The Warmergate Scandal

[Annie]

Knew this was coming:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEiLgbBGKVk&feature=player_embedded

Yep, because even debunked rightwingnut claims sound real if they are repeated often enough.

Oh, you found the story debunked? Where's that link?

 

[Ravi]

Read the thread.

 

[eots]

Knew this was coming:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEiLgbBGKVk&feature=player_embedded

Yep, because even debunked rightwingnut claims sound real if they are repeated often enough.

Oh, you found the story debunked? Where's that link?

in the netherworld of her of her wild imaginings

 

[Annie]

Read the thread.

Your doing an imitation of your perceptions of the party of 'No!' doesn't constitute a link.

 

[concept]

Indeed they might. I have no doubt that science, like any other human endeavour, is capable of producing egotistical, lying bastards (although politics has science snookered on that one) and if there's been skullduggery here then the individuals who perpetrated it should be sorted out. We know that more than one researcher has been busted for making data fit a hypothesis, but then sometimes that assertion loses it effect in the wake of further knowledge. Sometimes intuition is ahead of current knowledge

Oil-drop experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

But that's not an excuse for wholesale fabrication. And as I say, if that is the case here then get the pitchforks out. Anyway this isn't bad thing, it's good to have a bit of sunlight (sorry) on an issue to see what's really going on.

This is not to refute or acknowledge the OP, it is only FYI and is something I have suspected for a couple of decades. It's the proverbial tip of the iceberg and relates to part of your post.

I admit I'm somewhat trusting of science and scientists. I have to say I trust them more than I trust the spokespeople for polluting companies or scientists who have been put on the payroll of the aforesaid companies. Funnily enough I've just been reading a few bits and pieces from Paul Feyerabend, on resisting science. I haven't finished the articles yet but I have to say he presents a really interesting way of looking at science.

But scientists like every other human, have their weaknesses and some might have a weakness for money and some may have a weakness for fame. I always loved that story about Watson and Crick in a pub in England when they sort of intuitively came up with the double helix theory (after a few pints). But then on the sidelines there's the story about Rosalind Franklin. So yes, there can be all kinds of problems there, as I said, they're only human.

However I'm not willing to make the statement that it's all fiction about climate change, not at all. I want to see a useful and informative debate on the facts as we know them and anything we can reasonably extrapolate from them. What I find obnoxious is the ideological battle across the divide. That's the problem.

I agree but it is hard to have an honest debate when one side is basing their arguement on made up facts.

 

[concept]

Liberal Credo:

If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts. -Albert Einstein

Except in this thread, it is the "conservatives" doing just that.

You know, a little honesty from you libs would go a long way.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Knew this was coming:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEiLgbBGKVk&feature=player_embedded

Yep, because even debunked rightwingnut claims sound real if they are repeated often enough.

Get you head out of the Kool Aid Can, Moonbat.

Manmade Global Warming is all done.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

If Repub is the Party of No then Dems are the Party of Fingers in their ears going "nyah nyah nyah nyah I can't hear youuuuuuuuuuu"

Sock puppets and morons the whole lot of them

 

[CrusaderFrank]

We demand the Unconditional Surrender of these lying Climatic Jihadists!

 

[CrusaderFrank]

I've peer reviewed this thread and the ManMade Global Warming people are still morons

Can I get an "Amen"?

 

[NO!bama08]

How long will it take Al Gore to jump from the Global Warming bandwagon to the "Next Ice Age" bandwagon? The sky is freezing! The sky is freezing! Awk! Awk! idiot.

 

[Annie]

Slowly it's shifting into MSM:

The Real Problem With the Climate Science Emails - The Atlantic Business Channel

Nov 25 2009, 11:00 am by Megan McArdle
The Real Problem With the Climate Science Emails
With Obama heading to Copenhagen, where he's expected to pledge some pretty big cuts in US carbon emissions, the ClimateGate story is an economic story as well as a political one. I said before that I don't think the emails refuted the notion that AGW is real, and happening. I still don't--the fact is, everything we know about carbon dioxide indicates that it has a greenhouse effect, because it is more efficient at passing sunlight through to the earth, than at allowing that energy to reradiate back into space as heat.

What's at stake is the degree of warming associated with our carbon dioxide emissions. In particular, to what extent the earth's many complex and not necessarily well understood feedback systems may mitigate (or exacerbate) temperature increases. I've long been skeptical of the more catastrophic scenarios, because all this carbon used to be in the atmosphere, which probably defines a ceiling on how bad it will get--a ceiling well below "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIEEEEEEEE!!!" That said, I wouldn't really want to live in the Jurassic, and not just because I'm afraid of hundred-foot lizards. (for example, I am also afraid of the huge flying roaches Palmetto bugs that live in our nation's more southern climes). So that doesn't mean I don't worry quite a lot.

Bearing this in mind, I think most people--including me--missed the biggest part of the climate emails story. Sexing up a graph is at best a misdemeanor. But a Declan McCullough story suggests a more disturbing possibility: the CRU's main computer model may be, to put it bluntly, complete rubbish.

As the leaked messages, and especially the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, found their way around technical circles, two things happened: first, programmers unaffiliated with East Anglia started taking a close look at the quality of the CRU's code, and second, they began to feel sympathetic for anyone who had to spend three years (including working weekends) trying to make sense of code that appeared to be undocumented and buggy, while representing the core of CRU's climate model.

One programmer highlighted the error of relying on computer code that, if it generates an error message, continues as if nothing untoward ever occurred. Another debugged the code by pointing out why the output of a calculation that should always generate a positive number was incorrectly generating a negative one. A third concluded: "I feel for this guy. He's obviously spent years trying to get data from undocumented and completely messy sources."

Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"
​

The emails seem to describe a model which frequently breaks, and being constantly "tweaked" with manual interventions of dubious quality in order to make them fit the historical data. These stories suggest that the model, and the past manual interventions, are so poorly documented that CRU cannot now replicate its own past findings.

That is a big problem. The IPCC report, which is the most widely relied upon in policy circles, uses this model to estimate the costs of global warming. If those costs are unreliable, then any cost-benefit analysis is totally worthless.

Obviously, this also casts their reluctance to conform with FOI requests in a slightly different light.

That's not reason to abandon efforts to control our carbon emissions--as I say, they're still very likely to be problematic. But if the model turns out to be as bad as initial reports seem to imply, we should probably hold off on policy recommendations until we have a slightly better handle on the likely outcomes.

 

[Oddball]

I don't know how many laws have been proposed in various places. I do know here that there's a huge blue about it and the federal governments Emissions Trading Scheme. I'm not going to take on anyone else's domestic legal situation.

But I do see this as a bit of luck. For too long the debate has been conducted on, can I say, two levels, maybe more but I can only think of two. First there's the scientific debate. Occasionally us laypersons get to see a bit of it, usually when someone's pissing out of the tent, but then they go back to furiously arguing with each other in terms that most of us wouldn't understand. What's needed there is a few umpires and a video replay. The second level is the ideological level which is where many of us are at. We take positions based on our political views and yell at one another and call each other Sceptics or Denialists or variants. It's the equivalent of intra-tribal warfare.

I don't see the debates being any clearer soon, I just hope to hell that it gets sorted out before too long.

Cap-n-Tax has been SOP across a lot of Europe for awhile now.

Personally, my position on the matter is based upon reason, not necessarily politics. Largely on the bases that the "science" isn't reproducible on demand and the semantics of the warmists are deliberately deceptive.

 

[Annie]

Bumping this closer to the Atlantic post.

It's the code:

Pajamas Media » Climategate Computer Codes Are the Real Story

Climategate Computer Codes Are the Real Story
Posted By Charlie Martin On November 24, 2009 @ 4:09 pm In . Column1 02, . Positioning, Computers, Environment, Politics, Science, Science & Technology, US News | 38 Comments

So far, most of the Climategate attention has been on the emails in the data dump of November 19 (see here [1], here [2], and here [3]), but the emails are only about 5 percent of the total. What does examining the other 95 percent tell us?

Here’s the short answer: it tells us that something went very wrong in the data management at the Climatic Research Unit.

We start with a file called “HARRY_READ_ME.txt.” This is a file containing notes of someone’s three-year effort to try to turn a pile of existing code and data into something useful. Who is Harry, you ask? Clearly, a skilled programmer with some expertise in data reduction, statistics, and climate science. Beyond that I won’t go. I’ve seen sites attributing this file to an identifiable person, but I don’t have any corroboration, and frankly the person who wrote these years of notes has suffered enough.

The story the file tells is of a programmer who started off with a collection of code and data — and the need to be able to replicate some results. The first entry:

1. Two main filesystems relevant to the work:

/cru/dpe1a/f014

/cru/tyn1/f014

Both systems copied in their entirety to /cru/cruts/

Nearly 11,000 files! And about a dozen assorted “read me” files addressing individual issues, the most useful being:

fromdpe1a/data/stnmon/doc/oldmethod/f90_READ_ME.txt

fromdpe1a/code/linux/cruts/_READ_ME.txt

fromdpe1a/code/idl/pro/README_GRIDDING.txt

(yes, they all have different name formats, and yes, one does begin ‘_’!)

Believe it or not, this tells us quite a bit. “Harry” is starting off with two large collections of data on a UNIX or UNIX-like system (forward slashes, the word “filesystem”) and only knows very generally what the data might be. He has copied it from where it was to a new location and started to work on it. Almost immediately, he notices a problem:

...

Actually seems that others start feeling sorry for poor, overworked Harry:

Congress May Probe Leaked Global Warming E-Mails - Taking Liberties - CBS News

Yeah, CBS believe it or not!

...In addition to e-mail messages, the roughly 3,600 leaked documents posted on sites including Wikileaks.org and EastAngliaEmails.com include computer code and a description of how an unfortunate programmer named "Harry" -- possibly the CRU's Ian "Harry" Harris -- was tasked with resuscitating and updating a key temperature database that proved to be problematic. Some excerpts from what appear to be his notes, emphasis added:

I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective - since we're using an off-the-shelf product that isn't documented sufficiently to say that. Why this wasn't coded up in Fortran I don't know - time pressures perhaps? Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn't enough time to write a gridding procedure? Of course, it's too late for me to fix it too. Meh.

I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight... So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!

One thing that's unsettling is that many of the assigned WMo codes for Canadian stations do not return any hits with a web search. Usually the country's met office, or at least the Weather Underground, show up – but for these stations, nothing at all. Makes me wonder if these are long-discontinued, or were even invented somewhere other than Canada!

Knowing how long it takes to debug this suite - the experiment endeth here. The option (like all the anomdtb options) is totally undocumented so we'll never know what we lost. 22. Right, time to stop pussyfooting around the niceties of Tim's labyrinthine software suites - let's have a go at producing CRU TS 3.0! since failing to do that will be the definitive failure of the entire project.

Ulp! I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can't get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections - to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations?...​

As the leaked messages, and especially the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, found their way around technical circles, two things happened: first, programmers unaffiliated with East Anglia started taking a close look at the quality of the CRU's code, and second, they began to feel sympathetic for anyone who had to spend three years (including working weekends) trying to make sense of code that appeared to be undocumented and buggy, while representing the core of CRU's climate model.
...

 

[CrusaderFrank]

They'll drop the Great Climatic Googly Moogly and move onto somethign else as if none of this ever happened

 

[Sinatra]

Yes, the code information - the foundation for the model projections, tabulated temperature records, etc., is getting worked over big time now. This will take a bit of time as the information is terribly (intentionally) complex and at times, contradictory.

It is this biased code manipulation that will be the real nail in the coffin of AGW.

This manipulation has been ongoing for years, and has infected every level of the global warming science and resulting debate. The science became utterly political with an overt connection to certain economic interests.

The mainstream media is dragging its feet even more than anticipated, but the truth is winning out...

 

[CrusaderFrank]

SCOTUS says that CO2 is still deadly so many they'll try to control how people breathe

 

[Oddball]

And now, a nice musical interlude:

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEiLgbBGKVk[/ame]

 

[Annie]

And now, a nice musical interlude:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEiLgbBGKVk

See #319. ;}

 

[Midnight Marauder]

I don't know how many laws have been proposed in various places. I do know here that there's a huge blue about it and the federal governments Emissions Trading Scheme. I'm not going to take on anyone else's domestic legal situation.

But I do see this as a bit of luck. For too long the debate has been conducted on, can I say, two levels, maybe more but I can only think of two. First there's the scientific debate. Occasionally us laypersons get to see a bit of it, usually when someone's pissing out of the tent, but then they go back to furiously arguing with each other in terms that most of us wouldn't understand. What's needed there is a few umpires and a video replay. The second level is the ideological level which is where many of us are at. We take positions based on our political views and yell at one another and call each other Sceptics or Denialists or variants. It's the equivalent of intra-tribal warfare.

I don't see the debates being any clearer soon, I just hope to hell that it gets sorted out before too long.

Cap-n-Tax has been SOP across a lot of Europe for awhile now.

Personally, my position on the matter is based upon reason, not necessarily politics. Largely on the bases that the "science" isn't reproducible on demand and the semantics of the warmists are deliberately deceptive.

Right now all the talk in international climate circles is the US's "carbon debt" which is, MONEY we "owe" to underdeveloped countries for all our years of CO2 emissions..... Essentially, redistribution of wealth on a global scale.

Which is where this was all going from the beginning, all the way back when it was global cooling and the "new ice age" we were supposed to be afraid of.

They are LYING and this is and has been the motive. The hidden agenda that they no longer feel they have to hide. And the environment? The convenient emotional hook used to reel in the marks, the little fishies.