Pick a paragraph

This was a little experiment that turned up some interesting results. The idea was to pick a paragraph from the IPCC reports and look at its provenance, just to see if anything interesting turned up. It did.

Unfortunately it turned up so much, that I've decided only to analyse the first sentence of the paragraph. I've got a life you know.

Here's the paragraph. It's from WG2, Chapter 10, and its the start of section 10.2.4.1 which is about the effects of climate change on food production.

10.2.4.1 Agriculture and food production
Production of rice, maize and wheat in the past few decades has declined in many parts of Asia due to increasing water stress arising partly from increasing temperature, increasing frequency of El Niño and reduction in the number of rainy days (Wijeratne, 1996;Aggarwal et al., 2000; Jin et al., 2001; Fischer et al., 2002; Tao et al., 2003a; Tao et al., 2004). In a study at the International Rice Research Institute, the yield of rice was observed to decrease by 10% for every 1°C increase in growing-season minimum temperature (Peng et al., 2004). A decline in potentially good agricultural land in East Asia and substantial increases in suitable areas and production potentials in currently cultivated land in Central Asia have also been reported (Fischer et al., 2002). Climate change could make it more difficult than it is already to step up the agricultural production to meet the growing demands in Russia (Izrael and Sirotenko, 2003) and other developing countries in Asia.

First step was to look at the citations. I've linked PDFs where I have them.

• Surprisingly for a sentence about rice, maize and wheat Wijeratne 1996 turns out to be about tea production in Sri Lanka.
• I haven't been able to lay my hands on Aggarwal or Jin (I think Aggarwal should actually be Agarwal).
• Fischer et al is a study published by an NGO, the Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). This body seems to do research into environmental issues. THe study in question appears to be a special report paid for by the UN and as far as I can tell, non-peer reviewed.
• Tao 2003a I can't find
• Tao 2004 is a paper on variability in Chinese climate and how various oscillations (ENSO< EASM) affect crops.

So by the end of the first sentence, none of the cited papers that I can lay my hands on support the text as written, namely that "Production of rice, maize and wheat in the past few decades has declined in many parts of Asia".

Some of the reasons for this change became clear when I looked at the Second Order Draft. Here's the equivalent paragraph.

The increasing pressures of changes in climate and its variability would make it more difficult than it is already to step up the agricultural production to meet the growing demands in Russia. Increasing surface air temperature along with increasing intensity and frequency of El Nino, and the reduction in number of rainy days have heightened the water stress in many agricultural areas in China lowering the production of wheat especially in the Changjiang river, the yield of pasture areas in Qiaghai [sic] Province and the southern part of Gansu province and corn production in central China (Tao et al 2003a, Jin et al 2001, Tao et al 2004. Rice and wheat production in the Indo-Gangetic plains of South Asia, which increased in the 1970s and 1980s have in recent decade stagnated, attributed to the rising (minimum) temperatures during the growing season, resistance to weedicides, and decrease in soil productivities that appeared in large areas under rice-wheat sequence (Agarwal et al 2000). In Sri Lanka 30cm of soil has been eroded from upland tea areas over the years while in the lowland tea plantation production has been adversely affected by soil erosion and increased soil moisture deficit brought about by increase in temperature and drought (Wijeratne 2002).

Blimey. It's a remarkable change they've made there. Notice how we change from talking about what might happen to what has happened. Hasn't the whole purpose of the sentence changed? Doesn't this make a bit of a mockery of the review process? It's only one sentence, I know, but all the same.

Some things, however, become clearer.

• The use of a paper about tea production in a sentence about cereals is clearly due to their having deleted the sentence about tea in Sri Lanka, but not the citation. Wijeratne's paper says that drought and rainfall affects tea growth. She doesn't say that is has. In fact she presents a graph showing that production and yields have risen since the 1980s. I guess it's just as well they deleted this sentence.
• The Fischer et al citation, the NGO one, was new in the final draft. Note that carefully. The reviewers didn't have a chance to see it or criticise its inclusion.
• Tao 2004 still doesn't support the text.
• The other citations, I still can't comment on.

Finally to the expert and government review comments. These should help us understand who made the changes.

Or they should do, anyway. As far as I can tell, this radical rewrite between the second order draft and the final published piece was driven entirely by the authors. None of the reviewers requested the inclusion of Fischer et al. Nobody requested that tea be left out of the equation. And, nobody pointed out that Tao 2004 didn't support the text.

It's not right, is it?

+++Lord Stern in email hacking+++

Channel Four news:

Exclusive: Channel 4 News can reveal that renowned climate change economist, Lord Stern, has had his email targeted by a virus.

The British government's climate change guru, Lord Stern, has had his emails sabotaged in a possible "hacking attack" Channel 4 News can reveal. 

Full story here.

Paul Dennis blogs!

UEA geochemist Paul Dennis, who has been much in the news recently, has started a new blog called Harmonic Oscillator.

Why not go over and wish him well.

(H/T Lucia)

Hansen's colleague eviscerates AR4 Chapter 9

While perusing some of the review comments to the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, I came across the contributions of Andrew Lacis, a colleague of James Hansen's at GISS. Lacis's is not a name I've come across before but some of what he has to say about Chapter 9 of the IPCC's report is simply breathtaking.

Chapter 9 is possibly the most important one in the whole IPCC report - it's the one where they decide that global warming is manmade. This is the one where the headlines are made.

Remember, this guy is mainstream, not a sceptic, and you may need to remind yourself of that fact several times as you read through his comment on the executive summary of the chapter:

There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department. The points being made are made arbitrarily with legal sounding caveats without having established any foundation or basis in fact. The Executive Summary seems to be a political statement that is only designed to annoy greenhouse skeptics. Wasn't the IPCC Assessment Report intended to be a scientific document that would merit solid backing from the climate science community - instead of forcing many climate scientists into having to agree with greenhouse skeptic criticisms that this is indeed a report with a clear and obvious political agenda. Attribution can not happen until understanding has been clearly demonstrated. Once the facts of climate change have been established and understood, attribution will become self-evident to all. The Executive Summary as it stands is beyond redemption and should simply be deleted.

I'm speechless. The chapter authors, however weren't. This was their reply (all of it):

Rejected. [Executive Summary] summarizes Ch 9, which is based on the peer reviewed literature.

Simply astonishing. This is a consensus?

Vexatious behaviour

Eli Rabett is trying to argue that the requests put into the University of East Anglia were vexatious and also that they were turned down. Now, I know something about this, having put in one of the requests myself, although I was not part of the coordinated effort to ask for them five countries at a time. I just took the blunt approach and asked for all of them.

What is interesting is that neither my broad sweep nor the piecemeal requests were rejected as such. While everyone got a response that was in the form of a rejection, the grounds given were not that the request was vexatious. Each of us was in fact directed to a new webpage where the information we had asked for (or at least the paltry collection of available agreements that UEA could find) was to be found. The grounds for the rejection were therefore that the information was publicly available already.

The FoI Act allows public authorities to treat requests made obviously in concert as a single request, at which point it is possible to reject them as vexatious or demand payment as the circumstances demand. The fact that neither of these things happened shows that Eli's supposition that the requests were burdensome is wrong.

Ian Katz in the Graun

There's an interesting piece by Ian Katz in the Guardian today. His approach to the current state of global warming is to declare that every rock has to be lifted before any progress can be made. This doesn't seem unreasonable.

He has also started to think about where we go from here, and wonders about the possibility of removing the IPCC from the control of governments and having it run by national academies.

Next, the credibility of the IPCC – or some form of scientific high court – must be restored. In the short term that means appointing independent experts to review any alleged errors in the panel's reports. At the same time the IPCC should renounce, or at least severely restrict the use of, grey ­literature. "If that means you can't be comprehensive then don't be," says a senior scientist advocating this course. There is a strong case for more radical reforms: the panel should arguably be replaced by a body controlled by national scientific academies rather than governments.

The problem with this is that the national academies are wholly (or nearly wholly) owned subsidiaries of governments, even the nominally independent ones like the Royal Society. Those of us who are suspicious of the IPCC are hardly going to be convinced by a body run by the likes of the Royal Society's climate head honcho, ex-IPCC man Sir John Houghton, or the NAS's Ralph Ciccerone, he of the Hockey Stick panel shenanigans.

Michael Meacher on the Hockey Stick

The left wing Labour MP Michael Meacher has posted an article about problems with the Freedom of Information Act and makes a passing allusion to the Hockey Stick affair.

It is dreadful that the FOI requests made to the scientists at the UEA climactic research unit were so disgracefully blocked (albeit that some of the climate change sceptics demanding the information may have been obsessive and partisan themselves). Some of the data, for example concerning the location of 42 rural Chinese weather stations or the width of annual growth rings of trees in frozen Siberian bogs, might be arcane and of minute relevance to fundamental climate change questions, but it should still have been made readily available. The evidence about the 'hockey stick' is much more serious and should certainly have been provided in full. Scientific data should be a free resource to all who seek it. But that of course applies much more widely than just to contentions about climate change.

Amen to that. I wonder if he has read my book?

House Republicans attack Penn State

Republican representatives in the US Congress have criticised the Penn State investigation into Michael Mann's conduct.

The findings and, more importantly, the focus have set off a wave of criticism accusing the university panel of failing to interview key people, neglecting to conduct more than a cursory review of allegations and structuring the inquiry so that the outcome -- exoneration -- was a foregone conclusion.

On Friday, Rep. Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Investigations Committee, charged that the Penn State's failure to settle all the charges and called into question professor Mann's work. He is demanding that all grants to the noted scientist be frozen.

As whitewashes go, it has to be said that it was carried off very poorly. The failure to even go through the motions of interviewing aggrieved parties like Steve McIntyre was a mistake by the Penn State authorities. They have brought this unwelcome attention down upon themselves.

Interview in El Reg

There's an interview with one A.W. Montford Esq just gone up at the Register.

Council of Science Editors

The Council of Science Editors, a body that, in its own words, is a leader in promoting ethical practices in science publishing, is going to take the theme The Changing Climate of Scientific Publishing-The Heat Is On for its annual conference.

It reflects a program that addresses both global climate change (and the role science editors have in communicating relevant research on the topic) and the rapidly changing nature of the workplace and technology in the 21st century.

This sounded pretty interesting. There are some huge lessons to be learned by scholarly publishers from the sorry story of the Hockey Stick and Climategate. Materials availability, gatekeeping at journals is just the start of it. In fact I wondered why nobody had contacted me to speak on the subject. ;-)

Here's the reason: the Council is only interested in the role editors can play in promoting global warming scaremongering. Here's the notes on the keynote address:

It is striking that on climate change, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists (and the
scientific literature) are in consensus concerning climate change; yet a cloud (pun intended) of doubt and distractions like the recent “Climate Gate” email scandal continues to exist. Like a jigsaw puzzle, the climate change picture is clear to climate scientists even with a few missing pieces. This talk will examine the current and best science thinking on climate change and objectively discuss what “we know, don’t know, or need to know.”

So a body that exists to promotes ethical practices in publishing, when presented with evidence of unethical practices, gets in a speaker who is going to write them off as "a distraction".

Oh dear.

Climategate book reviews

Reviews of the Climategate books - Montford, Mosher and Fuller, Booker and Costella - by the Bit Tooth Energy blog.

Has JG-C found an error in CRUTEM?

John Graham-Cumming, the very clever computer scientist who has been replicating CRUTEM thinks he and one of his commenters have found an error in CRUTEM, the land temperature index created by Phil Jones at CRU which forms part of the HADCRUT global temperature index.

I have no idea why the correction given in this blog post by Ilya and I works: perhaps it indicates a genuine bug in the software used to generate CRUTEM3, perhaps it means Ilya and I have failed to understand something, or perhaps it indicates a missing explanation from Brohan et al. I also don't understand why when there are less than 30 years of data the number 30 appears to still be used.

If these are bugs then it indicates that CRUTEM3 will need to be reissued because the error ranges will be all wrong.

John is not a "jump up and down and shout fraud!" kind of guy. He is very careful and very cautious, as you can probably tell from the way he announces his findings.

Those of a mathematical bent might like to take a look and check what he's done.

Pulling the wool

The letter from Phil Willis, the chairman of the House of Commons select committee on science and technology to Sir Edward Acton, Vice Chancellor of UEA, received a certain amount of publicity at the time the announcement of the parliamentary inquiry was announced. It is now possible to read the reply from Sir Edward on the website of the select committee. A PDF is available here.

Here are a few of the highlights and some thoughts thereon:

Hack or leak?

A significant amount of material including emails and documents appears to have been accessed illegally from a back-up server in CRU and downloaded in whole, or possibly in part, on to the Real Climate website . Whilst it was removed promptly from that website, it was not before it had been widely accessed and distributed across a number of other websites . The method by which the material was obtained from CRU is the subject of a police enquiry. Substantial resources from the Norfolk Constabulary are being brought to bear but clearly this is a complex and technical forensic investigation, and must be expected to take time.

As is plain from this, there is no mention of hacking. I still find the fact that the police are apparently unaware of whether CRU's systems were hacked or not completely incomprehensible.

CRU's commitment to transparency

CRU's research outcomes have been published in peer-reviewed journals of the highest standing. All adjustments to data where this has been necessary (for example to account for the move of a meteorological station), have been explained.

But the code hasn't been released has it?

CRU has undertaken, with the good offices of the Met Office, to seek permission from the various national meteorological services which have provided the original station data to publish it.

Why wasn't this done before? If you can hand the data over to your pals, why not to other researchers?

This is not a simple undertaking as some 150 meteorological services were involved in the collection of the original data, and some see the data as having economic value or are otherwise sensitive to its release.

You mean the three met services that said it could only be used for non-commercial purposes?

Restoring confidence in CRU

None of the adjusted station data referred to in the emails that have been published has been destroyed.

Ah, but the emails referred to the raw data, didn't they? I winced when I read this. It looks a bit like trying to pull the wool over the eyes of our elected representatives.

When we receive Sir Muir's findings we will understand which if any of the
allegations stand and which fall and we will act accordingly. We will publish
the findings and the University's response.

Can we take it then that we are going to hear none of the evidence? That the hearings are going to be held in private? No surprise there then. Can we also take it then that Sir Muir will not be considering Sir Edward's apparent role in breaches of FoI law either?

I guess it's down to Parliament then.

Bob Watson sees the light

Speaking about the new Africagate story - the best telling is at EU Referendum - Bob Watson has been telling Jonathan Leake about his views on how claims in the IPCC reports need to be substantiated.

Watson said such claims should be based on hard evidence. “Any such projection should be based on peer-reviewed literature from computer modelling of how agricultural yields would respond to climate change. I can see no such data supporting the IPCC report,” he said."

Peer Review Josh '10Well, of course. Anyone who believes in the integrity of science would expect the conclusions to be made on the basis of such hard evidence.

Presumably then, when Bob Watson was in charge of the IPCC, everything was based on hard science?

Well, not quite. While my impression is that there was less input from advocacy groups on Watson's watch, searching the Third Assessment Report for the word "Greenpeace" returns 52 results, including for example, references like this:

Hoegh-Guldberg, O., 1999: Climate Change, Coral Bleaching and the Future of the World's Coral Reefs. Greenpeace International, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 27 pp.

Gibson, M.A. and S.A. Schullinger, 1998: Answers from the Ice Edge: The Consequences of Climate Change on Life in the Bering and Chukchi Seas. Greenpeace Arctic Network, Anchorage, AK, USA, pp. 32.

Perhaps Professor Watson is a new convert to the cause of scientific integrity in the IPCC reports.

Hockey Stick Illusion - US availability

I note that the Hockey Stick Illusion is now available on Amazon.com. The price is highish, but no longer silly.

The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science (Independent Minds)