[Vision2020] Vision2020 "Witch-Hunt?"

Fri Aug 26 20:00:02 PDT 2011

Here is why I don't trust one of the most prominent climate researchers 
in the field.

Let's talk hockey sticks.  Here is a PDF put together by Ross McKitrick, 
a member of the department of Economics and the University of Guelph:

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/McKitrick-hockeystick.pdf

The PDF does a much better job than I could ever do explaining what the 
"hockey stick" debate is about, but I'll go ahead and summarize it 
here.  Please read the document for more details.

Basically, Professor Michael Mann produced a graph in 1998 from various 
temperature proxies purporting to show the surface temperature history 
for the past thousand years or so.  If you've even cursorily looked into 
climate science, you've seen this graph.  It's called a "hockey stick" 
because it's more or less flat up until recent history where it turns 
upward strikingly.  This was featured prominently in the 2001 Third 
Assessment Report put out by the IPCC (the UN International Panel on 
Climate Change).

The tale this graph tells is a surprising one.  Previously, it was 
assumed that there was a period of time in the 1300s or so where 
temperatures were much warmer than they are now (called the Medieval 
Warm Period), followed by a period of time where temperatures were much 
colder than average (called the Little Ice Age).  Current temperatures 
were thought to be on the rebound from the LIA, presumably on their way 
back to MWP temperatures.  There was a graph of this in the IPCC report 
that came out in 1990, which shows how canonical this idea was.  The 
hockey stick graph tells a different tale, though.  According to that 
graph, temperatures for the last thousand years have been pretty much 
steady, albeit a little colder than now.  Lately, though, the 
temperature has sky-rocketed upwards, presumably due to Man and his evil 
ways.

In 2003, a retired minerals prospector and mathematician, Stephen 
McIntyre, was curious about the graph and wanted to look at the data.  
After some delay, the data was turned over to him.  He found out 
quickly, though, that he could not replicate some statistical constructs 
necessary to the analysis called principal components or PCs 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_components).  He joined up with 
Ross McKitrick (the author of the PDF), and they attempted to find out 
why things couldn't be replicated.  Initially, they found some errors 
relating to truncated series, location labels, and other things, and 
found that if the errors were corrected for and the PCs recomputed, the 
hockey stick-like curve on the graph disappeared.

They corresponded with Mann, who told them they had not computed the PCs 
correctly.  When they asked him for his computer code, he refused to 
make it available.  He also told them they had the wrong data set, so 
they went to the FTP site Mann pointed them to and downloaded the 
correct one (which was almost identical to the one they had).  They 
later found that some of the code used to compute the PCs was actually 
present on the FTP site, which explained why there were discrepancies, 
Mann et al hadn't used the proper procedure for scaling his PCs: instead 
of subtracting the mean for the whole series, he only subtracted the 
mean for the 20th century.  This causes any series in the data that have 
a large increase in the 20th century to be weighted much higher than any 
other random series.

McKitrick and McIntyre figured this out and showed how when they ran 
10,000 runs of random data using correctly computed PCs, they almost 
never got a hockey stick shape in the data, but when they ran it with 
Mann's method of computing the PCs, they got a hockey stick 99% of the time.

This is pretty damning stuff.  They wrote it up for Nature (where Mann's 
original paper was published) and they refused to print it.  So they 
went back and studied the data in more depth, and concluded that a small 
number series of bristlecone pines in North America were being severely 
weighted by the incorrect PC calculation which was causing most of the 
problem, and that when they removed just those series (from 5000 of 
them), the hockey stick went away.  Now, the really damning bit is that 
at that original FTP site was a folder called "CENSORED" that contained 
evidence that Mann himself had done this same analysis, and thus knew 
that his paper was incorrect, and has done nothing about it.

There is more (read the PDF for details), but that's enough to show that 
Mann is not to be trusted.

There is one other thing from the PDF that I find really damning for 
Mann.  In the PDF, a paleoclimatologist named David Deming tells of how 
he had done some work with borehole temperatures for the past 150 years 
that showed a warming trend. Here is a quote from him that was in the PDF:

"With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant 
credibility in the
community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was 
one of them,
someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political 
causes. So one
of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of 
climate change and
global warming sent me an astonishing email that said “We have to get 
rid of the
Medieval Warm Period.”"

The PDF was written in 2005, and the Climategate emails came out in 
2009.  In one of them, Mann is quoted as saying to Phil Jones (head of 
the Hadley Center) that "it would be nice to try to "contain" the 
putative "MWP", even if we don't yet
    have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back".  
This email is from June of 2003.  This tells me that they didn't just 
make an error with their statistical analysis, they deliberately 
misconstrued the data in order to prove a political point (i.e. 
everything was just fine a thousand years ago until Man mucked it all 
up).  It wasn't a surprising result that they innocently didn't 
recognize as an actual error, it was a guided attempt to deceive 
others.  In my opinion, of course.

This isn't just some lowly climate scientist wannabe, this is arguably 
one of *the* main guys in climate science, and he holds a lot of power 
at the IPCC.  Certainly, the IPCC spammed his hockey stick graph 
everywhere before McIntyre and McKitrick published their paper.

Now, the interesting thing is that the NSF recently "exonerated" Mann 
from any research misconduct, (see 
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-22/climate-change-scientist-cleared-in-u-s-data-altering-inquiry.html).  
But if you read the actual report from the NSF 
(http://www.nsf.gov/oig/search/A09120086.pdf) you find that they 
basically concluded that Mann was not under their jurisdiction at the 
time he published his paper, that his data is (now) available to 
researchers, that there were concerns raised about his statistical 
analysis techniques (which is the subject of this email), that he hadn't 
altered any data (which wasn't as far as I can tell a charge ever laid 
against him), and that his research has influenced the debate greatly in 
the climate science community.  Not exactly out of synch with what Ross 
McKitrick says in his PDF, and hardly "exonerating' him of his 
untrustworthiness.

Anyway, it's time for dinner.  There is far more I could write about one 
the major climate researchers telling us to trust them because they Know 
What They Are Doing, but this should really be enough.

It goes without saying that I am highly skeptical of anything coming 
from Michael Mann.

Paul

On 08/26/2011 10:58 AM, Ted Moffett wrote:
> An example of a "witch-hunt" on Vision2020 is the extreme absurd claim
> there is international widespread incompetence or political
> manipulation of climate science among thousands of scientists in
> numerous scientific organizations around the globe, to generate the
> international scientific consensus that human impacts on climate are
> profound, and increasing as we continue to increase atmospheric CO2
> levels and other human impacts.
>
> Paul Rumelhart godshatter at yahoo.com
> Thu Aug 25 18:04:41 PDT 2011 wrote:
>
> http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/2011-August/077920.html
>
> "Maybe we should wait until we have something we
> know we should be angry about before we start venting about it."
> ---------
> Implying scientists are censoring journals or hiding data based on
> criminally hacked and possibly altered private emails, before a full
> independent investigation, is a good example of not following the
> advice given above, an example of which be read at the following
> Vision2020 post: [Vision2020] Hacked Climate Reseach Unit E-mails:
> 1,092 Responses to “The CRU hack”
> http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/2009-November/067469.html
> ---------
> "...wait until we have something we know we should be angry about..." ?????
>
> The author or this sage advice has refused to accept that the
> scientists he quoted on Vision2020 from the email hack of the Climatic
> Research Unit of East Anglia University in the UK, have been
> investigated and cleared of any significant misconduct, as the
> following two sources indicate:
>
> http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2011/08/24/michael_mann_climategate_.aspx
>
> "The final investigation report from the National Science Foundation,
> published on Aug. 15, confirmed the initial investigation results from
> a Penn State panel also investigating Mann’s research, finding that
> “there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E. Mann,”
> according to the document."
>
> http://www.pewclimate.org/blog/gulledgej/sixth-independent-investigation-clears-climategate-scientists
>
> "In the course of 2010, five investigations—three in the U.K. and two
> in the United States—cleared scientists working for the CRU and an
> American scientist working at Penn State University of any scientific
> wrongdoing.
>
> That said, in my experience climate science is already more open and
> transparent than most other scientific fields, with gobs of data
> publicly available and many assessment reports and other climate
> science products intended specifically for public consumption
> (examples: here, here, here). No other field I can think of has been
> laid so bare to public scrutiny."
>
> --------------------
> His witch-hunt has continued, with errors and misunderstandings
> regarding climate science, repeated over and over, coupled with a
> refusal to admit mistakes and misrepresentations of the science on
> this subject, when they are clearly pointed out, as can be read in my
> response on Vision2020 below:
>
> http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/2011-July/077266.html
>
> [Vision2020] Climate&  Science
>
> On 7/13/11, Paul Rumelhart<godshatter at yahoo.com>  wrote:
>
>> I find it just as frightening that *any* criticism of climate scientists
>> is seen as a statement that there is a "paranoid extreme conspiracy".  I
>> have good reasons for not trusting some of the major figures in climate
>> science.  Mann, for example, and his "hockey stick" graph.
>>
> Climate scientists criticize each other every day, and I have never
> observed anyone behaving as though any criticism of climate scientists
> implies a "paranoid extreme conspiracy."
>
> The paranoid extreme conspiracy mentality is expressed by those who
> think the entire international field of climate science is involved in
> a deliberate hoax to promote anthropogenic climate change as a serious
> problem, aimed at a political or economic agenda.  Many of those who
> obsess on the email hack from the Climatic Research Unit from EAU in
> the UK express this mentality.
>
> The very implication you are suggesting, that there is to any
> significant degree in the world of science, or in media or Internet or
> any form of public discourse, a level of censur occuring that attacks
> any criticism of climate scientists as an expression of paranoia, is
> itself an example of paranoia!
>
>> Climate science is a young field.  The first actual degree offered in
>> climatology was a BS in climatology offered by the University of South
>> Queensland in Australia with the first enrollments in the degree in
>> 2001.  I think it's a bit soon in a field that looks at time spans of
>> 30+ years to say that we've pretty much concluded what the answers are.
>>
> For one thing, study of climate science is often called meteorology.
> Degrees in meteorology have been offered for decades, though I don't
> know when the first one was offered.  Thus some scientific
> organizations focusing on climate are the World Meteorological
> Organization and the American Meteorological Society.
>
> If you examine the degress of some prominent climate scientists who
> have been publishing in the field for decades, you won't find
> "climatology" as a degree title: MIT's Professor of Meteorology
> Richard Lindzen, a very often quoted and interviewed skeptic of a high
> value for climate sensitivity (i.e. human sourced CO2 in the
> atmosphere has a limited impact), has degrees in physics and math:
> http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/CV.pdf
>
> NASA's climate scientist James Hansen, who in his book "Storms of My
> Grandchildren" ( http://www.stormsofmygrandchildren.com/ ) called
> Lindzen the "dean" of anthropogenic climate warming skeptics, has
> degrees in physics, math and astronomy:
> http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/jhansen.html
>
> Climate science has been a major field of scientific study for over
> 100 years, at least since Nobel winner Arrhenius in 1896, sometimes
> referenced as publishing the first serious attempt to quantify climate
> sensitivity.  Here is long list of published scientific studies of
> climate sensitivity, from 1896 to past 2006:
> http://bartonpaullevenson.com/ClimateSensitivity.html
> Levenson in detail addresses the often heard comment that climate
> models are untestable or unreliable here:
> http://bartonpaullevenson.com/ModelsReliable.html
>
> I recall you once wrote on Vision2020 Levenson's climate sensitivity
> list reveals climate sensitivity to be "all over the board."  Yet when
> I responded that in fact all the results show temperature increases,
> that none show temperature decreases from negative feedbacks that
> overcome the radiative forcing of atmospheric CO2, so therefore these
> results are not "all over the board," you ignored this rather
> compelling fact.
>
> I dispute that climate science it is a "young" science, as is often
> stated, to undermine the credibility of climate predictions.  It could
> be argued modern genetics is a younger science, given DNA was not
> fully unraveled till the 1950s, yet we trust DNA evidence in court.
>
> Climate science has researched time scales of millions of years of
> Earths history, as anyone studying the subject knows, as revealed
> here: "Climate Change: Evidence from the Geological Record"
> http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/climatechange
>
> The peer reviewed publication in this field are vast.  Consider just
> one, GFDL climate scientist Manabe's publication record, 164
> publications, from 1955 to 2011, counting articles now "in press."
> http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/bibliography/results.php  Manabe is well know
> for publishing in 1980 what is sometimes considered the first serious
> discussion of "polar amplification": Manabe, Syukuro, and Ronald J
> Stouffer, 1980: Sensitivity of a global climate model to an increase
> of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Journal of Geophysical
> Research, 85(C10), 5529-5554. available in full (26 pages pdf) free
> here: http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/bibliography/related_files/sm8001.pdf
>
> While on the subject of meteorology, read the statements on human
> influenced climate change from the AMS and WMO:
>
> http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/2007climatechange.html
>
> How will climate change in the future?
>
> There will be inevitable climate changes from the greenhouse gases
> already added to the Earth system. Their effect is delayed several
> decades because the thermal inertia of the oceans ensures that the
> warming lags behind the driving forcing.  For the next several decades
> there is a clear consensus on projected warming rates from human
> influences among different models and different emission scenarios.
> ----------------------
> http://www.wmo.int/pages/themes/climate/causes_of_climate_change.php
>
> Since the industrial revolution, human activity has increased the
> amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (shown in the graph to
> the right). The increased amount of gases which absorb heat, has
> directly lead to more heat being retained in the atmosphere and thus
> an increase in global average surface temperatures. This change in
> temperature is known as global warming. The increase in temperature is
> also leading to other effects on the climate system. Together these
> affects are known as anthropogenic (human caused) climate change.
>
>> There may indeed be a well funded, politically supported junk science
>> agenda, I wouldn't know.  That's not where I get my info.
> How many times have you posted to Vision2020 defenses of junk climate
> science websites and articles?  More times than I can count...
>
> I''ll reference one notable example, a website you have referenced
> numerous times.
>
> National Snow Ice Data Center director Mark Serreze called Anthony
> Watt's junk climate science website "Watts Up With That" an expresion
> of "breathtaking ignorance."
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/realpolitic/worlds-oceans-warmest-on-_n_289210_31196131.html
>
> Yet you vigorously defended Watt's confirmation bias filtered
> statements on Arctic sea ice extent predictions for 2010 from "Watts
> Up With That," with profanity laced responses, revealed in the
> following Vision2020 posts from June and July 2010:
> http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/2010-June/070679.html
> http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/2010-July/070799.html
>
> The final Arctic sea ice extent for 2010 refuted Watt's scientifically
> irresponsible spring predictions, a result you never followed up on
> regarding our discussion of Watt's confirmation bias filter.
> ------------------------------------------
> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
>
>
> On 8/25/11, Rosemary Huskey<donaldrose at cpcinternet.com>  wrote:
>> Paul,
>> Please help us to understand what you mean by "witch hunts" and "over
>> reactions."
>>
>>
>> Rose Huskey
>>
>>