Putting the Nazi boot on the other foot!

My reply was, that in the case of the CRU data products , one cannot determine whether the data are tainted or not as the original raw data provided by world Meteorological agencies had been discarded in a move to the new CRU building ostensibly to save space. I stated that there is not audit trail from any of their data products back to the raw data. Can you believe that?! So I described the data control and management by the CRU as a dog’s breakfast (a not too insulting comment) and that CRU is too incompetent to be placed in charge of a repository of the world’s weather station data.

Apparently, these comments were too much for Gavin Schmidt and he deleted my post from the moderation queue. It appears that the team are very sensitive to the data issue and they will brook no criticism. You really do know when you are getting close to the jugular with these people because they moderate you out of existence. Of course this is common for RC, Climate Progress, and Open Mind as well as most other alarmist blog sites.

Thin skins indeed!!!

Foster claims that Steve Fielding is a fellow “denier” of Bob Carter. Fielding was neutral on this issue until now. The fact is the Steve Fielding (who happens to be a scientist in his own right) is probably the only politician in Canberra (Australia) to actually come from a position of blind belief of global warming to one of informed decision by actually finding out for himself, from both sides of the debate, the state of play with regard to global warming. What Foster does not tell you, is that Fielding when he visited the US he also sought advice from President Obama’s climate change advisors. He was summarily ignored (such is the arrogance of these AGW people).

Fielding met with Australian climate change minister Penny Wong to have three questions on global warming answered. Accompanying him were four scientists; Dr. Bob Carter, Stewart Franks, David Evans and Robert Kinninmonth. With Ms Wong were Australia’s chief scientist Penny Sackett and the head of the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute, Will Steffen. As the questions were put and discussed, the result was that minister Wong and her advisors had to retire and prepare a formal written reply as they could not answer the questions immediately. So much for easy to dismiss and amateurish questions that Foster implies they are. If the chief scientists and a boss of a climate change institute could not dismiss them summarily then I think Foster has no chance of doing so.

Foster denigrates Carter in particular and cites his and others document in answer to Minister Wong’s replies. Most of the content of that reply to Minister Wong is based in sound science. Foster is just plain wrong and is so because of his own unscientific bias. Foster is a good statistician and a “piss poor” scientist.

Subsequently, Foster proceeds to do a little statistical analysis of GISS surface temperature data to support the argument that global warming has not stopped. Well, I agree with him that if one chooses the period 2000-2009 there is a significant increase in temperature over that period. What he does not show you is that from 2001-2009 the warming stops and is not statistically significant. He has done a little cherry picking himself. The fact is that 2000 was a year when the temperature was very much lower due to the strong La Nina that followed the 1998 super El Nino. It is well documented that strong La Ninas will follow strong El Ninos. Below is the graph for the period 2001-2009 that Foster will not show you (remember, climate does not follow the Gregorian Calendar):

GISS Global Temperature 2001-2009

This figure shows that the warming trend for 2000-2009 shown by Foster is only significant because 2000 is unusually cold. He even alludes to the fact when he said of his box plots: “The outliers are plotted as small circles. Only the 2000s have a potential outlier; the year 2000 was quite a bit cooler than the rest of the 2000s.” From 2001, the warming trend is no longer significant (GLM p>0.5). The satellite data also confirm this.The caveat on all of this is that, of course, a period of eight years is not enough to confirm climate change. However, if the trend continues as many think it will, here, here and here, then the future is bleak for the AGW lobby.

In summary. His posting is just basically rubbish that is nicely cherry-picked to suit his argument. His assessment of Senator Steve Fielding is from a position of total ignorance of the man. His use of the term “denialist” is the typical mantra of zealous AGW believers to denigrate anyone who questions. He denigrates a scientist in Bob Carter by saying and I quote:

““scientist” Bob Carter. I put “scientist” in quotes because in spite of Carter’s scientific credentials, his statements regarding global warming are so amateurish as to cast doubt on his qualifications to opine on any scientific topic.”

This is a man that has forgotten more science than Foster could hope to fit into his limited intellectual landscape. The amateur is Foster, not Bob Carter. And his thread should be treated with the contempt that it deserves.

As you can see from the Loess functions, the trend for the last five years shows a general downward trend. However, the period of the 2000s is still substantially higher (statistically significant) than the other decades (i.e. 1980s and 1990s). The persistent trend downward in recent years places in doubt any declaration that global warming is accelerating or even increasing at the moment. A pdf copy of the graph can be downloaded here.

Why have peer review?

Ostensively, the peer review process is to ensure that only work of quality makes it through to publication. It has also been used to help to improve on a workers methodology and logical arguments. Peer review is regarded as the most reliable method for the determination of the validity of the work being examined.

So. Is peer review the ultimate determiner of quality science?

Well. No. Horton (http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/172_04_210200/horton/horton.html) states quite convincingly:

“The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability — not the validity — of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.”

His is not a lone voice in the wilderness. There was an editorial in Nature in 1999 (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v401/n6755/full/401727a0.html) that concluded that an over-reliance on peer-reviewed publication:

“has disadvantages that should be countered by adequate provision of time and resources for independent assessment and, in the midst of controversies, publicly funded agencies providing comprehensive, reliable and prompt complementary information”

Robert Higgs (http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/38532.html) comments that:

“Peer review, on which lay people place great weight, varies from important, where the editors and the referees are competent and responsible, to a complete farce, where they are not. As a rule, not surprisingly, the process operates somewhere in the middle, being more than a joke but less than the nearly flawless system of Olympian scrutiny that outsiders imagine it to be.”

Can peer review be abused?

Definitely YES. Examples abound where the peer review process has been used to prevent good research from being published. It has also been used to prevent research that contravenes the establishment consensus from being published in certain journals. This has happened in AIDS research, medical and dental research, climate research and many other disciplinary areas. See: http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/dissent/documents/ss/ss5.html for a number of cases of the misuse of the peer review process to quash research results.

Why bring this up on climate science blog?

I have introduced this issue to bring to reader’s attention that the assumption of peer reviewed research being true and accurate is not necessarily the case. I have encountered many comments on climate blogs (especially on Tamino’s site) that call to the fact that because papers are peer reviewed they are peerless. That is not true since these same sites denigrate peer-reviewed papers by non-AGW authors as if they were garbage. Peer review never has and never will guarantee that research is both good and correct. See Horton’s quote above. Any argument by either side of the debate that because a paper is peer reviewed and published in a prestigious journal it is beyond reproach is both wrong and unsustainable.

Can the process be improved?

Definitely. There are a number of possible strategies. I think that the only ones that will work are those that remove the process from the publishing journal. Peer review if it is to continue to be a useful process must be devolved back to the institution of the researcher. Some would argue that this would guarantee publication of poor quality research. That argument is not proven nor does it acknowledge the fact that institutions have greater expertise to review research. Most institutions will not allow research to be published in their name until it has gone through a thorough internal review. And they are not keen on letting dodgy research be published.

Perhaps a thorough audit process or review of the research by committees of disciplinary bodies is a viable alternative to peer review as it is practiced today. In fact this process is how peer review is really supposed to work.

Another possibility is to do away with peer review altogether. This has been done in astronomy and other disciplines to a lesser or greater degree. Leave it up to the scientists themselves to winnow out the frass.

Just some thoughts on the matter.

What did Steig et al. (2009) do that was different to other studies? In effect they interpolated the temperature of the continent as a whole by infilling gaps in the instrumental records (very large ones in this case) with data from satellites. They used Thermal Infra-red (T_ir) data from the NOAA satellite using the AVHRR (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer). The T_ir data measures the temperature at the surface (i.e. the ground and not the atmosphere above it). This can be fraught with incorrect readings of temperature due to the varying characteristics of the surface topography and makeup. However, Steig et al 2009 argue :

“Although it has been suggested that such interpolation is unreliable owing to the distances involved, large spatial scales are not inherently problematic if there is high spatial coherence, as is the case in continental Antarctica.”

Steig et al (2009) used the RegEM algorithm to combine data from weather stations and the T_ir satellite information. They did this because most of the weather station data is centered on the coastal regions of the continent and therefore they tried to interpolate the interior temperature profile of the continent with the satellite data.

Below are a few points that I would like to make about this study:

Applicability of T_ir Data to This Study:
Steig et al (2009) have argued that Antarctica has a high spatial coherence. Is this in fact true? I guess the assumption that because it is just ice it is spatially coherent may be understating things a little. Sure. It is not like a temperate terrestrial landscape where you have changes between forests, savannas etc. However to assume that there is low variability in the Antarctic landscape may be a little simplistic. Further research into variabilities in T_ir values over the Antarctic landscape with appropriate ground truthing may resolve that question.

Detrended data does not support their main argument:
When Steig et al (2009) reconstructed the temperatures with the detrended T_ir data, their reconstruction was not significantly different from zero at the 95% confidence interval. The West Antarctic remained significant (p<0.001) with a 0.08 ^oC/decade trend. This represents a 0.8 ^oC/century warming trend. Hardly anything to worry about. Even with the non-detrended data the warming trends were between 0.3 and1.7 ^oC/century for East Antarctica and between 0.5 and 1.9 ^oC/century for West Antarctica. Such a warming will be nowhere near enough to cause a melting of ice sheets, particularly in East Anarctica.

Rate of warming declined in latter decades
In Figures 3 and 4 of their paper it is obvious that the rate of warming declined in the period after 1969 for East Antarctica (Fig. 3. not significant) and after ~1980 (Fig.4. cf 4a and 4e). Even their model results with different boundary conditions show a cooling of the East Antarctic (Fig. 4. f, g and h). The West Antarctic has warmed in latter decades. This is not inconsistent with many other studies that have shown a warming West Antarctic and a cooling East Antarctic.

Ice core analyses:
Steig et al (2009) state:
” Moreover, ice-core analyses indicate average warming of West Antarctica over the entire twentieth century.”

If this is the case, then the proposition that the West Antarctic warming is due only to Anthropogenic Global Warming is unsustainable. The period of greatest input of anthropogenic greenhouse gases occurred from the early 1950s when post war industrialisation took off. Prior to that time the input by industry was at a very low level. If the warming of the West Antarctic occurred for the better part of a century then factors other than anthropogenic ones are the cause of that warming, at least in the first 50 years. Steig et al (2009) have virtually admitted that the warming of the West Antarctic is a long term naturally forced warming.

To summarise
Steig et al have introduced a new and innovative way to extrapolate temperature over a large spatial area. This technique has merit. I do not agree with Michael Mann’s rather arrogant statement:

“Outside of these impacts, the study also take away “one of the standard talking points of [global warming] contrarians,” Mann said. The argument used by skeptics was “how can the globe be warming if a whole continent is cooling,” Mann explained. “

This study is not convincing in it’s results that any warming in Antarctica is anthropogenically caused. Even detrending the data caused the significance to disappear and their attempt to argue against detrending is not convincing. Their admission that the West Antarctic has warmed for the better part of a century also undermines the anthropogenic argument. But putting the huff and puff aside. I believe this technique is useful for interpolating the climate change in Antarctica as a whole.

Bibliography

Steig, E. J., D. P. Schneider, S. D. Rutherford, M. E. Mann, J. C. Comiso, and D. T. Shindell, 2009: Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 International Geophysical Year. Nature, 457, 459-462.

RSS Data

A pdf of the RSS data can be found here

UAH Data

A pdf of the UAH data can be found here

I will make similar posts for the GISS and HadCRUT data sets when the December data become available.

As part of this blog I am also going to provide resources for people to analyse data themselves or to access alternative data and views on the issue.

So, please come back and visit often. I hope that this develops into a valuable resource for both sides of the divide.

Regards

Richard Steckis B.Sc. (Hons.)