Re: Was the ClimateGate Hacker Justified? Join the Debate!

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Fri, 27 Nov 2009 08:17:47 EST, Larry Seltzer said:
> PS - If you haven't guessed it already, I think that climate science is
> largely full of crap. Put aside for the minute that the models can't
> explain why we've had *cooling* for the last 10 years; why would you
> think that you can look at ice cores and use them to recreate
> temperatures to within fractions of a degree? You can only prove the
> accuracy of such methods by comparing them with actual temperatures and,
> of course, we can't do that.

"I can't think of a way to do it, so it can't be done" - the amateur
cryptographers and armchair crank's fallacy. ;)

Except of course, by taking the last 200 or 300 years worth of ice and
comparing it to the historical temperatures.  And we've had pretty damned good
thermometers for most of that time.  So you look at the ice, and see that for
the last 200 years, the ratio of hydrogen/deuterium  is a pretty damned good
fit to a function of measured temperature.  You double check with ice from
Greenland, Switzerland, the Himalayas, and the Antarctic, and hey, you find
that they all have the same H/D ratios for the past several hundred years (ok,
maybe only 100 years of Antarctic ice).  You stop and think about it for a
while, you come up with a reasonable model of differential deposits of water
based on molecular weight at different temperatures (and *that* science is
*very* well understood - it's what makes petroleum distillation columns work,
and similar models enter into gas-diffusion and centrifuge enrichment for U235/
U238 enrichment for nuclear use).  You check *other* data, such as the H/D
ratios in wood for the last 4,000 years or so, and find that the atmospheric
ratios have remained constant.  You then feel justified in extending your model
to the last 4,000 years of ice.  And then you leverage that and cross-correlate
to other data...

It's called Doing Science, Larry.

Here's the pretty-pictures version:

http://www.royalsaskmuseum.ca/gallery/pdf/icecore_panel.pdf

More details:

http://www.oxygentimerelease.com/A/ScienceOxygen/p5.htm

Plenty of other stuff can be found by feeding Google the words
'estimating temperature glacial ice deuterium'

A sample paper - have fun reading:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V61-46YJ2RR-2&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1112338535&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=8978ea0f537db4e6ae622428ae700ca9

Feel free to publish either retractions or similar double-checking for every
time you've put something like "Based on the last 2 quarter's income, we
predict that XYZ Inc will have $<mumble> sales in 2013".  Include all your work
justifying your extrapolation, which was almost certainly based on less data
and more pulled-from-orifices guesses than the climate data is.  I feel a
lot better about the Vostok data than any number *you* ever had the balls to
put in print. ;)

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