In a previous post I highlighted some representations of the temperature and CO2 data. I created my chart using Excel. It confirmed the conclusion that CO2 is barely correlated with temperature. It takes a climate scientist to look at these correlations make the argument that CO2 is the cause of the temperature increase. I decided to take another look at the data using my the statistical software, R, and the PerformanceAnalytics package. Using a R program Stephen Turner published on his blog, Getting Genetics Done. Here is the chart I came up with.

We can see that the best correlation is between CO2 and time. The correlations between July temperature and time and between July temperature and CO2 have similar values. Which is the driver of July temperature,  time or CO2? If CO2 is the driver why do we not see a similar correlation for January temperatures? For some this is settled science. Here is my original Excel chart again.

I disagree! As a person who lived in Houston for twenty years classifying hurricanes by their energy is rather useless number. It is probably more useless than the current classification scheme. The problem with classifying hurricanes is relating their probable effects to the people in the area around the land fall. For the people in harms way, it is all about disaster preparations and they want to know about four things, wind, rain, storm surge, and location. The wind and rain components of Sandy were pretty mild compared to most hurricanes/tropical storms. Sandy made landfall as a tropical storm and fortunately kept moving. That’s the good news. The biggest problems with this storm was the storm surge and its location. In this case the residents of New Jersey and New York had a case of bad luck. As McNoldy wrote, “The storm surge, combined with a full moon and high tide, affected hundreds of miles of highly populated coastline.” From the news reports we can see that this area was dramatically unprepared for a storm surge of this size. Disaster preparations for this storm were an epic failure of poor planning. The obvious solution to the storm surge problem is to build a seawall. It blocks your view of the sea but some days the sea is not your friend.

As an example when I was living in Houston, I was amazed that people would build beach houses on west Galveston Island. Every ten years or so a hurricane would come along and clean off the west side of the island. In a couple of years the houses would be rebuilt. The east side of Galveston Island is protected by a seawall. The seawall was built as a response to the 1900 hurricane. For the most part it protected the city of Galveston well although the seawall was over-topped by the 1915 hurricane,  severely damaged by Hurricane Alicia in 1983, and over-topped again by Hurricane Ike in 2008. I remember Hurricane Alicia well. The eye of the hurricane passed over our house. Live and learn!

In sheer power, Hurricane Sandy ranks second among modern hurricanes, beating even Hurricane Katrina, according to Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami.

Out in the Atlantic Ocean, Sandy was the most energetic tropical cyclone in history, thanks to its massive wind field.

Once Sandy ramped up to a Category 1 hurricane and slammed into New Jersey, the storm’s integrated kinetic energy was second only to Hurricane Isabel in 2003, McNoldy wrote in a blog post.

"It stood out to me that this was a pretty unique case of a rather weak storm as wind speeds go, but huge on the impact scale," McNoldy told OurAmazingPlanet.

Integrated kinetic energy (IKE) is a new scale designed to better convey the destructive power from both a hurricane’s wind and storm surge. It’s a measure of the wind speed integrated over how wide an area the winds are blowing. The U.S. government patented IKE in 2007. The Saffir-Simpson Scale, used by the National Weather Service, only reports top wind speeds.

The IKE scale helps explain why Hurricane Sandy, which quickly weakened after landfall, created such widespread flooding and damage, McNoldy wrote. The storm surge, combined with a full moon and high tide, affected hundreds of miles of highly populated coastline. The metric also incorporates the storm’s enormous size: The wind field was so large that tropical storm force winds (45 mph/ 72 kph) extended 485 miles (780 kilometers) out from the center at landfall. (Out at sea, the wind field reached a maximum extent of 520 miles, or 835 km.)

In modern records, Sandy’s IKE ranks second among all hurricanes at landfall, higher than devastating storms like Hurricane Katrina, Andrew and Hugo, and second only to Hurricane Isabel in 2003, McNoldy calculated.

Sandy’s IKE was more than 140 Terajoules, meaning it generated more than twice the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, McNoldy wrote. At any given moment, many hurricanes contain more energy than an atomic bomb in their surface winds alone, he wrote.

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The Real Way We Should Classify Hurricanes: By Their Energy
OurAmazingPlanet
Mon, 05 Nov 2012 22:22:00 GMT

I agree with Ann Althouse that the admissions make the non-skeptics, scientists and media, look bad. By failing to effectively criticize their own arguments for global warming, these non-skeptics have done more harm to the global progress on environmental issues than anything the deniers could say or do. Now we are confronted with a large amount of global science research of questionable scientific quality and set of global priorities which may be unjustified. This is probably a good time to re-examine the priorities advocated in The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjørn Lomborg and to re-read the article, The Case for Due Diligence in Policy Formation, by Bruce McCullough and Ross McKitrick. Bjørn Lomborg argues that we are spending too much time on th wrong environmental and social issues.  Bruce and Ross argue that faulty scientific research is consistently leading us to make poor government policies on major issues. As an example we may have a cleaner environment with more jobs if we can unlock the EPA from its view that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that they need to regulate. The article, Time to Repeal New Source Review? (Up to 30 GW of coal-plant upgrades hangs in the balance), makes the argument that the EPA is holding up a lot of jobs and a cleaner environment for the sake of regulating carbon dioxide.

Original link to Daily Mail article:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html

Similar article on Instapundit:

SHOCKER: Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming …

With all of the talk about the Climategate emails I devised a simple thought experiment for scientists. Let us imagine that you are teaching a college science class and you have assigned a science project to your students that will comprise the majority of their grade for the semester. The objective of the project is demonstrate the student’s knowledge of the material you are teaching, their ability to follow the scientific process like a scientist, and their ability to defend their conclusion in front of their fellow students. At the end of the semester you find one student who appears to have reasonable results but they lost the raw data and the method they transformed the raw data into the data that supports their conclusion. When you ask the student how they know the conclusion is correct, their primary defense is that it matches the results turned in by other students. During the defense of the project the other students do not seem to be bothered about the missing raw data and the method the data was transformed. So what grade do you give this student?

• You give the student an ”˜A’ or a ”˜B’ since they got the right result. Their defense of the conclusion was excellent despite the missing data and lack of questions by the other students.
• You give the student a ”˜C’ or an ”˜Incomplete’ since the conclusion was indefensible without the raw data and method used to transform the data. You are bothered that the other students were not more aggressive pursuing the questioning of this project. You have this uncomfortable sense of collusion amongst the students but you are unwilling to judge whether the student’s actions were deliberant or an unfortunate accident.
• You give the student a ”˜F’ since you believe the student deliberately subverted the scientific process. You want to send a message to the students in the class and to those students planning on taking this course to forewarn them that this behavior will not be tolerated.

The article published at Pajamas Media, Climategate Computer Codes Are the Real Story, is the best explanation of why the global warming scientists have been so passionate in avoiding the Freedom of Information act requests. These scientists knew they were in a lose-lose predicament. They knew they were brushing up with the law if they ignored the freedom of information act requests but they definitely did not want Steve McIntyre to look at the raw data and the programs and go ballistic. So they decided to replicate the results using synthesized data and prayed that they could put off the freedom of information act requests indefinitely.

As an IT guy in my day job I have seen this problem and it is called lax change management. In the professional programming world there are a multitude of horror stories associated with lax change management. This problem has been attributed to major cost overruns, project cancellations, and occasionally the failure of a company. To avoid these types of problems most companies have instituted a very simple and effective philosophy. You skirt the rules of change management and something goes wrong, you are fired!

Somewhere some important people are gathering and trying to figure out what to do with these scientists and their projects. Global warming science is important but are these scientists “too big to fail”? I am not sure an audit or internal investigation will satisfy either the politicians or the public. Such a waste of time and money! This is going to get uglier before it gets better. There are probably several ideas the scientific community probably needs to implement to avoid disasters like this in the future. As a starter maybe the scientific community will finally open its publicly funded projects to outside scrutiny much earlier in the game.

On Friday the woman giving the weather report for the  Cincinnati area said we might need to break out the sweaters. She was predicting that the high temperatures for the day might set new records for the lowest recorded high temperature. It seems like we have had only seven days of summer weather. Last night when we were taking horses out, my son wore a sweatshirt.

Our fly population has been decimated by the cool Spring and Summer. Flies are warm weather insects. The house fly is the most temperature hardy but their population is down considerably over previous years. They were at least a month late in arriving this year because of the cool Spring.  Our deer fly population typically arrives during June and I don’t think I saw more than one or two. Now is the time when the first horse flies should be showing up. They are hot weather insects and diminish rapidly with the cool weather of Fall. It should be interesting to see how many horse files emerge if the temperature remains below average. This year is shaping up to be the coldest summer in ten years for me.