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Frozen in Time

Jan 16, 2010

Climategate: The Perils of Global Warming Models By John Droz, Jr., Pajamas Media

Everyone readily admits that things aren’t always what they seem. But are we really applying this knowledge in our daily dealings? Are we consciously ferreting out the illusory from the reality? I think not.

For instance, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we aren’t really being run by pandering politicians, self-serving lobbyists, fanatical environmentalists, and greedy Wall Street manipulators. They are the illusion.

There is another even more powerful (but much less visible) agent behind all of these puppets. The person behind the screen is the computer programmer. And, just like in the Wizard of OZ, they do not want you to look at this real controller.

I’ll probably have to turn in my membership card, but as a computer programmer (and physicist and environmental activist) I’m here to spill the beans about the Wiz. The first hint of trouble is spelled out in Wikipedia’s explanation about computer programmers:

The discipline differs from many other technical professions in that programmers generally do not need to be licensed or pass any standardized (or governmentally regulated) certification tests in order to call themselves “programmers” or even “software engineers.”

Hmmm.

My layperson explanation is that computer programming is all about making assumptions, and then converting these into mathematical equations. The big picture question is this: Is it really possible to accurately convert complex real-world situations into ones and zeros? Hal may think so, but higher processing brains say no. Yet this is continuously attempted, with very limited success. Let’s pull the screen back a bit more. We’ll start with an example about how such a model makes assumptions.

One of the computer programs I wrote was for debt collectors. A typical scenario was that a debtor was given a date to make a payment and the collection company didn’t receive it on time. What response is then appropriate? In such a circumstance the computer program typically makes an automatic contact with the debtor. (Remember there are thousands of these debtors, and it would be prohibitively time consuming for an agency person to manually check into and follow up each case.) So what to say in this correspondence to the debtor? Well, it comes down to the assumptions made by the computer programmer.

The programmer tries to simplify such situations into mathematical options. In this case they may decide that the question is: “Does the debtor have the money to make this payment: yes or no?” This relatively basic choice then leads to a Boolean progression within the program. How does the programmer (model) decide on yes or no? Well, other indicators would be used (e.g., were prior payments made on time) to come up with a statistical probability.

Of course, any computer model is not one set of choices, but rather a whole series of yes/no (if/or) calculations that lead to a conclusion. In a complex situation (e.g., debt collection, climate change, or financial derivatives) there could easily be a hundred such choices to deal with.

To understand the implications of that, let’s just consider the case where there are ten such decision points - each with a “yes” or “no” answer. At the end of such a pipeline, that means that there are 210 (i.e., 1024) possible results. That’s a lot of different potential conclusions.

Unfortunately, there are actually many more possibilities! The assumption that this debtor situation could be condensed down to a “yes” or “no” answer is not accurate. There are several other real situations that fall outside of “yes” or “no.” For instance, what if the debtor never got a notice in the first place that the amount was due by the date the agency is monitoring? Or what if the debtor sent the money and it got lost in transition? Or what if the debtor made the payment to the original person they owed, rather than the collection agency? Or what if the debtor sent in the money on time, and the collection agency incorrectly didn’t credit the debtor for the payment? Etc., etc.

For the computer program (model) to be accurate, all of these scenarios need to be able to be handled properly (legally, timely, etc.). Can you begin to see the complexity here, just with this very simple example of a payment not being received on time?

There is still another significant factor (we’re up to #4 now) not mentioned yet. What about the situation where the debtor hasn’t paid, but it’s because his child has MS, and he has no insurance? How does a computer programmer write code for more abstract concepts, like “fairness”? In other words, can ones and zeros be arranged in such a way to represent intangibles? I think not.

So the bottom line question is this: Is there any way that a computer program can correctly handle all of these real-world possibilities - even in this simple debt collection case? The answer is no. We have considerable difficulties just translating the relatively simple thing we call language - e.g., Greek biblical texts into English. How many versions of the Bible are there? Why isn’t there just one?

Can we possibly hope to translate a process much more complicated than just words? We can certainly try, but clearly the answer is that there is a lot lost in the translation of any complex scenario (debtors, energy performance, etc.) into mathematical equations and computer code.

Some uninformed parties believe that the user has control of all the variables, and can manually (and accurately) change scenarios. That is incorrect, as the user-controlled elements only represent a small fraction of the actual number of factors that are built into the computer model. A similar fallacy is to think something like “we know the assumptions that the programmers made, and are adjusting accordingly.” This is wrong.

In writing a computer program of any complexity, there are literally hundreds of assumptions made. The computer programmer does not reveal all these to his customer, for much the same reasons that an accountant does not tell his client all of the assumptions made in preparing a tax return. He goes over a few of the more basic items, and then says “sign here.”

Oh, yes, this example brings up still another major variable (#7): the data the programmer uses as the basis for his creation. Just like preparing a tax return depends on two parties working together, writing a computer model is a collaboration between scientist and programmer. If the taxpayer gives incomplete or inaccurate data to the accountant, the result will be wrong. What’s disconcerting is that in many cases, neither party will know that the results are in error.

Similarly if the scientist (inadvertently) gives incomplete or inaccurate data to the programmer to use in his creation, the result will likewise be wrong. And neither party will know it. There is still one more significant variable (#8) that we have to take into account. After a computer model is generated, there is an interpreter (e.g., IPCC) that translates the “results” for politicians and the public (i.e., the media).

Here’s a surprise: These public interpretations are influenced by such factors as political, religious, environmental, financial, and scientific opinions. In their public revelations, do the interpreters explain all of their underlying biases? By now you know the answer: absolutely not. When these are introduced into the equation we obviously have strayed so far from scientific fact that it is not even in sight anymore.

So we need to think very carefully before we take major actions (e.g., spend a few trillion dollars based on climate predictions, wind energy projected performance, etc.) that are almost entirely based on computer models. What to do? Should we just scrap all computer models? No, that’s the other extreme. Computer models have merit - but shouldn’t be the tail wagging the dog.

We should realistically see computer models for what they are - tools to assist us in organizing our thoughts, and producers of highly subjective results that are simply starting points for real scientific analysis. Because of their inherent limitations (which I’ve just touched on here) all computer models should be treated with a very healthy degree of skepticism.

To insure appropriate integrity, all computer models regarding matters of importance should be subjected to the rigors of scientific methodology. If they can’t accurately and continuously replicate the results of real-world data, then they should be discarded. Unfortunately, that is not what is happening. We have gotten so addicted to the illusion that these programs are accurate - and some have become so agenda driven - that we are now adjusting or discarding real-world data that doesn’t agree with the model. This is insane. If a model has not been proven to fully reflect reality, then it has very limited use and should be treated with the same degree of consideration that one might give a horoscope. See post here.

Jan 12, 2010

Central Park Temperatures - Still a Mystery By Joseph D’Aleo

In Central Park Temperature - Three Radically Different Us Government Versions on Icecap in 2008 here, we noted some significant differences between the various NOAA versions for the stations.

The raw observations are taken from the stations then adjusted to account for local factors like site changes, changes in instrumentation, time of observation and at least at one time for urbanization in USHCN Version 1 (Karl 1988). Data sets are created for the US (USHCN) and NOAA global data bases (GHCN).

Historical Central Park observations were taken from the periphery of the park from 1909 to 1919 at the Arsenal Building 5th Ave (between 63rd & 64th) and then since 1920 at the Belvedere Castle on Transverse Rd (near 79th & 81st).

We found a surprisingly large difference from the NCDC United States USHCN version 1 and the NCDC global GHCN for that station (below, enlarged here).

The USHCN version 1 had an urban adjustment (Karl 1988) when it was introduced in 1990. The cooling was as 7F for July and 6F for January. Notice however as some state climatologists noticed, the annual adjustments began to diminish in 1999 and in version 2 of USHCN disappeared altogether (below, enlarged here).

This led Steve McIntyre here to quip “If one reverse engineers this adjustment to calculate the New York City population used in the USHCN urban adjustment, the results are, in Per’s words, ‘gobsmacking’ (utterly astounding), even by climate science standards.” This was because, it could only be explained by a massive depopulation of New York City (below, enlarged here).

Shown clearly not the case (below, enlarged here).

The story doesn’t end there. The same NCDC maintains a global data base of station data used for climate change assessment called GHCN Version 2 of GHCN contains some of the same adjustments except for the Karl urban adjustment. Central Park is one of the GHCN sites. Note in the top graph above, it mysteriously warms not cools New York’s Central Park by 4F.

GISS USES GHCN AS UNADJUSTED DATA BEFORE HOMOGENIZATION

GISS recently eliminated GHCN with USHCN adjustments as one of the data access options here. “We no longer include data adjusted by GHCN”. They claim they start with GHCN ‘unadjusted’ before they work their own homogenization and other magical wonders.

I downloaded the Central Park ‘unadjusted’ GHCN data from GISS and did a comparison of annual mean GHCN with the raw annual mean data downloaded from the NWS New York City Office web site here.

We found that the two data sets were not the same. For some unknown reason, Central Park was colder in the unadjusted data sets in the early record as much as 3F than the raw observation records. The difference gradually diminished so, currently the changes are small (2008 was the same). Some recent years the ‘unadjusted’ adjustments were inexplicably positive (below, enlarged here.

The difference is shown below, enlarged here.

Thus in the so called unadjusted data, the warming (due to urbanization) is somehow increased from 2.5 to 4.5F.

E.M. Smith downloaded the latest iteration of GHCN Central Park directly from NOAA and found it had found its way back closer to the raw data. He notes there are many iterations of the data sets out there. The differences is them is much greater than the changes over time calling into question our ability to accurately assess climate trends. See his discussion here.

Jan 12, 2010

Freeze May Kill 60,000 By Stuart Winter and Kirsty Buchanan, Express UK

Update: Read more here on Britain’s early incredible winter.

As Britain’s winter of discontent threatened a fresh wave of blizzards and freezing temperatures last night, Gordon Brown stood accused of failing to protect the nation.

With up to 60,000 deaths predicted because of the relentless cold and the country’s major roads facing a gritting crisis, Downing Street was heavily criticised for the widespread chaos.

Conservative leader David Cameron slammed the lack of leadership at Number 10 - as the Prime Minister all but ignored the national crisis in a battle for his own political survival.

Mr Cameron said: “At times like these the country needs strong and united leadership. “We can’t go on with a Government that is more focused on its internal problems than trying to help people through difficult times, including some of the worst weather conditions the UK has experienced for years.” The Prime Minister last night admitted that for many people this was a “very serious, worrying and frustrating time”.

But he tried to play down the crisis in a podcast from Downing Street. The embattled Premier insisted gas supplies were not threatened and that everything was being done to keep the roads clear. But the winter of 2010 threatens to become one of the biggest civil crises in modern times.

Experts predict a massive spike in death rates - with up to 60,000 more people dying than average because of the wintry conditions. The British civilian death toll in the Second World War was 67,000. The economy also faces losses of up to 15billion pounds as millions of workers are forced to stay indoors because of the impact on the transport system.

The AA warned the country could expect “creeping paralysis” as grit stocks dwindle over the next two weeks. With no end to the snow and freezing temperatures in sight, the country is facing the prospect of its essential services being unable to function. Despite the efforts of tens of thousands of local authority workers, emergency services personnel and others, the superstructure necessary to cope with a prolonged deep freeze has been revealed to be inadequate.

Shadow Communities and Local Government Secretary Caroline Spelman called for an emergency statement in the Commons as Britain braced itself for a second week of Arctic weather. She said: “I think the Government should voluntarily make a statement to the House on Monday. The statement will have to be made in the Commons. I think what is difficult for local government is that confusion reigns.”

The Conservatives last night accused Labour of sitting on a report for five months which outlined a new strategy for tackling extreme winter weather conditions. Commissioned in the wake of the February 2009 cold snap, the report, by the UK Roads Liaison Group, was completed in July but not produced in the House until December 15 - two days before the big freeze struck. Miss Spelman said that Transport Secretary Lord Adonis could lose his job. She said: “I think he is in danger. It is cheap currency to say a government minister should go, but he should get a grip on the situation and sort it out but he is a bit late into the game.”

Plunging Arctic temperatures and high energy bills have created the “perfect storm” to send winter mortality rates to appallingly high levels. The persistent snow and frost make the elderly far more vulnerable to killer diseases such as pneumonia and bronchitis and also more susceptible to strokes and heart attacks.

Charities are calling for a major shake-up in the way the elderly are helped to survive. It is estimated as many as one in three pensioner households are spending more than 10 per cent of their income on energy bills - the official definition of fuel poverty. As many comparisons are being made between the winter of 2010 and the Big Freeze of ‘63, a look back at official Government statistics reveals that there were more than 89,000 excess deaths that year.

Andrew Harrop, head of public Policy at Age Concern and Help the Aged, said: “It is shocking that there are more older people dying in winter compared to the rest of the year in England than countries with more severe weather such as Sweden and Finland. We are concerned that prolonged cold weather and high energy bills could create the perfect storm for hard-up older people this winter, causing hardship, illness and isolation.”

A spokesman for the Local Government Association said: “For older people freezing temperatures pose a very real danger, and sadly there is a risk of people dying unnecessarily. It would be a tragedy if any person was to die this winter because they kept their heating down because they feared a bill they could not afford.”

Tory shadow health spokesman Mike Penning said: “I was in my local accident and emergency unit recently and there were elderly people suffering from falls and hypothermia who are frightened to turn up the heating because they don’t want to be in debt.”

This weather pattern is deeply entrenched, say experts, raising the prospect of a prolonged freeze to rival the notorious winters of 1963 and 1947. Read more here.

Jan 10, 2010

The mini ice age starts here By David Rose, UK Mail online

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Enlarged here.

Their predictions - based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans - challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 - and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

The scientists’ predictions also undermine the standard climate computer models, which assert that the warming of the Earth since 1900 has been driven solely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions and will continue as long as carbon dioxide levels rise. They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a ‘warm mode’ as opposed to the present ‘cold mode’.

This challenge to the widespread view that the planet is on the brink of an irreversible catastrophe is all the greater because the scientists could never be described as global warming ‘deniers’ or sceptics. However, both main British political parties continue to insist that the world is facing imminent disaster without drastic cuts in CO2.

This image of the UK taken from NASA’s multi-national Terra satellite on Thursday shows the extent of the freezing weather

Last week, as Britain froze, Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband maintained in a parliamentary answer that the science of global warming was ‘settled’.
Among the most prominent of the scientists is Professor Mojib Latif, a leading member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has been pushing the issue of man-made global warming on to the international political agenda since it was formed 22 years ago.

Prof Latif, who leads a research team at the renowned Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University, has developed new methods for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000ft beneath the surface, where the cooling and warming cycles start. He and his colleagues predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September.

Last night he told The Mail on Sunday: ‘A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles - perhaps as much as 50 per cent. They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer. The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.’

As Europe, Asia and North America froze last week, conventional wisdom insisted that this was merely a ‘blip’ of no long-term significance. Though record lows were experienced as far south as Cuba, where the daily maximum on beaches normally used for winter bathing was just 4.5C, the BBC assured viewers that the big chill was merely short-term ‘weather’ that had nothing to do with ‘climate’, which was still warming.

The work of Prof Latif and the other scientists refutes that view. On the one hand, it is true that the current freeze is the product of the ‘Arctic oscillation’ - a weather pattern that sees the development of huge ‘blocking’ areas of high pressure in northern latitudes, driving polar winds far to the south.

Meteorologists say that this is at its strongest for at least 60 years. As a result, the jetstream - the high-altitude wind that circles the globe from west to east and normally pushes a series of wet but mild Atlantic lows across Britain - is currently running not over the English Channel but the Strait of Gibraltar.

A composite photograph released last year to highlight the issue of melting ice and global warming

However, according to Prof Latif and his colleagues, this in turn relates to much longer-term shifts - what are known as the Pacific and Atlantic ‘multi-decadal oscillations’ (MDOs). For Europe, the crucial factor here is the temperature of the water in the middle of the North Atlantic, now several degrees below its average when the world was still warming.

But the effects are not confined to the Northern Hemisphere. Prof Anastasios Tsonis, head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, has recently shown that these MDOs move together in a synchronised way across the globe, abruptly flipping the world’s climate from a ‘warm mode’ to a ‘cold mode’ and back again in 20 to 30-year cycles.

‘They amount to massive rearrangements in the dominant patterns of the weather,’ he said yesterday, ‘and their shifts explain all the major changes in world temperatures during the 20th and 21st Centuries. We have such a change now and can therefore expect 20 or 30 years of cooler temperatures.’ Prof Tsonis said that the period from 1915 to 1940 saw a strong warm mode, reflected in rising temperatures.

Pictures of the snow in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, last week show the city is the coldest it has been since 1970

But from 1940 until the late Seventies, the last MDO cold-mode era, the world cooled, despite the fact that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continued to rise. Many of the consequences of the recent warm mode were also observed 90 years ago. For example, in 1922, the Washington Post reported that Greenland’s glaciers were fast disappearing, while Arctic seals were ‘finding the water too hot’. It interviewed a Captain Martin Ingebrigsten, who had been sailing the eastern Arctic for 54 years: ‘He says that he first noted warmer conditions in 1918, and since that time it has gotten steadily warmer. Where formerly great masses of ice were found, there are now moraines, accumulations of earth and stones. At many points where glaciers formerly extended into the sea they have entirely disappeared. As a result, the shoals of fish that used to live in these waters had vanished, while the sea ice beyond the north coast of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean had melted. Warm Gulf Stream water was still detectable within a few hundred miles of the Pole.’

In contrast, Prof Tsonis said, last week 56 per cent of the surface of the United States was covered by snow. ‘That hasn’t happened for several decades,’ he pointed out. ‘It just isn’t true to say this is a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while.’ He recalled that towards the end of the last cold mode, the world’s media were preoccupied by fears of freezing. For example, in 1974, a Time magazine cover story predicted ‘Another Ice Age’, saying: ‘Man may be somewhat responsible - as a result of farming and fuel burning [which is] blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the Earth.’

Prof Tsonis said: ‘Perhaps we will see talk of an ice age again by the early 2030s, just as the MDOs shift once more and temperatures begin to rise.’ Like Prof Latif, Prof Tsonis is not a climate change ‘denier’. There is, he said, a measure of additional ‘background’ warming due to human activity and greenhouse gases that runs across the MDO cycles.

‘This isn’t just a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while’. But he added: ‘I do not believe in catastrophe theories. Man-made warming is balanced by the natural cycles, and I do not trust the computer models which state that if CO2 reaches a particular level then temperatures and sea levels will rise by a given amount. These models cannot be trusted to predict the weather for a week, yet they are running them to give readings for 100 years.’

Prof Tsonis said that when he published his work in the highly respected journal Geophysical Research Letters, he was deluged with ‘hate emails’. He added: ‘People were accusing me of wanting to destroy the climate, yet all I’m interested in is the truth.’ He said he also received hate mail from climate change sceptics, accusing him of not going far enough to attack the theory of man-made warming.

The work of Profs Latif, Tsonis and their teams raises a crucial question: If some of the late 20th Century warming was caused not by carbon dioxide but by MDOs, then how much? Tsonis did not give a figure; Latif suggested it could be anything between ten and 50 per cent. Other critics of the warming orthodoxy say the role played by MDOs is even greater. William Gray, emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University, said that while he believed there had been some background rise caused by greenhouse gases, the computer models used by advocates of man-made warming had hugely exaggerated their effect. According to Prof Gray, these distort the way the atmosphere works. ‘Most of the rise in temperature from the Seventies to the Nineties was natural,’ he said. ‘Very little was down to CO2 - in my view, as little as five to ten per cent.’

But last week, die-hard warming advocates were refusing to admit that MDOs were having any impact. In March 2000, Dr David Viner, then a member of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the body now being investigated over the notorious ‘Warmergate’ leaked emails, said that within a few years snowfall would become [a very rare and exciting event’ in Britain, and that ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’. Now the head of a British Council programme with an annual 10 million pound budget that raises awareness of global warming among young people abroad, Dr Viner last week said he still stood by that prediction: ‘We’ve had three weeks of relatively cold weather, and that doesn’t change anything. ‘This winter is just a little cooler than average, and I still think that snow will become an increasingly rare event.’

The longer the cold spell lasts, the harder it may be to persuade the public of that assertion.