John Coleman, Founder of the Weather Channel, on Global Warming Posted on January 1st, 2010
More evidence of gatekeeping Posted on December 20th, 2009
The news that a Russian think tank has accused the CRU ofcooking the books has been doing the rounds of the internet. The other intriguing angle to this story though was further evidence of climate sceptic papers being illegitimately rejected by reviewers. Here Phil Jones reports to Mann what he has done.
Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.
Now, someone has identified themselves as being the authors of one of the papers concerned. Commenting at Climate Audit, Lars Kamel says this:
One of those rejected papers about Siberian temperatures may have been by me. The time is about right. I got it rejected because of nonsense from a reviewer and the editor saw it as an attack on him when I critized the quality of the review. After that, I gave up the idea of ever getting something AGW critical published in a journal.
It will be interesting to see if Kamel’s paper on CRU’s handling of Siberian temperatures was valid, or if Jones rejected it simply because it disagreed with him. I wonder if we can get hold of Jones’ review? The second part of Kamel’s point is important though. This suggests that at least some sceptics simply gave up trying to get their views published because they knew they could not get their findings past the gatekeepers. This demonstrates that the IPCC reports can never be anything other than biased. The scientific literature does not represent the collected knowledge mankind has about the climate. It represents the collected views of part of the climatological community.
Another scientist has been speaking out on the same issue. Dutch professor, Arthur Rorsch, is making further allegations of misdeeds by climatologists. In an article entitled “Sick science” he explains how difficult it was for sceptics to get published.
“It is exactly as we feared. If I were to submit an article from a friendly colleague who wanted to publish in a scientific journal, we would always get a rejection; without proper argumentation. I was not the only Dutch researcher that happened to. Climate skeptics everywhere ran into brick walls.
He describes the emails as demonstrating an intent to deceive and has this to say of the state of climatology:
This is no longer genuine science. These are politically motivated people…it is a religion, or rather, a belief.
Bishop HillThe other paper appears to be Aufhammer et al. This second paper, interestingly has some of the Climate Audit regulars cooing with appreciation of what a good study it is.
Update: Aufhammer has now commented and says it’s a simple case of a good paper being rejected – bad stuff happens, in other words. He does say that one of the original reviewers had very strong opinions against it, so I’m not convinced this takes away from the original point that much – climatologists were still trying to reject papers for invalid reasons.
Positive Proof of Global Warming FOUND Posted on December 11th, 2009
This is irrefutable, non-bustable, Climategate-proof data that shows global warming is REAL and that Al Gore is right!
The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero Posted on December 9th, 2009
Note from Aaron: This article is lengthy and somewhat scientific, but not overly so. Grab a beverage and sit down. I’m only reproducing the first portion of it here. I suggest you follow the link below (author’s name) or at the bottom of this post to the original. It’s well worth reading and will give you some important insight into not only how the data is manipulated (for ill or good), but the kinds of things scientists deal with and why just sticking a thermometer out the window every few hours is not really “getting climate data.”
People keep saying “Yes, the Climategate scientists behaved badly. But that doesn’t mean the data is bad. That doesn’t mean the earth is not warming.”
Darwin Airport – by Dominic Perrin via Panoramio
Let me start with the second objection first. The earth has generally been warming since the Little Ice Age, around 1650. There is general agreement that the earth has warmed since then. See e.g. Akasofu . Climategate doesn’t affect that.
The second question, the integrity of the data, is different. People say “Yes, they destroyed emails, and hid from Freedom of information Acts, and messed with proxies, and fought to keep other scientists’ papers out of the journals … but that doesn’t affect the data, the data is still good.” Which sounds reasonable.
There are three main global temperature datasets. One is at the CRU, Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where we’ve been trying to get access to the raw numbers. One is at NOAA/GHCN, the Global Historical Climate Network. The final one is at NASA/GISS, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The three groups take raw data, and they “homogenize” it to remove things like when a station was moved to a warmer location and there’s a 2C jump in the temperature. The three global temperature records are usually called CRU, GISS, and GHCN. Both GISS and CRU, however, get almost all of their raw data from GHCN. All three produce very similar global historical temperature records from the raw data.
So I’m still on my multi-year quest to understand the climate data. You never know where this data chase will lead. This time, it has ended me up in Australia. I got to thinking about Professor Wibjorn Karlen’s statement about Australia that I quoted here:
Another example is Australia. NASA [GHCN] only presents 3 stations covering the period 1897-1992. What kind of data is the IPCC Australia diagram based on?
If any trend it is a slight cooling. However, if a shorter period (1949-2005) is used, the temperature has increased substantially. The Australians have many stations and have published more detailed maps of changes and trends.
The folks at CRU told Wibjorn that he was just plain wrong. Here’s what they said is right, the record that Wibjorn was talking about, Fig. 9.12 in the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, showing Northern Australia:
Figure 1. Temperature trends and model results in Northern Australia. Black line is observations (From Fig. 9.12 from the UN IPCC Fourth Annual Report). Covers the area from 110E to 155E, and from 30S to 11S. Based on the CRU land temperature.) Data from the CRU.
One of the things that was revealed in the released CRU emails is that the CRU basically uses the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) dataset for its raw data. So I looked at the GHCN dataset. There, I find three stations in North Australia as Wibjorn had said, and nine stations in all of Australia, that cover the period 1900-2000. Here is the average of the GHCN unadjusted data for those three Northern stations, from AIS:
Figure 2. GHCN Raw Data, All 100-yr stations in IPCC area above.
So once again Wibjorn is correct, this looks nothing like the corresponding IPCC temperature record for Australia. But it’s too soon to tell. Professor Karlen is only showing 3 stations. Three is not a lot of stations, but that’s all of the century-long Australian records we have in the IPCC specified region. OK, we’ve seen the longest stations record, so lets throw more records into the mix. Here’s every station in the UN IPCC specified region which contains temperature records that extend up to the year 2000 no matter when they started, which is 30 stations.
Figure 3. GHCN Raw Data, All stations extending to 2000 in IPCC area above.
Still no similarity with IPCC. So I looked at every station in the area. That’s 222 stations. Here’s that result:
Figure 4. GHCN Raw Data, All stations extending to 2000 in IPCC area above.
So you can see why Wibjorn was concerned. This looks nothing like the UN IPCC data, which came from the CRU, which was based on the GHCN data. Why the difference?
The answer is, these graphs all use the raw GHCN data. But the IPCC uses the “adjusted” data. GHCN adjusts the data to remove what it calls “inhomogeneities”. So on a whim I thought I’d take a look at the first station on the list, Darwin Airport, so I could see what an inhomogeneity might look like when it was at home. And I could find out how large the GHCN adjustment for Darwin inhomogeneities was.
First, what is an “inhomogeneity”? I can do no better than quote from GHCN:
Most long-term climate stations have undergone changes that make a time series of their observations inhomogeneous. There are many causes for the discontinuities, including changes in instruments, shelters, the environment around the shelter, the location of the station, the time of observation, and the method used to calculate mean temperature. Often several of these occur at the same time, as is often the case with the introduction of automatic weather stations that is occurring in many parts of the world. Before one can reliably use such climate data for analysis of longterm climate change, adjustments are needed to compensate for the nonclimatic discontinuities.
That makes sense. The raw data will have jumps from station moves and the like. We don’t want to think it’s warming just because the thermometer was moved to a warmer location. Unpleasant as it may seem, we have to adjust for those as best we can.
I always like to start with the rawest data, so I can understand the adjustments.
Al Gore and Global Warming Theory Shot Down by a 6th Grader Posted on December 9th, 2009
This is Peter. He’s a sixth grader (12 years old) and his dad is a biologist. They’ve made a video describing the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI) and showing how it skews surface temperature data. Using a simple formula, they downloaded freely-available data from NASA’s GISS, they plot the actual recorded data without “homogenizing” and show how UHI seriously screws up the global temperature data Al Gore and other pseudo-scientists use to plot climate change.
Who needs Climategate when you’ve got a 6th grader?
Of course, the video points out that Peter’s dad does not work for any oil or energy companies, so they aren’t being paid off to do this. Or are they?
What is not mentioned is that Peter works in the summer mowing the lawn of the local Conoco station for extra cash. That, of course, means he’s on Big Oil’s payroll, so he’s obvious got a “stake” in this game.*
*Note: if you believe those last two sentences, you are a moron and deserve to be called one. If that is all you can find wrong with this video, you are a Global Warming Gorebot and are nothing more than a mindless parrot for the Big Bankers who want to use global warming as a way to create a new world exchange based on nothing. Hope you got in early on your investment in Al Gore’s company, pal. Now quit pretending that science is on your side and go have a latte. Be aware that if you get into a car to drive to the coffee shop, you are a hypocritical dillweed. </rant>
