George Rebane

OK, by now most people not tied to the MSM mammary are aware of the global warming hockey stick hoax.  RR summarized the fraud issue here and offered links for those interested in more detail.  More detail has now started gushing on the thinking public, take a look at today’s (24no09) WSJ piece ‘Climate Science and Candor’ that serves up a collection of the hacked emails sent by the celebrated sleazebag scientists to each other.  And even the NYT and Washington Post (gasp!) have belatedly stuck their toe into this issue.

In its lead editorial today’s WSJ said –

Yet even a partial review of the emails is highly illuminating. In them, scientists appear to urge each other to present a “unified” view on the theory of man-made climate change while discussing the importance of the “common cause”; to advise each other on how to smooth over data so as not to compromise the favored hypothesis; to discuss ways to keep opposing views out of leading journals; and to give tips on how to “hide the decline” of temperature in certain inconvenient data. …

Yet all of these nonresponses (from involved scientists) manage to underscore what may be the most revealing truth: That these scientists feel the public doesn’t have a right to know the basis for their climate-change predictions, even as their governments prepare staggeringly expensive legislation in response to them.

But let’s take a step back and again see this fraud in terms of the politics of climate change and anthropogenic global warming (AGW), this is the part that will affect you, me, and all of us.  The True Believers are not yet daunted by this little fraud – no, no.  They argue that a few rogue scientists mangling the world’s historical temperature data and developing spectacular temperature curves is no big deal, and doesn’t affect the real conclusions about AGW and what must still be done.

Again we must identify the players here, so let me review who they are from my previous post.

There are three distinct groups involved here – 1) scumbag ‘scientists’, 2) True Believers, 3) sleazebag politicians.  Groups 2 and 3 are ignorant of earth’s climatology and climate modeling.  I grant that Group 2 probably consists of good-hearted, well-meaning people concerned about humanity, but they possess neither the knowledge nor the tools to understand how the AGW issue is framed, let alone proved.  They just listen to Groups 1 and 3, and then join the damaging background chorus.  Group 3 doesn’t really care about the science or humanity.  For them it is all about power and control, starting with maintaining and/or advancing their own political careers.  These pols are mostly composed of but not limited to progressives and collectivists.

And then there’s Group 1.  These guys have degrees, published papers, and positions that give cover to Groups 2 and 3.  They consist of technical types who don’t know what they don’t know and prattle on, and then the real scumbags are the ones who know what they don’t know and do ‘science’ with the intent to defraud – i.e. cook up pre-ordained results.

The Group 1 scientists will maintain that, no matter if the past temperatures were doctored, the future effects of global warming are still as predicted by their models.  And dutifully the know-nothing True Believers and leftwing politicos (Groups 2 & 3) will breathe a sigh of relief, shout ‘Amen!’, and continue the surge toward our economic Armageddon.

‘… as predicted by their models.’  It is in this round of selling AGW and the policies to ‘save the earth’ that the greatest mischief (what an innocent sounding term) has occurred – and you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.  We’re now talking about the development and exercise of what are called general circulation models (GCMs).  These are very large and complex computer programs attempting to replicate the behavior of the earth’s atmosphere.  I have covered overviews of the global warming issue here and here, and of models in this report.  The short form is that these models are both technical AND political animals.

As a systems scientist with a heavy background in physics, control and estimation theory, and complex dynamic systems, I have studied and developed models such as the GCMs.  It is from this background that I, and others like me, became early skeptics of the hysteria.

The earth’s atmosphere is one of the most complex natural systems known – not really known, let’s just say ‘identified’.  If progress is measured in crawl-walk-run phases, we are in the crawl phase of understanding the dynamics of earth’s atmosphere.  And never mind attempting to model these dynamics with sufficient accuracy to generate predictions that should influence social policy.

But the Group 1 scientists have an axe to grind here.  Since the state is the only funder of ‘big science’ research, the state also gets to call the tune that comes out of such research, especially if the results have a political component.  And boy, do GCM outputs have a political component – just ask Pelosi, Reid, Obama, and Schwarzenegger.  Over fifteen years ago the desired GCM outputs were prescribed, the required consensus identified, the trans-national coordinating agency nominated, and the process started to fund those scientific efforts that promised to play ball according to the established wink-wink rules.

Now, as an aside, the left-wing, one-worlders (tautology?) have no trouble understanding this conflict of interest, and pointing their fingers when there is even a hint that a corporation may have contributed to a university research project the results of which they don’t like.  But when it comes to AGW, they see nothing but goodness and light paving the money road to research.  Hopefully the great awakening has started, but I don’t hold my breath.  Group 2 has a lot of strong-minded, weakly-tutored people in it.  And Group 3 politicians know how to play them like a violin, especially when backed by the sleazebag scientists of Group 1.

So that’s how the next round of the AGW battle to pass Waxman-Markey (cap and tax) and to implement California’s AB32 will shape up.  The socialists have every expectation that the hoi polloi will continue to be compliant innumerates, and worship the mere mention of big climate science and its vaunted general circulation models that can’t predict jack.

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In the remainder of this piece I describe in lay terms one of the many hurdles that face the use of GCMs.

Think of a GCM as a large collection of interconnected computer programs or subroutines that looks pretty much like a bowl of spaghetti with looping datapaths coming out of here and going back into there with, perhaps, some number crunching along the way.  These are the various types of inter-connections or feeds – feedbacks, feedforwards, cross-feeds.  A GCM has tens of such major feeds, and hundreds of minor feeds.

A GCM sees the continuous world as chunked in both space and time.  The atmosphere is divided into chunks or distorted boxes that cover the earth in layers.  Each box is described by one set of numbers that covers the whole volume of the box.  Time does not flow continuously but in selectable discrete steps of, say, an hour or a day or … .  So at every time step all the boxes have to have their numbers recomputed with each box taking inputs from and giving inputs to other boxes in its neighborhood.  Then time is incremented, and the whole process repeated.  Getting pretty complex already, right?

What goes on inside each box is described by a set of very complex equations from the fields of thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, physical optics, molecular absorption, …, you get the picture.  Lots of feedbacks etc here before we even get to the surface of the box that touches another box.  Then certain numbers from each box feed into neighboring boxes.  Anyway, it is a big huge mess that is prone to errors from so many sources that it would make your head spin – and the errors grow with each time step forward.

So how do they do it?  They use assumptions or wags (technically, wild ass guesses).  To put your arms around the problem, you simply have to take some wags and push on.  So you pick a set of values and hold them fixed, and leave a few major feeds open to play with.  And here comes the fun.

The hundreds of values (constants) needed in a GCM come from individual scientists each studying (and perhaps modeling) a little bit of the big problem.  Sort of like the story of the blind men each touching a different part of the elephant.  The GCM systems team has to take all these different descriptions from the hundreds of scientists and put together what may or not wind up looking like the desired elephant – final GCM.

Now I won’t even go into how and what kinds of input datasets will be used to exercise the resulting GCM.  But I’d like to describe a little what goes on in each of the hundreds of ‘feedbacks’ (we’ll just use this term to cover them all).  The feedback of some model parameter’s value may be simply that value itself.  But in real systems the fed back value is modified by its unique ‘feedback gain’.

That gain may be as simple as a multiplier – take the value, multiply by 3.7, and feed it immediately to another calculation.  More likely it also has a time delay connected to it – hold on to it for ‘2.3 hours’ (problem time) and then feed it back.  And more likely the gain is ‘frequency dependent’.  To understand frequency dependence we must first remember that all atmospheric process are really continuous time series – wiggly lines of temperature, pressure, wind speed/direction, humidity, … .

A couple of hundred years ago Fourier showed that any wiggly line can be decomposed into components each one looking like a simple sine wave.  But the individual sine waves that add together to make the wiggly line each have a different frequency (how fast they wiggle), a different amplitude (how high/low they wiggle), and phase (how each of them is displaced in time from the others).  A sophisticated GCM feedback gain may take all of these things into consideration.

Having understood things this far, we now introduce the notion of sensitivity.  The output of the GCM is very sensitive to messing with the values of these feedback gains.  In fact, by playing around with various values – all in the ‘scientifically plausible range’ – one can pretty much generate any kind of an output one wants.  And, dear reader, if you’ve followed me this far, you now have a feeling of how unassailable such GCM outputs are, especially when presented to a bunch of nodding politicians and cheering True Believers.

Very few will have the necessary technical horsepower and motivation to dig into a GCM that was twenty years in the making, using input from hundreds of scientists, cobbled together by several software teams, and then exercised by some shrewd ideologues with PhD after their names.  Who is going to tell them that they are perpetrating fraud when they claim to reliably predict earth’s temperature out a hundred years?

Well, I am.  And my little stubborn ounces join the voices of many more diligent and better-known bloggers and prominent scientists who have blown the whistle on these shysters.  The True Believers who attempt to label us as “Deniers” (even the sleazebag scientists correctly call us skeptics in their emails) can do nothing but count the dubious number of IPCC consensus scientists.  And most of these simply lent their names as one of hundreds of these ‘domain specialists’ who contributed their small view of the elephant to the overall picture.

When his relativity theory was refuted by teams of established scientists a group of which was prepared to come and explain the matter to him, Einstein is reputed to have said, ‘Why send so many, when only one is needed to disprove my theory?’

His acolytes across the country are all atwitter today, but when will we hear from Al Gore?