Gerry North on McIntyre
Nov 28, 2009 Climate Gerry North, who chaired the NAS panel on paleoclimate that famously declared that the Hockey Stick's data and methods were wrong but its conclusions were right is interviewed in the Houston Chronicle.
McIntyre to me, I think he is probably a well meaning guy. He's not dumb, he's very smart. But he can be very irritating. This guy can just wear you out. He has started it with me but I just don't bite. But there are some guys, Ben Santer comes to mind, who if they are questioned will take a lot of time to answer. He's sincere and he just can't leave these things along. If you get yourself in a back-and-forth with these guys it can be never ending, and basically they shut you down with requests. They want everything, all your computer programs. Then they send you back a comment saying, "I don't understand this, can you explain it to me." It's never ending. And the first thing you know you're spending all your time dealing with these guys."
Controversial.
Reader Comments (37)
So how do you draw right conclusions from wrong methods?
Can't anyone get it through to these guys that if data and code was archived then no one would be pestering them. Concealment, in any situation, breeds suspicion, and then questions - lots of questions - are bound to follow. The fault is not McIntyre's, it is the paranoid tribal culture that exists in climate science which has been so clearly identified by the likes of Curry and Zorita on the evidence of the CRU emails. And what reason is there to think that this is confined to the CRU campus?
Idiot
Dangerous
Stupid
Weak
etc
etc
Certainly not...
Smart
Wise
Scientific
Logical
From what I have read previously on Climate Audit, WUWT and other sites, it seems the back and forth results from those who when asked for information send incomplete details, and evidently from the released e-mails, this is deliberate. Requesters using the FOIA have been led on a circular route.
Since Mann's hockey-stick fantasia was meant to explain the evidence of his conclusions, it is a puzzle how the conclusions can be " correct" when they can only be explained by falsehood.
It seems a "consensus" conclusion is considered "correct" merely by claiming it - proof being just an embellishment and redundant. No wonder they do not want anyone doing anything so tedious as checking on how the conclusions were reached.
Funny old World and no mistake.
This was the preceding paragraph in the article, not quoted here:
"I've been very courteous to McIntyre over the years since the committee in Washington. One time he sent me a message saying he couldn't understand the greenhouse effect, and asked for a simple model explaining it. So I took a few hours and tried to explain it. And I sent him a simple paper I wrote many years ago that I thought might be helpful to his readers. He wrote back and asked if he might post the .pdf of the paper and I said fine. Within an hour or two there must have been 75 or so of these really insulting comments. One of these guys wrote, "North is obviously promoting his own agenda." My answer to Steve is that no good deed goes unpunished.
Strange, Steve's site strikes me as much more civilised than North makes out here. "Really insulting comments", now where have I seen those before? - Real Climate? Promoting his own agenda" seems pretty mild to me.
I wonder if Gerry North's explanation of the greenhouse effect anything like Pa Annoyed's?
North says:
"Within an hour or two there must have been 75 or so of these really insulting comments<blockquote cite"
Now here's the link given in his comment:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1851
I followed the link, read the post and browsed through the commens, and I was unable to locate one single "really insulting comment". It seems to me they were having a polite and technical discussion about North's paper.
Please keep up the good work, here. The mainstream media are either corrupt or too stupid to see through this climate con. A full and thorough reading of those leaked CRU emails proves there came a stage when it was decided a data “fudge” was required. We know that Professor Jones admits that, “ it’s a travesty it’s stopped warming” and later there is agreement among these hucksters that “it hasn’t warmed for ten years.”
We won’t know how much of a “fudge” actually occurred and how corrupted Jones and his team made the data until we see a full response to those subpoenas issued in the US against NASA. We certainly need answers to what algorithms were tried and then found wanting. We need to ask questions like, when did the data-culling start and finish? What criteria determined that certain proxy samples were unreliable? If it transpires that samples were omitted for no other reason than that they didn’t confirm the hypothesis then we have proof of malfeasance and what has been manufactured for 13 years is not science but ideological propaganda.
At the moment, the biggest problem for man made warming advocates is that they haven’t shown us the raw data and the methods they used to produce their ‘Hockey Sticks’. The emails uncovered recently indicate that their response to Freedom of Information requests was to delete them rather than reveal them. If you don’t show your observed data, and all the algorithms (including computer code) used to produce your charts and graphs, so that other researchers can repeat your work and confirm it, you are not doing science.
As for those admissions by Professor Jones et al. in their emails, it is proven that "peer review” for major climatology publications is, in essence, no different from allowing students to mark their friends' exam papers". No wonder the media can spin the notion that there is “consensus” among scientists – all sceptics have been excluded from publishing in mainstream science journals.
Sounds like McIntyre meets the classic definition of a fanatic: Someone who can't change his mind, and won't change the subject.
"And the first thing you know you're spending all your time dealing with these guys."
---
Well, what does he expect? Considering how they push their science with predictions of universal doom, it is rather surprising that they have not got more people putting them through this kind of scrutiny.
Is it just me or is that the worst excuse I've ever heard? Essentially he's saying that he won't release data/code/etc because if he does, he might be asked to provide explanations. Forgive me but how is he in any way obliged to provide an explanation to laymen? Should we move science into the dark just because someone somewhere might misunderstand something?
You can see Steve McIntyre's post under the title "Gerry North's Suggested Reading on Climate Models". The paper itself is here (http://leonardo.met.tamu.edu/people/faculty/north/pdf/68.pdf). I think that's the paper, anyway. Climate Audit seems to have taken it down, but it's the only paper I can find co-authored by Graves and North in 1993, as indicated by the CA link.
His paper (assuming I've got it right) is discussing something entirely different. He's concentrating on the question of the Earth's albedo, which is different from discussing the basic mechanisms, and is trying to use satellite data to figure out how the albedo and hence the total energy input varies with surface temperature. I think it's a bad idea, because albedo effects and temperature are 2D, and if the distribution of temperature changes so does the relationship (warming matters more at the ice line, for example), but he's trying to fit a straight line to a 1D model that pretends distribution doesn't matter, only the average. But it certainly doesn't answer the question.
He also fails to answer Steve's question, which was about getting a more detailed and complete answer as to where the numbers come from, rather than the usual arm waving. By Steve's standards, my post would be classed as "arm waving" too, and I'd have no argument with that. I also would like a more complete and detailed explanation. You can read the comments for yourself (note comment 53), some are arguably rude, but not unjustifiably so in my view. (e.g. "IT seems bizarre that this article which has no discussion of CO2 is North's best source for how increased CO2 translates into 2.5 deg C. You'd think that somebody would have written up a clear exposition in the past 30 years.") They mostly just say they don't think he answered the question.
The general conclusion people have drawn after many such attempts is that this is because there is no such explanation written up anywhere. At best you get something on the level of my own explanation, albeit with more equations. More commonly, you get a brief allusion to "IR being trapped" before moving on to discuss some other aspect.
It's also worth noting they got their gridded surface temperature data from Jones et al.
First, thanks for all the great work you've been doing on the blog, covering climategate! I'll be citing you in some writing I have planned. The interesting thing about this thread is that Gerry North is considered one of the more civil of the climate modeling community. I've met him, and he doesn't have the kind of deranged arrogance of Mann, Hansen, and the others. Publicly, he toes the line about the models being unfailing, but privately he's willing to concede that much is not known.
It just irks some when others simply refuse to play along with a scam.
Does anyone know about the other 150 mb out there? Will that be released or what?
I think it ought to be trickled out, drip by drip.
Seems to me, that on any given weekday, I must prove to my boss that I actually went to work and did something. I know this sounds absurd, and boy is it a pain in the rear to have to actually report that I was there, I mean it just detracts from my daily routine.
You know, these guys probably wouldn't have had such a problem if they would not have proclaimed that "the science is settled" and that there is a "consensus". As soon as they proclaimed these things, the first reaction by all was, "whoa, what a minute, what about this, this, this, this and this".
How inconvenient...
"when the people lead, the leaders will follow"
You know, these guys probably wouldn't have had such a problem if they would not have proclaimed that "the science is settled" and that there is a "consensus"
Squidly It was the use of these two phrases that firts got me interestd in the underlying science. Until then I had taken as read that my fellow scientists who were promoting AGW were acting professionally.
Tregonsee,
By your "classic" definition it seems that most people on either side of the debate qualify as fanatics.
Looks like there's a typo:
"He's sincere and he just can't leave these things along."
should perhaps be:
"He's sincere and he just can't leave these things alone."
Mr. North is being disingenuous. Steve M has repeatedly asked for someone to provide a well constructed source, as opposed to arm waving, that is the source of the oft repeated claim that 2XCO2=2.5 degrees centigrade. Mr. North could not provide one and to date no one else has, to the point that he has given up looking I believe.