Data, Deflection And The Pause

David Rose’s splendid and significant article in last week’s Mail on Sunday certainly caused a stir. The initial reaction, mostly distractions, have been easily dealt with by David Rose in this week’s installment.

One of the points raised concerned a paper submitted to the Journal of Climate by Huang et al. It is about the new ERSSTv5 sea surface temperature dataset. It is an interesting paper that claims that ERSSTv5 shows a lower rate of warming than the previous ERSSTv4 which was used by the now famous Karl et al paper in 2015 to show that contrary to the IPCC there had been no slowdown in the rate of temperature increase in the past 15 years or so – the so-called pause.

One persistent activist said the paper was stolen and it was unethical to comment on it. In reality the preprint was obtained from a public webpage, anyone could have downloaded it. It has been in circulation for weeks.

The Huang paper and its inconvenient conclusion prompted the Carbon Brief website to publish an article early Friday afternoon by Prof Peter Thorne of Maynooth Universiry. Clearly, and unwisely, it was designed to forestall anything David Rose might say about discrepancies in ocean temperature data. It was a naïve move showing inexperience with ‘media management.’ Carbon Brief’s contributor said that the paper’s authors did not give permission for the yet to be published data to be distributed. But it doesn’t matter. By placing it on a public website they had. Also Carbon Brief or its advisors, know that no such restrictions apply to journalists. Some journalists have a relationship with some journals to respect short-term pre-publication embargoes, but it is voluntary and not applicable with the journal in question. Where would journalism be if every time a reporter was told ‘you can’t publish this,’ they acquiesced?

The author said because of the potential headlines he wanted to set the record straight. Because the Huang paper and its data was still undergoing peer-review he said he would only discuss it in the barest detail, only he didn’t. He went into much detail about many of the most important points of Huang et al. But he went even further than that. He actually published the HRSSTv5 dataset. It doesn’t matter that it was in graphical form – there it was on Carbon Brief who had given to the world data that was under peer review! The article on Carbon Brief is published under a CC license encouraging reproduction. There could be no copyright issues now.

Within minutes of the posting by Carbon Brief it was noted that their ERSSTv5 graph was not the same as in the Huang paper. Because of this there followed a series of twitter exchanges. I will spare the names and embarrassment You can go look at them if you like. Below is the Huang data (click on image to enlarge).

Firstly it was said that whoever had noticed the changes must have better eyes that one of the scientists concerned! Then there was a denial they were different. Then it was said that the two graphs had different baselines, (which they hadn’t being both 1971 – 2000). Then there followed a claim that all the data series in the Carbon Brief article had beed ‘rebased.’ When it was pointed out that of the four datasets on the Carbon Brief graph only ERSSTv5 had been altered (constant offset of +0.08°C) what confusion there was only increased. Below is the Carbon Brief version of the data.

It was then said that these things happen, it’s the type of thing reviewers pick up. Well, I’m not sure about that. The paper had ten authors (five of them were among the nine authors of the Karl 15 ‘pausebuster’ paper) and seemingly all of them missed it, if it was the case that the Huang graph was wrong at that time. The question left in the mind of Twitter readers was why all the prevarication and untrue excuses. Why no admission that it was a problem straight up.

If the discrepancy between the two graphs had not been pointed out a highly misleading article would have been allowed to stand. Either the authors did or did not know the graphs were different. In either case the answer is cause for great embarrassment at least. These revelations made the Carbon Brief paper look manipulative and misleading.

The baseline confusion was ironic given the criticism given to the Mail on Sunday last week for an incorrect caption regarding temperature baselines. This time the same mistake was made by TEN professional scientists. I don’t suppose an apology is imminent.

Today the Mail on Sunday consolidated its story, revealing that the release of new ocean temperature data was delayed for unscientific reasons. What is more a story in the Sunday Times confirms that the UK Met Office does not accept Karl et al’s denial of the global warming hiatus and acknowledges that, ‘the slowdown hasn’t gone away.’

Writing in this weeks New Scientist Michael Mann claimed that the pause is an ‘utterly debunked idea’ and ‘in the final analysis was much ado about nothing,’ and a ‘favourite climate contrarian talking point.’

The pause is real and it contains lots of interesting science, there are over 50 explanations proffered for it. But is also has another effect in that is shows the diversity of opinion in climate science, which on this important topic is certainly not settled. Who can deny that climate science isn’t divided over this crucial issue?

Here is HadCRUT4 global temperature for the past 20 years.

Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com

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February 11, 2017 at 11:34PM

Booker On The NOAA Scandal

By Paul Homewood

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Booker weighs in on the latest NOAA scandal:

Two years ago last week, I wrote a column given the provocative heading “The fiddling of temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever”. It was the second of two articles which attracted a record 42,000 comments from all over the world, reporting on the discovery by expert bloggers in half a dozen countries – led in Britain by Paul Homewood on his site “Not a lot of people know that” – that something very odd appeared to have been done to the official land surface temperature records on which, more than anything else, the entire alarm over man-made global warming has rested.

These derive from the record known as the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN), run by the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). By comparing archived data with that now being published, the bloggers claimed to have discovered that temperature records all over the world had, seemingly, been systematically “adjusted” to show older temperatures lower than those originally measured and more recent temperatures higher than those recorded: thus conveying the notion that the world is warming significantly more than the actual data justified.

This scandal has now  surfaced again with accusations made by Dr John Bates, a recently retired senior scientist at the NOAA, against his former boss , Tom Karl. Bates alleges that an NOAA paper written before the historic climate conference in Paris in 2015 breached its own rules and was based on misleading and unverified data. That, to many, looks like the paper was designed to stoke up hysteria over global warming in the run-up to the conference.

2015 saw a major climate conference in Paris Credit: Benoit Tessier/Reuters

The warmist lobby had no greater concern at that time than the so-called “pause”: the evidence that, for nearly 20 years, the trend in global temperatures had been failing to rise as all the official computer models had predicted it should.

Karl’s paper won worldwide publicity by purporting to show that there had, in fact, been no “pause”, and that both land and sea temperatures had continued to rise more than was previously accepted.

What Dr Bates now claims is that, in defiance of rules he himself drew up and over his (Bates’s) private objections, Karl’s paper had again been based on “adjustments” that the scientific evidence didn’t justify.

The paper, widely quoted by President Barack Obama and others, played a key part in persuading the Paris conference to sign a “historic” (but non-binding) agreement to take all sorts of hugely costly measures to prevent global temperatures rising by “more than two degrees”.

Dr Bates’s claims could not be more timely; the word from Washington is that a high priority of Donald Trump’s administration, and the science committee in the US Congress, is that they now want a full investigation of all this temperature “adjusting”, which – contrary to the satellite data – looks like it has been giving such a dangerously unscientific picture of just how far and fast the world has in reality been warming. Once this scandal has been properly brought out into the open, it will raise the most disturbing question mark yet over the promotion of the greatest and costliest scare story the world has ever known.

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February 11, 2017 at 10:12PM

‘Slowdown’ In Ocean Heating Gives Climate Sceptics A Warm Glow

Scientists have analysed millions of readings from across Earth’s oceans between 2000 and 2015, finding that sea surface temperature is rising at 1.17C per century compared with the 1.34C per century of previous estimates.

The difference is tiny in everyday terms but is important because the oceans are so large that even a warming by a tenth of a degree represents a big increase in the energy they store — and the potential impact on climate.

It is also politically potent, especially in America where an increasingly climate-sceptic Republican party will see it as confirmation of a suspected slowdown in global warming and evidence that previous warnings were exaggerated.

“The reduced warming emerging in the latest analysis is due to several separate factors,” said Professor Peter Thorne, chairman of the International Surface Temperature Initiative and co-author of the latest research. “This includes corrections to historic data collected from ships and the inclusion of new data about areas covered by ice.”

The research was led by Boyin Huang of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), America’s leading climate research agency. The paper has been discussed at conferences and is under peer review.

In any other field, such detailed findings might matter only to scientists. In America, however, the election of Donald Trump, who has described global warming as “a hoax”, has made climate science a political battleground.

The Republican-dominated congressional committee on science, space and technology has taken a keen interest in the “climate slowdown” between 1998 and 2012, when the rise in global temperatures appeared to fall from 0.12C a decade to 0.07C.

Its chairman, Lamar Smith, used this to claim that climate scientists had “greatly overestimated” global warming and was infuriated when, in June 2015, the NOAA published research suggesting that the apparent slowdown was down to data glitches — and the world had warmed as fast as ever.

This was controversial with scientists too — even Britain’s Met Office disagreed. Tom Karl, author of the NOAA paper, has been under attack ever since. Last week the pressure increased when John Bates, a former colleague of Karl’s who was a data manager at the NOAA until his retirement, wrote a widely reported blog post saying Karl “had his thumb on the scale . . . in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus”.

Huang and Thorne’s research suggests the reality is more complex. “There was a bit of a slowdown but it was smaller than we thought and explained largely by natural variability,” said Thorne. “The underlying trend for the world to get warmer is still strongly present in our research.”

Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office climate centre, said: “The slowdown hasn’t gone away . . . However, our confidence in a warming world doesn’t just depend on surface temperatures. It is seen in a wealth of indicators, including melting snow and ice, and rising sea levels.”

The acceptance by the NOAA that there was even a small “climate slowdown” may please sceptics. However, Bates is unlikely to be among them. He told The Sunday Times: “I do not believe Tom Karl was cheating and did not mean to imply he was. I believe the evidence supports climate change, and do believe the world is warming — and this could be a threat. The details are the difficulty.”

The Sunday Times, 12 February 2017

see also David Whitehouse: Karl et al. (2015) and the return of the ‘Pause‘

The changes made by Karl et al. were influential but small and temporary and are turning out to be irrelevant anyway because of what the data is actually doing. Should anyone still think that the higher trends that include the years 2015 and 2016 are due to long-term global warming take a look at HadCRUT4, Fig 3, where you can see the deviation caused by the recent strong El Nino. One can see the decline to 2014 temperatures and the return of the “pause.” 

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February 11, 2017 at 08:32PM

Green Madness: Blackouts Due To Unreliable Renewables Were Predicted In Royal Society Paper

The story goes, with mixed results in scientific experiments, that a frog suddenly put into hot water will jump out but if heated slowly it will not figure out the danger.

The state was warned of the electricity-shortage crisis – and consequent blackouts – yet ignored the warnings, according to Business SA executive Anthony Penney.

“The most frustrating aspect of this most recent event is that it was anticipated by many businesses and other energy industry experts well in advance but, like the frog in boiling water, nothing happened in time,” he says.

This week the SA frog boiled. About 100,000 customers were blacked out because of the reliance on unreliable wind and solar power in our network – more than a third of SA’s generation capacity.

This was combined with national authorities failing to predict the shortfall during a blisteringly hot and still day and not firing up the gas backup generator at Pelican Point fast enough. Incidentally, the NSW frog also boiled on Friday when that state experienced the same type of load shedding as SA but, because of the same colour of political party in office in Sydney and Canberra, avoided almost any attention because of it.

SA has now been hit with two load shedding problems in three months – three in 18 months – many smaller incidents during December storms and the big one that is still a national talking point – the statewide blackout that cost businesses $367 million.

But while leaders publicly point the finger at the SA frog, the water or the pot – depending on which side they are on – privately, along with experts and planners, they are using our vast resources to solve what is a simple problem made achievable more than 150 years ago – electricity generation.

One vast resource is the possibility of a State Government contract plate-delivered to Powerchina to build a 250-megawatt generator at a cost of $350 million. If this option is taken up it would be up and running by 2018 and not cost the taxpayer anything.

Gas, although increasing in price and unreliable in its bulk supply, is the option increasingly being called on by those proposing a solution to the problem before next summer’s heatwaves, or at least 2018, an election year. Reopening the mothballed Torrens Island or Pelican Point gas plant would be another immediate gas solution.

Gas is less dirty than coal and, while it may only be a transition, it is a more palatable one, especially given SA doesn’t have much usable coal – the cause of the closure of our 544MW Northern Power Station last year.

This year, the 1600MW Hazelwood coal power station in Victoria will also close, denying us its cheap electricity via an interconnector. Coal is dead and buried, gas is dying but may last long enough to save us.

The federal draft Independent Review into the Future Security of the National Electricity Market – ­released in December – advocates gas as a transition to our inevitable zero-carbon generation future. “Gas generation provides the synchronous operation that is key to maintaining technical operability with increased renewable generation until new technologies are available and cost-effective,’’ it found.

Wind and solar are not dead, just maligned to a point where they may as well be.

Ben Heard, a doctoral researcher at the University of Adelaide also runs environmental non-Government organisation Bright New World – which supports the use of nuclear – explains the problem.

He says the SA blackouts caused by unreliable solar and wind were predicted two years ago in the journal Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, and every MP in the Parliament was told.

“Back when wind generation was providing only 28 per cent of SA’s electricity supply, we flagged the risk presented by low supply in extreme heat conditions,’’ he says.

Mr Heard said it was well known that extreme heat conditions in SA were accompanied by very little wind.

“Our expectation at the time was that this would make it impossible to retire other generators from the market because of the security risk.

“Instead, the generators were allowed to retire, we took the risk, and we have started paying the price.”

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February 11, 2017 at 07:02PM