Climate Change Deniers Get Paper Through Peer Review, Confirm AGW In Antarctica!

A couple years back, Eric Steig published a paper showing, contrary to much previous work, that Western Antarctica had in fact been warming over the past several decades. Jeff Id of The Air Vent ( one of the guys close to the center of the CRU Hack), as well as several buddies of his, threw together a response which has made it through peer-review. It's called Improved methods for PCA-based reconstructions: case study using the Steig et al. (2009) Antarctic temperature reconstruction and, guess what?

Rather than finding warming concentrated in West Antarctica, we find warming over the period of 1957-2006 to be concentrated in the Peninsula (≈0.35oC decade-1). We also show average trends for the continent, East Antarctica, and West Antarctica that are half or less than that found using the unimproved method. Notably, though we find warming in West Antarctica to be smaller in magnitude, we find that statistically significant warming extends at least as far as Marie Byrd Land...

Eric Steig even shows up in the comments to congratulate Jeff and Co. on confirming his basic result Here:

I appreciate also Ryan’s comment that “I would hope that our paper is not seen as a repudiation of Steig’s results, but rather as an improvement” and his emphasizing that their results (evidently) back up our most important point – -the significant warming West Antarctica.

And here:

Jeff: (and Kenneth Fritsch): Given that you guys have apparently demonstrated much greater warming that we found (!), in the most critical area glaciologically (the Amundsen Sea embayment), I’m afraid you may well find that the media you complain about will indeed emphasize the red even more than last time...

"But wait! This is denial-land!" you say: "They must have something to bitch about...you know, hiding the decline and the great AGW Hoax and all that!"

Well, its true that the new paper shows a pattern of warming somewhat different in degree and extent that Steig's, and purports to have identified a couple of methodological problems in the original that ought to be corrected. I will leave the scientists to figure out whether these are substantive issues or quibbles. But what's really set off the denialist crowd isn't the substance of the paper itself, but (as hinted at in Steig's second quote)...wait for it....the colour scheme used by Nature to illustrate the paper on its front cover (see above). McIntyre is outraged...OUTRAGED!

In the Nature article, the lurid blotch of red over the Ross Ice Shelf and the land area abutting it (where Harry is located) was prominently featured. Now Steig says that this doesn’t “matter”.

And here's Jeff Id bashing that same cover:

The S09 authors never said the Antarctic will melt but the implication to the layperson was ‘big red plot’. Now the plot has an appropriate amount of blue but if I recall there were many dozens of mainstream papers which carried the ‘red’. Can anyone guess which mainstream papers will carry the ‘blue’.

Gawd! The sheer genius of these guys! They're not just scientists up to the level of Galileo, they do graphic design as well!

John Quiggan Lays The Blame

An Aussie economist lambastes Steve Mc:

In writing my previous post on the “Climategate” break-in to the University of East Anglia computer system , I remained unclear about who was actually responsible for the break-in theft of the emails, which were then selectively quoted to promote a bogus allegation of scientific fraud.

Looking over the evidence that is now available, I think there is enough to point to Steven McIntyre as the person, along with the actual hacker or leaker, who bears primary moral responsibility for the crime.

[...]

25 July 2009: The next day McIntyre announced that he had got a mass of CRU data, essentially all that sought in the harassment campaign, from “a mole”. Note that this may be true or may be misdirection to protect external hackers. In any case, it is clear that his harassment campaign was going hand in hand with attempts to gain unauthorised access to CRU computers, and did not stop when its supposed goal was realised.

Over the next few months, CRU started preparing a response to McIntyre which resulted in the creation of a file called FOIA.zip. Over the weekend beginning Friday 13 November, someone located and copied this file from a back-up server at the university’s Climatic Research Unit, and distributed it widely among anti-science blog sites, including McIntyre’s. It’s unclear whether the extraction of the file required sophisticated hacking, simple illegal entry to a poorly protected site, or McIntyre’s “mole”. What is clear, as this report notes is that going after FOIA.zip indicates that someone in McIntyre’s circle of supporters was responsible.

[...]

Having received the stolen emails, McIntyre played a prominent role in disseminating dishonest and misleading claims about their contents, focusing on the phrases “trick” and “hide the decline” which were used to suggest a conspiracy to commit scientific fraud. In fact, as the U Penn investigation found, these claims were baseless. “Trick” referred to a clever way of combining data, and the “decline” was not a decline in global temperatures but a well-known problematic feature of tree ring data.

Just to repeat: sure as shootin', if and when the police find the CRU hackers, it will be one or more of the bloggers hanging around Climate Audit.

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.

Oddly Appropriate

...that an old mining/petroleum industry guy turned fake scientist should be covered in The Star by someone whose regular beat is the state of kid's hockey.

No Discernable Bias

In this document, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA ) discuss the effect of poor station siting on the U.S. temperature record. Employing information gathered by Anthony Watts and Co. at Surface Stations, they conducted the following experiment:

Two national time series were made using the same gridding and area averaging technique. One analysis was for the full data set. The other used only the 70 stations that Surfacestations.org classified as good or best. We would expect some differences simply due to the different area covered: the 70 stations only covered 43% of the country with no stations in, for example, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee or North Carolina. Yet the two time series, shown below as both annual data and smooth data, are remarkably similar. Clearly there is no indication for this analysis that poor current siting is imparting a bias in the U.S. temperature trends.

Now, Anthony and McIntyre are bitching about Anthony's not being cited by name, but Mr. Watt's report...

Watts, A. (2009). Is The U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable? Downloadable from here,

...does not contain any of the kind of analysis performed by the NOAA. So it would have been of no use to such an analysis. It looks as though the material used was pulled directly off the SS site. Note the ref. to "70% of the 1221 stations " having been surveyed. This is from the yet to be updated homepage to the site.

In any case, you can't blame the NOAA for performing an analysis Anthony Watts has been unprepared to go forward with. At this moment, accroding to his Watts Up With That website, 80% of the U.S stations have been surveyed; he promised to start work on his own time series analysis at 75%. And yet there's still nothing been done. Why, Anthony, why?

(Hint: He knows he'll get the same answer as the NOAA.)

The Highest Compliment A Canadian AGW Denier Can Recieve

The Communist lie is exposed here by American Patriot and hero, Stephen McIntyre…

Fulsome praise indeed for an Ontario boy.