[Zipperfish]

N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:

With science a hypothesis is presented. Support is offered for it.

The other way around actually. The good scientist should set about trying as hard as he can to destroy his hypothesis, not offer support for it.

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Other scientists must me able to replicate those findings. In order to do that the data must be presented. The warmists destroyed the original Had Cru data upon which much of the IPCC report is based. Supposed peer review journals supporting warmism, such as Nature and Science are supposed to not insist on making the author's original data available. There are reputable sounding complaints saying they do not do that.

The warmists? I'm a warminst, I'm sure, by your definition, and yet I don't recall destroying any data. Who, specifically, destroyed this data

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You must also be able to replicate the methodology. Many warmists either refuse outright to present their methodology, or make it unreasonably difficult for other scientists to replicate the claimed findings.

Yes, I've heard of that happening. Not very sporting of them, and ultimately futile because it blew up in their faces and they ended up having to release data/methodology anyways. Rightly so, in my opinion. However, on the flip side, there is the issue of nuisance and vexatious requests--is the said scientist obligated to show all comers the intricacies of the statistical methodologies used.

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Another insistence of a scientific theory is that it be falsifiable. That is there must be conditions under which the theory can be proven to be false. This is not true of warmism. When something is proven to be false, such as Hansen's contention both poles would warm, or the global warming fingerprint they simply move the goal posts, and claim something else. The global climate cools over 8 years, while CO2 rises - doesn't matter, even though warmist graphs clearly show we were supposed to expect something completely different than what we see. Some predictions are made so far into the future they can never be proven false in this lifetime.

There are no limitations such as these with religion. So while warmism meets the standards necessary to be called a religion, it is not science.

I agree that a valid theory must be falsifiable--I guess you'd call that a commandment of science.

I think it's falsifiable, just not on time scales that would suit the political agenda. If the temperature steadfastly drops or stays the same on a long term time scale, say the next three or four decades, then people will give up on it.

I suppose it could be instantly falsified, say if someone could show that a vessel containing carbon dioxide is actually cooler than one containing air, all other factors considered, that would certainly spell an end to the idea of CO2 induced global warming. Or if someone showed that CO2 concentrations are not, in fact, accumulating.

But if you concede that CO2 concentrations are increasing, and that CO2 does indeed radiate in the infrared spectrum, then something has to change, otherwise there is a violation of a basic law of physics (conservation of mass-energy). Now that would be very interesting, but also pretty unlikely.

The simplest answer is that the CO2 warms the atmosphere. After all, that's what happenes in a laboratory gas cell. I guess there are other possibilities. The sensitivity factor could be zero or negative (and not 2 to 4 as postulated by the IPCC), in which case you'd be saying that despite the increase in CO2, due to a complex series of feedbacks in the ecosystem, this actually results in zero change or a drop in temperature. That would also be quite interesting.

I'm just happy that now I can write "scientist" in the religion box of my next census form!

[N_Fiddledog]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

Who, specifically, destroyed this data

What? You haven't read Patrick Michaels now well known article "The Dog that Ate Global Warming?"

I'll start you half-way through...

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Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that “+/–” came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust. In fact, the entire purpose of replication is to “try and find something wrong.” The ultimate objective of science is to do things so well that, indeed, nothing is wrong.

Then the story changed. In June 2009, Georgia Tech’s Peter Webster told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn’t have the data because he wasn’t an “academic.” So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.

Faced with a growing number of such requests, Jones refused them all, saying that there were “confidentiality” agreements regarding the data between CRU and nations that supplied the data. McIntyre’s blog readers then requested those agreements, country by country, but only a handful turned out to exist, mainly from Third World countries and written in very vague language.

It’s worth noting that McKitrick and I had published papers demonstrating that the quality of land-based records is so poor that the warming trend estimated since 1979 (the first year for which we could compare those records to independent data from satellites) may have been overestimated by 50 percent. Webster, who received the CRU data, published studies linking changes in hurricane patterns to warming (while others have found otherwise).

Enter the dog that ate global warming.

Roger Pielke Jr., an esteemed professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, then requested the raw data from Jones. Jones responded:

Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e., quality controlled and homogenized) data.

The statement about “data storage” is balderdash. They got the records from somewhere. The files went onto a computer. All of the original data could easily fit on the 9-inch tape drives common in the mid-1980s. I had all of the world’s surface barometric pressure data on one such tape in 1979.

If we are to believe Jones’s note to the younger Pielke, CRU adjusted the original data and then lost or destroyed them over twenty years ago. The letter to Warwick Hughes may have been an outright lie. After all, Peter Webster received some of the data this year. So the question remains: What was destroyed or lost, when was it destroyed or lost, and why?

All of this is much more than an academic spat. It now appears likely that the U.S. Senate will drop cap-and-trade climate legislation from its docket this fall — whereupon the Obama Environmental Protection Agency is going to step in and issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions. Unlike a law, which can’t be challenged on a scientific basis, a regulation can. If there are no data, there’s no science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer to the question posed above.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/23/t ... mate-data/

Since that case another one turned up concerning tree ring data, and some guy named Briffa. Had something to do with the claim the Hockey Stick graph is still valid. Have you heard about that one? They did finally get the data there, and by the time everything had been analyzed it turned out the whole BS claim was pretty much all based on the history of 1 tree. 1 tree was supposed to have told them everything they needed to know about the last thousand years of temperature. It took them years to get that idiot's data, and all that time fools were still out there talking like they knew something, claiming the hockey stick was still valid.

[fifeboy]

Brenda Brenda:

As far as I am concerned, he can go walk or swim (to overseas meetings ) but I take it he doesnt want that either

Can you be a little more specific, freestyle, butterfly???

[Zipperfish]

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N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:

What? You haven't read Patrick Michaels now well known article "The Dog that Ate Global Warming?"

Looks more like "he said/she said" to me. Michaels calls the CRU claim "balderdash." Jones says it was necessary and the data exist elsewhere.

And the argument Michaels presents does little to convince me that the significantly increased carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is not causing the planet to be hotter than it otherwise would be. As Michaels would readily attest--he does, after all, support the anthropogenic climate change theory.