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The release of emails and other documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) has proven to be, at the very least, an embarrassment to the scientists involved. Now, there may be legal issues involved.

Britain’s Freedom of Information Act (FOI) is referenced several times in the stolen emails, notably in a postscript from CRU director Phil Jones:

PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!

In the emails several of the scientists complain about the nature of the FOI requests. The problem, as they saw it, was that the requests consume valuable time. They were irritated that after granting some requests, they had follow-up questions regarding the data and, according to the emails, requests for help in running simulations. Some of the “obfuscation” email quotes in blogs are from these larger discussions, and the context is not provided. It should be, in the interest of fairness. (It is my opinion that the context is important to show the irritation the scientists experience, but doesn’t negate the fact that the scientists should have complied with all legal requests.)

Now, the CRU has issued a statement that all data will be made public, reports the UK’s Telegraph:

In a statement welcomed by climate change sceptics, the university said it would make all the data accessible as soon as possible, once its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had negotiated its release from a range of non-publication agreements.

The publication will be carried out in collaboration with the Met Office Hadley Centre. The full data, when disclosed, is certain to be scrutinised by both sides in the fierce debate.

The Telegraph story concerns one skeptic, an engineer by training, who had requested data through the FOI. His explanation of what he considered obfuscation and thwarting of the request is chronicled in this ClimateAudit post. The hacked emails contain disparaging comments regarding his request, and authorities in Britain are investigating the issue for possible criminal violations.

The University of East Anglia CRU will release the data. But, there is a problem: some of the data is not available.

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.

The data was destroyed prior to the term of the current director of the CRU, professor Phil Jones, and he is not implicated in any of the media reports I have seen. Further, the loss of data is not implied to be a criminal act, but simply a mistake.

The TimesOnline article states that it is now impossible to verify the calculations done by the CRU, a disturbing revelation if it proves to be true.

Cross posted to Donklephant.com

Climate CRU, emails hacked, hockey stick, Phil Jones, University of East Anglia

You know an issue is serious when it gets the suffix “gate” added to it.

“Climategate” seems to be sticking in the media for the publication of stolen email and program documents we covered in our story Climate Email Hacked. Even more significant: parodies are popping up:

Like all parodies, its probably not fair, and its over the top. Would we really jail someone for obfuscation? No. But it is funny.

Kidding aside, the serious issues raised by the release of the emails lies not in the idea that climate warming is a “fraud” as some attest, or that the researchers involved were knowingly passing off lies. Careful reading of the materials doesn’t reveal a “smoking gun” per se. The real story is the collusion to obfuscate some indication of recent cooling trends and attempts to silence critics.

Demetris Koutsoyiannis, professor of hydrology at the University of Athens and a scientist publishing in the field of hydrology (closely related to climate science) has some thoughts:

Due to my skeptical inclination, I’ve had the feeling that my colleagues had serious doubts about my perspective. The common dogma is that “climate change is real” and its consequences are catastrophic, so why oppose those ideas and the people who arduously work to save the planet, and us, from catastrophes?

I found it difficult to explain my convictions in a compelling manner. However, the explanation is actually simple and was formulated by my co-authors Alberto Montanari, Harry Lins, Tim Cohn, and myself in a recent paper criticizing the IPCC position on freshwater:

“A common argument in favour of the political orientation of the IPCC is that its aims are good for humanity and the natural environment and that reducing emissions of greenhouse gases will be beneficial for the planet, regardless of the ultimate validity of the IPCC model predictions. However, we believe that science is a process for the pursuit of truth and that fidelity to this system should not be affected by other aims. History shows that such distractions can be detrimental to science.”

(This paper can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1623/hysj.54.2.394 and a comment about it, as well as the IPCC authors’ reply, has been published on this weblog at http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/a-new-commentreply-on-the-subject-climate-hydrology-and-freshwater-towards-an-interactive-incorporation-of-hydrological-experience-into-climate-research/).

Koutsoyiannis has selected several of his favorite quotes from the released material showing the politicization and possible corruption:

“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 !” (http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=419).

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong.” (http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=1048).

“If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences.” (http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=544)

More alarming than the sniping and snide comments of the researchers are the comments from the code. Programmers, as a standard practice, put comments in program code to provide a road map for others (and for remembering where they were when they come back to it). Some illuminating comments found in the program code:

“OH **** THIS. It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.”

From the file data4alps.pro: “IMPORTANT NOTE: The data after 1960 should not be used. The tree-ring density’ records tend to show a decline after 1960 relative to the summer temperature in many high-latitude locations. In this data set this “decline” has been artificially removed in an ad-hoc way, and this means that data after 1960 no longer represent tree-ring density variations, but have been modified to look more like the observed temperatures.”

More on the code comments can be found here.

Even some ardent pro-climate change journalists are expressing deep concern about the tone and tenor of the emails, and calling for more analysis of the data called into question.

Hans van Storch, savaged as helping “junk science” get published in some of the released emails, has a more measured response. Rather than striking back, von Storch, a director of the Institute for Coastal Research of the GKSS Research Centre and professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg, keeps the issue in perspective:

# 24. November 2009 – The scandal around the stolen CRU-mails is rolling on; the interest, as documented by traffic on the internet is enormous – and likely the damage done to the credibility of climate science by the unfortunate writing by Phil Jones and others as well. But in spite of this, one can interpret the whole affair also in positive way – namely that science was strong enough to overcome the various gate keeping efforts, even it may take a few years. The self-correcting dynamics in science is robust and kicking. And the practice of allowing our adversaries to use our data (after a certain grace period) will become finally common.

We need to publically discuss the ethical norms, science is to operate under. Obviously, science can not define itself which these norms should be, but this is a task for society at large – who pays for the efforts and is looking for utility of science. The main guard to this respect is with the media – and it seems the media beginning to become serious, finally. An example is from Wall Street Journal – online. In Germany, journalists judge the affair more cavalier, e.g., in the Tagesspiegel.

Cross posted to Donklephant.com

Climate climategate, CRU emails

To paraphrase Julie Andrews, “The Blogs are Alive …”, but this time with stolen emails rather than “Music”.

Documents and archived emails were stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climatic Research Center (CRU). The first accounts indicate that 1,072 emails and 72 documents were stolen and then posted anonymously on file servers.

The stolen property appears to be the genuine article, as the CRU director has confirmed them. Less certain is what all this means.

Much has been made about the tone of the emails. Scientists are complaining about those with whom they disagree, insulting them and acting like normal, partisan human beings. There are some “plain English” misunderstandings afoot as well, as evidenced by this quote from an email that is being reproduced in several blogs:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

The blogs typically highlight or bold the word “trick” and the phrase “hide the decline” as evidence of a smoking gun.

The problem is that the email is about a well-known and discussed issue, the “divergence problem.” As I understand the issue, historical proxies, like tree ring, lake sediment and ice core samples, provide a measure of accuracy in the aggregate, but are not as accurate for telling us what the temperature was in the last few decades. It evidently is a common and well-known issue, even though the pro-climate change advocates will tell you there are no problems in the data. The scientists involved debate this issue, and come to an agreement on how to best deal with it; the advocacy groups simply gloss over any difficulties, even if they do not alter the end result. So the average person can be forgiven if finding this issue is shocking; what about the “consensus”? This is the messy stuff that leads to that consensus; like sausage, you sometimes don’t want to know what’s in it.

Now, about the word “trick”. In this context, it is used to indicate there is a difficult task at hand, such as in this statement that might be made to a winter driver:

When you find yourself in a skid on ice, the trick is to keep from making it worse. Steer in the direction of the skid and keep your foot off the brakes.

So the hard part about reconstructing historical temperature records is merging the proxies with the instrument data, and we need to discuss how to do this; that seems like an OK statement.

Less clear is what the phrase “to hide the decline” means; it appears this is either to correct what they truly believe is an error in the data when you combine the proxies and instrument data (most likely in my view), or is the “smoking gun” of a conspiracy to hide warming data (extremely unlikely, at least in my view again).

As to the language of the emails, I am shocked, shocked to find there is emotion in them! As stated in our post Climate: Mistakes or Prevarication, scientists are surprisingly human underneath those white smocks with pocket protectors.

As the popular RealClimate blog explains:

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

Cross-posted to Donklephant.com

Climate climate change, CRU, emails hacked

The deficit explosion under the Obama administration is a common complaint by fiscal conservatives, and is often represented with a graph such as this one, courtesy of the libertarian think-tank, Cato.org:

However, as Cato points out, the fiscal year starts in October of each year, and the budget for 2009 was signed into law by President Bush. So even while I tire of the Obama administration lamenting that they inherited most of their problems, on the deficit front at least, they are right:

Profligate spending by Republicans led to losing majorities in 2006, and the subsequent spending under President Bush and a Democratic Congress proved even worse. So while there’s plenty of blame to go around, the one actor currently on stage that can’t be blamed for the deficit is the Obama administration. Next year, maybe, but not this year.

Cross posted to Donklephant.com

Politics deficit

Michael Boskin is a professor of economics at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Today, in the Wall Street Journal, he proposes a temporary payroll tax reduction as a second try at a stimulus. He starts his argument with consideration of what would have happened with a temporary payroll tax reduction in February of this year:

My Stanford colleague Pete Klenow and Rochester economist Mark Bils estimated that cutting the payroll tax by six percentage points (of the 12.4% Social Security component) would, under standard assumptions, increase employment by three million to four million workers—an amount equal to all the job losses since the stimulus was passed.

The payroll tax cut would have reduced firms’ costs by roughly the same amount as from the entire decline in employment. It would have cost less than half as much as the stimulus bill, gotten far more income into paychecks quickly and, most importantly, greatly reduced incentives for firms to lay off workers. In fact, it would have created incentives to hire.

Instead, we choose a stimulus that critics called “porkapalooza”, and have seen unemployment exceed targets by about 25% (to over 10% instead of the promised maximum of 8.6%).

Boskin’s recommendation is a “partial payroll tax reduction”, cutting the tax in half for a few months. That means the average wage earner would see a 3% raise for those months (and the employer would also see a 3% drop in payroll taxes). On the employer side, that might spur hiring or help employers retain employees slated for layoffs, but I don’t think its enough of an effect for the wage earner.

Boskin also recommends accelerating some spending “that has to be done anyway”, such as replenishment of military stores. I have my own reservations about opening the door to any more government spending. The level of military spending is certainly something open to debate, anyway, and the current administration is more likely to try to cut military spending after huge increases for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In my view, a better idea would have been a three-month payroll tax “holiday”, with workers enjoying an increase in wages equal to 6%, and employers enjoying an immediate 25% reduction in taxes for the first quarter of next year.

Unlike income taxes, payroll taxes are levied disproportionally on the lower and middle income classes, with every dollar of their income taxed. The Earned Income Tax Credit is designed to offset some of that disproportionate burden, but it is reduced and eventually phased out for those earning over $43,279. People in the third and fourth quintile of income pay more of this tax as a percentage of total income than any other class. Because the payroll tax is collected on every dollar up to $106,800 in income, the richest families see payroll tax free income above that level. (All rates are 2009 figures.)

The middle class is the “engine” of consumer spending, and a reliable, defined 6% increase in wages for three months would do much to spur delayed spending on consumer goods. And it would be “kinder” to our budget deficit than “stimulative” spending.

While taxes on the “rich” are often decried by my fellow conservatives, when all taxes and tax credits are added together our system looks moderately progressive and not “confiscatory”. Economists separate household income levels into 5 equally sized groups, or “quintiles”, with income and effective tax rates per quintile, as shown:

Quintile Income Bracket Source: http://www.bls.gov/cex/2006/Standard/quintile.pdf

These are the estimated percentages actually paid in 2006, not what the tax tables state. Note that “the rich” don’t pay 39% on every dollar of income; with lower taxes on the income up to their top level, tax deductions and other credits, they end up paying 25.8% of their income. It would be simpler to incorporate these tax rates into a tax code of a single page instead of the 70,000+ page tax code we now have, but that’s another issue entirely.

The tax percentages above include payroll, income, excise and other federal taxes, minus deductions and credits, as estimated by the Cato Institute. The income levels for the quintiles, from the BLS, are “household” income (two wage earners if filing jointly). Many are shocked to find their family is in the 4th or 5th quintile, but you are in the top 40% of wage earners if your combined income is over $56,222. If you and your spouse earn $89,000 combined, you are “rich”, in the top 5th of all income earners.

Unlike the Making Work Pay tax credit, passed with the 2009 stimulus bill, a payroll tax holiday would not be accompanied by a temporary adjustment in the withholding tables that might “bite” some taxpayers. The $400 per person “Making Work Pay” tax credit was offset by automatic deductions in the withholding tables, providing the average wage earner with a few extra dollars each paycheck. But that affects the total amount withheld, and some tax payers may see a tax bill due instead of a refund at tax time in the spring. That tax surprise will not be pleasant for families already pressed by salary reductions, rising credit card interest and other effects of the recession.

Rep. Louie Gohmert had proposed a payroll tax holiday as an alternative to multi-national corporate bailouts in late 2008, but the proposal went nowhere. It is time to reexamine this proposal, perhaps even on a bi-partisan basis – one can hope – for the first quarter of 2010.

Cross-posted to Donklephant.com

Politics making work pay tax credit, payroll tax, stimulus, tax deduction