Climaquiddick: The Code Stories

According to CBS News, CRU’s Fortran code contained programmer notes, including the following:

“Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"

Only 5% of the data released is email; the rest is code. The code is examined by a real s/w engineer, with disastrous results:
They were unable to replicate their own outputs.

“I think there’s a good reason the CRU didn’t want to give their data to people trying to replicate their work.
“It’s in such a mess that they can’t replicate their own results.”

And,

“But put this in the context of what else we know from the CRU data dump:

1. They didn’t want to release their data or code, and they particularly weren’t interested in releasing any intermediate steps that would help someone else

2. They clearly have some history of massaging the data — hell, practically water-boarding the data — to get it to fit their other results. Results they can no longer even replicate on their own systems.

3. They had successfully managed to restrict peer review to what we might call the “RealClimate clique” — the small group of true believers they knew could be trusted to say the right things.

As a result, it looks like they found themselves trapped. They had the big research organizations, the big grants — and when they found themselves challenged, they discovered they’d built their conclusions on fine beach sand.

But the tide was coming in”.

I'd say more like a tsunami, while their feet are stuck in the muck and mire they made themselves....

The Obama Administration Moves to Suppress the Medieval Warming Period

If this comes as even a small surprise to you, you haven’t been paying attention. In the increasing fallout of the purloined East Anglia CRU data, emails are surfacing that illuminate the international attempts to suppress data that goes counter to the desired “hockey stick” upward tick result.

It is now revealed that the Obama administration’s “science czar”, John Holdren, was involved in trying to suppress inconvenient data concerning the warming period that occurred in medieval times, the Medieval Warming Period (MWP). This data, if valid, would cause the hockey stick to move from a different reference point, and demonstrate very warm periods without human CO2 as a cause. The MWP also falsifies the spurious claim that the current warming is the “warmest ever”.

The Medieval Warming Period was found and documented by physicist/astronomers Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon, based on “many sources”.

According to the Harvard / Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,

“Their report, covering a multitude of geophysical and biological climate indicators, provides a detailed look at climate changes that occurred in different regions around the world over the last 1000 years.
"Many true research advances in reconstructing ancient climates have occurred over the past two decades," Soon says, "so we felt it was time to pull together a large sample of recent studies from the last 5-10 years and look for patterns of variability and change. In fact, clear patterns did emerge showing that regions worldwide experienced the highs of the Medieval Warm Period and lows of the Little Ice Age, and that 20th century temperatures are generally cooler than during the medieval warmth."

And,

“Soon, Baliunas and colleagues analyzed numerous climate indicators including: borehole data; cultural data; glacier advances or retreats; geomorphology; isotopic analysis from lake sediments or ice cores, tree or peat celluloses (carbohydrates), corals, stalagmite or biological fossils; net ice accumulation rate, including dust or chemical counts; lake fossils and sediments; river sediments; melt layers in ice cores; phenological (recurring natural phenomena in relation to climate) and paleontological fossils; pollen; seafloor sediments; luminescent analysis; tree ring growth, including either ring width or maximum late-wood density; and shifting tree line positions plus tree stumps in lakes, marshes and streams. “

Holdren chose to take a public stand in opposition to the Baliunas and Soon findings, and brag about it to CRU AGW culprits, Mann and Wigley. When pressed as to why, Holdren claimed that it was based on “burden of proof”, and that,

“But, in practice, burden of proof is an evolving thing-it evolves as the amount of evidence relevant to a particular proposition grows.”

Dr Ball responds,

“No it doesn’t evolve; it is either on one side or the other.”

The truth is that Soon and Baliunas used data that is released, peer reviewed and available to public scrutiny, as opposed to the secrecy of the CRU and other AGW proponents. Which set of data should be considered valid in this situation?

Holdren threw his weight and the weight of the Obama administration behind the necessary choice: to suppress the MWP to keep AGW alive. No science necessary, so no science involved.

In an endeavor involving active suppression of conficting data and dissenting authors, science is not involved: it is politics, and Holdren is a politician.

Quote of the Day 11-24-09

"Here is why the truth matters. It was all very well for jesting Pilate to ask that question and then not to tarry for an answer. But that question that he asked, “what is the truth?” is the question which underlies every question and in the end it is the only question that really matters. When you ask that question what you are really asking is “what is the truth about the matter?” And we are now going to see why it matters morally, socially, and politically, as well as economically and scientifically. That the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth should inform public policy on this question."

Lord Monckton, on AGW and Copenhagen

AGW: Too Good...!

Now it turns out that a possible source of atmospheric change, SO2, could be tempering the warming effect. The rise in SO2 and the scrubbing of coal-fired plants to remove SO2 apparently correlates with the warming / cooling observations, according to this.

SO2 is a pollutant, which is being removed from emissions by hyper-expensive equipment mandated by the federal government enviro-nannies. Now it turns out that SO2 is likely to be a negative contributer to global warming. But SO2 is ignored in climate models apparently because the source and quantity is not easily predicted.

Apparently the alarmist climatologists acknowledge that SO2, frequently emitted in conjunction with CO2, nullifies, wholly or in part, any warming tendency associated with the CO2. What is the net effect? This is, obviously, an empirical, quantitative question. But these scientists can't answer it, not only because each of their models gives a different result, but because they have no idea how much SO2 is being emitted by the main countries that produce that pollutant, India and China.

As the revealed emails show, Dr. Phil Jones of the CRU is hell bent on proving warming, and really doesn't like the cooling spell. He writes to collegues Tim and Chris:

"I hope you're not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020...

But read the whole thing.

This site will be temporarily dormant for a few days...

Happy Thanksgiving All!

CRU and AGW according to Lord Monckton

[from PJM; re-published here in its entirety]

“This is what they did — these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.

“The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.

“Worse, these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up. Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset — the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century.

“Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and “global warming” profiteers — for that is what they are — have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled. And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offense. They are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.

“I am angry, and so should you be.

“What have the mainstream news media said about the Climategate affair? Remarkably little. The few who have brought themselves to comment, through gritted teeth, have said that all of this is a storm in a teacup, and that their friends in the University of East Anglia and elsewhere in the climatological community are good people, really.

“No, they’re not. They’re criminals. With Professor Fred Singer, who founded the U.S. Satellite Weather Service, I have reported them to the UK’s Information Commissioner, with a request that he investigate their offenses and, if thought fit, prosecute. But I won’t be holding my breath: In the police state that Britain has now sadly become, with supine news media largely owned and controlled by the government, the establishment tends to look after its own.

“At our expense, and at the expense of the truth.”

Man in 23 Year Coma Was Conscious All Along

The Mail On-Line reports that the man was evaluated several times and that his consciousness was declared “extinct”. Yet Dr Steven Laureys evaluated him again with new brain scan techniques and found him to be functional. He was given therapy – how wasted his muscles must have been! And he now converses by tapping on a computer screen, and he reads books with a special device that allows him to read from a horizontal position.

This leads one to wonder, if his condition can be found and localized, can stem cell therapy renew his injured system?

This is not the first time that a long term coma patient has returned to animation. The Mail On-Line cites another case, and I have heard of others, too.

Given this, why is it not murder to remove life-support from such patients? Do not injured people deserve care? At what point is their human-value less than the dollar-value of their care? And who is allowed the hubris to make that decision concerning another persons value?

The Leftist Science Fraud of All Time

The Left claims to love science, to even have a monopoly on loving science. The Left claims that the Right hates science, that they are superstitious fools.

But the Left only loves what science can do for them (what they think it can do). They think it gives them traction on their other claim: to be the monopoly on rationality. After all, if science is rational and I love science, then I must be rational, right? Or at least appear rational, or maybe think I appear to be rational.

In actuality the Left only loves science that seems (to them) to give them an edge on their agenda promotion. This is why Leftists are convinced that evolution and AGW are necessarily true in axiomatic verity.

Axiomatic verity is the same as absolute truth, but in a form that Leftists can find amenable. It is so absolute that the high priests are not to be questioned, and heretics are to be driven from the kingdom.

Yet axiomatic verity comes not from science, it comes from agendas. The science then must conform to the agenda. This involves a perversion of science.

That is exactly what is seen in AGW. The perversion of science is not a crime; it is a professional albatross. Unless ancillary laws are broken. For example it is not a crime to withhold data; it is a crime to destroy public documents that are pertinent to scientific outcomes and covered by Freedom of Information acts, as exist in the USA and Britain. It is not a crime to solicit funding; it is a crime to conspire to avoid taxes. It is not a crime to fabricate false data and generate models with unknown algorithms and present only the results while withholding everything else; it probably is a crime to present that data as representing something other than the actual raw facts, when trying to affect public policy while using public funding.

Legitimate science does not operate this way, the way Leftist “science” works. Legitimate science operates totally in the open, trying to find objective fact without the bias of agendas. Legitimate science welcomes replications, and answers criticism honestly, because Legitimate scientists know they might have missed something, perhaps in the hypothesis, or the experimental design, or the data, or the interpretation.

In leftist AGW Kabuki science, no replications are allowed, and critics are silenced as efficiently as possible, including ruining careers where possible.

Entirely complicit in this are the Leftist media and the political hacks from RINOs on to the massive Left. All those who argue for an effect when the cause is held secret by the “expert” enclave are not arguing for science, they are arguing for an agenda, supported by obviously corrupt Kabuki science.

In the case of AGW, not only has professional methodology been sacrificed at the Leftist altar of AGW, but laws were broken trying to conceal that fact.

These people are not scientists; they are felons.

Here, for your entertainment, or mine anyway, is actual thermometer data taken in the North Siberia area near where the infamous Yamal tree rings were taken. No hockey stick blade, no AGW.