Bishop Hill The hearings - cheerleaders
Mar 1, 2010 Climate: CRU Climate: Parliament It's all over! First something to eat and a glass of wine. Then I'll post up some reaction.
18:04 Is all CRU data and code available? Witnesses will check the story out and write.
18:01 Willis says chief scientist should prevent suppression of data in future. Beddington says there are issues. Proprietory data argument again. Beddington does not know if NOAA has same problem.
18:00 Beddington says new temperature set was not in response to the UEA emails.
17:58 Slingo says uncertainties order of magnitude higher for satellites.
17:56 Discussion of UHI. Slingo says they've looked at urbanisation. Says station environment is important. This was a very carefully worded answer.
17:52 Willis asks about plans for new global temperature sets. Has Slingo lost confidence. She says no, and then explains it all.
17:50 Stewart asks about FoI requests again. Does Beddington sympathise with scientists deluged with requests. "Sort of".
17:47 Willis asks about proactive release of materials under EIR. Beddington says timing is an issue. Says they can look at it. Beddington says lots of time invested. Need sensible limits. (Not if the law says otherwise!)
17:46 Slingo says they have released the code, but climate models are big. Says code is tested twice a day because they use it for weather forecasts. Code is given to academic institutions and to international met services. Tested all the time by many people.
17:43 Stringer asks Beddington if code should be available. Beddington says yes but it's a question of timing.
17:42 Watson talking about attribution and modelling. Much talk of the hockey stick being resolved but no mention of for or against.
17:40 Stringer cites Wegman siding with McIntyre in the face of IPCC peer review. Is Slingo worried. No. Waffles about current warming.
17:39 Stringer asks about funding sources influencing results. Beddington says there is no problem in this area.
17:36 Slingo says they are not withholding anything they can release. Refers to ownership by NMSs.
17:36 Beddington says that Russell's terms of reference are adequate. Notes scientific review too. Says very comprehensive.
17:35 Watson says media has portrayed CRU emails as a crisis. Says no effect on IPCC findings.
17:33 Slingo doesn't answer the question of whether there is a crisis in British science. Says wait until the Russell inquiry has reported. Slingo says IPCC peer review is much more thorough than any other area of science.
17:32 Naysmith asks if IoP has been premature. Beddington says yes. Possibility of things being taken out of context. Have they all been briefed to say this?
17:30: Naysmith refers to scientists whose submissions say CRU affair has damaged reputation of science. Beddington says not, and will not comment on UEA situation until then.
17:30 Watson agrees!
17:29 Slingo - global warming is unequivocal. 90% certain human activity. Says uncertainties re emissions scenarios and what will happen in future.
17:27 Beddington says important that questions are framed in uncertainty terms.
17:23 Boswell asks Beddington about Royal Society/NERC statement about warming climate. Beddington agrees with statement. Boswell asks how much uncertainty and if the data is transparent. Beddington relies on the "confirmed by other studies" argument.
Reader Comments (97)
Volume of work? If you don't have the resources or experience get out of the business!
Yes Stewart ask them if FOI request are an evil burden yet again! He really thinks scrutiny is just naughty and bad - hes a politican :)
Overwhelmed with FOI requests - nonsense. If they archived properly it would not be an issue.
61 requests in the year is a shade over 1 a week... I know that civil servants have a somewhat "relaxed" view of work, but....
Slingo says she wants this new data programme to refine research on heatwaves, new data sets impacting on people ... in the sense of warming, naturally, because cooling ain't happening, or so she maintain.
Gee whiz AJ,
I tend to think of the speed of light as 186,000 miles per second.
Bishop seems to type very fast indeed if lightspeed is the only delay element.
I'm thinking there must be some buffering somewhere along the way for the audio/video.
Maybe his local feed via the beeb is closer to realtime.
Group delay?
hehe.
You seem like a fairly smart guy AJ.
Probably smart enough to do a little better selfchecking on quick comments, which might otherwise undercut your hard-won credibility.
RR
Volume of work is civil service speak for getting more budget and headcount. Cheaper alternative, publish their code and let us debug it for them as JGC et al have been doing. Who let these people do IT?
Now we can see where they are going: don't need to redo the data because that would imply something wrong with the theory of AGW. So the excuse is: the existing monthly CRU is not sufficient resolution to analyse extreme weather so...Do it all again in greater detail. More funding please...
Slingo mentions the 2003 heatwave again - as justifcation for higher resolution data set - how many years are they going to dine out on that? - and wasnt it just in France?
UHI is only 'contaminating' the data by 0.3%, says Slingo.
She is again trying to baffling with B.S> - but Willis isn't having it.
Oh - and the satellite data are fine and agree with warming, she says - according to their model.
There ye have it: the model is all, it must not be queried, its sacrosanct.
Three more 'robusts' to underline her argument.
slingo is attempting to claim there was little adjustment on sensor thermal noise and modeling. It is a bogus claim since the delta change would be consistent. Her claim isolated and scattered ground measurements are more accurate than consistent global measurements from satellites is also incredibly naive and wrong.
She is conflating again - implies lots of corrections needed for satellite, so that is why cannot release straight away. But surely that does not apply to temperature readings taken at surface which have already been input to the CRU software. Note she is also casting some doubt on validity of the satellite data. Is their a divergence?
I don't think anyone's made the point that almost all of the large wave of FOI requests was for confidentiality agreements and not any actual data. The whole list of FOI requests is downloadable here http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/request_for_list_of_foi_requests
Surely the committee has it?
hahaha.. satellites less robust because of orbital dynamics and instrumentation. Methinks those are easier to account for and adjust. I get the feeling Slingo wants more money for surface instrumentation.
I keep getting the sense of the need for more funding as well.
Understand that the 'orbital drift' is a time of day measurement issue. If you take your measurement at slightly different times then you get an drifting off answer.
But the accuracy of ground based measurements to a common reference (UTC) has been drifting massively until GPS showed up. In 1880 the 'measurement drift' was horrendous! QED: the ground data is much nosier than satellite data.
Simple question, what is proprietary about temperature data .. or software to reduce temperature data ... This whole line of thought is really weird.
Maybe they should switch to citing what is true in AR4, it would be easier.
Ha - the three weaselling cheerleaders have been sent home to do some homework. They must write to the committee about the differences in data publishing policies between NOAA, NASA and the MetOffice/CRU.
Beddington was caught on the hop: a nice blush spreading all over his face ...
Over - and pretty unsatisfactary end it was, too!
AJS.- Agreed, but satellites seem a better, known issue compared to the state of the surface network(s), and surely we should have both anyway to observe any climate change from looking down instead of just the surface layer.
Thank you, dear Bishop Hill - that was most excellent!
I'm off for some sustenance meself now.
Well done Bish - you've provided a really useful service here.
Anybody count the number of use of "robust"?
The Climate Taliban have spoken. A bunch of Politicians.
re: code development. Two wrongs do not make a right.
Just because two programs agree doesn't make them right. Two programs adding 1.3, 1.5 and 2.2 and coming up with the answer 4 because of lack of floating precision doesn't mean they are correct. The correctness has to be proven elsewhere, I can't count the number of times we have rewritten one system and replicated the same errors in the new system because its 100% the same that "proves its right". I have even uncovered code where they explicitly comment out the correct method and do calculations incorrectly to ensure they get the same result as the old system.
Also, none of these climate models agree exactly on what will happen, they all vary massively which indicates that a lot of them are wrong.
In addition
Just echo Viv Evans - excellent job. There's quite a lot to absorb. In many ways I thought that Lawson and Peiser were not the best possible representatives of the doubtful tendency.
17:46 "... code is tested twice a day because they use it for weather forecasts." Oh, I thought climate is not weather, but apparently they use the same models!
Aomic,
Agreed. I have said for months now to use the sat data to validate the massive extrapolations produced by the land sensors (will show huge errors as we move to empty or lightly measured grids). Bolivia would be an obvious test case to show how the lack of sensor data for 20 years has led to unfounded warming in GISS and CRU. The sat data does cover 30+ years and is much more stable since the sensor biases are constant over the orbit and drift only slightly over time.
An interesting statistic would be the number of sips of water each interviewee takes.
I poste this on the Lawson thread but you'll probably miss it there - so, was there any mention of SteveMc - nThe Richelieu or 'eminence grise' for the agwers? The bogey under the bed?
I read somewhere, quite recently, that the Met Office admitted that their long range forecast software had a bias in it that consistently predicted higher temperatures (unfortunately I cant find it). I guess if this validates the modeling software the the modeling software has a warm bias.
@Lewis
There was mention of McIntyre a couple of times. Stringer mentioned him in relation to Mann V McIntyre at the NAS hearing.
BTW I have just noticed the whole thing is still available recorded on the link
http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=5979
[snip - don't leave comments like that here again]
TerryS,
"I read somewhere, quite recently, that the Met Office admitted that their long range forecast software had a bias in it that consistently predicted higher temperatures"
A new one was found by Ilya Goz, put in a comment at John Graham-Cummings blog,
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2010/02/something-odd-in-crutem3-station-errors.html
and the Ilya put up the calculations on a new site:
http://iv-6.blogspot.com/2010/02/station-errors-in-crutem3_04.html
JGC's post on confirmation of the 'bug' at Met:
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2010/02/station-errors-in-crutem3-and-hadcrut3.html
Here is the article you may be looking for:
Met Office's debate over longer-term forecasts
"The Met Office has now admitted to BBC News that its annual global mean forecast predicted temperatures higher than actual temperatures for nine years out of the last 10.
This "warming bias" is very small - just 0.05C. And the Met Office points out that the variance between the forecast and the actual temperature is within its own stated margins of error."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8462890.stm
Thanks Bishop for an excellent endeavour!
Can we please have the contribution by emm deleted? That's completely unnecessary and the kind of thing that's often used to discredit blogs like this.
[It's gone]
You're not going to win the fight in one round. Get over it.
The real victory here is that Graham Stringer got Jones to admit that he hadn't released all the data, but that he should in future.
And everybody agrees that the data should be released in future.
That's about the best you could hope for: And you got it.
Richard Drake - your completely right - some how we've begun to bend over backwards to hear any that a ranter needs to say. Not good.
missing word - 'rant'
If people get excited by this - fine. One can be passiotely rational - look at Dyson or Einstein or, even, even Oppenhower (bad spelling - sorry! )with his 'We have become death' statement. But what were dealng with here are or there falseifiability. Yes, we know the consequences and that can be emotive. But the point we're all saying is, that we havn't even got, to use an American expression, 'to first base'. It is a momentous and (in my opinion) rediculous idea that we can change history - a utopian idea that was tried by Lenin and Hitler - and, yet, that is what is proposed. So, I say, let us be polite but no 'year zero' unless its beyond, per adventure, unavoidable.
Just saw the Channel 4 report on the hearings. Just what was that graph of global temperature for 1800-present which was portrayed as fact of global in support of Jone's assertion about the lack of warming in recent years doesn't mean there is no warming over the long term? Not sure I saw that graph presented in the hearings? Where did it come from and why was it portrayed that way?
Why doesn't someone ask the question, "What's in the best interest of science? Is it to hide your data and code, or to publish them along with the paper?" And conversely, what's in the best interest of a researcher who is afraid of allowing everyone to see his work? The answers are so simple. The way forward should also be simple.
Rob Schneider. I caught the end of the Channel 4 news. The graph I think was from 1850, to show sustained warming and to show that the recent decade was the warmest on record. There was no mention of the recovery from the LIA. It was left to the viewer to make the link that industrialisation had caused all the warming. But John Snow is a warmist.
I noticed the Bishop Hill Blog was prominently displayed on the news! Way to go.
It fascinates me that comments such as “unequivocal”, "robust", “sound”, "fully resolved", “'warming is human driven”, “peer reviewed”, are always, without fail, followed by “need more research”
Quite amazing!
With CRU and the three wise, I think there were probably more "needs more research" than there were "robusts"
Still trying to wrap my head around the concept of "proprietary" temp data...
The information that Jones has never been asked for data or programs by his peer reviewers is a real stunner. So what were the reviewers doing, checking his spelling? To my mind this means that none of his papers have been properly peer reviewed. Is this another convention that only applies to the field of climate "science".
Please delete if inappropriate, but I just found this from Acton
http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements/vcstatement2
Interesting that he discusses 'the ability to understand climate change'...and not anything stronger. They will apologise of there is anything to apologise for.
But overall I am left with the entirely unscientific impression that he is an oily smug bastard.