Climate cuttings 23

Ian JolliffeBack in March, global warming's canine-in-chief, Tamino, wrote a series of posts explaining why the notorious decentred principal components analysis used by Michael Mann in his near-legendary hockey stick paper were, in fact, entirely valid. He rounded the series of postings up by citing in his support Ian Joliffe, an important authority on principal components. Tamino is now looking rather foolish, because Joliffe has posted a comment on his site saying that Tamino has misrepresented his views and that Mann should not have used decentred principal components. In fact he wonders about the validity of using principal components at all. Oh dear. 

Mann's latest magnum opus is still causing much hilarity, with the stick-meister deleting and replacing the data on his website faster than a climatologist can fill in a funding request. Unfortunately he has (to his credit) already placed the raw proxies in a public archive from where it is possible to see the quality of the inputs to his study. This is a particularly hilarious one..  

Iain StewartThe BBC's "history" of global warming (in reality it's a propaganda piece) showed a few frayed seams. Presenter Iain Stewart spent a lot of time pouting about how Reagan appointed the Nierenburg committee to look at the issue, and hand-picked its chairman so as to bias its findings. Unfortunately, somebody noticed that the committee was actually set up by the Carter administration. This (ahem) error has come straight from the mouth of Naomi Oreskes, so the producers of the programme have only themselves to blame for picking a "player" as the series adviser. The son of the committee's chairman has responded in the comments and notes that Oreskes knew that the committee was appointed by Carter, because she says so in a scholarly work on the subject. I guess the bit about it being wicked Reagan who appointed Neirenburg was a bit of a flourish for the benefit of the proles.

Atmoz (a climatologist from the US) has also been looking into Oreskes' work on the Nierenburg report, and has found some pretty outrageous selective quoting and misrepresentation of the findings. With all these revelations, she is starting to look throroughly dishonest. The perfect series adviser for a BBC documentary, in fact.

This year's Artic melt seems to have come to a end, with small increases in area appearing for the first time this year, slightly earlier than 2007. The minimum area seems to have been some 400,000 sq km higher than last year. Still no sign of the Antarctic warming either.

And lastly, it hailed in Kenya.

News from the front

Johann Hari has dared to cross the monstrous regiment of home educators in his article in the Independent today. In a carefully ambiguous article, he manages to imply that there are lots of home educated children who are simply not learning anything at all, and insinuates that HE parents are little better than child abusers.

Having bad-mouthed the HE community, Hari manages to compound his error by a bit of blatant misrepresentation. He quotes research by someone called Rob Blackhurst, who apparently found that children in HE families, as old as twelve, couldn't read and write. Now if you look up Rob Blackhurst and home education on Google, you will find that Mr Blackhurst is a journalist rather than an academic, and that he wrote a very sympathetic piece about HomeEd in the FT some months back. In it, he does indeed talk of children who didn't learn to read until very late...

One of our children didn't read until he was nine or 10...

says the quoted home educator. Full marks to Mr Hari then? Not exactly. The rest of the quote is

and he's just completed an MA in creative writing.

Not exactly what Mr Hari would have you believe that Blackhurst found, I would say.

There has been a great swathe of media comment about HE in the last week or so, presumably timed to coincide with the return of the English schools. The unions and the left wing commentators have been attacking really quite hard, with vague insinuations of child abuse, and heart-rending tales of children shut up inside for months at a time, deprived of the alleged benefits of a state education and the national curriculum.Reading between the lines though, there are two factors driving them. Firstly they are frightened that the trickle of children out of the state system and into HE will become a flood. If this happens then the state education system will be put under enormous strain and enormous pressure to change. And of course, change is the last thing that the teaching unions want. But most of all, they want access to people's homes. If you read Hari's article, he wants all children to go to school, but most of all he wants education and welfare officers to be able to turn up to check that home educating parents are not abusing their children. He is really that much of a fascist. And rest assured that once education and welfare officers have access to HE homes to check up on children there, the same outraged voices that question why nobody can check up on HE children now, will be raised again to demand why HE homes can be inspected, but not the homes of other children.

HE families are the front line in the fight against the big brother society. They may not realise it, but their fight is the fight of all of us. They deserve our support.

Insulation

My house is very very cold in winter. Ice on the inside of the windows cold. The plan for the autumn was to get the basement insulated, and maybe if I was feeling flush, putting some extra insulation in the loft.

The plans now are on hold, cos apparently Gordon Brown is going to subsidise me to do it. I'll just hold on for a while.

This action is very welcome, but it does suggest that he's a twit, because I was going to do it anyway.

Pooter in a hole in a wall

I'm grateful to Carlotta for this link to a story about Sugata Mitra's famous computer in a hole in a wall experiment. He and his colleagues set up a PC with a mouse and stuck it in a hole in a wall in a slum in Delhi so that passers-by could have a go. Then they sat back to watch what happened.

The story is quite well-known, but for those who haven't heard it, what happened was that the slum children taught themselves to use the PC, and then set about teaching each other. Adults seemed to approve of their kids educating themselves in this way, but they didn't actually get involved in trying to teach the children, not did they try to learn themselves.

The story is a wonderful tribute to the innate ability of children to learn and discover things on their own, and it raises all sorts of interesting questions about why we try to educate children the way we do, or in fact, if we are actually educating them at all. Do children really need so much formal learning as they get now?

I wonder if, back in the days before state education, those who fell outside the system of private schools and tutors and dame schools and ragged schools that were the backbone of the education system in those days, ended up passing their discoveries between each other like the slum children of Delhi today. One can imagine a battered copy of Dickens being passed round the urchins, with the little ones desperate to learn their ABCs so they could share in the excitement.

There's a research project for somebody in there somewhere.

The climate wars

Just finished watching the BBC's history of the climate wars in which a geologist called Ian Stewart manages to emit more carbon dioxide than most people manage in a year. In episode one he managed to visit Hawaii, Greenland, Colorado, the south-west of England, California. A powerboat trip was, of course, essential to his historical case. which was largely a predictable environmentalist take on the last half century. .

It included a wonderful moment where Ian Stewart tried to write off a committee reporting on the issue of climate change by saying its head was "a passionate believer in free markets". Well, that settles it then. He did engage in some pretty grubby innuendo at times.

The programme adviser was Naomi Oreskes, which kind of gives you an idea of the integrity of the piece. Oreskes has a companion piece in the Sunday Times today, which rather suggests that the show is part of a campaign rather than a serious attempt at a history of the controversy.

One interesting point was that when they got onto the subject of temperature reconstructions, they only talked about ice cores and not tree rings. It's possible that they'll cover this next week, but could it be that they are going to skip over the subject of the hockey stick entirely? They couldn't could they?

Climate cuttings 22

Right, having restarting the blogging engine, here's a much-delayed edition of climate cuttings. Some of these are quite old now, having sat waiting for me to click the publish button for a month now. Still - there's some interesting stuff out there.

A paper published in The Holocene said that there was a surge in summer storms in Britain in the 1680s and 1690s - the depths of the Little Ice Age. This rather dents recent theories that summer storms are being caused by global warming.

The Hockey Stick reared its ugly head again! Michael Mann's dodgy reconstruction of past temperatures appears in the pages of an important US report on climate. Still more remarkably it's in the variant where the thermometer record is tacked on to the end of the reconstruction to make it look more scary, with not a word of explanation that this is what has been done. Junk science from the US government, it seems.

And a few weeks later Dr Mann tried it on again, publishing a new take on paleoclimate, which quickly reduced readers at Climate Audit to tears of laughter as problem after problem with the data came to light. The cock-ups didn't so much crawl out of the woodwork, as fart up into the firmament like so many damp squibs. The full story is ongoing over at Climate Audit. I'd try to point you to a relevant place but there are so many threads outlining all the things wrong with this study that it's a full time job keeping up with them all. 

The new paper was, of course, given the headline treatment by the BBC ("Any old bilge, so long as it's green bilge"). The hockey stick is alive and well apparently.

Meanwhile, concerns were raised about the mental stability of statistician Matt Briggs. Dr Briggs may have been driven close to madness by the repeated transgressions of basic statistical procedures by the hockey team. (This is a really good posting, by the way, especially for any members of the hockey team who might still have delusions of statistical competence - didn't Wegman say they should involve some statisticians in their work so they would stop getting it wrong?).Having got his hands on CSIRO's drought data (see Climate Cuttings 21), David Stockwell did a statistical re-analysis of the numbers behind the Australian scientific body's claim that their models showed that droughts were going to double in the next twenty to thirty years. When it came to the models' correlation with observed rainfall, Stockwell observes:

In almost all cases, the correlation coefficient between simulated and observed values was very low, and not significant. The models on average explained less than 1% of the observed variation in rainfall.

There have now been no sunspots on our local star for 400 days. This is getting solar enthusiasts rather excited because most previous solar cycle minima have had between two and three hundred sunspot free days.

A guest blogger at Anthony Watts reviewed the Met Office's summer forecast:

On April 11, 2007 they issued this press release stating “there is a high probability that summer temperature will exceed the 1971-2000 long-term average of 14.1 °C ….. there are no indications of an increased risk of a particularly dry or particularly wet summer.”  This was interpreted by The Guardian as “Britain set to enjoy another sizzling summer.“

Britain was hit by flooding.

One of the oddities of the surface temperature record is the claim by climatologists that the effect of urban heat islands (warming from urbanisation) is negligible. A new study from some awkward so-and-so in Japan says that the effect is actually rather larger than the alleged twentieth century warming. Don't expect to read about this in the next IPCC report. (He was probably funded by big oil anyway).

August 2008 temperatures were well below 2007's. The BBC forgot to mention this. Again.

And finally, our favourite enviro-hero Lewis Gordon Pugh (remember him?) went on another CO₂ splurge conciousness raising mission to the Arctic. This time he was going to kayak to the North Pole, which was going to be ice-free this summer, you may remember. He had to turn back because of heavy sea ice. And because his bottom was cold.

Photo credit: Summer storm by Steve Lacy, Tree rings by Shekay,

Catz Club

Phew! The work crisis seems to have abated (slightly) and I am heading for the alehouse in a moment, but before I go here's an interesting snippet.

Labour has agreed to pay back £15,000 it received from a children's charity after a report found that charity law had been breached.

OK, more dodgy donations to the Labour party - nothing new there. Apparently the generous party benefactor, which provides after-school care and holiday clubs for children, believed it was an administrative error, and that they should have routed the gift through their trading subsidiary. Except that's illegal too, it seems.

Still, here's the fun bit. The accounts of Catz Club were qualified last time round on the grounds that the charity might not continue to operate as a going concern. They had a £3.4m deficit on income of £850k. Yes, folks they spent two and a half million more than they received in income! The auditors said they were being kept afloat by the chairman, one A Mitchell. The 2007 accounts are overdue too, so to say that they are up the creek without a paddle is probably an understatement.

So, do you think they were after something, in return for their generous gift?

Caspar - the PDF

A couple of readers have asked to use the Caspar paper. With this in mind, I've prepared a PDF version of Caspar & the Jesus Paper. At the same time I've corrected some typos and made a change to the final section just to clarify some of the issues around RE benchmarking.

The PDF doesn't include the pictures from the original posting, because I haven't got that far with LaTex yet(!), but I hope people find it useful. You can download it here.

Lack of posting

Apologies for the lack of posts, I am busy with work and family commitments, together with a certain amount of follow up on the Caspar post.

One little titbit that might interest readers. Nature Climate Feedback reveals in an aside to one of its recent postings that there is still debate over whether the medieval warm period was warmer than the late twentieth century. The existence of this debate may surprise some people, who have been led to believe that there was consensus over such matters, not least by Nature itself.

The admission is welcome.

And still they come

Well, two days on and the visitor numbers are still heading upwards. I've been enjoying seeing how people are reacting, and mostly it's been very positive. There have been visitors from all parts of the world, with a current surge from Australia, where the story has been picked up by Andrew Bolt of the Courier Mail Herald Sun, which is the first MSM link for the story. I also note with amusement that people are discussing my article in a bondage forum - when you're bored with talking dirty you can always have a chat about statistics, I suppose.

One interesting reaction was from Professor Barry Brook, the biologist who heads the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability at the University of Adelaide. Prof Brook responded to a commenter who had pointed him at my hockey stick article saying:

[T]here’s really no need, as this hoary old chestnut has already been gathered, roasted and eaten. If the folks at Climate Audit choose not to keep up to date, or to ignore any refutation, that’s their limitation.

Which is peculiar because if you follow those links, the scientific argument presented is all about principal components analysis (how the temperature reconstruction was extracted from the tree rings) which is something that I didn't mention at all in my article. The scientific part of my posting was about verification using the RE statistic (how well did the temperature reconstruction they extracted matched up against known temperatures in the past) , and isn't mentioned in any of Professor Brook's "refutations". I've asked him to explain, and also to give us the benefit of his opinions of Wahl and Amman's benchmarking procedures. It will be interesting to hear what he has to say.

If you are interested in the earlier story of the creation of the hockey stick, there's a popular science article here (h/t Steve McIntyre) which covers this earlier tale. It's just as scandalous, but equally mathematical.

Another interesting discussion has been the Prometheus blog where Roger Pielke Jnr discusses the "corruption of science" angle.

On writing popular blog posts

Thanks to everyone who has linked to the last post, which has given me record visitor numbers. There is an irresistable urge to spend your whole day refreshing your visitor number figures when this happens, isn't there?

The counter is still heading upwards as I write. Welcome to everyone who is visiting for the first time and thanks for all your comments.

Caspar and the Jesus paper

There has been the most extraordinary series of postings at Climate Audit over the last week. As is usual at CA, there is a heavy mathematics burden for the casual reader, which, with a bit of research I think I can now just about follow. The story is a remarkable indictment of the corruption and cyncism that is rife among climate scientists, and I'm going to try to tell it in layman's language so that the average blog reader can understand it. As far as I know it's the first time the whole story has been set out in one place. It's a long tale - and the longest posting I think I've ever written. You may want to get a long drink before starting, and those who suffer from heart disorders may wish to take their beta blockers first.

Click to read more ...

BBC backing climate change alarmism - official

The Harmless Sky blog has discovered that support for the catastrophic global warming case is official BBC policy. Tony quotes a BBC report as follows:

The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change].

The details of the seminar are, as one might expect from an organisation like the BBC which holds the public in such contempt, a secret. An FoI request has revealed that uber-warmer, Lord May, was the driver behind the decision, but the rest of the details are only going to be revealed if the Information Commissioner can force them to toe the line.

Update: Interesting also to remind ourselves that as recently as a year ago, the head of BBC news was claiming that the Corporation had no line on climate change. Well, what did you expect from a BBC man? The truth?

These ones are blunt too!

Iain Dale says that Boris has appointed Rosie Boycott as London's food czar. Rosie, the former editor of the Independent on Sunday, has her own small organic farm it seems, and reckons that if everyone had their own small organic farm then we'd all be much healthier and we'd be helping climate change too. (As Iain points out, we don't exactly want to help climate change, but leave that aside for the moment.)

You have to wonder about the collective intelligence of the journalistic classes don't you? You can tell them till you're blue in the face that small farms are more inefficient than big ones; that this means that they use more resources than small ones, and that this is bad for the environment; and that all of this goes doubly for organic farms.

And no matter how hard you try to ram this simple fact into their dull heads, they just don't get it.

It's amazing. These people - Boris and Rosie - have reached the very peaks of the journalistic profession, with the six figure salaries and the small organic farms that go to those in these exalted positions, and yet to any mildly educated outside observer they appear to be semi-educated half-wits. I'm left wondering who is worse: the dumb journalist who can't understand simple economics or the dumb journalist who appoints her to run a department in London's government.

Not the sharpest tool in the box

Everybody's piling in on Alex Lockwood, who seems to be one of those "academics" who earn their daily bread by campaigning for left wing causes. And seeing as everyone's having such fun, it seems a pity not to contribute something to the metaphorical kicking too.

Rather than throw brickbats at his current article (calling for censorship of people who don't toe the line on climate change) I thought I'd look through his recent oeuvre to see what else he has had to say.

Here's a goody, in which he takes umbrage at an article of Brendan O'Neill's in which the Spiked man accuses greens of wanting to curb our freedoms. This has got Mr Lockwood riled, and, all flustered, he girds his loins, summons up all his intellectual firepower and unleashes the following salvoes of pure illogic, the like of which can only be launched by journalism lecturers at the University of Sunderland. O'Neill is wrong to say greens want to curb freedoms because....

• There's nothing new here
• O Neill doesn't mention the science
• The argument has moved on
• O'Neill links to his own articles too much
• Well, yes, only the rich will be able to afford free movement when I'm running the country

I make that four logical fallacies and one admission that O'Neill is correct.

God help his students.