JG-C is worried

John Graham-Cumming is worried he may have found an error in the CRU temperature series algorithm.

Read it here.

Hans von Storch interview

English translation here:

It appears from the so-called CRU-Mails that the cartel has sinned against a basic scientific principle namely the principle of transparency. Science should be practiced openly. All published results should in principle be verifiable, should be open to criticism, also to criticism from people who are not well-meaning. That is something a scientist must accept, that people who are not well-meaning scrutinize him.

The e-mails from CRU indicate that there have been attempts to keep people from publishing
by contacting authors or publishers, that one lead author of the IPPC has at the least  expressed the thought of keeping certain persons out of the whole process and lastly, and possibly the worst, that the data on which their research is based has not been put into the open for verification. This is not acceptable.

The heights of bizarre

Warmist blogger Deep Climate has been doing some detective work and has found an extraordinary similarity between a paragraph of the Wegman Report (which demonstrated that the Hockey Stick algorithm was wrong) and a paragraph of a book written by a sceptic physicist, Donald Rapp.

Here's the Wegman section:

The average width of a tree ring is a function of many variables including the tree species, tree age, stored carbohydrates in the tree, nutrients in the soil, and climatic factors including sunlight, precipitation, temperature, wind speed, humidity, and even carbon dioxide availability in the atmosphere. Obviously there are many confounding factors so the problem is to extract the temperature signal and to distinguish the temperature signal from the noise caused by the many confounding factors.

And here's the Rapp equivalent

The average width of a tree ring is a function of many variables including the tree species, tree age, stored carbohydrates in the tree, nutrients in the soil, and climatic factors including sunlight, precipitation, temperature, wind speed, humidity, and even carbon dioxide availability in the atmosphere. Obviously there are many confounding factors so the problem challenge is to extract the temperature signal and to thus distinguish the temperature signal from the noise caused by the many confounding factors.

Too similar to be accidental, I'm sure you would agree.

The Wegman Report was published in 2006, while Rapp's book appeared two years later. Now you or I would therefore assume that Dr Rapp had pinched the relevant paragraph from Professor Wegman, but in the bizarre world of climate science such simple explanations do not hold. Deep Climate concludes instead that Dr Rapp was a ghostwriter for the Wegman report.

And slowly the awful truth dawned on me. The Wegman report section was an early version of the text book chapter, not the other way around. I had just discovered a hitherto well hidden fourth author.

I'm speechless. I simply do not have the words to express how ridiculous this is. I'm not the only one either. One of Deep Climate's commenters wonders if our hero hasn't maybe got things back to front:

DC, are you sure you don’t have the plagiarism backwards? Rapp author was ripping off Wegman, rather than Wegman ripping off/collaborating with Rapp?

To which our supersleuth replies thusly:

[DC: That doesn't work. First off, Wegman has no knowledge of climate proxies at all. But suppose he or one of his co-authors wrote it. Then you have to suppose Rapp took that and extended it to three other proxies but kept the same style. And kept on going. I just can't see it. Something else is going on here ...]

If you refer back to the paragraphs quoted above, this is Paleoclimate 101 stuff - anyone who had read a few review papers on paleoclimate or the IPCC reports could have put this together. The idea that Wegman needed to get expert help to write this is simply risible. Half the commenters on ClimateAudit or RealClimate could have put that handful of sentences together.

It all smacks of a desperate attempt to try to smear Wegman, but one that is so transparent in its efforts to twist the facts to fit a preconceived conclusion that I think it will simply backfire on its author. It's just too funny.

Update on Dec 20, 2009 by Bishop Hill

Deep Climate has changed the title of his article and posted an apology to Rapp and Wegman.

More evidence of gatekeeping

The news that a Russian think tank has accused the CRU of cooking the books has been doing the rounds of the internet. The other intriguing angle to this story though was further evidence of climate sceptic papers being illegitimately rejected by reviewers. Here Phil Jones reports to Mann what he has done.

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.

Now, someone has identified themselves as being the authors of one of the papers concerned. Commenting at Climate Audit, Lars Kamel says this:

One of those rejected papers about Siberian temperatures may have been by me. The time is about right. I got it rejected because of nonsense from a reviewer and the editor saw it as an attack on him when I critized the quality of the review. After that, I gave up the idea of ever getting something AGW critical published in a journal.

It will be interesting to see if Kamel's paper on CRU's handling of Siberian temperatures was valid, or if Jones rejected it simply because it disagreed with him. I wonder if we can get hold of Jones' review? The second part of Kamel's point is important though. This suggests that at least some sceptics simply gave up trying to get their views published because they knew they could not get their findings past the gatekeepers. This demonstrates that the IPCC reports can never be anything other than biased. The scientific literature does not represent the collected knowledge mankind has about the climate. It represents the collected views of part of the climatological community.

Another scientist has been speaking out on the same issue. Dutch professor, Arthur Rorsch, is making further allegations of misdeeds by climatologists. In an article entitled "Sick science" he explains how difficult it was for sceptics to get published.

"It is exactly as we feared.   If I were to submit an article from a friendly colleague who wanted to publish in a scientific journal, we would always get a rejection; without proper  argumentation. I was not the only Dutch researcher that happened to. Climate skeptics everywhere ran into brick walls.  

He describes the emails as demonstrating an intent to deceive and has this to say of the state of climatology:

This is no longer genuine science.  These are politically motivated people...it is a religion, or rather, a belief.

Update on Dec 17, 2009 by Bishop Hill

The other paper appears to be Aufhammer et al. This second paper, interestingly has some of the Climate Audit regulars cooing with appreciation of what a good study it is.

Update: Aufhammer has now commented and says it's a simple case of a good paper being rejected - bad stuff happens, in other words.  He does say that one of the original reviewers had very strong opinions against it, so I'm not convinced this takes away from the original point that much - climatologists were still trying to reject papers for invalid reasons.

Payday for Pachauri (redux)

Richard North has done it again, identifying a whole new source of income for everyone's favourite railway engineer, IPCC boss, Rajendra Pachauri. This man could teach even British MPs a thing or two about troughing.

Quote of the day

From the University of East Anglia media relations page:

Since it was founded in 1963, UEA has broken the mould in a number of areas, from creative writing to environmental sciences.

Presumably cross-disciplinary fertilisation is a particular strong point too?

Science-free journal

Fred Pearce has a shocking report in New Scientist. Two of the claims he makes are simply not true.

This is turning into a bad week for NS, what with the world and his wife now referring to the once august publication as "non-scientist".

Pearce is attempting to explain away the failure of the CRU to release its raw data - "move along, nothing to see here". The reason the data has been withheld, he says, is quite simple:

It is tied up in confidentiality agreements with the governments that provided it. The Met Office and the UK government say they are now seeking permission to publish it.

This is not true. When CRU was questioned about these alleged agreements there were found only to be a couple which prevented commercial reuse and that was it.  The CRU page where this was shown has now been taken down, but that's what it was. The Climate Audit thread at the time is here. Even then, we know that the data was being merrily passed on to other favoured researchers, i.e. Peter Webster at Georgia Tech.

Pearce looks as though he is acting as a willing accomplice to a programme of disinformation.

Meanwhile Pearce also has this to say about Doug Keenan's work on the Wang papers on urban heat islands in China:

Keenan won his FOI request and said it showed the data was flawed, because some of the stations had been moved by the Chinese scientists who ran them. He said Jones's reluctance to share the data was evidence of fraud.

Keenan said nothing of the sort. This is what he actually said:

The two papers relied on data from 84 weather stations in China that were required to have very few significant moves. Of the stations, 42 were classified as rural and 42 as urban. For 40 of the rural stations, no histories exist (hence moves cannot be determined); the other 2 stations had substantial moves. For 9 of the urban stations, no histories exist; most of the other 33 had substantial moves.

In other words Keenan was saying that the researchers had made false representations of their data.

Any excuse

Snaffled from the comments at WUWT (where I seem to get a lot of my material these days!) this from someone who has been trying to get more information on the "trick". Commenter "Informant" asked for any emails related to the WMO document in question and received a refusal on the following grounds:

i) information not held.

the only location that this information was held on was on a backup server as the original information had been ‘deleted’ some years ago. Only a technical measure resulted in the information being held on the server and, following Department of Justice guidance on this point, we feel that this information was not ‘held’ by this institution at the time of the request.

This is possibly the most bizarre attempt to avoid FoI requests I've ever come across. The idea that Department of Justice guidance allows FoI requests to be refused on the grounds that the data was on a server due to a "technical measure" is monstrous. There is simply nothing in the FoI legislation that allows information to be refused on these grounds.

Perhaps anticipating this reaction, UEA has another excuse up its sleeve.

ii) material subject to police investigation

pursuant to an investigation carried out by the Norfolk Constabulary, the server upon which the requested information resided was taken from the University grounds and now resides with the police forces conducting an investigation into a possible criminal offence. We no longer have access to either the server or any of the material on it.

This is interesting because of the light it shines on possible sources of the leak - a backup server would presumably not have been accessible to just anyone. It can only be a reason for a delay rather than an outright refusal. I'm also rather bemused that UEA doesn't have a backup of the data on the server.

Either way, this does rather give the impression that UEA will give any excuse to withhold information. They just don't appear to be an organisation that is keen on openness.

Two degrees/century still falsified

Those who are new to the nitty gritty of the climate debate may not be aware of the sterling work Lucia Liljegren does in monitoring monthly temperature anomalies against the IPCC's last published predictions of warming at 2°C/century.

Lucia is very careful to make her work bulletproof, in terms of avoiding accusations of cherrypicked start points and careful treatment of "weather noise". I think the warmists have stopped trying to poke holes in her results now.

The GISS figures are out for November and Lucia reports that they are highish, at 0.68°C, but not high enough to stop the IPCC's hypothesis from being remaining in falsified territory. I wonder why I don't read this in the newspapers?

The Pachauri Nexus

I did say so didn't I? Once Richard North has a hold on your ankles he will not let go. Rajendra Pachauri is just starting to realise this.

US readers, for instance, might be intrigued to learn that their tax dollars take a four-way hit. There US government agencies pay into Pachauri's pot, the US Agency for International Development, the US Department of Energy and US Environment Protection Agency and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, a US Department of Energy National Laboratory, also pays a contribution.

Lots more where that came from, and lots more to come too, I fancy.

Constructing a temperature record

Some background reading on creating temperature records. These are probably aimed at the geekier reader:

• Matt Briggs looks at the specific question of dealing with station moves in a four-part posting that starts here. He notes the failure of climatologists to account for their errors properly.
• Error budgets are also bothering AJStrata, who views the so-called homogenisation adjustments as science fiction.

Vested interests

It has been claimed that Steve McIntyre's employer having given a lecture at a thinktank that had once received funding from an oil company amounts to a vested interest.

That's not a vested interest.

This is what a vested interest looks like.

I think this could be the next big Climategate story. Richard North looks like he has the bit between his teeth, and we all know what happened the last time he did that...(Warning - that last link is non-climatic, for those who only want climate stuff).

Scientists say "trust us"

The Met Office's hastily assembled list of scientists speaking out in favour of the alleged consensus has been something of a damp squib. I mean, lots of people with a vested interest in the continuation of the global warming crisis think that the global warming crisis is real and important?

Big deal.

Here's an interesting thing though - people who didn't sign it:

• Phil Jones
• Keith Briffa
• Bob Watson
• Andrew Watson
• Mike Hulme
• Tim Osborn

Some people might say that it's remarkable that some of the most prominent climatologists in the country failed to sign a statement of confidence in climatology.

Or perhaps they know something that the rest of us merely suspect.

Then again, maybe they were busy on other things.

Yours truly in the Telegraph

I have a letter in the Telegraph today. Nothing new for regular readers here, but welcome nevertheless.

(H/T Jonathan in the comments)

Blast and counterblast

Giorgio Gilestro takes issue with Willis Eschenbach's attack on the credibility of the adjustments at Darwin. One should, he says, look at the big picture, and proceeds to an analysis of the adjustments showing that they are normally distributed and average to zero (i.e. there are as many upward adjustments as downwards ones).

Hooray! says RealClimate author Eric Steig in the comments:

This is a very nice analysis, and is really the last word on this entire fabricated scandal.

The last word? Not so, says Climate Audit regular, retired statistician Roman M, who produces this rather amazing graph of how the adjustments pan out over time.