
A Top Climate Scientist Blows the Whistle on Flawed Climate Science - sharemywin
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444668/whistle-blower-scientist-exposes-shoddy-climate-science-noaa
======
saalweachter
A counterpoint to this claim at the hoity-toity mashable.com:
[http://mashable.com/2017/02/05/noaa-global-warming-hiatus-
st...](http://mashable.com/2017/02/05/noaa-global-warming-hiatus-story/)

It misses a most important point: when people talk about a "global warming
hiatus" from 1998 to 20XX, _they are always full of shit_.

1998 was an abnormally warm year. When people say things like "The last N
years were N of the N+1 warmest on record", 1998 is always that +1. The trend-
line for global warming only just now started to creep above 1998; it was like
2 or 3 standard deviations above the average.

If you start your trend lines at 1998, they always look flat, because you are
starting at an outlier. If you take a trend line over a different period - for
instance, 1990 to 2010 - the "global warming hiatus" goes away and the data
looks like a normal noisy data series conforming reasonably to a linear trend.

If you see someone talking about climate data over a period of time starting
at 1998, _they are full of shit_. They are using one of the most obvious and
well-known lies-told-with-statistics you'll ever come across.

~~~
lotsoflumens
If you see someone talking about __climate __data over a period of time less
than a million years, they are full of shit.

------
cholantesh
Ars Technica explains this quite well in a piece [1] published yesterday. The
paper's original dataset was replaced with an updated one that was run through
the same algorithms that NOAA had previously used. The updated dataset better
reflects findings that other scientific bodies had released that counter the
claim of a warming 'slowdown', partly because they used a richer array of
sources. At the end of the day, the trend is not that different, and the trend
is still one of warming. Ho-hum.

[1] - [https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/article-names-
whistl...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/article-names-
whistleblower-who-told-congress-that-noaa-manipulated-data/)

~~~
nonbel
What is with the weird title there? It is written as if we should already know
about the existence of such a whistleblower, or maybe it was written up before
the name was known.

One possibility is he tried to whistleblow to the Washington post, but they
sent it to the whistleblow targets, allowing them to develop talking points:

"He submitted an earlier, shorter version of this essay to the Washington
Post, in response to the 13 December article (climate scientists frantically
copying data). The WaPo rejected his op-ed, so he decided to publish at
Climate Etc." [https://judithcurry.com/2017/02/04/climate-scientists-
versus...](https://judithcurry.com/2017/02/04/climate-scientists-versus-
climate-data/)

~~~
cholantesh
It was published a day after the Mail article was, and that so it's not
unreasonable to assume that readers are aware of its content - ie, that such a
whistleblower exists.

~~~
nonbel
Here is the title: "Article names “whistleblower” who told Congress that NOAA
manipulated data"

In the original source there is a giant picture of him at the top:
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4192182/World...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4192182/World-
leaders-duped-manipulated-global-warming-data.html)

Why is his name so important to someone who would have either not heard of
this, or just read an article prominently featuring the guy? It is definitely
odd.

~~~
cholantesh
From the Ars piece:

>[This] latest article is noteworthy in that it appears to reveal the supposed
“whistleblower” who has been cited by the US House Science Committee in its
ongoing clash with climate scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA).

The Mail made Bates a subject of import, and another outlet is responding.
What is odd about this, exactly?

~~~
nonbel
Well, I found this. Now it looks like that part of the Ars article is "fake
news":

"Yesterday, Bates said he was contacted by the Science Committee for the first
time only after the story broke. He said he has not communicated with anyone
there before and was not a whistleblower for the committee previously but that
he expected to be invited to Washington to testify at a future hearing."

[http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060049630](http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060049630)

~~~
cholantesh
That part of the Ars article is restating a claim made in the Daily Mail
article. Also, Lamar has been making the claim for awhile [1] that he has
whistleblowers in the NOAA, which is where the link comes from.

[1] - [http://www.npr.org/2015/12/07/458476435/is-this-
congressmans...](http://www.npr.org/2015/12/07/458476435/is-this-congressmans-
oversight-an-effort-to-hobble-climate-science)

~~~
nonbel
>"That part of the Ars article is restating a claim made in the Daily Mail
article."

Wow, this is why I ignore the news. What a clusterfuck. However, I cannot find
the part you are talking about in the Daily Mail article after a search. Can
you quote it?

------
viraptor
I really don't understand the complaint in the article.

> He claimed to have developed a way to raise sea-temperature readings that
> had been collected by buoys: He would adjust them by using higher
> temperature readings of sea water collected by ships.

So actually it's due to ships being used before, that the data needs to be
corrected. And they're using comparison between the buoys and the ships
running at the same time. This is the same story as the sensors which were
running in the cities and needed to be moved into the remote countryside in
the US to account for city heat. I get that he doesn't like that the bouys
readings were raised rather than ships, but relatively, why would it matter?

The linked article says:

> Now, some of those same authors have produced the pending, revised new
> version of the sea dataset – ERSSTv5. A draft of a document that explains
> the methods used to generate version 5, and which has been seen by this
> newspaper, indicates the new version will reverse the flaws in version 4,
> changing the buoy adjustments and including some satellite data and
> measurements from a special high-tech floating buoy network known as Argo.

Soooo.... basically exactly what he wanted?

~~~
nonbel
After looking it up quickly, it seems that one step really was raising the
buoy values by a single constant, but this was only a tiny part of a much more
involved process.

"The SSTs from ships or buoys were accepted (rejected) under a QC criterion
that observed SSTs differ from the first-guess SST from ERSST.v3b by less
(more) than 4 times standard deviation (STD) of SST (Smith and Reynolds 2003).
The ship and buoy SSTs that have passed QC were then converted into SSTAs by
subtracting the SST climatology (1971–2000) at their in situ locations in
monthly resolution. The ship SSTA was adjusted based on theNMATcomparators;
_buoy SSTA was adjusted by a mean difference of 0.12 C between ship and buoy
observations (section 5)_. The ship and buoy SSTAs were merged and bin-
averaged into monthly ‘‘superobservations’’ on a 28 3 28 grid. The number of
superobservations was defined here as the count of 28 3 28 grid boxes with
valid data. The averaging of ship and buoy SSTAs within each 28 3 28 grid box
was based on their proportions to the total number of observations. The number
of buoy observations was multiplied by a factor of 6.8, which was determined
by the ratio of randomerror variances of ship and buoy observations (Reynolds
and Smith 1994), suggesting that buoy observations exhibit much lower random
variance than ship observations. The SSTAs of superobservations were further
decomposed into low- and high-frequency components. The low-frequency
component was constructed by applying a 268 3 268 spatial running mean using
monthly superobservations where the sampling ratio is larger than 3% (five
superobservations). An annual mean SSTA was then defined with a minimum
requirement of two months of valid data. The annual mean SSTA fields were
screened and the missing SSTAs were filled by searching the neighboring SSTAs
within 108 in longitude, 68 in latitude, and 3-yr in time. The search areas
were tested using ranges of 158–208 in longitude, 58–108 in latitude, and 2–5
yr..."

[http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00006.1](http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00006.1)

It would be much easier to understand if they just showed us the code...

------
nonbel
I think, as usual, the media has obscured rather than clarified what is going
on here. If you read his own words, you will see John Bates is accusing NOAA
(in particular, Tom Karl) of _p-hacking_. He claims they are changing the
significance cutoff, choosing which data/processing to include based on
statistical significance of a trend, and that this process is not
reproducible.

"I questioned another co-author about why they choose to use a 90% confidence
threshold for evaluating the statistical significance of surface temperature
trends, instead of the standard for significance of 95% — he also expressed
reluctance and did not defend the decision.

[...]

Tom Karl constantly had his ‘thumb on the scale’—in the documentation,
scientific choices, and release of datasets

[...]

Tom Karl liked the maturity matrix so much, he modified the matrix categories
so that he could claim a number of NCEI products were “Examples of “Gold”
standard NCEI Products (Data Set Maturity Matrix Model Level 6).”

[...]

Since the version GHCNM3.X never went through any ORR, the resulting dataset
was also never archived, and it is virtually impossible to replicate the
result in K15.

[...]

The withholding of the operational version of this important update came in
the middle of a major ENSO event, thereby depriving the public of an important
source of updated information, apparently for the sole purpose of Mr. Karl
using the data in his paper before making the data available to the public."

[https://judithcurry.com/2017/02/04/climate-scientists-
versus...](https://judithcurry.com/2017/02/04/climate-scientists-versus-
climate-data/)

So statements like this are rendered meaningless:

>"Also, the new global trends are statistically significant and positive at
the 0.10 significance level for 1998–2012"
[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1469.full](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1469.full)

Personally, I know such statements about statistically significant deviations
from a strawman nil-null hypothesis are always meaningless. However, perhaps
this will open up a few more people's eyes to the awful state of affairs NHST
has brought us.

------
conjectures
lol. Difficult to take the original Mail article seriously. A look at the
temperature rise graph [1] tells you a lot. Bizarrely they've started the
y-axis at a value lower than the '97 baseline meaning the slope of a line
through the data _looks_ shallower than it is.

Secondly their interpretation of the graph is messed up. The Met Office data
tracks the NOAA data, but looks to be lower by a constant. This means you'd
expect that the _slope_ of a regression line through each of the two data sets
would be very similar.

Why did they choose 1997 as a baseline (why does anyone choose the baselines
they do)? '1997' doesn't appear in the article. '2000' appears in the article.
Oh look, the temperature was lower in 2000 meaning the slope would appear
greater if the graph matched the discussion. [I don't know who is pulling a
fast one here]

[1]
[http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/02/04/23/3CD7C57C0000057...](http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/02/04/23/3CD7C57C00000578-4192182-image-a-90_1486249374130.jpg)

------
markwaldron
The National Review isn't a science magazine. When it says things like "And in
the most Obama-esque move" and references The Cato Institute, you have to take
what they are saying with a grain of salt.

~~~
ytjohn
The main thing that caught my eye in this article was that it using
dailymail.co.uk as it's source. It's rather common to see an article originate
on dailymail, then get repeated by a hundred other news-like sites. They all
use that first article as their only source, and no follow up.

~~~
vixen99
its source

------
clarkevans
Is this a regurgitation of David Rose's critique?

[edit: this "debate" confuses me, is there a summary/reference somewhere?]

~~~
anon1385
It's a regurgitation of the Mail on Sunday's latest nonsense.

The MoS article did at least provide some humour by 'proving' misconduct by
using a doctored graph:
[https://twitter.com/ClimateOfGavin/status/828082851585388544](https://twitter.com/ClimateOfGavin/status/828082851585388544)

It's funny how David Rose continues to get baselines wrong despite it being
explained to him hundreds of times. Even more strange is how his 'inadvertent'
baseline errors always end up supporting his latest wacky conspiracy theory…

------
sharemywin
It's sad some scientists go to far in manipulating data to fit their model,
but that doesn't mean every scientist is crooked.

Anecdotal fallacy – using a personal experience or examples to extrapolate
without a statistically significant number of cases that could form
scientifically compelling evidence.

~~~
gtf21
It's sadder that someone is posting National Review articles on HN.

~~~
grzm
There's a wide variety of views among HN members. Reading a variety of
sources, including those you may not agree with, is a good way to understand
issues from different perspectives.

If you believe a submission is inappropriate for HN, flag it and move on.

~~~
gtf21
That sort of depends on believing that all publications are of equal quality,
or that there is no universal measure of quality in journalism and science.

While there are a range of perfectly good publications from across the
political spectrum (well, probably not right across it but the fringes rarely
produce well researched pieces), it is not true to say that any publication /
PoV is of equal validity / newsworthiness as any other. The Daily Mail (in the
UK) is a good example of a publication with |editorial value| < ε.

~~~
grzm
Sure, there's crap journalism all over the spectrum, some of it barely worthy
of the name. The National Review is hardly the Daily Mail. While you may not
agree with the opinions of its commentators, it's far from a tabloid. Over the
years it's consistently valued and published high quality commentary and
political opinion.

------
tzs
This article address many of the incorrect claims being made about the dataset
and processes: [http://icarus-maynooth.blogspot.com.au/2017/02/on-mail-on-
su...](http://icarus-maynooth.blogspot.com.au/2017/02/on-mail-on-sunday-
article-on-karl-et-al.html?spref=tw)

------
BugsJustFindMe
Why is nationalreview being posted here? This partisan toadying dross isn't
fit to be HN's toilet paper.

