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**Ole Juul** · Dec 01, 2009, 11:15 PM

Re: Eating your own dog food...

First of all, forgive me GG if I missed something here. That's a very long post, I've just had coffee, and I think I've read much of it elsewhere.

I have a couple of miscellaneous comments.

The problem with unavailable data is mostly a matter of governments wanting money from their endeavours - regardless of whether or not they were paid for by taxes. The holders of the data sets are generally government run meteorological agencies who have a mandate to make money. I've written more about that here: http://ojuul.baywords.com/2009/11/26...limate-change/ Science and the idea of proprietary information (read intellectual property) has always been at odds.

I am quite familiar with the cast.

Steve McIntyre is an interesting read but Gavin Schmidt over at RealClimate.org is actually quite civilized: http://www.realclimate.org/ Of course, if you want to see what the real sceptics are up to there is always Anthony's site here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/ Anthony Watts seems like a fairly credible person to me, but for some downright rude, and often abusive behaviour one can always read the comments to his stories.

Regarding AGW (anthropogenic global warming), I won't say much here, other than to comment that it has become highly politicized and that, in my opinion, is going to prevent humans for making some of the changes that they need to make regardless of any AGW or not. The "hack" was likely done by someone with an interest in the status quo who wanted to cause a bit of confusion leading up to the Copenhagen conference.

Which brings me to "the hack". I do believe that the files came from Professor Jones' computer and not "hacked from the IPCC website" as GG mentions. There is very little information about it out there and bits scattered here and there do not appear factual. The people involved have been unclear and, perhaps more important, ideas of hacking and security tend to become part of a kind of mythology. I also wrote an article on the computing angle on the whole story here: http://ojuul.baywords.com/2009/11/27...ckees-lay-low/

Sorry for the long post, but my two blog stories seem to be written in anticipation of GG's post - so I couldn't resist.

My second posting is also Linux related in that I think the "hack" happened because someone (Jones) was using an insecure MS-Windows mail client, when they should have perhaps considered something more secure. That, after all, is why many of us are on this forum.

- Ole

**GreyGeek** · Dec 02, 2009, 02:34 AM

Re: Eating your own dog food...

Originally posted by Ole Juul

....
My second posting is also Linux related in that I think the "hack" happened because someone (Jones) was using an insecure MS-Windows mail client, when they should have perhaps considered something more secure. That, after all, is why many of us are on this forum.

- Ole

If an outsider broke in and downloaded them, or an insider dropped the files onto a 3rd party server, the effect is the same. The "cat" is out of the bag, and we have a window on their activities and inner discussions from Mar of 1996 to Nov 11, 2009.

It's not a pretty picture. Combine that with the fact that they've "LOST" the raw data and you have the finishing touches of a complete cover up.

I noticed that some of the files were Windows EXE files and the reports were DOC files. I just finished browsing through a 700KiB text file called "HARRY_READ_ME.txt" which appears to be "journal" some grad student wrote during the summer of 2006 as he was trying to generate more graphs. You have to download the files and read that one. The causual adding or removing data, mulitplying data for arbritary constants, changing data in files and then changing the timestamp so that they appear to have the same timestamp as the group they were from... it goes on and on and on. It's criminal.

It is also obvious from the file listings that the grad student was working from a Linux (Solaris?) work station.

A listing of /cru/mark1/f080/gts gives:

drwxr-x--- 2 f080 cru 1024 Sep 12 2005 cdrom
drwxr-x--- 10 f080 cru 57344 Nov 1 2001 cld
drwxr-xr-x 19 f080 cru 24576 Feb 27 2001 dtr
drwxr-x--- 2 f080 cru 8192 Feb 25 1998 elev
drwxr-x--- 2 f080 cru 8192 Jun 8 1998 euroclivar
-rw-r----- 1 f080 cru 0 Aug 3 1999 foo
drwxr-x--- 6 f080 cru 8192 Aug 6 2002 frs
-rw-r-x--- 1 f080 cru 438 May 12 1998 gts.errors
-rw-r----- 1 f080 cru 10 Jul 21 1999 in
drwxr-x--- 5 f080 cru 8192 Jan 6 1999 jiang

Steve McIntyre is an interesting read but Gavin Schmidt over at RealClimate.org is actually quite civilized:

Civilized? You must not have read all of the "What's up with that" posts from the hacked files. They are only a drop in the bucket of what is in those files. The hubris and audacity of it all astounds me. Even after recieving a Freedom Of Information Act request they still went ahead and DELETED the files that were being requested, and any email relating to them, except, of course, the hacked files.

Start reading the emails and your opinion of the folks at the CRU and the IPCC will change dramatically. With their own words they reveal themselves to be anti-science as they discuss manipulation of data, pushing agendas, "Peer reviewing" each others work to avoid giving out the raw data, persuading journal editors to NOT publish research contrary to the Hockey Stick, ignore FIOA requests, etc... etc... etc....

An Oct 23, 2009 email, 1256353124.txt, had the name and password to the private files at the CRU website, which may explain why certain parts of it are no longer accessible. The page where Dr Keith Briffa posted his explanation of the data fudging and manipulation used in the newer "hockey stick" report based on the Yamal-12 data, which was revealed by McIntyre after he was able to get a hold of that data because of a blunder by Briffa, is no longer accessible. The emails discussed Briffa's first post and called it weak, and the discussion looked like they were ready to throw him under the bus:

1254756944.txt:

Phil,
It is distressing to read that American Stinker item. But Keith
does seem to have got himself into a mess. As I pointed out in
emails, Yamal is insignificant. And you say that (contrary to
what M&M say) Yamal is *not* used in MBH, etc. So these facts
alone are enough to shoot down M&M is a few sentences (which
surely is the only way to go -- complex and wordy responses
will be counter productive).
But, more generally, (even if it *is* irrelevant) how does Keith
explain the McIntyre plot that compares Yamal-12 with Yamal-all? And
how does he explain the apparent "selection" of the less well-replicated
chronology rather that the later (better replicated) chronology?
Of course, I don't know how often Yamal-12 has really been used in
recent, post-1995, work. I suspect from what you say it is much less
often that M&M say -- but where did they get their information? I
presume they went thru papers to see if Yamal was cited, a pretty foolproof method if
you ask me. Perhaps these things can be explained clearly and concisely -- but I am not
sure Keith is able to do this
as he is too close to the issue and probably quite pissed of.
And the issue of with-holding data is still a hot potato, one that
affects both you and Keith (and Mann). Yes, there are reasons -- but
many *good* scientists appear to be unsympathetic to these. The
trouble here is that with-holding data looks like hiding something,
and hiding means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is
being hidden.
I think Keith needs to be very, very careful in how he handles this.
I'd be willing to check over anything he puts together.
Tom.

and then they do, and even as they destroy the foundation of their Hockey Stick, and it's 2nd builder, they still hang tenaciously to their fundamental theorem: GW exists because.

*Subject:* [geo] Re: CCNet: A Scientific Scandal Unfolds

Gene:

I've been following this issue closely and this is what I take
away from it:

1) Tree ring-based temperature reconstructions are fraught with
so much uncertainty, they have no value whatever. It is
impossible to tease out the relative contributions of rainfall,
nutrients, temperature and access to sunlight. Indeed a single
tree can, and apparently has, skewed the entire 20th century
temperature reconstruction.

2) The IPCC peer review process is fundamentally flawed if a
lead author is able to both disregard and ignore criticisms of
his own work, where that work is the critical core of the
chapter. It not only destroys the credibility of the core
assumptions and data, it destroys the credibility of the larger
work - in this case, the IPCC summary report and the underlying
technical reports. It also destroys the utility and credibility
of the modeling efforts that use assumptions on the relationship
of CO2 to temperature that are based on Britta's work, which is,
of course, the majority of such analyses.

As Corcoran points out, "the IPCC has depended on 1) computer
models, 2) data collection, 3) long-range temperature
forecasting and 4) communication. None of these efforts are
sitting on firm ground."

Nonetheless, and even if the UNEP thinks it appropriate to rely
on Wikipedia as their scientific source of choice, greenhouse
gases may (at an ever diminishing probability) cause a
significant increase in global temperature. Thus, research,
including field trials, on the leading geoengineering techniques
are appropriate as a backstop in case our children find out that
the current alarmism is justified.

David Schnare

They also discussed ways to counter McIntyer's analysis in the blogs and media but in their emails they say

From: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>
To: "Mitchell, John FB (Director of Climate Science)" <john.f.mitchell@metoffice.gov.uk>
Subject: Yamal response from Keith
Date: Wed Oct 28 12:26:39 2009

John,

[1]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/
This went up last night about 5pm. There is a lot to read at various levels. If you get
time just the top level is necessary. There is also a bit from Tim Osborn showing that
Yamal was used in 3 of the 12 millennial reconstructions used in Ch 6.
Also McIntyre had the Yamal data in Feb 2004 - although he seems to have forgotten this.
Keith succeeding in being very restrained in his response. McIntyre knew what he was
doing when he replaced some of the trees with those from another site.
Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk
NR4 7TJ
UK
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

References

1. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/

Ya, McIntyre knew alright. He was showing that he had figured out what Dr Briffa was doing, by replicating his work, and they knew it. Isn't that what peer replication is supposed to do? Maybe that why Dr. Keith Briffa was being "restrained" in his response?

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/..._they_lie.html
http://www.devilskitchen.me.uk/2009/...ept-under.html

Gavin and others being "civilized" was a tactic discussed in the emails. They also talked about other proxies, studies and results to support their ad hoc arguments because in reality they don't use them for any other purposes. Like I said, you have to read their emails to believe it. It makes Nixon look absolutely patriotic.

**GreyGeek** · Dec 02, 2009, 12:28 PM

Re: Eating your own dog food...

. I also wrote an article on the computing angle on the whole story here: http://ojuul.baywords.com/2009/11/27...ckees-lay-low/

Juul,
I posted on your blog the reasons why I speculated that the hacked was by a grad student on the CRU staff. It was after 4 A.M. and I was getting tired and sleepy, so I cut it off and went to bed.

As I often have done in the past, last night I dreamed about what I had read and what it meant. The name of the root directory of the hacked files, FOIA, combined with the email which Dr. Keith Briffa sent to the CRU staff recommending that they do what he was going to do, which was to delete all files relating to the Freedom Of Information Act request, seems to me to indicate that someone ON THE INSIDE, who recieved the deletion request or saw the email, was aware of what would happen if Briffa's recommendation was carried out and "rescued" the data and emails to make sure the FOIA request was "honored". So, I agree with your conclusion that it was not an outside hack (even if Windows was involved) but done by an insider.

Since action on this request would constitute a felony, besides removing smoking gun evidence of the AGW scam that has taken place since 1988, and especially since 1996 at the CRU, I believe that the "hacker" created the collections of files which would have to have been turned over to fulfill the FOIA request. If the hacker is an insider fear of the law might be a motive, but if an investigation insues he/she would have to come forward and prove they released the data in order to avoid prosecution. I suspect that the hacker wasn't directly responsible for or part of the FOIA felony, so I opt for the conscience motive.

What few people realize is how this episode in science almost mirrors the Lysenko Affair, which set back Soviet biological sciences 50 years. Climategate has the potential, if the whole political dogma is not thrown out, to set back WORLD climate science for decades, if not centuries, or until the UN itself is dismantled, which ever comes first.

From the Wikipedia:

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (Russian: Трофи́м Дени́сович Лысе́нко, Ukrainian: Трофим Денисович Лисенко, Trofym Denysovych Lysenko) (September 29, 1898–November 20, 1976) was a Ukrainian agronomist who was director of Soviet biology under Joseph Stalin. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of the hybridization theories of Russian horticulturist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, and adopted them into a powerful political scientific movement termed Lysenkoism. His unorthodox experimental research in improved crop yields earned the support of Soviet leadership, especially following the famine and loss of productivity resulting from forced collectivization in several regions of the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. In 1940 he became director of the Institute of Genetics within the USSR's Academy of Sciences, and Lysenko's anti-Mendelian doctrines were further secured in Soviet science and education by the exercise of political influence and power. Scientific dissent from Lysenko's theories of environmentally acquired inheritance was formally outlawed in 1948, and for the next several years opponents were purged from held positions, and many imprisoned. Lysenko's work was officially discredited in the Soviet Union in 1964, leading to a renewed emphasis there to re-institute Mendelian genetics and orthodox science.

Though Lysenko remained at his post in the Institute of Genetics until 1965,[1] his influence on Soviet agricultural practice declined by the 1950s. The Soviet Union quietly abandoned Lysenko's agricultural practices in favor of modern agricultural practices after the crop yields he promised failed to materialize. Today much of Lysenko's agricultural experimentation and research is largely viewed as fraudulent.

The emails reveal that the CRU, with the assistance of certain government agencies in various countries, like the head of the NASA weather unit, GreenPeace, and others, were "purging" editors of journals who didn't toe the IPCC line, slandering the research and credentials of scientist who didn't climb onto AGW, were "peer reviewing" each others articles to avoid "deniers" having access to the underlying data, were creating indoctrination materials for "the children", and all the other measures that the old USSR leadership enacted to establish Lysenkoism. The collusion between the dialectical materialist and the CRU went so far that the CRU folks were using the same terminology internally as they encouraged each other for the sake of the "agenda", which was using the Carbon Tax to redistribute wealth around the world from the "polluters" (the USA and other 1st world countries) to the "non-polluters", mainly China, India and smaller Marxist and totalitarian regimes around the world. This despite the fact that China, India and the others ARE the greatest polluters precisely because they have no effective environmental agencies or controls in place.

**GreyGeek** · Dec 02, 2009, 04:40 PM

Re: Eating your own dog food...

The London Daily Express has an article about ClimateGate, called Climate Change 'FRAUD'. Of the many talksbacks, most extremely indignate but informed, are two posts by "NucEngineer". They are so clear and lucid, and provide so many facts pertenent to the CRU fiasco, that I suspect that he may have been associated with the CRU at one time.

Here are his two posts:
How ClimateGate worked
The Hoax Only Took a Few Dozen Paleoclimatologists, Here's How

My suspicions about his past relationship with CRU is derived from a URL he posted in his second message.

That site has an interactive graphing engine that allows you to plot various models against each other. From reading the hacked files I recognize some of the models offered in the drop down combo box as being created from the hacked data, but without running them through the fudge machine that CRU and the IPCC had set up to create the fiction of AGW for political purposes.

**GreyGeek** · Dec 02, 2009, 05:01 PM

Re: Eating your own dog food...

Twenty years ago NOVA produced a program titled "Do Scientists Cheat?".

Do Scientists Cheat?
A production of the Documentary Guild in association with WGBH/Boston for NOVA. "Copyright 1988 WGBH Educational Foundation." [VHS; col., sd.; 60 min.: 1988]

An investigation into the ethical requirements of scientists involved in research. Describes earlier fraudulent work, such as William Dawson's Piltdown Man, and the IQ studies of Cyril Burt; also reports more recent frauds including the faked mental retardation research of Steve Breuning and the falsified heart disease research of Robert Slutsky. Discussions with scientists and medical journalists cover the peer review process for detecting scientific fraud (and its lack of effectiveness); the pressure to cheat, due to strong competition for grant money; and the slowness of authorities to respond to whistleblowers or root out fraud on their own.

It cited figures produced by two researchers who reviewed the PhD work and publications of over 2,000 scientists and also those reported by whistle blowers. Their conclusion: 48% of all scientific research involves cooking, trimming, or actual falsifying of data.

While a couple of the scientists had their articles reviewed and rejected, and Slutsky had his PhD revoked because he had falsified data, most of the cheating was ignored, the whistleblowers were "punished" for doing so, and several years later we find our two government researchers were reassigned to meaningless posts in North Dakota and Alaska. If asked if they would do it again, most said no.

**GreyGeek** · Dec 03, 2009, 11:24 PM

Re: Eating your own dog food...

The solar influence on Earth's temperatures have been publicly denied by the CRU folks.

But, internally, they have another opinion:

From: John Daly <daly@vision.net.au>
To: n.nicholls@BoM.Gov.Au
Subject: Re: Climatic warming in Tasmania
Date: Fri, 09 Aug 1996 20:04:00 +1100
Cc: Ed Cook <drdendro@ldgo.columbia.edu>, NNU-NB@palais.natmus.min.dk, k.briffa@uea.ac.uk, Mike Barbetti <mikeb@emu.su.oz.au>, zetterberg@joyl.joensuu.fi, rjf@dar.csiro.au

Dear Neville,

You mentioned to me some time ago that in your view, the 11-year solar cycle
did not influence temperature. There have been numerous attempts by
academics to establish a correlation, but each has been shot down on some
ground or other. I remember Barrie Pittock was especially dismissive of
attempts to correlate solar cycle with temperature.

Have you tried this approach?

Load "Mathematica" into your PC and run the following set of instructions -

data = ReadList[ "c:\sydney.txt", Number]
dataElements = Length[data]
X = ListPlot[ data, PlotJoined-> True];
fourierTrans = Fourier[data];
ListPlot[Abs[fourierTrans], PlotJoined -> True];

fitfun1 = Fit[data,{1,x,x^2,x^3,Sin[11 2 Pi x/dataElements],
Cos[11 2 Pi x/dataElements]},x];
fittable = Table[N[fitfun1], {x, dataElements}];
Y = ListPlot[fittable, PlotJoined -> True];
Show[X, Y]

The reference to "c:\sydney.txt" is a suggested pathname for the following
set of data - which is Sydney's annual mean temperature.

16.8 16.5 16.8 17 17 16.7 17.1 17.4 17.9 17.4 17.2 17.1 16.9 17 17.2 17.2 17.4
17.6 17.6 17.6 16.7 17.1 16.8 17.4 16.8 17.3 17.8 17.5 17.1 17.2 17.6 17.3 17.1
16.9 16.9 17.3 17.3 17.3 17.6 17.5 17.4 17.2 17.1 17.3 17.2 17.2 16.9 17.5 17.4
17.2 17 17.5 17.4 17.5 17.7 18.3 17.8 17.4 17.2 17.4 18.3 17.3 18 18.1 18 17.5
17.3 18 17 18.2 17.4 17.6 17.5 17.4 17.1 17.4 17.3 17.5 17.7 18 17.8 18 17.4
17.8 16.8 17.5 17.4 17.6 17.6 17.2 17.4 17.9 17.9 17.6 17.7 17.8 17.7 17.6 17.8
18.3 18 17.6 17.8 17.8 17.8 18.1 17.9 17.5 17.8 18.3 18 17.7 17.3 17.5 18.5 17.4
17.8 17.7 17.8 17.7 18 18.5 18.2 17.8 18.1 17.5 17.8 17.8 18 18.6 18.1 18.1
18.6

So Far so good.

"Mathematica" first plots out the data itself (see Atachment 1)

The first part of the instruction set lets "mathematica" do a Fourier Transform
on the data, ie. searching out the periodicities, if there are any. The result is
shown on Attachment 2.

The transform result shows a sharp spike at the 11 year point (I wonder
what is significant about 11 years?). The second part of the instructions
now acts upon this observed spike (the Cos 11 bit), to extract it's
waveform from the rest of the noise. The result is shown as a waveform
in attachment 3, the waves having an 11-year period, with the long-term
Sydney warming easily evident.

Attachment 4 shows the original Sydney data overlaid against the 11-year
periodicity.

It would appear that the solar cycle does indeed affect temperature.

(I tried the same run on the CRU global temperature set. Even though CRU
must be highly smoothed by the time all the averages are worked out, the
11-year pulse is still there, albeit about half the size of Sydneys).

Stay cool.

John Daly http://www.vision.net.au/~daly

Attachment Converted: c:\eudora\attach\Sydney.gif

Attachment Converted: c:\eudora\attach\Fourier.gif

Attachment Converted: c:\eudora\attach\Solar1.gif

Attachment Converted: c:\eudora\attach\Solar2.gif

**Ole Juul** · Dec 04, 2009, 01:03 AM

Re: Eating your own dog food...

Interesting. It certainly looks like there is an old boys school here, or as several people have remarked, evidence of tribalism. I also think these scientists have gotten carried away by their association with strong political and philosophical agendas. Still, the science is in published articles and not e-mails or other conversation - not that I don't think that there are problems with the science. But in the end, climate scientists are not climate science, and climate science is not the climate. Anthropogenic global warming is interesting and important, but ultimately it will be, perhaps already is, politicized to the point that whatever governments or populations do that effects it, will not change substantially. Governments and industry are already cashing in on it but I think they would proceed along the same path even if they didn't have AGW as a driver.

Thanks GG for posting on my blog.

Your analysis of the forensics of the "hack" is probably the most detailed that anyone has attempted. With all the interest in computers and computer security these days, I find it hard to understand why there is no talk of it in this situation. Your skilled observations also cause me to doubt the legitimacy of the report from the CSIS Security Group.

**GreyGeek** · Dec 04, 2009, 03:26 PM

Re: Eating your own dog food...

Originally posted by Ole Juul

....
Still, the science is in published articles and not e-mails or other conversation
...

That would seem to be a big advantage in favor of AGW, EXCEPT that the emails prove that they gained control over the editors of the JoC, and most other climate journals, and colluded to 1) make sure that only pro-AGW scientists "peer reviewed" their articles, 2) colluded to make sure research not favorable to AGW was not published, 3) had friends use their "special" proxies in supposedly "independent" research to "backup" the AGW claims made in CRU reports. In fact, when Steve McIntyre took advantage of a new British FOIA, passed in 2000, to request the orginal YAMAL tree-ring data, the emails show they deliberately released data without station identifications, or with missing parts in the periods, etc... It wasn't until Dr Briffa, in an attempt to bolster the AGW claim after a flood of research in other journals, which other climate researchers were forced to use, destroyed AGW, published a paper in a journal he didn't have control over, and which honored McIntyre's request for the archived data, that McIntyre was able to analyze the YAML tree ring data for the first time.

Also notice that he referred to being "stonewalled" by Briffa and Jones regarding access to the data, but RealClimate comments accused him of lying and whining about it. After the hacked emails were made public I read that everything McIntyre said was true. Jones even discussed how he was going to do it, and how he did it after it was over. This despite the fact that McIntyre had filed an FOIA request and Jones response was nothing less than criminal.

Thanks GG for posting on my blog.

Your analysis of the forensics of the "hack" is probably the most detailed that anyone has attempted. With all the interest in computers and computer security these days, I find it hard to understand why there is no talk of it in this situation. Your skilled observations also cause me to doubt the legitimacy of the report from the CSIS Security Group.

I tried Dutch to English on that Danish CSIS page, but it didn't work. There was no "Danish to English" option.

All in all, I believe that the political fix is in, and they'll get off, unless they offer to be sacrificial lambs.

While Socialists may be behind using AGW as an excuse to curtail consumption of fossil fuels and redistribute wealth, and even though I think AGW is hog wash, I agree with the measures to curtail consumption of fossil fuels that the IPCC recommends. Not because of CO2 pollution, because CO2 is not a pollutant, but because of what I learned as I worked my way through my last two years of college and the first year of grad school - working as an analytical chemist at Bradford Labs in Abilene, TX. That lab was a subsidiary of the Calgon Corp at the time, because Sodium Hexameta Phosphate, which Calgon manufactures, was used as a sequestering agent in Cambrian brine used in the 2ndary recovery of oil in the West Texas oil fields. What I learned was that most of the wells were beginning to move into tertiary recovery, which is sucking the last drops out of the well. When the wells drop to only a couple hundred barrels or oil or less per day, only small time operators are happy and can afford that. Some small time recovery folks are happy with 10 or 20 barrels a day, what ever the minimum load on a transport truck is. Any less and they cement the well and cap it to conform to FED requirements. Once that happens any oil remaining in the well will be too expensive to recover because of the cement plugging the well. The cost of re-drilling wouldn't be justified by the amount of oil that could be recovered.

In other words, in 1968 I learned from first hand experience that the USA was running out of oil! I didn't think that was a problem, actually I didn't think about it all since we had cheap oil from the Mid-East to replace what our own wells stopped delivering. Then, in 1974, while teaching Physics, I got a hold of a paper by Dr Alfred Bartlett on energy consumption delivered at the Rolla, Mo Energy conference in the same year. It was a SHOCKER! It still is.

Add to what he said the knowledge that we are STILL pumping MOST of our oil from the GIGANTIC Mid-East oil fields, almost 70 years after their discovery, and the fact that today's "gigantic" oil finds, like the one this summer in the Caribbean Gulf, are drops in the bucket, and we are in SERIOUS global trouble. The Gulf find was was a "gigantic" 3 Billion barrels. It was drilled to approximately 35,055 feet (10,685 meters), greater than the height of Mount Everest. Peak Oil shows that the world passed the peak of oil production around 3 or 4 years ago and now we are on a 3.4% annual decline rate, which is the real reason behind the financial crisis. We are NOW consuming TWICE AS MUCH oil as we are discovering. That's why folks are leaving the Dollar for Gold, as if they could eat that, and why there is so much pressure by the IPCC to push the austere measures required by "AGW". They are masking their true intent - moving the world into a post Oil economy. Too bad the economists and other "movers" and "thinkers" don't believe Solar power can help. Actually, it's our only choice. The same laws of exponential growth and consumption work in nuclear energy as well. We'll be out of fissionable products before we burn our last drop of oil. Breeder reactors aren't practical.

At our present rates of consumption in the USA, 21 to 22 million barrels per day, that "gigantic" 3 Billion barrel find would supply our consumption for only 137 DAYS!

The only Hockey Stick graph that has me conscerned is the one showing oil prices in the future when, NOT IF, the Saudi oil fields start to falter. As Dr. Bartlett said, "Farming is only a way of using land to convert oil into food". When the oil stops running people will start starving. Understand why islands and other isolated spots are becoming very popular with the wealthy?

**dibl** · Dec 04, 2009, 03:36 PM

Re: Eating your own dog food...

I did not realize we were having a global warming debate here!

OK, here's my little contribution:

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

If memory serves, that report was prepared by a high school girl, at the time. And yet it is as solid and verifiable as any science I ever learned, on my way to a BS in biological sciences.

**GreyGeek** · Dec 04, 2009, 03:40 PM

Re: Eating your own dog food...

BTW, Juul,

There is another reason why I support FOSS and Linux. It is related to what will happen when economic times get worse enough to make Internet connections rare or un-affordable. Having an OS that won't deactivate on you when it fails to make contact with the Mother Ship (MS) on a regular basis, or if you have to move it to another computer. Apple computers will be no better than running Windows on PCs when times get really tough and oil supplies drop. I'm 68 and may not live long enough to see the real hard times hit, but maybe I will. My dad lived to 93. The mess will hit the fan within 25 years for sure. Probably within the next 10 or 15, and even, possiblly, by 2015.

Better have several copies of Linux AND the source code handy before then, and keep them current.

**GreyGeek** · Dec 04, 2009, 04:00 PM

Re: Eating your own dog food...

Originally posted by dibl

I did not realize we were having a global warming debate here!

OK, here's my little contribution:

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

If memory serves, that report was prepared by a high school girl, at the time. And yet it is as solid and verifiable as any science I ever learned, on my way to a BS in biological sciences.

Imagine, from the mouth of "babes"! She is spot on!

The greenhouse effect is a collective (colligative) property of gases. Some gases do not allow infrared energy to pass though, but absorb it and turn it into thermal energy, the vibration of molecules, which is the same as raising the temperature. Water is seven times better at that than Carbon Dioxide. Water is thousands of times more abundant in the atmosphere than CO2. I computed the greenhouse differences a few years ago and, IIRC, water was 287,000 times more powerful as a green house gas than CO2.

The AGW folks try to hook CO2 into water's MUCH more powerful greenhouse capability by claiming that CO2 is a "catalyst" which amplifies water's ability as a green house gas. This is nonsense of course, because the property, as I mentioned before, is colligative, meaning it is based purely on the property of the molecule AND the total number of the molecules. And, just like atmospheric pressure, the total greenhouse affect is merely the sum of the greenhouse affects of each component in the atmosphere. Part of it is albedo. When water evaporates and rises in the sky to form clouds, the tops of the clouds reflect a large part of the sunlight back into space, where it can not be converted into thermal energy. The warmer it gets the more evaporation, the more evaporation the more clouds form. The more clouds form the more sun light is reflected back into space. It's self modulating.

What REALLY contributes to the Earth's temperature cycles are two major contributors, the Solar output variations caused by sunspots, and the decreases in solar influx because the solar system bobs in and out of the Galactic cloud, which blocks Sunlight every few million years. The hacked emails contains one in which the CRU guys play with the Sidney Austrailia data using Mathematica and confirm for themselves that the Sun spot cycle affected Sidney's temp. Then, they explained it away in their published papers to avoid minimizing their CO2 theory. Gotta run. momma calls!

**Adrian** · Dec 04, 2009, 04:11 PM

Re: Eating your own dog food...

When I see this kind of discussion I usually post this link:
http://www.grist.org/article/series/skeptics/

It's more than I know anyway, but usually the arguments of the skeptics are found there and... rebutted.

**GreyGeek** · Dec 04, 2009, 04:44 PM

Re: Eating your own dog food...

Appeals to authority was the way the Greeks settled all philosophical discussions. It is always a weak argument, from the time of Galileo on, but with AGW, what if the "authorities" are lying?

The hacked emails show that even THEY don't believe their own "evidence", that they cooked, trimmed, deleted, fudged and dry labbed their data, "peer reviewed" their own articles, blocked "deniers" from publishing and worse. Download the file and see for yourself.

Take the research which shows that Mars is having a "global warming" event, as evidenced by (gasp!

) the shrinkage of its ice cap. RealClimate poo-ppo's that explanation. How?.

The shrinkage of the Martian South Polar Cap is almost certainly a regional climate change, and is not any indication of global warming trends in the Martian atmosphere.

It would be a disaster if other planets are warming up, too. That would mean that CO2 is not the culprit, IF the Earth is warming. The avg global temperature has dropped 0.7F since 1998. According to AGW it should have been about that much warmer.

In reviewing the various sites one thing stands out. IPCC people cross reference themselves in citing "proof" that AGW is a reality and CO2 is the cause, but the emails prove there is something other than GW driving their efforts.

Besides, IF CO2 is "the" catalyst that makes water vapor a stronger green house gas (and that's the only way 0.03% of the atmosphere could affect the other 99%,), it would be an easy thing to prove experimentally. The Stephan-Boltzman equation shows that energy radiates from an object according to the fourth power of Temperature. Put some water vapor in a clear container which does not trap infrared radiation by itself, fill it with water vapor at various percentages of saturation, along with CO2 at the current atmospheric percentage.

At each level of constant light intensity the temperature of the trapped water vapor + CO2 will rise until the temperature of the combination radiates as much energy as it is receiving from the light source. At that point the temperature will stabilize and remain constant. It is an easy matter to demonstrate that the output at temperature stabilization is the sum of the colligative properties of H20 and CO2.

Repeat for higher and higer levels of CO2. As the level of CO2 increases, for the same molar volume of H2O, the stabilization temperatures will still be the colligative sum of H20 and CO2. Continue until the stabilization temperature is high than that at which life can survive for a wide range of partial pressures of CO2. I can safely predict that at NO point will the CO2 reach some mystical level where the greenhouse capacity of water vapor suddenly becomes greater at any given temperature WITH CO2 than it was WITHOUT CO2.

If that were not true then the CRU crew would merely have to report that research and show, by peer review and easily repeatable experiments that anyone can do, the exact partial pressures and temperatures that product the "triggering tip over" that they claim exists.

**GreyGeek** · Dec 05, 2009, 12:40 AM

Re: Eating your own dog food...

Found this interesting explanation of the r2 verification statistic and its effects on the Hockey Stick:

Steve McIntyre is having a lot of fun.

* Verification r2 revealed

As we discussed many times, the fundamental scientific statement that is used to justify various global policies to fight the so-called "global warming" is the conjecture that the warming in the 20th century is unprecedented. The primary experimental evidence is based on the reconstruction of temperatures in the past millenium.

We did not have thermometers 500 years ago. Instead, we must use "proxies" such as tree rings etc. The hypothesis behind this scheme is that a good estimate of the past temperatures can be obtained as a particular linear combination of vectors of numbers extracted from these proxies. You try to find the right linear combination that optimally reproduces the observed temperatures in the calibration period (probably something like 1850-2000) and then you extrapolate the same linear combination of the proxies to guess the temperatures in the past, before we had any thermometers.

Can this procedure be trusted? In order to answer this question, you need verification statistics, a certain kind of generalized correlation coefficients for multi-variable linear regression. Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have shown in their papers - especially the latest paper in Geophysical Research Letters - that the statistical procedures used by Mann, Bradley, Hughes (MBH98, MBH99) in their "hockey stick" papers are flawed. Quantitatively, this fact shows up through very poor values of the R2 verification statistic.

Although a theoretical physicist would always prefer the R2 statistic, there also exist alternative formulae to quantify the quality of a "model", such as the RE statistic. In all cases, these numbers are between 0 and 1, with a value below 0.2 indicating a poor model. In previous climate papers, R2 was widely used. However, because it turns out that the R2 coefficient may be very low for various reconstructions, R2 suddenly became politically incorrect and some climate scientists even argue that it is "silly" to calculate R2 and only RE should be looked at because of something and especially because its values are higher.
Because Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre published a paper that has shown that the results of MBH are statistically insignificant and because the global warming and the hockey stick is a kind of dogma for a certain segment of the climate scientists, they have spent a significant portion of the last year or two by attempts to create and publish a paper that would invalidate the results of McKitrick and McIntyre. Otherwise, the state-of-the-art situation is that the hockey stick reconstruction has been proved to be an artifact of flawed statistical methods.

The paper of Ammann and Wahl could have become such a paper that could potentially save the most important part of the global warming theory. However, it turns out that according to Ammann and Wahl, the R2 verification coefficients for the early stages of the MBH paper are extremely low, just like McKitrick and McIntyre argued. The debate on that page attracted some people who are well educated in statistics. A typical interpretation of a low squared statistic combined with a higher RE statistic is that they deal with overfitting - the "model" for calculating the past temperature depends on too many variables. At any rate, the predictions can't be trusted. The RE statistic is spuriously high only due to self-correlations of the proxies in the calibration period.

It seems that once you analyze papers that were proposed as evidence for "extraordinary" warming in the 20th century, you will see that they are based on estimates of the temperature in the past millenium that look like worthless noise and guessing. You won't read these mathematical analyses in the media. Instead, the media will offer you irrational and hysterical whining of politicized scientists, politicians, and polar bears.

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