget that this is a 2003 email, and we now know that temps have stayed relatively flat since then.    The reflection Mr. Mann proposed, is therefore ad-hoc, and can now be proven inaccurate.

In the end, today’s reading was 99.9 percent review of just how loose a game is being played.  It shouldn’t be overlooked that the purpose of the enzyte filter Dr. Mike proposed is for publishing in the premier global warming report of all time.

 

 

Climategate 3.0

The password for the remaining emails was sent to me and several other blogs last night.   Anthony Watts has the letter up and it should explain a little about what is going on.

Sandwich Board Skeptics

Steve McIntyre has a nice post up which I missed for 4 days.   He is very good.  Imagine the work it takes to go to AGU, sit through a Mann lecture expecting bad graphs to be used and be ready with a camera.

Hell, even if I had the time, I sure as shit wouldn’t spend it that way, but look at the brilliant post it made.  The fakery of climate advocacy in full view again.

Despite my last post, apparently the fake science still gets me wound up [grammar improved].   Mann literally avoided showing measured temperature data in his graphs on models vs observation when describing predictions of global “temperature” trend.  Climate science, truncating climate records again, all for the cause.   Now that is scientifically IN-credible!!!

Were the rest of the team a little smarter, they would excise the cancer now because if the danger is so real, they cannot afford false exaggeration.  Of course they won’t, and it is good news for us because if team Mann didn’t exist, skeptics of global doom would be forced to invent them……  Lewandowsky would then be forced to publish…. well the same old garbage he always does.

—-

When did it become unreasonable to discount imminent global destruction anyway?

Blind Mice

I am having a hard time generating the will to write as of late.   It didn’t use to be that way.  I used to get really upset when I read some alarmist garbage or other, all pushing the same fake lines of global doom.   Now there is so much progressive propaganda in the global environment, (yes it has increased dramatically) I spend most of my time being upset about other things stupid and climate alarmism is just a symptom of the much broader disease.   Just look across the various localities of the world and you can see the result of leftist progressivism.  Heck, you can see it on a state by state, or even city by city basis.

Craig Loehle wrote a nice article which sums up my thoughts reasonably well at WUWT.   He refers to alarmism in terms of categorical thinking.   Basically making the point that alarmists as a whole do not critically challenge the fact that warming is automatically a disaster.  They see all change to the environment as unnatural and therefore universally bad.  He notes that alarmists cannot separate climate change from negative change:

It is irrelevant how much we have changed it, we have changed the state, like spitting into the swimming pool makes everyone get out. The climate is now broken. And with a broken, human-altered climate, anything is possible, even super storms (which we can conveniently create by naming them such). It doesn’t matter if we only changed it a trivial amount, we’ve ruined the Garden of Eden with our sinful ways.

I don’t see it as categorical thinking, as described by Dr. Loehle, perhaps I’m wrong, but I do see it as feel-think.  Our world has become so messed up with everything-is-equal-progressivism that feelings have replaced logic.  It is no small irony that progressivism is nothing new, it holds the key features of the most repressive governments on the planet yet re-branded and resold, people think feel they are doing something new.  Something less dangerous and deserving of a new brand.   Handing massive power to the central government, stealing money from economic creators and handling it for redistribution, always corrupts.   Political favorites are being paid off in droves with tax money by Obama’s administration,  yet progressives feel it is good to pay off anti-business unions and green companies, so it isn’t a problem.

I listened to a breakdown of a group of voters commenting on a couple of speeches delivered and the host asked the individuals what they thought about different aspects of the speakers.  Several of them ‘felt’ that one person was more honest, so that person got their support.   The youngest man in the audience based his entire opinion on how he felt, his answer was flat stupid but he justified it by feelings on honesty of the speaker, not logic.

Besides the fact that I disagreed with him and that his reply was entirely ignorant, answering in that manner seemed fully reasonable to him.  Worse, nobody in the audience seemed bothered by it.

Feelings are not logic.

We should help the poor by giving them money.   If they can’t find a job, we should support them long term on welfare.   While these are noble ideas which make everyone feel good, they neglect the long term result that people will often not try to do anything with themselves if they don’t have to.  Through generations of these policies we have created a culture of unemployable people who will never create a thing for this world.  Fifty percent unemployment in Detroit is a direct result of hard-left Obamaesque policies.  Take the money from the rich, they have a lot more than me, fails to recognize that there is a negative impact on other peoples jobs for that.   Guns kill people, take the guns away!  It feels good, yet the fact that criminals aren’t concerned with laws, is not incorporated into the feeling.

The problem is far deeper than that though.  We have an administration which has ignored the constitution, bent the rules, and done a huge variety of things outside of the legal structure of this country.   There is very little we can do to stop the erosion of our constitution under this regime.  The EPA is completely out of control, as is employment law interpretation.  The left makes little sound because they “feel” that the laws are helpful to the people.  Besides missing the hugely negative impacts of these policies on businesses and individual rights, they flatly fail to consider what the next person will do with that wildly expanded power.

Fracking is bad, because they feel it and windmills are good, for the same reason.   It doesn’t matter one lick that windmill production has trashed huge areas of China’s land, nor does it matter that there have been no serious impacts from natural gas production.  No consideration is given to positive effects of the much cleaner burning natural gas just as Nuclear power is a bad word no matter what the context.

All of these thoughts by the liberals are flatly wrong.  Feeling is an important part of being human, but in an adult society, it cannot replace logic.

I predicted a strong economic spring despite the tax increases.  Most liberals have already taken that feeling and internalized it into the category of more taxes are ok.  They feel it because they see the weakly positive sounding news, in the same general time frame as the tax increases.   It won’t matter that the true effect on the economy is the difference of where we are to where we would have been without the taxes.   It also won’t matter that the economy slows in a year (I’m not predicting that), because the feelings already happened.  They feel it is ok.

The first 6 hours of my day are spent working to send money to the government so that it can be redistributed to those who support feeling based thought, while they sit on their couches watch their government paid big-screen TV’s and collect checks.    I’m allowed to make money with the last 4. How would that make you feel..  I just got off the phone with one of our suppliers at 8pm and I went to work at 6 am today.    That is a normal day for me.

Until we grow up as people, stop pretending that fingers are firearms and giving a ribbon to everyone win or lose, the disease will grow progressively worse.  The examples are endless, and frustrating for those of us who rely on our minds for making determinations rather than our feelings.

So it is hard for me to give a crap about climate change.   I miss the data and the constant puzzles handed out by advocates pretending to be scientists, so it will be fun to go back.  In the meantime, I’m a grumpy business owner who can’t afford to operate by feeling and who is being robbed by ignorant people with negative “feelings” toward businesses which feed them.

The Power of Underpants

As you can tell, I have been very busy lately.   I still have been lurking the same blogs and reading the comment threads so my time isn’t quite reduced to zero.   Recently, an article came out regarding some Ohio State researchers who claimed to have invented a process to burn coal and emit no CO2.   You don’t need to have a lot of chemical engineering chops to be skeptical of a process like that but I was interested enough to investigate it.  Articles with headlines like this were common so it sounded like real progress toward retarding the global warming aspect of the pending progressive economic suicide:

A technology for generating electricity from coal without pollution achieves a milestone.

Chemical Looping May Make Cleaner Coal-Fired Power Plants Possible

DOE-SUPPORTED PROJECT ADVANCES CLEAN COAL, CARBON CAPTURE TECHNOLOGY OHIO STATE RESEARCHERS SHOW VIABILITY OF ADVANCED CHEMICAL LOOPING PROCESS

Of course every every news source I found made the fundamental assumption that CO2 emission (plant food) is actually hurting something.  Plenty of readers here agree with that premise,  however I don’t see any evidence for that claim.    The mere fact that CO2 can alter climate, does not preclude the possibility that the climate for our existence can improve.  This is beside the point though, a true zero emission technology is hard to argue against in our feelings-are-equal-to-logic world, and if it gets people moving in the right economic direction, I’m on board too.

But we deal with facts here, especially when they are not pleasant to read.  Here is a link to an excellent and complete explanation of the process.    It is described as follows:

   

Note that the resulting process on the bottom line looks very similar to the old fashioned process of actually burning coal in a fire pit.  In fact, it is exactly the same, so it leaves one wondering just what “scheme” these people have invented.

From Technology Review

This rather convoluted process has at least two advantages. It produces a pure stream of carbon dioxide that’s easy to capture and ready to be stored underground. And the burning of iron in air also takes place at lower temperatures that don’t produce nitrogen oxide.

So what we have is a process which uses Iron oxide (rust) to transport oxygen to pulverized coal. The Iron is then re-rusted with air, to recycle the material and burn more coal. The process happens slower than simply pumping air through coal so the material burns slower and the scientists separate the CO2 from the water rather than dropping it all into the sky.  In a nutshell, rather than some great technological leap forward, the process is a convoluted way to transport the oxygen to burning coal.   I can’t find anything of revolutionary properties that cannot already be achieved with other technologies.  Separating gasses from the H20 in the emission stream of a standard coal plant and compressing it into a tank, is not technologically challenging.  The emission fraction of CO2 from a standard coal plant is already 99ish percent and if you are putting the Co2 gas into a tank, why not put all of it except the water into it?   Other technologies already produce a more pure CO2 stream than most coal plants (if that is actually important) and do it at a high temperature more standard process.

One would think this would be a near non-story but this isn’t a world where logic trumps sensationalism.  There was plenty of money spent on it though.

The government has invested over 3 million and coal/oil companies have invested hundreds of thousands, and both of these groups have direct knowledge that the project cannot actually be successful because it doesn’t address what to do with the carbon dioxide.  Worse, the reduced efficiency to capture, grind and separate the CO2, it actually produces MORE CO2 per watt than standard coal plants.   I suppose that since there aren’t any good alternatives for investing green money, they have to dump the cash somewhere.   It is really too bad that the givernment is stealing it from me in huge wads first, because I could have actually done something with that cash.

You would think that the project would stop there until we had a place to actually put the CO2.   The scientists have shown the capability to burn stuff this way but we have nowhere to put the stupid compressed CO2 gas.  That isn’t how the left thinks  feels.  Instead, our glorious economic superiors are “investing” confiscated money toward actually implementing powerplants with this technology.

In a related advance, Illinois is actually building a carbon capture plant which uses purified oxygen, and apparently puts the CO2 into the ground where in the long run, we won’t actually know what happens to it.

It is unfortunate that we have to look to Hollywood for an explanation of anything, but South Park probably has the most apt description of these particular “clean burning” zero emission technologies: