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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.

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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.