It's Hot! But Fox Only Talks About Global Warming When It's Snowing

[Midgard Eagle]

Or finding out that ones self-appointed prophet of global warming is a hypocrite of mythic proportions not to mention the idiotic comments he makes on occasion.

Go big Al, go.

We're not discussing a religion. Science is about hard facts, not the words of "prophets". You don't prove or disprove a theory by making personal attacks.

I think it speaks novels about AGW deniers' understanding of science that they think their crusade against Al Gore does them any good. It's like me saying the Sun orbits the Earth, for then to prove it by throwing tonnes of mud at Galileo. Utterly bizarre.

 

[Dale]

We're not discussing a religion. Science is about hard facts, not the words of "prophets". You don't prove or disprove a theory by making personal attacks.

I think it speaks novels about AGW deniers' understanding of science that they think their crusade against Al Gore does them any good. It's like me saying the Sun orbits the Earth, for then to prove it by throwing tonnes of mud at Galileo. Utterly bizarre.

Is that similar to the personal attacks against Spencer, Christy, Michaels and Lindzen? The IPCC and AGW predictions of catastrophic climate collapse read like Revelations. If it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck, then it is a duck.

 

[Ayatollah So]

the IPCC models might validate short term against the satellite data, not one of them predicted the 2000's flat-line of SST and air temp.

As referenced above, some models (not necessarily adopted by IPCC) did get that right. So presumably we should prefer those, other things being equal, right?

RE the last few posts-
Beating up on nightly news reporters, Al Gore, or Sarah Palin is just stupid and irrelevant. Now if all the leading climate scientists on one side or another have relevant flaws - relevant meaning evidence why one can't trust their data or calculations - that's different.

 

[Tee Kay]

I'd rather get my science from the CSIRO than the Daily Mail or Anthony Watts.

Then you have this thing called Climategate.

Oh yes, this is important, because there was no scientific misconduct and the whole thing was an obvious smear campaign.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Or finding out that ones self-appointed prophet of global warming is a hypocrite of mythic proportions not to mention the idiotic comments he makes on occasion.

Go big Al, go.

What a great proof. Al Gore said something stupid, therefore global warming is a myth! Why can't we all be gifted with such infallible logic as this?

Oh I know why. Because Al Gore is a liberal. If Bill O'Reilly said tomorrow that he though Global Warming was real and a significant problem, I wonder how many minds would change?

 

[NBAfan]

I'd rather get my science from the CSIRO than the Daily Mail or Anthony Watts.



Oh yes, this is important, because there was no scientific misconduct and the whole thing was an obvious smear campaign.

What's wrong with Watts?

 

[Dale]

Oh yes, this is important, because there was no scientific misconduct and the whole thing was an obvious smear campaign.

Oh okay, it was a smear campaign. That just leaves me a couple of questions though.

1. What does "I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline." mean?

2. Why did a heap of emails get deleted? "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."

3. Do all climate scientists threaten assault? "Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted."

4. Are you saying that there was no compromising the peer-review method? "“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”"

I'm interested to know the answers, as these are questions I've had since the emails were released.

 

[Verbose]

Well, it means you're likely to be shocked if ever you find out for instance how between four eyes anthropologists might at times express themselves about people and societies they've done field-work on. Frequent use of the N-word on some hands etc.

People are pretty damn crass, and occasionally verbally aggressive, research scientists included. Doesn't in itself mean they're wrong.

Lots of commentary out there on that specific email. This one seems pretty clear. Fair bit of discussion in the comments to it as well. Not that I expect anything will convince you:

Spoiler :

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

The timing of this particular episode is probably not coincidental. But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/

 

[Dale]

Well, it means you're likely to be shocked if ever you find out for instance how between four eyes anthropologists might at times express themselves about people and societies they've done field-work on. Frequent use of the N-word on some hands etc.

People are pretty damn crass, and occasionally verbally aggressive, research scientists included. Doesn't in itself mean they're wrong.

Lots of commentary out there on that specific email. This one seems pretty clear. Fair bit of discussion in the comments to it as well. Not that I expect anything will convince you:

Spoiler :

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

The timing of this particular episode is probably not coincidental. But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/

Ok, a plausible answer (but from a dodgy source site). Here's another question for you then. In code, programmers make comments so that they know what pieces of code do when they look at it later. These comments are always 100% accurate as to what the code is doing (I'm a programmer, so I know this. )

Why does one of the post-processing code sections do this: "these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures"

It's pretty clear from this programmer code comment that the section in question is artificially adjusting the output to line up with real temperatures. What is this section hiding?

 

[Verbose]

Ok, a plausible answer (but from a dodgy source site). Here's another question for you then. In code, programmers make comments so that they know what pieces of code do when they look at it later. These comments are always 100% accurate as to what the code is doing (I'm a programmer, so I know this. )

Why does one of the post-processing code sections do this: "these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures"

It's pretty clear from this programmer code comment that the section in question is artificially adjusting the output to line up with real temperatures. What is this section hiding?

Well, you're the programmer. In my experience of research scientists (biomedicine), if you want answers on specifics like that, you should talk to their programmers, not to the researchers who use the programs.

 

[NBAfan]

Well, you're the programmer. In my experience of research scientists (biomedicine), if you want answers on specifics like that, you should talk to their programmers, not to the researchers who use the programs.

What about a researcher who knows programing?