Climategate? Where now?

The release of emails and some research code that was "hacked" from the CRU at East Anglia University is a severe blow to those who are looking to our politicians to make a rational response to climate change and concerns about the use of non-renewable resources.

For example some of the contents of the emails which have been uncovered appear to reveal a willingness on the part of the scientists involved to attempt to put pressure on scientific journals which attempted to publish scientific papers which were not supportive of AGW ( Anthropogenic Global Warming or Man made Global Warming). This is simply not acceptable and it is a betrayal of the scientific process.

There are legitimate areas of scientific debate around the exact balance of the causes of climate change and about such areas as the appropriate methods for constructing global temperature trends. It does science no credit if some of it's practitioners appear to be willing to countenance trying to stifle such debate. It makes no difference that they claim that such views were private expressions of "frustration" between like minded colleagues. It betrays a closed minded approach which is simply not acceptable on a matter which is potentially so weighty for all of us.

Other concerns are emerging from this episode.

Much is being made on some websites about how the raw data was cleansed and used to construct the historical global and northern temperature trend. I have been reading much of this stuff over recent days. Undoubtedly some on the "sceptics" side of the debate are making mountains of some issue that are in reality molehills. But there are also some issues of real concern that are emerging.

The one that concerns me the most has in fact received probably the least comment of all.

The CRU as I understand it is one of relatively few centres worldwide which has collated and stored data on temperature trends from a range of sources. Whatever your view of the current climate change debate it is clear that this type of raw data is immensely valuable for us all in the study of our earths climate. However what I have found utterly astonishing is that apparently the CRU lacked data storage capacity and appears to have been unable to store this historic raw data - it in short been throwing it away.

This is truly astonishing. It is worth looking at this issue in the light of another concerning issue revealed by this episode.

The directly measured temperature data that is collected comes from a large number of stations all around the world. Some of these stations first began measuring temperature many decades ago but the understandng of the critical issues in the siting of such stations was much poorer then. In addition there has sometimes been urban development near to stations which risks interfering with the validity of the temperature measurements. Sometimes the concern about the validity of such stations measurements reached the point where the stations were moved to new locations.

An appropriate method for allowing continuity between the measurements from the original station and the new station was to calculate an offset in the measurements taken between the two. This would allow a valid adjustment to be made to the data. However in order to do this it would be important that the new station and the old station operated in parallel for a reasonable length of time so that the offset calculation was well informed. What is clear is that this often does not happen.

My overwhelming impression from my recent reading is that despite the level of Global concern about climate change issues ( from both sides) there is still no rigorous approach being taken around the world to collecting weather and climate data, storing the raw data and making it accessible to researchers. If this is true it is a truly scandalous state of affairs.

If our politicians do nothing else at Copenhagen they must agree to measures supported by all countries to institute a much more rigorous approach to measuring the key data about our climate, secure robust approaches to storing that raw data and open up the methods for making it accessible.

Watch out for the Chinese Spammer!

The chinese spammer who left a comment on my previous post seems to have possibly somehow managed to inject some javascript into his comment as far as I can tell. it looks like he has used HTML entities to escape the code. the effect seems to be that I cant delete his comment and the comment footer has been turned into some form of javascript link. I am keeping comment moderation turned on meantime until I can get rid of his spam comment.

I may also turn the comments on and off on that post as I try to get rid of his comment - just in case your over for a look!

It's one of the perils of blogging.

Update: checked the blogger help group and others are reporting this issue over the last few days - again chinese spam.

Update: it seems it was possibly Korean rather than Chinese SPam that I got hit with from reading the blogger help forum. After trying numerous ways of getting rid of the spam comment the only method I could find that worked was to copy the original posts and the non spam comments to a new post, delete the original and then reset the copy back to the original date. Blogger would appear to have a vulnerability that is being exploited by this particular Korean spammer. He or they appear t have found a way to prevent their spam comments on posts being deleted.

The Global Warming Wait and See gamble

In a previous post I reflected on the Cumbria Floods and went on to talk a little about Global warming and to look a little at some of the issues around the possible interactions between a human influenced global warming trend and the Solar Cycle. As I pointed out in that post there are those who argue that the Solar Cycle is a much more significant driver of climate than any man made contribution from Global warming gases.

I had pointed out that that I had been reading that the solar cycle is aparently currently approaching a minimum but I didnt in that article give any reference to the data on that. Partly for my own reference and in case anyone else is interested I have a found what looks like a reliable reference site for the Solar Cycle . The graphs presented there show the predictions for the coming phase of the Solar 24 Cycle.

Interestingly they are predicting that the next Solar maximum will be sometime in 2013 but also that it will be "below average in intensity". Now if my understanding is correct then this provides an interesting scenario. If the effects of human activity on climate have been suppressed recently due to the Solar minimum then we should see a warming trend kick in clearly as the Solar maximum is reached. if the Solar cycle is the key factor in any warming trend then warming is also likely but we should not expect this to be very significant if the expected Solar maximum is indeed "below average intensity".

In other words in both scenarios some warming greater than recently seen should be expected. The stronger the warming signal between now and say 2014/15 ( allowing that some delay in solar maxima effects may occur) then the stronger the signal that human influenced Global Warming is at play.

So of course we do nothing in the meantime and just wait and see then eh?

If only it were that simple. If we delay taking action to change our dependancy on fossil fuels for five years this means that either a) we may not then have the time to stop any warming trend that had become fully established and/or b) the time to take effective action has by then become so reduced that taking action would have a massive impact on our economies because they had less time to adjust.

If it turns out that we take action now and the human influence on climate change proves to be less than we currently think then what are the consequences? Well the earlier we make changes the less radically people will feel those changes because they will occur over a longer period of time. Jobs in "old" technology industries will have time to be adapted to "new" technologies in renewables. We will have extra time to make changes to our infrastructure eg possibly moving to electric forms of transport and the infrastucture to support this. We will also have massively reduced our dependancy on fossil fuels many of which come from those parts of the world which are highly volatile or even unfriendly.

Of course other data continues to come in and waiting to see the influence of the solar cycle is not the only game in town. There is for example regular monitoring of Arctic Sea Ice ( also here) and Antarctic Sea Ice. ( Select Monthly>Antarctic >concentration trends for the best illustration of trends.)

The Sea Ice information is interesting because it shows a very marked downward trend in Arctic Ice ( most Arctic ice is Sea ice) and a relatively flat to slightly positive trend in Antarctic Ice cover. ( It is worth recalling that changes in Sea Ice have no impact on sea level - changes in ice cover over Greenland and faster Glacier loss to the sea will impact sea level. Check out this study of glacial changes for example. )

There will be costs but also benefits if we act firmly and act soon. If we do nothing and wait then the potential downside is enormous. It's a gamble either way of course but in strategic decision making terms this is really a no-brainer. Hopefully the US and China are beginning to recognise this.