More on Dessler 2010

Sep 8, 2011 – 11:37 AM

CERES data, as retrieved in its original state (see here) provides all-sky and clear-sky time series. Dessler 2010 made the curious decision to combine ERA clear-sky with CERES all-sky to get a CLD forcing series. This obviously invites the question about the impact of using CERES clear-sky in combination with CERES all-sky to calculate the CLD forcing series. One would have thought that this is the sort of thing that any objective peer reviewer would ask almost immediately. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen, climate science articles are too often reviewed by pals. Nor, to my knowledge, has the question been raised in the climate community.

The decision was touched on in Dessler 2010 as follows:

Previous work has shown that DRclear-sky can be calculated accurately givenwater vapor and temperature distributions (20 Dessler et al JGR 2008, 21- Moy et al JGR 2010). And, given suggestions of biases in measured clear-sky fluxes (22 -Sohn Bennartz JGR 2008), I chose to use the reanalysis fluxes here.

While peer reviewers at Science were unequal to the question, the issue was raised a month ago by Troy_CA in an excellent post at Lucia’s. Having exactly replicated Dessler’s regression results and Figure 2a, I’m re-visiting this issue by repeating the regression in Dessler 2010 style but making the plausible variation of CERES clear sky in combination with CERES all sky, and with the widely used HadCRUT3 series and got surprising results.

The supposed relationship between CLD forcing and temperature is reversed: the slope is -0.96 w/m2/K rather than 0.54 (and with somewhat higher though still low significance). Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (736)

The Stone in Trenberth’s Shoe

Sep 6, 2011 – 12:34 PM

Like most of us, I’ve been a bit taken aback by the ritual seppuku of young academic Wolfgang Wagner, formerly editor of Remote Sensing, for the temerity of casting a shadow across the path of climate capo Kevin Trenberth. It appears that Wagner’s self-immolation has only partly appeased Trenberth, who, like an Oriental despot, remains unamused.

Spencer and Braswell 2011, the stone presently in Trenberth’s shoe, is, to a very considerable extent, a critique of Dessler 2010 (Science). Over the past few days, I requested data from the authors of both articles and was promptly supplied with it by both. (I remind readers that Dessler, almost uniquely in the climate community, agreed with my request that IPCC AR4 Review Comments be placed online, rather than IPCC’s original plan to place one paper copy at Harvard Library). Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments (229)

NSF on Jones’ Email Destruction Enterprise

Sep 2, 2011 – 2:02 PM

David Holland, the professional engineer who submitted the FOI which prompted Phil Jones to initiate what can only be described as a conspiracy to destroy documents related to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, has repeatedly asked:

why did Jones take such a large professional risk by asking other scientists to destroy documents?

A correlative question for the other scientists (Briffa, Mann, Wahl, Ammann) is why they agreed to co-operate with Jones in this bizarre enterprise. These questions are not just Holland’s. They are important questions that deserve an answer.

But despite multiple so-called “inquiries”, Holland’s questions about Jones’ email deletion “enterprise” remain unanswered. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that, as far as the inquiries are concerned, they remained unasked. Instead of unravelling the conduct of Jones and his Team, the “inquiries” have been wilfully obtuse, both refusing to ask the salient questions and determining the matter on empirical findings that were either blatantly untrue or unsupported by the evidence that they collected.

In the UK, Muir Russell was commissioned by the University of East Anglia to inquire about the emails, but didn’t even ask Jones whether he deleted the emails. Muir Russell “explained” to the Parliamentary Committee that, if he had done so, he would have been asking Jones to admit misconduct. That a panel commissioned to inquire about misconduct should refuse to grasp the nettle of actually inquiring about misconduct is unfortunately all too typical of these sorry events. Muir Russell’s subsequent report then contained findings on email deletion that were blatantly untrue and known to be untrue to hundreds, if not thousands, of readers who’ve followed these events. In particular, even though Jones’ email initiating the deletion enterprise was marked re “FOIA” and was a direct response to Holland’s FOIA request, Muir Russell obtusely reported that there was no pending FOI request at the time of Jones’ deletion email. This sort of wilful obtuseness and/or incompetence was one of a number of factors that resulted in the Muir Russell “inquiry” exacerbating, rather than diminishing, the polarized attitudes in this field.

In today’s post, I’ll review the recent NSF Office of the Inspector General report as it pertains to Jones’ document destruction enterprise, together with the Penn State Inquiry Committee that it reviews. Like Muir Russell, both the Penn State Inquiry Committee and the NSF OIG neglected to consider obvious and fundamental questions about Mann’s participation in Jones’ document destruction enterprise and arrived at empirical conclusions that were unsupported by the inadequate record that they had collected.

Although the defects in the Penn State Inquiry Committee’s handling of Mann’s participation in Jones’ email destruction enterprise are or should be obvious to any Inspector General (and had been pointed out long ago at Climate Audit), the recent report of the Inspector General condoned Penn State’s mishandling of these matters, as I’ll discuss in today’s post.

On a number of occasions, I’ve urged readers to not hyper-ventilate so much about Mann and pay more attention to the institutions that have enabled Climategate conduct, as for example here:

Far too much attention in this controversy has been focused on Mann and not enough on the enablers.

I once again re-iterate this observation and request and ask people to focus more on the conduct of the inquiries and institutions than of the scientists and grant recipients. For the record, I was one of the people interviewed by the NSF Office of the Inspector General (OIG), though I see no evidence of my input in the report. I’ll discuss this in a follow-up post. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (77)

Neil Wallis and the “Poor Phil” Article

Aug 26, 2011 – 1:53 PM

Bishop Hill reports that UEA have released a portion of their correspondence and documents with Neil Wallis and Outside Organisation (see here); correspondence here. They have claimed exemptions for much of the request.

Under s.36(2)(b)(i) & (ii), they claimed that “release of some of the requested information would, or would be likely, to inhibit the free & frank provision of advice or the free and frank exchange of views for the purposes of deliberations”. Under s 40(2), They claimed that some of the information WAS “Personal information”. Under s. 41(1), they claimed that “disclosure of information would … constitute an actionable breach of confidence”. Under s 43(2), they said that “disclosure of information would, or would be likely, to prejudice the commercial interests of a person as defined by the Act”.

The limited information made available did clarify some points. Wallis seems to arrive on the scene in February 2010, not in early December 2009 (as speculated in my recent post here.) Thus the front page article for which Wallis claimed credit was not the Ben Webster article of December 4, 2009 but two Richard Girling articles in Murdoch’s Sunday Times on February 7, 2010 – here and here. These started or promoted many memes of the Empire Strikes Back phase of Climategate: blaming CRU misconduct since 2003 on FOI requests in late July 2009, focusing on the “poor Phil” meme, associating Jones with the honorable David Kelly, building up the alleged “death threats”.

As noted in stories about Wallis’ recent arrest in connection with the phone hacking scandal, Wallis, a former News of the World editor, maintained close connections with the Murdoch newspapers, which may have assisted him with obtaining a prominent placement for the poor Phil article.

Acton and Davies were delighted with the Times article.

Wallis seems to have been behind the tactic of offering up Jones for this one interview with a soft interviewer and then closing down access. (Briffa has avoided being interviewed altogether.)

Other emails show that Wallis and Outside Organisation prepped Acton and Phil Jones for their appearance before the Parliamentary Committee. If the resulting appearances represented improvement on their pre-coaching standards, one can only wonder at what they were like before coaching by Outside Organisation. Both Acton and Jones were savaged by the London press – see contemporary CA report here.

Acton was described by Quentin Letts as follows:

Professor Edward Acton… provided much-needed comic relief. Professor Acton, a younger version of Professor Calculus from the Tintin books, beamed and nodded at everything Professor Jones said. ‘I think that answer was spot-on,’ he cried, after listening to one response from the terror-stricken Jones.

Professor Acton’s left eyebrow started doing a little jiggle of its own. His eyeballs bulged with admiration for the climate-change supremo. His lips were pulled so wide in wonderment they must nearly have split down the
seams like banana skins.

Letts described Jones as follows:

Others, watching the tremulous Professor Jones, will have been less impressed. He may be right about man-made climate change. But you do rather hope that politicians sought second, third, even 20th opinions before swallowing his theories and trying to change the world’s industrial output.

I guess he didn’t get Neil Wallis’ memo.

Wallis and Outside Organisation appear to have been on retainer from February through at least April. The closing emails report Wallis being invited to attend a “do” by Acton and invited to stay at Wood Hall.

The new information also shows even more conclusively the ridiculousness of the Joe Romm/Keith Olbermann theory that the Murdochs had sabotaged East Anglia’s public relations. Quite the contrary. It seems that the Murdoch papers had helped East Anglia and that the university was delighted with their coverage in the Murdoch press.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments (51)

Erice 2011

Aug 26, 2011 – 1:24 PM

I spent the last week at the annual Erice conference of the World Federation of Scientists, returning to Toronto late yesterday. I’ll write some reports on this later as, unfortunately, I get tired too quickly these days. There was a session on solar, cosmic rays on clouds, timely in view of the CERN article. Svensmark, Shaviv and Veizer were there as well as Ilan Koren (of the predator-prey article on clouds) and Christiannson, a critic of Scensmark’s. Lindzen made an interesting overview lecture. I suggested to him that he place data (including collated intermediates) and code for Lindzen and Choi online so that more people can handle the statistics for themselves – he’s more than agreeable to that.

There was a session on the impact of Fukushima on nuclear – Erice has a strong nuclear contingent. Also some interesting information on China’s energy supply and demand and on fracked natural gas, both worth reporting.

I was online and noticed some of the events of the past week, but took a holiday from being online.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (15)

Neil Wallis and the Ben Webster Article

Aug 16, 2011 – 9:10 AM

Update – Aug 26,2011: the article placed by Wallis has been resolved with information obtained by Andrew Montford under FOI – see here. It was the Richard Girling “poor Phil” piece.]

We learned recently that the University of East Anglia retained Neil Wallis and the Outside Organisation to strike back at its critics. East Anglia has delayed responding to Andrew Montford’s FOI request for information on its relationship to Outside Organisation while it ponders the “public interest” – or more precisely, to give it additional time to try to think up reasons for refusing these documents.

Outside Organisation claimed to have almost immediately secured favorable coverage for the university, but, to date, contemporary news articles have not been surveyed to identify the fruits of Neil Wallis’ intervention. Hilary Ostrov begins the examination here (ht Bishop Hill here)

Update: 10 pm – Subsequent to the post, I sent an email to Ben Webster asking him about the article and received a cheerful reply including the following:

I have never spoken to Wallis and have never spoken to anyone from Outside Organisation in relation to UEA. I did not know until I read it recently that Wallis had worked for UEA.

So read the following with this in mind. Without confirmation of Webster’s source, the fact that Webster didn’t talk to Wallis doesn’t preclude the anonymous “source close to the investigation” referred to below having been coached by Wallis as part of their “covert” operations. Webster’s article, for the reasons outlined below, still seems to me the most likely fruit of Wallis’ endeavours relative to other candidates, but it’s just speculation for now.
Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments (117)

Hansen, WG3 and Green Kool-aid

Aug 13, 2011 – 12:59 PM

In today’s post, I’m going to discuss three articles on renewables by representatives of three green factions:

(1) Hansen’s comparison of belief in renewables to belief in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy and his comparison of such policies to forcing his grandchildren to drink kool-aid. Hansen placed part of the “intellectual” blame for widespread belief in such policies on Amory Lovins, a prominent American environmentalist who was the first proponent of soft renewables as a large footprint energy solution. It appears to me that there appears to be a direct lineage from Lovins’ fantasies criticized by Hansen to the IPCC Greenpeace scenario in the recent WG3 report on renewables.

(2) a critique of the IPCC WG3 Report on Renewables by Ted Trainer, along very similar lines (but in greater depth) to criticisms originally made at Climate Audit here.

(3) a self-serving editorial by WG3 chairman Ottmar Edenhofer in an IPCC trade journal (Nature), purporting tp defending their report on renewables, but, if anything, further demonstrating IPCC’s failure to address criticism.

Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (109)

Arctic Driftwood Re-Visited

Aug 7, 2011 – 2:30 PM

Both Anthony Watts and Judy Curry have covered a new Science article by Svend Funder et al entitled “10,000-Year Record of Arctic Ocean Sea-Ice Variability—View from the Beach” SI here.

Funder et al argued that driftwood travelled in sea ice across the Arctic Ocean during periods of less sea ice than at present and was deposited on now raised beaches in northern Greenland.

Funder et al 2011 is a useful study, but neither its use of driftwood nor its reconstruction of Holocene sea ice is original. These findings were articulated in substantially similar form in Dyke et al (1997), which was discussed at length in a Climate Audit post in 2007 here and here. Funder et al cite Dyke et al 1997 on multiple occasions and use its information in their analysis, though, needless to say, the press releases make the study sound more original than it really is. I don’t think that this is a defect in the study – studies can add useful data (as this one does) without being particularly “original” in an academic sense.

Here is a re-quotation of the abstract of Dyke et al 1997:

Driftwood appears to be absent in the Beaufort Gyre but abundant in parts of the Transpolar Drift (TPD), which crosses the Arctic Ocean from the Chukchi Sea to the vicinity of northeastern Greenland. Nearly 300 radiocarbon dates on Holocene driftwood from the Canadian Arctic Archipelago reveal two regions with contrasting histories of driftwood incursion: the region accessible to wood brought into Baffin Bay by the West Greenland Current and the rest of the archipelago, which receives wood from the Arctic Ocean. We hypothesize that when the TPD was deflected westward along northern Greenland, wood was delivered widely to the Canadian Arctic Archipelago; when the TPD exited entirely through Fram Strait via the East Greenland Current, little or no wood was delivered to most of the archipelago, but some continued into Baffin Bay via the West Greenland Current. A split TPD delivered wood to both regions. The regional driftwood incursion histories exhibit multiple maxima and minima that can be explained by this hypothesis. The Larix to Picea ratio of wood arriving in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago has also changed through time. This may indicate varying contributions from Russian versus North American sources, which in turn may indicate variable mixing of wood en route. The inferred discharge paths of the TPD were apparently stable for intervals ranging from several millennia to centuries or perhaps only decades. The last major switch broadly correlates with the onset of Neoglaciation.

Similar points are reported in Funder et al 2011. For example:

The changing proportions of larch and spruce therefore indicate changes in the strength of the TPD and BG, which are driven by atmospheric circulation (6 – Dyke et al 1997, 11).

The period ~8.5 to 6 ky B.P. marks the Holocene Thermal Maximum (HTM) in this area. Long continuous beach ridges northward along the coast up to 83°N show that this was the southern limit of permanent sea ice, ~1000 km to the north of its present position (Fig. 1C).

during the HTM [Holocene Thermal Maximum] in north Greenland were 2° to 4°C warmer than now, as elsewhere in this part of the Arctic (17). Driftwood from this period is sparse, and because there was free access to the coast, we can conclude that multiyear sea ice was reduced.

our data suggest more open water than at present until at least 4.5 ky B.P. (Fig. 3). The same pattern is seen on Ellesmere Island, but here permanent land-fast ice began to grow at 5.5 ky B.P., spreading to block most of the coast at 3.5 ky B.P. (5).

And an interesting MWP observation:

A larch-dominated peak at ~1100 to 1400 indicates a strong TPD and a weak BG during the Medieval Warm Period, whereas the woodless periods and the increase in spruce after 1400 show that situations with large BG input became increasingly frequent during the Little Ice Age (LIA), as shown also in the western Arctic Ocean (22).

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments (19)

The Guardian Is “Bemused”

Aug 6, 2011 – 10:20 AM

David Leigh of the Guardian has been added to the list of UK journalists who’ve engaged in phone hacking and other illegal/unethical conduct. Some of the more questionable conduct by UK journalists has involved their acquisition of information from police that police were not legally entitled to disclose either for payment or as a favour. David Leigh also had a role in the Empire Strikes Back phase of Climategate early last year and, in today’s post, I’ll discuss the connection. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments (236)

A Couple of CRU Stations

Aug 1, 2011 – 1:21 PM

As is by now well-known, CRU lost or destroyed the “original” data that went into the construction of CRU station data. This doesn’t mean that analysis is totally compromised (though it is made more difficult.)

Let me explain this through a comparison to GISS methodology. A given station may have a number of (what I’ve called) scribal versions. The GISS “dset1” station record is a combination of scribal versions using Hansen’s reference station method – a method that has received virtually no close examination from the “community” though it has some important defects. (One such defect is its contribution to the “Great Dying of Thermometers”, which results in part from the interaction of Hansen’s reference station method with the changeover from World Weather Records provenance to CLIMAT provenance.) Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (100)