As the climate conference in Copenhagen opens today, the democratization of expertise reaches new heights of danger. Scientifically illiterate people, shown a glimpse of how real science works, understanding nothing about it, pull random quotes that are supposed to be scary. They shouldn't be, and they aren't to me.
I am not a climate scientist, but I do read the major journals, and I know what words scientists use when communicating with one-another (but not with the public). Apropos, we come to the first supposedly controversial email
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Hey, look at that, a "trick"...but he says it's a "Nature trick". What the hell does that mean? It means that it's a 'trick' that was PUBLISHED IN THE MOST PROMINENT SCIENCE JOURNAL, which is called Nature. What he means is that there is a good method for inserting real measured temperatures as substitutes for another data set, which is a completely legitimate way of presenting the data and drawing inferences. If you don't like it, you too can come up with another way of analyzing the data. Guess what? Either way, global warming is not in doubt. The care that's going into this graph is to help understand the scope of global warming, the rate, mechanisms, feedback loops, and other things.
But what of "hiding the decline"? Isn't that damning. No. Hiding the decline refers to the fact that tree ring data doesn't seem to agree with actual measured temperatures, which indicates that there is some uncertainty about when tree ring temperature data is valid. We use the best data available...measured temperatures! What would you do? Now, I wouldn't publish a document using the word "hide", but it's nothing nefarious.
The other paper by MM is just garbage - as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also
losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well - frequently as I see
it.
I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep
them
out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !
Cheers
This isn't mere squabbling among peers. Jones thinks that the paper is bullshit, written by a hack. Trust me, science has hacks. If you go to the APS March Meeting (which is humongous) you can find the hack sessions. Entire sessions of people whose work is accepted to have no scholarly merit. But APS turns no man away, so they at least have the good taste to group the hacks together. And man, do you know it when you get caught in one. I have seen talks denying tenets of quantum mechanics, proposing the fabrication of materials which are nonsense, denying the existence of black holes, and worse. Jones sees shit and wants it out of the most important conference on climate change. Good! I hope somebody out there is fighting against denialism when it really matters.
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on
2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our
observing system is inadequate.
This is only a little bit messier. The problem he seems to be addressing is political, and not scientific. Over the past ten years, if you draw a line, you don't get a net temperature increase, based on the raw data. The reason that no cogent explanation for this has come forth is that climate science is really hard! That is, it's hard to make short-term predictions or say much of anything about recent times. As the time scale gets larger, the data are much easier to explain, as effects like El Nino become averaged out and the real phenomena emerge. Keep this in mind: global warming declarations by scientists are always couched as urgent when applied to LONG TIMES. Don't give me 10 years of data and try to draw an inference, let alone one year of data (if I hear one more asshole say that he doesn't see global warming because today is so damned cold...)
Science is hard. Scientists do a pretty good job keeping the public's well-deserved trust by being careful about presentation. Otherwise, those without training can be easily swayed by people with ulterior motives by putting a quote out of context. We don't show every data set that didn't work out because somebody forgot to turn on the preamp, or the water-cooling broke that day, or whatever. We make judgments and we go with what we believe. If the idiots win this fight because they got a peek behind the curtain, we will pay an awfully high price.