

Flawed climate data - BearOfNH
http://www.financialpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=2056988

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ghosttrails
Surely the flabbergasting thing is not whether this proves or disproves GW but
that scientists are allowed to flat-out refuse to release the raw data they
used to generate results.

~~~
mechanical_fish
A collection of raw data is full of systematic errors, accidental mistakes,
misleading black swans, and false trails (some of which get followed for years
before they finally turn out to be false). I've seen several talented, well-
trained, and highly experienced scientists fool themselves for decades with
their _own_ raw data. That's why it is called _raw_. That's why you have to
_analyze_ data, over and over, until you can't stand it anymore, and only
publish the last tiny fraction that comes out: Your best work, the stuff that
you're confident in and prepared to stand behind. And that's why there's a lot
more to science than just reading a lot of numbers off the front panel of your
instrument and sticking them up on the web.

If I were a scientist in a controversial field, where every dropped decimal
point, statistical anomaly, and speculative sentence (later to be disproved,
and to make even its own author blush with the memory) was liable to be mined
out of my notebooks and splashed all over the tabloids, I'd sure as hell
refuse to release my raw data. Indeed, I might just decide not to release any
data at all, but just switch to another field. That's obviously one of the
goals of this campaign of intimidation.

~~~
sorbus
One of the core parts of modern science is reproducable results - to allow
anyone to take data, follow through the methods used, and locate errors (or
see if something is an anomaly, in the case of experiments). Without it,
science is basically meaningless - one must rely on the word of a group of
people for their conclusion, and it is essentially pointless to publish the
method (as it's impossible for anyone to recreate the research).

~~~
mechanical_fish
You have to release data and methods that allow other people to recreate the
research. (And, obviously, your colleagues are free to object that you haven't
published enough, and to ask you for more.)

But that's not the same as releasing everything you ever write down to anyone
who asks, which is what the original comment seemed to be suggesting.

The problem with your raw data is that, in the hands of an opponent,
_especially_ one who argues in bad faith, the word _raw_ is quickly and easily
filed off and it gets described as "your data", despite the fact that _you
threw it away_ and didn't publish it, presumably for a reason.

It's easy to make a scientist look ridiculous -- to a nonscientist -- by
poking fun at their unpublished data, just as it's easy to make a great
novelist look ridiculous by poking fun at their grocery lists, their
kindergarten handwriting assignments, or their unpublished first drafts.

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patrickgzill
There is one part that sticks in my craw, that is, the part about the
correction applied for post-1960 tree ring data.

It smacks of corporate / bureaucratic mindset that there was (apparently) so
little effort to find out _why_ the tree ring data diverged after 1960.

Wouldn't a scientist be fascinated by the question of why this divergence was
occurring-instead of just accepting it happened?

Example: Feynman wondered if he could describe in mathematical terms the way
that a spinning plate would wobble. He took it as a challenge to himself as a
physicist to determine this, despite it not appearing to have any practical
application. These calculations later led to his work on electron spin.

THAT is the level of curiosity I would expect from people at a top flight
research institution. Or am I wrong, and there was a lot of research to
determine the tree ring divergence?

~~~
TeHCrAzY
I beleive that, even as the idealistic "curious scientist", one would have
priorities. Perhaps it wasn't interesting enough compared to the myriad of
other things one could be working on.

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guelo
This McKitrick guy is like a cockroach that keeps poping back up. Not only are
there TONS of datasources besides the tree ring proxies that he is so obsessed
with (<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/>), his specific
claims have been rejected many times including by peer reviewed sources such
as Nature.

[http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/myths-...](http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/myths-
vs-fact-regarding-the-hockey-stick/)

[http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/false-...](http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/false-
claims-by-mcintyre-and-mckitrick-regarding-the-mann-et-al-1998reconstruction/)

[http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&...](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=3&ved=0CA4QFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.realclimate.org%2Findex.php%3Fp%3D98lp_lang_view%3Dfr&ei=QTYXS_myJpGIsgOulPGcDg&usg=AFQjCNHWtWJ8gNZzvxIPmHlKmccI0qThsw&sig2=k27aZwbMFh_k7xHuBz9dxw)

~~~
anamax
The released e-mail reveal that the peer-review process was hacked.

And, since that e-mail also shows that realclimate is one of the participants
in the supression of contrary views from the beginning, citing it as evidence
now is ....

~~~
guelo
Ok this is preposterous. If the entire peer-review process was "hacked" we
can't trust any climate science? I guess all that science must be thrown away
with the coal companies' refuse water.

~~~
anamax
> If the entire peer-review process was "hacked" we can't trust any climate
> science?

Pretty much. We don't know how the data was adjusted and the original data
seems to be unavailable. Given that, what's to trust? Maybe they're right,
maybe they're wrong, but without data....

There is other data, from folks that disagree with the CRU folks....

~~~
guelo
f u hope you get ebola

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rjurney
How reliant are we overall on tree data to track temperature trends?

~~~
thaumaturgy
Climate scientists rely on (at least, but not limited to) oceanic temperature
measurements, satellite measurements, and worldwide ground temperature
measurements for current data modeling.

Historical data sources include ice cores, tree ring data, geological data
(e.g. evidence of past glacial activity), and coral analysis. To some extent,
human sources can also be used for historical data -- journals and old weather
station logs -- however, I think those are generally considered to be examples
of local weather events rather than climate data.

~~~
rjurney
And what do the other data sources say about temperature in comparison to the
tree data?

~~~
thaumaturgy
I'm glad you asked!

The first thing we have to acknowledge is that paleoclimatology yields
century-term trends; it's not able to tell us the precise local temperatures
of a given day 500 years ago, for example.

So what climate scientists do is establish "ranges of uncertainty"; their
graphs and data show that, given the raw data, the reconstructed temperature
was somewhere between Y1 and Y2 for a particular hundred-year period.

After comparing the reconstructions, going as far back as a.d. 1000,
scientists are finding that every source of paleoclimatic data that they can
come up with is showing that current temperatures are well above historical
temperatures, even after taking the uncertainty into account.

That is, this century is the warmest global century since a.d. 1000, even if
all of the paleoclimatic data were interpreted as warmly as possible.

They don't agree precisely in the shape of the graph -- glacial studies show a
slightly different-shaped graph than borehole studies do, for example -- but
the aggregate graphs do all agree on a warming trend over the last century.

However, in geological terms, a warming trend over a thousand-year period is
not that big of an indicator. So what happens if we go back further?

There is a paper [1] which uses data from several other studies to reconstruct
temperature deviations at 20 different global locations over a 2000-year
period. It argues that the statistical methods used in other paleoclimate
models are flawed, and uses a different statistical method which concludes
that, in the absence of tree ring data, the Medieval Warm Period (approx. 950
a.d. to 1250 a.d.) was warmer than the current century.

I don't have the necessary background in statistics to be able to analyze the
two different methods. However, even if we take that paper at face value,
2000-year data is still not geologically significant.

So, we turn to Antarctic ice cores. Specifically, data from the Vostok ice
core sample shows a clear 150,000 year warming and cooling cycle, going back
about 400,000 years ago (with increasing uncertainty).

At first glance, someone might think that this is damning evidence in the case
for AGW. However, the recent thousand year period is a mere blip on a graph
stretching back 400,000 years, so it's difficult to see the part that has
climate scientists really concerned:

The amount of CO2 currently in the atmosphere, and reconstructed over the last
thousand years, is dramatically greater than at any other point in the last
400,000 years. Specifically, CO2 concentrations have peaked at around 300 ppmv
during the 150,000 year cycle, but are currently at around 383 ppmv.

To put this in perspective, the difference between the amount of CO2 in the
atmosphere now, versus the amount in the peaks of the last 400,000 years, is
close to the same as the difference between the peaks and the troughs.

So while the Earth clearly does have its own warming and cooling cycle, we
have induced a dramatic change in the cycle, which should lead to some
interesting results.

(Further reading: "Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000
Years", free download at <http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11676>)

[1]: <http://www.ncasi.org/publications/Detail.aspx?id=3025>

~~~
rjurney
Thanks! Great reply.

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diego_moita
This thing is really blown out of porportion now:
[http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1...](http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1929071_1929070,00.html)

This "Climategate/Warmergate" thing is just another case of FUD, an invented
scandal.

~~~
presidentender
It's literally FUD (UD?), in that the skeptics are spreading uncertainty and
doubt about the legitimacy of the models and the underlying data that the
world leadership has accepted as gospel truth for the past decade. But it
might be good FUD, because it might reopen intelligent discussion on a topic
where debate has consisted of name-calling for just as long.

~~~
gloob
_But it might be good FUD, because it might reopen intelligent discussion on a
topic where debate has consisted of name-calling for just as long._

My suspicion is that it will renew name-calling in a discussion that has
consisted of name-calling for just as long, but then, I'm a cynic. Fingers
crossed, though.

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codahale
Ah yes, _The Financial Post_. The newspaper I turn to for all of my
climatological analysis. It's like _International Journal of Climatology_ ,
but with better op-eds and stock listings.

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earle
If Mars is heating up a the same rate as earth, they [martians] must have
quite a complex underground freeway system to produce all that CO2 on Mars,
which is obviously causing Marsian Warming...

~~~
thaumaturgy
The primary evidence for Martian warming is a comparison of two photographs,
one taken in 1977 and one taken in 1999, in which the planet appears brighter
in 1977 than in 1999.

However, the cause of the albedo change was attributed to dust storms, not to
a change in climate per se. Further, if there had been climactic change, there
were only two datapoints to go on and a line drawn between them -- not exactly
the kind of data that anyone on HN should choose to draw conclusions from.

More recent photographs suggest that there may be climactic cycles in effect,
however the data gathered so far is utterly insufficient to even begin to
guess at the systems and behaviors involved in that other planet.

One thing we _do_ know is that Martian atmosphere is dramatically different
from Earth's, and it doesn't make any more sense to draw conclusions about the
one based on the other than it does to, say, conclude that Windows is subject
to the same security vulnerabilities that Macs are.

