James' Empty Blog

Arbitration

2009-11-23T16:30:00.002+09:00

Having recently been appointed arbitrator by Stoat, I feel obliged to issue at least an interim statement on the CRU email thing. I'm not sure I am ready for a final verdict. Most of you will have had a look at RC already, who have a massive thread on it.

I will start with a disclaimer - I have not read all the emails, and do not intend to. It is hard to miss the irony in people eagerly poring through illegally-obtained private email, looking for ethical breaches by the writers! I'm sure we can all imagine the outrage if one of the emails revealed that a scientist had hacked into one of the sceptics' computers and was reading all their correspondence. So a bit of perspective is called for here.

About 16 of the emails - that's well over 1% of the total - involve me. I don't know Phil Jones personally but am involved in a joint (multi-author) paper. Which incidentally has just been judged acceptable for publication by the Editor, although it is still meandering at its own slow pace though the system. Anyway, since this email is freely available, and someone has even thought it worthy of publishing in a blog comment somewhere, this is what I wrote:

Dear All,

I had a reply from Grant, and have made some changes to the paper - very little of substance, but I've lightly edited the wording throughout. I also added refs to Newell and Weare, and Angell (not A+Korshover), which seem relevant. Despite this, I've managed to cut a few lines off in total. I have also drafted replies to the reviewers (with their comments appended for reference).

We do have a 2 week extension agreed, to 11 Nov. However it doesn't really seem like there is much more that needs doing. More suggestions are welcome, however, and before resubmitting, *I need an explicit OK from each author*.

Riveting stuff, don't you think?

There is more in a similar vein. Seriously, the minutiae of discussions over a few stylistic wording changes to a minor paper is among the top 1% of incriminating emails handled at CRU, that proves that AGW is a hoax and that we are all conspiring to fabricate evidence and cover it all up. Or something like that.

Most of the contents that have had people getting so excited about on the blogs seem pretty innocuous to me - the usual to-and-fro of scientists discussing, arguing, sometimes exhibiting frustration. We are, after all, human. A handful of messages hint at something a bit worse, and I'm not going to excuse anyone who has behaved in an unethical manner, but it is hard to condemn anyone based on a few cherry-picked emails, many of which in any case have straightforward explanations. If there was a lot of serious malpractice, I'd expect to see more substantial evidence from the past decade of email at one of the world's leading climate research centres. On the whole it is thin gruel indeed. It is clear that most of what people are getting excited by is just the typical banter of scientists engaged in debate and discussion, and many of the commenters just don't have a clue about the scientific process. The person who quoted our email correspondence about the edits to the manuscript claimed that this proved how political all us scientists are! In fact we were simply improving the paper in accordance with various comments from reviewers (which we basically agreed with), which is how the peer review process normally works.

In summary, there are probably some minor lapses in there, but everyone who has read any of the emails is already guilty of something worse and there's no firm evidence of major crimes.

[jules' pics] 11/22/2009 07:34:00 PM

2009-11-23T12:34:00.001+09:00

raw prawn, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Don't come the raw prawn with me, and yes that's the ole sea urchin's gonads next to it... mmm delicious. But it would have felt kinder if the chef had killed the poor prawn rather than leaving its top half a-twitching on the plate.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 11/22/2009 07:34:00 PM

CRU climate conspiracy - the proof!

2009-11-21T15:27:00.003+09:00

Now I've had a look at the stolen data, and the full extent of the International Program for Climate Conspiracy is clear.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. There are:

NO documents describing the microwave-sending units on satellites that are up there warming the planet (you didn't really think that MSU meant microwave sounding unit did you?!).

NO evidence of the hairdryer-wielding scientists who are melting the glaciers on their "field trips".

NO pictures of the heaps of rocks we throw into the sea each night to raise the sea level.

And what this means is...

THE CONSPiRACY IS EVEN BIGGER THAN I EVER IMaGinED!!11!11!!!ZOMG!!11!ELEVENTY

EVEN THe RUSSIAN HAX0RS ARE INVLOVED!!1!!!!

Ohtheresasomeoneatthedoortheyrecomingtotakemeawayhahahehehoho

More on the hack

2009-11-21T07:12:00.001+09:00

You weren't expecting that, were you...

That CRU data hack

2009-11-20T16:20:00.005+09:00

Love it or hate it, it's going to be a pretty big story. I was mildly amused to see that Wattatwat doesn't even know the difference between the Hadley Centre and CRU - the answer is about 300 miles, according to Google. And also, it seems that only one of them has an adequate firewall...

Remember, never say anything in an email if you aren't prepared to see it plastered over the internet subsequently!

[jules' pics] 11/18/2009 09:34:00 PM

2009-11-19T14:34:00.001+09:00

Hase Dera, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Another abrupt climate change occurred yesterday and it is only 4 months since the last one. Now it is cold, and therefore "virtually certain" that all the mantises are dead including dear sweet Trevorina

Photo is taken in a sub-temple at Hase-Dera. It is a scary place. There is one little concrete statue for each dead baby. I hope Trevoria managed to make 10 times this many progeny before she died. Mantis infant mortality rates are very high...

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 11/18/2009 09:34:00 PM

[jules' pics] 11/18/2009 03:09:00 AM

2009-11-18T20:09:00.001+09:00

shichi-go-san 七五三, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

A break from the nauseam on the empty blog, a quiz. Boy or girl?

Taking flight off the stairs to join the black kites swooping overhead seems a good solution to impossible to walk in shoes.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 11/18/2009 03:09:00 AM

[jules' pics] 11/16/2009 07:46:00 PM

2009-11-17T12:46:00.002+09:00

autumnal cherry blossom (10th month sakura) 十月ざくら, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Autumn colours and cherry blossom in a single photo! The title of the photo gives it away. This is a cherry blossom that flowers in October. The tree is rather sparse now, so I wouldn't bet on it still being in flower by the time the maple tree in the background has turned all the way to red. But then again I do usually lose my bets...

[Zuisenji, Kamakura]

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 11/16/2009 07:46:00 PM

Successful writer/call girl/blogger outed...as a scientist

2009-11-16T20:50:00.000+09:00

Oh, the shame, the shame.

All the luvvies in the meejah were swooning over the elegant prose, the urbane and erudite discussions of Iris Murdoch with punters.

Her purple prose had them speculating variously that the author was the novelist Sarah Champion, journalist Toby Young or writer Rowan Pelling. Others had suggested Lisa Hilton, Andrew Orlowski or Michael Faber.

But it turns out that this outwardly-normal girl-about-town had a secret double life. Behind the façade of a sophisticated cultivated lady of the night, she was living a double life - as a bench-monkey.

I cringe at the embarrassing phone calls that are surely taking place following this revelation: "Hi Mum, you know you thought I was living as a high-class escort in London? Well, actually, I was moonlighting as a PhD student. Now I'm working as an obscure research scientist."

Klotzbach ad nauseam 2009

2009-11-16T20:16:00.004+09:00

The Klotzbach et al paper (previous here) is finally published, and seems to have kicked off something of a blogstorm again.

As you may recall, when the preprint was first publicised, Gavin Schmidt quickly identified an error in the analysis. The paper looks at the difference in trend between surface and troposphere, and the claim that this points to some previously-unexplained factor (which they ascribe to "bias" in the surface measurements, see below) depends on the "expected" amplification factor of 1.2 which is derived from models.

As Gavin pointed out, however, the factor of 1.2 does not apply over land (his model's ratio is 0.95) which eliminated half of their effect at a stroke. K09 originally appeared to accept this (see table in blog post) so it was surprising to see that they hadn't bothered to correct this for the final version of the paper. They made several other changes later than that exchange, so it's not like they didn't have the opportunity.

K09 have now replied by claiming that Gavin's correction isn't correct after all, and they "understand" from McKitrick that the original 1.2 value is appropriate for the region they were considering. It is odd enough that they didn't clarify this in the paper, but what is even more bizarre is their repeated claim the different values don't matter, since clearly Gavin's value knocks off half of the claimed discrepancy at a stroke.

Ross McKitrick seems pretty embarrassed by the whole affair. All he did was write an informal email to one of the authors, which he never intended to be made public, and he seems to have been as astonished as Gavin was to find his calculations used as the basis for the analysis in K09. He thinks it was inappropriate for them to have used his numbers, which he now acknowledges are incorrect. His new values are contradicted by Gavin's, and I know who I'd place my money on (McKitrick's numbers imply a global mean factor of about 1.45, far higher than the generally accepted figure, and he's had difficulties with such complex issues as area-weighting in the past). But irrespective of the numbers themselves, it is staggering that K09, having been alerted to the problem by Gavin, didn't bother to check for themselves, preferring to publish the disputed values first and correct (or not) later. Of course this "see no evil" strategy means they have made McKitrick look stupid for the error, and whatever you feel about his contribution to climate science in general it's hard to not feel some sympathy for him in this case. It is shameful of K09 to hide behind McKitrick in this way rather than performing the calculation themselves if they won't accept Gavin's figures.

Distinct from the dispute over those numbers, there are some more rather amusing changes to the paper, in that the interpretation of the Lin et al 2007 results has been reversed. Originally (and repeatedly) touted as supporting the hypothesis of Pielke and Matsui 2005 (and don't forget that Pielke and Matsui were co-authors on L07), it was noted by Urs Neu out that this interpretation of the analysis was based on a sign error. When correctly interpreted, the L07 results actually oppose the PM05 hypothesis, which at a minimum demonstrates that if the PM05 effect really existed, it is not large compared to other local influences.

As a result of this belated realisation, there are some changes to the K09 paper. What was originally written was:

This was documented in Lin et al. [2007] who found from observational data that monitoring long-term near-surface daily minimum temperature trends at a single level on light wind nights will not produce the same trends as for long-term temperature trends at other heights near the surface. For instance, were the data from Lin et al. [2007] to be representative of biases in other station measurements taken at one height, then about 30% of the tropospheric warming during the 20th century reported by the IPCC would be explained as the result of this factor. A warm bias would occur even for daytime maximum temperatures for land locations at high latitudes during the winter when the surface temperature profile remains stably stratified all day.

One might think that correcting the sign error would naturally lead to

This was documented in Lin et al. [2007] who found from observational data that monitoring long-term near-surface daily minimum temperature trends at a single level on light wind nights will not produce the same trends as for long-term temperature trends at other heights near the surface. For instance, were the data from Lin et al. [2007] to be representative of biases in other station measurements taken at one height, then the tropospheric warming during the 20th century reported by the IPCC would be underestimated by about 30% as the result of this factor. A cold bias would occur even for daytime maximum temperatures for land locations at high latitudes during the winter when the surface temperature profile remains stably stratified all day.

But of course they couldn't bring themselves to say that, so instead the paper now reads:

This was documented by Lin et al. [2007] who found from observational data that monitoring long-term near-surface daily minimum temperature trends at a single level on light wind nights will not produce the same trends as for long-term temperature trends at other heights near the surface (although it was a cool bias in that data for the time period and location examined). A warm bias could occur even for daytime maximum temperatures for land locations at high latitudes during the winter when the surface temperature profile remains stably stratified all day.

Funny how this inconvenient result is now relegated to a "time period and location examined" when it was previously hypothesised to be representative of the global picture.

There were no fewer than three other places where L07 was originally cited as being consistent with the K09/PM05 hypothesis, but it would obviously have been too painful for them to mention that their own observations of boundary layer lapse rates contradict their theory. Therefore, these statements have just been deleted.

It is particularly curious that the contribution of Urs Neu (who corrected this sign error) is nowhere acknowledged. Perhaps he requested that his name was not mentioned, but otherwise this omission sits uncomfortably with (in particular) RPJr's willingness to throw accusations of plagiarism around at others.

Yet another error is the repeated mis-attribution of comments from Santer et al (2000) as coming from Santer et al (2005). The significance of this is that back in 2000, there was still a rather large discrepancy between satellite observations (and specifically between the UAH analysis and the expected tropospheric amplification), for which people put a lot of effort in to trying to think up plausible explanations. Of course a large part of this discrepancy was fixed, when it was discovered that another sign error in the UAH analysis had understated the trend (BTW, anyone notice a pattern here?), largely reconciling the problem. By giving the wrong reference, K09 gives the wholly misleading impression that many scientists in 2005 disagreed with this reconciliation. In fact, Santer et al 2005 (and accompanying papers) was this reconciliation!

So it seems we have a hypothesis about a significant decrease in lapse rates in the boundary layer which even were it true, has no real impact on predictions of climate change but anyway is (a) not supported by any theoretical calculations (since the PM05 calculation is simply inapplicable), and (b) actually opposed by the observational evidence on lapse rates that the proponents themselves have analysed (as L07 had a sign error). It seems that only one thing has remained a constant amongst the blizzard of errors and bluster, and that is Roger Pielke Sr's unshakeable beliefs that the surface temperature record is wrong, and that the fact that his nonsensical "research" on this has been ignored by the scientific community is evidence of some conspiracy to cover it all up. Perhaps this is what "Pielke Climate Science" means. I prefer the traditional approach.

[jules' pics] 11/15/2009 11:41:00 PM

2009-11-16T16:41:00.001+09:00

shichi-go-san 七五三, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Commissioned by Steve to disambiguate kiddy kimonos, here's a 3 year old girl.

Yesterday, 7-5-3 festival day, I stood inconspicuously with my long lens along with the other inconspicuous men with inconspicuous long lenses, at the foto-place at the foot of the stairs by the bandstand, and we all took pics of happy families. It is quite entertaining. Basically the child is charged with climbing a large staircase wearing expensively rented constricting clothes and shoes it is impossible to walk in. Luckily parents are allowed to help. Despite all this it was smiles all round and I saw not a single tear or tantrum. Japanese kiddywinks are the best!

Then, most bafflingly, as we stood there surrounded by beautiful people in lovely kimono, one of the inconspicuous photographers came up and asked me (dressed in tatty jeans and drab jacket) to pose for him! Hmmm.. seems that I will never be an inconspicuous photographer after all...

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 11/15/2009 11:41:00 PM

Air Capture

2009-11-15T17:00:00.004+09:00

It's relatively easy to buy decent bread in the UK these days, so I never got round to making my own when we lived there. Not so in Japan, where 6 slices of nondescript soft white costs an astonishing ¥200 or thereabouts, and there is nothing that comes close to Tesco's malted bread.

Eventually I got around to baking my own bread, which was reasonably successful - but I've always enjoyed sourdough bread, especially when visiting places like San Francisco where it is very common.

So a couple of months ago, I mixed up some flour and water and left it sitting around in a warm place...

...and this is what appeared! Well actually, this is now a few generations down the line from the original Kamakura sourdough starter. It's amazing what can be pulled out of thin air. I'm not sure it really tastes like Boudin's but it's better than nothing.

[jules' pics] 11/12/2009 08:54:00 PM

2009-11-13T13:54:00.001+09:00

boy in pink, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

In the comments to the tiny dot boy and his family, on Js empty blog Steve was getting curious about men's attire.

THis is how it seems to me:
0-10: "moe!" (dressed by Mum)
11-18: Exhausted school boy (dressed by school)
18-25: Fashion icon seeking mate (dressed by self)
25-65: Exhausted salaryman (soul and dress-sense owned by company, wife does what she can but his heart's not in it)
65+: Inconspicuous (obeys she who must be obeyed)

0-10 and 18-25 are by far the best. Here's one of the latter.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 11/12/2009 08:54:00 PM

[jules' pics] 11/12/2009 12:35:00 AM

2009-11-12T17:35:00.002+09:00

Hachimangu, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Our meeting last week was mostly about the last millennium, so as well as oceanography we also mused on some old trees, one of which (a ~500 year old ginkgo) frames most of the right hand side of this photo.

I often try to take this photo of the bandstand and several tori down the ~1.5 mile dead straight road between the beach and Hachimangu shrine in Kamakura. I like the lighting in this one but, the thing I find most interesting is that almost everyone who is not actually walking up the stairs is engaged in photography.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 11/12/2009 12:35:00 AM

[jules' pics] 11/10/2009 07:51:00 PM

2009-11-11T12:51:00.001+09:00

disaster training, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

This year disaster training had to be postponed at the last minute due to a disaster; a typhoon was directly overhead. Luckily the replacement day was 20C and sunny. For the first time this year there was a 10 second count-down to the pretend earthquake. I do hope we will get one of those for the real thing. Then there will be time to grab my helmet and sit cuddling my Mac Pro under my desk. Really I just like any socially acceptable excuse to cuddle my Mac Pro.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 11/10/2009 07:51:00 PM

Bankers "have learned lessons"

2009-11-10T19:20:00.001+09:00

The headline was actually that bankers "have not learned lessons" (though this is strangely absent from the web page) but I beg to differ. They have learned that they are "too big to fail" and that any blunders, no matter how colossal, will result in unending and unlimited taxpayer-funded bail-outs. The bigger the failure, the better, in fact, as losing a few million quid might actually cost a job or two, whereas losing several trillion guarantees the big pay-day (see "too big to fail" above). Thus, they have returned to business as usual at the first opportunity.

If I was a banker in this environment, I'd be betting someone else's farm - and pension - on every heads I win, tails you lose proposition I could think of. Wouldn't you?

One saving grace is that I'm not a UK taxpayer, and hopefully won't become one within the next few years :-) Of course Japan has been digging a hole for the past few decades, but that's all been done on funny money, and there are no signs of them attempting to raise it from the population as a whole.

[jules' pics] 11/09/2009 07:39:00 PM

2009-11-10T12:39:00.001+09:00

shichi-go-san 七五三, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

When the family dresses up kimono-stylee, the salaryman remains attired the same apart from his accessories; his briefcase always becomes a camera, and in extreme circumstances, such as shown in this picture, he may adopt a more brightly coloured tie. It is really quite odd, because there does exist traditional kimono-stylee wear for men.

[Early 7-5-3 celebrants at Hachimangu, Kamakura]

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 11/09/2009 07:39:00 PM

[jules' pics] 11/08/2009 10:28:00 PM

2009-11-09T15:28:00.001+09:00

faux fur on Motomachi, Yokohama, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

This picktur what I took in Yokohama yesterday is getting an awful lot of hits on flickr. Odd. It's not that great a picktur. Anyway, Christmastide has just started in Japan, so we are all dustng off our faux fur, mini-skirts (shorts are also permitted) and knee high boots.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 11/08/2009 10:28:00 PM

[jules' pics] 11/06/2009 06:18:00 PM

2009-11-07T11:18:00.001+09:00

Kamakura beach, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Our week of Let's Internationally Climate Science (=we had visitors) ended yesterday evening. Last session, oceanography.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 11/06/2009 06:18:00 PM

Roy Spencer debunks Lindzen and Choi

2009-11-06T22:02:00.002+09:00

Roy Spencer has weighed in here (thanks tb) with some analysis of the Lindzen and Choi study that I briefly covered before. It seems that RS has investigated the difference between CMIP (coupled atmosphere-ocean) and AMIP (atmosphere with prescribed sea surface temperature) runs and found that they give completely different answers. In other words, the analysis of AMIP output that LC performed is not relevant to diagnosing the properties of the fully coupled climate system. Which is what I suspected but had not checked. RS also has various other criticisms about how the data were processed, and his alternative analysis shows a much closer agreement between models and data. Although his wording tries to be gentle (because he wants to believe LC's overall conclusion that the models are too sensitive) it is quite clear that he thinks the LC paper is wrong.

The sad thing about this is to see Lindzen getting his claws into some young post-doc and teaching them how to do (and get published) shoddy analyses without doing obvious checks. I hope this person learns how to not fool himself so easily in future.

Update

Comments continue on the earlier post, and Rob in particular seems to have pointed to some sleight-of-hand in how LC dealt with the analysis of SW radiation (unrelated to the CMIP/AMIP issue). There are so many different definitions of feedback that I'm not 100% sure on this though.

[jules' pics] 11/04/2009 08:31:00 PM

2009-11-05T13:31:00.002+09:00

Old Faithful Inn, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

What's the integral of one over cabin dcabin?

[Old Faithful, Yellowstone]

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 11/04/2009 08:31:00 PM

[jules' pics] 11/03/2009 07:49:00 PM

2009-11-04T12:49:00.000+09:00

Opal Pool, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

[Midway Basin, Yellowstone]

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 11/03/2009 07:49:00 PM

Shorter Romm v Kloor

2009-11-04T07:44:00.002+09:00

Miaow.

(but am I supposed to care?)

I don't read Romm when I can avoid it. I have come across Keith Kloor's name a few times but not enough to really know what he thinks and how good he is (sorry). I see mentioned that he hadn't even read Superfreakonomics before getting embroiled in the argument, which seems a touch foolhardy to me. However he promised a week ago (28/10) that he would read it "in the next week" so assuming he's as good as his word we can all look forward to his informed commentary shortly...

[jules' pics] 11/01/2009 08:30:00 PM

2009-11-02T13:30:00.001+09:00

One of the futago ike (twin ponds), originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

ommmm..

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 11/01/2009 08:30:00 PM

No, global warming hasn't stopped (part 94)

2009-11-01T22:26:00.002+09:00

Fashionably late to the party as always, but (in contrast to Stoat's snark) I thought this was a pretty well-done piece by Seth Borenstein:

Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book.
Only one problem: It's not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press.

No prizes for guessing which "provocative book" he is talking about, and of course the "global warming has stopped" meme has been kicking about the delusionosphere pretty well for ever (eg see here). What he did was quite neat - sending off the time series of temperature data to a bunch of statisticians without telling them what it was, and asking them for their analysis. I would have preferred to disguise the data in some way (any linear transformation) but that's a bit of a nit to pick. Of course the statisticians gave the same answer that all competent climate scientists have already given, cos this stuff is hardly rocket science and there is no evidence for a marked drop in trend (mind you, the models suggest the trend should be accelerating, not just continuing). Cutting-edge science it is not, but it is an interesting and well-constructed news feature.

Best comment prize goes to Deep Climate, in the thread to Stoat's post

RP jr didn't write about it, so it must be right.

Sad but true.

Gavin Schmidt can be spotted highlighting the chances of a new temperature record next year. Obviously he's been reading McLean et al's ground-breaking paper where they show for the first time that ENSO affects global temperatures :-)

I've been keeping an eye on the ENSO forecasts recently myself, not because I care about ENSO itself - I don't think it has much of an effect here (cue Japanese scientists telling me how important it is) - but rather due to its likely effects on global temperature. The Hadcru temperature anomaly has been about +0.5C for the last few months, and the old 1998 record was +0.526C. The weekly pdf updates presented on this page give an accessible summary of recent ENSO status and predictions. According to it, the ENSO is "expected to strengthen and last though Northern hemisphere winter". It is almost certainly late now for this year to break any records, but given the lag of about 6 months in ENSO's effect, every extra month of positive ENSO index from here on means additional warmth next year.