Here are two posts providing valuable perspectives about the global climate debate, understandable even to non-scientists.
I. Data secrecy and the battle to allow replication of studies
“Is Briffa Finally Cornered?“, Steve McIntyre, Climate Audit, 30 July 2008 — Excerpt:
In 2000, Keith Briffa, lead author of the millennial section of AR4, published his own versions of Yamal, Taymir and Tornetrask, all three of which have been staples of all subsequent supposedly “independent” reconstructions. The Briffa version of Yamal has a very pronounced HS and is critical in the modern-medieval differences in several studies. However, the Briffa version for Yamal differs substantially from the version in the publication by the originating authors (Hantemirov, Holocene 2002), but is the one that is used in the multiproxy studies …
An important characteristic of tree ring chronologies is that they are sensitive to the method used. Chronologies can be quickly and easily calculated from measurement data. Rob Wilson, for example, will nearly always run his own chronologies from measurement data so that he knows for sure how they were done and so that they are done consistently across sites.
Osborn and Briffa 2006 was published in Science, which has a policy requiring the availability of data. It used Briffa’s versions of Yamal, Taymir and Tornetrask. At the time, I requested the measurement data, which had still not been archived 6 years after the original publication of Briffa 2000, despite the availability of excellent international archive facilities at WDCP-A (www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo). Briffa refused.
I asked Science to require Briffa to provide the data. After some deliberation, they stated that Osborn and Briffa 2006 had not used the measurement data directly but had only used the chronologies from an earlier study and that I should take up the matter with the author of the earlier study, pointedly not identifying the author, who was, of course, Briffa himself. I wrote Briffa again, this time in his capacity as author of the 2000 article in Quaternary Science Reviews and was blown off.
So years later, the measurement data for key studies used in both canonical multiproxy studies and illustrated in AR4 Box 6.4 Figure 1 (along, remarkably, with Mann’s PC1), remains unarchived, with Briffa resolutely stonewalling efforts to have him archive the data.
But has Briffa, after all these years, finally made a misstep? Maybe.
Recently Briffa published Briffa et al 2008 in Phil Trans Roy Soc, a journal with a long history, and with a life outside IPCC. A reader drew my attention to the fact that Phil Trans Roy Soc has a clear and forthright policy. As I reported a little while ago, I wrote to them observing that Briffa had not observed their requirements on data availability and that their editors and reviewers had failed to require observance of a data archiving policy that would require provision of a url as a condition of publication.
… Last week, I received a cordial replying undertaking to look into the matter and stating: “We take matters like this very seriously and I am sorry that this was not picked up in the publishing process.”
Imagine that. A journal that seems to have both a data policy and that takes it seriously. Unlike, say, Science or Nature, which have refused to make similar requirements of IPCC authors. On the face of it, a real science journal. That’s right: Real. Science.
However, Briffa is a wily data stonewalling veteran and may yet outwit the editors of Phil Trans Roy Soc. We shall see.
The journal discussed, Phil Trans Roy Soc, is Philosophical Transactions of the {British} Royal Society. From Wikipedia:
Begun in 1665, it is the oldest scientific journal printed in the English-speaking world and the second oldest in the world, after the French Journal des sçavans. It is still published, making it the world’s longest running scientific journal. The use of the word “philosophical” in the title derives from the phrase “natural philosophy”, which was the equivalent of what we would now generically call “science”.
The rest of the post and the comments provide more data on this vital aspect of the global warming debate, one which has played a large role in shaping public policy regarding climate change. Esp note this commenton why data is selectively shared among a small circle of researchers and effectively concealed from others. While this makes sense in terms of their professional life, it is obviously wrong to restrict access to data from publicly funded work on such a vital subject. It indicates how dysfunctional climate research has become that this problem continues for so many years after being widely identified.
Update: seeing how far Climate Science falls short of our standards for government research
I recommend reading this post: “Openness & Government“, Shane Deichman, at MountainRunner, 26 July 2008 (hat tip to Zenpundit) — Relevant and excellent material, including this gem.
One of the major opportunities for enhancing the effectiveness of our national scientific and technical effort and the efficiency of Government management of research and development lies in the improvement of our ability to communicate information about current research efforts and the results of past efforts.
— President John F. Kennedy’s opening statement in the “Weinberg Report“, 10 January 1963
II. A rare evaluation of global climate models
D. Koutsoyiannis, A. Efstratiadis, N. Mannassis & A. Christofides, “On the credibility of climate predictions” Hydrological Sciences-Journal-des Sciences Hydrologiques, 53 (2008) — Abstract:
Geographically distributed predictions of future climate, obtained through climate models, are widely used in hydrology and many other disciplines, typically without assessing their reliability. Here we compare the output of various models to temperature and precipitation observations from eight stations with long (over 100 years) records from around the globe. The results show that models perform poorly, even at a climatic (30-year) scale. Thus local model projections cannot be credible, whereas a common argument that models can perform better at larger spatial scales is unsupported.
For a less-technical discussion of this article and its significance, see “Koutsoyiannis et al 2008: On the credibility of climate predictions“, Steve McIntyre, Climate Audit, 29 July 2008 — “Par Frank observes: ‘In essence, they found that climate models have no predictive value.'”
I strongly recommend reading this comment posted by the lead author about the difficulty of getting non-consensus papers published in climate science.
Please share your comments by posting below (brief and relevant, please), or email me at fabmaximus at hotmail dot com (note the spam-protected spelling).
For more information about global warming
(a) Other posts on this site
- A look at the science and politics of global warming (12 June 2008)
- Global warming means more earthquakes! (19 June 2008)
- An article giving strong evidence of global warming (30 June 2008)
- Worrying about the Sun and climate change – cycle 24 is late (10 July 2008)
- More forecasts of a global cooling cycle (15 July 2008)
- Update: is Solar Cycle 24 late (a cooling cycle, with famines, etc)? (15 July 2008)
(b) Information from other sources
- “SURFACE TEMPERATURE RECONSTRUCTIONS FOR THE LAST 2,000 YEARS“, Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Division on Earth and Life Studies, NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES (2006) — aka The North Report.
- Report of the “Ad Hoc Committee on the Hockey Stick Global Climate Reconstruction”, commissioned by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce (July 2006) — aka The Wegman Report. Also note this excerpt from the Q&A session of the Dr. Edward J. Wegman’s testimony.
- “The role of statisticians in public policy debates over climate change“, Richard L. Smith, American Statistical Association – Section on Statistics & the Environment Newsletter (Spring 2007) — One of the too-few reports by statisticians on the climate change literature.
- A timeline of the science and politics of climate science.
- A Bibliography by year of climate science research.
