Dog's doing the same routine over and over and over again. He runs back to his denier websites, copies a bunch of crap, and posts it again.
Here's the story of the Karl paper, in all its glory.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/ ... ause-study As Dog won't click a link to actually read anything, I'll just print the whole damn thing out.
How a culture clash at NOAA led to a flap over a high-profile warming pause study
By Warren Cornwall, Paul VoosenFeb. 8, 2017 , 1:00 PM
A former scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Washington, D.C., made waves this past weekend when he alleged that climate scientist Thomas Karl, the former head of a major NOAA technical center, “failed to disclose critical information” to the agency, journal editors, and Congress about the data used in a controversial study published in Science in June 2015. Karl was the lead author of that paper, which concluded that global surface temperatures continued rising in recent years, contrary to earlier suggestions that there had been a “pause” in global warming.
John Bates, who retired from NOAA this past November, made the claims in a post on the prominent blog of Judith Curry, a climate researcher who recently retired from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and has walked the line between science and climate contrarians over the past decade. Bates’s complaints were also the centerpiece of a story published Sunday by David Rose of the United Kingdom’s The Mail on Sunday, a tabloid, which claimed that national leaders “were strongly influenced” by the “flawed NOAA study” as they finalized the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Rose's story ricocheted around right-wing media outlets, and was publicized by the Republican-led House of Representatives science committee, which has spent months investigating earlier complaints about the Karl study that is says were raised by an NOAA whistleblower. But ScienceInsider found no evidence of misconduct or violation of agency research policies after extensive interviews with Bates, Karl, and other former NOAA and independent scientists, as well as consideration of documents that Bates also provided to Rose and the Mail.
Instead, the dispute appears to reflect long-standing tensions within NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), based in Asheville, North Carolina, over how new data sets are used for scientific research. The center is one the nation’s major repositories for vetted earth observing data collected by satellites, ships, buoys, aircraft, and land-based instruments.
In the blog post, Bates says that his complaints provide evidence that Karl had his “thumb on the scale” in an effort to discredit claims of a warming pause, and his team rushed to publish the paper so it could influence national and international climate talks. But Bates does not directly challenge the conclusions of Karl's study, and he never formally raised his concerns through internal NOAA mechanisms.
Tuesday, in an interview with E&E News, Bates himself downplayed any suggestion of misconduct. “The issue here is not an issue of tampering with data, but rather really of timing of a release of a paper that had not properly disclosed everything it was,” he told reporter Scott Waldman. And Bates told ScienceInsider that he is wary of his critique becoming a talking point for those skeptical of human-caused climate change. But it was important for this conversation about data integrity to happen, he says. “That’s where I came down after a lot of soul searching. I knew people would misuse this. But you can't control other people,” he says.
At a House science committee hearing yesterday, Rush Holt, CEO of AAAS (publisher of Science and ScienceInsider) stood by the 2015 paper. "This is not the making of a big scandal—this is an internal dispute between two factions within an agency," Holt said in response to a question from Representative Lamar Smith (R–Texas), the panel’s chairman, and a longtime critic of NOAA’s role in the Karl paper. This past weekend, Smith issued a statement hailing Bates for talking about “NOAA’s senior officials playing fast and loose with the data in order to meet a politically predetermined conclusion.”
Some climate scientists are concerned that the hubbub is obscuring the more important message: that the NOAA research has generally proved accurate. “I’m a little confused as to why this is a big deal,” says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with Berkeley Earth, a California nonprofit climate research group that has examined surface temperatures. He’s the lead author of a paper published in January in Science Advances that found Karl’s estimates of sea surface temperature—a key part of the work—matched well with estimates drawn from other methods.
Researchers say the Karl paper’s findings are also in line with findings from the Met Office, the U.K. government’s climate agency, which preceded Karl’s work, and findings in a recent paper by scientists at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, an alliance of 34 states based in Reading, U.K. And although other researchers have reported evidence that the rise in global temperature has slowed recently, they have not challenged the ethics of Karl’s team, or the quality of the data they used.
When is data ready for prime time?
If there’s a dirty secret to the 2015 paper, it’s that “there wasn't a lot of new science in it,” says Karl, who retired in August 2016. It simply assembled the updated, already published NOAA ocean temperature record that their center had been assembling since 2011, and paired it with a published, nonoperational data set of land surface temperatures that included much more coverage around the world. “We said, let’s just put it together, and that’s what made it newsworthy and important.”
At its heart, Bates’s concerns amount to a desire for Karl and his team to have more clearly stated that one data set used for their study was not defined by NOAA to have been in a final, “operational” form.
One focus is the handling of a new approach to estimating temperatures on land around the globe. The agency’s monthly temperature estimates—which it uses to track climate trends—are drawn from 7000 stations scattered around the world. But a team of NOAA researchers sought to improve the accuracy of these global estimates by incorporating measurements from more than 15,000 sites with data collected by an international consortium, the International Surface Temperature Initiative (ISTI). They also incorporated measurements from farther north in the Arctic, where temperatures in recent decades have risen faster.
In the blog post, Bates says that when the Karl paper was published, this new merged data set hadn’t been put through a series of quality checks that NOAA required before data used for research are deemed ready for “operational” use such as routine monitoring of climate trends.
Bates says he first became concerned when the Karl paper came out, as the team shared their data only on a public NOAA file server, not NCEI's data archive, as the agency would for its operational data sets. Karl and his team have since uploaded the data to NCEI's archive, a process that finished last year. Bates claims that happened as a result of his concerns. “I shouldn't have to be the whistleblower. They should have had a process in place at NOAA to check this off. And they didn't do it,” he says
The Science paper would have been fine had it simply had a disclaimer at the bottom saying that it was citing research, not operational, data for its land-surface temperatures, Bates says.
But Mike Tanner, director of NOAA’s Center for Weather and Climate at NCEI, says there’s no NOAA policy that requires such a disclosure. “There's nothing. That doesn’t exist,” he says.
Tension in the NOAA ranks
The new furor underscores a long-running tension within NCEI, one that has generally pitted research scientists trying to publish new advances against engineers seeking to ensure everything follows standard protocols, say several scientists who have worked at the center.
Thomas Peterson, a principal scientist at NCEI who was involved in developing the new surface temperature estimates before retiring in 2015, says he spent several years pressing the agency to let its scientists publish parts of the new data analysis. But he says he met resistance from some who argued that even though the older approach was less accurate, it had gone through the quality control checks for operational data. The new study “wasn’t rushed. It was delayed for a long time. It would have been out years ago except for all this processing that John [Bates] pushed.”
The decision to move forward with the paper came in 2014 after Karl was presented with new analyses of both the land temperatures and ocean temperatures, Peterson says. When they realized the significance it could have for understanding the “pause,” Peterson says they worked to find a way to abide by the agency’s data rules without delaying further. “My view of the decisions is they met the letter of the law. And I would say—if I was trying to be polite—that John would view it as not meeting the full, strict measure of what should be done in an optimum condition. But it would have delayed getting this paper out for at least 2 years.”
This split within the office traces partly to cultural differences between scientists working with satellites and those working with ground-based measurements, says Peter Thorne, a climate scientist at Ireland's Maynooth University, and chair of the ISTI. He worked on surface temperature research at NCEI from 2010 to 2013. By contrast, for several years Bates was division chief for the part of the center that worked with satellite data.
Because the stakes are so high for ensuring the accuracy of a single, costly piece of equipment, and the streams of data are so massive, the people working with the satellites were more inclined to insist on always following detailed protocols. “Fundamentally it was a conflict between science and engineering,” Thorne says. “Do you want a product that is very well documented; where the code is available, transparent, well documented; where there is fundamental, deep archiving of everything; where you’ve dotted every 'i' and crossed every 't,' even if that product, scientifically, has issues? Or would you rather have the best scientific product you can get your hands on at this time and forgo that process maturity?”
Personal grudge?
Some suggest Bates’s criticism might also have a personal side to it. Tanner says Bates was administratively admonished and relieved of a supervisory position at NCEI in 2012, at a time when Karl led the center. Karl confirms that Bates was removed from his post as division chief, and placed in a position where he was not supervising other people.
Bates confirms the job shift, but denies his complaints are driven by any animus toward Karl. “He's just sort of an example. The reason I wanted to have a more public discussion was not to focus on him, [but] to have a bigger discussion about how we ensure the quality of the data,” Bates says.
Bates also says he was not the "whistleblower" cited in the past by Smith’s committee. Others note the accusations mirror those previously floated by Smith. And Karl says he can now understand why the committee has pursued him. “They're getting a lot of misleading information... I can understand why they’ve gone in the direction that’s not reflecting reality,” he says.
In a strange coincidence, Peterson ran into Bates at the theater in Asheville on Saturday, shortly before the Mail article was published. He says he asked Bates how retirement was treating him. Bates replied that it was “going to get interesting,” then walked off without clarifying what he meant. The play they were attending: Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
“That just strikes me as perfect,” Peterson says
The deniers took this whole "much ado about nothing" and amped their hysteria up to 11, making all sorts of false and scurrilous accusations. Just like they try to assassinate the character of every climate scientist who publishes something something they don't. And, yes, they got Congressional Republicans to try and abuse their power in order to try and intimidate climate scientists. Just like they did with Michael Mann. If Dog thinks I''m unfair to him, what I do is nothing compared to what the Republicans have done to try and destroy the reputations of scientists and shut them down completely. And it's straight out of the Tobacco Lobby playbook, often executed by the same guys and institutions.
Yes, there were Committee hearings. But what you never saw was any evidence that warming ever stopped for a pause or that adjusting a bunch of temperatures ending at around 1940 could make a "pause" in the 1980s somehow go away. The "pause" was the result of failing to take into account the annual fluctuations from year to year and evaluating statistically whether the warming trend had ever changed, let alone changed to anything like zero warming. You know what made the "pause" go away? A year or two of temeperatures -- 2015 and 2016. When examined with the proper statistics, the pause was never there. The shorter the period of time, the more the fluctuations can mask the trend. To know whether you have a statistically significant trend in a set of data that also contains noise, you have to show that your trend meets the test of statistical significance. That's what Dog never ever does. He just shows graphs of short, cherry picked intervals.
But I already showed Dog this. He just refused to click on the links. I challenged him a week ago to provide evidence of a "pause." He posted a graph and eyeballed it, without ever computing a trend or even trying to determine whether that trend had ever changed. What he does over and over and over is post cherry picked graphs from cherry picked pieces of data sets. He never even attempts to see whether there is statistical significance to the short periods of time in the graphs. Why not? Because they are all misleading graphs constructed to pretend there was a pause.
Because Dog doesn't care enough to actually read anything than what he finds at denier websites, I'll spoon feed this for him.
First, I'm going to paste some graphs that show what it would take for global warming trends to change to a "pause."
This example is from the hadCRUT4 data series from England. It stops at 1997, to avoid the obvious cherry pick of the 1998 El Nino. The solid red line shows what we would expect if there were no change in the trend from 1998 on. The dashed lines mark 2 standard deviations from the trend. The solid blue line is what we would expect if there were a pause -- a flat trend. Continued trends: the future points should be between the red dashed lines. Pause: the future points should be between the blue dashed lines.
So, what happens when we fill in the data for after the spike?
That's right. The data through the pause are exactly in the range we would expect if the trend remained unchanged.
But wait, maybe I just cherry picked a data set, just like I've pointed out Dog doing with his graphs. Well, here's the same exercise based on the National Climate Data Center:
And NASA Giss:
And Cowton and Way:
But Res Ipsa, you might ask: what about the satellites? Glad you asked. Here's RSS:
And UAH:
No evidence whatsoever that there was any statistically significant change in trend during the so-called "pause"
[Graphs from
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/01/30 ... -surprise/]
But, you say, what about Dog's graphs? Here's a little primer from statistician Grant Foster that will show you how all of those "pause" graphs are made:
STEP 1: Make a graph of global temperature. How about data from NOAA, from 1950 through 2017? If making graphs isn’t your forté, don’t worry, there are plenty of websites that will do it for you. I made my own:
STEP 2: Cherry-pick a time range which you think will make a good “pause” picture. How about 1998 through 2013?
STEP 3: Draw a flat line:
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2018/01/25 ... l-warming/Now, Foster actually omits a few steps:
Step 0: Look at all the different data sets, but cherry pick only the one that you think shows the best "pause"
Step 4: Show only the data that you claim shows a pause: don't show what comes before or after.
Step 5: Do not show a regression or similar line that would show the actual trend during the "pause"
Step 6: Do not test the statistical significance of any trend like during the "pause."
All of the graphs that show a pause follow this general game plan. When you see a pause graph, do this:
1. Google and find the entire data set. If it's missing data from before or after the "pause", you're looking at a cherry pick.
2. See if you can the data set with a trend line.
3. If the cherry-picked graph does not have a trend line, with the calculated slope of the line and the standard deviations, it's a fake graph. Point and laugh.
ETA: Found a pretty good piece on how deniers use graphs to give false pictures of what's actually going on.
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... mate_MediaYou might even find a graph in the paper that looks familiar...
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
