I hate the phrase “Climategate” (I prefer “Climaquiddick”) but it seems to have stuck. In any event, I don’t know whether or not this is true, but if it were to be, it would surprise me not at all.
[Monday-evening update]
Judith Curry has the latest on the foofaraw.
[Bumped]
A rebuttal:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-mail-sundays-astonishing-evidence-global-temperature-rise
Not having read, but that’s why I said “I don’t know whether or not it’s true.” I don’t believe anything I read about climate (or much else, to be honest) in the media.
Notice that the rebuttal glosses over the errors and merely asserts that the conclusions of the paper have been validated by other sources. This is the same strategy used with the 1999 “Hockey stick” paper. which also was rushed research intended to support particular talking points. Scientists doing science wrong, even when allegedly their research is later backed by actual science should be strongly discouraged. Not merely laughed off because they weren’t terribly wrong.
But, if you can’t believe the original, why should you believe the succeeding justifications? The goal is to produce so much crap that nobody can wade through it all, and supporters can point to specific points that are true in an effort to imply truth of the whole, no matter how slipshod the overall work is.
IOW, snow job.
Iowahawk summed this up pretty well:
Find a respected institution
kill it
gut it
wear it as a skin suit, while demanding respect #Lefties
You’re describing David Rose’s methodology right?
It’s all available on this link. There is a lot of controversy about the data, so use with caution.
Data, schmata. Who needs data? Who can understand all those charts with their multi-color squiggles? As either a responsible public official or a journalist or a pundit, all I need to know is that 97 percent of all climate scientists say everyone will die, soon, if we don’t stop using fossil fuels. That’s what they said, right? I don’t have time to look up that detail again. But could 97 percent of all climate scientists all be wrong? Of course not! Continue with the existing narrative! Less thinking and work work for me that way!
Look through Mosher’s comments at judithcurry.com. At BEST, they didn’t trust Karl’s results so they rechecked them. Ended up with the same answer.
It’s important to improve data archiving, because that helps produce results we can trust. It doesn’t mean that we’ll always be right about the results.
The flaw is the data itself. The rebuttal article is claiming it’s not absolute temperature that matters but change in temperature. The problem is any result, up or down, can be accomplished by choosing sources for data. The correct way to measure would be input and output of energy as a whole planet since weather patterns would distort any choice of individual data points.
I’m not sure how you would accomplish such a measurement but however we should be able to test it on other planets. Which would also help with the notion of ‘man made’ bias.
The problem is that so much “data” isn’t data, but the output of various algorithms.
As a concrete example: the rebuttal article says more data collection from the arctic were added. Most people would understand those to be extreme cold regions. So if the temperature of the earth did not change at all, the results from the data would indicate warming simply if average temperature became less extreme.
Yeah, but again: Data, schmata, so what? The “humans are destroying the planet by burning hydrocarbons” theme is all that matters to many scientists and politicians. Data will be found or created accordingly. Models will be created and adjusted accordingly.
As I read on-line somewhere a few months ago: Let’s say in a few years the data absolutely shows no warming trend, and no increase in major topical cyclones, in tornadoes, and in droughts, although CO2 continues to increase. The next game plan will then be: “The increasing CO2 is creating such climate havoc that our models can no longer predict what climate changes will occur! We scientists don’t know if terrible, life-extinction-level climate changes will start tomorrow morning or not, but to be safe we need to stop pumping-out CO2 NOW!”
Gref wrote:
“As I read on-line somewhere a few months ago: Let’s say in a few years the data absolutely shows no warming trend, and no increase in major topical cyclones, in tornadoes, and in droughts, although CO2 continues to increase”
You didn’t offer the other side of the coin conclusion that let’s say in a few years there IS an increase in major topical cyclones, in tornadoes, and in droughts. What then?
We go back to eating nuts and berries, the occasional bear, and living in caves.
Weather fronts are driven by temperature gradients. AGW is supposed to reduce temperature gradients. It was always pure panic mongering to link extreme weather to AGW. A sales tactic, nothing more.
It is quite likely we will soon be entering a cooling phase. When we do, extreme weather probably will ramp up. Unfortunately for the snake oil salespersons, it will be tough to blame it on AGW when temperatures are declining.
But then they will blame cooling on humans and use terms like climate chaos instead of climate change. They will promise that whatever the trendy policy is will stop the climate from changing. The entire movement is based on the belief that we can stop the climate from changing, which is rather anti-science.
What then? I cannot say now. I will judge the data and models and predictions as they come. My call now is that CO2 from human activity is not causing now, nor will it cause, changes to the climate that are harmful or detrimental to humans. YMMV.
The claim is not that Thomas Karl got the wrong answer. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. The “rebuttal” article seems to claim that he did, based on the notion that NOAA data can be analyzed to get very similar results to NASA data. Or vice versa. Whatever. Fine. But that rebuttal doesn’t address the claim.
The claim, by insider John Bates, is that Thomas Karl violated procedures and rushed the analysis in order to meet a purely political, and public relations, deadline. Again, maybe the shortcut “worked”. Fine. Suppose the procedure specified that data would be converted to logarithms by looking up values in a book, summed via paper tape adding machine, and the anti-log taken again from a book — but in the event the procedure used was to multiply values in an Excel spreadsheet. SO the results may be close. Or there might be subtle errors. Or both the results might be “within the margin of error” but only the more dramatic result would get reported. Who knows?
But if the claim has evidence it shows that the 97% are more concerned about other “norms” than following their own procedures of data capture, and statistical integrity. They will hack and torture and shortcut their data in order to get results for their political ends, not in the interests of objective science. And they’ll forthrigthly then tell you: The actual results hardly matter at all. It’s just what we expected. It’s the same as everybody else gets. Nobody cares. (As long as the grant money continues to roll in and the researchers’ reputations remain pristine. )
I for one am glad to read in the rebuttal that more emphasis is being put on the Argo buoys. In fact I’ve always been in favor of more of these being put in service to increase ocean coverage. Use of ship inlet temps was a huge mistake IMO.
As was an over reliance on tree rings as a temperature proxy.
The problem is in splicing one data record onto another from entirely different sensors. And, it created a spurious trend specifically because, as more ARGO floats are included, the bias offset gets more and more weight.
There really is only one thing you need to know to sort it all out. Prior to “Karlization”, both the satellite data and the surface data agreed substantially, and both showed an extended “pause” in temperatures that was wholly inconsistent with the AGW hypothesis.
A little legerdemain and, voila! The pause is erased in the surface data, and a campaign to discredit the formerly simpatico satellite data is launched. If your nose doesn’t wrinkle at the fishy smell from that, then your olfactory nerves are shot.
Modern science: change things until you get the results you want!
In National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration . . . data biases you!
I agree that one should not be splicing data between entirely different sensors. In fact if it were up to me ship inlet temperature & bucket data would be discarded altogether in favor of ARGO.
If the ARGO data alone can confirm the removal of the “hiatus” so be it, but let’s do it with accurate data points with known error bounds not by splicing data together from this and that.
If you are trying to make up for a lack of data because of insufficient number of ARGO data points, you fix that by obtaining more ARGO data points by using more floats, not by splicing in tree ring data, ship inlet and/or bucket drop temperatures, or who knows, growth spurs in vertebrate fish?
In the previous comment I mistakenly stated Argo “buoys” when I meant “floats”. I know how the Argo devices work, they use variable buoyancy to take periodic measurements of ocean temperatures at various ocean depths in a cyclical pattern. When they return to the surface they report via satellite their temperature recordings taken at the various depths. They are not anchored but drift around the ocean following the various currents. As such their position as well as temperature readings must be noted. The nice thing is that a few floats can give you a wide area of coverage. The bad thing is that the readings are not fixed to any particular latitude and longitude in the ocean. That is why more floats would help gather a more accurate picture of ocean temperature.
More equals more accurate may be an unjustified assumption. It might be that a single data point is more accurate even if more volatile. Not to be confused with my other comment about measuring the entire earth in one reading.
Essentially one data point is the goal of a multitude of readings which is proved by how they summarize the results. Of course, the academics would look foolish making predictions based on some groundhogs home thermometer even if the result were more reliable.
On this point we disagree. In fact a lot of the issues in the past over inaccuracy (or uncertainty if you prefer) in surface temperature measurement deals with the need to interpolate temperatures in the Arctic region due to the lack of actual sensor stations there.
I doubt there is actual a single “proof” point to be obtained by multitudes of readings that would not be based on some kind of statistical computation which has its own set of issues. What is at issue here is largely how well those data points are stored and documented, when they are available. When they are not, we are left with guesswork based on estimation, not hard data, which has even worse problems IMO.
More data points are better. With fewer data points, there is less confidence in any conclusions extracted. Much of the data for Africa and the Arctic is interpolated, and trends made up out of whole cloth.
I’d like to see a fleet of solar powered dirigible drones collecting weather data worldwide, uploading every minute to satellites.
Holy crap. That was just an off the cuff proposal, but after thinking about it a few minutes I think I can design and build something like that – an autonomous fleet of airborne weather stations blanketing the world. With GPS and a map of restricted airspace (including flight paths and airports and other such restrictions), it could cover the whole planet with weather stations with a high spatial resolution. I could make it open-source so anyone could build their own and add it to the network.
Airplanes?
Nope, dirigibles.
Yes, but why not use airplanes? Your airship plan could provide wide coverage but you could implement something low cost now with airliners.
There’s probably a place for both – a device on airplanes to get the readings within restricted airspace, dirigibles outside the flight paths. However, to get airlines to attach a device to their billion-dollar assets might take some convincing.
They probably already collect some form of temperature and weather data. But is it stored?
Yeah, it’d be great in the long term, once enough data had been gathered. In the short term, it presents another problem in data fusion, where those with an agenda have wide latitude for splicing disparate data sets together in a manner to promote their pet hypothesis.
NOT exactly the same – in the climate trend game, a few hundredths of a degree actually matters.
AGW alarmists should not be allowed to use imperceptibly small changes from year to year or over 100 years as grounds for mass hysteria and draconian measures to reshape societies and then blow off being accurate to a degree greater than the change they fear.