Climate Audit
Climate Audit is a blog devoted to the analysis and discussion of climate data started by Stephen McIntyre in January 2005.
It was co-winner of the 2007 Best Science Blog award.[1]
Climate Audit has been highlighted by the press including The Wall Street Journal[2] and United Press International.[3]
McIntyre's blog has as a recurrent topic the struggle to obtain underlying data from peer reviewed papers. McIntyre has stated that he started Climate Audit so that he could defend himself against attacks being made at the climatology blog RealClimate.[4] An earlier website, www.climate2003.com, provided additional information for papers co-written by McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, including raw data and source code.
Inspiration
McIntyre became interested in these issues after advocates of the Kyoto Protocol used the Hockey Stick graph from the 1998 paper by Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes[5] in ways that he found similar to Bre-X and other stock frauds, leading him to try to audit the data and analysis. He launched the blog in January 2005 just before Geophysical Research Letters published a paper by McIntyre and Ross McKitrick critiquing the Mann et al. paper. The blog is largely concerned with McIntyre's efforts to audit current climate publications. It supports comments, but topics not related to auditing results in climate science are generally discouraged.
Auditing
The ClimateAudit blog was credited with spurring two hearings on the Hockey Stick Graph, open documentation and the reliability of peer review in government-funded science research by the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee in 2006 at which Stephen McIntyre testified [citation needed]. Of the role of the Climate Audit blog in inspiring the hearings, the Prometheus blog of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research of the University of Colorado at Boulder said, referring to ClimateAudit, "[McIntyre and McKitrick] also have provided a case study in the power of blogs in today's worlds of science and politics".[6]
In 2007, McIntyre started auditing the various corrections made to temperature records, in particular those relating to the Urban Heat Island effect. In the course of his analysis of the records for individual sites, he discovered a small discontinuity in some U.S. records in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) dataset starting in January 2000. He emailed GISS advising them of the problem and within a couple of days GISS issued a new, corrected set of data and "thank[ed] Stephen McIntyre for bringing to our attention that such an adjustment is necessary to prevent creating an artificial jump in year 2000".[7] The adjustment caused the average temperatures for the continental United States to be reduced about 0.15 °C during the years 2000-2006. Changes in other portions of the record did not exceed 0.03 °C, and it made no discernible difference to the global mean anomalies.
McIntyre later commented:[8]
[M]y original interest in GISS adjustment procedures was not an abstract interest, but a specific interest in whether GISS adjustment procedures were equal to the challenge of “fixing” bad data. If one views the above assessment as a type of limited software audit (limited by lack of access to source code and operating manuals), one can say firmly that the GISS software had not only failed to pick up and correct fictitious steps of up to 1 deg C, but that GISS actually introduced this error in the course of their programming. According to any reasonable audit standards, one would conclude that the GISS software had failed this particular test. While GISS can (and has) patched the particular error that I reported to them, their patching hardly proves the merit of the GISS (and USHCN [9]) adjustment procedures. These need to be carefully examined.
See also
References
- ^ Best Science Blog - The 2007 Weblog Awards
- ^ "Global-Warming Skeptics Under Fire".
- ^ "Article in The Washington Times".
- ^ Stephen McIntyre (23 March 2006). "Blog comment". Climate Audit. Retrieved 2007-09-01.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ Mann M.E., Bradley R.S., Hughes M.K. (1998). "Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries". Nature. 392: 779–787. doi:10.1038/33859.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ Prometheus: Hockey Stick Hearing Number Two Archives
- ^ Data @ NASA GISS: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP)
- ^ Climate Audit - by Steve McIntyre » Does Hansen’s Error “Matter”?
- ^ United States Historical Climate Network