The Real Problem With the Climate Science Emails

http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/11/the_real_problem_with_the_climate_science_emails.php

by Perceval • 17 years ago

40 69 17 years ago

business.theatlantic.com

pradocchia3• 17 years ago

Are there any open source-style projects underway yet to fix up the code & data? I keep thinking this is the next obvious thing to do.

The climate models must be specified somewhere in the literature. Data can be munged. What stands in the way? Is the data in some legal netherworld that prevents redistribution?

flynth2• 17 years ago

There were some stories published recently how difficult it is to gain access to the raw data. CRU and organizations like it have exclusive access to it and as referenced in few of those emails(they refer to people asking for access as "loons trying to disprove") are quite reluctant to give the control away. Why give something so valuable away when by just creating pretty graphs out of it you can secure government funding, place in most reputable science journals and hundreds of citations a year from people having to cite YOUR papers instead of the real data which they can't access?

rbanffy12• 17 years ago

I understand their concern.

It's easy to imagine loons (or worse) getting access to the data, publishing findings that prove the warming is indeed caused by the decline in the pirate population, getting airtime in Fox News and other similar media outlets and making, thus, it true to a large chunk of the populace.

We don't need people, deliberately or not, spreading disinformation.

pradocchia3• 17 years ago

Wasn't some of the hitherto secret data included in the hacked emails as attachments? How much is still unavailable?

I wish the AGW folks would get out in front of this and stop acting like partisan hacks. As it stands today, many people have written off AGW as a fraud, nevermind whatever other other evidence may exist. Appeals to science and its trappings of legitimacy will fall on deaf ears if the researchers at the CRU all keep their positions and the data is not made publically available.

robotrout7• 17 years ago

    ... the fact is, everything we know about carbon dioxide 
    indicates that it has a greenhouse effect, because it is 
    more efficient at passing sunlight through to the earth, 
    than at allowing that energy to reradiate back into space 
    as heat.

As much as I hate to beat a dead horse, I find myself compelled to spell out, for those that may share her confusion, that there is no "indication" that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We just know, for sure, that yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. That has never been in debate, by anybody. Monkeys know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The debate is, and always has been, whether the 3.2% of atmospheric CO2 emitted by humans, which comprises 0.28% of the greenhouse effect on earth (counting water-vapor) is actually significant enough to be the cause of measurable extra warming, above and beyond the warming that would occur anyway, here in the waning years of the latest ice-age. It's never been about whether CO2 was a greenhouse gas or not.

WilliamLP3• 17 years ago

> whether the 3.2% of atmospheric CO2 emitted by humans

313 ppm in 1960 to 383 ppm in 2009 is 3.2%? Or is there indication that this increase isn't human caused?

> which comprises 0.28% of the greenhouse effect on earth

It's 9-26% for CO2, according to Wikipedia. (Which is a surprisingly large range.) Why the disparity with your figure?

I don't know anything about climate science, and I don't have an agenda, but I'm just wondering if your figures are based on anything.

sp332• 17 years ago

The indication that this isn't human-caused is just adding up all the CO2 output by cars, industry, etc. and subtracting from the amount of CO2 that has been added to the atmosphere in the same time period. I think it accounts for about 5%, but I'm not sure I read that right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_Earth%27s... Since water accounts for up to 85% of greenhouse effect (including clouds), that means man-made atmospheric CO2 accounts for 0.75% or less of the greenhouse effect.

robotrout7• 17 years ago

There is a link between temperature and CO2 concentration, as you know. For the last 18000 years, since the last ice age, pretty much, we've been getting warmer, and CO2 has been climbing. See the Vostok Ice Core Data. Even if there were no men on earth, the CO2 levels would be rising. That explains at least some of your 40 year CO2 climb that you mention.

Anyway, no, the 3.2% I reference is just by mass. 3.2% of the CO2 in the atmosphere is man-made.

If you care, only 2.2% of the warming caused by global warming gasses (excluding water vapor) is caused by man-made CO2, since different gasses are better or worse greenhouse gases, and CO2 isn't nearly as efficient as a greenhouse gas as some other gases, just using mass isn't quite accurate, in terms of percentage of greenhouse effect.

Now, again, ignoring water vapor, which is insane to do, but is "customary", your control of the system, if you eliminated all CO2 from every person on earth (perhaps we'll let you breath, but no campfires) is 2.2%. (Again, it's actually 0.28%, but just for the sake of argument, say water vapor is not a green-house gas, even though it is) So, how confident are you, that 2.2% is enough control to effect a reversal of the temperature rise? Now, given that you aren't going to get anywhere near a 100% elimination of man-made CO2, short of killing everybody, how much money are you willing to spend on this exercise, and shouldn't a little bit of number crunching (dollars per degree) be undertaken, before we start down this path?

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

The bigger problem with posts like this is that they fail to appreciate a very simple truth: Either humans are affecting the climate or they don't.

If they don't then it doesn't matter, if they do then we should study to what extent.

Reduction to extremes shows that we do, after all, every organism affects the biosphere simply by being alive, and we do a lot more than just being alive.

So the question to answer is not whether or not global warming is 'real' or not. If it is we'll find out eventually.

We need to find out long before it becomes evident whether or not we have a positive, a negative or a neutral effect.

If the planet is heating up and we can't influence it we can stop the debate. If the planet is warming up or cooling down and we can influence it we first need to ask ourselves if influencing it is a good thing, and if we can we need to figure out the best way to go about it.

The current 'fix' to me looks more like development aid in disguise, where rich countries give poor countries some money so the rich countries can continue to pollute much like they did before. That certainly won't solve anything, in the words of Douglas Adams, it isn't the green pieces of paper that are unhappy. It is us that will be unhappy if we do not take these issues seriously.

One of the bigger issues with the climate science emails is that anything that is developed outside of the light of day usually can't stand the light of day. So we need transparency and really well performed very well checked science, where each and every result is available to all parties.

With the adversarial nature of the subject I don't doubt there will be plenty of interpretations of the data so we don't have to worry about finding people to 'peer-review' the data. The upside is that by the time that the truth will be out it will be unassailable, whatever it is.

Open source is a great model to apply to science, many eyes works well for finding bugs, whether it is in software or in climate models that shouldn't make too much difference.

And then once we all agree on the facts we can look for a solution, if we have to, and if there is one.

yters• 17 years ago

Why don't people focus more on the benefits of global warming? The scenarios I've heard of are on the scale of 10s-100s of years, plenty of time where we can plan a good response. Plus, there's the question: mightn't the earth work better when it is warmer?

There are so many different ways to go with global warming, even if it is true, but we're constantly just told to be scared out of our minds about it and do whatever the experts tell us will save our hides. A sure recipe for manipulation if there ever was one.

rbanffy12• 17 years ago

"Why don't people focus more on the benefits of global warming?"

Think about it: if we realize the Earth will turn into Venus 2.0, we will see a lot of money being invested in the development of cheap and reliable space travel...

jackchristopher• 17 years ago

> mightn't the earth work better when it is warmer? - yters

The majority of history has seen a warmer earth. Warmer means life-friendly. I just worry that we fail the transition.

The planet earth is currently in the middle of an ice age. At regular intervals polar ice caps expand, causing widespread glaciation and causing widespread devastation to the planet's ecosystems.

An argument for global warming: http://timtyler.org/end_the_ice_age/

jberryman• 17 years ago

Been paying attention for the last decade? Noticed the record droughts in the Amazon River Basin or hundreds of thousands killed by the worst tsunamis in 700 years?

Whether humans are the primary cause or not, this is climate change, and its nothing like the pleasant Hawaiian vacation you seem to imagine it to be. I don't see the bright side.

artsrc2• 17 years ago

> The bigger problem with posts like this is that they fail to appreciate a very simple truth: Either humans are affecting the climate or they don't

These are tautologies:

* Human have affected the climate or they have not. * Humans either do affect the climate or they don't.

But this is not:

* Either humans are affecting the climate or they don't

You may have meant something different, but it is common flaw in reasoning about climate. Just because the smaller increases in CO2 levels so far have had a small impact on the climate so far, does not mean that future larger increases in CO2 will have no effect forever.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

To avoid future language mistakes I'll be writing in dutch from now on :)

So what I meant to say was:

There are only two possibilities:

- we have an effect on the environment

- we do not have an effect on the environment

Since it is trivially simple to prove that we have are having an effect on the environment the remaining task is to measure how our effect on our environment translates into an effect on the climate and what direction and magnitude that effect is.

I hope that is more clear to you, sorry for causing you distress :)

markbnine• 17 years ago

Thought it interesting how the programmers hinted in their code at problems with the climate model. These were not informative comments. They were disclaimers. I see them all the time. People put them in their code when they are too lazy to properly figure something out. They often say something like, "Yeah, I know. This is an awful hack. Fix later."

Quote from article: Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"

jgrahamc• 17 years ago

That code's not FORTRAN it's IDL.

petewarden4• 17 years ago

Here's a good summary of the fundamental science behind the climate change consensus: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/11/bl...

It's a complex, messy subject, and as an engineer I hate the reliance on computer models to make predictions, but the dramatic increase in CO2 levels is a fact. It's plain common-sense that a big increase in one of the inputs to the climate has a good chance of causing disruptive change.

There's also accumulating evidence from independent sources that the temperature is rising, but pretend it wasn't there, would an increase in CO2 from 313ppm to 383ppm over 50 years worry you?

mhartl• 17 years ago

It's plain common-sense that a big increase in one of the inputs to the climate has a good chance of causing disruptive change.

It is rarely noted (but undisputed) that the baseline climate response is logarithmic in carbon dioxide concentration (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_eff...). Since, absent feedback effects, exponential increases in CO2 levels lead to linear temperature changes, it's likely that common sense is not a reliable guide.

anthonyb4• 17 years ago

So what's the response in temperature when CO2 increases like this?

http://www.economist.com/images/mt_blog/democracyinamerica/c...

Is that geometric? Or worse?

acronymble• 17 years ago

Hah, not that I'm saying that this guy's other views have anything to do with his ideas on climatology, but the paragraph after the one you linked is titled "Racial Biology." It doesn't end well: "...and the results formed the scientific basis for the Compulsory sterilization program in Sweden, as well as inspiring the Nazi eugenics in Germany."

Don't nobody jump down my throat or anything, the juxtaposition just made me laugh.

dantheman3• 17 years ago

>> plain common-sense

in non-linear models with feedback is often times incorrect.

robotrout7• 17 years ago

    would an increase in CO2 from 313ppm to 383ppm over 50 years worry you?

No, but an increase from 313,000ppb to 383,000ppb would scare the crap out of me. Look how much bigger and impressive my numbers are than yours?!

Sorry, I couldn't resist. You really are talking ppm here, so keep in mind the number of 0's to the right of the decimal point before getting too concerned. That's not to say that in some systems, ppm increases are not concerning. However, your point was "it looks like a lot", and that's not valid, without actual perspective on how much a 1 ppm increase will effect the system.

petewarden4• 17 years ago

I'm talking about a 22 percentage increase in the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere over 50 years.

I assume you don't dispute that CO2 acts as a significant greenhouse gas in our atmosphere?

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

Bearing this in mind, I think most people--including me--missed the biggest part of the climate emails story. ...the CRU's main computer model may be, to put it bluntly, complete rubbish...The emails seem to describe a model which frequently breaks, and being constantly "tweaked" with manual interventions of dubious quality in order to make them fit the historical data. These stories suggest that the model, and the past manual interventions, are so poorly documented that CRU cannot now replicate its own past findings.

The interesting thing here is that having a bad model should have been okay -- you'd expect science to iterate a lot over the course of a few decades as it learned more and more about the climate. But for some reason it wasn't okay to be wrong any more. And whenever that moment passed it stopped being science and started being a religion, at least to some of those involved. Religions have "us against them" they have the elite and the unwashed masses, they have "we know the solution, just tell me your problem" They frequently have end-of-world predictions, a hierarchy of who can form dogma, a culture of secrecy, an emotional and visceral response to anybody who questions their beliefs, etc.

I'm not trying to beat a dead horse, only to say once again that this story is much more than just about the politics of climate change. It's about how professional science and professional scientists carry out their business. It's very easy to get emotionally wrapped up with whatever you're doing, especially if you think you're saving the world. It's critical that we establish sort of system of ethics to make thinking and acting like this anathema to professional scientists no matter what field they are in.

dantheman3• 17 years ago

A big difference between "climate science" and other sciences is that other sciences make predictions and perform tests. The duty of the scientist is to bend over backwards telling you all the ways that their results may be flawed.

Also, climate scientists have strong incentive for there to be AGW. If it turns out AGW isn't happening then most will be out of work, and their expertise will be deemed relatively useless.

hop• 17 years ago

Pretty amazing none of this info been open to peer review. Shouldn't their conclusions be replicable by others? Do they just write conclusion papers?

tome2• 17 years ago

No scientist of any kind ever publishes his/her source code, as far as I am aware.

waterlesscloud2• 17 years ago

Why not?

gvb• 17 years ago

Some do.

- http://www.openscience.org/blog/

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_research

- http://www.google.com/search?q=open+science

nazgulnarsil• 17 years ago

the entire debate is moot. even if we are causing global warming and the worst case scenarios are true, the way we're going about curbing it is out of fantasy land, not engineering and economic fact.

uuilly• 17 years ago

Nobody seems to be mentioning that a major source for climate research has made a shameful mockery of the scientific process. Regardless of whether their conclusions are right or wrong, they are doctoring numbers to fit their desired conclusions and sidelining scientists who raise doubts.

As scientists and engineers this should disgust us. The sanctity of the scientific process is a much bigger deal than climate change. It embodies all our technological decisions and it cannot be tainted.

It would be as if the supreme court was burying evidence to convict people they thought were guilty. It's wrong. Even if we think it achieves the right result. Once you lose faith in the system, it ceases to be useful.

pradocchia3• 17 years ago

Once you lose faith in the system, it ceases to be useful.

Lost faith will be a dominant trend for the foreseeable future, not limited to science. Sadly.

rbanffy12• 17 years ago

I think we are all failing to realize this is no longer a scientific discussion. It's politics. It's about allocation of resources, changing industrial bases and more or less changing, or not, a whole planetary economy.

Did anyone really expect all the political and economical interests to sit quietly and not try to interfere with scientific research that could be a matter of life and death to them?

The Real Problem With the Climate Science Emails

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