Climate Skeptic

Excellent.  Hard to excerpt because it is all so spot on.  I will give two examples:

2. “Climate change denier”. A first cousin to the first annoyance. Again, thirty years ago, “climate change denier” would have meant someone who denied that the Medieval Warm Period ever happened. Or that the Little Ice Age ever happened. What a kook fringe thing to believe that would have been! And now, those of us who still believe in natural climate change are called “climate change deniers”?? ARGHH….

6. A lack of common sense. Common sense can be misleading, of course. But when there is considerable uncertainty, sometimes it is helpful to go ahead and use a little anyway. Example: It is well known that the net effect of clouds is to cool the Earth in response to radiant heating by the sun. But when it comes to global warming, all climate models do just the opposite…change clouds in ways that amplify radiative warming. While this is theoretically possible, it is critical to future projections of global warming that the reasons why models do this be thoroughly understood. Don’t believe it just because group think within the climate modeling community has decided it should be so.

Steve McIntyre explains the “trick” referred to in the CRU emails.  The trick is subtle, which allows the scientists to weasel out, saying things that are technically true but in essence false and misleading.

Most of the proxy series are smoothed in some way.  Most smoothing algorithms adjust a data point by averaging in data both forwards and backwards in the series.  A simple algorithm puts high weights on nearby data points in this averaging and relatively lower weights on data points further away.

The problem occurs when the series reaches its end.  There are not points forward in the data series to average.  By the last point in the series, fully half the data necessary for smoothing does not exist.  There are various techniques for handling this, all of which have trade-offs and compromises (at the end of the day, you can’t create a signal when there is no data, no matter how clear one’s math tends to be).

The trick involved taking instrumental temperature records and using these records to provide data after the end point for smoothing purposes.  This tends to force the smoothed curves upwards at the end, when there is no such data in the proxy trend to substantiate this.  The perpetrators of this trick can argue with a semi-straight face that they did not “graft” the instrumental temperature record onto the data, but the instrumental temperature records does in fact affect the data series by contributing as much as half of the data for the smoothed curve in the end years.

Another Problem

I have always considered the “we-don’t-graft” claim disingenuous for another reason.  This is driven in large part because I have spent a lot of time not just manipulating data, but thinking about the most effective ways to represent it in graphical form.

To this end, I have always thought that while folks like Mann and Briffa have not technically grafted the instrumental data, they have effectively done so in their graphical representations — which is the form in which 99.9% of the population have consumed their data.

Below is the 1000-year temperature reconstruction (from proxies like tree rings and ice cores) in the Fourth IPCC Assessment.  It shows the results of twelve different studies, one of which is the Mann study famously named “the hockey stick.”

All the colored lines are the proxy (tree ring, ice cores, sediments, etc) study results.  The black line is the instrumental temperature record from the Hadley CRU.  There is no splice here – they have not joined proxy to instrument.  But they have effectively done so by overlaying the lines on top of each other.  The visual impact that says hockey stick is actually driven by this overlay.

To prove it, lets remove the black instrumental temperature line as well as the gray line which I think is some kind of curve fitted to all of the above.  This is what we get:

Pretty different visual impact, huh?  The hockey stick is gone.  So in fact, the visual image of a hockey stick is driven by the overlay of the instrumental record on the proxies.  The hockey stick inflection point occurs right at the point the two lines join, raising the distinct possibility the inflection is due to incompatibility of the two data sources rather than a natural phenomenon.

More here.

A lot of folks have asked me why I wasn’t more energized initially about the climate emails.  One reasons is that they don’t really reveal much that I and others who did not go along blindly with the orthodoxy knew for years.  The emails are kind of like getting a written confession from OJ Simpson to Nicole Brown’s murder-  newsworthy, but it wouldn’t be confirming anything I didn’t already know.

Here is a good example.  I wrote this November 10, 2007:

By the way, here is a little lesson about the integrity of climate science.  See that light blue line [in this graph from the IPCC Fourth Assessment]?  Here, let’s highlight it:

For some reason, the study’s author cut the data off around 1950.  Is that where his proxy ended?  No, in fact he had decades of proxy data left.  However, his proxy data turned sharply downwards in 1950.  Since this did not tell the story he wanted to tell, he hid the offending data by cutting off the line, choosing to conceal the problem rather than have an open scientific discussion about it.

The study’s author?  Keith Briffa, who the IPCC named to lead this section of their Fourth Assessment.

The recent data release apparently includes this chart of Briffa’s proxy data discussed above (from Steve McIntyre via Anthony Watts):

For the very first time, the Climategate Letters “archived” the deleted portion of the Briffa MXD reconstruction of “Hide the Decline” fame – see here. Gavin Schmidt claimed that the decline had been “hidden in plain sight” (see here. ). This isn’t true.

The post-1960 data was deleted from the archived version of this reconstruction at NOAA here and not shown in the corresponding figure in Briffa et al 2001. Nor was the decline shown in the IPCC 2001 graph, one that Mann, Jones, Briffa, Folland and Karl were working in the two weeks prior to the “trick” email (or for that matter in the IPCC 2007 graph, an issue that I’ll return to.)

A retrieval script follows.

For now, here is a graphic showing the deleted data in red.

Figure 1. Two versions of Briffa MXD reconstruction, showing archived and climategate versions. The relevant IPCC 2001 graph, shown below, clearly does not show the decline in the Briffa MXD reconstruction.

Contrary to Gavin Schmidt’s claim that the decline is “hidden in plain sight”, the inconvenient data has simply been deleted.

I think his hockey stick looks a little flacid.  Fortunately someone invented Tiljander sediments, a form of data Viagra (as long as one flips it upside down) and such games were no longer necessary.

Pay no attention to those guys behind the curtain.   Its all settled science.  There is total consensus among tens of thousands of scientists.  Which is why these guys were so hesitant to let anyone else view the details of their work, or allow anyone to criticize them in print.  The social network of the climate emails, via Warwick Hughes.

From Lou Glazner via Anthony Watts

1. The scientists colluded in efforts to thwart Freedom of Information Act requests (across continents no less). They reference deleting data, hiding source code from requests, manipulating data to make it more annoying to use, and attempting to deny requests from people recognized as contributors to specific internet sites. Big brother really is watching you. He’s just not very good at securing his web site.

2. These scientists publicly diminished opposing arguments for lack of being published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. In the background they discussed black-balling journals that did publish opposing views, and preventing opposing views from being published in journals they controlled. They even mention changing the rules midstream in arenas they control to ensure opposing views would not see the light of day. They discuss amongst themselves which scientists can be trusted and who should be excluded from having data because they may not be “predictable”.

3. The scientists expressed concern privately over a lack of increase in global temperatures in the last decade, and the fact that they could not explain this. Publicly they discounted it as simple natural variations. In one instance, data was [apparently] manipulated to hide a decline in temperatures when graphed. Other discussions included ways to discount historic warming trends that inconveniently did not occur during increases in atmospheric CO2.

4. The emails show examples of top scientists working to create public relations messaging with favorable news outlets. It shows them identifying and cataloging, by name and association, people with opposing views. These people are then disparaged in a coordinated fashion via favorable online communities.

What the emails/files don’t do is completely destroy the possibility that global climate change is real. They don’t preclude many studies from being accurate, on either side of the discussion. And they should not be seen as discrediting all science.

Free speech and transparency are meaningless unless they apply to the critics of the government as well as to its supporters.  Here is the heart of the scandal:

Wei-Chyung and Tom,
…
1. Think I’ve managed to persuade UEA to ignore all further FOIA requests if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit.
2. Had an email from David Jones of BMRC, Melbourne. [EMAIL NOT FOUND IN CRU EMAILS – Willis] He said they are ignoring anybody who has dealings with CA, as there are threads on it about Australian sites.
3. CA is in dispute with IPCC (Susan Solomon and Martin Manning) about the availability of the responses to reviewer’s at the various stages of the AR4 drafts. They are most interested here re Ch 6 on paleo.
Cheers
Phil [Phil Jones, head of the University of East Anglia CRU]

Climate Audit is a site dedicated to science.  You will seldom see any political polemic there, even in the comments.  Unlike sites like RealClimate, dissenting voices are not edited out of the comments.  And it is a site that has dedicated itself (thus the title) to backchecking, verifying, and attempting to replicate various climate studies, particularly historic temperature records and paleo-climatology work.

Essentially, Phil Jones is saying that, as a government official, he is going to ignore legal information requests under FOIA from certain groups that seek to hold him accountable — information requests, I might add, that should not have even been necessary in the first place by any reasonable rules of scientific openness.

Update: You really have to read the whole long post above.  It is a story of the CRU trying to stay one step ahead of those who want to make them accountable, as most scientists are to replication efforts.   One approach they took that really requires chutzpah – in response to the constant CRU stonewalling, more and more people began pinging them with FOIA’s.  Remember, this deluge of FOIA’s was only necessary due to the CRU’s constant stonewalling.  Their next tactic – use the volume of FOIA’s as evidence that it is somehow a concerted attack and therefore can be ignored:

I’ve saved all three threads as they now stand. No time to read all the comments, but I did note in “Fortress Met Office” that someone has provided a link to a website that helps you to submit FOI requests to UK public institutions, and subsequently someone has made a further FOI request to Met Office and someone else made one to DEFRA. If it turns into an organised campaign designed more to inconvenience us than to obtain useful information, then we may be able to decline all related requests without spending ages on considering them. Worth looking out for evidence of such an organised campaign

Update #2: I am curious how many other scientific fields support this attitude towards defending and replication one’s work

Dear Tom,
…
One of the problems is that I’m caught in a real Catch-22 situation. At present, I’m damned and publicly vilified because I refused to provide McIntyre with the data he requested. But had I acceded to McIntyre’s initial request for climate model data, I’m convinced (based on the past experiences of Mike Mann, Phil, and Gavin) that I would have spent years of my scientific career dealing with demands for further explanations,
additional data, Fortran code, etc. (Phil has been complying with FOIA requests from McIntyre and his cronies for over two years). And if I ever denied a single request for further information, McIntyre would have rubbed his hands gleefully and written: “You see – he’s guilty as charged!” on his website.

You and I have spent over a decade of our scientific careers on the MSU issue, Tom. During much of that time, we’ve had to do science in “reactive mode”, responding to the latest outrageous claims and inept science by John Christy, David Douglass, or S. Fred Singer. For the remainder of my scientific career, I’d like to dictate my own research agenda. I don’t want that agenda driven by the constant need to respond to Christy, Douglass, and Singer. And I certainly don’t want to spend years of my life interacting
with the likes of Steven McIntyre.

I hope LLNL management will provide me with their full support. If they do not, I’m fully prepared to seek employment elsewhere.

With best regards,
Ben [Ben Santer]

Anthony Watts has a statement from the American Meteorological Society about the Hadley CRU emails.  The basic message is “nothing to see here, move along:”

For climate change research, the body of research in the literature is very large and the dependence on any one set of research results to the comprehensive understanding of the climate system is very, very small. Even if some of the charges of improper behavior in this particular case turn out to be true — which is not yet clearly the case — the impact on the science of climate change would be very limited.

I sent this letter to their executive director:

I really believe your group’s statement is missing the point.  Your group’s position seems to be that this episode can be safely ignored as it taints only a small volume of a large mass of research.  But a large body of research is not useful if that body systematically excludes any work critical of the orthodoxy.  In fact, you should re-reread this paragraph from your own letter:

The beauty of science is that it depends on independent verification and replication as part of the process of confirming research results.  This process, which is tied intrinsically to the procedures leading to publication of research results in the peer-reviewed literature, allows the scientific community to confirm some results while rejecting others.

The Hadley emails describe a large conspiracy to corrupt exactly this process.  We see scientists conspiring to keep secret results and working papers that would have allowed their worked to be checked, verified, and replicated.  We see researchers working to prevent publication of any research that might falsify their work.

Sure, we see a few examples of researchers fudging their work.  But the issue is not necessarily the specific cases of fudging — in fact, I don’t care if its sloppiness or chicanery — from a science standpoint it almost doesn’t matter.  The problem here is the creation of a system and a culture where such fudging and sloppiness can occur without any of the independent scrutiny you seem to laud as part of the scientific process.  How much more exists?  We’ll never know, until organizations like yours stop enabling this climate Omerta and start demanding true scientific openness.

A reader wrote me that the comments found in the Hadley CRU program code are possibly far more damning than the emails, and in fact this appears to be the case given these excerpts at Anthony Watts’ site.

In the past, I have written that as an experienced modeller, I am extremely suspicious when anyone’s models very closely match history.  This is a common modelers trick – use various plugs and fudge factors and special algorithms to force the model to match history better (when it is used to “back-cast”) and people will likely trust the model more when you use it to forecast.   For a variety of reasons, I have been suspicious this was the case with climate models, but never could prove it.  One example from the link above

Looking back over history, it appears the model is never off by more than 0.4C in any month, and never goes more than about 10 months before re-intersecting the “actual” line.  Does it bother anyone else that this level of precision is several times higher than the model has when run forward?  Almost immediately, the model is more than 0.4C off, and goes years without intercepting reality.

Now we are closer, with programming code comments in the various climate programs that say things like this (from the code that apparently does some of the tree ring histories)

. FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\mann\oldprog\maps12.proFOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\mann\oldprog\maps15.proFOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\mann\oldprog\maps24.pro ; Plots 24 yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD reconstructions
; of growing season temperatures. Uses "corrected" MXD - but shouldn't usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.

or this

• FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\briffa_sep98_d.pro;mknormal,yyy,timey,refperiod=[1881,1940]
;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
(...)
;
; APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,x)
densall=densall+yearlyadj

The link above has 30+ similar examples.  The real insight will be when folks like Steve McIntyre and his readers start digging into the code and replicating it — then we will see what it actually does and what biases or plugs or overrides are embedded.  Stay tuned.

I am disappointed to see folks like Lord Monkton calling for scientists to go to jail over what has been discovered in the Hadley CRU emails.  No one is going to jail, at least based on what we know so far.  Laws were broken, but of the type that perhaps people lose their jobs but not their freedom.  And demanding that people go to jail just paints skeptics as opportunistic, over-the-top and vindictive.   We sound like the looniest of the alarmists when we say stuff like this.

This is not to say that the emails (as well as the source code, which Steve McIntyre and his readers are starting to dig into) don’t give us useful insights about the climate science process.  And what they really point to for me is the danger of a monoculture.

For years, with the media’s active participation, criticism of the mainstream scientific position on global warming has been painted as somehow outside the bounds of reasonable discourse.  Skeptics are called “deniers,” with the intent to equate them with those who deny the Holocaust.  At every turn, global warming activists with the help of the media, have tried to make it uncomfortable, even impossible, to criticize the science of catastrophic man-made global warming.  In the extreme, this has degenerated into outright threats.

NASA’s James Hansen has called for trials of climate skeptics in 2008 for “high crimes against humanity.” Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lashed out at skeptics of 2007 declaring “This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors” In 2009, RFK, Jr. also called coal companies “criminal enterprises” and declared CEO’s ’should be in jail… for all of eternity.”

In June 2009, former Clinton Administration official Joe Romm defended a comment on his Climate Progress website warning skeptics would be strangled in their beds. “An entire generation will soon be ready to strangle you and your kind while you sleep in your beds,” stated the remarks, which Romm defended by calling them “not a threat, but a prediction.”

In 2006, the eco-magazine Grist called for Nuremberg-Style trials for skeptics. In 2008, Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki called for government leaders skeptical of global warming to be thrown “into jail.” In 2007, The Weather Channel’s climate expert called for withholding certification of skeptical meteorologists.

The examples go on ad infinitum.  Several folks have emailed me and asked why I have not joined the feeding frenzy over the “climategate.”  In part, this is because I don’t think there is anything in the emails that is a whole lot worse than what many of the actors have been saying publicly.  The media has played along not only because many of its members were sympathetic to the message, but because the catastrophe played well into the “if it bleeds, it leads” culture.  Even when the media was not “picking a winner” in the science, it supported the catastrophist message in its editorial decisions, choosing to cover (for example) ad nauseum a 30-year low in Arctic sea ice but failing to even mention a 30-year high in Antarctic sea ice which occurred on nearly the same day (more here).  Ditto hurricanes, tornadoes, floods droughts, etc — only events and records in one particular tail of the normal distribution were covered.  Even when they worked to be fair,  the media were frequently criticized by alarmists for  allowing even a mention of the skeptic position in an article otherwise generally supporting the orthodoxy.  The term “false balance” was coined.

The result was a group who were effectively exempt from criticism — and knew it.

The most amazing thing to watch has been the absolute scorn and obstructionism piled on Steve McIntyre and his readers and partners.  I  have read Steve’s work for years, and find it to be incredibly fair and deeply analytical.  I took as one of my early roles at my climate site the explanation to laymen of exactly what McIntyre was talking about in his posts.  He often challenged the climate orthodoxy – which in most scientific disciplines is highly valued, but in climate science is a crime.  In the emails we even see scientists within the monoculture raising the exact same issues that they have blasted McIntyre for — apparently it is OK to raise such issues as long as 1) you are an insider and 2) such concerns are suppressed in any public document.

Perhaps the single most abusive part of the monoculture has been its misrepresentation of peer review.  Peer review was never meant as a sort of good housekeeping seal of approval on scientific work.  It is not a guarantee of correctness.  It is really an extension of the editorial process — bringing scientists from relevant fields to vet whether work is really new and different and worthy of publication, to make sure the actual article communicates the work and its findings clearly, and to probe for obvious errors or logical fallacies.

Climate scientists have tried to portray peer review as the end of the process–  ie, once one of their works shows up in a peer-reviewed journal, the question addressed is “settled.”  But his is never how science has worked.  Publication in a peer-reviewed journal is the beginning, not the end.  Once published, scientists attempt alternatively to tear it down or replicate its conclusions.  Only work that has survived years of such torture testing starts to become “settled.”

The emails help to shed light on some aspects of peer review that skeptics have suspected for years.  It is increasingly clear that climate scientists in the monoculture have been using peer review to enforce the orthodoxy.  Peer review panels are stacked with members of the club, and authors who challenge the orthodoxy are shut out of publication, while authors within the monoculture use peer review as a shield against future criticism.  We see in the emails members of the monoculture actually working to force editors who have the temerity to publish work critical of the orthodoxy out of their jobs.  We are now learning that when alarmist scientists claim that there is little peer-reviewed science on the skeptic’s side, this is like the Catholic Church enforcing a banned books list and then claiming that everything in print supports the Church’s position.

History teaches us that whenever we allow a monoculture – whether is be totalitarian one-party rule or enforcing a single state religion, corruption follows.  Without scrutiny of their actions, actors in such monocultures have few checks and little accountability.  Worse, those at the center of such monocultures can become convinced of their own righteousness, such that any action they take in support of the orthodoxy is by definition ethically justified.

This, I think, is exactly what we see at work in the Hadley CRU emails.

Except when its not:

I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC , which were not always the same

–Keith Briffa, who was in charge of the IPCC section that includes temperature reconstructions such as the Hockey Stick.

Despite loads of public scorn heaped on Steve McIntyre and Ross McKittrick for their criticisms of the Mann hockey stick, it turns out in private folks like the Hadley Center’s John Mitchell, the review editor for the relevant chapter of the last IPCC report, shared many concerns identical to those of M&M. The email at the link is pretty amazing – it is practically an outline of the section of my skeptic presentation dealing with the hockey stick.  But not a whiff of this uncertainty was ever made public or was included in the IPCC report.

Mitchell and the Hadley Center have tried every trick in the book to avoid FOIA of anything that would publicly reveal his true concerns about Mann’s study.  When we understand the incentives that are driving him to suppress his own scientific views, and to publicly ridicule those who share his private concerns, we will understand better what is broken in the climate science process.

Marc Morano, probably first up against the wall, had this post a while back with a number of public threats, from TPM, Joe Romm, Joe Kennedy, Grist Magazine, David Suzuki, and James Hansen, among others.

The Bishop Hill Blog has a summary of a lot of the more interesting emails.

A search engine of the content is here.

John Hinderaker here.

I thought this was one of the more interesting quotes unearthed so far from the Hadley CRU emails:

“When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA [Climate Audit] was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school – the head of school and a few others) became very supportive. I’ve got to know the FOI person quite well and the Chief Librarian – who deals with appeals.”

I am not familiar with the ins and outs of the British FOI request process, but in the US such requests must be honored based on the content of the information requested, and NOT based on the views of the requester or the intended us of the information.  Basically, what the FOI officer has determined here is that this was a perfectly legitimate request that had to be honored UNTIL it was learned that it came from a person or group who disagreed with the center’s scientific conclusions and wished to use the data to try to replicate and/or criticize their work — then it could be ignored.   In the US, this would be a gross violation of  FOIA rules.  I am willing to be that it is not too kosher under British law either.

From PHD Comics via Flowing Data, check out the lower left.

An interesting development you have probably seen at other climate sites already (I am pretty conservative about posting this stuff), apparently someone may have hacked the servers at the Hadley Center Climate Research Unit (CRU) in the UK and copied a bunch of data and emails and dropped it into the public realm (via links in a number of site’s comment sections).  I downloaded the file but have not checked it out.  It is unclear if this is real or a skeptic spoof or even an alarmist-set trap, though initial reactions from the Hadley Center CRU seem to point to it being real.  The ethics of the folks who grabbed this material are also seriously in question, though if it turns out to be real I have no problem using the material as it is public / government material that should have been in the public domain anyway (which is why I use the Pentagon Papers analogy).

Andrew Bolt has some background and excerpts from the material.  The very first email he has from Phil Jones seems to confirm my suspicions about splicing thermometer data onto proxy series I expressed here.   (Update:  much more from Steve McIntyre here).

A lot of the stuff in Bolt’s post is really stuff we in the skeptic community already know.  RealClimate ruthlessly purges comments of any dissenting or critical voices?  Who’d have thunk it.

I got an email today in response to this post that allows me to cover some ground I wanted to cover.  A number of commenters are citing this paragraph from Tedesco and Monaghan as evidence that I and others are somehow mischaracterizing the results of the study:

“Negative melting anomalies observed in recent years do not contradict recently published results on surface temperature trends over Antarctica [e.g., Steig et al., 2009]. The time period used for those studies extends back to the 1950’s, well beyond 1980, and the largest temperature increases are found during winter and spring rather than summer, and are generally limited to West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula. Summer SAM trends have increased since the 1970s [Marshall, 2003], suppressing warming over much of Antarctica during the satellite melt record [Turner et al., 2005]. Moreover, melting and surface temperature are not necessarily linearly related because the entire surface energy balance must be considered [Liston and Winther, 2005; Torinesi et al., 2003].”

First, the point of the original post was not about somehow falsifying global warming, but about the asymmetry in press coverage to emerging data.  It is in fact staggeringly unlikely that I would use claims of increasing ice buildup in Antarctica as “proof” that anthropogenic global warming theory as outlined, say, by the fourth IPCC report, is falsified.  This is because the models in the fourth IPCC report actually predict increasing snowmass in Antarctica under global warming.

Of course, the study was not exactly increasing ice mass, but decreasing ice melting rates, which should be more correlated with temperatures.  Which brings us to the quote above.
I see a lot of studies in climate that seem to have results that falsify some portion of AGW theory but which throw in acknowledgments of the truth and beauty of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory in the final paragraphs that almost contradict their study results, much like natural philosophers in past centuries would put in boiler plate in their writing to protect them from the ire of the Catholic Church.   One way to interpret this statement is “I know you are not going to like these findings but I am still loyal to the Cause so please don’t revoke by AGW decoder ring.”

This particular statement by the authors is hilarious in one way.  Their stated defense is that Steig’s period was longer and thus not comparable.  The don’t outright say it, but they kind of beat around the bush at it, that the real issue is not the study length, but that most of the warming in Steig’s 50-year period was actually in the first 20 years.  This is in fact something we skeptics have been saying since Steig was released, but was not forthrightly acknowledged in Steig.   Here is some work that has been done to deconstruct the numbers in Steig.  Don’t worry about the cases with different numbers of “PCs”, these are just sensitivities with different geographic regionalizations.  Basically, under any set of replication approaches to Steig, all the warming is in the first 2 decades.

Now, knowing this, here is Steig’s synopsis:

Assessments of Antarctic temperature change have emphasized the contrast between strong warming of the Antarctic Peninsula and slight cooling of the Antarctic continental interior in recent decades¹. This pattern of temperature change has been attributed to the increased strength of the circumpolar westerlies, largely in response to changes in stratospheric ozone². This picture, however, is substantially incomplete owing to the sparseness and short duration of the observations. Here we show that significant warming extends well beyond the Antarctic Peninsula to cover most of West Antarctica, an area of warming much larger than previously reported. West Antarctic warming exceeds 0.1 °C per decade over the past 50 years, and is strongest in winter and spring. Although this is partly offset by autumn cooling in East Antarctica, the continent-wide average near-surface temperature trend is positive. Simulations using a general circulation model reproduce the essential features of the spatial pattern and the long-term trend, and we suggest that neither can be attributed directly to increases in the strength of the westerlies. Instead, regional changes in atmospheric circulation and associated changes in sea surface temperature and sea ice are required to explain the enhanced warming in West Antarctica.

Wow – don’t see much acknowledgment that all the warming trend was before 1980.   They find the space to recognize seasonal differences but not the fact that all the warming they found was in the first 40% of their study period?   (And all of the above is not even to get into the huge flaws in the Steig methodology, which purports to deemphasize the Antarctic Peninsula but still does not)

This is where the semantic games of trying to keep the science consistent with a political position get to be a problem.  If Steig et al had just said “Antarctica warmed from 1957 to 1979 and then has cooled since,” which is what their data showed, then the authors of this new study would not have been in a quandary.  In that alternate universe, of course decreased ice melt since 1980 makes sense, because Steig said it was cooler.  But because the illusion must be maintained that Steig showed a warming trend that continues to this date, these guys must deal with the fact that their study agrees with the data in Steig, but not the public conclusions drawn from Steig.  And thus they have to jump through some semantic hoops.

Via Radley Balko:

The phrase shaken baby syndrome entered the pop culture lexicon in 1997, when British au pair Louise Woodward was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Massachusetts infant Matthew Eappen. At the time, the medical community almost universally agreed on the symptoms of SBS. But starting around 1999, a fringe group of SBS skeptics began growing into a powerful reform movement. The Woodward case brought additional attention to the issue, inviting new research into the legitimacy of SBS. Today, as reflected in the Edmunds case, there are significant doubts about both the diagnosis of SBS and how it’s being used in court.

In a compelling article published this month in the Washington University Law Review, DePaul University law professor Deborah Teurkheimer argues that the medical research has now shifted to the point where U.S. courts must conduct a major review of most SBS cases from the last 20 years. The problem, Teurkheimer explains, is that the presence of three symptoms in an infant victim—bleeding at the back of the eye, bleeding in the protective area of the brain, and brain swelling—have led doctors and child protective workers to immediately reach a conclusion of SBS. These symptoms have long been considered pathognomic, or exclusive, to SBS. As this line of thinking goes, if those three symptoms are present in the autopsy, then the child could only have been shaken to death.

Moreover, an SBS medical diagnosis has typically served as a legal diagnosis as well. Medical consensus previously held that these symptoms present immediately in the victim. Therefore, a diagnosis of SBS established cause of death (shaking), the identity of the killer (the person who was with the child when it died), and even the intent of the accused (the vigorous nature of the shaking established mens rea). Medical opinion was so uniform that the accused, like Edmunds, often didn’t bother questioning the science. Instead, they’d often try to establish the possibility that someone else shook the child.

But now the consensus has shifted. Where the near-unanimous opinion once held that the SBS triad of symptoms could only result from a shaking with the force equivalent of a fall from a three-story to four-story window, or a car moving at 25 mph to 40 mph (depending on the source), research completed in 2003 using lifelike infant dolls suggested that vigorous human shaking produces bleeding similar to that of only a 2-foot to 3-foot fall. Furthermore, the shaking experiments failed to produce symptoms with the severity of those typically seen in SBS deaths….
“When I put all of this together, I said, my God, this is a sham,” Uscinski told Discover. “Somebody made a mistake right at the very beginning, and look at what’s come out of it.”

Before I am purposefully misunderstood, I am not committing the logical fallacy that an incorrect consensus in issue A means the consensus on issue B is incorrect.  The message instead is simple:  beware scientific “consensus,” particularly when that consensus is only a decade or two old.

A month or two ago, after Kevin Drum (a leftish supporter of strong AGW theory) posted a chart on his site that looked like BS to me.  I posted my quick reactions to the chart here, and then after talking to the data owner in Washington followed up here.

The gist of my comments were that the trend in the data didn’t make any sense, and upon checking with the data owner, it turns out much of the trend is due to changes in the data collection process.  I stick by that conclusion, though not some of the other suppositions in those posts.

I was excited to see Dr. Mills response (thanks to reader Charlie Allen for the heads up).  I will quote much of it, but to make sure I can’t be accused of cherry-picking, here is his whole post here.  I would comment there, but alas, unlike this site, Dr. Mills chooses not to allow comments.

So here we go:

Two blog entries [1-online | PDF] [2-online | PDF] [Accessed June 18, 2009] mischaracterize analysis in a new report entitled Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. The blogger (a self-admitted “amateur”) created a straw man argument by asserting that the chart was presented as evidence of global climate change and was not verified with the primary source. The blog’s errors have been propagated to other web sites without further fact checking or due diligence. (The use of profanity in the title of the first entry is additionally unprofessional.)

Uh, oh, the dreaded “amateur.”  Mea Culpa.  I am a trained physicist and engineer.  I don’t remember many colleges handing out “climate” degrees in 1984, so I try not to overstate my knowledge.  As to using “bullsh*t” in the title, the initial post was “I am calling bullsh*t on this chart.”  Sorry, I don’t feel bad about that given the original post was a response to a post on a political blog.

The underlying database—created by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration—contains approximately 930 grid-disruption events taking place between 1992 and 2008, affecting 135 million electric customers.

As noted in the caption to the figure on page 58 of our report (shown above)—which was masked in the blogger’s critique—

First, I am happy to admit errors where I make them (I wonder if that is why I am still an “amateur”).   It was wrong of me to post the chart without the caption. My only defense was that I copied the chart from, and was responding to its use on, Kevin Drum’s site and he too omitted the caption. I really was not trying to hide what was there.   I am on the road and don’t have the original but here it is from Dr. Mills’ post.

Anyway, to continue…

As noted in the caption to the figure on page 58 of our report (shown above)—which was masked in the blogger’s critique—we expressly state a quite different finding than that imputed by the blogger, noting with care that we do not attribute these events to anthropogenic climate change, but do consider the grid vulnerable to extreme weather today and increasingly so as climate change progresses, i.e.:

“Although the figure does not demonstrate a cause-effect relationship between climate change and grid disruption, it does suggest that weather and climate extremes often have important effects on grid disruptions.”

The associated text in the report states the following, citing a major peer-reviewed federal study on the energy sector’s vulnerability to climate change:

“The electricity grid is also vulnerable to climate change effects, from temperature changes to severe weather events.”

To Dr. Mills’ point that I misinterpreted him — if all he wanted to say was that the electrical grid could be disturbed by weather or was vulnerable to climate change, fine.  I mean, duh.  If there are more tornadoes knocking about, more electrical lines will come down.  But if that was Dr. Mills ONLY point, then why did he write (emphasis added):

The number of incidents caused by extreme weather has increased tenfold since 1992.  The portion of all events that are caused by weather-related phenomena has more than tripled from about 20 percent in the early 1990s to about 65 percent in recent years.  The weather-related events are more severe…

He is saying flat out that the grid IS being disturbed 10x more often and more severely by weather.  It doesn’t even say “reported” incidents or “may have” — it is quite definitive.  So which one of us is trying to create a straw man?   It is these statements that I previously claimed the data did not support, and I stand by my analysis on that.

And it’s not like there is some conspiracy of skeptics to mis-interpret Mr. Mills.  Kevin Drum, a  huge cheerleader for catastrophic AGW, said about this chart:

So here’s your chart of the day: a 15-year history of electrical grid problems caused by increasingly extreme weather.

I will skip the next bit, wherein it appears that Dr. Mills is agreeing with my point that aging and increased capacity utilization on the grid could potentially increase weather-related grid outages without any actual change in the weather  (just from the grid being more sensitive or vulnerable)

OK, so next is where Mr. Mills weighs in on the key issue of the data set being a poor proxy, given the fact that most of the increase in the chart are due to better reporting rather than changes in the underlying phenomenon:

The potential for sampling bias was in fact identified early-on within the author team and—contrary to the blogger’s accusation—contact was in fact made with the person responsible for the data collection project at the US Energy Information Administration on June 10, 2008 (and with the same individual the blogger claims to have spoken to). At that time the material was discussed for an hour with the EIA official, who affirmed the relative growth was in weather-related events and that it could not be construed as an artifact of data collection changes, etc. That, and other points in this response, were re-affirmed through a follow up discussion in June 2009.

In fact, the analysis understates the scale of weather-related events in at least three ways:

• EIA noted that there are probably a higher proportion of weather events missing from their time series than non-weather ones (due to minimum threshold impacts required for inclusion, and under-reporting in thunderstorm-prone regions of the heartland).
• There was at least one change in EIA’s methodology that would have over-stated the growth in non-weather events, i.e., they added cyber attacks and islanding in 2001, which are both “non-weather-related”.
• Many of the events are described in ways that could be weather-related (e.g. “transmission interruption”) but not enough information is provided. We code such events as non-weather-related.

Dr. Mills does not like me using the “BS” word, so I will just say this is the purest caca. I want a single disinterested scientist to defend what Dr. Mills is saying. Remember:

• Prior to 1998, just about all the data is missing. There were pushes in 2001 and 2008 to try to fix under reporting.  Far from denying this, Dr. Mills reports the same facts.  So no matter how much dancing he does, much of the trend here is driven by increased reporting, not the underlying phenomenon.  Again, the underlying phenomenon may exist, but it certainly is not a 10x increase as reported in the caption.
• The fact that a higher proportion of the missing data is weather-related just underlines the point that the historic weather-related outage data is a nearly meaningless source of trend data for weather-related outages.
• His bullet points are written as if the totals matter, but the point of the chart was never totals.  I never said he was overstating weather related outages today.   The numbers in 2008 may still be (and probably are) understated.  And I have no idea even if 50 or 80 is high or low,  so absolute values have no meaning to me anyway.  The chart was designed to portray a trend — remember that first line of the caption “The number of incidents caused by extreme weather has increased tenfold since 1992. ” — not a point on absolute values.   What matters is therefore not how much is missing, but how much is missing in the early years as compared to the later years.
• In my original post I wrote, as Dr. Mills does, that the EIA data owner thinks there is a weather trend in the data if you really had quality data.  Fine.  But it is way, way less of a trend than shown in this chart.  And besides, when did the standards of “peer reviewed science” stoop to include estimates of government data analysts as to what the trend in the data would be if the data weren’t corrupted so badly.   (Also, the data analyst was only familiar with the data back to 1998 — the chart started in 1992.
• Dr. Mills was aware that the data had huge gaps before publication.  Where was the disclosure?  I didn’t see any disclosure.  I wonder if there was such disclosure in the peer reviewed study that used this data (my understanding is that there must have been one, because the rules of this report is that everything had to come from peer-reviewed sources).
• I don’t think any reasonable person could use this data set in a serious study knowing what the authors knew.  But reasonable people can disagree, though I will say that I think there is no ethical way anyone could have talked to the EIA in detail about this data and then used the 1992-1997 data.

Onward:

Thanks to the efforts of EIA, after they took over the responsibility of running the Department of Energy (DOE) data-collection process around 1997, it became more effective. Efforts were made in subsequent years to increase the response rate and upgrade the reporting form.

Thanks, you just proved my point about the trend being driven by changes in reporting and data collection intensity.

To adjust for potential response-rate biases, we have separated weather- and non-weather-related trends into indices and found an upward trend only in the weather-related time series.

As confirmed by EIA, if there were a systematic bias one would expect it to be reflected in both data series (especially since any given reporting site would report both types of events).

As an additional precaution, we focused on trends in the number of events (rather than customers affected) to avoid fortuitous differences caused by the population density where events occur. This, however, has the effect of understating the weather impacts because of EIA definitions (see survey methodology notes below).

Well, its possible this is true, though unhappily, this analysis was not published in the original report and was not published in this post.   I presume this means he has a non-weather time series that is flat for this period.  Love to see it, but this is not how the EIA portrayed the data to me.  But it really doesn’t matter – I think the fact that there is more data missing in the early years than the later years is indisputable, and this one fact drives a false trend.

But here is what I think is really funny- — the above analysis does not matter, because he is assuming a reporting bias symmetry, but just  a few paragraphs earlier he stated that there was actually an asymmetry.  Let me quote him again:

EIA noted that there are probably a higher proportion of weather events missing from their time series than non-weather ones (due to minimum threshold impacts required for inclusion, and under-reporting in thunderstorm-prone regions of the heartland).

Look Dr. Mills, I don’t have an axe to grind here.  This is one chart out of bazillions making a minor point.  But the data set you are using is garbage, so why do you stand by it with such tenacity?  Can’t anyone just admit “you know, on thinking about it, there are way to many problems with this data set to declare a trend exists.  Hopefully the EIA has it cleaned up now and we can watch it going forward.”  But I guess only “amateurs” make that kind of statement.

The blogger also speculated that many of the “extreme temperature” events were during cold periods, stating “if this is proof of global warming, why is the damage from cold and ice increasing as fast as other severe weather causes?” The statement is erroneous.

This was pure supposition in my first reaction to the chart.  I later admitted that I was wrong.  Most of the “temperature” effects are higher temperature.  But I will admit it again here – that supposition was incorrect.  He has a nice monthly distribution of the data to prove his point.

I am ready to leave this behind, though I will admit that Dr. Mills response leaves me more rather than less worried about the quality of the science here.  But to summarize, everything is minor compared to this point:  The caption says “The number of incidents caused by extreme weather has increased tenfold since 1992.”  I don’t think anyone, knowing about the huge underreporting in early years, and better reporting in later years, thinks that statement is correct.  Dr. Mills should be willing to admit it was incorrect.

Update: In case I am not explaining the issue well, here is a conceptual drawing of what is going on:

Update #2: One other thing I meant to post.  I want to thank Dr. Mills — this is the first time in quite a while I have received a critique of one of my posts without a single ad hominem attack, question about my source of funding, hypothesized links to evil forces, etc.  Also I am sorry I wrote “Mr.” rather than “Dr.” Mills.  Correction has been made.

I thought this article by Steve McIntyre was an interesting window on the IPCC process.  Frequent readers of this site know that I believe that feedbacks in the climate are the key issue of anthropogenic global warming, and their magnitude and sign separate mild, nearly unnoticeable warming from catastrophe.  McIntyre points out that the IPCC fourth assessment spent all of 1 paragraph in hundreds of pages on the really critical issue:

As we’ve discussed before (and is well known), clouds are the greatest source of uncertainty in climate sensitivity. Low-level (“boundary layer”) tropical clouds have been shown to be the largest source of inter-model difference among GCMs. Clouds have been known to be problematic for GCMs since at least the Charney Report in 1979. Given the importance of the topic for GCMs, one would have thought that AR4 would have devoted at least a chapter to the single of issue of clouds, with perhaps one-third of that chapter devoted to the apparently thorny issue of boundary layer tropical clouds.

This is what an engineering study would do – identify the most critical areas of uncertainty and closely examine all the issues related to the critical uncertainty. Unfortunately, that’s not how IPCC does things. Instead, clouds are treated in one subsection of chapter 8 and boundary layer clouds in one paragraph.

It turns out that this one paragraph was lifted almost intact from the work of the lead author of this section of the report.  The “almost” is interesting, though, because every single change made was to eliminate or tone down any conclusion that cloud feedback might actually offset greenhouse warming.  He has a nearly line by line comparison, which is really fascinating.  One sample:

Bony et al 2006 had stated that the “empirical” Klein and Hartmann (1993) correlation “leads” to a substantial increase in low cloud cover, which resulted in a “strong negative” cloud feedback. Again IPCC watered this down: “leads to” became a “suggestion” that it “might be” associated with a “negative cloud feedback” – the term “strong” being dropped by IPCC.

Remember this is in the context of a report that generally stripped out any words that implied doubt or lack of certainty on the warming side.