The republican party is now essentially lobotomized on Climate Change – and John Huntsman has decided that he does not want to be known for integrity or independence.
I guess it makes sense. Consistency does not seem to be a requirement for the Republican front runners. In fact, it looks like maleable, love-me love-me flip flopping seems to be what the tea party is looking for in a candidate.
Washington Monthly:
Remember when Jon Huntsman, the so-called moderate of the Republican presidential field, was saying sensible things about climate change? Well, forget it.
Jon Huntsman attended a packed blogger sit down at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday. TPM’s Evan McMorris-Santoro attended, pressing the GOP presidential candidate about his position on climate change.
In August, Huntsman acknowledged the broad body of science pointing to climate change. Seated at an elite conservative think tank, however, Huntsman played a different tune, saying climate scientists “owe us more” information before we can decide if climate change is real.
“I think there’s probably more debate to be played out within the scientific community,” he said.
up until now, Huntsman was known for carving his own path and listening to the science on climate change –
Huntsman boasted, “To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”
What was “crazy” was thinking Huntsman could thrive in national Republican politics saying sane things about science. Now that the pressure’s on, he’s pulling a Romney, abandoning what he knows to be true, and desperately trying to tell his party’s right-wing base what it wants to hear.
Station-by-station monthly averages are better than “gridded” data, which is all Jones was willing to release, but it certainly isn’t raw station data. Why won’t they just release the raw data?
Because the CRU doesn’t *own* the raw daily data in question — if you deniers really want raw *daily* data, you can use the GHCN raw daily data, or you can contact the various met offices who supply the CRU with raw monthly data and get the daily data from them (you may have to pay for a lot of it, being that the CRU uses a lot of proprietary data that it has access to under licence agreements). Or you can use the GHCN raw daily data-set, which is public domain and comes with no restrictions on use or redistribution.
Besides, the raw monthly data are just fine for computing long-term temperature trends, your made-up objections nothwithstanding. There are things that you can do with daily data that you can’t do with monthly data, but long-term temperature trend calculations aren’t one of them.
Besides, the global-warming results published by the CRU/NASA/etc are presented as average *annual* temperature anomalies. You have not provided a single valid reason why the monthly average data are not adequate for computing long-term temperature trends. All you are doing here is flailing, trying to come up with silly ad-hoc excuses as to why you can’t or won’t do any analysis work of your own.
Not that the monthly vs. daily data thing matters to you guys anyway, because you haven’t lifted a finger to analyze *any* temperature data, monthly *or* daily.
Want to impress us? Stop with the excuses, roll up your sleeves and get to work producing some real *results*. All of the data, software, and documentation you need to perform your own verification of the global-temperature record are already in the public domain.
None of it, g2? Do you really believe that the UEA CRU cannot release any raw station data? Do you really believe that the UEA CRU released all the data they legally can release (about 5 years late)?
I certainly don’t believe that, and I doubt you really do, either, particularly in light of the climategate email exchanges in which they discussed using intellectual property claims as an excuse for keeping data secret, and their history of denying skeptics access to the data based on undocumented verbal confidentiality agreements which they claimed existed, but of which they had no evidence!
And what do you think of Jones’ resolve to destroy data, rather than let skeptics get ahold of it? I’m talking about this email to Mann, in which Jones says that if McIntyre requests the station data under the Freedom Of Information Act, he (Jones) will delete it rather than let McIntyre see it:
http://www.burtonsys.com/FOIA/1107454306.txt
Do you think those are the words of an ethical scientist, who has confidence that his results will stand up to critical scrutiny?
As for the sleeve-rolling, I’m a sea level guy, not a temperature guy. We can’t all do everything.
Give it up, David — if you had any clue about the global temperature data set, you’d know that the GHCN raw data-set is perfectly suitable for computing global-average temperature results.
Two points and I am finished:
1) The CRU (and other organizations) have already released enough raw data for any *competent* analyst to perform an independent verification of their results.
2) If you can’t figure out how to perform an independent check of the CRU’s global-average temperature results from the data and documentation already available to you, then you have no business participating in this discussion. You are just too incompetent.
Why do you keep changing the subject, g2?
The issue isn’t how adequate or inadequate is the data that the CRU finally released (5 years late, under UIC order), for some particular purpose. The issue is that you claimed that the CRU released raw temperature data, but there seems to be no raw temperature data at all on their site, only monthly averages.
Could it be that you know you were mistaken — the CRU has not released raw temperature data — but you don’t want to admit it?
Or maybe there’s raw data on the CRU web site somewhere, in some obscure corner of the site, that I haven’t been able to find? If so, I’d be grateful if you would direct me to it.
But if not, then please just admit that the CRU has not released raw station-by-station temperature measurement data.
And why won’t you say what you think of Jones’ stated resolve to destroy data, rather than let skeptics get ahold of it? I’m talking about this email to Mann, in which Jones says that if McIntyre requests the station data under the Freedom Of Information Act, he (Jones) will delete it rather than let McIntyre see it:
http://www.burtonsys.com/FOIA/1107454306.txt
Do you think those are the words of an ethical scientist, who has confidence that his results will stand up to critical scrutiny?
I’ll tell you what I believe, Dave. You sceptics have gone on a fishing trip and caught nothing. Or at least nothing that is recognised as being significant by anyone whose opinion matters.
Unfortunately, you guys have nevertheless managed to do just enough to prevent widespread public pressure upon politicians (sufficient to over-ride special interests vested in the oil industry) being mobilised to prevent environmental catastrophe. Congratulations, I do hope you are proud of yourself because you children and grandchildren will not be.
If you’re in any doubt, you should watch the final episode of the BBC’sFrozen Planet – it very carefully avoids attributing causation; it simply reports the fact that change is accelerating rapidly. It even suggests that an ice-free Arctic might have advantages for potential oil exploration (although I am hoping the producers were trying to get around accusation of bias by being use or irony).
Do you think those are the words of an ethical scientist, who has confidence that his results will stand up to critical scrutiny?
Those are the words of an ethical scientist who has become terminally exasperated with having to waste a bunch his time catering to incompetent jerks.
Mathematician & Statistician Steve McIntyre is a polymath and a true genius. He’s also the guy who, despite being denied access to NASA’s temperature corrections, algorithms and code, nevertheless reverse-engineered NASA’s work well enough to identify a major error, forcing them to revise the reported 48-state U.S. temperature record, which revision left 1934 as the warmest year on record:
http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/08/1998_no_longer_the_hottest_yea.html
The reason that Jones. Mann et al hate Steve McIntyre is not that he’s a jerk (he isn’t at all), and certainly not that he’s incompetent. It is just the opposite: they hate him because he is way, way too competent for their comfort, and because he’s incorruptible. That’s presumably why you hate him, too, g2-b31f1590b0e74a6d1af4639162aa7f3f.
Today’s James “One man truth squad” Inhofe’s video…
http://bit.ly/vI2Drn
Regarding, McIntyre and his competence, he screwed up on multiple levels when he tried to claim that Mann’s processing created hockey sticks from synthetic noise.
Screwup #1) McIntyre used Mann’s tree-ring data to generate a noise model for his synthetic noise. But he forgot to subtract out (i.e. detrend) the long-term global-warming signal from the tree-ring data before he used it to construct his noise model. As a result, McIntyre’s “synthetic noise” was heavily contaminated with the long-term global-warming signal, rendering it useless as a true representation of tree-ring noise. Folks, if you are going to use real data as a “template” for generating random noise, you need to remove the signal components first. If you model your noise with data contaminated by signal, then your “synthetic noise” isn’t going to be a realistic noise model. That is exactly what McIntyre did here.
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Bullshit. As usual, you rely exclusively on biased sources using cherry-picked data
See http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Journals/rahmstorf_vermeer_2011.pdf
You come here and present a minority report from the Republican minority as if it was an objective source – are you fracking kidding?
I’ll ask you again, despite the fact that you ignore all pointed questions. Where do you think all the melt water, and all the expansion of heated water, goes? Perhaps it is magically made to disappear by the same cabal of conspiring scientists implied by the minority report?
Tell us, you who communicates here as daveburton, do you receive financial remuneration or free goods, or barter, or any compensation for your efforts on the internet? Just for the record.
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McIntyre screwup #2) When you run noise through Mann’s procedure, you can’t just look at the leading principal component (singular vector) alone — you also need to look at the associated singular value. The singular vector tells you something about the shape of the hockey stick (but nothing about its size). The associated singular *value* will tell you how big the hockey stick is. Is it a “big” hockey stick that stands above the noise (and represents a real global-warming signal)? Or is it a “tiny” hockey stick that is buried in the noise (and represents nothing significant)? Unless you compare the “noise: hockey-stick singular value with the real “tree ring” hockey stick singular value, then you just won’t know. As it turns out, McIntyre’s “noise hockey stick” singular values were much smaller than Mann “tree ring” singular values.
McIntyre screwup #3) Once you have your singular vectors, you need to regress them against the instrumental temperature record to see if you can calibrate/verify them. McIntyre didn’t even do this with his “noise hockey sticks” to see if they how they would calibrate/verify against the instrumental temperature data. If you are going to claim that Mann’s method will mistakenly treat random noise as a hockey-stick temperature signal, you need to go through the entire procedure (including the calibration/verification steps) to see if it is really possible for Mann’s method to confuse noise with the global-warming signal. McIntyre failed to do this.
(continued)
McIntyre may be a well qualified statistician, but when it comes to analyzing paleoclimate data, he’s incompetent. Talented people can avoid falling into the “incompetence” trap by doing their homework first, but McIntyre failed to do so.
Also, regarding his pestering the CRU for the raw temperature data, if McIntyre were competent when it comes to analyzing global-temperature data, he would have known that you can validate the CRU’s global-temperature results without any access to the CRU’s raw data and code. Plenty of public-domain raw temperature data are available to do this, and the procedure for computing global-average temperatures from temperature station data is straighforward and well documented.
So with regard to the CRU temperature data, McIntyre was either completely incompetent or was just interested in harassing the CRU staff. Either way, he was not acting as a legitimate player.