Jeff Id is looking into integrity failures in Climate Science. Which reminded me of a job I once did.
Integrity failure cascades are not unfamiliar to me. As a contractor I see a LOT of that.
At one company that shall remain nameless I encountered the following.
1. A poorly designed circuit board that did not follow design rules for its logic components. Lines at least double the maximum length.
2. I pointed this out. Showed the people (managers, engineers) the references.
3. The company men pointed out that the prototypes were working fine and I was just being an “old lady” about the matter. Besides it would cost $100K (because of the burn rate) and one month to do a new spin. Customers wouldn’t like the delay.
4. Ten pre-production prototypes were built and they worked perfectly – boy were they laughing at my unwarranted concern. The rest of my work was excellent so they just wrote off my concern as “engineering perfectionism”.
5. Production started – 90% production failure rate. That is when I left. They wanted me to stay on to work production to get the pass rate up. I declined.
6. Of those that passed production tests 99% failed in the field
7. They lost $3 million on that one and it cost them a lot of customer good will.
LMAO
You can only violate the rules so long until it comes back to bite you.
I think the lack of integrity in climate “science” will follow a similar path. The wheels are already starting to come off. Only big wobbles for now. But it won’t be long before the wobbles turn into collapse.
I will then have another opportunity to LMAO. I’m looking forward to it.
Watts Up With That has the news the sceptic community has been waiting for. The CERN experiments done by Svensmark et. al. [Update: actually they were done by Kirkby but they validate the Svensmark hypothesis] show that clouds are significantly affected by cosmic rays.
...it appears that a non-visible light irradiance effect on Earth’s cloud seeds has been confirmed. The way it is posited to work is that the effect of cosmic rays (modulated by the sun’s magnetic variations which either allow more or deflect more cosmic rays) creates cloud condensation nuclei in the Earth’s atmosphere. With more condensation nuclei, more clouds form and vice-versa. Clouds have significant effects on TSI at the surface.
Even the IPCC has admitted this in their latest (2007) report:
“Cloud feedbacks are the primary source of inter-model differences in equilibrium climate sensitivity, with low cloud being the largest contributor”.
If a significant effect has been left out of the models that means in the general sense that they are not even wrong. All the sensitivities used to come up with the current results will have to be adjusted to account for the new cloud factor. Effects once attributed to something else will have to be attributed to clouds. And estimates of future solar activity will have to be added to climate models. And we are not doing such a good job of predicting solar activity. The current decline in solar magnetism was unpredicted. So what does that tell us about the future of the climate? That it is very hard to predict.
Long-anticipated results of the CLOUD experiment at CERN in Geneva appear in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Nature (25 August). The Director General of CERN stirred controversy last month, by saying that the CLOUD team’s report should be politically correct about climate change (see my 17 July post below). The implication was that they should on no account endorse the Danish heresy – Henrik Svensmark’s hypothesis that most of the global warming of the 20th Century can be explained by the reduction in cosmic rays due to livelier solar activity, resulting in less low cloud cover and warmer surface temperatures.
There are a a LOT of careers and vast sums of money involved in the "CO2 is going to kill us all eventually" idea. They will not go quietly. In the history of science they never have.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." - Max Planck
This is not about some decline in an economic indicator especially not about the latest trends in unemployment claims. It is about the coming of a quiet sun.
A missing jet stream, fading spots, and slower activity near the poles say that our Sun is heading for a rest period even as it is acting up for the first time in years, according to scientists at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
As the current sunspot cycle, Cycle 24, begins to ramp up toward maximum, independent studies of the solar interior, visible surface, and the corona indicate that the next 11-year solar sunspot cycle, Cycle 25, will be greatly reduced or may not happen at all.
Will we be heading for a period of cooling as we have seen in other periods of a dormant sun such as the Maunder Minimum? No one knows. But it does seem stupid to be shutting down coal fired power plants in the face of that possibility.
If you have been worried about global warming the latest news will give you some comfort.
Since 1979, NOAA satellites have been carrying instruments which measure the natural microwave thermal emissions from oxygen in the atmosphere. The signals that these microwave radiometers measure at different microwave frequencies are directly proportional to the temperature of different, deep layers of the atmosphere. Every month, John Christy and I update global temperature datasets (see here and here)that represent the piecing together of the temperature data from a total of eleven instruments flying on eleven different satellites over the years. As of early 2011, our most stable instrument for this monitoring is the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU-A) flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite and providing data since late 2002.
So what does the graph show? Global temperatures are falling like a rock and are now .02 degrees C below the baseline. Of course if the coming of an Ice Age (or even a Little Ice Age) worries you this is bad news. I have reliable reports that it is rather difficult to grow food crops under ice.
Third Assessment Report: “In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
It all starts from the simple idea that increasing internal radiation reflection (Greenhouse Gas Theory) increases temperature. Fine so far. But there are complications. The climate system is not simple physics. For instance: surface water absorbs energy. And the Earth's surface has a LOT of water. Well the water evaporates and you get clouds. Clouds are very complicated. Sometimes the water vapor precipitates out of the atmosphere and you get rain, or snow, or sleet, or hail. This is part of an energy transport system (heat pipe)in the atmosphere. Clouds also complicate the radiation picture. They reflect from both sides. Which matters day AND night on Earth but only day for incoming radiation. And that is just one aspect of the system. Vegetation varies radiation depending on type and amount.
The simple and not so simple physics of a number of climate parameters, are programmed into the climate computer models. Many of these parameters, it is acknowledged, are not completely understood or that there is serious contentious debate about in the scientific literature. ie aerosols, clouds, solar pacific and atlantic oscillations, volcanoes, etc,etc
Engineers (or economists now, perhaps) will advice climate scientists, model are not reality, reality is often more complicated than any computer model. Take a step back, view with hindsight with respect to risk in the financial markets. At the trouble the cream of the last few decades of science graduates – turned computer modellers – left the world’s economy in, following the modelling of credit risk amongst many other economic assumptions.
Engineers have always been the biggest sceptics (I prefer the Brit spelling) of the CO2 causes global warming hypothesis.
Engineers spend decades in efforts to match simple deterministic systems to complex environments.
Back in the 80s I (electronics engineer) used to worry about second order effects (deviations from simple laws) caused by the non-linearity of materials. We are now in third order territory with occasional forays into fourth order effects. Climate is like 14th or 40th order stuff. And very non-linear. It is possible (not likely) for 12th order effects to have first order results (chaos).
Is it possible to do decent predictions in short time frames? Maybe. I saw Piers Corbin on Nightline the other day and he has claimed to have predicted much recent weather and predicts a cold winter in the Northern Hemisphere.
Piers Corbyn’s presentation showed the major advances in power and skill now achieved by his Solar-Lunar-Action-Technique (SLAT) of weather & climate forecasting which now includes the ability to predict from months ahead extreme events all over the world and changes in the Jet Stream such as those which caused the West Russian heatwave and the Pakistan super-deluges and floods and marked their ending in mid August 2010. In his presentation Piers showed a film of the double sunspot superfast solar coronal ejection on 14th August and the consequent Sudden Ionospheric Disturbance and the predicted jet stream disruption – See:
I'm trying to figure out what a Just Climate™ actually is. But there is no doubt that what ever it is, we need it. Well I need it. For sure. Which is why I’m all for Climate Justice. How much will it cost to move the climate of Central America to Northern Illinois? It is unjust that my heating bills are so high this early in the season.
I do have a proposal that will reduce the cost of justice some. The move only need be done during the months of Dec., Jan., Feb., and March. That should reduce the costs by 2/3rds over a year ’round solution.
It would seem that one of our satellites may have been misreporting Earth temperature data for as much as a decade.
US Government admits satellite temperature readings “degraded.” All data taken offline in shock move. Global warming temperatures may be 10 to 15 degrees too high.
Caught in the center of the controversy is the beleaguered taxpayer funded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA’s Program Coordinator, Chuck Pistis has now confirmed that the fast spreading story on the respected climate skeptic blog is true.
However, NOAA spokesman, Program Coordinator, Chuck Pistis declined to state how long the fault might have gone undetected. Nor would the shaken spokesman engage in speculation as to the damage done to the credibility of a decade’s worth of temperature readings taken from the problematic ‘NOAA-16’ satellite.
‘NOAA-16’ was launched in September 2000, and is currently operational, in a sun-synchronous orbit, 849 km above the Earth, orbiting every 102 minutes providing automated data feed of surface temperatures which are fed into climate computer models.
NOAA has reported a succession of record warm temperatures in recent years based on such satellite readings but these may now all be undermined.
World-renowned Canadian climatologist, Dr. Timothy Ball, after casting his expert eye over the shocking findings concluded, “At best the entire incident indicates gross incompetence, at worst it indicates a deliberate attempt to create a temperature record that suits the political message of the day.”
Let me add that this error - if confirmed - will have no effect on the climate. It will, however, hugely affect the Global Warming debate. Except I think the science does not matter. After all it is the political agenda that drives things. Jeff Id agrees. Tim Ball seems to be leaning in that direction as well.
I was reading Watts Up With That about a dispute between Christopher Monckton and John Abraham about some climate issues. But as is often the case the most interesting stuff is in the comments.
I completely understand, why Christopher Monckton felt a need to make an example of a typical reprehensible representative of modern Academia. People like Christopher Monckton make me hope again that not everything is lost yet under the Moon.
And yet… I spent first half of my life battling liars and cockroaches in the former USSR. I would win against any individual liar or cockroach, no sweat. But year after year after year, I was getting more and more convinced that I didn’t want to die in this battle, overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of my enemies.
So. I live in a quiet valley now, in Colorado Rockies. Grass is green, air is fresh, sky is huge. But what is this constant swish and rustle coming from the East Coast and from the Left Coast? I know this sound well! There is no escape from the battle: cockroaches are coming.
You can read more by Mr. Feht by clicking on his name above.
As to the cockroaches: they are a self inflicted wound. Keep the place clean, limit the availability of free food, plus the occasional dose of poison and you can at least keep them in check.
So how about this for a campaign slogan:
Poison The Cockroaches In November
But perhaps that is too harsh and would be interpreted as a threat, so as an alternative:
Art Robinson ran in the GOP Primary to represent the Oregon in 4th Congressional District. Wise Republican voters selected Dr. Art Robinson to represent them in the November 2010 Congressional race against Democrat Peter DeFazio.
I saw an online video by Art Robinson at the 4th International Climate Change Conference explaining why he is running. He wants to being some scientific rationality to the discussions on issues in Congress, especially climate change. “Let’s have at least one real scientist in Congress,” he said.
Dr Robertson is an expert on energy and founder of the Oregon Institute of Science & Medicine. He is widely known for his petition signed by more than 31,000 American scientists exposing human-caused global warming as a fraud.
It wouldn't hurt to have more than a few engineers (those well versed in the practical applications of science) in Congress either.
I was reading the comments at Watts Up With That and came across a link to the above photo. What is most interesting is how iStockphoto describes their offering:
A polar bear managed to get on one of the last ice floes floating in the Arctic sea. Due to global warming the natural environment of the polar bear in the Arctic has changed a lot. The Arctic sea has much less ice than it had some years ago. (This images is a photoshop design. Polarbear, ice floe, ocean and sky are real, they were just not together in the way they are now)
Well what better way to advertise something that may or may not be happening than to use a photo of something that definitely did not happen?
Also from iStockphoto is the same photo shop with a penguin. If that ice brick the penguin is floating on melts the penguin, like the bear, will have to swim for its life. What? Penguins and polar bears swim for a living? Oh! Never mind.
I love the American tie. There were always some Brits who supported the American Revolution. Good to see that the supply hasn't dried up. And here is hoping we can return the favor.
Here is a bit from the page this video was posted on.
The case for a climate treaty is in tatters. We've seen the Climategate emails expose scientists who adjusted their data to suit their politics. We've seen Glaciergate in which we've learned that the famous IPCC climate change report falsely stated that Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035 and based this not on science, peer reviewed or otherwise, but on the unfounded claims of the WWF, an environmental campaigning organization. Now we're learning about Nasagate – that climate researchers at the American space agency concede that their temperature data was inaccurate and inferior to the data used at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia which is the very data that the Climategate emails reveal has been tinkered with. These days we can't seem to go a week without witnessing some further aspect of the climate charade collapsing into a new “gate.”
Well all this has the bureaucrats of the U.N., left-wing climate organizations and the businesses planning to cash in on the climate change scare, racing to restore their position before the gate closes for good on the entire climate change scare.
Polls tell us that the public has seen through the climate scare, but that their governments are not yet listening to them. People of good sense and good intentions need to make their voices heard. Let your elected representatives of every party know that they will pay a handsome price at the ballot box unless they withdraw their support from unwise climate change treaties and legislation and actively oppose them. Tell the U.N. Representatives meeting in Bonn that there must be no new climate change treaty.
Consider. When it was global cooling - coal plants were the enemy. Now with warming - coal plants are the enemy. I'm beginning to detect a pattern. Perhaps James "Coal Trains are Auschwitz Trains" Hansen can tell us more.
The British Met (Meteorological) Office says it is time for a redo of the world temperature records.
The land-based temperature records collected by the British Meteorological Office form a central plank of the scientific evidence for global warming.
The office has collated global temperature readings back to 1850, and while the raw data have not been freely available, graphs representing it have been.
The office provided details this week of its self-imposed review of global temperature records, announced last month, in an effort to try to regain public trust in climate science in the wake of the East Anglia University debacle.
In a document entitled ''Proposal for a New International Analysis of Land Surface Air Temperature Data'', the office argued that it was time to propose an international effort to reanalyse surface temperature data in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organisation.
The new analysis, which is expected to take three years, aims to test the conclusions reached by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that ''warming of the climate system is unequivocal''.
I'm pretty confidant that if the review is carried out with that goal in mind the results will be reported as: "It is worse than we thought."
What is interesting is that they make no mention of proving that CO2 is the cause. I guess that now a days that is just assumed.
Fox News is reporting that there is to be a redo of climate data.
At a meeting on Monday of about 150 climate scientists, representatives of Britain’s weather office quietly proposed that the world’s climatologists start all over again to produce a new trove of global temperature data that is open to public scrutiny and “rigorous” peer review.
Isn't that supposed to be how science is done? Yes it is. Ah. But they still have a few surprises in store. Check this out:
The Hadley stonewall began to crumble after a gusher of leaked e-mails revealed climate scientists, including the center’s chief, Phil Jones, discussing how to keep controversial climate data out of the hands of the skeptics, keep opposing scientific viewpoints out of peer-reviewed scientific journals, and bemoaning that their climate models failed to account for more than a decade of stagnation in global temperatures. Jones later revealed that key temperature datasets used in Hadley’s predictions had been lost, and could not be retrieved for verification.
No data. Well that is bad.
But how about this for a capper:
Then, in a last defense of its old ways, the Met proposals argues says that its old datasets “are adequate for answering the pressing 20th Century questions of whether climate is changing and if so how.
So no data is good enough to make a case in the 20th Century but for the 21st Century such an oversight will just not do. That kind of thinking puts my mind totally at ease.
After years of getting "it is worse than we thought" from the Climate Catastrophists crowd and their pet scientists it turns out that maybe the certainty is not so certain after all. And wonder of wonders. Error is admitted.
Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.
The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.
At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study "strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results". The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm [7" to 23" ed.] by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.
Many scientists criticised the IPCC approach as too conservative, and several papers since have suggested that sea level could rise more. Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany published a study in December that projected a rise of 0.75m to 1.9m [30" to 75" ed.]by 2100.
I guess it is still worse than we thought. So what is the current rate of sea level rise you ask? Some say 2.2 mm a year is a pretty good number. Others like 3.3 mm a year. I have also seen lower numbers. The variation is due to the imprecision of measurement. No matter. Let me translate 2.2 mm a year is 22 cm (8 1/2") a century and 3.3 mm a year is 33cm (13") a century. The people cooking the books (excuse me Climate Scientists) are going to have to do a lot of work accelerating the real world to match their model predictions.
We have some new Climate e-mails to peruse. This one is from the fourth pdf. I transcribed it by hand so if you find any errors let me know.
Subject: Re: Fwd: US temperature correction graphic and file From:Reto Ruedy Date:Mon, 13 Aug 2007 11:30:24 -0400 To:James Hansen CC:Makiko Sato , gavin@e-mail, klo@e-mail
Jim,
I did make those calculations (I assume you mean using only GHCN and hand-adjusting only St. Helens and Lihue, in both cases decreasing the trend, eliminating a 1C and .8C step, resp., as stated in our 1999 paper, also using our urban adjustment.
I only held them back because bringing in a new analysis at this time would confuse the situation beyond hope.
As far as global means are concerned, the effect of our cleaningis slightly negative for the pre-1950 period, slighly positive thereafter, the biggest deviations are -.01C in 1922, +.01C in 2006; the change in 1900-1999 (lin. trend) is .01C/century (i.e. without cleaning it would decrease by .01C).
The US trend however is a different story though not surprising: In addition to the change caused by the UHCN modifications (+.30C for the 1900-1999 change as noted in our 2001 paper: +.14 TOBS, +.16 station hist.adj), the other modifications added .08C/century to the trend. So the trend would decrease by .38C.
The deviations for the individual years caused by the cleaning range from -.13 in 1922 to +.37 in 2006. The optical impression this creates when you look at the table of data is totally misleading: the 1998 anomaly just happens to fall below 1C (.93C) whereas 1921, 1931, 1934 are above 1C (1.27, 1,20, 1.37C) !
Reto
It would be real nice to find out what this is about. At first glance it appears they adjust things in a way that adds almost .4°C to the US trend. Is this a valid adjustment? We would need to go back to the station data and then all the various adjustments and corrections to find out.
Think of it this way though. If the trend has been incorrectly adjusted by nearly .4°C a century then the temperature trend is almost non-existent.
According to FTC regulations I am required to disclose any material benefit I receive from any blog post.
OK.
I get paid from Amazon if you order from any of the links provided. I will give you an honest opinion of any products I have ordered if I blog about them.
If you don't trust me read the Amazon reviews. If there is no review you are on your own.
If you pay me enough and promise to cover my lawyers fees I may say something nice about you. Or I may not. Enough is generally more than you can afford. Unless you have a a really really big bank account or more that a few large gold bars under the mattress.
If you do pay I expect to be transported to a country with no extradition treaty with the US.
If I review a book it may be because the author or publisher sent me a review copy. Other wise I will quote a review of some one else. If I say a product looks interesting it is because it interests me. Sometimes I will link to books so you can educate yourself on a subject and so I can make some off the sale.
If some one employs me I will probably say good things about them as long as the money keeps coming. Or I may say nothing. To keep out of trouble with their lawyers.
That covers most of what I can think of. I'm getting old and sometimes I don't think of everything.
And if you have read this far please Buy Something From Amazon. I can use the money - well actually I will use the proceeds to buy something from Amazon. I get a better deal that way.
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