Climategate 2.0: Will the Media Do Its Job This Time?

Imagine if all the money spent on Kyoto and carbon credits had gone to feed people instead.
If all the money spent on inefficient alternative energy boondoggles like ethanol and wind power had instead gone to treat disease.

The current green models condemn so many people to poverty but the Left could care less. Their cause is more important than the people living with mercury fumes in their homes.

Rockdoc Franz wrote: The Liberals GOP Twin, the code would mean nothing to me. I'm just a nuts and bolts scientist and my negative stance originates with the science itself. I've posted some of the problems on global warming hype before. SC and I have gone done a few rounds on it as well. So not only is there a problem with the physics models they use, there also are computer problems. The story just keeps getting better. Yep, CO2 is driving global warming, but doing so from the back seat of the solar radiation engine.

And in the case of the physics model they use, you have a leg up on me. I'm not a physicist. I wouldn't know if those models are flawed. But I know programming, data processing, data base management and the correct way to write program code. And the crap at CRU is defective. If I had written such buggy code for an employer, I would have been fired. And "Harry" tried to point the problems out to his supervisors and other scientists and they ignored him. He even took it upon himself to inform other scientist that had been using some of the data sets that the data was suspect.

It is interesting. When the British Parliament Science and Technology Committee requested input from the scientific community for the upcoming investigation two years ago, there were numerous suggestions that asked the modeling software and the review process that the data did/didn't go through. Many computer experts, scientific computing experts and programmers weighed in, suggesting that the modeling software be included in the investigation. Well, it was well known among the parties that "Harry" had written 300 pages of notes questioning the process, and guess what. Except for some "hand slapping" about the lack of sharing data, the validity of the modeling software was never approached. Any wonder?

Here were the issues that the British Parliament Science and Technology Committee addressed... "charges of manipulation/suppression of data, UAE’s/CRU’s practices for information dissemination and its compliance with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests." None of these subjects dealt with the modeling software and the way the data was created.

The hacked emails were a soft target, both for the hackers who released them and for the inquiry by the British Parliament Science and Technology Committee. Their excuse for not dealing with this issue in a detailed and meaningful way was stated... "The committee acknowledged that its investigation was limited in scope due to time constraints. “We would have preferred to carry out a wider inquiry into the science of global warming itself,” they wrote."

The final British Parliament Science and Technology Committee report be view here http://www.examiner.com/climate-change- ... z1fEelRMPT ... the READ_ME "HArry text can be found here http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt

If you want my summary of Harry's READ_ME narrative... PM me for a link. I developed the analysis two years ago for a internet site.

Science Chic wrote:
[snip]

I've got to get to a meeting, I'll be back later!

(Here Science Chick... my summary of the climate/temperature modeling software at CRU. I didn't bother to strip out the HTML, so you'll have to deal with the "busy" look of the document. How about you address the points made below?)

Who is Ian “Harry” Harris? He is a staff member at the Climatic Research Unit at East
Anglia University. His short bio on the CRU staff page says this… “Dendroclimatology,
climate scenario development, data manipulation and visualisation, programming.”
( http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/ ). He was tasked with maintaining, modifying and
rewriting programs from the existing climate modeling software suite that existed at CRU
since at least the 1990’s. He kept copious notes of his progress from 2006 through 2009,
including his notes and comments internally in the programs themselves and in a 314
page document named “harry_read_me.txt.” If you revel in the minutia of programmer’s
notes you can easily find this document on the internet.
I will document 4 different aspects of Ian “Harry” Harris’ notes
1) General comments, inaccurate data bases
2) CRU Time Series 3.0 dataset
3) a RUN dialog
4) Faulty code
Quotes are verbatim, including typos, misspellings and language differences)… any other
mistakes are mine.
(end comment 2)
(comment 3)
1) General comments from the “harry_read_me.txt.” about the CRU programs and data.
Here is Ian “Harry” Harris talking about both the legacy programs and legacy climate
databases and the new data he is trying to create.
<blockquote>
“Oh GOD if I could start this project again and actually argue the case for junking the
inherited program suite!!”
<em>author note: This is the program suite that has been generating data for years for
CRU and staff.</em>
...knowing how long it takes to debug this suite - the experiment endeth here. The option
(like all the anomdtb options) is totally undocumented so we'll never know what we lost.”
<em>author note: Remember, Dr. Phil Jones, head of CRU initially said they never lost
any data.</em>
“Sounds familiar, if worrying. am I the first person to attempt to get the CRU databases
in working order?!! The program pulls no punches. I had already found that
tmx.0702091313.dtb had seven more stations than tmn.0702091313.dtb, but that hadn't
prepared me for the grisly truth:”
3
“Getting seriously fed up with the state of the Australian data. so many new stations have
been introduced, so many false references.. so many changes that aren't documented.
Every time a cloud forms I'm presented with a bewildering selection of similar-sounding
sites, some with references, some with WMO codes, and some with both. And if I look
up the station metadata with one of the local references, chances are the WMO code will
be wrong (another station will have it) and the lat/lon will be wrong too.”
<em>WLN note: How were they generating temperature data on their world grid in the
past if they couldn’t even match up stations?</em>
“I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a
state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations,
one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and
very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large
overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh!”
<strong> “So.. should I really go to town (again) and allow the Master database to be
'fixed' by this program? Quite honestly I don't have time - but it just shows the state our
data holdings have drifted into.</strong> Who added those two series together? When?
Why? Untraceable, except anecdotally. It's the same story for many other Russian
stations, unfortunately - <strong>meaning that (probably) there was a full Russian update
that did no data integrity checking at all.</strong> I just hope it's restricted to Russia!!”
<em>WLN note: Fixed? What does that mean? And why the quotes? This is live data Ian
is talking about.</em>
“This still meant an awful lot of encounters with naughty Master stations, when really I
suspect nobody else gives a hoot about. So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the
nuclear option - to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations (er,
CLIMAT excepted). <strong>In other words, what CRU usually do. It will allow bad
databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad, but I really don't think
people care enough to fix 'em,</strong> and it's the main reason the project is nearly a
year late.”
<em>WLN note: This is about the strongest statement Ian makes about the state of the
data at CRU</em>
“The big question must be, why does it have so little representation in the low numbers?
Especially given that I'm rounding erroneous negatives up to 1!! Oh, sod it. It'll do. I
don't think I can justify spending any longer on a dataset, the previous version of which
was completely wrong (misnamed) and nobody noticed for five years.”
“This was used to inform the Fortran conversion programs by indicating the latitudepotential_
sun and sun-to-cloud relationships. It also assisted greatly in understanding
what was wrong – Tim was in fact calculating Cloud Percent, despite calling it Sun
Percent!! Just awful.”
4
<em>author note: Dr. Tim Mitchell or Dr. Tim Osborn? CRU -
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timm/index.html </em>
“They aren't percentage anomalies! They are percentage anomalies /10. This could
explain why the real data areas had variability 10x too low. BUT it shouldn't be - they
should be regular percentage anomalies! This whole process is too convoluted and
created myriad problems of this kind. I really think we should change it.”
“Am I the first person to attempt to get the CRU databases in working order?!!”
“Right, time to stop pussyfooting around the niceties of Tim's labyrinthine software suites
- let's have a go at producing CRU TS 3.0! since failing to do that will be the definitive
failure of the entire project..”
<strong> “OH F*** 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.”</strong>
</blockquote>
Remember, he is talking about legacy programs and legacy data.
(end comment 3)
(comment 4)
2) About the CRU Time Series 3.0 dataset.
Remember all the comments I posted here about HARCRUT3 dataset, which contains
global temperature readings from 1850 onward and the possible problems with the data in
that database. Well, HADCRUT3 is built from CRUTEM3 and the Hadley SST data.
CRUTEM3 is built partially from CRU TS 3.0 which is mentioned above. And much of
the data used for climate modeling in the past was contained in earlier versions of this
data table CRU TS 2.1, CRU TS 2.0, CRU TS 1.1 and CRU TS 1.0… table used for
earlier climate models. (see history of CRU TS at http://csi.cgiar.org/cru/ ).
Evidently Ian “Harry” Harris managed to finally produce the dataset CRU TS 3.0 and
here is a question from Dr Daniel Kingston, addressed to “Tim.”
<blockquote>
So, you release a dataset that people have been clamouring for, and the buggers only
<strong>start using it! And finding problems.</strong> For instance:
<blockquote>
5
Hi Tim (good start! -ed)
I realise you are likely to be very busy at the moment, but we have come across
something in the CRU TS 3.0 data set which I hope you can help out with.
We have been looking at the monthly precipitation totals over southern Africa (Angola,
to be precise), and have found some rather large differences between precipitation as
specified in the TS 2.1 data set, and the new TS 3.0 version. Specifically, April 1967 for
the cell 12.75 south, 16.25 east, the monthly total in the TS 2.1 data set is 251mm,
whereas in TS 3.0 it is 476mm.
The anomaly does not only appear in this cell, but also in a number of neighbouring cells.
This is quite a large difference, and the <strong>new TS 3.0 value doesn't entirely tie in
with what we might have expected from the station-based precip data we have for this
area.</strong>
Would it be possible for you could have a quick look into this issue?
Many thanks,
Dr Daniel Kingston
Post Doctoral Research Associate
Department of Geography
University College London
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
And here is Ian “Harry” Harris’ answer.
<blockquote>
Well, it's a good question! And it took over two weeks to answer. I wrote angola.m,
which pretty much established that three local stations had been augmented for 3.0, and
that April 1967 was anomalously wet. Lots of non-reporting stations (ie too few years to
form normals) also had high values. As part of this, I also wrote angola3.m, which added
two rather interesting plots: the climatology, and the output from the Fortran gridder I'd
just completed. This raised a couple of points of interest:
1. The 2.10 output doesn't look like the climatology, despite there being no stations in the
area. It ought to have simply relaxed to the clim, instead it's wetter.
2. The gridder output is lower than 3.0, and much lower than the stations!
6
I asked Tim and Phil about 1., they couldn't give a definitive opinion. As for 2., their
guesses were correct, I needed to mod the distance weighting. As usual, see
gridder.sandpit for the full info.
So to CLOUD. For over a year, rumours have been circulating that money had been
found to pay somebody for a month to recreate Mark New's coefficients. But it never
quite gelled. Now, at last, someone's producing them! Unfortunately.. it's me.
The idea is to derive the coefficients (for the regressing of cloud against DTR) using the
published 2.10 data. We'll use 5-degree blocks and years 1951-2002, then produce
coefficients for each 5-degree latitude band and month. Finally, we'll interpolate to get
half-degree coefficients. Apparently.
Lots of 'issues'. We need to exclude 'background' stations - those that were relaxed to the
climatology. This is hard to detect because the climatology consists of valid values, so
testing for equivalence isn't enough. It might have to be the station files *shudder*.
Using station files was OK, actually. A bigger problem was the inclusion of strings of
consecutive, identical values (for cloud and/or dtr). Not sure what the source is, as they
are not == to the climatology (ie the anoms are not 0). Discussed with Phil - decided to
try excluding any cell with a string like that of >10 values. Cloud only for now. The
result of that was, unfortunately, the loss of several output values,
</blockquote>
(end comment 4)
(comment 5)
3) Run dialogs
Ian “Harry” Harris did a very good job of documenting his different “runs” of the
programs, clipping and pasting the “run time dialog” into his “harry_read_me.txt.”
document. Run time dialog is the text, messages and input prompts that appear on the
screen when you run the program. You can see below that the original programmers of
the CRU program suite had a “lively” style of informative messages to the end user. Here
is a message you get when running an “update” program to merge temperature reporting
stations.
<blockquote>
Before we get started, an important question: If you are merging an update - CLIMAT,
MCDW, Australian - do you want the quick and dirty approach? This will blindly match
on WMO codes alone, <strong>ignoring data/metadata checks</strong>, and making any
unmatched updates into new stations (metadata permitting)?
Enter 'B' for blind merging, or <ret>: B
7
</blockquote>
Do you know what this program produced? Bad records, an incomplete dataset. Records
with station identifiers missing, stations duplicated, no checks for missing data. And if
the program had data it didn’t know what to do with, it turned the data into a new station,
even if it didn’t really know what that data was in reference to.
Remember, these are the legacy programs that CRU used to generate data. These were
live programs, live data. Ian “Harry” Harris was trying to fix and modify these programs,
because many of them produced invalid data.
(end comment 5)
(comment 6)
4) Example of faulty code.
Here is one example, from Ian “Harry” Harris, about an already existing function, one
that had been used to generated data in the past.
<blockquote>
Back to precip, it seems the variability is too low. This points to a problem with the
percentage anomaly routines. See earlier escapades - <strong>will the Curse of Tim
never be lifted? </strong>
A reminder. I started off using a 'conventional' calculation
absgrid(ilon(i),ilat(i)) = nint(normals(i,imo) + * anoms(ilon(i),ilat(i)) * normals(i,imo)
/ 100) which is: V = N + AN/100
This was shown to be delivering unrealistic values, so I went back to anomdtb to see how
the anomalies were <strong>contructed in the first place</strong>, and found this:
DataA(XAYear,XMonth,XAStn) = nint(1000.0*((real(DataA(XAYear,XMonth,XAStn))
/ & real(NormMean(XMonth,XAStn)))-1.0)) which is: A = 1000((V/N)-1)
So, I reverse engineered that to get this: V = N(A+1000)/1000
And that is apparently also delivering incorrect values. Bwaaaahh!!
</blockquote>
Harry eventually fixed this, so in the future it would produce accurate data, but one
wonders how many times data was pushed through this formula in the past and how
much invalid data was generated from this faulty function.
8
(end comment 6)
(comment 7)

Epilog:
Remember Ian “Harry” Harris was working on a legacy program suite, not some “quick
and dirty methods.” A suite of programs and datasets used by CRU for climate modeling
and in use for many years. If you want to, read his 314 pages of notes that detail better
than I could all of the problems he ran into trying to work with those existing legacy
programs.
Does this information presented here disprove AGW? Of course not. There are many
other scientific organizations besides the CRU. But it does highlight, with provable facts
that the CRU in themselves have been responsible for bad data, bad programs and as we
have seen by the dust up about the ignored Freedom of Information Act requests that was
issued to CRU, responsible for trying to cover up their mistakes. This is bad science and
unfair to all the honest scientist the world over who are diligently working on honest
climate science.
Addendum:
You have to give Ian “Harry” Harris a lot of credit. Evidently he has been responsible for
cleaning up a lot of the mistakes that have existed in climate based datasets in the past.
This little narrative represents some of his work with NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis. (National
Centers for Environmental Prediction – NOAA - http://www.ncep.noaa.gov/ )
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/ncep/
<blockquote>
1948-1957 Data Added (Ian Harris, 22 Jul 2008)
2007 Data Added (Ian Harris, 17 Apr 2008)
2006 Data Added (Ian Harris, 11 Mar 2007)
2005 Data Added (Ian Harris, 13 Jan 2006)
2004 Data Added (Ian Harris, 28 Nov 2005)
2003 Data Added (Ian Harris, 11 May 2004)
SURFACE TEMPERATURE ADDED (Ian Harris, 10 December 2003)
WARNING NOTE ADDED FOR SURFACE FLUX TEMPERATURES (Ian Harris, 10
December 2003)
ALL DATASETS UPDATED TO 2002 (Ian Harris, 23 June 2003)
LAND/SEA MASKS ADDED (Ian Harris, 16 December 2002)
Land/Sea Masks for regular and Gaussian grids have been added.
NEW WINDOW ONLINE (Ian Harris, 9 July 2002)
The new Quarter-Spherical Window (0N-90N; 90W-90E) is now in use (see table
below).
9
The old window data (here) has now been entirely replaced.
Please address any requests for new variables to me.
BAD DATA REPLACED (Ian Harris, 23 May 2002)
The TOVS Problem has been resolved and only corrected data appears on this site.

<strong>Anyone wishing to access the old (potentially incorrect) data in order to evaluate
the extent of the problem should contact me.</strong>

</blockquote>

The last entry in that narrative is interesting.
(end comment 7)

I'm waiting Science Chick. Fisk the above document for all of us. Do some of your Mr. Wizard for us.

Oh, yer just asking for it now....Fire away SC!

SC you know that I'm not even talking about the specific e-mails. All you need to do is go to the reports being issued and then go the the scientific literature on CO2 measurements, the physics of the upper atmosphere vs the physics used in their model. Show me one paper in a refereed journal that demonstrates a comprehensive understanding of the CO2 flux. Show me one example where the equivalent of a raindrop in an ocean makes a difference in Sea level, because that is what man's measured contribution is relative to the CO2 degassing of the ocean and land. Humans emits 5Gt or so per annum, but the oceans emit about 90Gt and the land-plants about 60Gt, for a total of maybe 150Gt.

Then explain to me why the global warming data gets cut off before the paleorecord that shows CO2 being as high or higher than it is today. Or, for that matter, show me one example where a rise in CO2 (the engine driving global warming) precedes a temperature rise and not the other way around.

If I were to publish on my geologic results in a manner akin to what the climatologists have done I'd be ostracized for bad science, my working hypothesis would be nailed to the wall with refuting data, not to mention being ostracized from the geologic community for a lack of integrity. Why don't you tell me what qualifies for rejecting a working hypothesis in science?

SC

The science of AGW as a whole is not questioned, so in that regard it is settled: it is widely accepted as being real and man-made

What???? Perhaps in your mind, but not thousands of other scientists who in increasing numbers point out major flaws with that science.
SC

The discussions on what is up in the air are details of smaller parts of climate cycles, how to more accurately compute long-range variability, how to determine regional and local variation, etc

Hardly. For crying out load, climatic cycles have done their thing for millions of years before an got involved. Now you are telling me that man is the cause? How absurd it that? Pssttt.. This happens to be an area of research I've been engage in for the past 20 years and have just spent the past three months doing additional primary research.

Ruffell, A., and R. Worden, 2000, Palaeoclimate analysis using spectral gamma-ray data from the Aptian (Cretaceous) of southern England and southern France: Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, v. 155, p. 265-283.
Sierro, F. J., S. Ledesma, J.-A. Flores, S. Torrescusa, and W. M. del Olmo, 2000, Sonic and gamma-ray astrochronology: Cycle to cycle calibration of Atlantic climatic records to Mediterranean sapropels and astronomical oscillations: Geology, v. 28, p. 695-698.

You talk about validation of the science because of peer review. This is a joke. The people who review many of these papers are the same ones who cooperate on those studies. In cases where that is not the case a totally different perspective emerges. Have you read some of the peer reviews by people who have no vested interest? It's not pretty.

A reviewer comment by Eric Steig on a Second Order Draft, Chapter 6; section 6-42: states:
In general, the certainty with which this chapter presents our understanding of abrupt climate change is overstated. There is confusion between hypothesis and evidence throughout the chapter, and a great deal of confusion on the differences between an abrupt "climate change" and possible, hypothetical causes of such climate changes

You still want to associate with "scientists" who can't distinguish between an idea and facts?

So what has been driving the global warming that began 10,0000 years ago since the last ice age? Humm must have been all those Neanderthal campfires. And what drove the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Pennsylvanian, and more recent Tertiary ice ages????? I suppose man must have gone back in time and those nasty CO2 gasses relaeased by man.... How anyone in their right mind can even postulate that man is the cause is simply beyond my comprehension.

The reason is simple: politics and money

I was taught that if there is one piece of data that refutes it, you either throw out the idea or modify the hypothesis so it can be incorporated. That at least is how we practice science in my field without politics and money.

Rockdoc Franz wrote: SC you know that I'm not even talking about the specific e-mails. All you need to do is go to the reports being issued and then go the the scientific literature on CO2 measurements, the physics of the upper atmosphere vs the physics used in their model. Show me one paper in a refereed journal that demonstrates a comprehensive understanding of the CO2 flux. Show me one example where the equivalent of a raindrop in an ocean makes a difference in Sea level, because that is what man's measured contribution is relative to the CO2 degassing of the ocean and land. Humans emits 5Gt or so per annum, but the oceans emit about 90Gt and the land-plants about 60Gt, for a total of maybe 150Gt.

Then explain to me why the global warming data gets cut off before the paleorecord that shows CO2 being as high or higher than it is today. Or, for that matter, show me one example where a rise in CO2 (the engine driving global warming) precedes a temperature rise and not the other way around.

If I were to publish on my geologic results in a manner akin to what the climatologists have done I'd be ostracized for bad science, my working hypothesis would be nailed to the wall with refuting data, not to mention being ostracized from the geologic community for a lack of integrity. Why don't you tell me what qualifies for rejecting a working hypothesis in science?

SC

The science of AGW as a whole is not questioned, so in that regard it is settled: it is widely accepted as being real and man-made

What???? Perhaps in your mind, but not thousands of other scientists who in increasing numbers point out major flaws with that science.
SC

The discussions on what is up in the air are details of smaller parts of climate cycles, how to more accurately compute long-range variability, how to determine regional and local variation, etc

Hardly. For crying out load, climatic cycles have done their thing for millions of years before an got involved. Now you are telling me that man is the cause? How absurd it that? Pssttt.. This happens to be an area of research I've been engage in for the past 20 years and have just spent the past three months doing additional primary research.

Ruffell, A., and R. Worden, 2000, Palaeoclimate analysis using spectral gamma-ray data from the Aptian (Cretaceous) of southern England and southern France: Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, v. 155, p. 265-283.
Sierro, F. J., S. Ledesma, J.-A. Flores, S. Torrescusa, and W. M. del Olmo, 2000, Sonic and gamma-ray astrochronology: Cycle to cycle calibration of Atlantic climatic records to Mediterranean sapropels and astronomical oscillations: Geology, v. 28, p. 695-698.

You talk about validation of the science because of peer review. This is a joke. The people who review many of these papers are the same ones who cooperate on those studies. In cases where that is not the case a totally different perspective emerges. Have you read some of the peer reviews by people who have no vested interest? It's not pretty.

A reviewer comment by Eric Steig on a Second Order Draft, Chapter 6; section 6-42: states:
In general, the certainty with which this chapter presents our understanding of abrupt climate change is overstated. There is confusion between hypothesis and evidence throughout the chapter, and a great deal of confusion on the differences between an abrupt "climate change" and possible, hypothetical causes of such climate changes

You still want to associate with "scientists" who can't distinguish between an idea and facts?

So what has been driving the global warming that began 10,0000 years ago since the last ice age? Humm must have been all those Neanderthal campfires. And what drove the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Pennsylvanian, and more recent Tertiary ice ages????? I suppose man must have gone back in time and those nasty CO2 gasses relaeased by man.... How anyone in their right mind can even postulate that man is the cause is simply beyond my comprehension.

The reason is simple: politics and money

I was taught that if there is one piece of data that refutes it, you either throw out the idea or modify the hypothesis so it can be incorporated. That at least is how we practice science in my field without politics and money.

You hit the nail on the head at the beginning of your comment above. "SC you know that I'm not even talking about the specific e-mails. All you need to do is go to the reports being issued and then go the the scientific literature on CO2 measurements." The emails are are easy straw man for folks like Science Chick to beat up and make all sorts of claims that the emails are "out of context," " personal correspondence's never intended for the general public," "that doesn't mean what you think it means"... in short... attacking the emails means they don't have to deal with the hard science... it's a smoke and mirror show.

The hacked and released emails did serve a purpose... they woke the world up to the possible deceit that had been fostered on the nations. The emails gave other scientist, professionals, journalist and the general public a foundation, a map... that could be used to find the right rocks to look under. And that's what has been happening for 2 years now. A good example is the information technology experts that have looked into the climate modeling software and the data processing practices of EAU and found it flawed. Flawed software and data processing procedures was only the tip of the iceberg.

Pandora's box has been opened and Science Chick can't close it again. I'm still waiting for a point by point explanation of the software problems that Ian Harris found at EAU and detailed in his 300 page document and I summarized above.

Related and pertinent...

One of the changes among scientists in this century is the increasing number who believe that one can have complete and certain knowledge. For example, Michael J. Mumma, a NASA senior scientist who has led teams searching for evidence of life on Mars, was quoted in the New York Times as saying, "Based on evidence, what we do have is, unequivocally, the conditions for the emergence of life were present on Mars—period, end of story."

This belief in absolute certainty is fundamentally what has bothered me about the scientific debate over global warming in the 21st century, and I am hoping it will not characterize the discussions at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, currently under way.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... inion_main

This is a cancer effecting many professions now a days. That need to make that "media sound bite" that will vault the scientist or the lawyer or the law enforcement official into their 15 minutes of fame. Damn the scientific process, damn the lawyer/client confidentiality and damn the innocent until guilty concept. Everything is a reality TV segment, every discovery is the final answer... until the next great revelation is made. I wish scientist, lawyers and law enforcement would get back into their labs, court rooms and police cars and stay off the front pages of the newspapers or You Tube. We even have people with avatars bragging that they are a "scientist" as if they were some Hollywood personality.

A if there were anything absolute.

And then, let us just look at CO2.

Fossil fuels are richer in C12 than the atmosphere, so too is plant life on Earth, and there isn’t a lot of difference (just 2.6%) in the ratios of C13 to C12 in plants versus fossil fuels. (Fossil fuels are, after all, made in theory from plants, so it’s not surprising that it’s hard to tell their “signatures” apart). So if the C13 to C12 ratio is falling (as more C12 rich carbon is put into the air by burning fossil fuels) then we can’t know if it’s due to man-made CO2 or natural CO2 from plants.
Essentially we can measure man-made emissions reasonably well, but we can’t measure the natural emissions and sequestrations of CO2 at all precisely — the error bars are huge. Humans emits 5Gt or so per annum, but the oceans emit about 90Gt and the land-plants about 60Gt, for a total of maybe 150Gt. Many scientists have assumed that the net flows of carbon to and from natural sinks and sources of CO2 cancel each other out, but there is no real data to confirm this and it’s just a convenient assumption. The problem is that even small fractional changes in natural emissions or sequestrations swamp the human emissions.

From speech Murry Salby gave at the Sydney Institute
Salby does not dispute that some of the rise in CO2 levels is due to man-made emissions, but found that temperature alone explains about 80% of the variation in CO2 levels.