No, they’ve still managed to miss the importance of this:
An amateur meteorologist in Canada has embarrassed Nasa scientists
into admitting that some of the data they used to show significant
recent increases in global warming is flawed.
As a
result of Stephen McIntyre’s calculations, climatologists at the
Goddard Institute of Space Science in New York now accept that 1934 was
historically the United States’ hottest year since records began, not
1998 as they had claimed. It also turns out that five of the 10 warmest
years on record in the US occurred before 1939, and only one is from
the 21st century, raising questions over the statistics used in Al
Gore’s environmental film An Inconvenient Truth to highlight the faster
pace of climate change.
It isn’t that he’s an amateur meteorologist, it’s that he’s a professional statistician.
That the temperatures are moved around by a few hundredths of a degree, agreed, that they cover only the US, not the globe, agreed. But that there are statistical errors in this whole towering pyramid is a serious problem.
As regular readers will know, I’m not a climate change "denialist", nor even sceptic. It’s happening and we’re causing at least part if not most of it (that being my personal opinion and it’s worth exactly what you’re paying for it). I do have problems with three things.
1) The SRES. The economic models which are used to provide the emissions numbers which are then fed into the computer models. I don’t think they cover all of the likely, let alone possible, future paths. I think it’s absurd that between TAR and AR4 that these were not updated: we’re still working on pathways a decade old, when we know a great deal more now than we did then on which way the global economy seems to be going (for example, the A1 family, actually showing greater emissions, now seems more likely than A2 which is what Stern used).
2) What we should do about it, something which is again an economic argument, not a climate science one.
3) The details of the statistics in such things as temperature records and the adjustments made to them: exactly the area that McIntyre is working on. No, I don’t think that there’s been some mass conspiracy, nor lying. But we are trying to make decisions about trillions upon trillions of dollars here. You can even insert "the future of the human race" or "the future of the planet" rhetoric here if you wish. For all the talk coming out of things like the Stern Review about insurance….well, OK, let’s talk about insurance, shall we? Before we conclude that we do need to spend $13 trillion, or $25 trillion, or whatever today’s number is, can we please go and spend a few million, perhaps a few tens of millions, checking our workings? That is a reasonable insurance policy, isn’t it? Get everyone’s workings out into the open and go over them again?
Given that it is exam season, what’s the advice given to everyone doing anything mathematical? Check your workings before you hand in the paper?
Leave a Reply