Global Fraud, Round Two

George Rebane

OK, by now most people not tied to the MSM mammary are aware of the global warming hockey stick hoax.  RR summarized the fraud issue here and offered links for those interested in more detail.  More detail has now started gushing on the thinking public, take a look at today’s (24no09) WSJ piece ‘Climate Science and Candor’ that serves up a collection of the hacked emails sent by the celebrated sleazebag scientists to each other.  And even the NYT and Washington Post (gasp!) have belatedly stuck their toe into this issue.

In its lead editorial today’s WSJ said –

Yet even a partial review of the emails is highly illuminating. In them, scientists appear to urge each other to present a "unified" view on the theory of man-made climate change while discussing the importance of the "common cause"; to advise each other on how to smooth over data so as not to compromise the favored hypothesis; to discuss ways to keep opposing views out of leading journals; and to give tips on how to "hide the decline" of temperature in certain inconvenient data. ...

Yet all of these nonresponses (from involved scientists) manage to underscore what may be the most revealing truth: That these scientists feel the public doesn't have a right to know the basis for their climate-change predictions, even as their governments prepare staggeringly expensive legislation in response to them.

But let’s take a step back and again see this fraud in terms of the politics of climate change and anthropogenic global warming (AGW), this is the part that will affect you, me, and all of us.  The True Believers are not yet daunted by this little fraud – no, no.  They argue that a few rogue scientists mangling the world’s historical temperature data and developing spectacular temperature curves is no big deal, and doesn’t affect the real conclusions about AGW and what must still be done.

Again we must identify the players here, so let me review who they are from my previous post.

There are three distinct groups involved here – 1) scumbag ‘scientists’, 2) True Believers, 3) sleazebag politicians.  Groups 2 and 3 are ignorant of earth’s climatology and climate modeling.  I grant that Group 2 probably consists of good-hearted, well-meaning people concerned about humanity, but they possess neither the knowledge nor the tools to understand how the AGW issue is framed, let alone proved.  They just listen to Groups 1 and 3, and then join the damaging background chorus.  Group 3 doesn’t really care about the science or humanity.  For them it is all about power and control, starting with maintaining and/or advancing their own political careers.  These pols are mostly composed of but not limited to progressives and collectivists.

And then there’s Group 1.  These guys have degrees, published papers, and positions that give cover to Groups 2 and 3.  They consist of technical types who don’t know what they don’t know and prattle on, and then the real scumbags are the ones who know what they don’t know and do ‘science’ with the intent to defraud – i.e. cook up pre-ordained results.

The Group 1 scientists will maintain that, no matter if the past temperatures were doctored, the future effects of global warming are still as predicted by their models.  And dutifully the know-nothing True Believers and leftwing politicos (Groups 2 & 3) will breathe a sigh of relief, shout ‘Amen!’, and continue the surge toward our economic Armageddon.

‘… as predicted by their models.’  It is in this round of selling AGW and the policies to ‘save the earth’ that the greatest mischief (what an innocent sounding term) has occurred - and you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.  We’re now talking about the development and exercise of what are called general circulation models (GCMs).  These are very large and complex computer programs attempting to replicate the behavior of the earth’s atmosphere.  I have covered overviews of the global warming issue here and here, and of models in this report.  The short form is that these models are both technical AND political animals.

As a systems scientist with a heavy background in physics, control and estimation theory, and complex dynamic systems, I have studied and developed models such as the GCMs.  It is from this background that I, and others like me, became early skeptics of the hysteria.

The earth’s atmosphere is one of the most complex natural systems known – not really known, let’s just say ‘identified’.  If progress is measured in crawl-walk-run phases, we are in the crawl phase of understanding the dynamics of earth’s atmosphere.  And never mind attempting to model these dynamics with sufficient accuracy to generate predictions that should influence social policy.

But the Group 1 scientists have an axe to grind here.  Since the state is the only funder of ‘big science’ research, the state also gets to call the tune that comes out of such research, especially if the results have a political component.  And boy, do GCM outputs have a political component – just ask Pelosi, Reid, Obama, and Schwarzenegger.  Over fifteen years ago the desired GCM outputs were prescribed, the required consensus identified, the trans-national coordinating agency nominated, and the process started to fund those scientific efforts that promised to play ball according to the established wink-wink rules.

Now, as an aside, the left-wing, one-worlders (tautology?) have no trouble understanding this conflict of interest, and pointing their fingers when there is even a hint that a corporation may have contributed to a university research project the results of which they don’t like.  But when it comes to AGW, they see nothing but goodness and light paving the money road to research.  Hopefully the great awakening has started, but I don’t hold my breath.  Group 2 has a lot of strong-minded, weakly-tutored people in it.  And Group 3 politicians know how to play them like a violin, especially when backed by the sleazebag scientists of Group 1.

So that’s how the next round of the AGW battle to pass Waxman-Markey (cap and tax) and to implement California’s AB32 will shape up.  The socialists have every expectation that the hoi polloi will continue to be compliant innumerates, and worship the mere mention of big climate science and its vaunted general circulation models that can’t predict jack.

***

In the remainder of this piece I describe in lay terms one of the many hurdles that face the use of GCMs.

Think of a GCM as a large collection of interconnected computer programs or subroutines that looks pretty much like a bowl of spaghetti with looping datapaths coming out of here and going back into there with, perhaps, some number crunching along the way.  These are the various types of inter-connections or feeds – feedbacks, feedforwards, cross-feeds.  A GCM has tens of such major feeds, and hundreds of minor feeds.

A GCM sees the continuous world as chunked in both space and time.  The atmosphere is divided into chunks or distorted boxes that cover the earth in layers.  Each box is described by one set of numbers that covers the whole volume of the box.  Time does not flow continuously but in selectable discrete steps of, say, an hour or a day or … .  So at every time step all the boxes have to have their numbers recomputed with each box taking inputs from and giving inputs to other boxes in its neighborhood.  Then time is incremented, and the whole process repeated.  Getting pretty complex already, right?

What goes on inside each box is described by a set of very complex equations from the fields of thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, physical optics, molecular absorption, …, you get the picture.  Lots of feedbacks etc here before we even get to the surface of the box that touches another box.  Then certain numbers from each box feed into neighboring boxes.  Anyway, it is a big huge mess that is prone to errors from so many sources that it would make your head spin – and the errors grow with each time step forward.

So how do they do it?  They use assumptions or wags (technically, wild ass guesses).  To put your arms around the problem, you simply have to take some wags and push on.  So you pick a set of values and hold them fixed, and leave a few major feeds open to play with.  And here comes the fun.

The hundreds of values (constants) needed in a GCM come from individual scientists each studying (and perhaps modeling) a little bit of the big problem.  Sort of like the story of the blind men each touching a different part of the elephant.  The GCM systems team has to take all these different descriptions from the hundreds of scientists and put together what may or not wind up looking like the desired elephant – final GCM.

Now I won’t even go into how and what kinds of input datasets will be used to exercise the resulting GCM.  But I’d like to describe a little what goes on in each of the hundreds of ‘feedbacks’ (we’ll just use this term to cover them all).  The feedback of some model parameter’s value may be simply that value itself.  But in real systems the fed back value is modified by its unique ‘feedback gain’.

That gain may be as simple as a multiplier – take the value, multiply by 3.7, and feed it immediately to another calculation.  More likely it also has a time delay connected to it – hold on to it for ‘2.3 hours’ (problem time) and then feed it back.  And more likely the gain is ‘frequency dependent’.  To understand frequency dependence we must first remember that all atmospheric process are really continuous time series – wiggly lines of temperature, pressure, wind speed/direction, humidity, … .

A couple of hundred years ago Fourier showed that any wiggly line can be decomposed into components each one looking like a simple sine wave.  But the individual sine waves that add together to make the wiggly line each have a different frequency (how fast they wiggle), a different amplitude (how high/low they wiggle), and phase (how each of them is displaced in time from the others).  A sophisticated GCM feedback gain may take all of these things into consideration.

Having understood things this far, we now introduce the notion of sensitivity.  The output of the GCM is very sensitive to messing with the values of these feedback gains.  In fact, by playing around with various values – all in the ‘scientifically plausible range’ – one can pretty much generate any kind of an output one wants.  And, dear reader, if you’ve followed me this far, you now have a feeling of how unassailable such GCM outputs are, especially when presented to a bunch of nodding politicians and cheering True Believers.

Very few will have the necessary technical horsepower and motivation to dig into a GCM that was twenty years in the making, using input from hundreds of scientists, cobbled together by several software teams, and then exercised by some shrewd ideologues with PhD after their names.  Who is going to tell them that they are perpetrating fraud when they claim to reliably predict earth’s temperature out a hundred years?

Well, I am.  And my little stubborn ounces join the voices of many more diligent and better-known bloggers and prominent scientists who have blown the whistle on these shysters.  The True Believers who attempt to label us as “Deniers” (even the sleazebag scientists correctly call us skeptics in their emails) can do nothing but count the dubious number of IPCC consensus scientists.  And most of these simply lent their names as one of hundreds of these ‘domain specialists’ who contributed their small view of the elephant to the overall picture.

When his relativity theory was refuted by teams of established scientists a group of which was prepared to come and explain the matter to him, Einstein is reputed to have said, ‘Why send so many, when only one is needed to disprove my theory?’

His acolytes across the country are all atwitter today, but when will we hear from Al Gore?

Comments

[Russ]

George,

CBS has the story on the CBS Blog here. No telling if it will make it to CBS Evening News with Katie Couric.

Declan McCullough dives into the East Anglia CRU exposure and delivers a well-researched and fair look at the controversy for CBS News.  McCullough looks at the various e-mails, including portions that have not yet gotten much attention from the media, and concludes that the CRU has acted without transparency.  He also shows why the data itself has become suspect, as well as the modeling on which anthropogenic global-warming activists rely for stoking public demand for action.

H/T to Hot Air

[Larry Wirth]

George, I always knew you were good for something! That is the best short-form description of what is unfolding that I could ever imagine. Too bad the MSM will never get it enough to enlighten the folks...

Anna, get a life.

[Anna Haynes]

George, let me know when you're ready to stand behind your writing, and I'll look into it. Until then, I have higher-ROI things to do with my time.

[Dixon Cruickshank]

Anna you having a big helping of Crow for Thanksgiving, I hear horse manure with mixed Nuts makes a great stuffing

Happy Thanksgiving everyone

[Steven Frisch]

I am thankful today that the voices of Russ and George are a voice in the wilderness.

Read the response to the "climate change e-mail fraud" in the Scientific American.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=climate-change-cover-up-you-better-2009-11-24

[George Rebane]

For those who missed it, Scientific American is now celebrating about twenty years of having converted to a progressive promoter of one-world ideology wrapped in various layers of science and 'science'.

It's response is right on script - ignore and deny all skeptical claims, no matter their provenance, number, or pedigree. Just keep repeating the same mantra of AGW. The particular article referenced by Mr. Frisch is a cut below sophomoric as a reasonable response to the new dimension in the climate change debate (which is far from over).

And describing Russ and George to be some lonely voices in the "wilderness", I suppose is an attempt to influence the occasional innocent that wanders on to these pages. I could expand the list of such opposing voices, but there is little profit in it - the reader in doubt can simply pick up any issue of the WSJ, the world's leading newspaper in print and online, and judge for himself the how lonely and misled are the cited voices and the nature of the wilderness they inhabit.

The acid test still remains - the skeptics answer the True Believers' points one-by-one with testable science. The True Believers respond with vilification, and the recounting of a litany that never varies, returns, or acknowledges the material criticiques of their poorly formed belief system.

But then, if one's purview is sufficiently narrow, then Russ and George may indeed loom large and lonely. And even then, we are both thankful that our voices are at least heard in whatever context, so that ours may be added on to those of the others when the listeners' ears open wider.

[Steven Frisch]

There are no innocents here. Just a collection of like minded nativists, anti-intellectuals, conspiracy theorists, and curmudgeons.

By the way, Eric Hoffer would roll over in his grave at your reference to "True Believers". He was describing you.

[Dixon Cruickshank]

Steve I will quote via copy and paste a couple items from your article and comment-

"highlight definite character flaws among some climate scientists—including an embarrassing attempt to delete emails that discussed the most recent report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change"
= A BUNCH OF LYING BASTADS, and we don't still know what was deleted in the AR-4 emails - after FOI requests = criminal behavior

"one of the most "damaging" emails in question from Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., is actually mourning the paucity of Earth observation systems and data in the past decade, such as satellites (gutted by a lack of funding and launch miscues in recent years) to monitor climate change in the midst of natural variability."

$80 BILLION IN THE US ALONE SINCE 2003 ISN'T ENOUGH - maybe fewer meetings in Tahiti - per Phils emails

"While the revelations about pressuring the peer review process and apparent slowness in responding to an avalanche of requests for information unveil something below impressive scientific and personal behavior, they can also be seen as the frustrated responses of people working on complex data under deadline while being harassed by political opponents."

Read the emails - they controlled the peer review process so only the The Teams papers were published - they reviewed their own papers - apparently reading comprehension is not required at Scientic American

SLOWNESS - all the SCIENTISTS wanted was the base TEMP DATA - since 2003. Read the emails sir (no cap on purpose) - Phil Jones tried everything to not release anything to anybody because it was total adulterated CRAP and he knew it- thereby propping up his Political Co-Conspiritors and the $$$ from grants to him and the others.

"Because the opposition here is not grounded in any robust scientific theory or alternative hypotheses (all of those, in their time, have been shot down and nothing new has been offered in years)

Another through back to "It's not peer reviewed" see above - if you can't get data hard to come up with something - if you can't something peer reviewed it doesn't count - see above.

"Has there ever been a nuclear reactor built anywhere in the world that didn't rely on government to get it done?"

Other than a gazillion permits we built a bunch of power plants that the rate payer is paying for. ie:Fla Power Crystal River

"The problem is not the behavior of climate scientists or their results"

OH HELL YES IT IS - thats the whole issue, sorry you missed it - that damn reading comprehension thing again

"That's not something some folks want to see, primarily those working in the fossil fuel extraction and/OR FUEL BURNING BUSINESS."

THAT'S US YOU IDIOT - I burn fossil fuel in my car, in my boat and to get A/C - the power company or Exxon doesn't give a rats ass - they get 10% of whatever WE PAY

"There is, in fact, a climate conspiracy."

ABSOLUTELY AND EVERYBODY KNEW IT BUT YOU,WELL ANNA TOO, BUT WE JUST GOT THE PROOF ITS ALL BS - Although you didn't have to point out the obvious, we're not stupid

Since Thanksgiving is over maybe you can have your Crow with Mixed Nuts stuffing at Christmas. Sorry this may not be PC correct for Liberal Progresive, you probably have a new name for it, sorry.

[Steven Frisch]

This blog, you people, from George to Russ to Dixon, to the lot of your mindless followers, are the most retrograde idiots in the history of the friggin' world. Why would anyone waste their breath on you?

I cite as evidence George's much vaunted LOGIC MODEL which even he could not following when responding to me.

In the last 6 months my work with collaborators has leveraged more than $3 million in investment in the region and protected more than 3,000 acres of land.

I think the best course for me is to do my work, ignore you folks, and out compete you laggards.

Have fun in Florida Dixon, and in the curmudgeons retreat with Russ, George.

[Sarah D]

Steve, you sound like a very enjoyable person (sarcasm attempt). Next time you post I hope you share whatever recipe you used for the crow you ate.

p.s. WMD and AGW have a lot in common.

[George Rebane]

Does anyone have an idea whose $3M "investment" was "leveraged" in what manner? Also, what 3,000 acres are now "protected"? Something protected is usually the suspect code word for the use of that something being limited or eliminated. I was not able to discover this noteworthy project on the Sierra Business Council website. I would ask Mr Frisch, but he seems to have left in a huff, never to return.

And finally, can anyone explain what "business" does SBC do? Who gets to put more bread on the table through the good offices of SBC? Such answers are not discernible from its website, which makes SBC sound like another leftwing busybody organization, living off tax dollars and grant monies, that impedes the natural intercourse among a free people. Surely this is not an accurate assessment.

[Dixon Cruickshank]

It would be intereting to get some details, but getting some land to do nothing doesn't sound too hard.

[Dixon Cruickshank]

Steve I know your still around and no I don't expect you to respond after the last thrashing. Keep in mind we do take this crap personally - because it is in fact about us. So maybe just sit back awhile until the smoke clears and possibly re- think some of your positions, some make you look foolish. Steve this entails blatent fraud and collusion, so blatent a 3rd grader wouldn't buy it so why should grown ups.

George for you and your devoted readers, I ran across this which exemplifies the issue wonderfully.

http://www.countingcats.com/?p=5023

[George Rebane]

Dixon, can you recheck that URL? I get a 'page cannot be displayed' notice.

[Russ Steele]

George,

When I clicked on Dixon's link it worked just fine.

[George Rebane]

Yep, it also worked for me now. Must have been a server glitch.

Dixon has pointed to a good piece documenting more hanky-panky of the kind that you Russ are most familiar with, given your work on Anthony Watts' temperature stations survey.

[Dixon Cruickshank]

I didn't really know which place to put it, but picked this one for my new friend Steve. Glad you found it interesting, I'll keep digging, if I had an email I would just forward it and let you guys run with that stuff.

Damn cold down here by the way, froze my butt off (actually hands) fishing yesterday high was only in the 60's lots of sun though. Also reenforced the thought that getting up at 6AM is over rated.