Climate Audit

I would not recommend reading realclimate.org without also reading climate audit and watts up with that: http://climateaudit.org/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/

> Citation please? http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=6789 quotes them saying they no longer had the raw data in August. > why didn't they say as much in their statement about the loss? When exactly did they not say this? They say it on their statement on their website which is currently down but cached at http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:mcd09WUmm08J:https://www.cru.uea.… > Furthermore, why did Jones, Mann, et. al. spend so much time talking about "hiding from" (their words) FoI requests if the data being requested were lost? Presumably they were talking about different data. > The proper response is to re-establish those results as quickly and conclusively as possible. If this debacle leads to that happening then that would be a great outcome. I don't get the impression that's mostly what CRU's critics want though.

If you're interested in winning, you will destroy your opponents' arguments. But if you're interested in the truth, you will fix their arguments for them to the best of your ability, and then set out to update your position accordingly. To make an impression on me, don't go looking for easily dismantled arguments. Pick your most formidable intellectual opponents. Try arguing successfully against the best available brand of "denialism" (what a word!) - the blog Climate Audit. For example, explain to me this: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=5902 .

The IPCC is supposed to summarize the state of the existing literature, but it was born political, tends to attracts eco-activists of all sorts and relies more than it should on "grey literature" - unrefereed "reports" written by ecological organizations. The IPCC also to some degree generates the consensus it is supposed to be merely reporting on, in that the lead authors have been known to push specific articles into print supporting "their side" of things and delay articles supporting "the other side" with IPCC deadlines in mind so that their side gets the last word. That's one part of the process where excess alarmism gets to creep in. On the other side, your sources are correct that the result then gets massaged into acceptability. The "summary for policymakers" in particular is the result of political compromises - various country's representatives argue about it and then the rest of the document in some cases gets rewritten to reflect what the summary says, leaving nobody happy. Nonetheless, the IPCC documents aren't terrible and do tend to be worth reading if you really want to know what's going on. On being "past skepticism": The most credible skeptics tend to be "lukewarmers". They believe reality is a bit more complicated and uncertain than has been portrayed, they tend to suspect climate sensitivity is a lot lower than the models predict and they tend to be suspicious of doomsday claims generally. But almost nobody at this point doubts "CO2 is a greenhouse gas"…

I've followed Steve McIntyre for awhile, and it is in fact shameful, damning, and unscientific how ardently climate scientists have fought to keep their data from him when he has requested it to check their models. The problem seems to be particularly acute among the old guard of the profession. Seeing the other side of the conversation doesn't add a whole lot, we already knew what bastards they are. For those who haven't checked out Steve's work, look at http://www.climateaudit.org/ . But be warned, if you're looking for politics over numbers, he will put you to sleep. And the server is getting hammered at the moment. But please book mark it and go back later. His blog is an important piece of the internet, what we all thought the internet could be before lolcats disillusioned us. It doesn't surprise me to see a lot of people here coming to the climate scientists' defense. They are, after all, a popular and respected group in society at the moment. But when you cherry-pick data, create unreproducible models, and then refuse to share your data with other people, you ought to lose a little bit of that respect. We will get precisely the quality of science we enforce, which at present is any quality of science the authoritative voices in the area chose to give us. When Steve has been successful at obtaining the data he wants, he has been able to find flaws in various analyses. If you come from a scientific perspective, that ought to be great news! Independent confirmation or…

The study you cite is neither predictive nor evidence based. It is a speculative, after the fact explanation: "We used computer-generated simulations to get this research result. I hope that in the future we'll be able to verify this result with real data through a long-term ice thickness measurement campaign." ( http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/06/050630064726.htm ) That doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong. But it is not evidence, nor is it conclusive. There is simply no reason to believe Powell's explanation over the explanation I cited in my previous comment. The NASA explanation is based on actual observation rather than computer simulations. The climate is so complex that you can always come up with an after the fact explanation. The only way to judge science is either a) by the predictions it makes or b) following the chain of deductive reasoning. Predictions are not really possible with climate science in the short term because there are too many variables. So that leaves b). I have not studied the science behind sea ice changes closely. But many of the global climate models have been subjected to egregious tuning: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2475 Given what we know about CO2, hard to see how it could be otherwise, but not worth arguing over. The effect of CO2 on temperature is both a) logarithmic and b) non-cumulative. For models to predict a levels of warming that are actually alarming, the models must include feedback loops. No one knows…

Ah! Circumlocution. My new favourite word :) I had a look at the Navier-Stokes stuff and what I found was incredible complicated maths. I'd like it if you'd linked out to some discussions on this topic but in any case I was able to find this [0] which takes the position that many climate scientists have invoked Navier-Stokes as a theoretical basis but mathematicians in general consider the finer details of NS behaviour at this scale to be (practically) unknowable. My personal insight from an information science pov is that NS would be the wrong tool to use. It looks like an exhaustive model used at a fine-grained scale that would be simply too complex at macro level. [0] https://climateaudit.org/2005/12/22/gcms-and-the-navier-stokes-equatio…

climateaudit.org ( http://climateaudit.org/ ) examines sometimes the technical issues in climate research. Pretty much guaranteed to be opposed by many HN readers, but interesting reading regardless.

Check out http://climateaudit.org/. He has obtained lots of data and caught bad data which exaggerates global warming.

What happened? Simple. The data and/or methodology that was used to calculate the huge increase was incorrect. Steve McIntyre finally got hold of the raw tree-ring data that was used in the now famous hockey stick graph. He claims that they cherry-picked data to support the conclusions they wanted. He has recently got hold of the raw data (after a decade of trying) and has rerun the data and generated a graph that seems to predict the climate of the past couple of decades correctly (R source code included). http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7168

It was never debunked. Like a lot of stuff in climate climatologists simply referred back to their own totally corrupted data and then asserted there was no problem. You link to BEST, but BEST is a good example of their strategy. BEST's list of "very rural" weather stations include weather stations in the middle of international airports and cities. Climatologists don't collect their own data, they just scrape stuff from the internet and whatever other random datasets they can OCR so their data is often GIGO. Obviously if you classify weather stations as rural when they're not, you will conclude UHI isn't important, but this just means you're bad at science, not that the effect doesn't exist. Anyone who has ever driven through a city into the countryside knows that UHI exists and has a significant effect. https://climateaudit.org/2011/12/20/berkeley-very-rural-data/ The Berkeley classification in Thailand also looks very suspect. As in Peru, many of the “very rural” sites are small cities. Some locations look suspicious. “Bangkok Pilot” is shown as “very rural”, but when googled is associated with Suvarnabhumi, the name of the very urban Bangkok airport (data is sparse, so it may be something else, but anything associated in any way with Bangkok can hardly be “very rural”) This isn't the only example either. They loooooove to pretend that weather stations sited right next to jet aircraft engines reflect the temperature in the nearest tiny village.

You ask good questions, and raise good points. Since one can't read all the primary sources, how can you decide who to trust? In this case, I don't think there is a simple and logically defensible answer. Normally, your best bet would be to trust that the recognized experts in the field probably have it right. But I think Climate Science is so politicized at this point that unless you can sit down and have a beer at a backyard BBQ with those experts, anything you read is more likely to be well-calculated propaganda than the experts' true beliefs. The data presented in the papers is largely true, but the ancillary spin is so strong that it's hard to know what to conclude without a close reading of the entire paper. And even then, the choice of which papers are published in which journals makes it hard to know how much weight to put on what. So you ask why to trust Willis Eschenbach. For me, I trust him because I've been reading his comments on ClimateAudit.org for well over a decade, and I've never seen him attempt to mislead. He's occasionally wrong, and but readily owns up to his errors. My impression from reading him over many years is that he's a smart guy who believes what he's saying, knows a lot about the field, has no obvious conflicts of interest, and does his best to be accurate. I don't feel like the SkepticalScience.com post you linked to treats him fairly. Since that post considers him together with McIntyre, the best answer I can provide is that…

> "My mind is mostly made up, due to the fact I believe that the energy sector has a much higher profit motive to distort the facts than the academic one, but in any case:" The "we're all gonna die" faction gets four orders of magnitude more funding each year than the global warming skeptic faction. Oil company spending on climate science propaganda consists of a few $million here or these, and the best skeptics don't even take any of their money. The best ones are unpaid amateurs (like Steve McIntyre) or they achieved a position in academia decades ago before belief in global warming became required to advance. I suggest you read some skeptics like Steve[1] and see if you think he is as evil as Phil Jones thinks he is[2]. Moreover, the environmentalists control the institutions which create public opinion - namely the media and the universities. I'm guessing this is how your opinion was formed[3]. It's remarkable how utterly dominant cultural forces can see themselves as underdogs. [1] http://climateaudit.org/2012/05/06/yamal-foi-sheds-new-light-on-flawed… [2] http://www.therightplanet.com/2011/11/phil-jones-for-your-eyes-only-em… [3] http://anomalyuk.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-modern-structure.html

> And here is a recent climate paper by Gergis which was retracted after the blogosphere found flaws while attempting to replicate their work: > http://climateaudit.org/2012/06/10/more-on-screening-in-gerg... The link is to a website that clearly has the agenda of "anti-climate-crisis" and is run by a guy named Steve McIntyre, who, surprise surprise, appears to be from the mining and minerals exploration business, either as a finance guy or lawyer or both, per his own words here: "Previously, I spent about 35 years in the mining and mineral exploration business. During the last 20 years of this, I worked in the micro-cap exploration business and have a great deal of practical experience in dealing with prospectus and securities issues from the company point of view. Concepts like audit trails, due diligence and full, true and plain disclosure become second nature when you work in such an environment. ............ For McIntyre, undertaking this project has required an unpaid leave of absence from his career in mineral exploration financing, at the cost of over a year’s foregone earnings so far." ............. Wikipedia: "Stephen McIntyre is a Canadian mathematician, former minerals prospector, and semi-retired mining consultant (...) In 2011 he became Chairman of the Board of Trelawney Mining and Exploration Inc." Thus, probably a shill, and/or somebody with a financial incentive to hold his views, combined with a lack of relevant expertise. Bad combo. And unlikely to be…

Take a bunch of data. Go through this data by hand and select which data to use and which to throw away. Use proprietary models to adjust some of the data. Use proprietary models to merge data series from different sources, some of which conflict with each other, into a unified whole. When asked, refuse to divulge your models, your adjustments, or the raw data, delete data if necessary to avoid anyone else, especially critics, getting hold of it. Given such methods one could provide support for just about any hypothesis using just about any sufficiently large set of data. Unfortunately, this appears to be the modus operandi of the CRU. Which is a tad bit disconcerting if one wants to hold any confidence in the CRU's findings, to put it mildly. The theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is dependent upon having reliable climate models (specifically those that show that CO2 is such a predominant driver of climate that the increases in CO2 emissions due to human activity throughout the 21st century will not only be the overwhelming force shaping climate but will force a dramatic shift to a much warmer climate). The proof of reliable climate models is dependent upon accurate historic climate data. Over the last 2 decades or so it appeared that climate researchers, most of them associated with the CRU, had not only constructed accurate climate models, but had produced reconstructions of historical climate which showed a dramatic uptick in global average…

AGW is a myth. http://www.climateaudit.org/

That paper comes from the same group as the original MM paper (one of the authors studied under Mann even), has some of the same problems and was itself rebutted: https://climateaudit.org/2006/08/30/wahl-and-ammann-again-1/ WA reported that reconstructions without bristlecones (their Scenario 6) lack “skill” in reconstruction and “climatological meaning”, a finding with which we concur. The NAS Panel says that bristlecones should be avoided in temperature reconstructions. Thus, MBH-type reconstructions (with PC networks) with or without bristlecones are both eliminated. So much for the “refutation” of our criticisms.

I was thinking exactly this too. And found quite a few other articles about glacier archaeology, like this one: https://climateaudit.org/2005/11/18/archaeological-finds-in-retreating… As it dates back from 2005... I'm not sure the parent one will spark any doubt either

Every trick in the book? https://climateaudit.org/2016/04/19/gavin-schmidt-and-reference-period… Who is right?

For another view of this issue: https://climateaudit.org/tag/gergis/

Be careful in selecting your "other side" -- the examples you use to define it may have been brought by "your side." I can't speak for the other two, but I'm guessing you're not thinking of Steve McIntyre. Eg, go here and have a productive conversation: http://climateaudit.org/2016/01/05/update-of-model-observation-compari…

This is from another blog, but the figures are from draft versions of the latest IPCC report: http://climateaudit.org/2013/10/08/fixing-the-facts-2/ The figure that was removed shows that measured temperatures are falling outside a 95% confidence interval from the multi-model mean. This does not mean the climate will not warm, that C02 is not the major factor (or at least a major factor), but it does mean the models that are used for 100 year projections have failed after after 15 years and are running too hot. It should be cause for celebration. The highest warming scenarios are considerably less likely. This also does not mean that an emissions tax and spending on R&D on low emissions energy sources is unwise. But it should be factored into cost benefit analysis of climate change response. Ultimately response to climate change is a public policy problem and is not just based on scientific data and projections. Really, the response boils down to one question, how much is each of us willing to pay per year to respond? $10, $100, $1000, $10000?

Well, the "auditors" are called denialists and attacked from many sides -- even though they are the only ones who publish full source code, push for raw data release, and actually try to replicate results. We are making $100T decisions on the basis of $1M papers and closed datasets. Regarding retraction, I think this is pretty unambiguous http://climateaudit.org/2012/06/08/gergis-et-al-put-on-hold/ Dear Stephen, I am contacting you on behalf of all the authors of the Gergis et al (2012) study ‘Evidence of unusual late 20th century warming from an Australasian temperature reconstruction spanning the last millennium’ An issue has been identified in the processing of the data used in the study, which may affect the results. While the paper states that “both proxy climate and instrumental data were linearly detrended over the 1921–1990 period”, we discovered on Tuesday 5 June that the records used in the final analysis were not detrended for proxy selection, making this statement incorrect. Although this is an unfortunate data processing issue, it is likely to have implications for the results reported in the study. The journal has been contacted and the publication of the study has been put on hold. This is a normal part of science. The testing of scientific studies through independent analysis of data and methods strengthens the conclusions. In this study, an issue has been identified and the results are being…