Bishop Hill 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.
Hmm! As someone already said - if all the data was archived and publicly available - it wouldn't have to be asked for. If we are going to have to endure massive taxes and restrictions in the name of global warming, then we need a statistical expert like McIntyre to examine the evidence.
As Bishop Hill posted on the BBC's Richard Black's blog:
The multiproxy studies illustrated in the NAS panel to support the hockey stick, and their relevant flaws were:
Mann and Jones 03 (bristlecones)
Moberg el al (Use of grey data, bristlecones, hilarious use of Glob bulloides proxy)
Hegerl et al (Cherrypicked data, secret data)
Esper et al(bristlecones/foxtails, use of dodgy Polar Urals site, cherrypicked data, secret data)
Osborn & Briffa (Uses the hockey stick itself, naked cherrypicking of hockey stick shaped series).
The NAS panel never explained how they could condemn the use of bristlecone pines as proxies but still cite studies based on them in support of the hockey stick.
And what was said under oath?
CHAIRMAN BARTON Dr. North, do you dispute the conclusions or the methodology of Dr. Wegman’s report?
DR. NORTH No, we don’t. We don’t disagree with their criticism. In fact, pretty much the same thing is said in our report.
Barton then asked North’s colleague on the NAS panel, Peter Bloomfield, a similar question. Bloomfield’s reply: “Our committee reviewed the methodology used by Dr. Mann and his co-workers and we felt that some of the choices they made were inappropriate. We had much the same misgivings about his work that was documented at much greater length by Dr. Wegman.”
P Gosselin,
There are (probably) no more files to be released. The FOI2009.zip is it. When you unzip it, it becomes roughly 150 MB. Maybe a misunderstanding?
I agree with P Gosselin: probably a misunderstanding. OTOH, if there were any more to come out, trickling it might be quite an effective tactic.
Just to add that the Grauniad is continuing its line of treating this story in a very low-key way. Buried away on page 9 in the Saturday 28th November edition in a half-column (what I have come to think of as its "sweep under the carpet" column) is this:
Climate email hackers had access for more than a month
(the online version went up the evening before - i.e. on Friday 27th)
From the article:-
Personally (as I have said in a similar posting on CA) I think that the fact that Hudson received this small subset of mails in advance supports the theory that it was an inside job - a leak - a whistleblower, in other words. If Hudson believes the same, then perhaps as a good journalist he will do all he can to protect his source. OTOH, if he thinks or is persuaded that it was a hack, then he will feel obliged to hand over what information he can about how these emails were received.
If you submit a paper with all code and data -- a turnkey solution that any idiot can run to get your results, a package that any undergraduate worth a damn could easily put together -- you won't have to field an endless stream of questions. Any questions you do get can simply be answered with "read the frigging code." The dendos will never do that because they know that their results are not robust. They depend on a single tree. They depend on "adjusting" some of the raw data so things look "right." I'd be surprised if Mann could reproduce any of his past papers. If he can, I dare him to release the turnkey solution including the source code for just one of his hockey stick papers.. He'll probably be surprised by how many mistakes he made and how sharp the "skeptics" really are. Or maybe he won't be, which is why he'll never do it.
I have written about the orchestration of victories in the climate debate, that happens on the AGW website Real Climate, before. This is the leading AGW alarmist web site, and they seem to have more credibility than others because the people who run the site are published climate scientists and they are cornerstones of the IPCC. I have noticed in the past that there is a pattern to the way that Gavin Schmidt and the other contributors moderate the site so as to appear to be engaging in open discussion and letting skeptics have their say, while at the same time, they censor any and all comments for which they have no adequate answer. In other words, the outcome of the debates are known because Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and the others will always censor their way to winning the arguments. Of course complaints about RC censoring can be found all over the net from hundreds if not thousands of people. I wrote a short piece about my findings regarding RC here:
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2009/11/function-of-real-climate-in-climate.html
I also took some screen shots of comments that I made that were subsequently deleted here:
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2009/10/more-fraudulent-censorship-at-real.html
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2009/10/real-climate-attacks-mcintyre.html
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2009/10/briffa-yamal-data-debate.html
Notice the quality of the debate that Schmidt is not screening out in the comment before mine. That comment passed moderation.
So now it turns out that Climategate has exposed the reality of RC's debate orchestration policy in Michael Mann's own words:
Michael Mann:
“Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you're free to use RC. Rein any way that you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through, and we'll be careful to answer any questions that come up to any extent we can.”
Not only does Mann reveal that RC tactic, but he also reveals a second one that I had suspected but was unsure about. During the Briffa/Yamal debate on RC I asked some questions and made some points concerning those issues. I noticed that my comments remained in a state of moderation for two or three hours at a time. In the meantime, other comments that were posted after mine continued to flow through. So I knew that there was a moderator at work. I wondered why he didn't simply post my comments or delete them. It occurred to me that Gavin didn't know how to answer the comments and so he asked for help, either from Keith Briffa, or from another dendrochronologist But I had no way of confirming my suspicion. Now my suspicion has been clearly confirmed by one of the Michael Mann emails.
Michael Mann:
“On the other hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you'd like us to include.”
My long held comments were eventually deleted. So I assume that Briffa, or whoever Schmidt went to, was unable to respond to my points.
But the bottom line comes to this, RC may be run by peer reviewed, published, climate scientists that contribute to the IPCC, but they are fraudulently pushing the AGW propaganda on their climate site none the less.
The ace "science guy" at the Chronicle lets this bozo get by with this:
" 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."
A rather condescending attitude. I can't click thru now because CA seems to be overloaded, but this is actually the question that McIntrye has been asking for years....please give an detailed explanation of CO2 sensitivity.
This is a long way from not understanding the "greenhouse effect", it is asking for a compilation (without hand waving) of all the positive and negative feedbacks that are triggered.
Of course no one can do this. Hansen at one point claimed a 6 degree C increase for doubling CO2, the average estimated sensitivity is 2 degrees, but some think is it less than 1 degree C.
North is hand waving to a credulous "science guy" who probably did poorly in HS math and hasn't been back since.
Oops, now I see that Brian B on the 1st page of the comments beat me too this. But it bears repeating IMHO : )
Of course, if the Team wrote their papers properly, giving a proper explanation of the methods used and revealing where the raw data had been archived, and if the peer review process was a meaningful event, used to iron out any inconsistencies or lack of clarity in the paper, there would be no need for a lengthy dialogue with any climate sceptics.
The Team can only blame themselves.
..."the NAS panel on paleoclimate that famously declared that the Hockey Stick's data and methods were wrong but its conclusions were right "...
Do you have the actual source for this? I have seen it claimed many times,but the reports I have seen of it leave it open to question as the comment re: wrong methods and right conclusions could be interpreted as a generic statement, not specifically one which says the conclusions of Mann et al were correct despite their methods. IMO the latter would be nonsense.
thanks
"Do you have the actual source for this?"
See Climate Audit http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2322 and scroll down
There are links there to the report itself.
Thanks Pa but I was hoping for an actual page/line reference or a quote.
I get this:
"Based on the analyses presented in the original papers by Mann et al. and this newer supporting evidence, the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium. The substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600 lower our confidence in this conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming. Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that “the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium” because the uncertainties inherent in temperature reconstructions for individual years and decades are larger than those for longer time periods, and because not all of the available proxies record temperature information on such short timescales. However, the methods in use are evolving and are expected to improve."
from page page 117 here:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11676&page=117
but a search for "wrong" only turns up this one:
http://books.nap.edu/booksearch.php?term=wrong&isbn=0309102251&Search+This+Book.x=16&Search+This+Book.y=17
Notbannedyet
Discussion of the bristlecones is on p51. Mann's PC1 is (IIRC) 93% bristlecone for the critical AD1400 step - ie the medieval warm period. On p52 the panel advise that they should be avoided for temperature reconstructions.
On p91 the panel produces a hockey stick from red noise, confirming that Mann's methods were biased. The language is very hedged, but it's the unavoidable conclusion of what they say. As someone on this thread has pointed out, North said that his panel agreed with Wegman on this point.
Bishop - Agreed re: the criticism of Mann but I don't see the support that is widely reported of "right conclusions". Given the extract I quote above I wonder if this is a myth?
That conclusion is based on the first sentence you quote. "Plausible" has been widely interpreted by the media to mean "correct".
Not banned yet,
I don't think they say it. Steve McIntyre explains how and why it doesn't say it. That was why I pointed you to the report, and McIntyre's discussion so you could see for yourself.
The best description of the North report I've seen was to the effect that it was the most damning it could possibly be in the current political climate. They agreed that the methods were wrong and Mann's claims about 1000 years were unsupported, but said the claim was plausible over 400 years (which we knew already because that's the little ice age) and there were many other reconstructions giving similar results (which is true, but neglects to mention that they used similar methods and in many cases the same bent data sources). But unfortunately, there isn't any really compact quote summarising it all.
The supporters of course seized on that "plausible" as complete vindication, and to this day many still assert that it confirms Mann's work totally.
Poor Gerry North. Advocate for a complete overhaul of the way the world works and get irritated when intelligent people question your work. Billions of the world poor may see their standard of living decrease markedly, but we wouldn't a scientist to be inconvenienced.
Pa and Bishop - quite; that was the reason I posted the query.
I have read both reports (admittedly a while ago) and I think they could hardly have been more damning of Mann. I think the oft repeated "right conclusions but wrong methods" should be withdrawn from the lead post on this thread. To repeat it is misinformation - I'd suggest "Poor methodology with some conclusions which are plausible when looked at against other sources" is more accurate.