And so it begins

McIntyre has posted his first analysis of some of the emails. It's not looking good for the Hockey Team, with their scheming to remove the divergence problem and "hide the decline" from the IPCC reports laid out in horrifying detail.

There are going to be months of revelations like this.

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.

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.

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 ...

Climate Audit, potted history

Steve McIntyre has posted a presentation he made recently which is an excellent potted history of the Hockey Stick story. It's not too technical so it's suitable for anyone new to the subject.

It's a very large file though (11MB) 

An opportunity for Roger Harrabin

Leading hurricane expert Kerry Emmanuel has published a new paper in which he reports that his models suggest that global warming will cause a reduction in the number of hurricanes (with a slight rise in hurricane intensity in some regions).

Steve McIntyre notes that the results have been strangely ignored by the mainstream media, and wonders if this is because Emmanuel's university - MIT- has failed to publish a press release. This is odd, because as Steve M notes, they weren't so reticent for an earlier Emmanuel paper which predicted an increase in hurricanes.

This should be a great opportunity for the BBC's Roger Harrabin to redeem his reputation by telling the world about the Emmanuel paper. Come on Roger, show us that you're not actually a mouthpiece for the green movement...... 

The hitchhikers guide to the IPCC

The IPCC has finally released the reviewers comments on its recent 4th Assessment Report. If you want to study them they are available in hard copy only at the Littauer Library of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. You may think that this means that if you are a hard up climatology student from, say, India, you are completely stuffed. But no, the IPCC have thought of everything. The staff at Harvard will arrange to copy up to 100 pages for you at a cost of $34 plus $0.40 per page. If you can afford to employ a researcher they are happy for someone to come in to see which pages might be of interest. Otherwise you will have to make do with 100 pages at random...so maybe the Indians are stuffed after all.

Does this situation remind you of something? 

 

PROSSER
But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.

ARTHUR
Oh, yes, soon as I heard of this plan, I went straight around to see them yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call much attention to them, had you? Such as maybe telling someone about them?

PROSSER looks more uncomfortable.

PROSSER
Well, the plans were on display –

ARTHUR
On display? I had to go down to the cellar to find them!

PROSSER
That’s the display department.

ARTHUR
With a flashlight.

PROSSER
Well, the lights had probably gone.

ARTHUR
So had the stairs.

PROSSER
Er – well – you did find them, didn’t you?

ARTHUR
Oh, yes. Yes, I did. The plans were on display, in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory, with a sign on the door reading “Beware of the Leopard.”

It is not known if the Littauer Library has stairs, or whether the Environmental Science and Public Policy Archives are, in fact, located in a disused public convenience.

(Source here. Hitchhikers Guide reference shamelessly ripped from the comments). 

Is the game up for the climate junk scientists?

I posted a while back about the failure of climate scientists to archive their data or to release it on request - a scandal which has been carefully documented by Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit blog.  Another post on the same subject developed a very interesting comments thread with contributions from McIntyre and Maxine Clarke, the executive editor of Nature - one of the journals who have failed to enforce their own policies on data availability.

Over this weekend there have been a couple of developments which suggest that change is afoot. The first was a comment left by the eminent climate scientists, Hans von Storch and Eduardo Zorita, on Nature's Climate Feedback blog

Another important aspect [of McIntyre's contributions to the climate debate was] his insistence on free availability of data, for independent tests of (not only) important findings published in the literature. It is indeed a scandal that such important data sets, and their processing prior to analysis, is not open to independent scrutiny. The reluctance of institutions and journals to support such requests is disappointing.

[My emphasis] 

For two such prominent scientists leave comments of this kind on this particular blog can only be seen as a pretty stern criticism of Nature's stance on the issue, and we should certainly applaud their integrity in doing so, particularly as they seem to disagree with many of McIntyre's scientific arguments.

The second development looks to me as if it could be dynamite though. In a story entitled "Lies, all lies, but who do you tell?" the Sunday Times Science Correspondent Anjana Ahuja does a pretty good job of covering the issue of replication of scientific papers, and gives us the reactions of the management at Nature.

[Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature] is considering whether some studies, especially ones that make headlines, should be replicated before going to press.

Science operates on an assumption of honesty – raw data are rarely scrutinised by either institutions or journals, and academics are encouraged to work independently. Rogue researchers feed off this culture of trust: busy superiors and colleagues often sign off research papers and grant applications without reading them. Fame ensues and grants and citations roll in.

And so it becomes hard to “out” a suspect. Do you snitch to your head of department, for example? To your vice-chancellor? Might he or she wish to conceal an issue that could make the institution look culpable? If the person moves and you divulge your suspicions to his new employer, can you be sued?

If Nature actually go through with this and enforce the policy of replication before publication, it will be a big step forward for the integrity of science in general and of climate science in particular, although I'm sure it won't be the end of the story. For a start one might well ask the question of "who will do the replication?" Someone in the same closed clique is not going to give us the same assurance as someone who is of a diametrically different opinion. And it should also be pointed out that the new policy does not absolve scientists of the duty to make their data and code available. Different researchers may bring different criticisms to bear, and while it is obviously impractical to demand that everyone should have a shot at a paper pre-publication, it remains vital that they are able to do so after the event.

But all this notwithstanding it looks as though there may have been a welcome shift in the position of Nature on the issue. I'm sure everyone who cares about science, whether believers in global warming or not, will recognise that this can only help the search for the truth. Let's hope that this embarrasses the other culprits into making similar changes.

And while we're about it, we might also note that pretty much the whole story has been played out on blogs. Well done the blogosphere. 

What's going on here then?

One of the most important scientific documents in the global warming debate is Jones et al 1990 on the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. This was long claimed by sceptics to be a major factor in the apparent rise in global temperatures - essentially they were saying that as urbanisation took place, many formerly rural weather stations ended up surrounded by buildings. These gave off heat and raised the local temperature. In other words it looked like global warming, but wasn't.

Jones' letter to Nature in 1990 was widely claimed to have killed this argument off by presenting three temperature time series from rural weather stations.  By comparing these to another wider set of data, it was possible to show that the wider series had no significant UHI effect.

The story has suddenly come to the fore again because the UHI effect has attracted the interest of Steve McIntyre, a  prominent sceptic and something of a thorn in the side of the mainstream. He has been asking the author, Phil Jones for his raw data - specifically he wants to identify which weather stations were used his work - presumably he means to test if they were genuinely rural or not.

And thus far, Jones has refused to release the information, despite a formal request under the Environmental Information Regulations.

Now to anyone who knows anything about science, this is pretty exciting stuff. It's pretty much a given that you release your data on request so that others can test it. Nature, which published the orginal letter, makes prompt availability of data a condition of publication. So the refusal is likely to be viewed in a pretty dim light by the scientific community, or at least I hope it is.

There are other lines of enquiry for McIntyre to pursue in order to get the data, but in the meantime let's just notice the startling fact of a "real" scientist refusing to release his data to someone who is alleged to be a fake and the equivalent of a creationist.