"Jones et al. have been cleared of all wrongdoing"

Cleared my arse.

Q85 Graham Stringer: I suppose we are haggling about the word “attempt”, aren’t we?
Sir Muir Russell: Yes.

Graham Stringer: That’s the real issue.

Sir Muir Russell: I don’t want to play with semantics because the real challenge that is in behind here is that the Russell Review—we will call it that—didn’t come to a conclusion on deliberate deletion of e-mails that had been requested. The reason we didn’t do that was something that I think I made clear to Mr Boswell when this came up in question 171 in March. I said I wasn’t going to put the review into the position of making the sort of quasi-judicial prosecutorial, investigative judgments that Mr Thomas—you will remember he spoke at the beginning of that session— had spoken about. That was an ICO’s job. That was the position that we took. So, had we been going to get into this, we would have had to start asking questions under caution. We would have been doing the sort of investigative stuff, because you’re getting to the point where you’re alleging that there might have been an offence, and that really wasn’t the thing that my inquiry was set up to do, especially when there is a parallel entity called ICO that has the investigative skills, the training and the background with its personnel.

So that, in short order, was why we didn’t go down the road of saying, “And did you delete things that had been requested?”, because we felt that that would take us into an area where we would have had to operate under caution, and it wasn’t actually relevant to where we had got to on the issue that all this is about, which is what was the end product of the influence that this process had on what was said in the IPCC report. We can talk about that at some length But what I said to Mr Williams about going after the big issues is really referable to the fact that we moved in that direction rather than chasing the words in the individual e-mails.

They didn't investigate because they were afraid of the possible answer, the most likely answer IMHO.

The ICO, by the way, wasn't interested in using their "investigative skills" as well.

Q86 Graham Stringer: I find it a bit surprising, that you didn’t ask directly when a lot of the controversy had been about the request to delete e-mails. You didn’t personally ask Professor Jones—it was the 29th, not the 27th; I apologise for that—directly whether he had deleted those emails?

Sir Muir Russell: That would have been saying, “Did you commit a crime?”, and we would have had to go into a completely different area of the relationship and formal role for the inquiry. Remember, what this chain of logic is all about is a process that is leading up to what did or didn’t get admitted as evidence in an IPCC chapter. That’s the issue that matters.

Q87 Graham Stringer: Well, I think it does matter.

Sir Muir Russell: It is not that it is immaterial. We had lots to say about FOI and Professor Acton can say quite a bit about what the university has done about that.

Yes, that is the question: Did they commit a crime? And being afraid of the answer, Muir didn't ask.

Climate Travesty

In September 2010, Fred Pearce wrote sarcastically in September 2010 that Muir Russell must have been the “only person studying the affair not to have known about it”:

One of the most serious charges to emerge from “climategate” was that CRU scientists did back-door deals to include unpublished research in the last IPCC report, published in 2007. This subverted the supposedly open review process of the IPCC. And, when someone asked for the emails that would have exposed it, they hastily deleted them – a potential breach of freedom of information (FoI) law.

The Muir Russell inquiry said it found no evidence that the CRU scientists had done this. Observers were incredulous. The chronology seemed straightforward. British sceptic David Holland submitted an FoI request to the university asking for emails in which CRU scientists discussed their work for the IPCC. Two days later, Jones sent an email to colleagues asking them to delete emails relating to the behind-the-scenes work for IPCC. That email, as Montford points out, carried Holland’s FoI number as its subject line.

How did Sir Muir miss this? In a development not covered by Montford, the university has since admitted, in correspondence with blogger Steve McIntyre, that it omitted the email from its list of FoI requests sent to Sir Muir. So Sir Muir seems to have been about the only person studying the affair not to have known about it.

This is all, we may hope, cock-up rather than conspiracy. But the university did itself no favours in its own response to Sir Muir last week, when it expressed its satisfaction that he had found no evidence of such culpable deletions. Advice to UEA: when in a hole, stop digging.

Cowardly Furtiveness

The Wahl-Briffa correspondence contains many marks of furtiveness, due, in my opinion, to the fact that the AR4 document was now in its final stages and Wahl, who was not an IPCC contributing author or even reviewer, was now both editing the language of the final AR4 document and the responses to reviewers on an issue in which he was a disputant. The emails were all headed “confidential”, with the word “confidential” recurring in the emails. Briffa asked Wahl to “PLEASE REMEMBER that this is ‘for your eyes only’” and “Please do not pass these on to anyone at all”. Briffa asked reassurance from Wahl that the language that he had “borrowed (stolen)” from Wahl was “OK (and will not later be obvious) hopefully”.

Income Inequality is Bad for Society

Really Bad. (via)

Or maybe it is an underlying problem that causes all other problems, and income inequality is just another measure for this problem?

Are these winter's temperatures proof or disproof of global warming?

The answer is no.

Here’s the thing: No matter how cold the winter is, no matter how much snow falls, the global warming models will not be disproved. In technical language, they cannot be falsified by the observations.

Another way to say this is that the winter we’re seeing is consistent with what the models have been predicting. Again — does this consistency mean that the models are right and that the theories of man-made warming are true?

No.

Consistency is such a weak criterion that almost any imaginable theory of climate will produce predictions that are consistent with observations. The term is probabilistic: It means that what actually happens had to have some chance of occurring according to a model. If global warming climate models said, “It is impossible that this winter will see temperatures below X,” and temperatures did, in fact, drop below this threshold, then the models would be inconsistent with the observations. The model would be falsified.

But global warming climate models never make statements like that. They say that any temperature is possible, even if this possibility is low. Certain temperatures have probabilities as low as you like, but they are never precisely zero. (To anticipate an objection: “that number was practically zero” is logically equivalent to “she was practically a virgin.”)

Bill Briggs on Homogenizations

Step 1 is to model A as a function of B to predict the “missing” values of A, the period from year 1 – 49. The result is the (hard-to-read) dashed red line. But even somebody slapped upside the head with a hockey stick knows that these predictions are not 100% certain. There should be some kind of plus or minus bounds. The dark red shaded area are the classical 95% parametric error bounds, spit right out of the linear model. These parametric bounds are the ones (always?) found in reporting of homogenizations (technically: these are the classical predictive bounds, which I call “parametric”, because the classical method is entirely concerned with making statements about non-observable parameters; why this is so is a long story).

Problem is, like I have been saying, they are too narrow. Those black dots in the years 1 – 49 are the actual values of A. If those parametric error bounds were doing their job, then about 95% of the black dots would be inside the dark red polygon. This is not the case.

I repeat: this is not the case. I emphasize: it is never the case. Using parametric confidence bounds when you are making predictions of real observables is sending a mewling boy to do a man’s job. Incidentally, climatologists are not the only ones making this mistake: it is rampant in statistics, a probabilistic pandemic.

Make sure to read the whole series!

Are "politically incorrect" climate measurements unfit for publication?

Is that a rhetorical question? And what is a rhetorical question anyway?

Garth Paltridge writes:

LOADED DICE IN THE CLIMATE GAME

Back in March of 2008, three of us sent off a manuscript to the Journal of Climate. It was a straightforward paper reporting the trends of humidity in the middle and upper troposphere as they (the trends) appear at face value in the NCEP monthly-average reanalysis data. NCEP data on atmospheric behaviour over the last 50 years are readily available on the web and are something of a workhorse for much modern research on meteorology and climate.

The paper did two things:

(1) It pointed out that, according to the NCEP data, the zonal-average tropical and mid-latitude humidities have decreased over the last 35 years at altitudes above the 850mb pressure level – that is, in the middle and upper troposphere, roughly above the top of the convective boundary layer. NCEP humidity information derives ultimately from the international network of balloon-borne radiosondes. And one must say immediately that radiosonde humidity data have more than their fair share of problems. So does the NCEP process of using an operational weather forecasting model to integrate the actual measurements into a meteorologically coherent set of data presented on a regular grid.

(2) It made the point (not an original point, but on the other hand one that is not widely known even among the cognoscenti) that water vapour feedback in the global warming story is very largely determined by the response of water vapour in the middle and upper troposphere. Total water vapour in the atmosphere may increase as the temperature of the surface rises, but if at the same time the mid- to upper-level concentration decreases then water vapour feedback will be negative. (There are hand-waving physical arguments that might explain how a decoupling such as that could occur).

Climate models (for various obscure reasons) tend to maintain constant relative humidity at each atmospheric level, and therefore have an increasing absolute humidity at each level as the surface and atmospheric temperatures increase. This behaviour in the upper levels of the models produces a positive feedback which more than doubles the temperature rise calculated to be the consequence of increasing atmospheric CO2.

The bottom line is that, if (repeat if) one could believe the NCEP data ‘as is’, water vapour feedback over the last 35 years has been negative. And if the pattern were to continue into the future, one would expect water vapour feedback in the climate system to halve rather than double the temperature rise due to increasing CO2.

Satellite data from the HIRS instruments on the NOAA polar orbiting satellites tend (‘sort of’, only in the tropics, and only for part of the time) to support the climate model story. The ‘ifs and buts’ of satellite information about upper tropospheric humidity are of the same order as that from balloon radiosondes.

Anyway, our paper concluded by suggesting that, in view of the extreme significance of upper-level humidity to the climate change story, the international radiosonde data on upper-level humidity should not be ‘written off’ without a serious attempt at abstracting the best possible humidity signal from within the noise of instrumental and operational changes at each of the relevant radiosonde stations. After all, we are not exactly over-endowed with data on the matter. The attempt would be similar in principle to the current efforts at abstracting a believable global warming signal from the networks of surface-temperature observations.

Suffice it to say that after 3 or 4 months the paper was knocked back. This largely because of an unbelievably vitriolic, and indeed rather hysterical, review from someone who let slip that

“the only object I can see for this paper is for the authors to get something in the peer-reviewed literature which the ignorant can cite as supporting lower climate sensitivity than the standard IPCC range”.

We argued a bit with the editor about why he took notice of such a review. We are not exactly novices in the research game, and can say with reasonable authority that when faced with such an emotive review the editor should simply have ignored it and sent the paper off to someone else. The argument didn’t get far. In particular we couldn’t get a guarantee that a re-submission would not involve the same reviewer. And in any event the conditions for re-submission effectively amounted to a requirement that we first prove the models and the satellites wrong.

A couple of weeks after the knock-back, and for unrelated reasons, two of us went to a small workshop on water vapour held at LDEO in New Jersey, whereat we told the tale. The audience was split as to whether the existence of the NCEP trends in humidity should be reported in the literature. Those ‘against’ (among them a number of people from GISS) simply said that the radiosonde data were too ‘iffy’ to report the trends publicly in a political climate where there are horrible people who might make sinful use of them. Those ‘for’ simply said that scientific reportage shouldn’t be constrained by the politically correct. The matter was dropped. I found after the event that the journal editor had come (I think specifically) to hear the talk. He didn’t bother to introduce himself.

I guess the story doesn’t amount to much. Perhaps it is significant only in that it shows how naïve we were to imagine that climate scientists might welcome the challenge to examine properly and in detail even the smell of a possibility that global warming might not be as bad as it is made out to be. Silly us.

After some kerfuffle, the paper was accepted by “Theoretical and Applied Climatology” and appeared on February 26 on the journal’s web site. (One can if so inclined, and if one has personal or institutional access to the journal, find it here). We presume it will be ignored. Being paranoiac from way back, we wonder at the happy chance by which a one-page general-interest article appeared in ‘Science’ on February 20. With some self-referencing, it extolled the virtue of the latest modelling research, and of new(?) satellite observations of short-term, large amplitude, water vapour variability, which (say the authors) strongly support model predictions of long-term positive water vapour feedback. Well, maybe. It would be easy enough to argue against that conclusion. The paranoia arises because of another issue. We know that at least one of the authors is well aware of the contrary story told by the raw balloon data. But there is no mention of it in their article.

This is the abstract:

The National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis data on tropospheric humidity are examined for the period 1973 to 2007. It is accepted that radiosonde-derived humidity data must be treated with great caution, particularly at altitudes above the 500 hPa pressure level. With that caveat, the face-value 35-year trend in zonal-average annual-average specific humidity q is significantly negative at all altitudes above 850 hPa (roughly the top of the convective boundary layer) in the tropics and southern midlatitudes and at altitudes above 600 hPa in the northern midlatitudes. It is significantly positive below 850 hPa in all three zones, as might be expected in a mixed layer with rising temperatures over a moist surface. The results are qualitatively consistent with trends in NCEP atmospheric temperatures (which must also be treated with great caution) that show an increase in the stability of the convective boundary layer as the global temperature has risen over the period. The upper-level negative trends in q are inconsistent with climate-model calculations and are largely (but not completely) inconsistent with satellite data. Water vapor feedback in climate models is positive mainly because of their roughly constant relative humidity (i.e., increasing q) in the mid-to-upper troposphere as the planet warms. Negative trends in q as found in the NCEP data would imply that long-term water vapor feedback is negative—that it would reduce rather than amplify the response of the climate system to external forcing such as that from increasing atmospheric CO2. In this context, it is important to establish what (if any) aspects of the observed trends survive detailed examination of the impact of past changes of radiosonde instrumentation and protocol within the various international networks.

"bender" on the same thread:

1. Paltridge’s quote makes it quite clear that the report was suppressed – in part – because of the political implications of its publication. i.e. It wasn’t just the methodology.
2. There’s no “conspiracy” theory in play here – just the fact that there seems to be a shared concern that one single publication could rock the IPCC’s scientific foundation. The thing I don’t understand is this: if the foundation is so solid, then what is the basis for this fear? (So you see, it’s not that psychoanalysis is “fun”. It seems to be necessary.)
3. IPCC has done this to themselves by deciding at the outset not to discuss IN DETAIL greenhouse physics and the derivation (i.e. statistics) of the GHG sensitivity coefficients. An engineering quality exposition is desperately needed.