Tim Worstall

The Guardian on Steve McIntyre

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?

In

14 responses

  1. Philip Thomas Avatar
    Philip Thomas

    Glad I’m not the only right-winger that thinks global warming is happening. I have issue with the clouding of the truth, the rampant eco-fascism, the idiotic economics and the hyperbolic rhetoric, but not the central conceit that the earth is warming and that some of that is due to anthropogenic causes.
    Whether we should actually do anything about that is another matter. Sometimes I wonder if we should just invest all the fuel duties, etc. into nuclear fusion research. Once we get that sorted, we won’t stay a carbon economy for long. But with that said, the destruction of primary rainforest, coral reefs and wetlands are a bigger manmade ecological problem and far easier solved than climate change.

    Reply
  2. pogo Avatar
    pogo

    As a, now retired, physicist I’m concerned, to the point of becoming increasingly sceptical, about the apparent very poor quality of the “science” of “climate change”.
    Not only are some of the luminaries of AGW working in fields that are demonstrably *not* their areas of expertise – Mann for instance is not a good statistician, and that’s being polite – but they seem in many instances to be worryingly secretive about their data and methods; which is why it appears to have taken McIntyre so long to track down the error in the GISS database, it looks like he had to reverse-engineer it.
    The manipulation of temperature data seems to be introducing “corrections” that are greater than the “signal”, not to mention introducing what Murray Laver termed “spurious accuracy”. There’s a non-trivial case to be made that “global warming” is genuinely man-made, “made” meaning that all the apparent increase in global temperature is purely a statistical artifact introduced by the correction factors.
    Everywhere you look there seem to be serious inadequacies. For example, nobody seems to have thought it necessary to update the proxy temperature record (tree-rings etc) so that it runs in parallel with the latest, instrument-derived, figures. Consequently there seems to be a complacent comparing of apples and dump-trucks as the temperature history jumps from proxy to instrumentation. One would have thought that it might be a good idea to test thoroughly the correlation between the two.
    I’m amazed that journals such as “Nature” don’t appear to demand that data etc be placed in a public archive before the publication of a paper – how else can it be shown to be proveable or otherwise – unless, of course, this is the intention.
    Too much of what goes on around the climate change “industry” is *not* “proper science”. But I suppose that’s only to be expected when politics takes over.

    Reply
  3. Philip Thomas Avatar
    Philip Thomas

    Pogo, precisely my concerns. I do believe that climate change is probably happening (though I also hold that the significant effects of it won’t manifest themselves for decades or even centuries). However, I don’t understand why this consensus has to be so shadowy. The facts should speak for themselves. After a significant fraud in my field of behavioural ecology, it is now common to have the raw data as online appendices to the published research.
    Furthermore, I think it is worth pointing out repeatedly that whilst climate change has many problems, not least the fact that cultures and economies are tailored to their current region’s climate, a global warming is vastly preferable to a global cooling. It may turn out that we accidentally protected ourselves from the latter by instigating the former.

    Reply
  4. billadams Avatar
    billadams

    Global warming is the biggest, most successful lie since Communism. surfacestations.org shows some of the United States’ 1200 “scientific monitoring stations”. Many are on asphalt, near air conditioning outlets, and one on asphalt at an airport is regularly hit by jet backblasts. “Yep, global warming is real”, say the morons who read the thermometers.
    catholicfundamentalism.com points out that this is a typical Babylonian lie, destroying the remnants of Christianity and freedom in Europe and the Americas.

    Reply
  5. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    I’m with you, Pogo. An undergraduate research project could be failed for the sort of sloppiness, or worse, that McIntyre has now uncovered twice. It would certainly be failed for omitting to report its data and algorithms. For me the Global Warm-mongers have lost any benefit of the doubt: I am now a Global Warming Cynic.

    Reply
  6. David Duff Avatar
    David Duff

    Freeman Dyson sums up the dilemma in a ‘must read’ essay, thus:
    “We are at present in a warm period that began twelve thousand years ago, so the onset of the next ice-age is overdue. If human activities were not disturbing the climate, a new ice-age might already have begun. We do not know how to answer the most important question: do our human activities in general, and our burning of fossil fuels in particular, make the onset of the next ice-age more likely or less likely?”
    http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge219.html#dysonf
    Also, Anthony Watts’s excellent campaign to investigate and photograph the actual temperature recording sites upon which so much of NASA’s statistics are based shows that you would not bet the deeds of the house on their accuracy. That’s bad enough, but NASA soothes everyone’s fears by saying that they correct this raw data to allow for local differences – however, they *refuse* to disclose the codes by which these re-adjustments are made.
    http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/
    I used to be a second-hand car dealer but I could never have got away with pulling the strokes these people get away with. And as Phillip Thomas indicates above, all this stuff *matters* and we need honest science to give of its best, not its shoddy worst.

    Reply
  7. Cleanthes Avatar
    Cleanthes

    This article is really really bad:
    Compare:
    “Mr McIntyre, a prolific internet blogger from Toronto ” and no mention of climateaudit.org
    with
    “Dr Gavin Schmidt, a climate change expert at GISS and author of the website realclimate.org, ”
    Coupled with the headline “Blogger gets hot and bothered”, this is just desperate.
    Mr McIntyre just happens to be the guy who showed the fakery of Mann et al’s hockey stick. I would have thought that that was relevant in an article of this sort.
    That Gavin Schmidt also happens to be one of the key people involved in ensuring Hansen’s data and code were not released so that McIntyre could check it and he had to reverse engineer it might also be relevant.
    Climate Audit exists precisely because the AGW believers refuse to archive the materials required to allow their results to be checked.
    This could be a really really big story if a journalist actually looked into it. Poor.

    Reply
  8. Philip Thomas Avatar
    Philip Thomas

    Cleanthes, you’ve highlighted why nowadays I turn to the blogosphere as much as the MSM for my daily info download.

    Reply
  9. Matt Munro Avatar
    Matt Munro

    I’m firmly on the fence about global warming, although it’s surely common sense that we shouldn’t be reckless with natural resources. But looking at this in terms of “who benefits” ? the only problem I have with whole conspiracy theory is that surely the vested interest behind denying there is a problem (global capitalism) is far bigger, richer and more infleuntial than the vested interest behind MMGW hypothesis (a few middle class hippies and a handful of climatologists hoping for reasearch grants) so you would expect the former to have silenced the latter, whereas the reverse seems to have happened.
    Also, I dimly remember from physics (or maybe chemistry) O level, the mantra “matter cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change form” ergo, all the carbon which is causing a problem now, must have existed at some point in the past, and if it wasn’t a problem then, why is it now ?
    Tim adds: As to the latter, when it’s solid and in the ground, it isn’t a problem. When it’s CO2 and in the atmosphere it is (or might be, to taste).

    Reply
  10. pogo Avatar
    pogo

    Matt: the only problem I have with whole conspiracy theory is that surely the vested interest behind denying there is a problem (global capitalism) is far bigger, richer and more infleuntial than the vested interest behind MMGW hypothesis
    The real vested interest behind the AGW hypothesis is big government, and their interest can be summed up in two words… “Green Taxes”.
    Global capitalism will win either way, somebody has to make and market the “solutions” to AGW, only government stands to win if we can be taxed into the ground for such wonderfully altruistic reasons!

    Reply
  11. procrustes Avatar
    procrustes

    I too am a right wing death beast who is not a climate change science denialist.
    As a professional economist and statsitician, experience has tought me to be a government intervention sceptic. Nothing in the IPCC reports this year or the Stern report last year changes my belief me that adaptation is still the best policy in the current circumstances.
    As a public policy insider, I have witnessed the closed minded IPCC machine at first hand. In particular, the reaction to the whole Henderson-Castles critique to do with purchasing power parity was a disgrace. There was an initial freezing out of anyone who advocated the theoretical soundness of this position. While there are questions as to how material the Henderson-Castles critique is, the fact of the matter is that the IPCC would not even engage with the issue and kicked it into the long grass.
    That the science (hockey stick, the latest 2YK correction) is handled in such a cavalier and arrogant fashion is even more worrisome.

    Reply
  12. CouldaShouldaDidnt Avatar
    CouldaShouldaDidnt

    I like the dismissal that it just an error in the record of 2% of the Earth.
    At least I guess we can be confident about the African and Russian and Chinese data, Oh! and the temperature stations all over the oceans.
    Maybe we should start looking at the satellite data…

    Reply
  13. Cleanthes Avatar
    Cleanthes

    “Maybe we should start looking at the satellite data…”
    Well yes, except it doesn’t show any warming. Unless you put a rising trend of adjustments to it…

    Reply
  14. Tim H Avatar
    Tim H

    “What we should do about it, something which is again an economic argument, not a climate science one.”
    For “economic” read “ethical”.

    Reply

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