Amongst the argy-bargy over the CRU emails over the last 24 hours, have come the expected denials, claims of "being taken out of context" and the usual spin.
As one reader of wattsupwiththat points out, programmers comments in code have to be an honest description of what the program is doing. Comments are there to help the programmers and their successors understand the intention of the program at that point.
A commenter named Neal on climate audit writes:
People are talking about the emails being smoking guns but I find the remarks in the code and the code more of a smoking gun. The code is so hacked around to give predetermined results that it shows the bias of the coder. In other words make the code ignore inconvenient data to show what I want it to show. The code after a quick scan is quite a mess. Anyone with any pride would be to ashamed of to let it out public viewing. As examples [of] bias take a look at the following remarks from the MANN code files:
Here’s the code with the comments left by the programmer: function mkp2correlation,indts,depts,remts,t,filter=filter,refperiod=refperiod,$ datathresh=datathresh ; ; THIS WORKS WITH REMTS BEING A 2D ARRAY (nseries,ntime) OF MULTIPLE TIMESERIES ; WHOSE INFLUENCE IS TO BE REMOVED. UNFORTUNATELY THE IDL5.4 p_correlate ; FAILS WITH >1 SERIES TO HOLD CONSTANT, SO I HAVE TO REMOVE THEIR INFLUENCE ; FROM BOTH INDTS AND DEPTS USING MULTIPLE LINEAR REGRESSION AND THEN USE THE ; USUAL correlate FUNCTION ON THE RESIDUALS. ; pro maps12,yrstart,doinfill=doinfill ; ; Plots 24 yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD reconstructions ; of growing season temperatures. Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually ; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to ; the real temperatures. ;
and later the same programming comment again in another routine: ; ; Plots (1 at a time) yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD ; reconstructions ; of growing season temperatures. Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually ; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to ; the real temperatures.
You can claim an email you wrote years ago isn’t accurate saying it was “taken out of context”, but a programmer making notes in the code does so that he/she can document what the code is actually doing at that stage, so that anyone who looks at it later can figure out why this function doesn’t plot past 1960. In this case, it is not allowing all of the temperature data to be plotted. Growing season data (summer months when the new tree rings are formed) past 1960 is thrown out because “these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures”, which implies some post processing routine.
Spin that, spin it to the moon if you want. I’ll believe programmer notes over the word of somebody who stands to gain from suggesting there’s nothing “untowards” about it.
Either the data tells the story of nature or it does not. Data that has been “artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures” is false data, yielding a false result.
OK so it's the weekend and we have serious bushfires burning and a "record" heatwave.
But you would have thought that the media which is normally so quick to jump on any angle of "the most important issue facing our planet ever" (which depending on the day would be either climate change or the fate of some footballer's knee), you would have thought that someone in the media might have picked up the fact that one of the two top most prestigious climate research institutions in the world has been caught making up data and bullying scientific journal publishers to ensure that they toe the party line.
And with the Liberal Party undergoing frantic discussions about whether to support the Government's Emissions Trading Scheme even as we speak you would think somebody other than bloggers might be putting this little titbit to air.
And given the way the ABC especially runs with every crazy little story about the doom of climate change-- my personal favourite one was the Melbourne vet who claimed that climate change was making stray cats breed more often and that Melbourne would soon be overrun by moggies, oblivious to the fact that Sydney and Brisbane which are already much warmer than Melbourne don't seem to have that problem-- you would expect that somebody might be starting to ask some searching questions about the whole deal.
No... the carbon heating must go on. After all the science is settled, and even if it's all been a total fabrication nothing will get in the way. Journalists will continue to resist the publishing of genuine information if it runs against the established ideology.
Maybe, just maybe, somebody later in the week will tell the Liberals it's time to act like an Opposition and actually oppose something on the basis of principle.
And maybe somebody will whisper in Penny Wong's ear "the emperor has no clothes."
Then possibly we might wake up to the fact that Australia has always been mostly hot and dry with extremes of weather, that England has always been a tad damp and America prone to hurricanes--long before climate change and global warming were invented.
There has been some concern lately that the British Government-run climate change research centre The Hadley Climate Centre has been hiding its scientific data from the public and evading freedom of information laws. While they have been happy to publish their findings they have refused to release raw data to confirm or refute their findings. This is contrary to normal scientific procedure, leading sceptics to smell a proverbial rat.
It seems the deception has been far more sinister than even the most cynical had suspected.
The Hadley's computer system has been "hacked" and hundreds of emails and memos have been released to investigative journalists. Some of these emails are just dismissive of sceptics, but some suggest systemic fudging of data to make it more conforming to the theory.
I've seen some comments on this, including people whose own emails to the centre and the centre's responses have been leaked, and these people confirm that the information leaked is genuine.
Is it possible that we will see an unwinding of the bureaucracy, the expensive carbon taxes, the academic sinecures, the scare-mongering industry-- or are there too many vested interests including powerful banks who stand to make trillions from carbon permit trading?
This article from Australian climate scientist Joanne Nova summarises the leaks.
On the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, there are still people out there who think it was all a hoax. Given that undredsof people were involved from a dozen or more countries, including Australia, it takes a lot more faith to believe the conspiracy theory than to believe the fact of the lunar landing. Here's a clip from mythbusters showing how that flag flapped in a vacuum.
Climate "scientist" Dr Ben McNeil shows the logic of climate "science" here.
His argument is very simple- if you wear sunscreen you must believe in human caused global warming. Silly me- I thought it was because I believed in the link between exposure to ultra-violet radiation and risk of developing skin cancer.
The reason for this stupid line of thinking is that the guy who first discovered that CO2 can act as a kind of thermal blanket in the atmosphere also discovered that certain chemicals can absorb UV radiation by the same kind of process.
It's great to think that our global economy is being re-constructed demolished on the basis of this kind of nonsense.
If you are still worried about CO2 and the non-existent warming, consider these gems from "Heaven and Earth" by Ian Plimer:
* termites produce far more greenhouse gases than all the human outputs combined.
* the CO2 in the air is a tiny amount of that dissolved in the oceans and the amount "sequestered" in rocks is many billions of times more- all of these sinks for CO2 are in a dynamic equilibrium.
We have more to fear from the influence of "climate scientists" than we do from the effect of CO2 in the air.
Richard Dawkins, British scientist is the front-runner in the atheistic evangelism religion. Although he claims to be a rationalistic scientist, the truth is that he is unable to carry the argument on scientific and rational grounds and has to resort to personal attacks.
Melanie Phillips reports on a rather nasty character:
The Truth Delusion of Richard Dawkins Tuesday, 28th April 2009
The most famous atheist in the world, biologist Professor Richard Dawkins, poses as the arch-apostle of reason, a scientist who stands for empirical truth in opposition to obscurantism and lies. What follows suggests that in fact he is sloppy and cavalier with both facts and reasoning to a disturbing degree.
I previously wrote about the remarkable debate (which can be seen at this website) between Dawkins and John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics and Fellow in the Philosophy of Science at Oxford. Lennox is the author of God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? which demolishes Dawkins by showing not only that there is no inherent conflict between science and faith but that the argument for faith is now being bolstered enormously by the remarkable developments in science. Dawkins was on the back foot because Lennox was attacking him from his own platform of science. He was on safer ground only when, in a further debate between the two at Oxford’s Natural History Museum last October, he attacked Lennox for his Christian faith which he could more easily ridicule. But to Lennox’s core arguments, he seemed to me to have no convincing response.
Narrabri's Radio Telescope detects evidence of star-making potential in the Magellanic Stream.
Cold gas sparks cosmic stream debate
Australian and Japanese astronomers have for the first time detected cold hydrogen in the Magellanic Stream, a ribbon of gas that stretches halfway around our galaxy.The find has sparked off a debate about the ultimate fate of the Stream, which despite containing no stars, is thought by some astronomers to be the birthplace of new dwarf galaxies.
The research, led by PhD student Deanna Matthews from La Trobe University in Melbourne, was published in a recent issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The Magellanic Stream trails 180 degrees across the sky behind the Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way.It is thought to be the result of gas being ripped out of the Magellanic Clouds by our larger galaxy.
The researchers used the Australia Telescope Compact Array near Narrabri, New South Wales, to detect the absorption of radio waves by hydrogen gas in the Stream.
Melanie Phillips has a very good article here about the current state of the global warming propaganda and some of the lies being perpetrated within the "scientific" community.
She concludes with this:
But it was the Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus, who knows a thing or two about totalitarian ideologies, who summed up the phenomenon:
He likened the situation to his former experience under communist government, where arguing against the dominant viewpoint falls into emptiness. No matter how high the quality of the arguments and evidence that you advance against the dangerous warming idea, nobody listens, and by even advancing skeptical arguments you are dismissed as a naïve and uninformed person. The environmentalists say that the planet must be saved, but from whom and from what? ‘In reality’, the President commented, ‘we have to save it, and us, from them’.
You may have heard that a scientific report has corrected beliefs that Antarctica is cooling and has produced "new evidence" that Antarctica is "warming at the same rate as the rest of the planet."
The real story is that the study was basically trying to guess temperatures that stations that are not there should have produced. In other words it was guesswork (educated or otherwise). In biblical studies it is called "eisegesis" which means reading a meaning into your text that you think it should say... generally not a good idea.
Here is a letter written by a meteorologist, Ross Hays who is actually on the ground in Antarctica to the writer of the report:
Eric, Let me first say that this is my own opinion and does not represent the agency I work for.
I feel your study is absolutely wrong.
There are very few stations in Antarctica to begin with and only a hand full with 50 years of data. Satellite data is just approaching thirty years of available information. In my experience as a day to day forecaster that has to travel and do field work in Antarctica the summer seasons have been getting colder. In the late 1980s helicopters were used to take our personnel to Williams Field from McMurdo Station due to the annual receding of the Ross Ice Shelf, but in the past few years the thaw has been limited and vehicles can continue to make the transition and drive on the ice.
One climate note to pass along is December 2006 was the coldest December ever for McMurdo Station. In a synoptic perspective the cooler sea surface temperatures have kept the maritime storms farther offshore in the summer season and the colder more dense air has rolled from the South Pole to the ice shelf.
There was a paper presented at the AMS Conference in New Orleans last year noting over 70% of the continent was cooling due to the ozone hole. We launch balloons into the stratosphere and the anticyclone that develops over the South Pole has been displaced and slow to establish itself over the past five seasons. The pattern in the troposphere has reflected this trend with more maritime (warmer) air around the Antarctic Peninsula which is also where most of the automated weather stations are located for West Antarctica which will give you the average warmer readings and skew the data for all of West Antarctica.
With statistics you can make numbers go to almost any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage.
The American space agency NASA has made an appeal for public help with one of its stranger experiments.
It wants information on the fate of 90 rubber ducks deployed on a special mission to pinpoint where melt waters go under the Greenland ice shelf in summer months.
The bathroom toys were put into one of the crevasses which drain vast amounts of Greenland's melt waters in the hope they would pop out eventually and reveal the route taken by the water.
Nothing has been seen or heard of the ducks since.
At last we know why we yawn and why yawning is contagious... and it's got nothing to do with the length of my sermons
Yawning cools the brain
Tuesday, 16 December 2008 Jennifer Viegas Discovery News
If your head is overheated, there's a good chance you'll yawn, according to a new study that found the primary purpose of yawning is to control brain temperature.
The finding solves several mysteries about yawning, such as why it's most commonly done just before and after sleeping, why certain diseases lead to excessive yawning, and why breathing through the nose and cooling off the forehead often stop yawning.
The key yawn instigator appears to be brain temperature.
"Brains are like computers," says Andrew Gallup, a researcher in the Department of Biology at Binghamton University who led the study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Animal Behavior.
"They operate most efficiently when cool, and physical adaptations have evolved to allow maximum cooling of the brain."
He and colleagues Michael Miller and Associate Professor Anne Clark analysed yawning in parakeets as representative vertebrates because the birds have relatively large brains, live wild in Australia, which is subject to frequent temperature swings, and, most importantly, do not engage in contagious yawning, as humans and some other animals do.
Contagious yawning is thought to be an evolved mechanism for keeping groups alert so they "remain vigilant against danger," says Gallup.
Since this blog is not primarily about climate, I only post here about 1% of articles that I come across which provide evidence to show that man-made climate change is a delusion.
We have "climate change experts" in Poland, the scene of a UN conference on the topic, saying that the balmy conditions there prove that climate change is real-- the maximum temperatures there each day have been around 5 to 7 degrees C, pretty close to average for that region.
This one though is a real doozie and goes to the heart of the issue. We know that atmospheric CO2 has been increasing since the early 1800s due to the burning of fossil fuels. We know that CO2 levels were 100 ppm lower when people started measuring them and have been increasing steadily since then.
In this article by climate science Professor Tim Ball, we discover that it's not that simple and in fact the raw data from that times has been edited to ignore high readings and only accept the low figures.
And the polar ice cores that go back thousands of years and reliably prove that CO2 and temperature are linked? Well they forgot to mention that under the pressure that exists at great depths of ice, the ice becomes fluid and is not as reliable as you would think.
But still the lies multiply. It is the hijacking of good science by political ideology that really makes me angry.
Professor Emeritus Don J. Easterbrook warns of global cooling:
Global warming (i.e, the warming since 1977) is over. The minute increase of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere (0.008%) was not the cause of the warming—it was a continuation of natural cycles that occurred over the past 500 years.
The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling, perhaps much deeper than the global cooling from about 1945 to 1977. Just how much cooler the global climate will be during this cool cycle is uncertain. Recent solar changes suggest that it could be fairly severe, perhaps more like the 1880 to 1915 cool cycle than the more moderate 1945-1977 cool cycle. A more drastic cooling, similar to that during the Dalton and Maunder minimums, could plunge the Earth into another Little Ice Age, but only time will tell if that is likely.
UPDATE
No need to tell Perth:
Perth has experienced its wettest and coldest November in 17 years. The city saw more than 57ml fall over the month, the seventh wettest on record.
Melanie Phillips reports on dastardly doings at the bastion of scientific rigour, the Royal Society.
Secular Inquisition at the Royal Society Wednesday, 17th September 2008
Totalitarian atheism has taken another scalp. Michael Reiss, the Royal Society’s embattled director of education, has been forced out – for daring to suggest that children should be taught to discuss alternative views and subject them to the scrutiny of empirical reasoning. As the Times reports, Professor Reiss told the British Association for the Advancement of Science last week that teachers should accept that they were unlikely to change the minds of pupils with creationist beliefs – ie, that the world was created literally in six days. Instead of dismissing creationism as a misconception, teachers should try to explain why it had no scientific basis.
‘My experience after having tried to teach biology for 20 years is if one simply gives the impression that such children are wrong, then they are not likely to learn much about the science,’ he said. ‘I realised that simply banging on about evolution and natural selection didn’t lead some pupils to change their minds at all. Just because something lacks scientific support doesn’t seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from the science lesson . . . There is much to be said for allowing students to raise any doubts they have — hardly a revolutionary idea in science teaching — and doing one’s best to have a genuine discussion.’
What is wrong with that? Nothing. It is merely a statement of impeccably liberal educational beliefs. And as the Royal Society implicitly admits, there was nothing there which contradicted anything it stands for. But Rev Reiss was grievously misrepresented by people who seized upon the fact that, although he is a scientist he is also – gulp – a Christian. They accused him of suggesting that creationism should be taught in school as having equal value to evolution. In vain did Reiss protest that he had said nothing of the kind. The Royal Society has got rid of him because his views were
"open to misinterpretation"
and thus
While it was not his intention, this has led to damage to the society’s reputation.
So he has been pushed out not because of what he actually said but because other people misrepresented what he had said. Instead of standing up to the bullying Phil Willis, the chairman of the Commons Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee, who said
I was horrified to hear these views and I reject them totally. They are a step too far and they fly in the face of what science is about. I think if his [Professor Reiss's] views are as mentioned they may be incompatible with his position,
(how dare an MP seek to dictate what a scientist may or may not say!) the Royal Society itself pushed its heretic into the flames.
Far from Reiss damaging the reputation of the Royal Society, it has now done this to itself. Appalling.
If you've ever wondered how creation could be singing praise to God, then this article should make you think!
From the ABC:
Earth hums while making 'Love' waves
A subtle and mysterious global hum has been detected by seismologists studying records from earth's most boring seismic stations.
The newfound vibration is made of two-minute to five-minute, side-to-side surface seismic waves, called Love waves.
They are named after the UK mathematician Professor Augustus Edward Hough Love, who created the mathematical model of such waves in 1911.
The discovery comes 10 years after seismologists first identified louder global oscillations that resemble the ringing of a gigantic bell.
All of the planet's natural oscillations have signatures, or modes of vibration, depending on where and how they are created by earthquakes, ocean waves or other forces.
Among the suspects for making the Love wave hum are winds, ocean waves or even the sun.
The Love wave is a mode that essentially torques the earth's north and south hemispheres against each other.
It's as if the planet is dancing the twist, says Dr Rudolf Widmer-Schnidrig of the Black Forest Observatory in Wolfach, Germany, and the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Stuttgart.
This report from the ABC is interesting. I always thought that boomerang flight was a result of aerodynamics, but it must have something more to do with angular momentum- or something
Boomerang returns, even in space
In an unprecedented experiment, a Japanese astronaut has thrown a boomerang in space and confirmed it flies back, much like on Earth.
Astronaut Takao Doi "threw a boomerang and saw it come back" during his free time on March 18 at the International Space Station (ISS), a spokeswoman at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said.
Mr Doi threw the boomerang after a request from compatriot Yasuhiro Togai, a world boomerang champion.
"I was very surprised and moved to see that it flew the same way it does on Earth," the Mainichi Shimbun daily quoted the 53-year-old astronaut as telling his wife in a chat from space.
The space agency said a videotape of the experiment would likely be released later.
Doi travelled on US shuttle Endeavour on the March 11 blast-off and successfully delivered the first piece of a Japanese laboratory to the ISS.
People take off their shirts when it gets hot: peer-reviewed study
March 1st, 2008
I am finding it difficult to breathe after reading this abstract from a peer-reviewed scholarly article in a respected journal1.
This paper describes the application of a methodology designed to analyse the relationship between climatic conditions and the perception of bioclimatic comfort. The experiment consisted of conducting simultaneous questionnaire surveys and weather measurements during 2 sunny spring days in an open urban area in Lisbon. The results showed that under outdoor conditions, thermal comfort can be maintained with temperatures well above the standard values defined for indoor conditions. There seems to be a spontaneous adaptation in terms of clothing whenever the physiological equivalent temperature threshold of 31°C is surpassed. The perception of air temperature is difficult to separate from the perception of the thermal environment and is modified by other parameters, particularly wind. The perception of solar radiation is related to the intensity of fluxes from various directions (i.e. falling upon both vertical and horizontal surfaces), weighted by the coefficients of incidence upon the human body. Wind was found to be the most intensely perceived variable, usually negatively. Wind perception depends largely on the extreme values of wind speed and wind variability. Women showed a stronger negative reaction to high wind speed than men. The experiment proved that this methodology is well-suited to achieving the proposed objectives and that it may be applied in other areas and in other seasons.
In case you are not used to parsing academicese, I have take the liberty of re-writing this abstract in plain English.
We went to an open-air cafe in Lisbon on 2 sunny spring days and asked people if they were hot or cold. People were happier being in the sun than indoors. When it got hot, people took their shirts off. People generally did not care to think about out questions about the difference between perceptions of temperature and wind. It was always hotter sitting in the sun. People didn’t like when the wind blew away their newspapers and napkins. Women complained more than men about the wind. We plan on asking these questions in Hawaii in January if we can get another grant.
Remember this! It isn’t true unless a study says it’s true. 1Sandra Oliveira and Henrique Andrad, 2006 (may they forgive me). An initial assessment of the bioclimatic comfort in an outdoor public space in Lisbon, International Journal of Biometeorology, 52, 69-84
WIDGETIZE