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Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Labels: homosexuality Instead, it appears that at least one of our local leaders (Supervisor Bevan Dufty) has agreed to take the matter "under advisement." Since our local leaders are having trouble speaking the obvious, we will: Public sex is not appropriate at Folsom Street Fair or anywhere else. Even in San Francisco. Public sex isn't just lewd, it's illegal under state law. San Francisco officials and police have historically given the fairs broad leeway to self-police bawdy behavior, but that should have been revoked the moment that citizens complained. Instead, people are giving serious thought to ways to make the streets safe for public sex and unsafe for public decency. Enough. This is a quality-of-life issue that should have been tackled years ago. Local leaders need to stop clowning around and insist that everyone obey the law. Labels: homosexuality Labels: global warming Labels: terrorism NEW YORK -- Opponents of gay marriage celebrated a decisive vote in the New York State Senate, where a proposal to legalize same-sex marriage was defeated 38 to 24 on Wednesday. The unexpectedly wide margin was delivered in a relatively liberal state where the other chamber of the legislature has thrice approved the measure and the governor, David A. Paterson, had been poised to sign it into law. The vote prompted pronouncements that the momentum for gay marriage had been not only halted, but also effectively reversed. Same-sex marriage is legal in Iowa, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut and, most recently, New Hampshire, where it goes into effect Jan. 1. Labels: homosexuality Researchers were conducting a study comparing the views of men in their 20s who had never been exposed to pornography with regular users. But their project stumbled at the first hurdle when they failed to find a single man who had not been seen it. “We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography,” said Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse. “We couldn't find any.” Although hampered in its original aim, the study did examined the habits of those young men who used pornography – which would appear to be all of them. Prof Lajeunesse interviewed 20 heterosexual male university students who consumed pornography, and found on average, they first watched pornography when they were 10 years old. Around 90 per cent of consumption was on the internet, while 10 per cent of material came from video stores. Predictably, the IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri reacted angrily citing the IPCC 2007 climate change reports which asserted that the (Himalayan) glaciers are receding faster than in any other part of the world and if the present rate ( of melting) continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps even sooner is very high if the earth keeps warming at the current rate. Several other Indian scientists and glaciologists have got into the debate now with some of them criticizing the Indian Government with an ostrich-like attitude in the face of impending disaster. What is the reality? Let us take a closer look: First, where did this number 2035 (the year when glaciers could vanish) come from? According to Prof Graham Cogley (Trent University, Ontario), a short article on the future of glaciers by a Russian scientist (Kotlyakov, V.M., 1996, The future of glaciers under the expected climate warming, 61-66, in Kotlyakov, V.M., ed., 1996, Variations of Snow and Ice in the Past and at Present on a Global and Regional Scale, Technical Documents in Hydrology, 1. UNESCO, Paris (IHP-IV Project H-4.1). 78p estimates 2350 as the year for disappearance of glaciers, but the IPCC authors misread 2350 as 2035 in the Official IPCC documents, WGII 2007 p. 493! Labels: global warming Labels: global warming Labels: history Labels: humor Labels: global warming SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years. The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation. The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building. ... In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.” The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible. Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said. Labels: global warming Labels: global warming After my paper was published, the State University of New York — where the research discussed in my paper was conducted — carried out an investigation. During the investigation, I was not interviewed — contrary to the university’s policies, federal regulations, and natural justice. I was allowed to comment on the report of the investigation, before the report’s release. But I was not allowed to see the report. Truly Kafkaesque. The report apparently concluded that there was no fraud. The leaked files contain the defense used against my allegation, a defense obviously and strongly contradicted by the documentary record. It is no surprise then that the university still refuses to release the report. (More details on all of this — including source documents — are on my site.) My paper demonstrates that by 2001, Jones knew there were severe problems with the urbanization research. Yet Jones continued to rely on that research in his work, including in his work for the latest report of the IPCC. Labels: global warming There are four major classes of such bugs known definitively to be in the code. 1) Use of static data or static places: This means the code sometimes stores things in a particular place, but always the same place. If two instances of the code are ever running at the same time, they will step on each other, producing incorrect output. This is the least serious, as someone could simply assure us that they never ran two instances at once. We’d have to trust them on this, but under normal circumstances, that wouldn’t be a disaster. 2) Failure to test for error conditions. In many places, the code fails to test for obviously insane error conditions but just goes on processing. That means that if the input is somehow fundamentally broken, the output may be subtly broken. Again, we don’t have the input to retest. 3) Reliance on the user to select the correct input sets. The code relies on the user to tell it what data to process and doesn’t make sure the data is correct, it must trust the user. CRU had data sets with identical names but fundamentally different data. There’s no way now to be sure uncorrected data wasn’t used where corrected data was appropriate or that data wasn’t corrected twice. 4) Reliance on the user to select the correct run-time options. During the run, many of the programs relied on the user to select the correct options as the run progressed. The options were not embedded in the results. A single mis-key could cause the output to be invalid. Unfortunately, these types of defects combine in a multiplicative way. A mis-key during a run could result in subtly bad input that could cause an error condition that’s not detected resulting in radically bad output that’s not detected because of lack of input validation ... Minor quibble here: If the program gives garbage output for “obviously insane” or “fundamentally broken” inputs, this may not be the fault of the program. If I’d spent my time doing input validity tests on all the possible inputs to subroutines I wrote, I wouldn’t get at real work done. At some time, you have to assume some good nature in others, and get on with the tasks at hand. After all, they’re using your code, you aren’t using their data..... Sounds cruel, but if you’ve worked in the field... If they pay me for taking care of their excessive stupidity, then again.... Not to mention, what do you care if the output is wrong for “fundamentally broken” input? I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can't possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging. The response of the greens and most of the scientists I know is profoundly ironic, as we spend so much of our time confronting other people's denial. Pretending that this isn't a real crisis isn't going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We'll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again. It is true that much of what has been revealed could be explained as the usual cut and thrust of the peer review process, exacerbated by the extraordinary pressure the scientists were facing from a denial industry determined to crush them. One of the most damaging emails was sent by the head of the climatic research unit, Phil Jones. He wrote "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" ... When it comes to his handling of Freedom of Information requests, Professor Jones might struggle even to use a technical defence. If you take the wording literally, in one case he appears to be suggesting that emails subject to a request be deleted, which means that he seems to be advocating potentially criminal activity. Even if no other message had been hacked, this would be sufficient to ensure his resignation as head of the unit. Labels: global warming
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I Guess This Theory Is Dead
I mentioned a while back that Hawaii has a procedure for issuing birth certificates to people born outside Hawaii, but legally adopted in Hawaii--and suggested that perhaps this is the reason the long-form birth certificate hasn't been exposed. I see now that Hawaii actually has regulations on the issuance of birth certificates for the foreign born that requires the birth certificate to clearly state country of birth.
The question still remains: why is Obama so intent on keeping that long-form birth certificate hidden--enough so that it is worth having a bunch of very high priced lawyers fighting this matter out in the courts at probably $500 per hour. Since he seems to have been born in Hawaii, it almost certainly isn't a question of whether he is legally qualified to be President of the United States. I'm guessing that there is something terribly embarrassing on the long-form that is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep hidden.
For Those Who Think Homosexuality Is An Alternative Lifestyle
Gateway Pundit has a detailed report on the books that GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network) recommends that schools offer to kids. GLSEN is the organization that Kevin Jennings used to run before Obama gave him an appointment as the "Safe Schools Czar." The books that GLSEN promotes to schools are explicit pedophile pornography--as the excerpts will demonstrate. To call these excerpts disgusting doesn't even begin to describe it--many readers will be nauseated, angry, and filled with rage seeing what one of Obama's advisors thinks is appropriate for kids.
To put it bluntly, GLSEN's book recommendations alone demonstrate that pedophilia and homosexuality are closely allied. Many homosexuals are not pedophiles--but GLSEN clearly sees these as kindred movements.
Not surprisingly, there has been a cyberattack on Gateway Pundit because homosexual activists really don't want Americans to know what depravity and evil GLSEN and similar homosexual advocacy groups are trying to put onto our kids.
A Courageous Editorial
At least in San Francisco. In most of America, this wouldn't even be an issue. From the December 2, 2009 San Francisco Chronicle:Public sex tents? Now there's an idea that should have been shot down the second it was announced from the mouth of a member of the "leather community" in response to complaints about public sex at Folsom Street Fair and its smaller sibling fair, Up Your Alley.
San Francisco is such a sick and disgusting place. Let me emphasize: there's a reason that San Francisco city government tolerates this behavior in public places. They aren't doing this because 1% of 1% of the population is sick and depraved. It's a lot bigger fraction of the population that finds this acceptable.
The comments are pretty indicative of the state of San Francisco culture:Why doesn't the author of this editorial just find a nice safe mall to go to on Folsom Day? If sex tents are not your thing, you can choose to not go into one. I think moral outrage and the impulse to send the police in to facilitate one's control-freaky intolerance for that which one can simply and easily opt-out of is FAR MORE DESTRUCTIVE to society than public sex.. or sex in a tent. STAY AT HOME AND FAINT ON YOUR OWN DAMN COUCH, YOU VICTORIAN CONTROL FREAK PRUDE!
and:How is this a "quality of life" issue? Those who object to witnessing sexual behavior in public certainly don't have to go. Who are the complainers? I'll give some latitude to the people who live there and are impacted, though SOMETHING is gonna impact you in every neighborhood. It is a city, after all. But most of the complainers don't live in the neighborhood -- many don't even live in the City. Why is it a bad idea to use tents to hide the behavior from people who don't wanna watch?
Really?? This is folsom street. Of course guys and girls str8 and gay are going to be having sex in public. It is an erotic leather festival. And for the people who live on the street and complain.. dude.. what were you thinking moving to Folsom street?! This is what folsom street is all about and has always been about. You don't really have the right to complain. If you wanted to live in suburbia you should have moved there. Let folsom street be folsom street.
and:Grow up. If you don't like it, DON'T GO. Now one "runs" into the Folsom Street Fair by mistake. We all know what it is, what it does, and what a wonderful freedom it is. I'm a married man who has not caught "the gay" yet thank God (though I wash my hands a lot), but this is about personal freedoms. If you can't handle either avoiding the Fair, ignoring the Fair or going to and enjoying the Fair, then pack up your stuff, leave SF and move east, they are more like you there. You can all be stuffy together. Or maybe you would like to move to a country where they kill people with "the gay"?
and:
All I can look forward to is when I'm 60, I'm the "old conservative" one, and everyone younger than me doesn't even remember Prop 8, Civil Rights movement, JFK, Bobby, King, Milk and why on earth we ever kept down other humans when there are all these aliens and robots around to abuse.Why are Americans so hung up on sex? It is just sex. What if we all went to small booths and ate alone only to go later to large fecaltoriums to sit on toilets with friends and love ones to share share our bowel movements. More openness. If you don't like it don't look.
My favorite sensible comment was:It's very difficult to take people seriously when they claim to want homosexuality to be an officially approved and socially sanctioned form of relationship equal to heterosexual relationships while at the same time supporting disgusting and disease-spreading public sex events either explicitly or by silence and lack of condemnation.
Gay advocacy groups need to do more to promote traditional values among the gay community if they want acceptance into traditional values! Condemning public promiscuous AIDS/STD-spreading sex would be a big step forward, but I suspect that they'll never do it because the real reason for trying to legalize gay marriage in their eyes is to offend and get some sort of "revenge" on anyone who doesn't approve of homosexuality.
Sarah Palin's Going Rogue
I'm only part of the way through this book at the moment. There are some rather amusing moments in it. One in particular brings back memories of when my wife delivered our daughter, and she described the first serious contraction as feeling like a horse had stepped on her belly. I told my middle sister about this, and her response was, "Oh, no. It doesn't feel anywhere near that good."
As a result, I had a good laugh over Gov. Palin's description of childbirth. Her husband was working on the North Slope at the time--858 miles away--and she ended up at her parents' home just before going into labor.I had set up camp there for the night, trying to find comfort while ignoring Dad's attempt at humor: "I'm sticking close to home for the next few days," he told a buddy on the phone. "Sarah's ready to calve."
I was quite a cocky young mom-to-be. I'd gone through the requisite childbirth class (we were going to use the Lamaze method), and, being an athlete used to pain, I figured, How tough could giving birth be?
Oh. My. Gosh. I thought I was going to die. In fact, I began to pray that I would die.
A laserlike searing rolled through me in waves, from my knees to my belly button. Had any woman ever hurt this much? I didn't think so. I gritted my teeth and willed myself not to scream.
...
All through my perfect, healthy pregnancy, I had pictured this peaceful Earth Mother birth experience, the lights low in the delivery room, maybe even some of that nature-sound music playing in the background. Like a pioneer woman, I would bravely deliver our firstborn, Todd beaming beside me, with the Alaska wilderness waiting outside to welcome our son, the newest addition to Nature's grand march of creatures great and small.
Instead, by the time the nurses got me prepped, I was sweating and painting, trying to do those infernal breathing techniques, when what I really wanted to do was scream bloody murder and beg for drugs. Blessed Mother of Jesus, I finally got them!
The delivery room was chaos: the doctor and nurses bustling around; Todd and my mom saying sweet, soothing, irritating things; my mother-in-law angling for a better shot with a video camera that I cursed every time she aimed it. [pp. 51-52]
International Year of Astronomy Posters
The year 2009 is the "International Year of Astronomy" commemorating the 400th anniversary of Galileo's use of the newly invented telescope to look up at the sky. There's an interesting collection of posters created for the various dark sky national parks here. This one for Chaco Culture National Historic Park I find especially attractive:
Words You Don't Often Hear in Songs
If you are old enough, you remember when Helen Reddy recorded "I Am Woman." If you were a mushy-brained liberal in your youth (as I was, to some extent), it was a powerful anthem about the importance of getting beyond sexism. I heard "I Am Woman" yesterday afternoon, and I was struck by how incredibly self-important it sounds now (perhaps because there's no longer any question about this)--and then I found myself saying, "Did she just rhyme 'embryo' with 'go'?" Sure enough?I am woman watch me grow
See me standing toe to toe
As I spread my lovin' arms across the land
But I'm still an embryo
With a long long way to go
Until I make my brother understand
Adjustable Rate Mortgages
I just received my annual rate adjustment notification, and for the second year in a row, my payment is dropping. We started out with a $1298 mortgage payment; then it dropped to $1134; now it is about to drop (starting February 1) to $1044.
It would be nice to think to think that it is going to drop more, but that's not realistic. The interest rate is one month LIBOR + 2.75, and even though the one month LIBOR yesterday was .255% (even a bit below what it was when this adjustment happened), I think it most unlikely that the one month LIBOR is going to zero.
At some point, either the economy is going to recover, or serious inflation problems are going to happen, and my mortgage will start rising again. But there's a limit to how much it can rise each year, and I think for at least the next two or three years, the increase will be pretty minor. The good news is that all of the increase will be interest, which is deductible on Schedule A. This means that every dollar of increase in my mortgage payment will be, net taxes, only about a $0.65 increase.
Of course, it also means that the amount of interest I'm paying now is less, so I get less tax advantage--but even once I start work for the State of Idaho, I'm not going to be in that high of a tax bracket.
Those White House Party Crashers...
As an email I received pointed out, there was no reason to be upset. They weren't party crashers--they were "undocumented guests."
Maybe This Is Just Clumsy Writing
It's a June 24, 2003 email from the CRU archive:From: "Mick Kelly"
Why would you need money to cover the costs of a trip that wasn't made? And the concern that NOAA (that's a U.S. government agency) might become "suspicious" certainly has a whiff of something improper going on.
To: Nguyen Huu Ninh (cered@xxxxxxxxx.xxx)
Subject: NOAA funding
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 14:17:15 +0000
----boundary-LibPST-iamunique-1131694944_-_-
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Ninh
NOAA want to give us more money for the El Nino work with IGCN.
How much do we have left from the last budget? I reckon most has been spent but we need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip Roger didn't make and also the fees/equipment/computer money we haven't spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious.
Politically this money may have to go through Simon's institute but there overhead rate is high so maybe not!
Best wishes
Mick [emphasis added]
UPDATE: A reader suggests that the NOAA funding might have been specifically for certain categories of activities, and CRU had used the money as some general purpose funding. That's a very easy mistake to make, and perhaps indicative of careless accounting as opposed to intentional fraud.
I Really Want To Discount This Claim
Red Ink: Texas prints an email he received from a passenger aboard the flight that was reported as being delayed-for 2 1/2 hours--because one passenger would not get off his cell phone. The email by someone who claimed to be aboard indicates what sounds like some sort of either dry run, or an attempt to provoke a reaction like the flying imams used to file a lawsuit.I was in 1st class coming home. 11 Muslim men got on the plane in full attire. 2 sat in 1st class and the rest peppered themselves throughout the plane all the way to the back. As the plan taxied to the runway the stewardesses gave the safety spiel we are all so familiar with. At that time, one of the men got on his cell and called one of his companions in the back and proceeded to talk on the phone in Arabic very loudly and very aggressively. This took the 1st stewardess out of the picture for she repeatedly told the man that cell phones were not permitted at the time. He ignored her as if she was not there.
I really want to believe that the final outcome of this--the 11 troublemakers taken off the plane, then allowed back on--and the entire flight crew had to be replaced, because they wouldn't fly the plane--is some outrageous fabrication. But watching the way that everyone bent over backwards to make Dr. Hasan's actions into anything but what they obviously were--I just don't trust our government to be looking out for the interests of the people anymore. Especially because this account by another person who was there largely confirms the email.
The 2nd man who answered the phone did the same and this took out the 2 stewardess. In the back of the plane at this time, 2 younger Muslims, one in the back, isle, and one in front of him, window, began to show footage of a porno they had taped the night before, and were very loud about it. Now….they are only permitted to do this prior to Jihad. If a Muslim man goes into a strip club, he has to view the woman via mirror with his back to her. (don’t ask me….I don’t make the rules, but I’ve studied) The 3rd stewardess informed them that they were not to have electronic devices on at this time. To which one of the men said “shut up infidel dog!” She went to take the camcorder and he began to scream in her face in Arabic. At that exact moment, all 11 of them got up and started to walk the cabin.
A Surprising But Pleasing Victory
New York State Senate overwhelmingly rejects gay marriage. From the December 3, 2009 Washington Post:
Not A Very Large Sample
But it still doesn't say much for the situation, especially when you look at the average age they started. From the December 2, 2009 Telegraph:
This really is Generation Porn.
2035 vs. 2350
An amusing example of what happens when you get the digits in the wrong sequence.
The Raw Data
I mentioned a few days ago a Times article quoting CRU scientists that they had lost much of the raw temperature data upon which their house of cards is based. I received an email full of foul language and personal insults calling me a liar, and pointing to this. (I expect foul language and rage from environmentalists. They seem to have trouble remaining calm.)
It turns out that while CRU discarded some of the raw data, it is claimed that the original data is still out there:[Response: No. The original data is curated at the met services where it originated. - gavin]
What this means is that with a bit of effort (probably a lot of effort), you could request all of the raw data from the various national meteorological services and reconstruct what CRU started from. But without a comprehensive list of what datasets were originally in CRU's raw data, you wouldn't get the same results. The problem of inability to recreate the massaged data because of discrepancies and deficiencies in the programs mentioned in the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, of course, would be an issue.
UPDATE: It may not help to ask for the raw data, unless you do it behind their backs. Lord Monckton's report (starting at p. 31) points out that New Zealand's government published data showing rising temperatures over the last century--but when some troublemaker actually downloaded the data from their website, it turned out that the rising temperatures weren't in the raw data at all. The New Zealand government had "adjusted" the raw data before producing their own claims, and refuses to explain the rationale for the adjustments.
New Job
Well, I signed the offer letter today, and I start work for the State of Idaho on December 14. I would have preferred a private sector job, especially at a couple of the startups that I interviewed with, but if cap-and-trade passes, I suspect that private sector jobs over the next few years will end up increasingly:
1. Scamsters trading carbon credits, carbon credit futures, carbon credit derivatives, carbon credit futures derivatives, carbon credit derivatives index funds, and hedge funds holding these.
2. "Green" companies, some of which might actually produce something useful, but most of which will be high-tech versions of the solar water heater/wind generator scams of the 1980s. In short, operations that will be profitable until someone takes away the underlying tax credits, and we discover that they were hiding that the energy inputs didn't match well with the energy outputs.
If there were a serious opposition party to the Democrats, I wouldn't be so discouraged about this, but the Republican Party is nearly useless when it comes to seriously challenging the delusions associated with the global warming religion.
At least for the next few years, working for the state government is probably about as stable a job as one can hope for anymore. There was another job opportunity that I might have been offered, but it involved contract work with a job shop at HP--and talk about the definition of instability: a contractor to a company that compares unfavorably to a government agency in terms of long-term planning.
One of today's "firsts": drug testing. I have never had to give a urine sample for employment before. I know that this will be a surprise to many of you, but I have mostly worked for startups over the years, that tend not to be terribly concerned about such matters.
Putting Together a Chronology of the Abolition of the International Slave Trade
I am doing this for my wife, who rather likes the film Amazing Grace, which is about William Wilberforce's efforts to abolish slavery within the British Empire. I knew that the movie played a little fast and loose with the sequence of events, but the more I dig into the documents, the more interesting this gets. I'm looking at a treaty that Britain signed with Spain in 1817 by which Spain agreed to abolish the African slave trade north of the equator immediately, and south of the equator in 1820. What was Spain's incentive? Britain gave them £400,000 as compensation both for previous losses of slave ships to the British government, and future losses.
Remember that Britain really didn't have any financial interest in ending the slave trade. The British government had abolished the international slave trade for its citizens by an Order in Council of August 15, 1805, and additional restrictions in 1806 and 1807. To give £400,000 as a bribe to the Spanish government to end the Spanish involvement in the international slave trade is a pretty astonishing act of humanitarianism.
Harry Plotter
I mentioned the efforts of the unknown programmer Harry to get the HadCRUT datasets to reproduce, so that the data could be plotted to match the previous output. The following parody of Harry Potter and Hogwarts was too good to pass by.
I Have A Job Offer
The pay isn't great, but it's a state government job, so the benefits are decent--and it has benefits! There is the possibility of another job offer coming through shortly, so I will try to accelerate that other offer.
Not Everything That Looks Bad Is Bad
A number of people have made much of this code fragment from the CRU software:;
Eric S. Raymond over at Armed and Dangerous sees this as prima facie evidence of intentional fraud. Some of the responses to his argument make the claim that this is actually an adjustment to bring Maximum Latewood Density measures into conformity with known thermometer readings for recent decades. This is a proxy for temperature derived from measuring tree growth characteristics--and it might be a legitimate method for correcting this data to more correctly match the temperature data. It is rather curious that the adjustments down match the last peak global temperatures, in the 1930s, but then suddenly start up at the time when the global warmists claim that--surprise, surprise--it was getting hotter because of mankind's actions.
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
If this was a legitimate correction, you would hope for a better comment than "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" Especially since some of the other emails from the true believers acknowledge that they are having a problem with recent temperature declines not matching their elegant models. Once you demonstrate that you can't be trusted to tell the truth, everything--even the most innocent statements--suddenly get a lot more scrutiny than they did before.
CRU Admits That They Threw Away The Original Data
This just gets better and better. From the November 29, 2009 Sunday Times:
Look, they have a plausible claim--that they threw away the originals way back when because of limited space, and what was then only an academic interest in temperature data. But if there is no way to recreate how they created their "value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data," why should anyone believe them? Especially in light of these emails admitting that they were trying to prevent differing points of view from getting published?
Private Note To Nosy
I can't successfully email you. Your ISP not only bounces my emails to you--it even bounces my emails to your ISP's support address. And they won't return my calls about fixing the problem.
The Dishonesty of This Crowd
In an September 29, 2009 email from Michael Mann at PSU to Andrew Revkin, a New York Times environmental reporter, Mann says:Skepticism is essential for the functioning of science. It yields an erratic path towards eventual truth. But legitimate scientific skepticism is exercised through formal scientific circles, in particular the peer review process. A necessary though not in general sufficient condition for taking a scientific criticism seriously is that it has passed through the legitimate scientific peer review process. those such as McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted.
And yet on July 8, 2004, Phil Jones wrote to Michael Mann:The other paper by MM is just garbage - as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well - frequently as I see it. I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !
So those who operate outside the peer review process are not to be trusted--and if need be, they will change the definition of peer-review literature to keep peer reviewed papers from being included.
Positively Stalinist
I've started picking stuff at random from the CRU dump--and I'm astonished at how Stalinist it is. For example, this email from Tom Wigley to Rick Piltz suggesting that someone should work on getting the University of Wisconsin to reassess the granting of a Ph.D. to a scientist who Tom Wigley decided was a problem for their global warming cause:You may be interesting in this snippet of information about
Now, even if we assume that Wigley is correct, and Michaels' doctoral work was flawed, Wigley is admitting that this was at the time "a common way to account for the effects of changing technology on yield." Wigley claims that Michaels' might have done this out of "ignorance," while also admitting that it was common practice at the time. If it was common practice, then how does it qualify as "ignorance"?
Pat Michaels. Perhaps the University of Wisconsin ought to
open up a public comment period to decide whether Pat Michaels,
PhD needs re-assessing?
Michaels' PhD was, I believe, supervised by Reid Bryson. It dealt
with statistical (regression-based) modeling of crop-climate
relationships. In his thesis, Michaels claims that his statistical
model showed that weather/climate variations could explain 95%
of the inter-annual variability in crop yields. Had this been
correct, it would have been a remarkable results. Certainly, it
was at odds with all previous studies of crop-climate relationships,
which generally showed that weather/climate could only explain about
50% of inter-annual yield variability.
How did result come about? The answer is simple. In Michaels'
regressions he included a trend term. This was at the time a common
way to account for the effects of changing technology on yield. It
turns out that the trend term accounts for 90% of the variability,
so that, in Michaels' regressions, weather/climate explains just 5
of the remaining 10%. In other words, Michaels' claim that
weather/climate explains 95% of the variability is completely
bogus.
Apparently, none of Michaels' thesis examiners noticed this. We
are left with wondering whether this was deliberate misrepresentation
by Michaels, or whether it was simply ignorance.
Trying to get someone's Ph.D. revoked under such conditions is positively Stalinist. Those who want to pretend that there's nothing to this scandal are beginning to look positively delusional.
The Scale of This Fraud....
Douglas J. Keenan writes about what happened when he had a paper published pointing out that "some important research relied upon by the IPCC (for the treatment of urbanization effects) was fraudulent." And what happened as a result?
Read the discussion between Phil Jones and Tom Wigley about this, in which Wigley admits:Seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers
And Jones says to "keep quiet." Jones knew that Keenan was correct about this--but keeping the fraud going took precedence.
that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (WCW
at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect.
The global warming believers can keep trying to spin this, but these are not the actions or statements of scientists trying to find truth.
This Global Warming Scandal
It just keeps getting worse. Along with statements by the scientists that strongly suggest intentional efforts to suppress alternative points of view and manipulation of the data to get the "right" results, the programs actually used to convert the raw data have a lot of very serious problems. Some of these problems are sloppy programming that raises serious questions as to whether the outputs can be trusted. The comments at Volokh Conspiracy are quite enlightening:
The defenses of this bad programming are enough to make me wonder if I was some sort of weirdo is how I do my job (or did my job, back when I had one):
Perhaps if I had not written defensive code that checked inputs for validity, I would still be employed writing bad code? Or are the defenses of this absurdity just ad hoc, to make the Climate "Research" Unit look good?
Along with bad programming without dishonest intent, there seems to be dishonest intent as well. John Lott over at Fox News discusses this problem:But the CRU’s temperature data and all of the research done with it are now in question. The leaked e-mails show that the scientists at the CRU don’t know how their data was put together. CRU took individual temperature readings at individual stations and averaged the information out to produce temperature readings over larger areas. The problem comes in how they did the averaging. One of the leaked documents states that “our flagship gridded data product is produced by [a method that] renders the station counts totally meaningless” and “so, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!” There were also significant coding errors in the data. Weather stations that are claimed to exist in Canada aren’t there -- leading one memo to speculate that the stations “were even invented somewhere other than Canada!”
Yet as Lott points out, the vast majority of American news media are barely covering this story, if they are covering it at all.
The computer code used to create the data the CRU has used contains programmer notes that indicate that the aggregated data were constructed to show an increase in temperatures. The programmer notes include: “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” and "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend -- so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!" The programmers apparently had to try at least a couple of adjustments before they could get their aggregated data to show an increase in temperatures.
All this could in theory be correctable by going back and starting from scratch with the original “raw” data, but the CRU apparently threw out much of the data used to create their temperature measures. We now only have the temperature measures that they created.
UPDATE: For those who insist that this is a tempest in a teapot--even George Monbiot, one of the true believers in AGW, is admitting that the problem is substantial, and that the refusal of a lot of other AGW true believers to admit that the problem is real is a form of a denialism. From the November 25, 2009 Guardian:
Now, Monbiot's defense is that the denialists are even less honest. And this justifies the misbehavior we see in the CRU's emails how?
What's also important is to understand how thoroughly non-reproducible the "results" of all this work really is. Some poor programmer named Harry put a very detailed description of his attempts to recreate the temperature data sets in a document called HARRY_READ_ME.txt. (The use of file names with READ_ME or some variant by programmers documenting what they have found is quite common.) If you are a programmer, you will read through this, and sympathize with Harry--but you will also be horrified at how irreproducible the results were of running various programs on existing data sets. Here's one small example:..not good! Tried recompiling for uealogin1.. AARGGHHH!!! Tim's
So how did this code work the first time that they created the data? Different hardware and compiler, probably, handled floating point overflow correctly--or the floating point exception simply didn't get reported. So how accurate was the data? Poor Harry also reports on his considerable efforts to recreate some of the data files upon which this whole global warming claim is largely based--and his attempts to verify that running one of these conversion programs actually can recreate the data files that they are current using:
code is not 'good' enough for bloody Sun!! Pages of warnings and
27 errors! (full results in 'anomdtb.uealogin1.compile.results').
17. Inserted debug statements into anomdtb.f90, discovered that
a sum-of-squared variable is becoming very, very negative! Key
output from the debug statements:
OpEn= 16.00, OpTotSq= 4142182.00, OpTot= 7126.00
DataA val = 93, OpTotSq= 8649.00
DataA val = 172, OpTotSq= 38233.00
DataA val = 950, OpTotSq= 940733.00
DataA val = 797, OpTotSq= 1575942.00
DataA val = 293, OpTotSq= 1661791.00
DataA val = 83, OpTotSq= 1668680.00
DataA val = 860, OpTotSq= 2408280.00
DataA val = 222, OpTotSq= 2457564.00
DataA val = 452, OpTotSq= 2661868.00
DataA val = 561, OpTotSq= 2976589.00
DataA val = 49920, OpTotSq=-1799984256.00
DataA val = 547, OpTotSq=-1799684992.00
DataA val = 672, OpTotSq=-1799233408.00
DataA val = 710, OpTotSq=-1798729344.00
DataA val = 211, OpTotSq=-1798684800.00
DataA val = 403, OpTotSq=-1798522368.00
OpEn= 16.00, OpTotSq=-1798522368.00, OpTot=56946.00
forrtl: error (75): floating point exception
IOT trap (core dumped)
..so the data value is unbfeasibly large, but why does the
sum-of-squares parameter OpTotSq go negative?!!
Probable answer: the high value is pushing beyond the single-
precision default for Fortran reals?Welcome to the GRIM Comparer
Please enter the first grim file (must be complete!): cru_ts_2_10.1961-1970.tmp
Please enter the second grim file (may be incomplete): glo2grim1.out
File glo2grim1.out terminated prematurely after 4037 records.
SUMMARY FROM GRIMCMP
Files compared:
1. cru_ts_2_10.1961-1970.tmp
2. glo2grim1.out
Total Cells Compared 4037
Total 100% Matches 0
Cells with Corr. == 1.00 0 ( 0.0%)
Cells with 0.90<=Corr<=0.99 3858 (95.6%) Cells with 0.80<=Corr<=0.89 119 ( 2.9%) Cells with 0.70<=Corr<=0.79 25 ( 0.6%) ..which is good news! Not brilliant because the data should be identical.. but good because the correlations are so high! This could be a result of my mis-setting of the parameters on Tim's programs (although I have followed his recommendations wherever possible), or it could be a result of Tim using the Beowulf 1 cluster for the f90 work. Beowulf 1 is now integrated in to the latest Beowulf cluster so it may not be practical to test that theory.
Now, getting pretty close is a good thing--but it isn't confidence inspiring that 95.6% of the cells are 90% to 99% correct--and 90% is likely to exceed by many times the supposed global warming. Now, if the errors are randomly distributed, it might not much matter--but I thought that what separated science from humanities is the ability to do mathematical verification.
Why It Has Been So Quiet Here
The Thanksgiving holidays. Finishing up grading papers for my State & Local Government class. Preparing to teach Introduction to Personal Computers next term.
And then: A weird type of flu, I was suffering severe muscle pain, chills, and exhaustion--and it was gone almost as fast as it came. Strange.
