Eating your own dog food...

[GreyGeek]

Re: Eating your own dog food...

The current US population distribution was determined about 50 years ago when there was a debate between those who said that the US would peak in production around 1970, with good math and honest data, and those who said we'd find all the oil we need for the foreseeable future, mostly economists. Congress bought into the infinite bucket of oil fairy tale and that opened the gates for rambling ranch homes built with no insulation in suburbs 15 or miles from the city, where the jobs were. The suburbanites traveled to and from work in 4,000+ bls automobiles that got 12 mpg in the city and 15-17 on the highway. Gas tanks held 30 gallons or more and gas cost as little as 15-20 cents per gallon, so gas mileage didn't matter.

When I began working at the Dept of Revenue I lived 3.25 miles from my office. I began riding my bike to work. It would take about 30 minutes when I started but within a year I could make the trip in 15 minutes without breathing hard. The only time I didn't ride my bike to work was when there was a forcast of thunder & lightening storms, or when heavy snow restricted access to bike paths, which weren't plowed, and streets were one lane each way with banks of snow on both sides. No room for a bike.

It didn't take me long to experience a motor sport: chase the bicyclist off the road. I even had folks drive out of their lane, across the center lane and point their vehicle at me in order to force me off the road, the laugh their head off.

My wife asked me to stop riding my bike and begin using our car again when a truck, without signaling, turned into a driveway crossing the the sidewalk I was riding on and hit me. The damage to my left ankle added to the genetic foot deformities I have and I have never worn a pair of shoes since. Alway sandals.

Now, the major US job centers are Walmart, Target, McDonalds, Burger King and various lesser know restaurants and fast food places, mostly in shopping centers and strip malls. Downtown Lincoln, except for bars and one major theater chain, the Dept of Rev bldg, and the State Capital bild, is not far removed from being business slums. The fast food places are moving into the suburbian shopping malls and sharing roofs. Walmart + McDonalds, etc....

So, unlike European cities, in which the homes and work places are almost within walking distance of each other, the US service industry jobs are spread through the suburban shopping centers, leaving city centers to stagnate. The grand result of letting corporate profits control housing development. In Lincoln, if you don't own a car the chances of you being hired are reduced significantly. Why? Because you can't make a living with just one fast food job. Each job pays minimum wage and less than 40 hrs to avoid paying benefits. So, folks have to work at two, or sometimes three, service jobs to put in enough hours to earn living expenses. They couldn't get to their next job in time, etc.. Also, bikes are the best for taking the kids to the doctor, or shopping for groceries or for parts to repair your furniture, apartment or home. Also, since over 40% of the population is obese, if not morbidly so, they couldn't ride a bike to work if their life depended on it. Which it might.

This puts the US population in a REAL pickle.

[Ole Juul]

Re: Eating your own dog food...

I have to say a couple of things about bikes. First, I understand the problem of balance between real estate development, road building, and transportation. That is a difficult bind and it has been a problem since we started developing transportation technology. Both in Europe and USA there have been real estate developments because of the use of the bicycle and then later because of the auto mobile. People start living further and further away from work. The amount of human resource taken out of the economy by wasted productive hours is criminal. If AGW is real and governments start to ban auto mobile commuting then I'll know they're actually taking things seriously. But I digress ...

The bicycle:
Commuting distances of less than 15 miles or so are efficiently managed by using a bicycle. In a city environment it is also very important to note that the bicycle is much faster than a car. A large part of the people who use cars in an urban environment simply just don't value their own time. That is very sad on a human level. I understand that there is status is owning a sexy car and when you are young it gives a sense of power to swing those car keys around. From a psychological point of view those are real values. It is just sad that so many people don't value their own ability to do something and instead will gladly pay huge sums and take more time to get from A to B. Who would willingly use a wheel chair? As someone who is disabled, though I don't need a wheelchair, let me tell you that driving a car is a hollow victory. A healthy person with no personal pride in their ability to get around fast is a sad sight to me.

Every year in Vancouver there is a race between three people. One takes the bus, one drives a car, and the third drives a bicycle. This is of course a publicity stunt put on by Bicycling BC, but it is real nevertheless. The order of the the winners is the same every year. The bus is last and the bicycle is first. No surprises there. Vancouver is lucky in that snowfall is fairly low, but unlucky in that there are lots of steep hills. One can commute via bike most of the year in relative comfort. Most European cities are much flatter and warmer, but still many people commute via bike in Vancouver.

I remember once being at a meeting where one old guy always showed up on his bicycle. I asked him where he was coming from and he told me about 20 miles away. His response was that he was getting too old to walk any more.

Despite my disability (I have post polio) I have a lot of bicycling experience. I can tell you first hand that it is much easier to ride than it is to walk. I don't remember the research results, but I seem to remember a 1 to 6 ratio or thereabouts. Bicycling is "geared" walking. The efficiency gain is huge. As for speed, I can attest to that as well. In a city there is no way that a car is going to beat a car bicycle. When you take parking time into account, the comparison becomes ridiculous.

@dibl:
Thanks for not taking offence. Yes, there are some serious problems in many cities everywhere. One has to bow to social and physical realities and can't always follow through on an ideology. Many people are in the same bind as you and unfortunately I don't see things changing soon.

However, in the greater parts of the U.S.A. there is a very different reality. My office is 38 miles (61km) of bad under-construction freeway from my house. It is impossible -- you could not survive the first trip.

That reality is indeed imposing. Although 38 miles is a nice ride on a pleasant highway, freeways are generally inappropriate and also illegal territory for bicycles. That kind of distance is also way too far for commuting, no matter how you look at it. Cars win out when the distances get longer. For reasonable distances, in some places there are ways to deal with traffic or get around freeways. Traffic in itself is not a problem for bicycles if the bicyclist is knowledgeable about traffic regulations and theory.

[Ole Juul]

Re: Eating your own dog food...

Ole Juul, the logic doesn't hold. GreyGeek says that somebody made this brilliant invention with global warming to ween us out of oil and on the same time you say that they have interest in oil, it doesn't add up. It's one or the other.

Industry and governments are playing games. AGW has provided a great amount of industry with oil dependent revenue. Most, so called, green technology uses vast amounts of plastic. The prius is still a car and it is of arguable overall energy efficiency. Biofuel is a disaster but companies are making money off it. Recycling centres make their money off oil dependent plastic. Don't get me started on the economic and environmental disaster of CFLs. What is happening is a lot of environmental endeavours (not all) are simply energy laundering. There are lots of opportunities for oil (or coal) centric business to make money on AGW.

Besides, oil is only a small part in this picture, it's coal too and we don't run out of coal that soon, US has big reserves.

You are correct. I do think that that oil and coal can be put in the same category for the purposes of this discussion. BTW: I live in Coalmont BC.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Eating your own dog food...

Juul,
I had a laugh yesterday when the Governator was talking about California going green, and mentioned the Tesla electric car. I guess he didn't understand that they use the Coal powered electric grid to recharge the Tesla batteries!

The recent scam of using Ethanol to replace gasoline was a classic case of greed, ignorance and fraudulent research and publishing. Our Sen Nelson campaigned in his last election claiming that Ethanol would allow us to replace oil fields with fields of corn. ETOH proponents were dishonest about how much net energy was available in a gallon of ETOH. Net energy calculations easily showed that it takes SEVEN gallons of ETOH to replace the energy in ONE gallon of gasoline because of the energy necessary to grow the corn and distill the ETOH. No ones calculation included the unforeseen, by most, result that people starved because food resources were diverted to creating Gasohol. It also turned out that although oxygenated, compared to gasoline, ETOH turned out to create larger amounts of organic carcinogens due to incomplete combustion and actions in the catalytic converter.

Because of the economic world wide depression we are experiencing a 3.4% NEGATIVE growth rate in oil production. A negative rate of at least 3% guarantees that the current amount of remaining oil will offer some oil supplies to our great grandchildren's grandchildren. Maybe by then we will have replaced Oil with Solar powered energy completely. The negative oil production rate is important because we've replaced metal and wood with plastic made from oil (or Corn husks - Nylon). We make medicines and medical equipment, antibiotics, and lubricants from oil. Most of our synthetic cloths are made from oil.

We EAT oil. It takes SEVEN times more energy to bring a slice of bread to your breakfast table than you get eating it, provided you don't toast it. Otherwise, it's cost even more oil. Farming used to take over 95% of our labor force, now it is less than 1% and dropping because we use oil powered equipment to farm more land with less labor. We are not prepared to return to animal power, or even electric powered farming equipment. A sudden loss of oil in amounts sufficient to maintain the production levels of food would result in mass starvation within a month in most major urban areas. In fact, in most rural areas too, because most farmers don't have gardens any more. The shop the grocery shelves too. We heat our homes with oil or natural gas. Petroleum supplies are critical already and growing more tenuous each day.

Todays energy companies and corporations have already made deals with Carbon Credit holders, mainly 2nd & 3rd world countries, besides China and India, and they've already set up a Carbon Credit Market, just like the stock market but using Carbon Credits as money. They are buying the Carbon Credits of the poor countries so they can continue to business as usual in the rich countries, after tacking the cost of the Carbon Credits onto the price of their energy.

People believe that because we (USA) have SIX times more energy in coal fields than the energy in the Saudi oil fields that we can "get by" turning coal into liquid and gaseous fuels. They think that because they do not understand two important facts: 1) Most of our coal fields are not the high energy Anthracite coal. It is a softer, low-grade coal with more pollutants. We'll get less energy from it and it will cost more to make it burn clean. 2) Most people do not understand exponential growth of consumption. Our current coal consumption rate is about 8%. Switching from oil to partly coal would raise that to 13% or higher, the more we depend on coal. At 8% we'd double our consumption of coal every 8.5 years! At 13% we'd double our consumption of coal every 5 years! Every 5 years we'd consume as much coal as been consumed from the beginning of using coal. I've attached a graph that illustrates the point.

During the Arab oil embargo of 1973 the coal companies put an ad in most major newspapers around the country. It claimed that "At the current rate of consumption we have enough coal to supply our energy needs for the next 600 years. There is no energy shortage!" They weren't lying, they just didn't tell the whole truth. GROWTH MEANS EXPONENTIAL GROWTH. We can have geometric growth only with a Soviet style command and control economy, and all it produced were long bread lines. Exponential growth means more people will be using a resource, or the same people will be using MORE of a resource, or more people will be using more resources. The latter is what we have occurring today, as it was back then. Fifteen years later, during the energy crisis of the late 1980's, they repeated their ad stunt. That time their ad stated "... we have enough coal to supply our energy needs for the next 200 years!". Like before, they weren't lying. They just didn't say the second time what they didn't say the first time ... the rate of energy consumption is not a fixed value. We lost 400 years of coal in just 15 years because our rate of coal consumption increased during those 15 years. Here is what Dr. Barttlet computed:

Table VIII.

United States coal resource.
Ultimate total production (Ref. 7)
High estimate 1486
Low estimate 390
Produced through 1972
(My estimate from Hubbert's Fig. 22) 50
Percent of ultimate production produced
through 1972
Percent of high estimate 3%
Percent of low estimate 13%
Coal resource remaining
High estimate 1436
Low estimate 340
Annual production rate, 1972 0.5
Rate of export of coal, 1974 0.06
Annual production rate, 1974 0.6
Annual production rate, 1976 0.665
Units are 10^9 metric tons.


Table IX.

Lifetime in years of United States coal (EET). The lifetime (EET) in years of U.S. coal reserves (both the high and low estimate of the U.S.G.S.) are shown for several rates of growth of production from the 1972 level of 0.5 (x10^9) metric tons per year.

High Estimate (yr) Low Estimate (yr)
Zero 2872 680
1% 339 205
2% 203 134
3% 149 102
4% 119 83
5% 99 71
6% 86 62
7% 76 55
8% 68 50
9% 62 46
10% 57 42
11% 52 39
12% 49 37
13% 46 35

Coal will give us more time to develop alternate energy sources. IF we squander that time then there remains NO viable energy source with which to create an alternate energy source infrastructure, which is the exact predicament that 3rd world countries are in right now.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Eating your own dog food...

Well, the Copenhagen conference is in high gear. Drudge reports that their transportation and accommodations are releasing more CO2 than 60 countries, combinedl which ever they are. Never followed that up. It was easy to predict that the media news coverage would favor the CRU and AGW, and it has. Amazingly, the very people who refused to release data so independent researchers could verify their results, throttled apposing viewpoints in climate journals, got negative peer reviewrs discharged and began peer reviewing their own groups papers, stuffed panels and committees, cherry picked data, suppressed other data, all with their governments funding, are now being cited by the media as "proof" that despite Climategate, "the AGW science is good", i.e., it's "settled".

Amazing. So, with AGW research practices as a precedent, scientists can now refuse to release the data surrounding any research project they do by merely claiming that 1) those who ask for it want it merely to destroy their research, 2) they lost it, Good luck with all that biochemical research which purports to show that drug X is a safe and effective treatment for disease Y, especially after your child is prescribed drug X.

I've been finishing up on reading the "HARRY_readme.txt" file, which is 700kb long and is a running account of the trials and tribulations of "Harry", as he tries to work with the data to produce "deliverables". A lot of it is captured Linux console output that results from his running various programs, scripts, entering parameters, and capturing the output or error message, plus a LOT of his personal comments. I noticed a trend and begin keeping track of the use of "argh", "f*ck", " TF ". It's an interesting read just to download the files to follow those word trails.

I feel for Harry. Here is a guy who is writing all sorts of fortran, matlab, IDL and other scripts to supposedly massage data in statistically correct and significant ways order to generate "griddings" that prove AGW, and then I read on line 8688:

So, once again I don't understand statistics. Quel surprise, given that I haven't had any training in stats in my entire life, unless you count A-level maths.

At line 8718 he writes:

Another problem. Apparently I should have derived TMN and TMX from DTR and TMP, as that's what v2.10 did and that's what people expect. I disagree with publishing datasets that are simple arithmetic derivations of other datasets published at the same time, when the real data could be published instead.. but no.

At line 13221 he writes:

No. I'm going to back my previous decision - all station count files reflect actualy obs for that parameter only. So for secondaries, you get actual obs of that parameter (ie naff all for FRS). You get the info about synthetics that enables you to use the relevant primary counts if you want to. Of course, I'm going to have to provide a combined TMP and DTR station count to satisfy VAP & FRS users. The problem is that the synthetics are incorporated at 2.5-degrees, NO IDEA why, so saying they affect particular 0.5-degree cells is harder than it should be. So we'll just gloss over that entirely ;0)

ARGH. Just went back to check on synthetic production. Apparently - I have no memory of this at all - we're not doing observed rain days! It's all synthetic from 1990 onwards. So I'm going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that. And separate gridding before 1989. And what TF happens to station counts?

OH F**K THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found.

At 14110 he write:

Now, this is a clear indication that the standard deviation limits are not being applied. Which is extremely bad news. So I had a drains-up on anomauto.for.. and.. yup, my awful programming strikes again.

Been there, done that. If you have ever programmed you can sympathize with Harry!

At 14565 he writes:

This whole project is SUCH A MESS. No wonder I needed therapy!!

When 200 clerks are entering citizen's information, tax data, forms, applicatiions, etc., into data bases, and you are trying to write a program to pull that data out you suddenly realize that some clerks use the 2nd and/or 3rd address line as a comment line, or a city, st zip line, even though there are fields for that, and all other sorts of data entry contamination. Again, I can sympathize with Harry. He's trying to generate data from text files from all over the world, entered by poorly trained or untrained people. His discussions about the state of data in the databases should be required reading for student programmers AND data entry clerks.

To illustrate the mess, at 14594 he writes:

I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can't get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog.
I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections - to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more.

So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations? Well, how about fixdupes.for? That would be perfect - except that I never finished it, I was diverted off to fight some other fire. Aarrgghhh.

I - need - a - database - cleaner.

What about the ones I used for the CRUTEM3 work with Phil Brohan? Can't find the bugger!! Looked everywhere, Matlab scripts aplenty but not the one that produced the plots I used in my CRU presentation in 2005. Oh, F**K IT. Sorry. I will have to WRITE a program to find potential duplicates. It can show me pairs of headers, and correlations between the data, and I can say 'yay' or 'nay'. There is the finddupes.for program, though I think the comment for *this* program sums it up nicely:

' program postprocdupes2
c Further post-processing of the duplicates file - just to show how crap the
c program that produced it was! Well - not so much that but that once it was
c running, it took 2 days to finish so I couldn't really reset it to improve
c things. Anyway, *this* version does the following useful stuff:
c (1) Removes and squirrels away all segments where dates don't match;
c (2) Marks segments >5 where dates don't match;
c (3) Groups segments from the same pair of stations;
c (4) Sorts based on total segment length for each station pair'

You see how messy it gets when you actually examine the problem?

This time around, (dedupedb.for), I took as simple an approach as possible - and almost immediately hit a problem that's generic but which doesn't seem to get much attention: what's the minimum n for a reliable standard deviation?

I wrote a quick Matlab proglet, stdevtest2.m, which takes a 12-column matrix of values and, for each month, calculates standard deviations using sliding windows of increasing size - finishing with the whole vector and what's taken to be *the* standard deviation.

The results are depressing. For Paris, with 237 years, +/- 20% of the real value was possible with even 40 values. Windter months were more variable than Summer ones of course. What we really need, and I don't think it'll happen of course, is a set of metrics (by latitude band perhaps) so that we have a broad measure of the acceptable minimum value count for a given month and location. Even better, a confidence figure that allowed the actual standard deviation comparison to be made with a looseness proportional to the sample size.

All that's beyond me - statistically and in terms of time. I'm going to have to say '30'.. it's pretty good apart from DJF. For the one station I've looked at.

Back to the actual database issues - I need a day or two to think about the duplicate finder.

Let's just look at the year 2003, for all the French stations in each database! Duh.

And then he goes on to describe what a total mess the temperature data collected by the French is.

All in all an interesting read, but not as interesting as the emails.

[Ole Juul]

Re: Eating your own dog food...

There was another analysis of the "hack" published by a systems analyst named Lance Levsen. He goes through the files and concludes: "wasn’t because of some hacker, but because of a leak from UEA by a person with scruples." You can read his report here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/0...ak/#more-13821
I also did an overview on one of my blogs here: http://ojuul.baywords.com/2009/12/08...mate-research/

@GG: Regarding the Tesla, it's a good sales pitch to get people interested in electric cars, but green it aint! My favorite "fooled ya" vehicle is the compressed air cars that "don't pollute". They are, of course, great for warehouses and explosive environments like mines, but again: green they aint!

[GreyGeek]

Re: Eating your own dog food...

That URL about the comprehensive analysis of the emails was exactly that. VERY WELL DONE analysis establishing almost without a doubt that the FOIA file was gathered and released by someone on the inside, most likely carrying it out in a USB stick.

I was also surprised to realize the timing of the event. As I said before, NO ONE could claim they had the FOIA file before Nov 12th, 2009, and it was released on Nov 17, 2009. Claims that the BBC sat on it for two months, and other such stories, are nonsense.

Steve McIntyre reported that his FOI request had been rejected. In that report Steve McIntyr also observed the timing;

On Nov 18, 2009, I received the letter attached below from Jonathan Colam-French, Director of Information Services of UEA, turning down my appeal. The letter is dated Nov. 13, 2009. In the letter refusing the appeal, Colam-French says that he consulted a file on the matter.

Now consider the following chronology.

On Nov 17, 2009 at 9.57 pm occurred the first public notice of the 63 MB CRU file entitled “FOIA.zip” came at Jeff Id’s blog by a poster called “FOIA”, who stated:

We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps.

We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.

The file contained emails up to and including Nov 12, 2009 (the most recent is 1258053464.txt) the day prior to the date on the letter refusing the appeal.

Housekeeping emails are absent from the file. In addition, the file contains statements by Jones that he had “deleted loads of emails” (1228330629.txt) and a request from Jones to Mann to “delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4″, noting that similar requests were being made to Briffa, Wahl and Ammann (1212073451.txt).

I first learned of the existence of the file a few hours after notice was posted at Jeff’s blog and first saw the files a day later. I know nothing of the provenance of the FOIA.zip that is not in the public domain.

The names of the emails in the zip file were generated automatically by the email archiver. The date of the email in which Jones said he had deleted loads of emails was:
date -ud @1228330629
Wed Dec 3 18:57:09 UTC 2008

One would suspect that Jones would have also deleted the email saying he had deleted a "load of emails" and asking others to do the same, but in the zip file is loads of incriminating emails before Dec 3, 2008, and afterwards, so it is obvious Jones never thought about the mail server automatically archiving each email it sent or received.

Claims that the emails were cherry picked are also without proof. While I pointed out that the file names were monotonically increasing, that did not mean that the gaps between numbers were proof of a conspiracy of cherry picking. The numbers were generated from the timestamp of the email itself. No conclusion can be made about the presence or absence of emails between specific numbers unless someone reveals actual emails. The idea that "FOIA", whom ever s/he is, is preserving additional emails for rebuttal purposes is also speculation.

But, It is also apparent that someone knew about McIntyre FOI requests, was following their progress, and heard about or read the letter that was sent to McIntyre denying his request. That letter included several bogus arguments which Jones himself raised as a means to dodge the FOI requests. The last email was Nov 12th, the rejection letter was Nov 13th. On November 17, 2009, at 9:57pm, "FOIA" posted the zip file and wrote:

FOIA said
November 17, 2009 at 9:57 pm

We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps.

We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.
Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.

This is a limited time offer, download now: http://ftp.tomcity.ru/incoming/free/FOI2009.zip

Sample:

0926010576.txt * Mann: working towards a common goal
1189722851.txt * Jones: “try and change the Received date!”
0924532891.txt * Mann vs. CRU
0847838200.txt * Briffa & Yamal 1996: “too much growth in recent years makes it difficult to derive a valid age/growth curve”
0926026654.txt * Jones: MBH dodgy ground
1225026120.txt * CRU’s truncated temperature curve
1059664704.txt * Mann: dirty laundry
1062189235.txt * Osborn: concerns with MBH uncertainty
0926947295.txt * IPCC scenarios not supposed to be realistic
0938018124.txt * Mann: “something else” causing discrepancies
0939154709.txt * Osborn: we usually stop the series in 1960
0933255789.txt * WWF report: beef up if possible
0998926751.txt * “Carefully constructed” model scenarios to get “distinguishable results”
0968705882.txt * CLA: “IPCC is not any more an assessment of published science but production of results”
1075403821.txt * Jones: Daly death “cheering news”
1029966978.txt * Briffa – last decades exceptional, or not?
1092167224.txt * Mann: “not necessarily wrong, but it makes a small difference” (factor 1.29)
1188557698.txt * Wigley: “Keenan has a valid point”
1118949061.txt * we’d like to do some experiments with different proxy combinations
1120593115.txt * I am reviewing a couple of papers on extremes, so that I can refer to them in the chapter for AR4

which contains what "FOIA" considers to be "smoking guns". The first one, for example, states:

Trust that I'm certainly on board w/ you that we're all working towards a common goal.
...
Our own analysis convinces me that things are already quite uncertain a millennium back in time. With regard to longer timescale variations, the evidence is all over the place. At EGS I saw some convincing evidence that many new paleo proxies indicate steadily decline at least over several millennia, and so do, in large part, the available long borehole estimates (though we should all take that w/ a good dose of NaCl). So I'm skeptical of estimates more than a millennium back in time until we have multiple proxies we can trust at that timescale, and can verify somehow the DC component of the estimates, or at least replicate them. This was my concern about the latest 2000 year recon that was shown.

You are right, the Milankovitch forcing argument is ONLY A NULL HYPOTHESIS. I hope I haven't argued nything more than that. That our millennial scale trend, which we reasonably trust, and have some idea of the uncertainties in, is in line w/ that null hypothesis is information that cannot be ignored. That Kutzbach, Berger, and others are showing increasingly convincing model integrations over several millennia suggesting this, is more evidence. In the real word, anything *could* have happened. But lets not loose site of the appropriate null hypothesis here.

There are at least several kinds of "NULL HYPOTHESES". One describes an hypothesis which CAN be disproved, and another, probably the meaning used in this sense because AGW is ALL ABOUT statistical manipulations, a formal description of some aspect of the statistical behavior of a set of data. Their "appropriate" null hypothesis is most likely that THEIR description of the statistical behavior of THEIR data supports the theory of AGW.

Most scientific experiments are designed to prove an hypothesis WRONG because while millions of experiments can "prove" it right, it takes only one failed experiment to prove it wrong. Scientists assume an hypothesis is correct, otherwise, why test it? Thus, experiments by ethical scientists are designed to prove an hypothesis wrong. Einstein did that when he published in 1905 his Special Theory of Relativity. In that publication he said that if the shift of a specific star whose light would skim the edge of the Sun during the next full solar eclipse in 1912 (IIRC) was not within a certain angle, +- experimental error, then his theory was wrong. The wikipedia gives an explanation:

This description is assumed to be valid unless the actual behaviour of the data contradicts this assumption. Thus, the null hypothesis is contrasted against another or alternative hypothesis. Statistical hypothesis testing, which involves a number of steps, is used to decide whether the data contradicts the null hypothesis. This is called significance testing. A null hypothesis is never proven by such methods, as the absence of evidence against the null hypothesis does not establish its truth. In other words, one may either reject, or not reject the null hypothesis; one cannot accept it. This means that one cannot make decisions or draw conclusions that assume the truth of the null hypothesis. Just as failing to reject it does not "prove" the null hypothesis, one does not conclude that the alternative hypothesis is disproven or rejected, even though this seems reasonable.

so, one can understand the relentless drive by CRU scientists, and their allies at other government agencies, to find the "right" proxies, and to "homogenize" the data in such a way that the AGW hypothesis cannot be rejected. The big scam is the insistence that since the AGW hypothesis is not rejected (by THEIR manipulated data) it is "truth", even though not rejecting a statistical null hypothesis is not the same as proving it true, but rejecting it is proving it wrong. That little distinction is always swept under the rug by those with an agenda.

BTW, the fact that H2O vapor is a much MORE powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 is made evident in an infrared spectrum of the two gases. The graph I attached was used by an AGW supporter to "prove" that CO2 was critical to global warming because it "controlled" the amount of IR radiating out through the IR transparancy "windows" of water vapor. While doing graduate work I made hundreds of IR spectrums of solids, liquids and gases. This graph gives the Y axis of the H2O, CO2 and O2 spectrum the same height. Then, the concentrations of the gases are such that at least part of the spectrum of each gas peaks at 100% absorption. The "sum" of the adsorption spectrums, labeled "total" and on top. Contrary to "proving" the significance of CO2 it proves the insignificance. First IF the IR spectrums were taken with the gases being present at the partial pressures they have in the atmosphere one would find that instead of being a wide, blunt, flattened on top pole, the CO2 spectrum would be a very narrow, sharp spike, like the small O2 spike on the left side of the O2 graph, that wouldn't even reach 100% absorption in the 12 to 18 Micron wavelength range, which is the ONLY range where it could have an effect in blocking the outgoing IR energy. The other three CO2 absorption bands are BELOW the 3 micron wavelength at which the Earth's IR begins, so they couldn't block anything. Water vapor let's IR energy through between 6.5 and 12 Microns wavelength. IF the CO2 spike were in proportion to its atmospheric concentration one would see a sharp spike that would have little affect in the blocking the outflow of IR in the H2O window. Another thing most AGW proponents gloss over is that the amount of IR that can be absorbed is proportional to the number of molecules of the gas doing the absorbing and the energy band to which each molecule can be excited to. Energy is absorbed and released in photon packets, not continuously, as was once thought. If there is no higher quantum level for the energy jump to take place it will not absorb the photon.

All of the AGW Chicken Little "The Sky is Falling" reminds me of another time, 35 years ago, when we were told we were going to freeze to death. As the article relates, and as I well remember, including reading all the media's breathless story telling of impending doom UNLESS WE ACT NOW. Well, they may have been right, too soon. Contrary to the AGW fudged graphs, satellite data which Briffa called "cold biased" shows that since 1998 the average temperature of the Earth has declined 0.7 F. The Sun is long overdue for climbing out of its sun spot minimum, and we very well could be entering a repeat of the Maunder Minimum, which lasted 60 years.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Eating your own dog food...

Jon Stewart weighed in...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgPUp...ayer_embedded#

[PhilT]

Re: Eating your own dog food...

Sorry to go on about this but take a look at this Spectator article!

http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/al...ng-files.thtml

It seems the same scare tactics were used in the 1970s (and I CAN remember that!) to promote the view that we were heading for a New Ice Age. A politically motivated "scientific consensus" generated to promote Ice (then) or Heat (now)? Why? It's depressing.

Why can the world not have an intelligent debate about the real issues:- population control, unsustainable economic models, depletion of resources, contamination of the earth, future water shortages, political interference, and, deliberate lying to the public for short-term influence and to "steal from the little guys"?

[GreyGeek]

Re: Eating your own dog food...

Gore lies about the emails in the FOIA files!

Al Gore has studied the Climategate emails with his typically rigorous eye and dismissed them as mere piffle:

Q: How damaging to your argument was the disclosure of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University?

A: To paraphrase Shakespeare, it’s sound and fury signifying nothing. I haven’t read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus.

And in case you think that was a mere slip of the tongue:

Q: There is a sense in these e-mails, though, that data was hidden and hoarded, which is the opposite of the case you make [in your book] about having an open and fair debate.

A: I think it’s been taken wildly out of context. The discussion you’re referring to was about two papers that two of these scientists felt shouldn’t be accepted as part of the IPCC report. Both of them, in fact, were included, referenced, and discussed. So an e-mail exchange more than 10 years ago including somebody’s opinion that a particular study isn’t any good is one thing, but the fact that the study ended up being included and discussed anyway is a more powerful comment on what the result of the scientific process really is.

In fact, thrice denied:

These people are examining what they can or should do to deal with the P.R. dimensions of this, but where the scientific consensus is concerned, it’s completely unchanged. What we’re seeing is a set of changes worldwide that just make this discussion over 10-year-old e-mails kind of silly.

So, Gore claims he read the "most recent ones", and they are 10 years old. IF he DID read them he is lying.

IF he didn't read any of them then he is lying.

The CRU isn't the only ones circling the wagons. It looks like Gore has jumped into the center of the ring and begun firing at "deniers".

[dibl]

Re: Eating your own dog food...

OK, semi-OT, cut from a current (today) news item on a cable news channel:

An Arctic high pressure system or air mass began moving southward from Canada on Wednesday, bringing with it frigid temperatures.

The temperature in Portland, Oregon, was 12 degrees, breaking the previous record of 15 degrees, set in 1972, said Jonathan Wolfe, meteorologist with the weather service's Portland bureau.

Kind of makes the imagination run, doesn't it?

[Ole Juul]

Re: Eating your own dog food...

Yes, that's funny. The last few days it's been 7°C (45°F) by my chair here. Not funny! Luckily it's going back up again so my stove can keep up. Anyway I don't think that weather has much to do with climate.

[Adrian]

Re: Eating your own dog food...

OK, semi-OT, cut from a current (today) news item on a cable news channel:

An Arctic high pressure system or air mass began moving southward from Canada on Wednesday, bringing with it frigid temperatures.

The temperature in Portland, Oregon, was 12 degrees, breaking the previous record of 15 degrees, set in 1972, said Jonathan Wolfe, meteorologist with the weather service's Portland bureau.

Kind of makes the imagination run, doesn't it?

No, it's pretty silly, global warming is about averages, 1 degree increase per several years, it's not about the local weather. There's not much debate that the Earth is warming up, the only thing that remains debatable is if is caused by man or not, the warming is pretty much a fact. Besides, warming up in general of the Earth can have the effect of cooling down of some locations. Basically this guarantees that you can still die of cold even if the Earth in general warms up -- and in some regions it makes it even more likely, that's why you'll hear people talking more about "climate change" than about "global warming".

[GreyGeek]

Re: Eating your own dog food...

....
that's why you'll hear people talking more about "climate change" than about "global warming".

That was a topic of on of the emails. The "decline" was too obvious to overlook so discussions began to focus on "climate change" rather than "global warming" The IPCC is the International Program on Climage Change.

[dibl]

Re: Eating your own dog food...

No, it's pretty silly

Well, I thought it humorous (I know about the statistics ....). It's not quite as funny as a plague of Spotted Owls crapping all over the Multnomah County Courthouse would be, but it's up there.