Climate Scientist Starter Kit

I've just put together a Climate Scientist Starter Kit. The kit contains a spreadsheet in Apple Numbers and Microsoft Excel formats. The spreadsheet has data on:

* Monthly Global Mean, TDYN, ENSO, and Volcano temperatures from January, 1900 till March 2009.
* Monthly UAH satellite temperature data from December, 1978 till November 2009.
* Daily and monthly Cosmic Ray data from January, 1951 till November, 2006.
* Monthly low level cloud data from July, 1983 through June, 2008.
* Ice Core CO2 data and monthly CO2 data for the years 1958 through 2008.

It nice because you have all the data in an easy to use spreadsheet, rather than having to parse up various data formats.

There's also supporting data, including raw cloud data, daily cloud data, C++ code for parsing raw cloud data files, and HTML documents that provide additional information.

You can download the zip file here. NOTE: The comment on the download page will say it's the FreePOOMA Add-On Pack. Don't worry, that's just the name of the project that contains the zip file.

Feedback for improvements for future versions of the kit is welcome.

References:
The Climate Scientist Starter Kit

I'm Unblocked From Wiki!

Update: I forgot to mention I had to double dutch promise not to post anymore links to ClimateGate emails.
==========

Wiki has unblocked me. I want to thank editor Rlevse for taking the time to do this.

There was a mia culpa on my part. It turns out I actually posted twice to the discussion page, once as an unregistered user, and once as Magicjava. The first one got deleted and when I checked a few hours latter and didn't see it, I just assumed an unregistered user couldn't post to a deletion discussion page. So I registered as Magicjava and posted it again. My apologies for the mix up.

But the important thing is now I'm free to spread all the lies and propaganda that ExxonMobile is paying me for.

BWAH HA HA HA HA!




Just kidding. ;)

Another Skeptic Blocked From Wikipedia - Me

Continuing Wikipedia's trend of blocking skeptics from the ClimateGate debate, another skeptic has been banned from Wikipedia. This time it's me.

I have a total of 1 edit to Wikipedia. Yes, just 1. And it's not even to an actual article.

On the ClimateGate deletion discussion page I said that William Connolley should not be allowed to vote on the ClimateGate issue, as he's personally involved in it. I provided two links to ClimateGate emails involving him.

And now I'm indefinitely blocked.


Screenshot showing I've been blocked.


Screen shot showing every edit I've ever made to Wikipedia. It's from the deletion discussion page. (Minus links to emails that someone edited out.)

I've sent off an email to the admin who blocked me, Rlevse, asking why he blocked me.

Late Edit:

Screen shot showing my Wikipedia editing history.

References:
ClimateGate Deletion Discussion Page
William Connolley email #1
William Connolley email #2
Wikipedia Blocks All Skeptics From Editing ClimateGate Page

ClimateGate Page Deleted From Wikipedia. More Attempts To Block Skeptics

UPDATE: Wikipedia has moved the deletion discussion page to here.
========

In the middle of the night on Monday morning, enough believers posted they wanted the article deleted to tie the count evenly between delete and keep. Then the polling was shut down early and the page was deleted. It's now a redirect to the Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident article.

Editor Rd232 has tried to block the ClimateGate author from posting to wikipedia. This isn't the first time this has happened. Wikipedia previously blocked all known skeptics from posting on the ClimateGate article.

The deletion is under review, as it occured less than 12 hours after the delete notice was posted and there was no consensus for deletion. We need wiki editors to get over there and get this reversed.

And Rd232 needs to lose his editor privileges due to abuse.


Screen shot of editor Rd232 saying he tried to block the author of the ClimateGate article from posting.

References:
Wikipedia ClimateGate article
Wikipedia Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident article
ClimateGate Deletion discussion page
ClimateGate Deletion Review Page
Wikipedia Blocks Skeptics From Posting

Wikipedia Now Trying To Delete ClimateGate Article

It looks like the believers lost the battle to control the ClimateGate page that I talked about in this post, because now wikipedia is trying to delete the ClimateGate page altogether. Deleting a page in wikipedia means the entire page and all it's history is forever gone. The public can never view it and will never even know it existed. The plan seems to be to move the article to Climatic Research Unit e-mail_hacking incident.

Only wikipedia editors can vote on whether or not to delete an article, so if you're an editor please HURRY over to the ClimateGate article and make sure it doesn't get deleted.

Thanks. :)


Screen shot of wikipedia's attempt to delete the ClimateGate article.

References:
Wikipedia ClimateGate Article
Climatic Research Unit e-mail_hacking incident article
ClimateGate deletion discussion page
Wikipedia deletion policy page

Cosmic Rays And Climate. Part V: Cosmoclimatology

This video has been placed in the public domain.

Met/CRU Releases Some "Truthiness" Data And Code

Steve McIntyre is reporting the Met Office has decided to release a sub-set of their data and code obtained from CRU. The data is the "value-added" data, not the raw data. It's also not the full data set. It's unknown at this point what exactly is contained in the code.

Head on over to Climate Audit for full details and updates.

References:
Climate Audit

Cosmic Rays And Climate. Part IV: CO2 Global Warming

This video has been placed in the public domain.

Cosmic Rays And Climate. Part III: Clouds

This video has been placed in the public domain.

Wikipedia Blocks All Skeptics From Editing ClimateGate Page

Update:
After removing all the skeptic's comments, they've locked the page down, leaving only the believer's comments.
=======

You may have heard from Watts Up With That that a single editor had been responsible for all articles in Wikipedia related to global warming and had been editing out skeptic's views. U.K. scientist, Green Party activist, and RealClimate.org team member William Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 Wikipedia articles. His handiwork included getting rid of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm period and slandering scientists he didn't agree with. Connolley had his wikipedia administrator duties taken away from him in September. But that hasn't stopped him, as he's edited more than 800 articles in December alone.

But it seems there's more to the story.

According to wikipedia editor "A Quest For Knowledge", wikipedia has blocked all known skeptics from editing their ClimateGate page. Reading the ClimateGate page you can see it's little more than propaganda copied and pasted from the Huffington Post and RealClimate.

The skeptics had to be banned for trying to maximize the damage that ClimateGate would cause, says the editor. He goes on to say a group of believers are doing the reverse, trying to minimize the damage. But for whatever reason, the believers haven't been banned by wikipedia. This despite the fact that the believers are no more neutral than the skeptics were, according to the editor.

Please contact the wikipedia editors and help get the ClimateGate page up to wikipedia's neutrality standards. See below for links.


Screen grab of administrator's entry saying all skeptics were blocked from ClimateGate page.

References:
Watts Up With That Wikipedia Story
Wikipedia statistics for Connolley
Nation Post Reports the Wikipedia Story
Statement by Wikipedia Administrator A Quest For Knowledge
Wikipedia contact page
Wikipedia ClimateGate page

COP15 Flops

Senator Inhofe said it best. I can only add "Get used to it."

Next up, the EPA.

References:
TreeHugger

Cosmic Rays And Climate. Part II: Plasma Physics

This video has been placed in the pubic domain.

Happy Holidays

Obama, Scientists, Take Climate Approval Rating Hit

According to the Washington Post, Obama's approval rating on handling global warming has dropped below 50%. It's not clear how much of this is due to Climategate, as the "approve" trend was heading downward at about the same rate before the story broke. However, the "disapprove" trend does show an increase in growth after Climategate.

The poll was conducted by telephone Thursday the 10th through Sunday the 13th.



The poll showed that most people thought Obama should cap greenhouse gases by a 2-1 margin, so long as that cap didn't cost very much. If the costs to a household were $25 per month, the responses were nearly evenly split between the "shoulds" and "should nots".

According to documents obtained from the Obama administration via the Freedom of Information Act, average monthly increase in costs per household would be between $73 and $146.


Trust in scientists took a big hit, with 40% saying they don't trust scientists on this issue at all or only very little. 30% said they had moderate trust, while 29% said they trust scientists completely or a lot.


By a 2-1 margin people said they believe scientists disagree with each other over this issue.

References:
Washington Post Article
Washington Post Graph
Obama Administration FOIA Documents

Cosmic Rays And Climate. Part I: Quantum Physics

This video has been placed in the public domain.

Pennsylvania Senate Tells PSU "Anything Short of Absolute Science Cannot Be Tolerated"

The Pennsylvania State Senate has written Pennsylvania State University regarding the investigation of Michael Mann, saying their constituents have "requested the Commonwealth further withhold Penn State's funding" until action is taken against Dr. Mann.

The letter goes on to say that funding will not be withheld for now, but the allegations of "intellectual and scientific fraud" are serious in any case, but are especially so in this case, as world economies are influenced by his work. It goes on to say "anything short of the pursuit of absolute science cannot be accepted or tolerated".

Just in case anyone's wondering, the Pennsylvania Senate is controlled by Republicans.

The picture above is the letter in full. The two pictures below are close ups of the letter.




Reference:
Sen. Piccola Letter on PSU Prof Michael Mann

Updated (Again) Cap And Trade Video

New information keeps pouring in about the seedy connections that make up "Cap and Trade". This one includes info on the head of the IPCC.

This video has been placed in the public domain.

R.I.P. AGW 1988 - 2009

'

This video has been placed in the public domain.

Updated Cap And Trade Video

The new version includes information recently obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

This video has been placed in the public domain.

ClimateGate And The Mainstream Media

Examines possible reasons the MSM is trying to ignore ClimateGate.

This video has been placed in the public domain.

Happy Fun Ball

This video has been placed in the public domain.

I'm Sorry

The video and images have been placed in the public domain.

References
Goldman Sachs
Deutsche Bank
Société Générale

CRU Code Not Smoking Gun

The graph presented here shows the data manipulation taking place in one example of the computer code from CRU. Many (most? all?) of my fellow climate skeptics are saying this is the "smoking gun" that proves CRU has manipulated its climate data.

It's not.

I've been a professional computer programmer for over 25 years. There's several things that stood out as odd to me about the CRU code. I've been holding off posting about it until it all came together for me. I think it has now.

*) First of all, the code is written in a language called IDL. IDL is a popular language in the scientific community, including climate science. However, it execution is slow so it's not good at handling large data sets. It's also not a well structured language, so it's not well suited for building large, complex systems. Climate models have large data sets and are complex. Because of this, professional grade models usually use FORTRAN, not IDL.

*) Secondly, the code is terrible. Truly terrible. The hacked code is not in any way a professional product, but looks more like it was written by someone who either had no experience in programming beyond an introductory course or who was writing "throw away" code for some purpose other than creating a final professional result.

*) Third, the programmer knew they were a terrible programmer. In the comments in the code the programmer refers to his own lack of skill over and over again. I can't see such a person using that code to create data that would be even glanced at by a climate scientist.

*) Fourth, the data was terrible. According to the programmer who wrote the code, it was a complete mess and had to be heavily altered to get anything close to real world values. We can all say what we will about Phil Jones but three of the grants he received at CRU were for creating climate databases. It seems unlikely that he'd have gotten such grants repeatedly if his databases produced data that had no resemblance to the real world.

So what's it all add up to?

To me it seems the code in the leaked files is toy code using a toy database used to convert small data samples in a quick and dirty way without the need for a supercomputer and the programs running on the supercomputer. Nothing more.

But we'll never know for sure until CRU releases its official code to the world, allowing it to be reviewed by outside professionals.

References
CRU Files
NASA FORTRAN Climate Model
Wikipedia IDL page

And The Magicjava 2009 Peace Prize Goes To...

Announcement

The Magicjava Peace Prize Committee
The Magicjava Peace Prize for 2009
The Magicjava Peace Prize Committee has decided that the Magicjava Peace Prize for 2009 is to be shared by Stephen McIntyre for his tireless efforts to ensure correct scientific data and analysis are made available to the public regarding climate change of the Earth, and by the unknown hacker or whistleblower who released years of information from the Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia, revealing systematic attempts to hide and manipulate climate data, keeping scientists who have contrary views out of peer-review literature, and talk of destroying various files in order to prevent data being revealed under the Freedom of Information Act. It also revealed the computer code used to process climate data had numerous cases of manipulating the data in order to get the desired results.

On February 12, 2005, Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick published a paper in Geophysical Research Letters that claimed various errors in the methodology of a paper published by Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes frequently referred to as the MBH98 reconstruction. The paper by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick claimed that the "Hockey Stick" shape of the Mann et al. MBH98 reconstruction was the result of an invalid principal component method. They claimed that using the same steps as Mann et al., they were able to obtain a hockey stick shape as the first principal component in 99 percent of cases even if trendless red noise was used as input. This paper was nominated as a journal highlight by the American Geophysical Union, which publishes GRL, and attracted international attention for its claims to expose flaws in the reconstructions of past climate.

In 2007, Stephen McIntyre started auditing the various corrections made to temperature records, in particular those relating to the urban heat island effect. He discovered a small discontinuity in some U.S. records in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) dataset starting in January 2000. He emailed GISS advising them of the problem and within a couple of days GISS issued a new, corrected set of data and "thank[ed] Stephen McIntyre for bringing to our attention that such an adjustment is necessary to prevent creating an artificial jump in year 2000". The adjustment caused the average temperatures for the continental United States to be reduced about 0.15 °C during the years 2000-2006.

In the wake of the release of the Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia data Professor Professor Jones has stepped aside as Director while an investigation into the matter takes place, Pennsylvania State University has announced it will investigate Michael Mann, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) promised an investigation into claims that the CRU manipulated data to favour the conclusion that human activity is driving global warming, the Met Office, a UK agency which works with the Climate Research Unit in providing global-temperature information has said it will make its data available to the public, and Dr. John P. Holdren, advisor to the President of the United States for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) has told the United States Congress he believes all completed results of research not protected by national security concerns should be made available to the public.



References
Climate Audit
CRU Files

Palm Oil: The Green Mass Extinction

A new video is up. This one is about the dozens of animals facing extinction due to the activities of the palm oil industry. This video has been placed in the public domain .

ClimateGate: Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil

I've created some ClimateGate wallpapers and a banner. These images have been placed in the public domain. Click the images for a larger picture.

Fixing Climate Science II

The call for more transparency in science has reached all the way up to Congress. In the video above we see Congressman Sensenbrenner asking White House science czar John Holdren that the public have access to all documents prepared with government funding, including documents given to the IPCC. It's not clear to me if by "documents" the Congressman also means data and computer code.

Mr. Holdren's response is that the public should have access to the "results" of research that they pay for, excluding classified information and information that is incomplete. By phrasing his response this way, it's not clear to me if he believes raw data should be made available, or if only the so-called "value-added" data that was released by CRU should be made available. If only the "value-added" data is made available, 3rd parties cannot reproduce the steps needed to verify all of the various assumptions and "fixes" scientists make to the data.

What's really amazing though is we've been having the Global Warming debate since 1988 and Mr. Holdren had to say the public "should have access", he couldn't say "does have access".

To see the videos in their full context, follow the links below.

References
Video 1
Video 2
Fixing Climate Science

Two New ClimateGate Related Videos

Both videos have been placed into the public domain.