20101001_M3
Source: CITRIS
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbR0EPWgkEI
Date: 01/10/2010
Event: Professor Richard Muller at i4Energy seminar, 2010: Part 3
Credit: CITRIS
Also see:
People:
- Richard Muller: Lead scientist, Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project
Richard Muller: Now, what about the Climategate? The scientists have now been exonerated... acquitted... not guilty. They did get a wrist slap. [Prof. Muller slaps his own wrist.] They deceived the public and they deceived other scientists. But they did nothing that was immoral, illegal or anything like that. What did they do, to deceive the public? This is in the report, this is in the review - not the charts.
[Slide: MULLER_20101001-3019.jpg]
But these are the data, as they published it on the cover of the World Meteorological Organisation magazine. These are the data that many of my fellow scientists at Berkeley use. They say "Hello, you know the public don't understand graphs. But I do. And look at this. Here's the temperature for the last 1000 years, going over the place. It's not actually temperature - we actually measure tree rings and [inaudible] and coral and things - but it's a proxy for temperature. Goes all over the place. And look what happened recently. Zoom! That's clear and incontrovertible. The public may not understand this, so I have to now lend my prestige to this. I'm a Professor of Physics, and I will now go and tell people that global warming is clear and uncontrovertible, because I have seen the actual data. And it is." And, unfortunately, a lot of my colleagues have behaved in this way.
In their paper, if you dig into it, they said they did some things with the data from 1961 onwards. They removed it and replaced it with temperature data. So some of the people who read these papers asked to see the data. They refused to send it to them - the original raw data. They used the Freedom of Information Act. The Freedom of Information Act officer, on the advice of the scientists, would not release the data.
Then the data came out. They weren't hacked, like a lot of people say - most people who know this business believe they were leaked, by one of the members of the team who was really upset with them.
So now I can show you what the data, that they refused to release - the original data, before they did anything. What they did was - and there's a quote. A quote came out in the emails, these leaked emails, that said "Let's use Mike's trick to hide the decline". That's the words. "Let's use Mike's trick to hide the decline." Mike - who's Michael Mann - said "Hey, "trick" just means mathematical trick, that's all". Now my response is: I'm not worried about the word "trick". I'm worried about the decline.
What do you mean, "hide the decline"? Let me show you this. Now we have the data, now it's been released. And this is what it is.
[Slide: MULLER_20101001-3215.jpg]
That's the raw data, as any Berkeley scientist would have published it. It would have said "Okay, we've had the Medieval [sic] Ice Age, and now we have global warming. And there's some disagreement, but hey, there's disagreement all over the place. And that just shows the technique isn't completely reliable."
What they did is they took the data from 1961 on, from this peak, and erased it. What was the justification for erasing it? The fact that it went down. And we know the temperature's going up. Therefore, it was unreliable. "Is this unreliable?" "No." "How do we know?" "Well, we don't know, but..." You know. [Audience laughter.]
The justification would not have survived peer review in any journal that I'm willing to publish in. But they had it well hidden. And they erased that. And they replaced it with temperature going up - and let me show you how cleverly this was done. They get back to this block - there it is.
They added the same temperature data to three different plots, giving the illusion that there are three different sets going up. And they smoothed it. This temperature changes smoothly. If they hadn't smoothed it, you might have gone "So wait a minute, what's the change going on, right there? Why is it abruptly different?" But you don't notice that, because it's smooth. But smoothing is legitimate, in their minds, because temperature change is not discontinuous.
So that's what they did. And what is the result, in my mind? [Prof. Muller flips repeatedly between the two slides.] Frankly, as a scientist? I now have a list of people whose papers I won't read any more. You're not allowed to do this, in science. This is not up to our standards. I get infuriated with colleagues of mine, who say "Well, you know, it's a human field. Do you make mistakes?" And then I show them this. And they say "Err... no. That's not acceptable."
Now here's part of the problem. The temperature I showed you before - this one? Of the three groups, I'd pick the one I trusted the most.
[Slide: MULLER_20101001-3421.jpg]
Guess which group this was. Yeah... The group that hid the decline.
So we have Jim Hansen, who predicts things ahead of time, well he's going fine.[?] We have a group here, who feels it is legitimate to hide things. This is why I'm now leading a study to re-do all this in a totally transparent way.
Okay. Want to finish in about five minutes, so what'll I say? I mentioned the IPCC things, see the problems with the Himalayan glaciers - their next report is going to be much cleaner and much better.
[Slide: MULLER_20101001-3445.jpg]
They have taken such a blow. Because it wasn't just the Himalayan glaciers. It was this long list of things - all the things that really grabbed the newspaper headlines were not based on science. That's not surprising. They're not in a discovery mode, they're in a reporting mode, so they're in deep trouble. Their chairman will have to resign or be fired. And this report now, that they need to clean this up - their act - and they will. The result will be - the next IPCC report out, in about two years, will not have the spectacular headlines that the previous ones have had. We'll have really dry science - that's what I predict.