Regressions and Global Warming

The webpost http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/how-long/ has a nice step-by-step exposition of how to estimate whether there is a warming trend in temperature data 1975-2008, first using OLS, then using an AR-1 process, then an ARMA. The trend is significant. But the post is responding to the observation that the trend has flattened out since 2000. It doesn’t really respond to that.

To see why, note the graph above. It has artificial temperatures that rise from 1975 to 2000 and then flatten out. If you do an OLS regression, though, YEAR comes in significant with a t-statistic of 25.33 and an R2 of .95. I just did it with Excel, because I haven’t installed StarOffice or STATA on my new computer here, but I’m sure that doing a serial correlation correction wouldn’t alter the result much. Yet eyeballing it, we can see that though it is clear that temperatures have risen since 1975, it is also clear that they’ve flattened out since 2000. A linear regression just doesn’t summarize the data correctly.

Let’s do a couple more examples for fun and to drive home the point. In the second figure, the temperature levels out in 1982 but year is still highly significant, with a t-stat of 4.89, though the R2 drops to .42 (what’s the R2 with the real data? –very small, I’d expect).

Okay, now look at the third figure, in which the trend actually reverses. The t-stat is actually bigger—4.98--- and the R2 is .43.

So don’t go and use a linear model when eyeballing the data tells you it isn’t appropriate. When you have a simple regression in which only one variable explains another, use your eyes first, and software second. Do remember, though, that checking for statistical significance--- and autocorrelation and all those other things--- are useful too, so long as you start off right. Here, the question is not just “Have temperatures been rising with time over the past 30 years?” but, separately, “Have temperatures been rising with time over the past 10 years?”

The way to start addressing that with regression, by the way, is to do a regression of temperature on four variables: Constant, Year, a dummy equaling 1 if the year is after 1999 and 0 otherwise, and an interaction of that dummy with Year.

If a lot of people are interested, I could apply the serial correlation corrections to the artificial data or do this 4-variable regression on the real data, but maybe somebody else can take over now. My Excel spreadsheet is at http://rasmusen.org/t/2009/warming.xlsx, this document at http://rasmusen.org/t/2009/warming.pdf, I’m Eric Rasmusen at erasmuse@indiana.edu, and this is December 29, 2009, and I've put a pdf of this post at http://rasmusen.org/t/2009/warming.pdf.

Spending on Global Warming Research

Mark Kleiman writes

Bjorn Lomborg turns out not to be a global-warming denialist. He wants to spend $100 billion a year on what he calls “green energy research and development.”... I’m waiting to hear all the Republicans and libertarians who love to cite Lomborg as a guru when he’s attacking Ky0to and its progeny endorse his proposal, and the new taxes required to pay for it. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

I'm a definite skeptic, and I certainly would not reject Lomborg's proposal without mulling it over. I think a lot of skeptics would support it, in fact--- even those who would put the probability that carbon dioxide is causing temperature growth at only 20%. It's a matter of cost and benefit. Here are some reasons:

1. $100 billion per year is small compared to the cost of the carbon-reduction proposals that have been made.

2. Whether the research is making progress or nor would be much easier to see than whether a carbon-reduction proposal is working.

3. Some of that money, I hope, would be used for seeing whether global warming is actually occurring. I know this would benefit the climatologists who have been such frauds, but if the money were spent on honest research, that would be very useful.

4. Research has a good hope of finding a way to solve the problem. Carbon-reduction proposals just slow down the growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (well, almost all of the proposals-- that Canadian editorial's ruthless "one-child" policy would work). Roughly, instead of the temperature rising X much by 2100, the typical leftwing proposal has it rising X much by 2120.

5. Research spending can be done unilaterally and succeed. Germany, for example, could decide to go-it-alone and spend the $100 billion, find the solution, and give it away.

Latest Links on Global Warming

I've decided to use this page for lots of global warming posts. I'll cut and paste it to the top of my blog every once in a while, so I can have easy access to it. The bottom items in it will be the older ones.

1. "A Petition I Am Thinking of Circulating." My draft ClimateGate petition for economists to sign, which has lots of ClimateGate email excerpts on the two topics of fiddling with journals and hiding data.

2. This 2005 post at ClimateAudit thoroughly discusses the open-data policies of the US funding agencies that the East Anglia people ignored (and the US D. of Energy condoned). It has the story of the famous Philip Jones email quote, when refusing to disclose his data: "We have 25 or so years 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."

3. Dec. 18 in NatureNews, two prominent climatologists not at East Anglia, Von Storch and Allen, show their total unconcern with the unethical practices displayed in the Climategate Emails: "We welcome debate about the ethics of science prompted by the language of some of these e-mails, which, rightly or not, have created concerns about the scientific process."
4. This 2009 post has the story of the Kamel Siberia paper that Jones boasted of having gotten rejected. "In the case of another paper (Aufhammer et al )[the economists], obstruction has delayed publication of the paper by six years but the authors are still endeavouring to get the paper into print. This was not the case with the Kamél paper; Kamél himself had abandoned the field."
5. This pdf article by James Hansen is a good survey of lots of global warming issues from his warmist point of view. It shows what a fraud he is, too. Two things I note are (1) when he discusses the year-2000 mistake, he fails to point out that it was a skeptic who found it in spite of Hansen's total lack of cooperation, and (2) when he discusses the failure of temperature to rise over the past decade he says that temperature did rise, because the 11-year moving average rose. (This last is blatantly deceitful, because if temperatures are rising and then flatten, it will take 11 years before the 11-year moving average stops rising! Note, too, that 1998 was by his own admission a year that was unusually warm for reasons unrelated to CO2.) The best place to prove a man's lack of integrity is from his own writing.

6. December 20, 2009 A Climatology Conspiracy? By David H. Douglass and John R. Christy. On the conspiracy to slow down an article's appearance in print till the warmists could write a response (and the editor's acquiescence and apparent guarantee of acceptance).

7. Climatedebatedaily is a very good site that in two columns links to Warmist and Skeptic webposts, and even links to "Ripostes" and "Replies" to each webpost. It is especially useful for the Warmist column, I think--- better than RealClimate.

8. Wikipedia’s climate doctor: How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles December 19, 2009, Lawrence Solomon

9. There;s a good post by a statistician showing step by step how to do your own Hockey Stick, at

   http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/12/fables-of-the-reconstruction.html

   I'd like to try this out myself, but I haven't yet. He even limits himself to free spreadsheet statistical software (Star OpenOffice--Excel doesn't have the tools). Any statistician could have found out what was wrong with the Hockey Stick paper, one of the most important in the field, if he'd been allowed to see the data and techniques.

10. EUReferendum reports on the truly remarkable number of conflicts of interest thatDr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, has. It's about as bad as if he were a director of Exxon. The number of directorships and consultantcies he has must make him a very rich man. Pegasus Capital, Siderian Ventures, The Sustainable Future Fund Iceland, International Risk Governance Council, Asian Development Bank, GloriOil Limited,Chicago Climate Exchange, Inc. , Oil Trade Associates Singapore, Climate Change Advisory Board of Deutsche Bank. Some of these are "advisory board" positions, so maybe they aren't paid much, but it makes one wonder.

11. A good post on public opinion: "You can feel that most crucial of propaganda processes happening with Climategate: the reversing of the burden of proof."

12. Hamweather record weather events mapped over the US for last week.

13. RealClimate, the main Warmer blog, has been surprisingly quiet about ClimateGate. Below are their most recent updates on it. These are useful because they present the Warmer case, which essentially is "I'm a very good guy and so is Phil Jones and it's a shame people are saying bad things about him " without mentioning anything specific. There's not a sign of contrition. Don't take my word for it--- read these.

    Further update: Nature’s editorial.

    Further, further update: Ben Santer’s mail (click on quoted text), the Mike Hulme op-ed, and Kevin Trenberth.

14. "Pielke Sr. responds to NCDC’s “Talking Points” about surfacestations.org". Arguments that the US raw temperature record is of dubious value for looking at long-term trends. Very feeble response from the weather station people, it seems.

15. "The Climate Research Dispute over Publishing Soon and Baliunas". Response of the journal editor to complaints about his publishing a Skeptic article.

16. It's interesting how comments are so often better informed and wiser than the writer. This Megan McCardle post is about death threats to climatologists after ClimateGate. The comments note that the only evidence that such threats were really made comes from the same scientists who have been discredited in the scandal itself.

17. Fables of the Reconstruction (Or, How to Make Your Own Hockey Stick). This goes through it, supplying the temperature and proxy data and telling you how to download and use OpenOffice to do principal components analysis. I'll do this myself when I have time. I emailed the author asking why principal components was a better technique than just regression here.

18. From Mark Steyn:

    The documents were leaked on the Internet, the CRU confirmed their authenticity, they've announced that they've thrown out all their raw data, the head guy has stepped down . . . But that's no reason not to "continue to look into the issue" for another, oh, three, four, seven months before running a story. I like this fellow's sign-off:

    Slice your average environment correspondent through the middle and you're going to find a left-leaning liberal arts graduate who is utterly out of his/her depth. Their world view is being swept from underneath them and they are being shown — in ways that they do not really and have never had to understand — that the guys they thought were the goodies are in fact "at it" and that those they have spent a decade disparaging as deniers were in fact spot on.

    I would find that hard to report too.

    Like eight year olds that just found out there's no Santa. Kind of earth shattering and traumatic. Lied to by those you most trusted.

19. The Harry Read Me file is worth having a link to. Here are some excerpts. One of them: “So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option — to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations … In other words what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad …”

20. In my regulation class this week, a Taiwanese student jokingly suggested that the way to solve global warming would be to kill any children born to a family that already had one child. Then this Op-Ed appeared in one of the top Canadian newspapers: "The real inconvenient truth: The whole world needs to adopt China's one-child policy"

21. Megan McCardle very gently brings up the Darwin data fraud and politely asks if there's some reason it's not as bad as it looks. She hopes the warmist blog RealClimate will say something about it. I've been checking that site regularly, and they seem to have adopted the strategy of saying very little about ClimateGate and related scandals, probably because they can't give good answers and they don't want to even give their readers access to any details that might upset their views.

22. Look at the comments on this Boston Globe blog in which Harvard Prof. McCarthy tries to dismiss ClimateGate. The amount of scorn heaped on the Globe is amazing.

23. Bellamy: Twenty-Eight Years on TV, Then Blackballed for Challenging AGW

24. Global Warming US Cities Getting Warmer: This is a You-Tube video a geneticist made with his son showing how only the urban temperatures in the US are going up, not rural stations. "A comparison of GISS data for the last 111 years show US cities getting warmer but rural sites are not increasing in temperature at all. Urban Heat Islands may be the only areas warming." The emperor really does have no clothes. I've wondered about that myself, but I thought people in the field had surely looked at something so simple.

25. Climate Scientist to Revkin: "we can no longer trust you" to carry water for us. Another incredible email leak. A well-known U. of Illinois scientist condemns a NY Times liberal writer for making light of global warming and threatens to cut off his sources. These people have no shame, and no sense of humor either.

26. It is worth keeping in mind that maybe people who say they don't believe in absolute truth and who believe that the most important things for scientists to do is to help people, not to advance science, actually mean what they say, in which case they believe that a scientist has a duty to lie about his results if he thinks that will advance social justice. And if they believe that, they'll do it.

27. Nature has an editorial belitting the importance of ClimateGate and making misstatemetns such as that Antarctic sea ice is diminishing. Read it, and think less of that journal.

28. A good Levitt-Dubner comment on why anything happening with glaciers is unrelated to global warming (for example-- where glaciers are melting, temperatures aren't rising!)

Applying Time Series Econometrics to Temperature and Carbon Dioxide

For an economist, what I suggest below is obvious, but I wonder if anybody has done it.

1. Does the world temperature rise over time? Check the statistical significance of a time trend.
2. Next, check for serial correlation, and re-check for whether there is a time trend.
3. Now regress temperature on carbon dioxide levels. Is there a significant relationship?
4. Now add a time trend for 1950-2009. Does it explain temperature better than carbon dioxide?
5. Now start applying some time series econometrics. I don't know that stuff really. But what we'd want to do is to detrend the variables and include lagged values.

Eyeballing the data, it's hard for me to believe there's a significant relationship. The temperature is highly variable from year to year, and the amount of average increase 1970-2000 is tiny compared to year-to-year variation. Once we allow even for first-order autocorrelation, finding an effect would be tough.

As I said, to an economist this is the obvious way to proceed. But has anybody done it? Now that we are finding out how poorly constructed the temperature series are, we'd better ask about all kinds of things.

The Direct and Indirect Implications of the ClimateGate Emails

I was just reading a post and comments by a reputable statistics blogger who seems blind to the implications of ClimateGate. My sense is that he hasn't really looked into it much--- he doesn't seem to realize that the Medieval Warm Period's existence has important implications, for example. My comment:

It is true that only a few climatologists are implicated in the appalling emails about concealing data and pressuring journals. But just as CO2 is the just the direct driver for warming and the real action comes from indirect effects, we need to look at a second layer: the response of other climatologists.

In my field, economics, if it were revealed that top people in the field had sent emails like this, they would be repudiated by the rest of us. I have had my PhD for 25 years and I've never heard of anything like this. There's sloppy work and contrived results, but we don't need to use FOIA to get people's data.

But in climatology, where's the condemnation? The response seems to be, "Oh, this kind of things is just how scientists talk in private," and "Well, other scientists have reached much the same results, so this isn't really misleading," or "How dare someone leak private emails!". I don't trust *anyone* in a field that responds like that. If they say this is humdrum behavior, we can assume they do it themselves, or are so intimidated that they don't dare publish papers contrary to what the East Anglia people like to see.

Latest Links on Global Warming

I've decided to use this page for lots of global warming posts. I'll cut and paste it to the top of my blog every once in a while, so I can have easy access to it. The bottom items in it will be the older ones.

1. "A Petition I Am Thinking of Circulating." My draft ClimateGate petition for economists to sign, which has lots of ClimateGate email excerpts on the two topics of fiddling with journals and hiding data.

2. Climatedebatedaily is a very good site that in two columns links to Warmist and Skeptic webposts, and even links to "Ripostes" and "Replies" to each webpost. It is especially useful for the Warmist column, I think--- better than RealClimate.

3. Wikipedia’s climate doctor: How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles December 19, 2009, Lawrence Solomon

4. There;s a good post by a statistician showing step by step how to do your own Hockey Stick, at

   http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/12/fables-of-the-reconstruction.html

   I'd like to try this out myself, but I haven't yet. He even limits himself to free spreadsheet statistical software (Star OpenOffice--Excel doesn't have the tools). Any statistician could have found out what was wrong with the Hockey Stick paper, one of the most important in the field, if he'd been allowed to see the data and techniques.

5. EUReferendum reports on the truly remarkable number of conflicts of interest thatDr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, has. It's about as bad as if he were a director of Exxon. The number of directorships and consultantcies he has must make him a very rich man. Pegasus Capital, Siderian Ventures, The Sustainable Future Fund Iceland, International Risk Governance Council, Asian Development Bank, GloriOil Limited,Chicago Climate Exchange, Inc. , Oil Trade Associates Singapore, Climate Change Advisory Board of Deutsche Bank. Some of these are "advisory board" positions, so maybe they aren't paid much, but it makes one wonder.

6. A good post on public opinion: "You can feel that most crucial of propaganda processes happening with Climategate: the reversing of the burden of proof."

7. Hamweather record weather events mapped over the US for last week.

8. RealClimate, the main Warmer blog, has been surprisingly quiet about ClimateGate. Below are their most recent updates on it. These are useful because they present the Warmer case, which essentially is "I'm a very good guy and so is Phil Jones and it's a shame people are saying bad things about him " without mentioning anything specific. There's not a sign of contrition. Don't take my word for it--- read these.

   Further update: Nature’s editorial.

   Further, further update: Ben Santer’s mail (click on quoted text), the Mike Hulme op-ed, and Kevin Trenberth.

9. "Pielke Sr. responds to NCDC’s “Talking Points” about surfacestations.org". Arguments that the US raw temperature record is of dubious value for looking at long-term trends. Very feeble response from the weather station people, it seems.

10. "The Climate Research Dispute over Publishing Soon and Baliunas". Response of the journal editor to complaints about his publishing a Skeptic article.

11. It's interesting how comments are so often better informed and wiser than the writer. This Megan McCardle post is about death threats to climatologists after ClimateGate. The comments note that the only evidence that such threats were really made comes from the same scientists who have been discredited in the scandal itself.

12. Fables of the Reconstruction (Or, How to Make Your Own Hockey Stick). This goes through it, supplying the temperature and proxy data and telling you how to download and use OpenOffice to do principal components analysis. I'll do this myself when I have time. I emailed the author asking why principal components was a better technique than just regression here.

13. From Mark Steyn:

    The documents were leaked on the Internet, the CRU confirmed their authenticity, they've announced that they've thrown out all their raw data, the head guy has stepped down . . . But that's no reason not to "continue to look into the issue" for another, oh, three, four, seven months before running a story. I like this fellow's sign-off:

    Slice your average environment correspondent through the middle and you're going to find a left-leaning liberal arts graduate who is utterly out of his/her depth. Their world view is being swept from underneath them and they are being shown — in ways that they do not really and have never had to understand — that the guys they thought were the goodies are in fact "at it" and that those they have spent a decade disparaging as deniers were in fact spot on.

    I would find that hard to report too.

    Like eight year olds that just found out there's no Santa. Kind of earth shattering and traumatic. Lied to by those you most trusted.

14. The Harry Read Me file is worth having a link to. Here are some excerpts. One of them: “So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option — to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations … In other words what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad …”

15. In my regulation class this week, a Taiwanese student jokingly suggested that the way to solve global warming would be to kill any children born to a family that already had one child. Then this Op-Ed appeared in one of the top Canadian newspapers: "The real inconvenient truth: The whole world needs to adopt China's one-child policy"

16. Megan McCardle very gently brings up the Darwin data fraud and politely asks if there's some reason it's not as bad as it looks. She hopes the warmist blog RealClimate will say something about it. I've been checking that site regularly, and they seem to have adopted the strategy of saying very little about ClimateGate and related scandals, probably because they can't give good answers and they don't want to even give their readers access to any details that might upset their views.

17. Look at the comments on this Boston Globe blog in which Harvard Prof. McCarthy tries to dismiss ClimateGate. The amount of scorn heaped on the Globe is amazing.

18. Bellamy: Twenty-Eight Years on TV, Then Blackballed for Challenging AGW

19. Global Warming US Cities Getting Warmer: This is a You-Tube video a geneticist made with his son showing how only the urban temperatures in the US are going up, not rural stations. "A comparison of GISS data for the last 111 years show US cities getting warmer but rural sites are not increasing in temperature at all. Urban Heat Islands may be the only areas warming." The emperor really does have no clothes. I've wondered about that myself, but I thought people in the field had surely looked at something so simple.

20. Climate Scientist to Revkin: "we can no longer trust you" to carry water for us. Another incredible email leak. A well-known U. of Illinois scientist condemns a NY Times liberal writer for making light of global warming and threatens to cut off his sources. These people have no shame, and no sense of humor either.

21. It is worth keeping in mind that maybe people who say they don't believe in absolute truth and who believe that the most important things for scientists to do is to help people, not to advance science, actually mean what they say, in which case they believe that a scientist has a duty to lie about his results if he thinks that will advance social justice. And if they believe that, they'll do it.

22. Nature has an editorial belitting the importance of ClimateGate and making misstatemetns such as that Antarctic sea ice is diminishing. Read it, and think less of that journal.

23. A good Levitt-Dubner comment on why anything happening with glaciers is unrelated to global warming (for example-- where glaciers are melting, temperatures aren't rising!)

Death Threats

I saw a Guardian article saying that climatologists had been receiving death threats after ClimateGate and that the FBI and British police are investigating. Megan McCardle's post on this has a lot of good comments. The problem is that when people who have been exposed as cheats who refused to reveal the evidence they claimed to have for their strong scientific assertions say they are being sent death threats but refuse to reveal the evidence they claim to have for being threatened, we ought to be a little skeptical. McCardle comments said:

[1] "I doubt the FBI comments on pending investigations." 

And you'd be right. The don't comment on actual investigations that are under way. That's the point. There is no FBI investigation under way concerning email threats to US climate scientists because there haven't been any.

If you doubt it, I suggest you call the telephone number listed here:

(202) 278-3519

If you are credentialed journalist, the Public Affairs spokesman for the Washington Field Office of the FBI will gladly confirm for you that this Guardian story is a hoax.

Takes five minutes to do this simple legwork.

[2] Yep! If they really wanted people to see these things they could just post emails, with ALL the header info on the web. Everyone, including authorities, would know who sent them. Amazing how that never seems to happen. Instead, it's "trust us".

I googled and found an example of some earlier threats to Skeptics instead of Warmists. From Scientists threatened for 'climate denial' The Telegraph, 11 Mar 2007:

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five deaths threats by email since raising concerns about the degree to which man was affecting climate change.

One of the emails warned that, if he continued to speak out, he would not live to see further global warming.

Compare with the 2009 situation. "Climate scientists receive death threats," Eleanor Hall interview, Australia, December 9, 2009:

ELEANOR HALL:Now to those death threats against climate scientists at the centre of the East Anglia University email affair. The death threats are now being investigated by the FBI in the US and the British police.

Dr Tom Wigley is a former director of the Climatic Research Unit at the East Anglia University and has had several of his emails used by climate change sceptics to suggest that he and his fellow climate scientists have been distorting data and cooking the books to fabricate evidence of global warming....

TOM WIGLEY: Well there've been a number of abusive and threatening emails that have been sent to a number of the protagonists here, and I'm not going to mention the names of the individuals but it does include me, and those things are very worrying.

I've been asked not to say anything about the details of these threats but I can at least say that the FBI in the USA and the police in England are taking these things seriously and are investigating the sources of the threatening emails as well as they can....

ELEANOR HALL: I understand that you can't go into detail about who you think might be behind this but can you tell me a little bit more about your reaction? I mean do you now feel frightened for your life?

TOM WIGLEY: You know, I'm in a rather fortunate position that I spend half my time in Australia and half my time in the United States. I mean one of the emails to me said: "we know where you live". Well I'm not really sure whether they do know where I live.

In that sense I'm not particularly worried but the other emails that some people have received have been rather more pointed and detailed and, as I said, I mean I wish I could tell you more but I just can't say any more at the moment so...

From my reading of the ClimateGate emails, I doubt that Dr. Wigley would send himself fake death threats, but other people might, and it's interesting that the journalists just take his word for it, without even seeing copies of the threats. Note, too, the mention of police reaction. Do the police care about Skeptics being threatened too?

ClimateGate-- Best Links, with Description

I've decided to use this page for lots of global warming posts. I'll cut and paste it to the top of my blog every once in a while, so I can have easy access to it. The bottom items in it will be the older ones.

1. "A Petition I Am Thinking of Circulating." My draft ClimateGate petition for economists to sign, which has lots of ClimateGate email excerpts on the two topics of fiddling with journals and hiding data.

2. EUReferendum reports on the truly remarkable number of conflicts of interest thatDr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, has. It's about as bad as if he were a director of Exxon. The number of directorships and consultantcies he has must make him a very rich man. Pegasus Capital, Siderian Ventures, The Sustainable Future Fund Iceland, International Risk Governance Council, Asian Development Bank, GloriOil Limited,Chicago Climate Exchange, Inc. , Oil Trade Associates Singapore, Climate Change Advisory Board of Deutsche Bank. Some of these are "advisory board" positions, so maybe they aren't paid much, but it makes one wonder.

3. A good post on public opinion: "You can feel that most crucial of propaganda processes happening with Climategate: the reversing of the burden of proof."

4. Hamweather record weather events mapped over the US for last week.

5. RealClimate, the main Warmer blog, has been surprisingly quiet about ClimateGate. Below are their most recent updates on it. These are useful because they present the Warmer case, which essentially is "I'm a very good guy and so is Phil Jones and it's a shame people are saying bad things about him " without mentioning anything specific. There's not a sign of contrition. Don't take my word for it--- read these.

   Further update: Nature’s editorial.

   Further, further update: Ben Santer’s mail (click on quoted text), the Mike Hulme op-ed, and Kevin Trenberth.

6. "Pielke Sr. responds to NCDC’s “Talking Points” about surfacestations.org". Arguments that the US raw temperature record is of dubious value for looking at long-term trends. Very feeble response from the weather station people, it seems.

7. "The Climate Research Dispute over Publishing Soon and Baliunas". Response of the journal editor to complaints about his publishing a Skeptic article.

8. It's interesting how comments are so often better informed and wiser than the writer. This Megan McCardle post is about death threats to climatologists after ClimateGate. The comments note that the only evidence that such threats were really made comes from the same scientists who have been discredited in the scandal itself.

9. Fables of the Reconstruction (Or, How to Make Your Own Hockey Stick). This goes through it, supplying the temperature and proxy data and telling you how to download and use OpenOffice to do principal components analysis. I'll do this myself when I have time. I emailed the author asking why principal components was a better technique than just regression here.

10. From Mark Steyn:

    The documents were leaked on the Internet, the CRU confirmed their authenticity, they've announced that they've thrown out all their raw data, the head guy has stepped down . . . But that's no reason not to "continue to look into the issue" for another, oh, three, four, seven months before running a story. I like this fellow's sign-off:

    Slice your average environment correspondent through the middle and you're going to find a left-leaning liberal arts graduate who is utterly out of his/her depth. Their world view is being swept from underneath them and they are being shown — in ways that they do not really and have never had to understand — that the guys they thought were the goodies are in fact "at it" and that those they have spent a decade disparaging as deniers were in fact spot on.

    I would find that hard to report too.

    Like eight year olds that just found out there's no Santa. Kind of earth shattering and traumatic. Lied to by those you most trusted.

11. The Harry Read Me file is worth having a link to. Here are some excerpts. One of them: “So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option — to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations … In other words what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad …”

12. In my regulation class this week, a Taiwanese student jokingly suggested that the way to solve global warming would be to kill any children born to a family that already had one child. Then this Op-Ed appeared in one of the top Canadian newspapers: "The real inconvenient truth: The whole world needs to adopt China's one-child policy"

13. Megan McCardle very gently brings up the Darwin data fraud and politely asks if there's some reason it's not as bad as it looks. She hopes the warmist blog RealClimate will say something about it. I've been checking that site regularly, and they seem to have adopted the strategy of saying very little about ClimateGate and related scandals, probably because they can't give good answers and they don't want to even give their readers access to any details that might upset their views.

14. Look at the comments on this Boston Globe blog in which Harvard Prof. McCarthy tries to dismiss ClimateGate. The amount of scorn heaped on the Globe is amazing.

15. Bellamy: Twenty-Eight Years on TV, Then Blackballed for Challenging AGW

16. Global Warming US Cities Getting Warmer: This is a You-Tube video a geneticist made with his son showing how only the urban temperatures in the US are going up, not rural stations. "A comparison of GISS data for the last 111 years show US cities getting warmer but rural sites are not increasing in temperature at all. Urban Heat Islands may be the only areas warming." The emperor really does have no clothes. I've wondered about that myself, but I thought people in the field had surely looked at something so simple.

17. Climate Scientist to Revkin: "we can no longer trust you" to carry water for us. Another incredible email leak. A well-known U. of Illinois scientist condemns a NY Times liberal writer for making light of global warming and threatens to cut off his sources. These people have no shame, and no sense of humor either.

18. It is worth keeping in mind that maybe people who say they don't believe in absolute truth and who believe that the most important things for scientists to do is to help people, not to advance science, actually mean what they say, in which case they believe that a scientist has a duty to lie about his results if he thinks that will advance social justice. And if they believe that, they'll do it.

19. Nature has an editorial belitting the importance of ClimateGate and making misstatemetns such as that Antarctic sea ice is diminishing. Read it, and think less of that journal.

20. A good Levitt-Dubner comment on why anything happening with glaciers is unrelated to global warming (for example-- where glaciers are melting, temperatures aren't rising!)