IPCC and the Law Dome Graphic--« A Small FOI/EIR Success( More on Climate Gate & Hockey Stick)

Re-reading Climategate and AR4 Review Comments, I noticed an interesting discussion about handling the Law Dome O18 record – a series used in Mann and Jones (2003) and Jones and Mann (2004) with a very elevated MWP.

The Law Dome O18 series was illustrated in Jones and Mann 2004 as follows (although the digital data for most series in this article was commendably archived, the digital version of the Law Dome O18 series wasn’t. After a couple of years of effort, I obtained it from Tas van Ommen.) Law Dome O18 was one of three series used in the Mann and Jones (2003) Sh “reconstruction” ( Cook’s Tasmanian tree ring chronology and Thompson’s Quelccaya, Peru ice core were the others.) The Mann and Jones (2003) SH reconstruction was discussed in the AR4 Second Draft as follows (language unchanged in the final version).

AR4 Second Draft Figure 6.11 purported to show the “locations of temperature-sensitive proxy records with data back to 1000, 1500 and 1750″, but, for some reason, didn’t include Law Dome, Quelccaya and other sites. The caption was as follows;

Neither was the Law Dome O18 data shown in Figure 6.12, illustrating SH proxy histories.

IPCC AR4 Second Draft Figure 6.12

SOD Review Comments
One (and only one) IPCC noticed that SH proxies in R1 and R2 (Jones et al 1998, Mann et al 1999) were missing from Figure 6.11:

IPCC accepted this criticism (and did add missing proxies), mentioning in passing that they had removed the term “temperature sensitive” from the caption – I hadn’t made this request. In retrospect, this was sort of an odd thing to do, given that these are supposed to temperature proxies. More on this later.

I also wondered what had happened to the Law Dome proxy and why it wasn’t shown in Figure 6.12:

This prompted a surprisingly elaborate answer – one that is considerably clarified by the Climategate emails.

Although I hadn’t previously noticed this point, Dahl-Jensen (1999) – Dahl-Jensen, D., V.I. Morgan, and A. Elcheikh, 1999: Monte Carlo inverse modelling of the Law Dome (Antarctica) temperature profile. Ann. Glaciol., 29, 145–150. – was not mentioned in the Second Order Draft.

Climategate Letters
The Climategate Letters in July 2006 proved to have a surprisingly lengthy discussion about how to refuse my request that the Law Dome proxy series be shown.

On July 14 (700. 1152912026.txt) Overpeck wrote Briffa, Osborn, Villalba, Jansen and Masson-Delmotte revisiting Figure 6.12:

Later on July 17, 2006 16:25 (704. 1153167959.txt) Osborn replied to Overpeck, also commenting on his June 30 questions (cc Briffa, Jansen, Villalba, Joos):

Late in the evening of July 17 (Arizona time), Overpeck reverted to Osborn that they thought that they would go with borehole data (which didn’t have an elevated MWP – though it had elevated values in earlier periods):

The next day, (709. 1153233036.txt), Overpeck wrote that Masson-Delmotte had sent them references a couple of weeks earlier and that the Law Dome borehole data was available and should be the data used in a revised Figure 6.12 (various references from Masson-Delmotte were shown in the email):

Soon afterwards on July 18 (709. 1153233036.txt), Osborn wrote to explain that, if they showed the borehole data with its supposedly cool MWP, they would be criticized for not showing the isotope data with its warm MWP. Osborn suggested a Sir Humphrey solution of showing neither – instead talking around the problem verbally in the text;

Overpeck liked Osborn’s tactic of dealing with the inconsistency verbally (rather than letting readers actually see the inconsistency). Overpeck congratulated his team for their “nice resolution”, but didn’t overlook the opportunity to make a snide comment about the “experts” who had the temerity to wonder why the Law Dome data hadn’t been illustrated:

Following the CRU strategy, Figure 6.12 was left unchanged with the following sentence added to the text:

Just in case you wondered what Osborn and Overpeck didn’t want you to see, here it is:

Note that the inversion of borehole temperatures raises interesting questions equivalent to principal component retention – see prior posts on this. I’ve asked the Danish institution for the pre-inversion borehole measurements. See http://www.climateaudit.org/?tag=borehole especially Truncated SVD and Borehole Reconstructions

From related link at ClimateAudit and the posted article...we have a James Hansen article:

The Temperature of Science: Discussion of global temperature change and more (by James Hansen)

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December 16, 2009 – Dr. James E. Hansen

Current Updates

Each month we receive, electronically, data from three sources: weather data for several thousand meteorological stations, satellite observations of sea surface temperature, and Antarctic research station measurements. These three data sets are the input for a program that produces a global map of temperature anomalies relative to the mean for that month during the period of climatology, 1951-1980.

The analysis method has been described fully in a series of refereed papers (Hansen et al., 1981, 1987, 1999, 2001, 2006). Successive papers updated the data and in some cases made minor improvements to the analysis, for example, in adjustments to minimize urban effects. The analysis method works in terms of temperature anomalies, rather than absolute temperature, because anomalies present a smoother geographical field than temperature itself. For example, when New York City has an unusually cold winter, it is likely that Philadelphia is also colder than normal. The distance over which temperature anomalies are highly correlated is of the order of 1000 kilometers at middle and high latitudes, as we illustrated in our 1987 paper.

Although the three input data streams that we use are publicly available from the organizations that produce them, we began preserving the complete input data sets each month in April 2008. These data sets, which cover the full period of our analysis, 1880-present, are available to parties interested in performing their own analysis or checking our analysis.

The computer program that performs our analysis is published on the GISS web site.

Fig. 1. (a) GISS analysis of global surface temperature change. Open square for 2009 is 11-month temperature anomaly. Green vertical bar is 95 percent confidence range (two standard deviations) for annual temperature.
(b) Hemispheric temperature change in GISS analysis.

Responsibilities for our updates are as follows. Ken Lo runs programs to add in the new data and reruns the analysis with the expanded data. Reto Ruedy maintains the computer program that does the analysis and handles most technical inquiries about the analysis. Makiko Sato updates graphs and posts them on the web. I examine the temperature data monthly and write occasional discussions about global temperature change.

Scientific Inferences and Issues

Temperature data – example of early inferences. Figure 1 shows the current GISS analysis of global annual-mean and 5-year running-mean temperature change (left) and the hemispheric temperature changes (right). These graphs are based on the data now available, including ship and satellite data for ocean regions.

Figure 1 illustrates, with a longer record, a principal conclusion of our first analysis of temperature change (Hansen et al., 1981). That analysis, based on data records through December 1978, concluded that data coverage was sufficient to estimate global temperature change. We also concluded that temperature change was qualitatively different in the two hemispheres. The Southern Hemisphere had more steady warming through the century while the Northern Hemisphere had distinct cooling between 1940 and 1975.

It required more than a year to publish the 1981 paper, which was submitted several times to Science and Nature. At issue were both the global significance of the data and the length of the paper. Later, in our 1987 paper, we proved quantitatively that the station coverage was sufficient for our conclusions – the proof being obtained by sampling (at the station locations) a 100-year data set of a global climate model that had realistic spatial-temporal variability.

The different hemispheric records in the mid-twentieth century have never been convincingly explained. The most likely explanation is atmospheric aerosols, fine particles in the air, produced by fossil fuel burning. Aerosol atmospheric lifetime is only several days, so fossil fuel aerosols were confined mainly to the Northern Hemisphere, where most fossil fuels were burned. Aerosols have a cooling effect that still today is estimated to counteract about half of the warming effect of human-made greenhouse gases. For the few decades after World War II, until the oil embargo in the 1970s, fossil fuel use expanded exponentially at more than 4%/year, likely causing the growth of aerosol climate forcing to exceed that of greenhouse gases

Fig. 2. Global (a) and U.S. (b) analyzed temperature change before and after correction of computer program flaw. Results are indistinguishable except for the U.S. beginning in year 2000.

in the Northern Hemisphere. However, there are no aerosol measurements to confirm that interpretation. If there were adequate understanding of the relation between fossil fuel burning and aerosol properties it would be possible to infer the aerosol properties in the past century. But such understanding requires global measurements of aerosols with sufficient detail to define their properties and their effect on clouds, a task that remains elusive, as described in chapter 4 of Hansen (2009).

Flaws in temperature analysis. Figure 2 illustrates an error that developed in the GISS analysis when we introduced, in our 2001 paper, an improvement in the United States temperature record. The change consisted of using the newest USHCN (United States Historical Climatology Network) analysis for those U.S. stations that are part of the USHCN network. This improvement, developed by NOAA researchers, adjusted station records that included station moves or other discontinuities. Unfortunately, I made an error by failing to recognize that the station records we obtained electronically from NOAA each month, for these same stations, did not contain the adjustments. Thus there was a discontinuity in 2000 in the records of those stations, as the prior years contained the adjustment while later years did not.

The error was readily corrected, once it was recognized. Figure 2 shows the global and U.S. temperatures with and without the error. The error averaged 0.15°C over the contiguous 48 states, but these states cover only 1½ percent of the globe, making the global error negligible.

However, the story was embellished and distributed to news outlets throughout the country. Resulting headline: NASA had cooked the temperature books – and once the error was corrected 1998 was no longer the warmest year in the record, instead being supplanted by 1934.

This was nonsense, of course. The small error in global temperature had no effect on the ranking of different years. The warmest year in our global temperature analysis was still 2005. Conceivably confusion between global and U.S. temperatures in these stories was inadvertent. But the estimate for the warmest year in the U.S. had not changed either. 1934 and 1998 were tied as the warmest year (Figure 2b) with any difference (~0.01°C) at least an order of magnitude smaller than the uncertainty in comparing temperatures in the 1930s with those in the 1990s.

The obvious misinformation in these stories, and the absence of any effort to correct the stories after we pointed out the misinformation, suggests that the aim may have been to create distrust or confusion in the minds of the public, rather than to transmit accurate information. That, of course, is a matter of opinion. I expressed my opinion in two e-mails that are on my Columbia University web site:

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2007/20070810_LightUpstairs.pdf
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2007/20070816_realdeal.pdf

We thought we had learned the necessary lessons from this experience. We put our analysis program on the web. Everybody was free to check the program, if they were concerned that any data “cooking” may be occurring.

Unfortunately, another data problem occurred in 2008. In one of the three incoming data streams, the one for meteorological stations, the November 2008 data for many Russian stations was a repeat of October 2008 data. It was not our data record, but we properly had to accept the blame for the error, because the data was included in our analysis. Occasional flaws in input data are normal in any analysis, and the flaws are eventually noticed and corrected if they are substantial. Indeed, we have an effective working relationship with NOAA – when we spot data that appears questionable we inform the appropriate people at the National Climate Data Center – a relationship that has been scientifically productive.

This specific data flaw was a case in point. The quality control program that NOAA runs on the data from global meteorological stations includes a check for repetition of data: if two consecutive months have identical data the data is compared with that at the nearest stations. If it appears that the repetition is likely to be an error, the data is eliminated until the original data source has verified the data. The problem in 2008 escaped this quality check because a change in their program had temporarily, inadvertently, omitted that quality check.

The lesson learned here was that even a transient data error, however quickly corrected provides fodder for people who are interested in a public relations campaign, rather than science. That means we cannot put the new data each month on our web site and check it at our leisure, because, however briefly a flaw is displayed, it will be used to disinform the public. Indeed, in this specific case there was another round of “fraud” accusations on talk shows and other media all around the nation.

Another lesson learned. Subsequently, to minimize the chance of a bad data point slipping through in one of the data streams and temporarily affecting a publicly available data product, we now put the analyzed data up first on a site that is not visible to the public. This allows Reto, Makiko, Ken and me to examine maps and graphs of the data before the analysis is put on our web site – if anything seems questionable, we report it back to the data providers for them to resolve. Such checking is always done before publishing a paper, but now it seems to be necessary even for routine transitory data updates. This process can delay availability of our data analysis to users for up to several days, but that is a price that must be paid to minimize disinformation.

Is it possible to totally eliminate data flaws and disinformation? Of course not. The fact that the absence of incriminating statements in pirated e-mails is taken as evidence of wrongdoing provides a measure of what would be required to quell all criticism. I believe that the steps that we now take to assure data integrity are as much as is reasonable from the standpoint of the use of our time and resources.

Fig. 3. (a) Monthly global land-ocean temperature anomaly, global sea surface temperature, and El Nino index. (b) 5-year and 11-year running means of the global temperature index.

Temperature data – examples of continuing interest. Figure 3(a) is a graph that we use to help provide insight into recent climate fluctuations. It shows monthly global temperature anomalies and monthly sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies. The red-blue Nino3.4 index at the bottom is a measure of the Southern Oscillation, with red and blue showing the warm (El Nino) and cool (La Nina) phases of sea surface temperature oscillations for a small region in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean.

Strong correlation of global SST with the Nino index is obvious. Global land-ocean temperature is noisier than the SST, but correlation with the Nino index is also apparent for global temperature. On average, global temperature lags the Nino index by about 3 months.

During 2008 and 2009 I received many messages, sometimes several per day informing me that the Earth is headed into its next ice age. Some messages include graphs extrapolating cooling trends into the future. Some messages use foul language and demand my resignation. Of the messages that include any science, almost invariably the claim is made that the sun controls Earth’s climate, the sun is entering a long period of diminishing energy output, and the sun is the cause of the cooling trend.

Indeed, it is likely that the sun is an important factor in climate variability. Figure 4 shows data on solar irradiance for the period of satellite measurements. We are presently in the deepest most prolonged solar minimum in the period of satellite data. It is uncertain whether the solar irradiance will rebound soon into a more-or-less normal solar cycle – or whether it might remain at a low level for decades, analogous to the Maunder Minimum, a period of few sunspots that may have been a principal cause of the Little Ice Age.

The direct climate forcing due to measured solar variability, about 0.2 W/m2, is comparable to the increase in carbon dioxide forcing that occurs in about seven years, using recent CO2 growth rates. Although there is a possibility that the solar forcing could be amplified by indirect effects, such as changes of atmospheric ozone, present understanding suggests only a small amplification, as discussed elsewhere (Hansen 2009). The global temperature record (Figure 1) has positive correlation with solar irradiance, with the amplitude of temperature variation being approximately consistent with the direct solar forcing. This topic will become clearer as the records become longer, but for that purpose it is important that the temperature record be as precise as possible.

Fig. 4. Solar irradiance through October 2009, based on concatenation of multiple satellite records by Claus Frohlich and Judith Lean (see Frohlich, 2006). Averaged over day and night Earth absorbs about 240 W/m2 of energy from the sun, so the irradiance variation of about 0.1 percent causes a direct climate forcing of just over 0.2 W/m2.

Frequently heard fallacies are that “global warming stopped in 1998” or “the world has been getting cooler over the past decade”. These statements appear to be wishful thinking – it would be nice if true, but that is not what the data show. True, the 1998 global temperature jumped far above the previous warmest year in the instrumental record, largely because 1998 was affected by the strongest El Nino of the century. Thus for the following several years the global temperature was lower than in 1998, as expected.

However, the 5-year and 11-year running mean global temperatures (Figure 3b) have continued to increase at nearly the same rate as in the past three decades. There is a slight downward tick at the end of the record, but even that may disappear if 2010 is a warm year. Indeed, given the continued growth of greenhouse gases and the underlying global warming trend (Figure 3b) there is a high likelihood, I would say greater than 50 percent, that 2010 will be the warmest year in the period of instrumental data. This prediction depends in part upon the continuation of the present moderate El Nino for at least several months, but that is likely.

Furthermore, the assertion that 1998 was the warmest year is based on the East Anglia – British Met Office temperature analysis. As shown in Figure 1, the GISS analysis has 2005 as the warmest year. As discussed by Hansen et al. (2006) the main difference between these analyses is probably due to the fact that British analysis excludes large areas in the Arctic and Antarctic where observations are sparse. The GISS analysis, which extrapolates temperature anomalies as far as 1200 km, has more complete coverage of the polar areas. The extrapolation introduces uncertainty, but there is independent information, including satellite infrared measurements and reduced Arctic sea ice cover, which supports the existence of substantial positive temperature anomalies in those regions.

In any case, issues such as these differences between our analyses provide a reason for having more than one global analysis. When the complete data sets are compared for the different analyses it should be possible to isolate the exact locations of differences and likely gain further insights.

Summary

The nature of messages that I receive from the public, and the fact that NASA Headquarters received more than 2500 inquiries in the past week about our possible “manipulation” of global temperature data, suggest that the concerns are more political than scientific. Perhaps the messages are intended as intimidation, expected to have a chilling effect on researchers in climate change.

The recent “success” of climate contrarians in using the pirated East Anglia e-mails to cast doubt on the reality of global warming* seems to have energized other deniers. I am now inundated with broad FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests for my correspondence, with substantial impact on my time and on others in my office. I believe these to be fishing expeditions, aimed at finding some statement(s), likely to be taken out of context, which they would attempt to use to discredit climate science.

There are lessons from our experience about care that must be taken with data before it is made publicly available. But there is too much interesting science to be done to allow intimidation tactics to reduce our scientific drive and output. We can take a lesson from my 5-year-old grandson who boldly says “I don’t quit, because I have never-give-up fighting spirit!” http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2009/20091130_FightingSpirit.pdf

There are other researchers who work more extensively on global temperature analyses than we do – our main work concerns global satellite observations and global modeling – but there are differences in perspectives, which, I suggest, make it useful to have more than one analysis. Besides, it is useful to combine experience working with observed temperature together with our work on satellite data and climate models. This combination of interests is likely to help provide some insights into what is happening with global climate and information on the data that are needed to understand what is happening. So we will be keeping at it.
_________________________________
*By “success” I refer to their successful character assassination and swift-boating. My interpretation of the e-mails is that some scientists probably became exasperated and frustrated by contrarians – which may have contributed to some questionable judgment. The way science works, we must make readily available the input data that we use, so that others can verify our analyses. Also, in my opinion, it is a mistake to be too concerned about contrarian publications – some bad papers will slip through the peer-review process, but overall assessments by the National Academies, the IPCC, and scientific organizations sort the wheat from the chaff.

The important point is that nothing was found in the East Anglia e-mails altering the reality and magnitude of global warming in the instrumental record. The input data for global temperature analyses are widely available, on our web site and elsewhere. If those input data could be made to yield a significantly different global temperature change, contrarians would certainly have done that – but they have not.

References

Frölich, C. 2006: Solar irradiance variability since 1978. Space Science Rev., 248, 672-673.
Hansen, J., D. Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind, and G. Russell, 1981: Climate impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Science, 213, 957-966.
Hansen, J.E., and S. Lebedeff, 1987: Global trends of measured surface air temperature. J. Geophys. Res., 92, 13345-13372.
Hansen, J., R. Ruedy, J. Glascoe, and Mki. Sato, 1999: GISS analysis of surface temperature change. J. Geophys. Res., 104, 30997-31022.
Hansen, J.E., R. Ruedy, Mki. Sato, M. Imhoff, W. Lawrence, D. Easterling, T. Peterson, and T. Karl, 2001: A closer look at United States and global surface temperature change. J. Geophys. Res., 106, 23947-23963.
Hansen, J., Mki. Sato, R. Ruedy, K. Lo, D.W. Lea, and M. Medina-Elizade, 2006: Global temperature change. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 103, 14288-14293.
Hansen, J. 2009: “Storms of My Grandchildren.” Bloomsbury USA, New York. (304 pp.)

Hot Damn....from the NOVA SCIENCE – Science & Technology News website :

Why there’s no sign of a climate conspiracy in hacked emails

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December 4, 2009 – New Scientist

The leaking of emails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, UK, has led to a media and political storm. The affair is being portrayed as a scandal that undermines the science behind climate change. It is no such thing, and here’s why.

We can be 100 per cent sure the world is getting warmer

Forget about the temperature records compiled by researchers such as those whose emails were hacked. Next spring, go out into your garden or the nearby countryside and note when the leaves unfold, when flowers bloom, when migrating birds arrive and so on. Compare your findings with historical records, where available, and you’ll probably find spring is coming days, even weeks earlier than a few decades ago.

You can’t fake spring coming earlier, or trees growing higher up on mountains, or glaciers retreating for kilometres up valleys, or shrinking ice cover in the Arctic, or birds changing their migration times, or permafrost melting in Alaska, or the tropics expanding, or ice shelves on the Antarctic peninsula breaking up, or peak river flow occurring earlier in summer because of earlier snowmelt, or sea level rising faster and faster, or any of the thousands of similar examples.

None of these observations by themselves prove the world is warming; they could simply be regional effects, for instance. But put all the data from around the world together, and you have overwhelming evidence of a long-term warming trend.

We know greenhouse gases are the main cause of warming

There are many ways, theoretically, to warm a planet. Orbital changes might bring it closer to its star. The star itself might brighten. The planet’s reflectivity – albedo – can change if white ice is replaced by darker vegetation or water. Changes in composition of the atmosphere can trap more heat, and so on.

It could even be that Earth isn’t really warming overall, just that there has been a transfer of heat from the oceans to the atmosphere.

Researchers have to look at all of these factors. And they have. Direct measurements since the 1970s make it certain, for instance, that neither the sun’s fluctuating brightness nor changes in the number of cosmic rays hitting Earth are responsible for the recent warming. Similarly, direct measurements over the past century show that the oceans have warmed dramatically. The planet as a whole is getting warmer.

That leaves the rising levels of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere – which have been directly measured – as the main suspects. Working out how these changes should affect the planet’s temperature in theory is extremely complicated. The only way to do it is to plug all the detailed physics into computers – create computer models, in other words. The results show that the only factor that produces anything like the temperature rise seen is the observed increase in greenhouse gases.

How do we know the models aren’t wrong? From studies of past climate. To take one example, ice cores drilled from the Antarctic ice-sheet show a surprisingly close correlation between greenhouse gas levels and temperature over the past 800,000 years.

During this time, greenhouse gases have never risen as high or as fast as they are now. That means there is still a lot of uncertainty about the extent of future warming – estimates of the effect of doubling CO₂, including all feedback processes, range from 2°C to 6°C. But the big picture is clear.

Is it possible that tens of thousands of scientists have got it wrong? It is incredibly unlikely. The evidence that CO₂ levels are rising is irrefutable, and the idea that rising levels lead to warming has withstood more than a century of genuine scientific scepticism.

So why are scientists “fixing” the temperature data?

Some of the contents of the hacked email material, such as the “Harry_read_me.txt” file, might appear shocking, with its talk of manipulation and “tricks”. But raw data almost always has to be “fixed”.

For example, suppose you and your neighbour keep a record of the temperature where you live, and decide to combine your records to create an “official” record for your locality. When you compare records, however, you’re surprised to find they are very different.

There are many reasons why this might be so. One or other thermometer might be faulty. Perhaps you placed your thermometer in an inherently warmer place, or where it was sometimes in direct sunshine, or took measurements at a different time of day, and so on. To combine the two records in any meaningful way, you’ll need to adjust the raw data to account for any such factors.

Not doing so would be pretty dumb. Where possible, scientists should always look at their data in the context of other, comparable data. Such scrutiny can often reveal problems in the way one or other set of data was acquired, meaning it needs adjusting or discarding. Some apparent problems with the predictions of climate models, for example, have actually turned out to be due to problems with real-world data caused by the failure to correct for factors such as the gradual changes in orbits of satellites.

The tricky question is where to draw the line. There is a continuum from corrections based on known problems (essential), to adjustments based on probable errors in the data (good practice as long as all assumptions are made clear), to adjustments done solely to make the data fit a hypothesis (distinctly dodgy).

It remains to seen if any of the adjustments described in the hacked material fall into this last category. But the mere fact that the leaked material reveals climate researchers “fixing” data is not proof of fraud. Manipulating data is what scientists do.

But what about that “trick” to “hide the decline”?

One of the leaked emails refers the “trick” of adding the real temperatures, as recorded by thermometers, to reconstructions of past temperatures based on looking at things such as growth rings in trees.

The problem is that some sets of tree-ring data suggest temperatures start falling towards the end of the 20th century, which direct temperature measurements show was not the case. So the researchers instead replaced the reconstructed temperature data for this period with the directly measured temperature data.

Is this an unjustified “fix”? No, because some sets of tree-ring data can be compared with the direct records of local temperature for the past century. Up until the 1960s, there is a very close correlation between the density of growth rings in trees in northern latitudes and summer temperatures, but after this it starts to break down.

We don’t know why. It might be that the correlation breaks down whenever it gets too hot, in which case reconstructions of past temperature that rely heavily on tree-ring data will give a misleading picture. Or it might be due to some factor unique to the 20th century, such as changes in the timing of the snow melt, in which case it will not affect reconstructions.

The issue has not yet been resolved but there has been no attempt to conceal this or any of the many other problems with temperature reconstructions. On the contrary, the head of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia, Phil Jones, and others whose emails were hacked, have published papers discussing it in prominent journals such as Nature.

What really matters is not how hot it is now or how hot it was a few hundred years ago, but how hot it is going to get. Campaigners have highlighted temperature reconstructions like the “hockey stick” graph because they are easy for people to understand, but in scientific terms they are not of great significance. We know the world is warming and we know that the main cause is rising CO₂ levels. So with CO₂ levels rising ever faster, we can be sure things are going to get a lot hotter.

But surely any attempt to block publication of sceptical scientific papers is indefensible?

Some of the leaked emails reveal the climate researchers’ unhappiness with the publication of scientific papers questioning the global warming consensus, and seem to indicate a desire to remove editors at journals they perceived as being sympathetic to global warming sceptics.

This sounds horrifying to many non-scientists. But that is confusing two very different things: attempting to block publication in certain scientific journals and the suppression of information.

Scientific journals are only supposed to publish papers that meet certain scientific standards. Researchers work for years on papers and then submit them to the top journals in their field. The editors select the ones they think are most important or noteworthy, and send them to a handful of reviewers – scientists working in the same areas. Each reviewer sends back a report suggesting acceptance, rejection or revisions, and the editor decides whether to publish based on these reports. Most papers sent to leading journals get rejected.

This system of “peer review” has its critics, but is generally regarded as the least-worst system to ensure the quality of published scientific research. Researchers whose work is rejected can resubmit their papers to other, less high-profile journals. Failing that, anyone is free to publish their views on global warming online, or in books and newspapers if they can.

Respected scientists have agreed that the papers mentioned in the emails had serious scientific flaws and possibly should not have been accepted by the journals in question. If this were the case, it would raise questions about the role of the editors at those journals. It is hardly outrageous behaviour to call for the replacement of people who are, in your personal view, not doing their jobs properly.

What about apparent attempts to avoid freedom of information requests?

In some emails, Jones – who has stepped down pending a review of what went on – discusses ways not to fulfil requests made under the UK’s freedom of information laws. In one, he calls on other researchers to delete certain emails. While on the face of it that does not look good, whether they broke any laws or breached any university guidelines remains to be determined.

In other cases, however, it is clear that researchers could not comply with freedom of information requests because they did not have the right to release all the data in question. There is also no doubt that climate change deniers have been using freedom of information requests to harass researchers and waste their time, with the CRU receiving more than 50 such requests in one week alone this year.

What’s more, individual researchers have little to gain from giving away data and software they have spent years working on. Scientific careers depend on how many papers you publish. If you keep data to yourself, no one else can publish papers based on it before you do.

This does not mean researchers should be allowed to hold onto their data. It is undoubtedly in the public interest for there to be full disclosure of the measurements upon which climate scientists are basing their conclusions. In fact, much of it is already freely available. But the pressures climate researchers are under does help to explain why many are so reluctant to make all data public.

Clearly the leaked emails have caused disquiet in some quarters. There’s no doubt there are concerns about the content of some of the emails – even when you know the way science really works – as laid out above. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the University of East Anglia are now holding investigations to determine if anything unethical did go on. If these dispel uncertainty and restore the credibility of science, that can only be a good thing.

Categories: - CLIMATE CHANGE · Hacked CRU emails

Want to include this from JoNova....more on the ClimatechangeDATA:

Speigel Online

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(Did I say a few days ago there would be more feature articles?) Well already, this is another long professional article.

Don’t be put off by the start. The sympathetic treatment of Jones is “faint praise”, not unreasonable, and in the end, taking an impartial line means telling something of both sides of the story. Articles like this will help skeptics far more than they will help the Big Scare Campaign.

There is plenty of ammo, and punches are landed:

On balance, the entire profession has been seriously harmed by the scandal. “We are currently suffering a massive erosion of trust,” concludes German climatologist Hans von Storch. “Climate research has been corrupted by politicization, just as nuclear physics was in the pre-Chernobyl days, when we were led to believe that nuclear power plants were completely safe.”

That any reasonably unbiased view ends up being supportive of skeptics is of course, just what you’d expect from on a topic where one side–skeptics have so much of that essential ingredient–reality– on their side. I found the whole article worth reading, and I expect Parts 3 & 4 are the most interesting for skeptics. It’s good to finally see the work of people like McIntyre and McKitrick making it into the realms of the mainstream media.

Journalists should have been knocking on their door back in 2004.

Though having said that, McIntyre must be bemused to find he apparently has supporters who know how to “hack”. I mean, I presume the hackers or whistleblowers are “supportive” of McIntyre, but it’s a tad rich, when their identity is unknown, to phrase things to imply that McIntyre had any active hand at all in encouraging this. Could it just be that someone in the UK (or Canada, Australia, or the US, say) was a bit “put out” that their entire national economy was being offered on a platter to the bankers?

It’s not surprising that it took three authors to pull this together. They have managed to condense entire PhD’s on topics like Hurricanes down to a paragraph or two. That’s no mean feat. I’m looking forward to seeing more of these indepth articles, and expect that the effect of them will be significant.

A Superstorm for Global Warming Research

By Marco Evers, Olaf Stampf and Gerald Traufetter
Plagued by reports of sloppy work, falsifications and exaggerations, climate research is facing a crisis of confidence. How reliable are the predictions about global warming and its consequences? And would it really be the end of the world if temperatures rose by more than the much-quoted limit of two degrees Celsius?

Part 4: The Smoking Gun of Climatology

Most of all, however, Jones controlled the “smoking gun” of climatology: the Earth’s temperature curve. The temperature records dating back to the beginning of industrialization are intended to prove that the average global temperature has already increased by almost one degree Celsius since 1850.
The problem is that the quality of the raw data derived from weather services around the world differs considerably. At a number of weather stations, temperatures rose because houses and factories had been built around them. Elsewhere, stations were moved and, as a result, suddenly produced different readings. In all of these cases, Jones had to use statistical methods to correct the errors in the temperature readings, using an approach called “homogenization.”
Did Jones proceed correctly while homogenizing the data? Most climatologists still believe Jones’ contention that he did not intentionally manipulate the data. However, that belief will have to remain rooted in good faith. Under the pressure of McIntyre’s attacks, Jones had to admit something incredible: He had deleted his notes on how he performed the homogenization. This means that it is not possible to reconstruct how the raw data turned into his temperature curve.
‘One of the Biggest Sins’
For Peter Webster, a meteorologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, this course of events is “one of the biggest sins” a scientist can commit. “It’s as if a chef was no longer able to cook his dishes because he lost the recipes.”
The Jones team attributes another sudden jump in temperature readings to the decline in air pollution since the 1970s as a result of stricter emissions laws. Particles suspended in the air block solar radiation, so that temperatures rise when the air becomes cleaner. Air pollution in the south has always been much lower than in the north, because, as Webster explains, “there is less land and therefore less industry in the Southern Hemisphere.”
Oddly enough, however, the temperature increase in the south is just as strong as it is in the north. “That isn’t really possible,” says Webster.
…

On the Urban Heat Island Effect

Environmental economist Ross McKitrick, one of McIntyre’s associates, examined all rapidly growing countries, in which this urban heat effect was to be expected, and found a correlation between economic growth and temperature rise. He submitted his study in time for the last IPCC report.
Jones did everything he could to suppress the publication, which was critical of him. It proved advantageous to him that he had been one of the two main authors of the temperature chapter. In one of the hacked emails, he openly admitted that he wanted to keep this interfering publication out of the IPCC report at all costs, “even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Jones failed in the end, but he did manage to smuggle a devastating sentence into the IPCC report, which states that McKitrick’s findings were “statistically insignificant” — in other words, meaningless.

…

The full article (in English) starts here.

About the Hockey Stick....found this at Nova Science:

Discover Interview – Michael Mann -- March 10, 2010

**************************************************************************************************

Ever since his “hockey stick” graph of rising temperatures figured prominently in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Mann has been at the center of the climate wars. His e-mail messages were among those stolen and widely published last November.

See Website for photo
Michael Mann is the director of Pennsylvania
State University’s Earth System Science Center

Let’s talk about the hacked e-mails and the ensuing climategate scandal. What happened?

My understanding—and I only know what I’ve read from other accounts—is that hackers broke into the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia and stole thousands of e-mail messages, which they then proceeded to distribute on the Internet. They even tried to hack into a Web site that I help run, called RealClimate.

Does anybody yet know where the attack came from?

No. There are many of us who would really like to know because obviously this is a serious criminal breach. And yet there’s been very little discussion, unfortunately, about the crime.

Who might have done the hacking?

It appears to have been extremely well orchestrated, a very professional job. There also appears to have been a well-organized PR campaign that was all ready to go at the time these e-mails were released. And that campaign, involving all sorts of organizations that have lobbied against climate change legislation, has led some people to conclude that this is connected to a larger campaign by special interests to attack the science of climate change, to prevent policy action from being taken to deal with the problem.

Are you talking about the so-called denial machine?

These aren’t my own inferences. I’m talking about what I’ve read on other sites. Interestingly enough, in the January 14, 2010, issue of Nature, there is a review of a book called Climate Cover-Up, by James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore, which details what I’ve just described to you. Back in 2006 there was a perfect storm of sorts. The IPCC had just come out with stronger conclusions. Al Gore’s movie inspired people to get interested in climate change. We had some hot summers; we had some very destructive hurricane seasons. To say hurricane Katrina was an indication of climate change is no more correct than saying the current cold outbreak is evidence against climate change—I mean, that’s weather—but it does influence people. A lot of things came together. There was a concerted effort by special interests who are opposed to policies to combat climate change to retrench and fight even harder in their campaign to discredit the science. There has been a lot more misinformation and, indeed, disinformation about climate change in the public discourse since then.

What about the e-mails themselves? Was it embarrassing having them brought to light?

Nobody likes having their personal e-mail exposed. We can all imagine, I think, what that would be like.

There’s an investigation at Penn State, where you work, into your own role in this. How is that going?

Technically it’s not an investigation. It’s an inquiry to determine if there is a reason for an investigation. [Editor’s note: The inquiry subsequently reported that it had found no credible evidence that Mann had suppressed or falsified data.]

Do you think you and your colleagues did anything wrong?

There’s nothing in any of these e-mails that demonstrates any inappropriate behavior on my part. There are a few things that a certain colleague said that I wouldn’t have said and I can’t necessarily condone, although I can say that they were under a huge amount of pressure. They were attacked by FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] demands. A colleague of mine, Phil Jones, had as many as 40 FOIA demands—frivolous demands—made against him over a single weekend. Frankly, he showed some poor judgment, and there are things I said that I would phrase differently, obviously, if I were saying them in public. But there’s nothing in any of these e-mails, despite the claims of those attacking us, that indicate any sort of conspiracy among climate change researchers to commit fraud, that indicate any destruction of data.

What about the references to “cleaning up” data? Does that amount to destruction?

No. In some cases there’s been intentional misrepresentation of what people were talking about in the e-mail exchanges. Nature had an editorial [December 3, 2009] where they basically came out and said that the attackers of climate change had misrepresented two statements. One was about a “trick,” which was simply a reference to a clever mathematical approach to a problem, the way scientists use the term trick: “Here’s the trick to solving that problem,” or “trick of the trade,” and so on. And then conflating that with an unfortunately poorly worded phrase where Phil Jones refers to hiding a decline in temperatures. Much hay has been made of that. But these are internal discussions among scientists who understand the lingo and understand what it means and understand the context. And it’s extremely easy for those looking to make mischief to take single words and phrases out of context.

The hockey stick—Michael Mann’s widely cited graph of average temperatures in North America over the past 1,000 years—was attacked by two prominent critics, Steven McIntyre, a former mineral company executive, and Ross McKitrick, an economics professor at the University of Guelph in Canada. Where does that dispute stand?

One would have hoped it would have an outcome similar to the hurricane story, but the hockey stick thing was exacerbated by Michael Mann’s behavior, trying to keep the data and all the information away from McIntyre, McKitrick, and other people who are skeptical of what they were doing. So we’ve just seen this blow up and blow up and blow up, and it culminated in the East Anglia hack and the e-mails that discredited those guys quite a bit. This made us reflect on the bigger issues of how scientists should be interacting with the media and how we should be dealing with skeptical arguments. I think the way that Mann and Phil Jones [the former director of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia, who resigned over the scandal] and those guys were going about it was wrong, not just in terms of ethics. It also backfired.

What motivated you to speak out?

When this hit, I was probably more ready than many others to respond because I’d been thinking about these issues for a number of years.

Do you find it hard to get people to talk about climate change without being evangelical?

I put myself in the middle, and I’m taking fire from both sides. Neither side is happy with what I’m doing. Obviously, people like Michael Mann are offended by what I’m saying [about the shortcomings of climate science], and I have received an e-mail from one of the people involved in the East Anglia e-mails who’s not happy with what I’m doing. The so-called skeptics think I’m just trying to cover myself. But I’m not personally involved in any of this, other than that I’ve been thinking about these issues for a long time, and there are certain things I felt compelled to say.

Where do you come down on the whole subject of uncertainty in the climate science?

I’m very concerned about the way uncertainty is being treated. The IPCC [the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] took a shortcut on the actual scientific uncertainty analysis on a lot of the issues, particularly the temperature records.

Don’t individual studies do uncertainty analysis?

Not as much as they should. It’s a weakness. When you have two data sets that disagree, often nobody digs in to figure out all the different sources of uncertainty in the different analysis. Once you do that, you can identify mistakes or determine how significant a certain data set is.

Is this a case of politics getting in the way of science?

No. It’s sloppiness. It’s just how our field has evolved. One of the things that McIntyre and McKitrick pointed out was that a lot of the statistical methods used in our field are sloppy. We have trends for which we don’t even give a confidence interval. The IPCC concluded that most of the warming of the latter 20th century was very likely caused by humans. Well, as far as I know, that conclusion was mostly a negotiation, in terms of calling it “likely” or “very likely.” Exactly what does “most” mean? What percentage of the warming are we actually talking about? More than 50 percent? A number greater than 50 percent?

Are you saying that the scientific community, through the IPCC, is asking the world to restructure its entire mode of producing and consuming energy and yet hasn’t done a scientific uncertainty analysis?

Yes. The IPCC itself doesn’t recommend policies or whatever; they just do an assessment of the science. But it’s sort of framed in the context of the UNFCCC [the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change]. That’s who they work for, basically. The UNFCCC has a particular policy agenda—Kyoto, Copenhagen, cap-and-trade, and all that—so the questions that they pose at the IPCC have been framed in terms of the UNFCCC agenda. That’s caused a narrowing of the kind of things the IPCC focuses on. It’s not a policy-free assessment of the science. That actually torques the science in certain directions, because a lot of people are doing research specifically targeted at issues of relevance to the IPCC. Scientists want to see their papers quoted in the IPCC report.

You’ve talked about potential distortions of temperature measurements from natural temperature cycles in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and from changes in the way land is used. How does that work?

Land use changes the temperature quite a bit in complex ways—everything from cutting down forests or changing agriculture to building up cities and creating air pollution. All of these have big impacts on regional surface temperature, which isn’t always accounted for adequately, in my opinion. The other issue is these big ocean oscillations, like the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and particularly, how these influenced temperatures in the latter half of the 20th century. I think there was a big bump at the end of the 20th century, especially starting in the mid-1990s. We got a big bump from going into the warm phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation was warm until about 2002. Now we’re in the cool phase. This is probably why we’ve seen a leveling-off [of global average temperatures] in the past five or so years. My point is that at the end of the 1980s and in the ’90s, both of the ocean oscillations were chiming in together to give some extra warmth.

If you go back to the 1930s and ’40s, you see a similar bump in the temperature records. That was the bump that some of those climate scientists were trying to get rid of [in the temperature data], but it was a real bump, and I think it was associated with these ocean oscillations. That was another period when you had the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation chiming in together. These oscillations and how they influence global temperature haven’t received enough attention, and it’s an important part of how we interpret 20th-century climate records. Rather than trying to airbrush this bump in the 1940s and trying to get rid of the medieval warm period—which these hacked e-mails illustrate—we need to understand them.

They don’t disprove anthropogenic global warming, but we can’t airbrush them away. We need to incorporate them into the overall story. We had two bumps—in the ’90s and also in the ’30s and ’40s—that may have had the same cause. So we may have exaggerated the trend in the later half of the 20th century by not adequately interpreting these bumps from the ocean oscillations. I don’t have all the answers. I’m just saying that’s what it looks like.

What about risk? Isn’t it worth heading off even a small risk of catastrophe?

Oh, absolutely.

How does the lack of uncertainty analyses affect the calculation of risk?

You can think of risk as what can happen multiplied by the probability of its actually happening. The IPCC gives the whole range of things that could happen, some that involve a small amount of warming and some involving rather large amounts of warming. In terms of how probable each of those is, there’s a lot of debate, but in terms of actually making policy, you have to look at all possibilities and figure out possible actions you could take to limit the damage from climate change. Then you need to put price tags on each of these. With that kind of information, you can decide the policies you want to adopt and how to spend your money. I don’t think that whole analysis has really been thoroughly done. The UNFCCC has focused on one policy—carbon cap-and-trade and emissions reductions. There’s a whole host of others. Even if you’re focused on limiting CO2, there are taxes, and there is the possibility that through technology the problem will solve itself without cap-and-trade or a carbon tax. On the adaptation and geoengineering side, there’s a whole host of possibilities. These haven’t been assessed. Instead we’ve been fighting this little war over science.

Should we wait to resolve all the uncertainty before taking action?

The probability of something bad happening is at least as high as the probability that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That turned out not to be true, but we ended up going in there anyway. So we have a history of taking action on bad things that have a low probability of happening.

Is it fair to say that the kind of open inquiry you are calling for isn’t being done because scientists have been trying to convey a focused message to the public?

That’s part of it. You heard that in the [hacked] e-mails: Let’s simplify the story for the IPCC. But that’s just not how science is. The scientists have gotten caught in these wars with the media and the skeptics. They spend so much energy trying to put them down, energy that isn’t going into uncertainty analysis and considering competing views. I don’t think the scientists have personal political agendas. I think it’s more hubris and professional ego.

Do you agree that the Copenhagen meeting was a disaster?

Yes, it was.

So where does climate research go from here?

I personally don’t support cap-and-trade. It makes economic sense but not political sense. You’re just going to see all the loopholes and the offsets. I think you’re going to see a massive redistribution of wealth to Wall Street, and we’re not going to reduce the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We need a massive investment in technology. We do need to help the developing world that is most vulnerable now to the impacts of climate variability, not even the stuff that’s related to carbon dioxide. There are a lot of things going on—floods, hurricanes, droughts, and whatever—that can’t even be attributed to global warming right now. By reducing the vulnerability of the developing world to these extreme events, we’ll have gone a long way to helping them adapt to the more serious things that might come about from global warming.

Do you think the IPCC is going to have a reduced role?

If they are going to continue to be relevant, they need to tighten up their act in terms of making the process more open and transparent. How do you actually get to be a lead author of the IPCC? I have no idea who actually makes those selections. Things like that. All the data sets need to be out there and available and documented, so we don’t have these issues that we ran into with the hacked e-mails. The UNFCCC has become a big free-for-all. The G20, or some other group of nations, is where you’re going see the action.

Do you subscribe to the argument that today’s climate models are crude and need to be taken with a grain of salt?

No, I think the climate models are becoming quite sophisticated. We learn a lot from the simulations. But you have to keep in mind that these are scenario simulations. They’re not really forecasts. They don’t know what the volcano eruptions are going to be. They don’t know what the exact solar cycles are going to be. There will be a whole host of forcing uncertainties in the 21st century that we don’t know.

You’ve said that climatologists should listen more to bloggers. That’s surprising to hear, coming from a scientist.

There are a lot of people with Ph.D.s in physics or chemistry who become interested in the climate change story, read the literature, and follow the blogs—and they’re unconvinced by our arguments. There are statisticians, like McIntyre, who have gotten interested in the climate change issue. McIntyre does not have a Ph.D. He does not have a university appointment. But he’s made an important contribution, starting with criticism of the hockey stick. There’s a Russian biophysicist I communicate with who is not a climate researcher, but she has good ideas. She should be encouraged to pursue them. If the argument is good, wherever it comes from, we should look at it.

What about arguments on talk radio?

No, we debunk those once and then move on.

Is there a denial machine?

It’s complicated. The denial thing is certainly not monolithic. The skeptics don’t agree with each other at all. The scientific skeptics—[hurricane forecaster] Bill Gray and [MIT meteorologist] Dick Lindzen and [University of Alabama climatologist] Roy Spencer—criticize each other as much as we criticize them.

You wrote an article for climateaudit.org, a conservative Web site. Are people now calling you a denier?

No, they’re calling me naive. I stepped off the reservation, clearly.

Are you taking a career risk?

A couple of people think so, but I’m senior enough and well-established enough that it doesn’t matter. I also live in Georgia, which is a hotbed of skeptics. The things I’m saying play well in Georgia. They don’t play very well with a lot of my colleagues in the climate field.

Does it bother you that skeptic has become a bad word?

It’s an unfortunate word. We should all be skeptical of all science. The word denier has some unfortunate connotations also. I use “scientific skeptics” versus “political skeptics.” A scientific skeptic is somebody who’s doing work and looking at the arguments. A political skeptic is somebody who is getting the skepticism from talk radio.

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Steve McIntyre points out some inconvenient data from Law Dome.

A Superstorm for Global Warming Research

On the Urban Heat Island Effect