Who Will Be Mark Steyn's Witnesses?

Just noticed another piece on Steyn's website re the defamation case climatologist Mike Mann has brought against him.  Its largely the same old same old, but then there is this bit towards the end:

I have a great legal team headed by Dan Kornstein, the man behind the most consequential piece of free-speech legislation enacted this century, and we've been interviewing prominent scientific witnesses tired of the climate of fear that Mann and his Clime Syndicate have imposed on their field.

Be interesting to see who he finds who can pass muster as an expert witness.  We are talking a very, very short list of possibles.  Also, Steyn references a recent post by Steve McI at Climate Audit.

Steve quotes par 2 of Mann's statement of claim:

And comments thusly:

But, needless to say, Mann had nothing to do with the development of the instrumental temperature data showing 20th century temperature increases.... 

And thusly:

Mann’s (false) claim to have been “one of the first” to document 20th century temperature increase was apparently based on MBH98 and MBH99, which he described later in the pleadings (paragraph 15) as “two research papers showing a steady rise in surface temperature during the 20th Century and a steep increase in measured temperatures since the 1950s”. Needless to say, these papers showed 20th century temperature data in key graphics, but the papers themselves were obviously about the proxy reconstructions, not the instrumental record.

Well, note the qualifier "apparently".  Maybe the claim is not based on these two papers.  Maybe its based on this 1994 publication, for example, in which Mann and his co-author write thusly:

 ...and conclude thusly:

Or maybe not, but its clear that Mann's work from the early 1990s (pre hockey-stick graph) dealt with the instrumental record.   At least so says his wiki entry:

Mann then joined the Yale Department of Geology and Geophysics, obtaining an MPhil in geology and geophysics in 1993. His research focused on natural variability and climate oscillations. He worked with the seismologist Jeffrey Park, and their joint research adapted a statistical method developed for identifying seismological oscillations to find various periodicities in the instrumental temperature record, the longest being about 60 to 80 years.

So his claim seems sound.  Steyn is flailing.  And McI....god his stuff is boring these days.  He needs to find another hobby.

Mann Vs. Steyn: Steve McIntyre Weighs In

I've written fairly extensively on the topic of Michael Mann's defamation case against Mark Steyn. Earlier this month, having fired, or been fired by, his lawyers, Mark Steyn appealed to the Internet to help build a case for claiming that, when he described Michael Mann's work as "fraudulent", he was not accusing him of scientific misconduct.  

Canadian climate change denier Steve McIntyre has now stepped up to make that case.  It's not going to help.

As usual, reading through McI's writing at Climate Audit is a joyless experience.  There's veiled accusations, insinuations, quote-mining, tortured semantics ...the works.  It's a hard job to boil it down to some at-bottom essence.  I am going to focus on this post, mostly because it's been reproduced uncritically at The Volokh Conspiracy blog, a right-wing legal blog which the Washington Post has, for some reason, decided to carry, and where it may therefore be seen by a larger audience.  The end-point of McI's argument  is that Michael Mann was not exonerated by the many, many panels, boards, and etc. which investigated him.  Therefore Steyn's claim, that Mann's results were "fraudulent", can somehow be supported.  That's what I gather, at least, having read through his original piece and its regurgitation at the VC site twice now.

McI's analysis of the Oxburgh Panel's report lean quite heavily on a few tossed-off comments made by statistician David Hand at a press-conference announcing the panel's findings.  These remarks were widely reported at the time.  McI quotes three or four press outlets, but I will reference just The Daily Telegraph, which seems to have reproduced them most extensively:

Professor David Hand said that the research – led by US scientist Michael Mann – would have shown less dramatic results if more reliable techniques had been used to analyse the data… But the reviewers found that the scientists could have used better statistical methods in analysing some of their data, although it was unlikely to have made much difference to their results.
That was not the case with some previous climate change reports, where “inappropriate methods” had exaggerated the global warming phenomenon. Prof Hand singled out a 1998 paper by Prof Mann of Pennsylvania State University, a constant target for climate change sceptics, as an example of this. He said the graph, that showed global temperature records going back 1,000 years, was exaggerated – although any reproduction using improved techniques is likely to also show a sharp rise in global warming. He agreed the graph would be more like a field hockey stick than the ice hockey blade it was originally compared to. “The particular technique they used exaggerated the size of the blade at the end of the hockey stick. Had they used an appropriate technique the size of the blade of the hockey stick would have been smaller,” he said. “The change in temperature is not as great over the 20th century compared to the past as suggested by the Mann paper.”

So, to begin with, let's assume that David Hand is strictly speaking correct here.  Mann's research team could have used more appropriate statistical techniques, and these would have given less "exaggerated" results.  Although the results obtained were not greatly exaggerated, because as Hand notes better techniques would also have shown "a sharp rise in global warming".  The work might have been done more carefully, in other words, but the fact it wasn't doesn't matter much.

This a long, long way from an accusation of scientific misconduct.  And remember, previous judges have already concluded that in this particular setting Steyn's use of "fraudulent" = "scientific misconduct. There is no colloquial sense of the term where it means something less serious.  So how this is suppose to help Steyn's case is a little bit mysterious.

But, of course, it's pretty clear that Hand has got his facts bungled.  Mann's team was interested in a paleoclimatic reconstruction--in an attempt to determine temperature changes before the instrumental record.  This work took the 20th century instrumental record, which shows rapid increases in temperature,  as a given, and did nothing to transform it in either an exaggerated or any other manner.  Therefore Hand's criticism seems to have little merit.

And it is significant that shortly after the Panel published its findings, it added the following addendum to them:

Addendum to report, 19 April 2010

For the avoidance of misunderstanding in the light of various press stories, it is important to be clear that the neither the panel report nor the press briefing intended to imply that any research group in the field of climate change had been deliberately misleading in any of their analyses or intentionally exaggerated their findings. Rather, the aim was to draw attention to the complexity of statistics in this field, and the need to use the best possible methods. 

As I argued at the time, this sounds pretty close to a grovelling apology.  Oddly enough, McI and the folks at the VC blog interpret it differently:

Note that this statement doesn’t actually offer an opinion on whether the (criticized) findings were “deliberately misleading” or “intentionally exaggerated,” merely stating that their comments were not intended to imply this accusation.

This strikes me as semantic noodling, but if we are going to engage in such things, note that the addendum references not just Mann's team but "any research group in the field of climate change".  So if it is refusing to offer an opinion of Mann's work, it is also refusing to offer one on the work of the CRU scientists who were the subject of its investigation in the first place.  And such a stance would be ridiculous given the reason for the panel's existence.

Finally, McI seems to be claiming that, since the panel was not investigating Mann directly, it cannot "exonerate" him.  Indeed, the Oxburgh Panel had other concerns, and if I remember events correctly, it was only when a small group of deniers within the  U.K. Institute of Physics hijacked a sub-committee and used it to spread the accusations of misconduct more broadly, that Mann and his team were dragged into this mess.  But insofar as the panel touched on Mann's work, it cleared him of wrong-doing.  Other investigations, more directly focused, cleared him in a more decisive fashion.  And it's more than a little silly that McI would lean on a non-existent colloquial sense of "fraudulent" while insisting on a legalistic reading of "exonerate".

The CRU Hack: 3 Months Later

From DeSmog Blog, we are directed to this story from IT-Networks, which looks at what we know about the CRU hack an IT perspective. Short version: it was a deliberate, skilled attempt to target

Phil Jones, the head of the CRU; Professor Keith Briffa, who studied tree rings; Tim Osborn, who worked on climate modelling for modern and archaeological data; and Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

A couple of details mentioned in the story that I have written about previously.

1) The hack was launched from a computer based on the east coast of north America.

This is deduced from the naming conventions used by CRU's email system, which also serve as time-stamps. More here.

2) Digital forensic analysis shows that the zipped archive of emails and documents was not produced on a single date. Instead it was created by copying the files over a number of weeks, with bursts on 30 September 2009, 10 October and 16 November. On the last date a folder of computer analysis code by Osborn was added to the package.

Early on, BBC meteorologist Paul Hudson implied that he had been shopped a subset of the hacked emails on October 12th, though it is not clear whether these were from the hacker (Hudson did not specify). He later went silent on the topic, but if the hacks were taking place over a 6 week period, then the idea that the emails came from the hacker becomes much more plausible. In fact, there is an interesting possible sequence of events here. On October 9th, Hudson writes a piece entitled What happened to global warming? which inspires a certain amount of email snark from the four scientists mentioned above, and it is just those emails that wind up in Hudson's in-box on the 12th. Is the hacker "telling tales" on the four CRU scientists in the hopes that Hudson will somehow respond?

Also, given that the N.A. location of the hack puts us in the middle of denier land, it would be interesting to find out what messages were hacked on what date and see how these correlate with what is going on Climate Audit at around the same time.

PS. Might be a good time to mention that Swifthack is still out there, countering the crud.

Climate Audit: DOS (Denial Of Service) Men

It has become clear that the efforts of climate change denier Stephen McIntyre and his followers at Climate Audit to extract data from CRU in East Anglia through multiple FOI requests (dozens) amounted to a Denial Of Service attack against a scientific institution. Nor is it the first time McIntyre has been caught out at this sort of thing. Ben Santer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, once wrote:

"I'm damned and publicly vilified because I refused to provide McIntyre with the data he requested.... Had I acceded, I am convinced I would have spent years of my scientific career dealing with demands for further explanations, additional data, Fortran codes [a programming language] etc... For the remainder of my scientific career I'd like to dictate my own research agenda."

And of course, there was his 2007 attack on GISS (which was admittedly more a sign of lousy internet manners than ill-intent).

Some have suggested that the actions of McIntyre and his small army of tea-baggers with spread-sheets are undertaken in good faith. That the people around CA really just want to "set the information free", or some such nonsense. I find this difficult to believe. For one thing, as a strategy for political activism--sandbagging a gov. agency/researcher/institution you disapprove of with time wasting requests for information--is as old as the hills. Recently we have seen it here in Canada, with the Far Right's assault on the Canadian Human Rights Commission and corresponding provincial human rights bodies. Bloggers lodged frivolous human rights complaints to demonstrate that the system didn't work, bragged left and right that they were really out to hassle the agency, and then whined righteously when their frivolous complaints were dismissed. Right wing pressure groups launched pointless FOI requests, and then complained that their demands were not instantly met.

Nor are climatologists the only scientists to have suffered this kind of treatment. After Richard Lenski published his recent work on mutations in E. Coli, creationist Andy Schlafly (son of Phyllis) hounded him for his "raw data", all of which turned out to be available in the original paper. (And this, interestingly enough, highlights another occasional McIntyre stratagem...to demand data he's already been given.)

In any case, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, its likely a duck. Climate Audit is the center of a harassment campaigned being waged by anti-science activists against climate scientists. There's nothing more to it than that. It is not a science website.

ClimateHackerGate! CRU First Hacked In October????

An interesting development:

E-mails alleged to undermine climate change science were held back for weeks after being stolen so that their release would cause maximum damage to the Copenhagen climate conference, according to a source close to the investigation of the theft.

[...]

The first hack was in October or earlier, the source said. The e-mails were not leaked until mid-November.

Interesting because, back on the 25th, I theorized that the hackers might have first shown a selection of illegally obtained emails to the BBC's Paul Hudson back in October and then--perhaps because he didn't write on them--hit the CRU server again for more of the good stuff. This new development would be consistent with that theory, which would be uncomfortable for Mr. Hudson, as it would mean he sat on illegally obtained emails without reporting them for a whole month.

Also--since the private CRU emails discuss Briffa's tree-ring proxies and Tijander and etc.--did the hackers delay their release in the hopes of harvesting more embarrassing material on this particular topic? That might put them in rather close proximity to Steve M's gang at CA, since he was the guy stirring the pot on these issues. In any case, it is clear that the emails were held back for weeks after being stolen so that their release would cause maximum damage to the Copenhagen climate conference. That's the takeaway message.

The Left Out-FREEPS The Right: Climate Audit Rejected As Best Science Blog

I try to pay as little attention to these on-line polls as possible, but since the weblog awards give a site a certain amount of real world credibility, it is a good thing that Bad Astronomy won, and a good that Climate Audit lost, in the category of best science blog.

And, let me point out that Steve's lament over at CA, where he expresses surprise that this has become a left/right issue, is either incredibly naive or disingenuous. His own politics are identifiably right, he has spent his career been courted/used by a Republican congress, and his "scientific" results generally only get play on Fox news and sites like Newsbusters, where the motto is "Exposing and Combating Liberal Media Bias".

In fact, it is probably a mistake to consider Climate Audit (and sites like it) a science blog in the first place. It is more like an on-line social gathering point for, as I like to call them, "wing-nuts with spreadsheets": anti-science Conservatives with rudimentary math skills. Cyber-caves where Conservatives may go and let the world pass them by while they spin out the conspiracy theory of the day.

PS: Don't know if I just missed it earlier, but the folks at weblog have written:

RESULTS ARE NOT FINAL FOR THIS POLL! This poll is still being checked for excessive voting from individual machines. If excess voting is found it will be noted and the votes will be removed. The winner should be announced Monday.

So hold the bubbly.

PPS. Some folks at CA are claiming that the poll got hacked. Of course it got hacked! It's a online poll! The only question is how many times and in how many different ways? Tellinya blog has the scoop on one possible method used. It's owner tells me he could deliver about 2,500 votes per minute.

PPPS. Welogs is officially calling it a tie.

Climate Auditors Discover Global Warming Worse Than Suspected!

According to the lads at CA, Hansen's methodology, when applied to the Russian weather stations, actually introduces an artificial cooling to records before 1987. Apparently, warming there is even worse than people thought!


Oh my! They'll be planting palm trees in Moscow. For Steve and co., this must feel like their paradigm is shifting without a clutch.

Update:

Just because S. Mosher and some of the climate accountancy boyz have tried to call me on this. The cool bias:

1) causes the warming trend during the first part of the century to be understated.
2) causes the cooling trend mid-century to be overstated.
3) causes the warming trend between 1975 and 1987 or so (when the bias comes to an end) to be understated.

It is only when you look from the beginning of the series to the warming from 1987 or so on that the bias seems to cause the warming to appear overstated.

So Nyah nyah freaking nyah.

The "Value" Of McIntyre's Discovery

DailyTech Blogger Michael Asher sees through to the nub of significance within Steve McIntyre's discovery of errors in the GHCN weather data:

The effect of the correction on global temperatures is minor (some 1-2% less warming than originally thought), but the effect on the US global warming propaganda machine could be huge.

In other words, Steve's achievement is a propaganda victory (for the forces of climate change skepticism) more than a scientific one (which is not to dispute the fact that McIntyre's work has uncovered a real error in GHCN collection procedures).

Incidentally, it is disingenuous to, as some media outlets have, refer to this error as a result of the Y2K bug. McIntyre himself writes:

By Y2K problem here, I don’t specifically mean that the error is due to 2-digit date formats, but that the error, whatever its source, is observed commencing Jan 2000.

Or at least there has been no evidence provided yet that the error was caused by this specific bug.

Give The Denier His Due

Steve McIntyre's weblog Climate Audit has always been a hotbed of Climate Change Denialism, and he has spent much of the last several years flailing about madly in an effort to discredit the science behind AGW. However, it seems he might have hit onto something this time, having detected an error in the Global Historical Climatology Network's data collection procedures which, when corrected, reorders the the ranking of 10 hottest years recorded in the lower 48 states of the United States such that several years in the 1990s and 2000s fall out of the top ten, and several years from the 1930s come into it.

The new and old top ten lists can be found here, and the numbers for the last 120 years, as corrected by NASA itself, can be found here.

Now, there are lots of mitigating factors to consider. For example, the new adjustment does not seem to affect global average values much (these are calculated separately using results from a number of distinct networks). Nevertheless, grist for the skeptics mill, and material that will get huge play over the course of the next several months.

Climate Audit: Climate Science Or Political Semiotics?

I've been writing about Steve McIntyre's Denialist website, Climate Audit, a lot recently, especially the discussions that have been raging over the surface station data being collected by Anthony Watts. But now the discussion has taken a detour into the bizarre, as it is has become possible to perceive shards of political ideology poking through the miasma of charts and graphs at the CA site. Specifically, McIntyre and his readers seem to be promulgating a faux scientific version of your standard "Red State/Blue State" political symbolism under the guise of arguing climatological theory.

The heart of the question is: how are weather stations located in Urban areas, which can often be subject to the heat island and other micro site problems associated with the artificial city environment, worked into the broader United States Historical Climatological Network (USHCN) so that the network might deliver accurate regional and national temperature figures? The answer is twofold. Firstly, the urban stations are "adjusted" via reference to the nearest rural station (ie a station presumably unaffected by these various problems). Secondly, the information from them is not used to determine the overall temperature numbers; only data from rural, "unlit"stations is used for this end.

But, McIntyre asks, is this really the case? He suspects that in at least one instance--the Grand Canyon (rural) vs. Tuscon (urban) station-- it is not just the former station that is being used to adjust the latter, but that the information from both is being "blended", so that the rural station is no longer quite as rural as it once was:

It appears to me that the total adjustment process (including USHCN adjustments incorporated by GISS) result in “adjusted” stations becoming a type of blend of urban and rural stations, so that it is not actually correct to say that the overall trend results only from rural stations.

[...]

It looks to me like the USHCN adjustment process feeds back trends from urban sites to adjust rural sites and this contradicts the claim that only rural sites are used in GISS trends.

In other words, his argument is that the purity of the data produced by the rural station is compromised by its proximity to/interaction with data from the urban site.

...the Grand Canyon values are being blended up and the Tucson values are being blended down.

[...]

The net impact of this is that, if Grand Canyon neighbors have urban trends, then the USHCN adjusted Grand Canyon version will also incorporate some amount of urban trend.

This theme, of the dirty urban stations introducing an "urban bias", and therefore corrupting the "pure" rural stations, is then taken up in Steve's comments sections. For example, Sam Urbinto comments:

I’d say that taking a rural station and adjusting it with urban adjustments rather turns it into an urban station.

My God, the stations have been "turned" by their proximity to urban data! I'm surprised they haven't gone gay. In fact, I'm surprised Steve doesn't refer to these urban stations as "too damn Liberal", insinuating that they are in some sense "black weather stations". The symbolism of rural=good, urban=bad, permeates the entire thread...

...as it does in Anthony Watts analysis of station data, incidentally. In his world, uncompromised rural stations inevitably show a downward temperature trend, whereas the lying urban stations show evidence of global warming.

Yes, it sounds a bit loopy, but in fact McIntyre has explicitly employed Red State/Blue State terminology here and here to demonstrate that the Red States provide no evidence for AGW:

But the oddest pattern is surely the degree to which red and blue states on these maps match their political counterparts. There are a few exceptions - Arizona, Montana, Utah, but it looks to me like voting patterns would be a better proxy for the existence of a 20th century temperature trend (by state) than tree rings.

As to why you can see crude Conservative symbolism percolating up through what is supposed to by a discussion of pure science, well I think this has something to do with the audience McIntyre is trying to cultivate. His "argumentation" often resembles a random data dump of charts and graphs, and the only real movement in it is therefore less logical than symbolical. I think it is also significant that Anthony Watts has considered using his appearances on Hannity and the Rush Limbaugh show to scare of volunteers for the Surface Stations project.

In both cases, they're throwing raw meat to the Bubbas.

Auditing Climate Audit

Steve McIntyre is a former mining executive who has, over the past several years, taken up the role of prominent AGW denier and amateur scientist. His main claim to fame is that he, along with another amateur scientist, Ross MicKitrick, managed to discover some trivial methodological short-comings in Michael Mann's work on the "hockey stick graph" (minor, in that, once these short-comings were corrected, Mann's number crunching still produced nothing but hockey sticks).

One of Mr. McIntyre's projects is the Climate Audit blog, where he and other climate science deniers, some with rudimentary math skills, gather together and keep one anothers spirits up by engaging in pointless silliness like running around the country taking pictures of the weather stations. Think of Churchill's WWII aluminum appeals, which were essentially pointless but raised civilian morale. However, in this case, digital cameras are involved. And it is all in an attempt to prove (as far as I can gather from the website) that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by an international group of communist climatologists (or, as I like to call them, Commietologists).

So I was over at Climate Audit yesterday, reading one of Mr. McIntyre's open threads, and I came across the following comment by one Carl Smith:

For those interested in solar cycles material, I have written a post called “New Little Ice Age Instead of Global Warming?”http://landscheidt.auditblogs.com/archives/24

This examines Dr Landscheidt’s 2003 paper of the same name - here is the the abstract of the paper:

Abstract: Analysis of the sun’s varying activity in the last two millennia indicates that contrary to the IPCC’s speculation about man-made global warming as high as 5.8° C within the next hundred years, a long period of cool climate with its coldest phase around 2030 is to be expected. It is shown that minima in the 80 to 90-year Gleissberg cycle of solar activity, coinciding with periods of cool climate on Earth, are consistently linked to an 83-year cycle in the change of the rotary force driving the sun’s oscillatory motion about the centre of mass of the solar system. As the future course of this cycle and its amplitudes can be computed, it can be seen that the Gleissberg minimum around 2030 and another one around 2200 will be of the Maunder minimum type accompanied by severe cooling on Earth. This forecast should prove skillful as other long-range forecasts of climate phenomena, based on cycles in the sun’s orbital motion, have turned out correct as for instance the prediction of the last three El Niños years before the respective event.


As Steve M wishes to keep his blog focused mostly on his current areas of interest this is simply a shameless plug and any discussion of this material should be done over on my blog rather than here.

Curious, I did a quick wiki search for Theodore Landscheidt. As it turns out he, like Mr. McIntyre, was (for he died in 2004) an amateur climatologist and global warming skeptic. For his day job the man was a judge, and in addition to kibitzing in the climate science field as a kind of sun worshipper, the man practised...wait for it...astrology. Yes, Landscheidt told fortunes when he wasn't connecting the rising temperatures here on Earth to "solar cycles".

A good example of how all this "research" comes together can be found, for example, in "Sun-Earth-Man, A Mesh of Cosmic Oscillations", where he wrote:

The years that followed 1789, 1823, 1867, 1933, and 1968 were periods of radical change and revolution, a break-down of old structures and the emergence of new forms and ideas ... The next major instability event will start about 2002 and last till 2011.

This is an exceptionally long period. It is impossible to predict the details of its historic effects. But the basic quality of all boundary functions will be evident: the years past 2002 will prove to be another turning point, a period of instability, upheaval, agitation, and revolution, that ruins traditional structures, but favours the emergence of new patterns in society, economy, art, and science.

So I read this and I was shocked, shocked! And I left a brief comment on Climate Audit pointing out that Mr. Landscheidt's was an Astrologer. However, you can't see it in the comments section because Mr. McIntyre hit the delete button (although Mr. Smith's comment linking to material re. our German fortune teller is still there). Apparently, one is not allowed to utter the term "Astrologer" on Climate Audit, even when the purpose of one's utterance is to show that a fellow traveller in denial was, to put it another way, a "reader of the stars". In fact, I got alot of crap from some of McIntyre's other readers to the effect that, in pointing out how Solar Boy was some kind of "peerer into the Heart of the Cosmos", I was engaged in "name calling". So I left another brief comment:

It frankly astounds me that Mr. McIntyre would delete my post critizing the notion that a blog like this should be paying ANY kind of attention to a climate change “skeptic” who told fortunes in his spare time, but keep a link to a site propounding [Landscheidt's] theories. It seems to me that the onus is on Mr.McIntyre to keep his blog fruit-loop free, given its larger purpose.

I then left another comment noting that Mr. Smith's comment concerning Star Man's theories was still up and that this seemed unfair and, guess what? Another deletion, and more grief from Mr. McIntyre about how using the "A" word was forbidden on Climate Audit, although linking to sites concerning GW-denying wielders-of-Celestial-Wisdom was apparently OK.

So, let me just repeat myself, Mr. McIntyre: given that the End of Climate Audit site is to show that the vast majority of Climate Scientists are Socialists engaged in hoaxing All Of Mankind, do you not think it impacts your credibility when you are associated in this way with "research" of this caliber? I mean, I hear Kreskin accepts the IPCC consensus, but you don't see
this guy linking to his stuff.