The Great Climate Change Debate- Continued

[SnowBear]

Sorry Roo, I am not entering into the "fraud" part, I have no-where said anything about fraudulent science and indeed am not interested in discussing it ;-) I am though interested in the rather "closed shop" arena science seems to have become of late, is this due to the peer review process stifling breakthroughs? I tend to think it could be.

Dunno Dev, I think he had a theory kicking around in the 70's which said they could leak then firmly went against it and made them "non leaky".

This is the story which is in 2004 regarding the wager he lost and him having to revise his theory to account for leaky black holes.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6193

[Guest Shetland Coastie]

1) 03.% of scientists is not ideal but is by no means anywhere near a significant amount...and, anyway, of those how many were caught out?

2) All the papers you cite were proved to be fraudulent (by scientists) very quickly after they were published and all were very publicly (and immediately) withdrawn. The system worked.

3) As for Horton: he published (against the advice of some of his reviews board) the paper written by Wakefield on MMR which has now been absolutely discredited by the rest of those working in the field: his peers, you might say.....

But that is not fraud, and that is what is constantly alleged by some people: that AGW is the result of a conspiracy of badly achieved and fraudulent science.

Of course theories adapt, change and are proven to be correct or incorrect...that is the nature of academia. But cheating isn't.

With regard to point 2 - no the system did not work, not the peer review system. As was pointed out all the above got through the peer review process and were subsequently found out to be fraudulent. So how did the process 'work'.

Richard Horton is not the only one. Drummond Rennie is deputy editor of the Journal of American Medical Association and organiser of the International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication and he said of the peer review process:

"There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print."

Edited September 4, 2008 by Shetland Coastie

[Roo]

With regard to point 2 - no the system did not work, not the peer review system. As was pointed out all the above got through the peer review process and were subsequently found out to be fraudulent. So how did the process 'work'.

But peer review is not just about papers: it is a whole process by which the academic community regulates itself: in print, in employment, in teaching, in presentation of research, etc, etc.

You are constantly under review from your peers, sometimes formally, sometimes less so, but you are always visible, and somebody, somewhere always knows what you are up to. The minute you produce anything, be it a paper in a journal, give a paper at a conference or submit a grant review, you are open to the scrutiny of your peers and they will soon see if you are making it all up or have made a serious error....

[Guest Shetland Coastie]

The original question posed is: Are there any examples of evidence of research on climate change that could be seen as fraudulent?

Possibly. The Jones et al 1990 paper which has been cited in the IPCC 2007 4AR on the basis that it showed that measurement errors resulting from the Urban Heat Island effect were negligable and therefore did not matter.

I was going to ask if anyone knows the latest about Wei-Chyung Wang?

For those who don't know, Wei-Chyung Wang is a Professor of Applied Sciences at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He was one of the co-authors of the above mentioned paper and its has been alleged that his contribution to this paper was fraudulent and was fabricated. As of 28th Feb this year, the Inquiries Committee at the said University found these allegations serious enough to place Professor Wang under investigation. I havent seen anything further and just wondered if anyone knew what the outcome was. Perhaps the investigation is still ongoing?

[Mondy]

Dunno about anyone else, but I sure enjoyed ready this

Edit, does the swear filter really have to kick in at every opportunity?!

http://hubpages.com/hub/GLOBAL-WARMING-IS-BULLS***

Replace the last three asterix with HIT

Edited September 4, 2008 by Delta X-Ray

[Devonian]

Possibly. The Jones et al 1990 paper which has been cited in the IPCC 2007 4AR on the basis that it showed that measurement errors resulting from the Urban Heat Island effect were negligable and therefore did not matter.

So did Parker. .

SC, I have listened to Dr Jones speak, I've the greatest of respect for him, his research, honesty and integrity. But, he does seem to come second (to Dr Michael Mann) in the 'most hated and defamed climatologist' league. We do indeed live in a sad, sad world

[Chris Knight]

Perhaps I could drop this in here.

[Anti-Mild]

Perhaps I could drop this in here.

Excellent read that, IMHO, attempts to debunk some of the more outlandish claims by the IPCC and AG in a reasoned manner (I particularly likes the bit that claims that AGW supporters conveniently 'forget' about the MWP). And rather than just saying "I think you are wrong" and leaving it at that, it presents a range of contradictory evidence to back up their opinions.

Great link!

[RedShift]

A recent flawed theory which has a thirty year history is Hawkins theory of Black Holes. His original theory said Black Holes do not leak, they suck in all that goes over the event horizon, nothing escapes. His theory was peer reviewed and accepted as the standard. Later he then had to bow down to the pressure of a fellow scientist (John Preskill) who questioned this "non leakiness". He had to concede that they do indeed leak radiation over time thus altering the whole view of how the universe works and backing up string field theory. The bet he made at the time was a complete Encyclopaedia Britannica which he duly gave to the other scientist in question. So yes, recent peer reviewed theories have been wrong in very fundamental ways.

I think the current mainstream climate change theory is similarly flawed, and at some point possibly soon, certain parts of it will have to be reworked as new data and mechanisms are found and those new mechanisms are found to influence a larger degree than first thought. CO2 will be a factor, but not as first thought.

The whole climate change theory is an experiment in progress, the results will not be in for decades so again I say how can mainstream science, media etc keep saying its all done and dusted and that warming is now a given and no variation from it will occur? This in my view is being closed minded, not open to new theories coming along, as once said to a theoretical scientist regarding string theory, "The theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?". Therefore with a subject as diverse and complex as the climate of our planet, the theory to cover all parts must equally be "crazy" and not just focused on one single part (CO2).

Sorry SB but I can’t let this go…

First, Stephen Hawking, never ever claimed that black holes ‘do not leak’. He, along with some Soviet scientists, developed the idea of Hawking radiation in the 1970s, where black holes do indeed emit radiation and lose mass. The discussion you are referring to is the Thorne-Hawking-Preskill bet. This was not about the ‘leakiness’ of black holes themselves, but of the ‘leakiness’ of information from a black hole. Say if you fell into a black hole, you would add to its mass but eventually be emitted through Hawking radiation. The question was...would a black hole remember that it was you (or what was left of you) it was now radiating? Turned out that Hawking was wrong – information cannot be lost by a black hole, it will remember (and he gave Preskill a baseball encyclopedia).

Second, to call Hawking’s thoughts ‘wrong in very fundamental ways’ beggars belief. This was/is cutting edge astrophysics which I would seriously doubt anyone in this forum could comment on meaningfully. This is how science works at such a theoretical level, there is always more than one answer to a problem. Hawking was, for a few years, wrong…but what is wrong with being wrong sometimes? Hawking has earned the right to be wrong. The process worked, he is now publishing papers on information loss in black holes.

If parts of climate science thoughts are shown to be wrong and have to be reworked as new data arrive...so what? This shows that science is flexible enough to adapt.

Peer review will, ultimately, root out poor thinking. Publishing e-books won't.

[johnholmes]

yes, what a fascinating read, in the end not only do we amateurs really have no real idea of what is or has happened, neither it seems does the scientific community.

The comment about little knowledge of the oceans, compared to the atmosphere is highly relevant, both to weather forecasting currently and to trying to work out what happened in the past and why and even more so what may happen in the future and why.

The CO2 line and temperatures lines to me have never seemed to be quite as clear cut as many 'experts' would have me believe. I remember asking a question when the Hadley centre first showed this apparent link. I never did get what I considered a full answer, certainly not one that totally convinced me. But of course I was just a bog standard senior forecaster with no understanding of climatology, or that was the hint given.

perhaps if David of Gl Osc reads this he may understand my scepticism of his claim for the link he wants everyone to believe. Its nothing personal David, I need to be shown, within my limited ability, that a link does exist, a direct link that is.

Edited September 6, 2008 by johnholmes

[Chris Knight]

yes, what a fascinating read, in the end not only do we amateurs really have no real idea of what is or has happened, neither it seems does the scientific community.

The comment about little knowledge of the oceasn, compared to the atmosphere is highly relevant, both to weather forecasting currently and to trying to work out what happened in the past and why and even more so what may happen in the future and why.

The CO2 line and temperatures lines to me have never seemed to be quite as clear cut as many 'experts' would have me believe. I remember asking a question when the Hadley centre first showed this apparent link. I never did get what I considered a full answer, certainly not one that totally convinced me. But of course I was just a bog standard senior forecaster with no understanding of climatology, or that was the hint given.

perhaps if David of Gl Osc reads this he may understand my scepticism of his claim for the link he wants everyone to believe. Its nothing personal Daviud, I need to be shown, within my limited ability, that a link does exist, a direct link that is.

John, I think that there is a long - term misconception about climate - that it is weather over time. No, climate is not an atmospheric effect, like weather, the atmosphere is the effector, but the climate is based in the oceans. The oceans include the polar oceans, but in particular the energy input into the oceans comes from the tropics. The polar oceans always lose heat to space - which is why they are generally ice-covered. When the Ice goes, the oceans below lose a considerably greater amount of heat, into the atmosphere, and then out into space. The albedo of the north pole (<8% of the surface) is irrelevant to the energy input of the earth at high latitudes, even in the polar summer, when the sun angle is always low. In winter the net polar energy budget is always running at a loss.

Temperatures are also in many ways an irrelevance too, except to weather. The currency is heat, and in volume, rather than in the 2 dimensional surface area of the earth. The majority of the sun's energy reaching earth is in the visible spectrum, and only when absorbed by the surface (land, ocean or vegetation) does the energy degrade to heat. When warm surface radiates heat, most of the energy is absorbed in the first few feet of atmosphere, about 80% in the first ten metres above the surface - by the 2-4% of water vapour in the atmosphere, by about 30 metres the majority of radiated heat from land or sea has gone into warming the near surface atmosphere, which radiates heat in all directions. Depending on atmospheric and topographic conditions, this heated air either rises convectively or drifts over the surface, so that everything warms. If the air is dry, the water vapour still warms the air, but to a lesser immediate extent, perhaps including a much higher height of air above the ground. Carbon dioxide does a similar job of absorbing and reradiating heat, but to about 1/1000 of the water vapour effect due to its relatively low concentration. The water and CO2 molecules pass on their energy to the other, non-greenhouse gases via thermodynamic collisions. The air warms. As the sun passes towards evening, it's heating effect on the surface diminishes, but the greenhouse gases continue to reradiate heat. Oxygen and nitrogen continue to be warm, losing their energy by collision only. If the transfer of kinetic energy happens to be to a greenhouse gas, then it can lose the energy by reradiating that heat

We know the effects well - warm, humid air is oppressively hot, warm dry air at the same temperature is pleasant. It is not because we cannot lose heat by sweating, it is because the humid air pumps heat back at us. There is the latent heat of vapourisation for a start, a much larger amount of energy released for a molecule of water to condense, as it does when it contacts our mucus membranes, than an nitrogen molecule posesses to give up its energy in a simple collision with our nasal passages.

Another misconception is that events such as El Nino, or record Arctic melt are warming events. They are the opposite - they are major cooling events removing large amounts of heat out of the oceans and into the atmosphere and out to space - the effects of previous long-term oceanic warming being released off the planet. The evidence for this is the drop in global temperatures in 1999 and 2008, and will be evidenced next year too, for the same reasons.

[SnowBear]

Sorry SB but I can’t let this go…

First, Stephen Hawking, never ever claimed that black holes ‘do not leak’. He, along with some Soviet scientists, developed the idea of Hawking radiation in the 1970s, where black holes do indeed emit radiation and lose mass. The discussion you are referring to is the Thorne-Hawking-Preskill bet. This was not about the ‘leakiness’ of black holes themselves, but of the ‘leakiness’ of information from a black hole. Say if you fell into a black hole, you would add to its mass but eventually be emitted through Hawking radiation. The question was...would a black hole remember that it was you (or what was left of you) it was now radiating? Turned out that Hawking was wrong – information cannot be lost by a black hole, it will remember (and he gave Preskill a baseball encyclopedia).

Second, to call Hawking’s thoughts ‘wrong in very fundamental ways’ beggars belief. This was/is cutting edge astrophysics which I would seriously doubt anyone in this forum could comment on meaningfully. This is how science works at such a theoretical level, there is always more than one answer to a problem. Hawking was, for a few years, wrong…but what is wrong with being wrong sometimes? Hawking has earned the right to be wrong. The process worked, he is now publishing papers on information loss in black holes.

If parts of climate science thoughts are shown to be wrong and have to be reworked as new data arrive...so what? This shows that science is flexible enough to adapt.

Peer review will, ultimately, root out poor thinking. Publishing e-books won't.

Hiya RedShift!

I will have to look up the background again on Hawkins thoughts as it is a long time ago! I do remember the BBC article which was released at the time (which I sadly cannot find now, it is where I heard about the wager) which said an Encyclopaedia Britannica..a big book he had to give away anyway! lol

Whether it is radiation, information or anything else, I still think it did change the fundamental way we think of the universe. It added weight to the string field theory, the only theory now which is a real candidate for the "theory of everything". It brought much closer the unification of the laws of the very large and the laws of the very small, that in my view is a fundamental change.

I do have a problem with the saying "earned the right to be wrong". No-one earns the right to be wrong especially where lives are at stake. Climate change either to cooler or warmer conditions will have an impact and it is imperative we get it right first time. In Hawkins case he was wrong, wrong is wrong, and this was after peer review and despite many theoretical physicists saying it was wrong for years. But black holes and any theory being whole or partly wrong will not effect us much here on Earth. Whether they leak or not, does not matter much. Lives are not at stake. But to get a part of climate change wrong, say the effect of CO2, or the effect of the moon and other astronomical bodies, or the part the oceans play, could cost lives if it is wrong and I personally think the normal processes involved for peer review in science are not working within the realms of climate change due to external influences.

This is not a game, or a competition of pro and anti and who can shout down the opposition the loudest, or who can insult the best, this is important, and any theory should be listened to and researched thoroughly by all concerned as we just cannot afford to miss something in this large and very complex matter.

[osmposm]

Perhaps I could drop this in here.

Chris, there are some interesting things there, and some of it presented quite fairly.

But I find it hard to take as remotely balanced somebody who presents as hard evidence this paragraph: In Greenland, we know that Viking farmers settled in what was a much warmer period in Greenland than we have today (thus the oddly inappropriate name for the island) and were eventually driven out by falling temperatures. There are even clearer historical records for the Little Ice Age, including accounts of the Thames in London and the canals in Amsterdam freezing on an annual basis, something that happened seldom before or since.

The "green" Greenland question is complex, and to bring it up without mentioning the political/propaganda matters surrounding its christening is either ignorant or biased.....certainly it was much warmer than it became later, and it was the greater cold (and their unadaptability) that destroyed the settlers. But we may never know for sure whether Greenland was warmer than now in the Medieval Warm Period or not.

Even less impressive - indeed patently ignorant and ridiculous - is the statement about the freezing of the Thames. Again, the matter is complex, because of changes to bridges (especially), drainage of riparian marshes, embankment, covering over of tributaries. But even in the coldest periods it never froze anything like regularly every year (the Dutch canals may well have done so) though there were two consecutive winters 1683-4 & 1684-5 when it did. Interestingly, there seem to have been frozen years throughout the MWP - there are records for it freezing notably in 827, 908, 923, 987, 991, 1063, 1076, 1092-3, 1114-5, 1141, 1150, 1204-5, 1207, 1233-4, 1269, 1281-2, & 1309-10. The earlier of these records must be considered very unreliable - indeed, there is some doubt as to where the ones before the 11th Century come from - but that still suggests that big, big freezes came from time to time - at least three or four times a century - even in the warmest years.

It seems probable that our last freeze on this scale was 1962-3, and that is now nearly forty-six years ago. Perhaps comparable cold will hit us in the next decade, but I'm not holding my breath.

Edited September 6, 2008 by osmposm

[Chris Knight]

Chris, there are some interesting things there, and some of it presented quite fairly.

But I find it hard to take as remotely balanced somebody who presents as hard evidence this paragraph: In Greenland, we know that Viking farmers settled in what was a much warmer period in Greenland than we have today (thus the oddly inappropriate name for the island) and were eventually driven out by falling temperatures. There are even clearer historical records for the Little Ice Age, including accounts of the Thames in London and the canals in Amsterdam freezing on an annual basis, something that happened seldom before or since.

The "green" Greenland question is complex, and to bring it up without mentioning the political/propaganda matters surrounding its christening is either ignorant or biased.....certainly it was much warmer than it became later, and it was the greater cold (and their unadaptability) that destroyed the settlers. But we may never know for sure whether Greenland was warmer than now in the Medieval Warm Period or not.

Even less impressive - indeed patently ignorant and ridiculous - is the statement about the freezing of the Thames. Again, the matter is complex, because of changes to bridges (especially), drainage of riparian marshes, embankment, covering over of tributaries. But even in the coldest periods it never froze anything like regularly every year (the Dutch canals may well have done so) though there were two consecutive winters 1683-4 & 1684-5 when it did. Interestingly, there seem to have been frozen years throughout the MWP - there are records for it freezing notably in 827, 908, 923, 987, 991, 1063, 1076, 1092-3, 1114-5, 1141, 1150, 1204-5, 1207, 1233-4, 1269, 1281-2, & 1309-10. The earlier of these records must be considered very unreliable - indeed, there is some doubt as to where the ones before the 11th Century come from - but that still suggests that big, big freezes came from time to time - at least three or four times a century - even in the warmest years.

It seems probable that our last freeze on this scale was 1962-3, and that is now nearly forty-six years ago. Perhaps comparable cold will hit us in the next decade, but I'm not holding my breath.

I don't know the details, but the Greenland settlement apparently lasted over 300 years - link

Just makes you think what changes in the north Atlantic currents were in operation during those times

Looking over the CET record, it is amazing how infrequently we get a really cold winter of any duration.

Please don't remind me how long ago 1962-3 was, I remember it well.

[johnholmes]

so do I and a reasonable memory of 1947!

[Thundery wintry showers]

In my view, the main problem with the peer-review system is the "consensus" aspect of it, i.e. there may be a bias towards accepting papers that conform to the views of the consensus (which aren't necessarily always right). However I'm yet to come across a review system that doesn't contain similar flaws.

As it happens, I have Phil Jones as my primary PhD supervisor, and can confirm that he is strongly into his subject and performs frequent research of a consistently high quality, and knows a lot about the methodologies behind stats and the like. He's certainly been a good supervisor to date. I won't deny that there is some political influence in the Climatic Research Unit (many researchers contribute to the IPCC etc) but they do make a genuine effort to try to avoid their own biases cloud the results of their own research. David Parker from the MetO is also on my supervisory panel- one of his papers was mentioned earlier- he's wrote some excellent papers as well, including the "Global and regional climate" articles in Weather.

If there's a consensus on something, it doesn't mean that it's right, but if the consensus is based on independent evidence- which is the whole premise behind research work- then it makes it more likely to be right in view of the fact that people are looking at the same evidence and, to some extent, independently reaching similar conclusions. (The independent evidence part is important- if there's a consensus that something is right because "the rules say so, and rules are rules", then the consensus means nothing as it merely reflects people following the rules!)

[Mondy]

This Global Warming malarky - if there is such a thing does that mean the Southern Hemisphere isn't part of the globe?

[Gray-Wolf]

This Global Warming malarky - if there is such a thing does that mean the Southern Hemisphere isn't part of the globe?

????

Argentinian ice dam collapses mid-winter, further collapse of Wilkins in the middle of a 'cold' southern winter, continued Murray Darling basin drought........and a lot of water warmer than the 'average' (seeing as most of the South is oceans).

[Thundery wintry showers]

The Antarctic interior did indeed cool slightly in recent decades (winters have got warmer but summers much cooler) despite strong evidence for warming in the Peninsula. Furthermore, Southern Hemisphere ice coverage was at record high levels last time I checked.

However, the Southern Hemisphere as a whole did warm substantially during the late 1970s and 1980s, followed by only very slow warming over the following two decades. Meanwhile the Northern Hemisphere's rapid warming started later, towards the late 1980s.

[Gray-Wolf]

I heard mooted, with regards to the 'Wilkins breakup' that the circumpolar current is now failing to stop the southern oceans 'warmth' from penetrating up to the Antarctic coastlines.

This ,naturally, would be most apparent around the peninsula which juts out into the southern oceans.

If you think about the pattern of shelf loss since 1980 you'll see the phenomena creeping in towards the 'normal' latitude for the bulk of the Antarctic Continental coastline.

Wilkins ,in my estimations, is on the 'edge' of the zone that pushes furthest into the Southern Ocean which makes me wonder if the 'warm waters' are now lapping up coasts of the majority of the continental shoreline.

If we take a look at the current 'MODIS' images we can plainly see open waters along much of the coasts surrounded by a belt of grey ,slushy looking ice forming the next 'band' out from shore before you hit the fractured (snow white) ice packs.

Our seal friends will no doubt provide us with the answers to this from their 'thermometer caps' but if proven then the rest of the continents ice shelves become a worry.

We all know what happens when you remove the 'girdle' the shelf provides to the glaciers behind. If we loose Ross then we have not a hope of offsetting the inevitable impacts that follow.

[Mondy]

????

Argentinian ice dam collapses mid-winter, further collapse of Wilkins in the middle of a 'cold' southern winter, continued Murray Darling basin drought........and a lot of water warmer than the 'average' (seeing as most of the South is oceans).

Again, you only mention negatives (which you appear to enjoy doing) and you fail to mention the southern hemisphere was nearly .2C below normal for August. Other parts of Antarctica were 5.5 to 6.5C below normal. LINK

Instead of looking at areas which you know are melting or are naturally losing ice, and have no worry whatsoever to 90% on here, perhaps you should focus some of your attention on the above and let me or others know anything constructive and positive about the ongoing Antarctic cooling from your point of view. I'm continually irked by your negativity, clearly omitting anything which clashes with your "findings". I suspect I'm not alone. Indeed, I know I'm not alone.

Edited September 6, 2008 by Delta X-Ray

[johnholmes]

John, I think that there is a long - term misconception about climate - that it is weather over time. No, climate is not an atmospheric effect, like weather, the atmosphere is the effector, but the climate is based in the oceans.

I am afraid you are incorrect, this is the very simple definition

the general weather conditions prevailing in an area over a long period.

it covers all aspects of the long term conditions, be they on land in the air or on and in the oceans.

[Chris Knight]

As I said, John, the atmosphere is merely the effector, the underlying engine is the oceans, and the sun. If people continue to view climate as just the time series of weather, and average away the noise to show the "climate", no wonder there is confusion, and no new understanding about climate change.

[johnholmes]

best we agree to disagree there I think Chris

water/oceans are only part of it

[Mondy]

Dang, I better order less coal for my fire next time

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080905/ful....2008.1086.html