Friday, April 01, 2011

A Contest

The Auditors have a new post up at Denial Depot presaging the response of Tony Watts and his Svengali, Roger Pielke Sr. to the testimony yesterday of Richard Muller, the Svengali of the BEST project.

1) Any errors, however inconsequential, will be taken Very Seriously and accusations of fraud will be made.

2) If you adjust the raw data we will accuse you of fraudulently fiddling the figures whilst cooking the books.

3) If you don't adjust the raw data we will accuse you of fraudulently failing to account for station biases and UHI.

4) Homogenization is what Enron did.

5) If you rely on CLIMAT messages for the monthly updates this will cause a sharp station count drop after the first month. If that happens we will accuse you of fraudulently deleting stations to produce warming.

6) If you ever modify your algorithm and rerun it over the data so that some past monthly values change, we will accuse you of fraudulently rewriting written history.

7) By all means publish all your source code, but we will still accuse you of hiding the methodology for your adjustments. . . . .

24) In the event that you comply with all of the above, we will point out that a mere hundred-odd years of data is irrelevant next to the 4.5 billion year history of Earth. So why do you even bother?
and here is Tony doing # 1
He fails to distinguish CRUTEM (the land-only temperature record produced by the Climategate folks) from HadCRU (a land-ocean record produced jointly by the Hadley folks and the Climategate folks). A minor point to be sure, but one indicating his unfamiliarity with the underlying datasets he is discussing.
Surprise!

Now these are excellent Auditors over at Denial Depot, and they expect you to do their work for them, else they will be very cross, so your job bunnies is to go over to WUWT and match the responses to Anthony and Roger Sr. posts. For extra credit, troll the comments.

28 comments:

Dol said...

Gotta love WUWT commenters: "Does it even make sense to be pushing temperature data of 110 years out of 4.5 billion years???"

Anonymous said...

Dipped into RPSr.'s post over at WTFWT. Ugh. The stupid is too strong. Painful.

Anonymous said...

FYI, the post you link to is under Willis' name. It gives his audience the red meat it wants, but leaves Tony with a bridge to Muller still (maybe).

I'm not sure what # this is, but it surely should count.
“Recently, while resurveying stations that I previously surveyed in Oklahoma, I discovered that NOAA has been quietly removing the temperature sensors from many of the USHCN stations we cited as the worst (CRN4, 5) offenders of siting quality. "

-blueshift

TrueNorthist nails #18 in the comments.
"I remember fondly a time when should someone mention a scientist, an image would pop up in my mind of some wild haired recluse toiling away with no regard – or even a serious distaste for publicity."

Anonymous said...

An enjoyable tidbit from http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/03/028625.php


But in the aftermath of Climategate, Muller is "going big" you might say. Watch this and you'll see what I mean, especially his summary phrase, "You're not allowed to do this in science." Muller is not just tenured, but is late in his career, so feels free to speak out, unlike younger academics who don't dare cross the Climate McCarthyism of the universities. More importantly, Muller is heading up the new Berkeley Earth Temperature Study, which will review and analyze all of the data on this subject starting from scratch. Unlike the Climategate cabal in Britain and in our NASA, the Berkeley group will share its data with all comers. Keep your eye on this; it will take time--years more than months probably--but may prove to be the thread that unravels the main prop of the climate campaign.

Anonymous said...

Ah, yes. Tony, of the deep understanding of the underlying datasets, which led him to self-publish a document with the following phrases highlighted: "Around 1990, NOAA began weeding out more than three-quarters of the climate measuring stations around the world. They may have been working under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). It can be shown that they systematically and purposefully, country by country, removed higher-latitude, higher-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler."

Oh, but Tony _also_ objects to Muller presenting results without going through the peer-reviewed literature first.

-M

Lionel A said...

"...so your job bunnies is to go over to WUWT and match the responses to Anthony and Roger Sr. posts. For extra credit, troll the comments."

Go over to WUWT, not fecking likely, I would rather chew CUD or HadCRUD or something, or even book one of them '50p' flights!

Chad said...

"... or even book one of them '50p' flights!"

Ain't no fecking thing!

Lars Karlsson said...

The classic WUWT post A look at temperature anomalies for all 4 global metrics: Part 1 from 2008 illustrates very clearly Watts's level of understanding. Here he makes the shocking discovery that if you consider the period 1979-2009, then the anomalies for RSS and UAH are somewhat evenly distributed around 0, but the anomalies for HadCRUT and in particularly GISS are strongly biased towards positive anomalies.

Anonymous said...

Tony has thrown Muller under the bus... Snicker.

chris said...

Select quotes from Tony Watts, 3/6/2011:

"I’ve seen some of the [BEST] methodology, and I’m pleased to say that their design handles many of the issues skeptics have raised and has done so in ways that are unique to the problem."

"The approaches that I’ve seen during my visit give me far more confidence than the “homogenization solves all” claims from NOAA and NASA GISS, and that the BEST result will be closer to the ground truth that anything we’ve seen."

"And, I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the method has promise. So let’s not pay attention to the little yippers who want to tear it down before they even see the results."

Hmmm.

Anonymous said...

@Lars Karlsson:

"The classic WUWT post A look at temperature anomalies for all 4 global metrics: Part 1 from 2008..."

Ah, yes - the posts that got me banned from WUWT. I was one of several posters in parts 1 and 2 of that series, pointing out to Anthony that he made a serious error by comparing anomaly data with different baselines.

Anthony responded by saying that choice of baseline mattered, and he was going to show that in part 3.

Abut a month later, I asked Anthony politely in a comment for another post, when he was going to get around to part 3, because it looked to me like he had some uncorrected errors remaining in parts 1 and 2.

Anthony responded be telling me I was no longer welcome on WUWT, blocking me, and then going back and manually deleting every comment I had ever made there, and editing his own and other's comments to remove references to me. And editions some of his comments to make it sound like he knew more than he clearly had at the time.

I'm still not allowed to comment at WUWT, to this day.

-Lee

Anonymous said...

"Anthony responded be telling me I was no longer welcome on WUWT, blocking me, and then going back and manually deleting every comment I had ever made there, and editing his own and other's comments to remove references to me. And editions some of his comments to make it sound like he knew more than he clearly had at the time."

Yay, time for comparison to 1984.

Lars Karlsson said...

Lee,

This one, Andrew Bolt scores the Quote of the Millennium is at about the same level of breath-taking stupidity.

But then anything on the topic of "Andrew Bolt scores" must be terrible to behold.

Anonymous said...

@ chris
Good quotes, but I would recommend a screenshot ;-)
Andreas

Boris said...

Slightly related to Watts: he has up a link to Alan Carlin's (EPA guy) paper. I read a bit and it is pretty impressive. He reminds us that we should all be using RealScience(tm). Also, denies CO2 rise is human caused and trots out Segalstad. There's more, but it was so terribly written that I had to stop when I got the urge to stick my tongue inside a blender and turn it on.

J Bowers said...

Deep Climate (June 2009): EPA’s Alan Carlin channels Patrick Michaels and the Friends of Science

"[Update, June 29: In the immediately subsequent post, I've now established that the Carlin report's central premise, along with four key sections, came directly from a November, 2008 World Climate Report blog attack on the EPA proposed endangerment finding on greenhouse gas emissions.]"

Real Climate (June 2009): Bubkes

"Their main points are nicely summarised thus: a) the science is so rapidly evolving that IPCC (2007) and CCSP (2009) reports are already out of date, b) the globe is cooling!, c) the consensus on hurricane/global warming connections has moved from uncertain to ambiguous, d) Greenland is not losing mass, no sirree…, e) the recession will save us!, f) water vapour feedback is negative!, and g) Scafetta and West’s statistical fit of temperature to an obsolete solar forcing curve means that all other detection and attribution work is wrong. From this “evidence”, they then claim that all variations in climate are internal variability, except for the warming trend which is caused by the sun, oh and by the way the globe is cooling.

Devastating eh? "

Rattus Norvegicus said...

The thing I found funny is that Willis couldn't even do the subtraction correctly and so came up the wrong numbers for the warming since 1957.

Muller in his testimony said "the early 1900's" so Willis took 1900 as the start date and came up with numbers which seem to dispute what Muller said. However if you take 1904 as the start date his numbers are correct. I think 1904 qualifies as "the early 1900's".

Horatio Algeranon said...

Tony's Tale

Anonymous said...

My favourite bit of the post was this - refering to Muller's Testimony.

But to give that kind of erroneous testimony, not in a random paper he might written quickly, but to Congress itself, marks him to me as a man driven by a very serious agenda, a man who doesn’t check his work and who pays insufficient attention to facts in testimony.

But when looking at the Wegman report to Congress I seem to recall the argument was that Wegman couldn't be expected to document or be all that accurate because it was only a submission to Congress and was not men to be up to academic standards.

You really can't make this stuff up!

Regards,
John

Anonymous said...

The LATimes has picked up the Muller/BEST story -- linky here: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-climate-berkeley-20110404,0,772697.story

I love the title: "Critics' review unexpectedly backs global warming data".

Unexpectedly? Not to anyone who has actually worked with the temperature data.

Other than that quibble with the title, not a bad article -- the whole thing is framed fairly nicely as a denier "own goal".

J Bowers said...

New York Times, too.

Paul Krugman: The Truth, Still Inconvenient

Anonymous said...

Sigh, 'Epic Face Palm'!

chek said...

Not a good week to be a lyin'asshole.
Even Morano is reduced to squawking "Climategate!" yet again and featuring what looks like a 6 year old's attempt to photoshop Mann into a State Pen costume.

Steve Metzler said...

@Rattus Norvegicus

The thing I found funny is that Willis couldn't even do the subtraction correctly and so came up the wrong numbers for the warming since 1957.

I noticed that too. Even after several readers pointed this blatant error, he still couldn't be bothered to correct it. Because, of course, if the numbers are too big, it makes the 'warmists' look bad. Which is the whole idea.

cRR Kampen said...

After all is said and done, we are reminded of the fact that climate change has absolutely nothing to with surface air temperature and we are reminded of the strange obsession of some institutes that there IS a relation.

Thus: "The global average surface temperature, however, unfortunately, has become the icon of the IPCC community and in the policy debate."

So Pielke Sr. in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/01/pielke-sr-on-the-muller-testimony/ .

EliRabett said...

Jein. Try and imagine a scenario where the surface temperature increases and the energy content of the system stays the same or declines

cRR Kampen said...

Maybe a planet surface with nil atmosphere, read vacuum, on top is implied? Meantime the energy content of this system would remain the same if some process in the interior of the planet transports some heat to its surface or vice versa. I imagine Solaris could do just that.

cRR Kampen said...

To be sure: cRR = RR. I changed my alias for celestial reasons.