JG-C confirms the errors in HADCRUT

John Graham-Cumming reports that the Met Office has confirmed the errors found by him and his readers. The effect of the correction will be a slight narrowing of the error bars. Well done to JG-C.

Comments

[MarcC]

Typo? I think "my him" should be "by him".

[BH: Thanks, fixed now. Only one cup of coffee so far]

[Phillip Bratby]

I previously suggested he send them an invoice for doing their verification work for them. I suppose a grudging thanks will be all he'll get.

[TerryS]

Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh on the Met Office, but JG-C found this out from a BBC journalist. You would think that the first person they would inform would be JG-C rather than a journalist.

[software audit required]

Maybe there are a few problems!
(Tim and Harry - Harry_read_me.txt wrote how much hadcrut code?)

How qualified are former Geography students in software development, physics, mathematics, statistical methods, yet they produced the HADCRUT code.
No audits, public code review, etc

Tim Mitchell: (CRU, UEA)
“At Oxford University I read geography (1994-1997, School of Geography). My college was Christ Church. At Oxford I developed a special interest in the study of climate change.

In 1997 I moved to Norwich to carry out the research for a PhD at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia. My subject was the development of climate scenarios for subsequent use by researchers investigating the impacts of climate change. I was supervised by Mike Hulme and by John Mitchell (Hadley Centre of the UK Meteorological Office). The PhD was awarded in April 2001.”
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timm/personal/index.html

Of course if you get eco green evangelical christians students with a geography degree to write the HADCRUT might you get a warm bias, especially if it is your phd supervisors agw theory.

“…Although I have yet to see any evidence that climate change is a sign of Christ’s imminent return, human pollution is clearly another of the birth pangs of creation, as it eagerly awaits being delivered from the bondage of corruption (Romans. 19-22).

Tim Mitchell works at the Climactic Research Unit, UEA, Norwich, and is a member of South Park Evangelical Church.
http://www.e-n.org.uk/p-1129-Climate-change-and-the-Christian.htm

Even the scientists seem to want to Believe in AGW, rather than test for it experimentally, like John Houghton, they seem to want to believe that humans are polluting and destroying the earth. If you don’t look for the null hypothesis, you may not find the good news that AGW theory, may have a miniscule impact when compared to natural processes.

CRU provides one of three datasets (Hadcru) for OTHER researchers:
(we have since seen that the 3 are more interlinked than previously thought)

Tim Mitchell:
“An important part of my work is to develop climate data-sets. My intention is that these data-sets will then be used by researchers investigating the impacts of climate change. Here I provide access to these data-sets.”

CRU TS 1.2 10′ Europe 1901-2000 time-series pre, tmp, dtr, vap, cld MITCHELL et al, 2003 this site

CRU TS 2.0 0.5° globe 1901-2000 time-series pre, tmp, dtr, vap, cld MITCHELL et al, 2003 this site

(full list see the links)
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timm/data/index.html
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timm/data/index-table.html

There are three centres which calculate global-average temperature each
month.

•Met Office, in collaboration with the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UK)

•Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is part of NASA (USA)

•National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (USA)”

Tim Mitchell again:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timm/research/index.html

I imagine an audit of the software development processes would be interesting to see.

If you’re going to do good science, release the computer code too:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/05/science-climate-emails-code-release

Steve Mosher sums it up:
“So, I take a hard hard line on this. If you dont freely release your data and freely release your code in all cases then I am not rationally bound to even consider your claims.
You haven’t produced science, you’ve just advertised it.
The real science, is not the paper describing the data, its not the words describing the algorithm. the real science is the data AS YOU USED IT
and the code AS YOU RAN IT

[Jonathan]

Recent email from the Institute of Physics:

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This webinar will investigate how this situation has come about, why it is important to the future of research, and what can be done about it.

[Duncan Samuel]

I admire JG-C for confirming the errors in HADCRUT. I don't see any problems with students who notice errors in HADCRUT, even if they're students doesn't mean they're less qualified of knowledgable about it. Even geniuses makes errors but one doesn't have to be geniuses to point them out. There should be someone who would look into every error report however small it is.

Duncan Samuel
Web Based Scheduling Software