A Few Points On That Climate Thingy
Irradiated by LabRat
So, the hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have been news for awhile now and I haven’t said a damn thing about it. Partly it’s because I don’t like talking about the subject very much because it’s a big complicated ball of snakes, of scientific, cultural, economic, and political varieties and it gives me a headache, and partly it was because I wanted to see how reactions went and what would emerge as people more industrious than me dug into the data; either way I didn’t want to comment at the time.
There was a Vicious Circle on the subject (yes, I know, a finer panel of expertise has never been assembled), in which Unix-Jedi mentioned that I had been wrong about one thing, which was that at the time we talked about it, I thought it would amount to roughly nothing. I figured it didn’t really fit well into the media’s narrative- and while various media outlets are definitely biased in their respective partisan ways, nothing can get one to ignore a story faster and more thoroughly than not fitting well into established narrative- and scientists would shrug it off, because detractors would pick up on all the wrong things in the e-mails and make stupid points. As it turned out, I was about half right, but definitely wrong about it turning out to be a nonevent. So since I don’t have much of a narrative myself beyond, a few bits and pieces.
1. The damning thing in the e-mails isn’t the language, like “trick”- it doesn’t really mean the same thing within that kind of scientific circles as it does in, say, running the con game. And it isn’t that it catches a bunch of senior scientists behaving like catty sorority sisters, either; despite the white idealistic edifice of Science, there are a lot of rivalries and bitter enmities within disciplines, and people defintely have their own agendas. If anything, this prevents huge conspiracies from being formed; nobody would be able to resist the temptation of showing up that bastard Doctor Brandx well enough to maintain them. And the peer-review process is sadly political, though it usually doesn’t go to quite the lengths described. I say this not to defend that sad reality, but to say it’s not really that extraordinary. The lengths gone to in the e-mails are unusual, they’re just not fantastical.
2. The damning thing *is* the deletion of the raw data. The space-saving excuse is just unfiltered bullshit; you just don’t dump your raw data like that. Especially not when it’s as critical to the other people working in your field as it is.
3. The damning thing is also the code for the modelling and the data it was based on found, which is a complete spaghetti mess. The now-infamous in programming circles HARRY_READ_ME file is a rather poignant account of a programmer faced with producing project-dependent results from buggy, poorly documented code with sometimes-missing and sometimes-invalid data. If you’re going to rely heavily on computer modeling.. it should fucking well be a well-constructed model.
4. The general response from the scientific community as a whole has been a giant scoff, pointing out that just because this one dataset (though it was a dataset from which a great deal of work has been done) is compromised doesn’t mean the earth isn’t warming. And the thing that a lot of skeptics are missing is, they are absolutely right. Recent warming over the past century HAS been corroborated by a vast number of other data sources, both direct and proxies like melting ice. Saying that global warming is a sham based on Climategate is like saying evolution is bullshit because of Piltdown man. (Which doesn’t stop a ton of creationists from doing just this, but never mind.)
But here’s the other thing: that’s not the issue. If I were continuing to use evolution as an analogy, let’s say that I was a scientist in an alternate universe where Charles Darwin went into the clergy and Alfred Russel Wallace was fatally bitten by a viper and no naturalist with any real observational skill to speak of had ever followed them. Say I were a naturalist who had observed what I believed to evidence of species changing over time, and that ever since my mother was raped during an itinerant carnival when I was small, I had a tendency to relate everything surprising or bad in my life to clowns in some fashion. I develop a complex theory statistically relating the practice of dressing up in makeup for entertainment over the course of history to change in species over time and show their relationship, and arguing that societies being able to afford more luxuries to support more full-time clowning as they became richer would lead to catastrophic and grotesque mutation in the species.
At that point, if you were seeking to support or refute the Theory of Clown Corruption of The Kinds, you would have deep and multiple wells of data supporting the idea that species changed over time, and you would probably also be able to find a higher rate of mutants near sources of industrial (rich-society) waste- but the actual relevant point you would need to attack or defend would be their link to clowns and the strength of the statistics supporting a direct causal relationship between clowns and change in species.
The argument between serious people isn’t about whether the world is warming or whether climate modellers tried to “hide” the recent slowdown in warming- which climate scientists themselves readily accept is due to solar activity at this point. It’s not even about whether human-generated CO2 causes warming; both of these things are, in fact, “settled science”. What it’s about is how much warming it can cause, and what drives natural variations in climate, and whether the current warming trend is being *dominated* by human sources or natural variation. That’s what makes the models important: they help us tease out the variables involved in something that doesn’t offer historical data as nicely as the fossil record does for vertebrate evolution. And that’s what makes the integrity of the modelers- and how well they’re looking after that historical data that we do have- important, and why this IS a big deal, even if a lot of people who should really know much better are playing see-no-evil, speak-no-evil.
5. On that last point: again, they’re not doing it because there’s a conspiracy. Some climate researchers have a lot to gain in grants from the catastrophic anthropogenic scenario, but a lot of others could make an insta-reputation tearing it apart, and a lot more than that work in some other physical science altogether. They act like they do because virtually to a man, CAGW opponents act like just about every other variety of anti-science loon there is. In a great many cases they’re even the same people. They use the same kind of arguments, the same kind of paranoia-mongering, the same kind of ignorance of basic facts well-known within physical science, and generally look, act, flap, and quack just crackpot ducks. Shrugging off this breed is reflex at this point.
6. I should reiterate: “the establishment” of whitecoats is right in that this doesn’t actually invalidate anything or prove any kind of conspiracy; what it DOES is suggest that the various organizations and major researchers involved need to voluntarily commit to transparency at all levels if we want to get data we can trust to both demonstrate what is happening and plausibly demonstrate why. And so far they seem more interested in denial games.
I’d finish this off and say THAT’S the damning part, but I can’t feel any sense of triumph or vindication over this. Because there’s still the chance they might be right anyway, as a thousand jackasses before them were right for the wrong reasons or behaved badly with their information. That’s the tragic part.
November 30th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Do we actually have a short term data source for anything prior to 1930 on a wide scale though? They use tree rings to say they have temp data, but as far as I know, nobody knows why the tree ring data actually becomes unreliable after 1960. Have there been actual experiments run on the cause with hermetically sealed environments and variable temperatures/CO2 concentrations to confirm it? Because otherwise, we still don’t know how the tree ring data stacks up, and thusly have no clue if it’s a continuously reliable temperature sensor or if it randomly diverges from the actual temp during various periods in the past as well.
Combine this with the fact that there are large amounts of temperature sensors that are placed outside the accepted guidelines which data is still accepted from, and do we really have any clue how much warming is actually occurring and whether it has any major push coming from CO2 output?
November 30th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Unix-Jedi mentioned that I had been wrong about one thing
Hey, could I pass up the chance to say LABRAT IS WRONG!!? (and be right?)
That being said, I understand what you mean, and I do have concerns that the media is going to bury it, because the CRU release does not fit the dominant media paradigm (Which almost always is to give the government more control which they can then extort/blackmail/control).
Recent warming over the past century HAS been corroborated by a vast number of other data sources, both direct and proxies like melting ice.
But what’s the “baseline”?
After all, there was a lot of warming coming out of the Ice Age. I think the problem here is the lack of people willing to set down a hard number - amazingly and state what the most *desirable* baseline is, and why they put it there. And if we can actually affect the climate enough to change it one way or the other.
November 30th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
As Monster pointed out, this isn’t just about catty scientists. This is about creating numbers out of thin air.
I’m not a computer genius by the stretch of anyone’s imagination but I can program my way out of a paper bag. I write code for a “shudder” private corporation and my code is subject to review by my colleagues and supervisors.
If I ever, Ever, EVER included an undocumented “fudge factor” in my programs in order to achieve the desired output, I’d be out on my ass as soon as someone discovered it.
BUT
Here’s the big point.
The really big point.
Folks higher up the food chain,
folks that will never see my code or even understand it if they did,
folks who trust me to give them the right answer, will be making corporate decisions, committing actual share-holder dollars, based upon my data. I take that responsibility very seriously. After all, my livelihood depends on it. There is no room in the corporate world for “fudge factor” when it comes to basic data.
So, my take on AGW (I know you’ve all been dying to know)
1. Is the world warming?
Up until last week I was inclined to say, probably. But since we now know that there is no original data and the computer models are pure fiction, move me to the IDK column.
2. Is human activity responsible for the warming?
Well, there are about 7 billion of us and most of those breathe, so, yeah, a little bit.
3. Is this a CRISIS that requires massive taxation, global standards(LOL), condemning most of the third world to staying third world?
Are you out of your Vulcan mind? (I’ve always wanted to use that line)
December 1st, 2009 at 12:56 am
Labrat: This debacle has thrown folks like me completely into the “this is all bullshit” camp.
I used to feel that GW was a settled fact, and that AGW was probably political bullshit.
I’m now firmly in the “hang the fuckers” camp now.
They have completely blown their credibility. Massaging data, ordering programmers to create a desired result, ostracizing anyone who attempts real peer review … there is a word for this crap:
Lysenko-ism.
December 1st, 2009 at 6:49 am
Well done Labrat- To the point, yes there is global warming, .6 deg C since the start of record keeping in the 1880s. Since I work we people who are climatologists, both here and in Canada, I’ve had a different perspective, as they do real data and data analysis, almost NO modeling; their bottom line per se is we do NOT have enough valid datasets over a long enough period to actually determine the root cause. Part may be attributable to humans, part to industrialization, part to a natural earth cycle… But they freely admit THEY DON’T KNOW for sure…
One thing they do know- temps in urban reporting stations have risen at a greater rate than those in the rural stations; reason- there is more concrete/reflective/absorbative material than there was when the stations were originally put in.
December 1st, 2009 at 6:50 am
[…] Labrat: The damning thing *is* the deletion of the raw data. The space-saving excuse is just unfiltered bullshit […]
December 1st, 2009 at 7:43 am
As an aside, I think UJ also mentioned that most of the global temperature data pre-1984 was rounded to the nearest integer.
I’d like to see a source on that.
Even if the collated data that the CRU folks used has disappeared from their system, the source data should exist (scattered as it is). We should have some idea whether this is true, and for how much of the data it is true.
Second problem: if the scientists involved were doing climate projections based on such low-significant-figure data, and the reporters asking questions didn’t know how to ask about significant-figure-data, then things were royally screwed up.
If the reporters on science don’t know how to tack on a footnote or a side-bar on sig-figs, and how they limit the usability of the results of the effort, then they aren’t capable as science reporters.
I’ll likely get my own view of the modelling problem up elsewhere, but I will say that I agree with Eric S. Raymond: if the model is secret, and the source code is secret, then the scientific community can’t properly critique the results of the model.
December 1st, 2009 at 9:02 am
I agree that dumping the data was damnable. But it’s hard to argue with ice sheets.
All along, I was puzzled by the smoothing-over of the Medieval Warm Period too, which cannot be blamed merely on the many coal-burning power plants in Sung Dynasty China.
More conservation and use of renewable energy would give us a *cleaner* environment, which is a plus, whether AGW is the problem or not. But I would rather see it more market-driven than top-down directed.
December 1st, 2009 at 9:21 am
Here’s what I can’t wrap my head around.
We now know that the CRU data was manipulated, folded, stapled, spindled and mutilated to get the results that they published. We know that we can’t trust those results.
However, all the other major results all match the manipulated, folded, stapled, spindled and mutilated results that CRU obtained, so we should treat the situation exactly the same.
If we know that CRU’s results are bogus, why should we trust all the matching results? Shouldn’t the results be different? And if they aren’t, why all the manipulation in the first place?
To me, it seems more likely that this small group (it’s reported to only be about 300 total, and not all of them are working from raw instrumentation) of climate scientists all used similar “tricks” to get the “known” results, than that CRU happened to stumble into accurate results after all these shenanigans.
December 1st, 2009 at 9:57 am
You want to talk about significant changes in ice distribution? I’m typing this from where there used to be over a mile deep sheet of ice covering the ground. Global warming is, and always has been, bullshit, because they started from an arbitrary point and never matched changes against *real* historical norms.
Hell, we don’t even have the data to construct a run chart of mean temperatures over the last 4.5 billion years, but if we did, what odds would you give that they’d show a few tenths of a degree celcius to be well within normal variation, and not indicative of special cause? I think that’s a big part of the problem with this debate; I’m as willing as the next scientist to say “we just don’t know if this means anything,” but since we don’t have the data to show it is statistically meaningless, and may never have that data, we will have to listen to idiots prattle on about “ZOMG teh warming is suxorzzz!!!!1111″ pretty much indefinitely, even though they can’t affirmatively prove meaningfullness.
December 1st, 2009 at 10:09 am
Old NFO: “yes there is global warming, .6 deg C since the start of record keeping in the 1880s.”
Have you ever seen what it takes to calibrate a thermometer? I have, and the technology to accurately do this didn’t exist until much much later than 1880. .6 deg C is well within what the standard error of the thermometers that would have had in the 1880s would have been. Thermometers back then would have been correct within a few degrees. Using that data to conclude a warming of less than one degree isn’t reliable.
This is all far from “Settled Science”. I really don’t like that term. There really is no such thing as “Settled Science”. In Science, everything is a “Theory”, even gravity (as in the “Theory of Gravity”). While nobody would think to question the existance of gravity, it is indeed still a Theory. Once a theory gets as universally accepted as gravity is it becomes an “Accepted Theory”, it is not, and never will be, “Settled Science”. Science doesn’t work that way, or at least didn’t used to and still shouldn’t. Back to the topic of global warming, it is also a theory. The “Theory of Global Warming”, and there are enough real scientists out there that question the very existance of global warming, and the mechanism of global warming is not understood well enough for the “Theory of Global Warming” to rise to the level of an accepted theory, no matter how much the global warming zealots want it to be. The fact that the data and methods (that doesn’t seem to be able to replicate it’s own results) have been hidden from any form of REAL peer review is making the “Theory of Global Warming” start to look like the “Theory of Cold Fusion”. Nobody can duplicate those guys data sets either.
Is the earth warming? I think so. Is mankind causing it? I haven’t seen a single (worthwhile) study that really proves that to much certanty. I’ve read a lot of crap that SAYS that, I’ve read a lot of so-called studys that amount to an emotional outcry that make that claim, but I’ve seen nothing that offers an objective look at real data along with an explanation of why that data proves that global warming is caused by man.
What I do know (and will swear to) is that there was an ice age, and now it is warmer than then. SO… ergo… the earth must have gotten warmer… but don’t mistake that for scientific data.
s
December 1st, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Stuart, I agree, and so do the folks I work with that differential is within the error bars… Gallo also raises a good point, 130 years vs. How Many Eons? So we are ‘calculating’ on less than a .01% of the actual data… sigh…
December 1st, 2009 at 7:58 pm
Well said, Labrat. I mostly agree except for the part about conspiracy. Misdirecting, stonewalling, password-protecting and deleting data-especially against employers’ stated policy or legal requirement-is conspiratorial in nature. Weren’t people accusing tobacco companies of doing some of this 40 years ago? What happened to the outrage? (Nothing. We’re still political animals that have an innate desire to fit the world into belief systems-those beliefs which are shared by a group are undeservedly given greater weight.)
I believe that softening criticism of the wayward practices in the hope that climate research will be spared a public barrage of irrelevancy by kooks will more likely hurt science in the long run. I realize “peer review is what it is” (as Steve McIntyre likes to say), but to make it impossible to reproduce results or evaluate methods *weakens climate science* by not correcting flaws. In terms of public perception, a string of false predictions may give the impression of quackery-and pretty soon someone claims it’s a hoax-even when the fundamental data and process are definitely salvageable and valuable.
“Climategate” is only the end of the hypothesis that the carbon apocalypse will occur shortly unless we all become socialists. It is otherwise a beginning. Maybe McIntyre and the crew at Climate Audit will finally be able to reproduce the results of the studies.
I didn’t want to discuss climate change, but the ridiculous solutions proposed really pushed my buttons, as did some of the climate scientists’ treatment of outsiders. Instead of a realistic assessment of stupid government energy policies and an acknowledgment that there exist pure economic sciences, we have the sinister Herman van Rompuy, who couldn’t care less about carbon dioxide-he just wants to play with human chess pieces. I’m not particularly happy about the outcome so far, but I do not feel sorry for those who attempted to push the whole matter into the political arena. They should know better. In politics, people take the contradictory view of their political opponents-regardless of whether or not the resulting system of beliefs is logical-or, alternatively, they just don’t care. Unfortunately, there doesn’t to appear to be any room for climate-change-but-not-as-bad-as-we-thought.
December 2nd, 2009 at 12:55 am
why does every conversation about this ignore the fact that we are still in an Ice Age?
December 2nd, 2009 at 1:32 am
Thank you Labrat.
I was really looking forward to hearing y’alls take on this.
There’s not many folk out there I trust to *both* get the science right *and* not wrap it up in politics I don’t trust. Thanks for taking the time to write up your take on the whole thing.
December 2nd, 2009 at 6:59 am
Interesting anecdote pertaining to the whole “why do the non-data-massaging entities reach the same conclusion as the flawed, data-massaging entities”.
In the course of performing my 9-5 job, one of my many responsibilities is running the occasional interlaboratory study. We invite laboratories from all around the world to analyze a particular matrix (soil, food, fish, etc.) for various environmental pollutants ranging from dioxins/furans, PCBs, and brominated flame retardants all the way to polyaromatic hydrocarbons and organochlorine pesticides.
A few years back we ran two new samples for analysis, a “clean” soil and a contaminated sediment. Both were new; both had no information available about what might or might not be in the samples.
Lo and behold, the data varied wildly. Using a complex data modeling system designed by one of the premier statistical analysis groups on the planet, we were able to public consensus values for a good number of compounds.
Well, a few years later we ran another interlaboratory study using these same standards. Imagine our surprise (NOT) to find that the numbers had *significantly* improved - rather than have a 10-15% variation across the laboratories’ results, it was more like 2-3%.
Why, it’s almost like knowing the answer in advance influenced their analysis!
Just thought it was interesting…
December 2nd, 2009 at 12:50 pm
I hear what you are saying when you don’t want to touch this subject, but I wish you would reconsider.
I myself would very much like to hear how it is that we ‘know’ what the global temperatures are/were, especially with the stated accuracy. I would like to see your whole analysis of the subject ,actually.
I don’t know what the truth is… but I do know I am being lied to. You are on the short list of people who’s opinion on the subject I have reason to trust.
December 2nd, 2009 at 2:50 pm
Further supporting Jay G’s suggestion: Richard Feynman (pbuh) has a couple of tales in Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman! about experimenters “correcting” their results to conform to previously published data, when the previous data was wrong. One of them is “The 7 Percent Solution”; damned if I can find the other one, but I think it had to do with measuring electron cloud density: the book value came from an old experiment, which no-one had bothered to repeat with more modern equipment.
I think part of the issue is that, if you’re not working directly on a specific facet of a problem, it’s a lot easier to take the published results at face value than it is to read through the methods and try to repeat them. Once this happens often enough, the published results get more (undeserved) credibility: “Everyone’s using them and getting good (read: expected, or publishable) results, so they must be accurate.” (See also: A sign, a flipped structure, and a scientific flameout of epic proportions.)
December 2nd, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Good essaay LabRat. I especially agree with Chas and Jenny.
December 2nd, 2009 at 3:35 pm
“Recent warming over the past century HAS been corroborated by a vast number of other data sources, both direct and proxies like melting ice.”
Actually, I don’t think very many “deniers” argue this point. We are coming out of the mini-ice-age, so of course, temperatures are on the rise, that is until they are not. What bugs most of the skeptics are the claims that it will just keep on going up and up to the eventual destruction of life as we know it. All based on these guys model.
Or, are you saying that there are a vast number of models out there that all show this trend. That tidbit i have not heard.
December 3rd, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Aha! Found it: it’s the measurement of the charge of the electron, in “Cargo Cult Science” at the back of the book.
Excerpted from the PDF I found here:
Sound familiar?
December 6th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
At the end of the day, as someone who practices a science with the ultimate, most transparent peer review (litigation), I have a hard time seeing why climate scientists claiming AGW are any more credible than creation scientists claiming a 6000 year old Earth. Both decided what the result was before they ever started, and have spent decades finding data to support them, and ignoring data that didn’t.
December 9th, 2009 at 11:59 am
Back to that overwhelming data thing. You should really go take a look at this:
http://volokh.com/2009/12/08/the-homogenized-data-is-false/
December 9th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Thomas: I should have clarified earlier that I’m in the position of “the earth is definitely in a warming trend”- but not “it is definitely primarily caused by human-generated carbon dioxide”.
There really ARE am embarrassing number of climate skeptics that do dispute that the earth is warming at all.
December 9th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Well, there always seems to be an embarrassing fringe on just about any subject.
I must admit, I was a skeptic before all this hit the fan. But I was coming from the angle of, hey, we need a little Global Warming; who are these folks to make the decision to stop that? And, I was/am afraid that we have the technology to push this world over the edge into an ice age and the ignorance to do so.
To borrow someone elses’ argument; if there is a 1% chance that we force the world into an ice age, it is my duty to oppose that with whatever means available. (heh, now I sound fringe)
Oh, and Cap and Tax is not going to force the cold on us, other than not being able to afford heating oil, but have you heard some of their proposed solutions? Wild.