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The Inconvenient Truth about David Rose's 'Special Investigation'
12:24 pm - December 14th 2009
So, at last, the Mail on Sunday has waded into the furore surrounding the hacked CRU emails with a special investigation, bringing out its big guns, David Rose, who is highly regarded as a journalist and has a solid track record in serious reporting and investigations, to write up the story.
For all his well-deserved reputation as a serious journalist, Rose, it must be said, also has previous form for being taken in by sources he believed to be reliable at the time but which then proved to have been feeding him disinformation. In this case the disinformation in question related to alleged links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, which Rose fell for hook, line and sinker. To his credit Rose did eventually come clean and admit to having been duped, expressing his regrets in very strong and, in regards to the role of some of his sources.
The point I'm making here is that even a very good journalist is only ever going to be as good as his sources, and in the case of Rose's investigation his choice of sources are letting him down very badly indeed.
Misquoting Roger Pielke Jr.
In the article Roger Pielke Jr is presented by Rose as a credible (i.e. non-skeptical) climate scientist who fully accepts the reality of anthropogenic global warming and a strong advocate for action who has, nevertheless, been highly critical of the scientists at the centre of this issue:
Pielke's verdict on the scandal is damning.
'These emails open up the possibility that big scientific questions we've regarded as settled may need another look.
'They reveal that some of these scientists saw themselves not as neutral investigators but as warriors engaged in battle with the so-called sceptics.
'They have lost a lot of credibility and as far as their being leading spokespeople on this issue of huge public importance, there is no going back.'
Pielke may well stand by his opinions of the scientists but, as he disclosed on his own blog within hours of the article's publication, not by the suggestion that any of the big scientific questions relating to AGW may need to be re-examined.
Dear David-
I just saw your story in the Daily Mail and a small correction is needed. You quote me as saying:
"These emails open up the possibility that big scientific questions we've regarded as settled may need another look."
What I said was:
"While these emails open up the possibility that some scientific questions we've regarded as settled may need another look, time will tell and the implications for science are not the most important aspect of the emails."
The point was that while I am agnostic about the implications for science, leaving that to others, I am certain that the emails have broader implications for the credibility and legitimacy of certain quarters of climate science. Based on what I've seen, I do not believe that any "big scientific questions" are implicated by the emails.
So, what Pielke actually suggested was that while the CRU emails raise, for him, questions about the credibility of paleoclimatology, which provides only a small part of the evidence for climate change, he's content that this does not challenge the credibility of AGW theory as a whole, which is what the misquote implies. Pielke, as you can see if you follow the link, has asked for a correction, to which Rose has responded by indicating that he's forwarded that request to the 'appropriate editor' at the Mail.
Whether he gets his correction or not, given that this is a Mail we're talking about, could be another matter entirely – it hasn't happened yet.
Dishonesty in the Southern Hemisphere
Later in the article, after noting, correctly, that climate scientists have to make adjustments to proxy data from sources such as tree rings and ice cores to correct for anomalies that would distort their findings, Rose adds the following:
But can we trust the way such 'adjustments' are made?
Last week, an article posted on a popular climate sceptic website analysed the data from the past 130 years in Darwin, Australia.
This suggested that average temperatures had risen there by about two degrees Celsius. However, the raw data had been 'adjusted' in a series of abrupt upward steps by exactly the same amount: without the adjustment, the Darwin temperature record would have stayed level.
The 'popular climate sceptic website' is, in this case, that of Anthony Watts, the TV weatherman who famously responded to a video by Peter Sinclair that debunked his claim that the NOAA's US Surface Station record was unreliable, not by acknowledging that he was in error but by firing off claims of copyright infringement to You Tube in an effort to suppress the video. As questions about scientific effects are central to the debate surrounding the CRU emails, its well worth remembering that deniers like Watts routinely behave as if they those same standards do not apply to their own 'research'.
The claims relating to the Darwin temperature record were made by Willis Eschenbach, who deploys a 'trick' of his own to make the warming trend in the data relating to Darwin 'disappear', the same trick used a couple of weeks earlier by a 'sceptic' group calling itself the New Zealand Climate Change Coalition, that of treating data from different weather stations as if they were from the same site.
Had Rose bothered to carry his investigations further that Watts' site he might have found that the NZ CSC's trick was rapidly debunked, while Essenbach's attempt to pull out the same trick on the data from Darwin lasted less than 24 hours before it too was exposed as a fraud.
(UPDATE – even if Rose failed to scan a few independent blogs for responses to Eschenbach's piece on the Darwin temperature record, he might have noticed this take down by The Economist).
The Divergence Problem and the Medieval Warm Period
The heart of Rose's 'investigation' is a discussion of the contents of some of the CRU emails.
I've covered this already but to quickly recap, the divergence problem relates to the proxy data derived from tree rings which is used to reconstruct temperatures from the pre-industrial era, i.e. before the advent of reliable meteorological records and the quickest way to explain it is simply to show it to you using this graph:
The data in red comes from the instrumental record and shows the average global temperature since 1850 as derived from measurements taken by weather stations, while the data in blue shows the proxy record compiled from tree ring data by Keith Briffa, which is known as 'Briffa 99' and for each I've added polynomial trend lines so you can see exactly what's going on.
As you can see, from around 1960 onwards, the two graphs diverge sharply – the instrumental record keeps rising, which is consistent with global warming, but the proxy record shows an apparent downward trend that much more pronounced than the upward trend on real temperatures. Something is clearly wrong with the proxy record from 1960 onwards as it clearly doesn't show what we know to be actually happening, hence the divergence problem.
The core of the current controversy stems from the omission of the proxy data from 1960 onwards from the 'hockey stick' graph which appeared in the 2oo1 IPCC report and, more importantly, the failure of the IPCC to acknowledge that this data had been excluded. The graph that did appear in the report substituted the data from the instrumental record and omitted the proxy data from 1960 onwards, ensuring that the correct trend was shown but did not admit to the use of this 'trick'. This is the 'decline' that the scientists refer to when they talk about 'hiding the decline' in the hacked emails.
If you look at what various skeptics and deniers are saying about this graph at the moment you'll find three common claims being made.
First, some deniers claim that the proxy data shows that the global climate is actually cooling and its this that the scientists were deliberately hiding. This claim is complete bullshit.
The second claim is that the divergence problem, which has been extensively researched since it was discovered in the late 1990's, somehow invalidates the entire hockey stick graph because it proves that the entire proxy reconstruction is in error.
The short answer to that claim is 'no, it doesn't'. It does raise some legitimate questions as to whether and what extent any of the confounding factors that are thought to contribute to the observable divergence problem in the post-1960 data may be present in the pre-industrial reconstruction, meaning that there is a need for much more research into those questions, but it remains the case that a series of reconstructions produced after MBH98/99 and Briffa 99 using different proxies all support the reconstructed temperature trends that were shown by both models for the pre-industrial period, all of which suggest that despite there being known, and acknowledged, methodological flaws in the compilation of these earlier reconstructions, the flaws did not unduly affect their outcome.
How warm was the Medieval Warm Period?
The third issue relates to one very specific part of the reconstruction, which is called the 'Medieval Warm Period' (MWP). This is period of seemingly natural warming in the Northern Hemisphere, and particularly in Northern Europe, the North Atlantic and North American, of around 300-400 years centred on the first century of the first millennium (1000-1100AD). It encompasses, amongst other things, the period during which we know that the Vikings embarked on several significant voyages of discovery, reaching Iceland, Greenland (which got its name, which seems incongruous today, during this period) and North America.
Amongst some sceptics, including McIntyre and McKitrick, the contention is that the natural warming that occurred during parts of the MWP was as pronounced as it is today, and that this disproves that the claim, made by climate scientists, that the current level of warming is unprecedented in recent human history (i.e. the last 1500-2000 years or so). This line of argument is reflected in Rose's article in this passage:
For example, some suggest that the 'medieval warm period', the 350-year era that started around 1000, when red wine grapes flourished in southern England and the Vikings tilled now-frozen farms in Greenland, was considerably warmer than even 1998.
Of course, this is inconvenient to climate change believers because there were no cars or factories pumping out greenhouse gases in 1000AD – yet the Earth still warmed.
Some tree-ring data eliminates the medieval warmth altogether, while others reflect it. In September 1999, Jones's IPCC colleague Michael Mann of Penn State University in America – who is now also the subject of an official investigation –was working with Jones on the hockey stick. As they debated which data to use, they discussed a long tree-ring analysis carried out by Keith Briffa.
Briffa knew exactly why they wanted it, writing in an email on September 22: 'I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards "apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more".' But his conscience was troubled. 'In reality the situation is not quite so simple – I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.'
The suggestion here is that scientists at the CRU may have been manipulating the proxy data, as much by omission as anything else, to minimise the apparent scale of the MWP as it appeared in, at least, Briffa's proxy in an effort to lead people to the conclusion that scientists are concealing a crucial piece of evidence which would indicate that there is nothing particulaly unusual or unprecedented about current warming trends and they are, if natural in origin then, at least, within the scope of past trends which didn't trigger a global climate catastrophe.
There are, however, two key facts about the evidence relating to the proxy data, the divergence problem and MWP that you won't see cited on the websites of 'skeptics' like McIntyre and McKitrick in conjunction with their musings on the meaning of these emails.
One of these is that one of the possible implications of the divergence problem that is being heavily investigated at the moment is that some of the confounding factors that are thought to account for the anomalous decline in the post-1960 trend line would, if found to be active in the pre-industrial reconstructions, have the effect of causing scientists to over-estimate the degree of warming that occurred during the Medieval Warm Period. The MWP may not have been quite as warm as those skeptics who are relying on it to debunk AGW, or at least cloud the issues around it, think.
The second is that, at least some of the emails that are being put forward as being the most damaging evidence against the CRU researchers and other paleoclimatologists are anything up to ten years old, and both the science and its evidence base have moved on considerably in the intervening years, particularly in regards to understanding the scope and [lack of] significance of the MWP.
So what you won't see are these two plots of global temperature patterns, one from the MWP, the other covering the period from 1998-2008.
As you can clearly see from the two plots, the MWP was not a global phenomenon. It was, in fact, localised on the North Atlantic and had very little impact on overall global temperatures, not least due to cooling in the Southern Hemisphere, unlike the current warming pattern which shows temperatures rising almost everywhere but for Eastern Pacific. As such, plots of raw data from exclusively Northern Hemisphere proxies, the data that McIntyre has been trying to obtain and would no doubt have presented as evidence against AGW theory, will not provide an accurate picture of global warming during the MWP because the warming trend was localised on one specific region.
Much of the chatter on 'skeptic' websites of late has focussed on putting interpretations on comments within the CRU emails which suggest a deliberate conspiracy to conceal or minimise evidence relating to the MWP. One email, in particular, makes a reference to the need to 'contain' the MWP, which deniers have interpreted as evidence that scientists have been attempting to make the temperature changes during that period appear small than they actually were as part of their global AGW conspiracy. i.e. that they we seeking to 'contain' the scale the warming that occurred during that period on the reconstruction graphs.
In reality, this comment refers to the need to 'contain' the MWP temporally – at the time the email was written, the available reconstructions stretched back only as far as 1000AD and, began, started during the Medieval Warm Period, making it impossible to see the full trend. The need to 'contain' the MWP, in this case, meant only the need to extend the scope of the reconstruction back further in time so that both the beginning and end of the MWP could be seen on the graph, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the scale of the warming evident during that period other than in the sense that it could not be fully assessed without a suitable reference point right at the very start of the period.
The Inconvenient Truth
All of the additional information I've provided here, in relation, to Rose's article is sourced from the public domain and most of it, with the exception of Pielke's complaint about being misquoted, was available to Rose before his article was published, if only he'd spent 10-15 minutes checking his sources using nothing more complicated than Google.
As a result his 'special investigation' fails to live up to its billing.
More to the point, it – like almost everything else published by the mainstream press since these emails emerged – completely ignores the central ethical dilemma that climate scientists working at the CRU have faced over the last ten years.
What do you do when faced with a barrage of requests for raw data when you know full well that the people making the requests will misuse that data, if its given to them, to fundamentally misrepresent your work and publish a false and entirely misleading picture of the evidence?
What is the correct, ethical, answer to that question?
And if we're going to make a big deal of the apparent ethical shortcomings of the CRU scientists, then should we not also apply those same standards to their critics, most of whom have already been caught out for publishing misleading claims?
'Unity' is a regular contributor to Liberal Conspiracy. He also blogs at Ministry of Truth.
· Other posts by Unity
Story Filed Under: Blog ,Environment ,Media ,Science
1:12 pm, December 14, 2009
1. Constantly Furious
"Something is clearly wrong with the proxy record from 1960 onwards as it clearly doesn't show what we know to be actually happening".
The data is clearly wrong, because it doesn't show what we 'know' ?
2. Matt Volatile
Can someone email this to Melanie Phillips, and then report back her response?
3. Iain Coleman
Constantly Furious:
Try, please, to understand the difference between a direct measurement and a proxy measurement.
For example, imagine trying to determine the circumference of a man's waist. The direct measurement would be to use a tape measure. A proxy measurement would be to look at the waist size of his jeans.
In many cases, the proxy would give us a similar result to the direct measurement. But if we tried to use this proxy for, say, Jeremy Clarkson it would give an incorrect result: the waist size of the jeans being smaller than the directly measured circumference. This is because Mr Clarkson wears jeans that are much too tight, leading to an unsightly bulge over the top of them.
Proxy measurements are useful when there are no direct measurements available, but a direct measurement is always better than a proxy.
In this case, we are comparing a proxy (tree ring widths) to a direct measurement of temperature. The direct measurement shows that the proxy is a reasonable indication of the actual values for the period up to 1960, but not afterwards.
4. Tom
Pretty much, yes. The tree ring data is a proxy for temperature. We know that it's wrong, as a measure of temperature over the last 40-odd years, because we have other direct data, from other more reliable sources, that conflicts with it. That doesn't seem difficult to understand or accept; even those most sceptical of global warming don't believe the earth has got colder by 3K over the last 40 years, surely?
5. Unity
We know what the temperature changes were from 1960 onwards because we have reliable records from numerous surface weather stations, a mass of real data showing real temperatures.
So we know that the data from the proxy record, in which temperatures are extrapolated from tree ring growth patterns is in error because it fails to follow the trend in the real data.
That graph compares two data sets. One is correct (the instrumental record) and one goes badly wrong after 1960.
if we tried to use this proxy for, say, Jeremy Clarkson
Is there an award for the best scientific analogy of the year, because if there is then you've won it hands down.
7. MoreMediaNonsense
Some questions :
1. What is exactly the tree ring data that diverges we are talking about here ? How many trees ? How are they distributed worldwide ? Is it a set of trees from all over the world that diverge or just a subset ?
2. In the MWP graph above what are the proxies used given its so long ago ?
8. John Meredith
Unity, does it not bother you at all that Keith Briffa, not usually considered a sceptic or 'denier' does not believe that recent warming is unprecedented but that he seems to have been pressured into keeping that view to himself? Does it not strike you as at least a bit spinny to doctor the graph for the IPCC as was done? Do you apply the same interpretative genorosity to Blair's 'dodgy dossier'?
As to the proxy record, it may be as you describe it, but until we know, we have to discount its reliability. In other words, nobody can confidently say anythhing about temp trends before the instrumental record began until the post 1960 anomoly has been satisfactorily explained. It seems to me that you have expended a lot of words trying to muddy what is (for once) quite a clear issue.
9. pagar
"even those most sceptical of global warming don't believe the earth has got colder by 3K over the last 40 years, surely?"
So how far does a proxy have to diverge from reality before consideration is given to its overall worth as a proxy?
And what served as a proxy for the temperature of the Atlantic ocean during the MWP?
Seaweed?
10. Unity
Briffa used the Yamal proxy data set, which is what I used in the divergence graph. It's not a large sample and it comes from one area but it is only one proxy amongst many that are in use.
The MWP plot uses multiple proxies including tree rings, ice cores, corals and sediments, as does the IPCC.
11. FrankFisher
[moderated out for being a trolling idiot]
12. MoreMediaNonsense
Just did my own search on 2, here's McIntyre's take on the MWP using some of the non tree ring proxies :
http://climateaudit.org/2008/09/03/mann-2008-mwp-proxies/
Can't find a rebuttal immediately but there are people arguing in the thread against him.
Unity – so the divergence issue is solely due to the Yamal data set ?
13. Matt Volatile
"It really is of no significance if a number of different proxy measures show the same back-story"
Errmm…. it really is.
[moderated out for telling the truth]
[Told to fuck off for being a twat – Unity]
15. Andrew Adams
The divergence problem occurs in a number of datasets from high latitudes.
16. John Meredith
Which makes you wonder why it was the data chosen to be represented on the IPCC graph, especially since even that had to be doctored to fit the message. Do you really think that Keith Briffa's opinion, based on an expert understanding of the paleoclimatological science (I don't think Briffa has yet been anathematised as a 'denier' so I hope we can agree for the time being that he IS an expert and a scientist), that the late 20th century warming is not unprecedented in recent (geologically speaking) times, can be easily dismissed?
If we have been this warm before without catastrophic problems, it rather changes the parameters of the debate.
Sort of – Yamal is where the divergence problem was identified and having found the problem, researchers are now trying to understand and quantify its causes.
The key thing to note, in regards to the hockey stick graph, is that several subsequent reconstructions support the accuracy of the graph regardless of whether the tree-ring data is included or excluded as a proxy.
Rose's article is nonsense. On the issue of the proxy data and the IPCC chart he cites some of the CRU emails and claims they show that Briffa recalculated his data in response to concerns expressed therein that his original reconstruction was "too warm" and thereby contradicting the preferred narrative of his colleagues. He also claims that the divergence problem emerged specifically as a result of this recalculation.
However, them emails actually show that Briffa had already performed the recalculation (in fact the new version had been published in Science a few months earlier). Furthermore the divergence problem was already known by this time and was mentioned in a paper published by Briffa the previous year.
I have written more about this here if anyone's interested.
http://www.mutantblog.co.uk/?p=102
I don't quite understand, you mean there is other proxy data that can be used instead that shows no divergence but the team perferred to use this incorrect set and doctor it? The fact that there has been a steep warming in ther late 20th century (which has levelled off for about 12 years perhaps due to negative feedbacks) is not in question, it is whether this warming is unprecedented and catastrophic that raiseds the temperature of the debate. It now seesms that Briffa, a leadingg climatologists, did not consider the data to show what it was claimed to show and, in fact, altered it to fit more closely with the preferred message.
I am amazed that you are so complacent about this. If (let's say) a government had claimed they had a dossier which (say) showed that a political enemy had weapons of a kind that made war necessary, and it was later found that one of the key lines of evidence in that dossier had been altered before it was shown to policy makers because it did not support thae preferred view, would you not (in that entirely hypothetical case) consider it a scandal?
Briffa's data only goes back to 1400 so his opinion that the MWP was as hot as the late 20th century is just that, an opinion. Of course he is perfectly entitiled to speculate but that is hardly hard evidence, and it doesn't fit with other reconstructions.
The problem is not so much that we are as warm as we are now (although that could cause some problems in itself). The real problem is that we are going to get significantly warmer.
Briffa's comments don't bother me in the slightest. Not only are they ten years old, and the science has moved on considerably since then, but they are also, more often than not, being quoted out of context.
You can read the full email here and it worth taking the time to follow the discussion in full – http://eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=136&filename=938018124.txt
What this all comes back to, in the end, is the last question I posed in the full article, about the 'ethics' of some of the more prominent 'sceptics'.
The pressure on Mann, Briffa et al to produce a nice tidy story for AR3 came almost entirely from the knowledge that anything that looked even the slightest bit anomalous would be blown up into 'proof' that AGW was a fraud by deniers, regardless of its significance, or lack thereof.
AGW theory rests, like so much other science, on consideration of the totality of the evidence not on any one individual piece of evidence. What happens, however, is that the likes of Watts and McIntyre consciously cherry-pick the evidence for only those elements that appear to support their position, even if that evidence is relatively insignificant when set against the weight of evidence opposing their position, and then present it as if it were the single most important piece of evidence there is.
In scientific terms that's just plain flat out dishonest.
Do you have any evidence that Briffa doctored his data to fit with the preferred message? There is certainly none in Rose's article.
23. Laban
I'll say one thing for Unity. He's not afraid to dive head-first into controversies where a lot of better-qualified people are slugging it out and pronounce who the goodies and baddies are. Let's hope his stats have improved since he took the Telegraph to the cleaners so impressively last year.
I don't pretend to know what the score is. What I do know is that where there's disagreement, people should ideally be presented with both sides of the argument, then hopefully the facts will speak for themselves, or the most convincing advocates will.
It's great that Unity has posted the rebuttals to Eschenbach's stuff on the Darwin record. Wouldn't it have been REALLY great if he'd linked to Eschenbach's original Darwin post
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/
as well as to the rebuttals ? Then, inshallah, we can read the whole story and examine claim and counter-claim (yes, I know there's a link in Eschenbach's rebuttal of the Economist – just make it easy for those of us who aren't qualified in stats or earth sciences, will you ?).
I like the impartiality. MY guy 'takes down' your guy's data. YOUR guy only has a 'snarky response'.
BTW, those tree rings. My understanding from reading Unity's post is
a) tree rings are great for measuring temperature before 1960. A good thing too, because before about 1850 they're one of the few sources we have. The fatter the ring, the higher the temperature. Simples !
b) in 1960 something goes horribly wrong. We know the climate's hotter cos of our thermometers. Yet the rings aren't getting as fat as we'd like. The whole thing breaks down !
c) but it doesn't matter. We've got the thermometer readings post 1960. We know we can rely on the tree rings before 1960. What ? How do we know we can rely on them pre-1960 ? Because.. er .. DENIER ! BIG-OIL STOOGE !
I'm sure that's not a fair characterisation of the argument (simple me thinks that surely rainfall as well as temperature would affect ring width) but … as someone who's obviously on top of these things, Unity, can you give me a link to somewhere that explains why tree rings are kosher pre-1960 but a pile of pants thereafter ?
And Rose's article is a perfect example of exactly that.
If we do get warmer that may create serious problems, although the fact that we are not currently getting warmer and haven't for 12 years or so should give us pause.
Briffa's view that current temps are not extraordinary is based on an expert view of the science and so, as far as I know, it is as significant as any other and more than most. I do not understand why you think he made it in ignorance of the data, this is his specialist subject.
We know that the data was doctiored (that much is uncontroversial), whether Briffa actually recalculated data to produce results that were asked of him is something that the inquiry will resolve, I should think.
That is the problem you face when you are in a debate, but personally I think people can cope with the full complexity of the argument and do not need it interpreted for them by Mann and co. It should not lead you into misrepresenting the evidence because that eventually blows up in your face. This scandal is much more damaging that it would have been if the data had been in the open in the first place.
Look at you comment with a few changes, to see why many people will not find your defence of CRU to be wholly convincing:
"The pressure on Blair et al to produce a nice tidy story for parliamentary scrutiny came almost entirely from the knowledge that anything that looked even the slightest bit anomalous would be blown up into 'proof' that Saddam was no threat by appeasers, regardless of its significance, or lack thereof."
My point about his data is that it did not go back far enough to actually provide hard evidence. I'm not saying that I would not give credence to his opinion given that he is indeed an expert, but then so is Mann and he clearly disagrees. I'm happy to give more weight to the opinions of experts over those of non-experts (something the skeptics are reluctant to do) but I would also give more weight to published papers than to opinions voiced in an email.
"My point about his data is that it did not go back far enough to actually provide hard evidence."
But his view is presumably based on all the available evidence, not just his.
Briffa did not doctor any data, he revised his calculations using a different methodology and this was done some months prior to the email exchange mentioned by Rose. I'm not qualified to comment on whether this new methodology was more appropriate but the onus is on those who suggest that it was done for improper motives to providee some evidence.
My impression is that it was based on the conclusions he had drawn from his own work – there was not much other published work on this at that time apart from Mann and Jones, whose work did not show such an extreme MWP.
"the likes of Watts and McIntyre consciously cherry-pick the evidence for only those elements that appear to support their position, even if that evidence is relatively insignificant […] In scientific terms that's just plain flat out dishonest."
This is an odd comment, by the way, because McIntyre is not picking evidence that 'supports' his view but challenging the reliablity of other bits of evidence. It may be relatively important compared to the 'mass' of evidence or not, but we should only be concerned about whether it is right or wrong and adjust our view of the probabilities slightly accordingly. That is how science works. The idea you seem to have that science is about making grand narrative statements and not being distracted by nitty gritty details is the perversion, and it is what a lot of us have grown so alarmed at. The unsexy stuff is the real science nine times in ten.
"Briffa did not doctor any data, he revised his calculations using a different methodology and this was done some months prior to the email exchange mentioned by Rose."
I will wait for the enquiry. The only thing we know for sure is that it was doctored to 'hide the decline'.
34. Sunny H
No one's stopping you from posting those links Laban, are they? Or are your freedoms being trampled on when someone takes down an investigation you'd love to believe in?
People can of course make up their minds… but please don't try and pretend this is some 'balanced debate' with equally stacked sides.
35. pagar
Briffa did not doctor any data, he revised his calculations using a different methodology
If it looks like a fish, smells like a fish, chances are……..
By the way, here is a reconstruction of the climate record using non-tree ring proxies. I don't know why the IPCC don't use this since it shows the recent warming so they wouldn't have any awkward 'decline' post-1960 to 'hide'. Very strange.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-background-articles/2000-years-of-global-temperatures/
"please don't try and pretend this is some 'balanced debate' with equally stacked sides"
Re Unity's post, that's exactly my point.
I'm an AGW agnostic (but with a precautionary bias. IMHO it makes sense to err on the side of caution re CO2 emissions, given that the consequences COULD be exceeding unpleasant). But I sense an unholy alliance between a lot of people whose careers (and status – never discount that) depend on AGW being true, and other people who see it as a great opportunity to increase the power of the state (and supra-state).
Mixed in with that you have some clever financial chaps, from Lakshmi Mittal to Goldman Sachs, who see carbon credits as the new moneyspinner. And don't forget the VAT carousel fraudsters are already doing the biz with carbon credits now – so much easier to transport than real mobiles.
"I don't know why the IPCC don't use this since it shows the recent warming"
Which it doesn't becuase it stops in 1935 due to the shortage of proxies (my bad). But that is a good non-arbitrary scientific reason for stopping and replacing with the instrumental measures, so it would still be better for the IPCC and save them embarrasment and all the uncertainties of the tree rings. Still a mystery why they don't prefer this then.
Laban at #37, that is more or less my poisition, although my view of the reasonable costs to incur in reducing emissions is afffected by scepticism about the scale of the problem. But, yes, 'agniostic' is probably the most accurate word.
completely ignores the central ethical dilemma that climate scientists working at the CRU have faced over the last ten years
The ethical dilemma involved in, erm, complying with the FOIA?
41. Planeshift
"But I sense an unholy alliance between a lot of people whose careers (and status – never discount that) depend on AGW being true,"
But you don't seem to account for that there are a awful lot of people whose careers (and status – never discount that) depend on AGW being false. Oil companies, republicans, Saudi Arabia, people for whom AGW is ideologically inconvenient, careerist contrarians etc. None of whom have anything like the peer review process to hold them to account.
"None of whom have anything like the peer review process to hold them to account."
And how has that holding to account been going for you?
Everybody knows there are vested interests on both sides and we are grown up enough to take them into acccount without having the data gingered up in any way. But it is important to remember that the vested interests are on both sides. When Greenpeace pipe up they are not an disinterested voice.
ut I sense an unholy alliance between a lot of people whose careers (and status – never discount that) depend on AGW being true, and other people who see it as a great opportunity to increase the power of the state (and supra-state).
Ahh yes, that argument which was properly demolished by John Band earlier on this site.
It's amusing you say that without irony even though there's more money to be made and more exposed instances of lobbying where big corporations have deliberately funded front-groups to distort the science around climate change to suit their agenda.
Oh and guess who is advocating more taxes to deal with climate change? Exxon Mobil.
44. Eugene
Obviously the counter claim is that the data is wrong, and is influenced by urban island effects etc.
I dont get using proxys at all in this case. Either use the proxy the whole way through, or say we dont know exactly what temperature the past was.
Or re-calibrate the temperature now to the tree ring data now.
If we were to discover the tree rings as a proxy right now would we not.
1) Make sure that the tree rings were consistent changing with regad to yearly temperature ( we know that to be true)
2) Calibrate the temperatures of the last few years to the tree ring data.
3) From that calibration work out the temperature way back when.
Which of course, adds back in the Medieval Warm Period.
Instead we calibrate the proxy temperatures with known values up until 1960, and 1980 and ignore the rest. Or stop the proxy data just when it diverges from instrumental readings.
Sounds like manipulation, and anywhere else it would be.
I see that comprehending English still isn't one of your strong points cjcjc.
"It's amusing you say that without irony even though there's more money to be made and more exposed instances of lobbying where big corporations have deliberately funded front-groups to distort the science around climate change to suit their agenda"
yes, James Watts is just rolling in the money. The people who are funded are
1) Funded by Governments.
2) Funded By Soros – RealClimate – and he is the worlds richest man ever.
3) Funded to a degree by "enegry companies". The oil companies are not funding the sceptics one bit, which is why the sceptics are generally scientists, or computer programmers running a website from their bedrooms.
And a certain Jim Hansen, of course.
The only thing we know for sure is that it was doctored to 'hide the decline'.
You are conflating two different issues. The "hide the decline" remark refers to the production of the temperature chart for the IPCC report, not to Briffa's reworking of his calculations, which took place well before any of these emails were sent.
49. Charlieman
@41 Planeshift: "None of whom have anything like the peer review process to hold them to account."
The agnostics (John Meredith, Laban) appear to be arguing that peer review of the CRU failed. If the temperature pattern implied by proxy data is inconsistent with measured data, any analysis that mingles the two sources is iffy. You need to re-examine the proxy data and come up with a correlation that provides a closer match between proxy and real world data. Then you can apply the two data sources side by side.
The cost of reanalysing the data is trivial and needs to be done promptly.
50. Bishop Hill
The Loehle study was published after 4AR, so couldn't be included.
"you don't seem to account for that there are a awful lot of people whose careers (and status – never discount that) depend on AGW being false. Oil companies, republicans, Saudi Arabia"
The first AGW sceptic I came across was the late John Daly. I'm well aware that people like oil companies – and coal companies for that matter – would find AGW an inconvenient truth, were it indeed a truth. But I didn't get the impression JD was funded by anyone – I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong. And I don't think many, if any, of the prominent sceptics are, either. Whereas I know for sure that governments of whatever stripe never object to paying experts who will conclude that 'the government should do more'.
And what's this about 'republicans' ? Are you suggesting they're in the pockets of Big Oil ? I'm not sure they'd ever have done for Big Oil what they (and the UK Labour Party) did for Big Capital this time last year.
I forgot to add 'using our money' to that last sentence.
53. bernard
Fuck off, Laban.
10:01 pm, December 14, 2009
More articulate then usual, Bernard.
55. douglas clark
Eugine @ 44,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_0-gX7aUKk&feature=player_embedded#
Essentially you'll have to spend eight minutes of your life to find out you are wrong.
56. Phil
And what's this about 'republicans' ? Are you suggesting they're in the pockets of Big Oil ?
*guffaw*
1:05 am, December 15, 2009
57. Charlie2
Unity . Ther palaeoclimate community should use the same level of statistical expertise as used in the medical and pharmaceutical industries and publish all raw data and computer codes. Read the Wegman Report and Stupak Response. The issue is too important to have doubts about experiments. It would be sensible to re-run experiments but with adequate input from statisticians- a lot cheaper than all these climate change conferences.
Ther palaeoclimate community should use the same level of statistical expertise as used in the medical and pharmaceutical industries and publish all raw data and computer codes.
Fuck me, you've obviously never read any of the research published by big pharma, have you?
Serious point Charlie2:
For his 2008 paper, in which the reconstruction was based on over 1,000 datasets, Michael Mann did publish both his data and program code in full. Haven't got the link to hand but its all on the web.
The Loehle study, which Bishop Hill mentions and which is often put forward as debunking Mann's work, is based on a mere 18 datasets only five of which are suitable for an MWP reconstruction.
Much of the obsession with gaining access to raw, unadjusted, data comes from asshats like Watts and Eschenbach who simply want to spit out graphs based on raw data and claim, without any credible supporting evidence or analysis, that the adjustments that climate scientists have to use to iron out confounding factors, such as the re-siting of weather stations, are part of a scam to artificially inflate temperature records in support of AGW.
What neither have done, nor shown themselves capable of doing, is challenging the scientific basis on which these adjustments are made. There are at least four summary papers that cover the process used to make adjustments to the US surface record, none of which Watts has ever attempted to critique beyond whining about suppose urban heat islands, even though many of the adjustments to the NOAA dataset relate specifically to dealing with siting artefacts in the data.
That's one of the key reasons why Watts ended up having his arse handed to him by Peter Sinclair when it was found that the data from the weather stations that Watts identified as being free from confounding factors showed the same temperature trend as the full data set.
Another factual inaccuracy in Rose's piece. He says
It is true that, in Watson's phrase, in the autumn of 1999 Jones and his colleagues were trying to 'tweak' a diagram. But it wasn't just any old diagram.
It was the chart displayed on the first page of the 'Summary for Policymakers' of the 2001 IPCC report – the famous 'hockey stick' graph that has been endlessly reproduced in everything from newspapers to primary-school textbooks ever since, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a dizzying, almost vertical rise in the late 20th Century.
But the "hide the decline" email doesn't refer to the graph in the IPCC report, it refers to a similar one in the "WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999".
It uses the non tree-ring datasets that are available and complete, I think. The advantage of this is that it does not use data that we know (because of the post 1960s divergence) to be unreliable. Loehle has also offered strong theoretical grounds for believing that tree-ring data will always be unreliable during warming periods. It may be that Loehle's reconstruction is faulty, of course, but we have no better reason for dismissing it than we have for dismissing other reconstructions, which means we cannot know that current warming is unprecedented or even unusual.
10:59 am, December 15, 2009
@ John
Loehle has also offered strong theoretical grounds for believing that tree-ring data will always be unreliable during warming periods.
That, of course, would explain almost everything- divergence, MWP etc.
The only remaining mystery would be why scientists continue to believe that tree ring data might be a good proxy for temperature measurement.
Al Gore really is the gift that keeps on giving:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/copenhagen/article6956783.ece
following on from the "million degrees" brilliance
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/11/024973.php
64. Will A
A minor point, but the polynomial fits in your "The Divergence Problem" figure are a poor choice to illustrate the changes, as they clearly don't fit the underlying data. They make the disagreement between the two data sets look greater than it actually is, especially in recent years.
John M :
"It uses the non tree-ring datasets that are available and complete, "
So there are only a handful of non tree ring proxies for reconstructing climate before the modern age ? Are you sure ? That sounds crazy.
66. Watchman
Just taking a quick look at the pale lines on the Divergence Problem graph shows one thing. There is no corelation between the measured average temprature variation (pink line) and the tree-ring average temprature variation (light blue line), to the point where an unusully cold year can have particularly high tree-ring growth (which is used to reconstruct the temprature). On a year by year basis this lack of corelation would rule out using this as a comparator anyway, at least without a level of statistical analysis that would need to be fully published with the diagram.
As to the map of the Medieval Warm Period (now to be renamed the 'where Anglophone Historians have noted better climatic conditions c. 1000 AD Period'?), I would love to know where that map comes from and on what data it is based (being a scholar of the period and all). The fact the Artic and Ireland are so well covered suggests tree ring data is partially responsible, and as Unity and I have for different reasons noted this is not the best way to analyse a Warm Period. More importantly, the British Isles, the Atlantic, the more habital bits of North America, west Africa and the Middle East, being the areas with mapped temprature rises, are wierdly the same places where Anglophone historians have undertaken the most study in the period – beyond British and Irish history and American archaeology, note the traditional Anglophone historical areas of Viking studies, African studies and Byzantine studies. The correlation is slightly concerning – in those areas where historians who primarily work in English are likely to comment, the warming they would expect is indeed found. I can't think of an area where the same conditions would apply where it is not.
"The correlation is slightly concerning – in those areas where historians who primarily work in English are likely to comment, the warming they would expect is indeed found."
That's right. All the historians who noted the Warm Period (often decades ago) are tools of Big Oil. And so were the guys who wrote the Greenland Sagas in the 13th century.
68. Daniel Hoffmann-Gill
I've come late to this but yet another thorough, informative and brilliant post Unity.
62. Unity. Wegman has raised the issue of the lack of statistical skills of the palaeoclimate community and the lack of independence of many involved in the peer review process. What is important is to design experiments using statisticians such that the raw data is as good as it is possible to achieve. The repeatability of experiments helps to show the methods used are correct. For the amount of potential investments required, repeating all the experiments but ensuring the sampling is statistically valid and statisticians are used in the analysis makes sense.
The stagnant conditions of peat bgs are ideal habitats for preserving wood; moist, aerated and warm environments are not.
One form of proxy should not be relied upon. Therefore tree ring, coral, ice core and sediments should all be used but with the input of statisticians to ensure the experiments have been properly designed, results analysed and peer review is fully independent.
WillA:
The polynomial fills are there simply to illustrate the direction of the trends, i.e. to make the divergence problem more readily visible as an adjunct to the explanation.
That graph is not intended to be an exact model/reconstruction. It does what it needs to do, just don't try and analyse the detail or draw precise conclusions from it because that's not what its for.
Charlie2:
Wegman was criticising MBH98/99 and was, in some respects, badly out of date by the time it was presented to the Senate Commitee, as Thomas Crowley noted in evidence:
Bullet three – the researchers do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. This statement is based on a small subsample of paleoclimate papers. Overall, there is increasingly strong incorporation of statistical methodologies in the climate sciences, including increased interactions with
statisticians. For example, the National Center for Atmospheric Research has had a postdoctoral program for statisticians for thirteen years. A key project jointly funded by DOE and NOAA for detection and attribution of climate change
involves not only several statistical climatologists but also explicitly seeks out input from statisticians.
The present (and key) IPCC Fourth assessment chapter on detection and
attribution of climate change has a statistician and statistical climatologist (with a training in applied mathematics) as co-lead authors. Statisticians are welcome to respond to any of the chapters in the review process.
From these statements it is clear that the Wegman Report is somewhat uninformed with respect to the effort to include statisticians in the IPCC review process.
I might add that interactions between geoscientists and statisticians have long been hampered by what can only be described by some as a condescending attitude from some statisticians that geoscientists were not employing the most recent, state of the art statistical methods. Such attitudes almost guarantee subsequent poor communication and fail to recognize the unusual nature of
"field laboratory" geoscience data, which are very different than "closed laboratories" where the conditions of an experiment are well controlled.
The latter types of data require an intimate understanding of the raw data and simpler, more robust statistical methodologies that recognize the limitations of such data.
Oh, and I found the link to Mann's data and code for his 2008 paper – http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/supplements/MultiproxyMeans07/
There's also this commentary on Loehle's paper which notes some or its limitations:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/past-reconstructions/
Laban @ 67,
If big oil would fund historians, my life would be much easier. My concern is a map which shows that all the areas where Anglophone historians are most likely to study had a medieval warm period, whilst less studied areas in the English-speaking world (such as the Baltic, which was undergoing a huge colonial expansion at this time which might suggest better climatic conditions, which might mean higher tempratures) have in general no such evidence.
At the least suspicious this would be selection bias – the evidence is sought where historians say we should find it (a common archaeological issue). At the worst this could be data manipulation to accord with certain views. As I say, the source of the map would be very nice (Unity – you are still reading this thread are you not?).
And Loehee revised the paper in 2008 to take into account the more legitimate of the criticisms. There still shows a lot of earlier warming and it is still likely to be more reliable than the Briffa et al data given that we know that that data is unreliable because of the massive divergence post 1960.
Frome Realclimate, though, this para is interesting:
"All previous multiproxy reconstructions indicate a Northern Hemisphere mean temperature less than current levels, though possibly on a par with the mid- 20th century. But there are only a few tenths of a degree in it"
But you wouldn't know from the hockey stick that all multiproxy reconstructions show temps as high as the modern era give or take a tenth of a degree, would you? Funny that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
A rough glance tells me that leaving aside the one reconstruction which seems much cooler than the rest, the MWP temperatures are about 0.3° – 0.7° lower than at the end of the 20th century, which would be consistent with the comment at Realclimate.
There are a number of different reconstructions there, all of which, I believe, use tree rings to an extent but some also use other proxies, and they are all reasonably consistent apart from the one I mentioned above which is actually cooler than the rest. I don't know why you would give Loehle's paper more credence than all of these, and it is wrong to assume that the post-1960 divergence problem must neccessarily render reconstructions based on tree-ring data invalid.
76. Paulo
Let me get this straight. Tree rings are not a reliable proxy after 1960, but they're fine from 1955-60?
Mmmm.
Surely the fact they are not reliable now must cast some smidgeon of doubt over whether they are much good at all?
The reliability of tree rings as proxies can be judged by comparing their results to the instrumental records as far as we have them and to other proxies and on both counts they perform well enough apart from (in some not all cases) post-1960. What's more, I believe that in the cases that do exhibit the post-1960 divergence it's not just that the behaviour in terms of the width of the tree rings that changes but there are certain physiological changes as well which would suggest that there is something odd happening to these trees after that time.
Ah, Paulo, did you really think you would get that sort of logical thinking past an AGW disciple like Andrew?
there is something odd happening to these trees
Even if that is true, how can we possibly be sure that they didn't go through some odd phases of development in the previous 950 years?
The fact is that we can't and, until we can transport thermometers in a time machine, we never will.
:: http://bit.ly/6E6UzC
@libcon New Post – The Inconvenient Truth about David Rose's 'Special Investigation' – http://bit.ly/6E6UzC
Unity with some sense on climate graphs > @libcon Inconvenient Truth about Mail on Sunday 'Special Investigation' http://bit.ly/6E6UzC
Two posts today eviscerating media coverage of global warming: http://bit.ly/6E6UzC (Daily Mail) http://bit.ly/7UdRyj (poll in The Times)
mjrobbins
RT @pickledpolitics Eviscerating media coverage of climate http://bit.ly/6E6UzC (Daily Mail) http://bit.ly/7UdRyj (poll in The Times)
Matt Lodder
On media coverage of climate science. RT via Liberal Conspiracy http://bit.ly/6E6UzC
gimpy
.@iaindale should stick to politics, science really isn't his thing http://bit.ly/6khLBV debunked here http://bit.ly/7zqJi8 h/t @DailyQuail
Shared item: The Inconvenient Truth about David Rose's 'Special Investigation': So, at last, the Ma.. http://tinyurl.com/yegaplr
Claire Spencer
A million times WOW at this excellent @libcon post 'The Inconvenient Truth about David Rose's 'Special Investigation'' http://bit.ly/7r5Yk0
The Inconvenient Truth about David Rose's "Special Investigation": Unity was also ace on @NadineDorriesMP http://bit.ly/5EfnOJ
Adrian Sevitz ?
I love the detail this article goes into on the Q's raised by the CRU emails on climate change. http://bit.ly/5EfnOJ
/via @bengoldacre
Greenies! [@christineottery @adamvaughan_uk @TheGreenParty @CarolineLucas] You may be interested in this: http://bit.ly/7r5Yk0
RT @sevitzdotcom: I love the detail this article goes into on the Q's raised by the CRU emails on climate change. http://bit.ly/5EfnOJ
Christine Ottery
RT @pickledpolitics: Two posts today eviscerating media coverage of global warming: http://bit.ly/6E6UzC (Daily Mail) http://bit.ly/7UdR …
Paula Thomas
RT @bengoldacre: The Inconvenient Truth abt David Rose's "Special Investigation": Unity was also a1 on @NadineDorriesMP http://bit.ly/5EfnOJ
Bren Tierney
@mmfa re 'Climategate' if you've not yet seen this, it's required reading http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/12/14/9845/
Brendan Meachen
On media coverage of climate science. RT via Liberal Conspiracy http://bit.ly/6E6UzC (via @mattlodder)
john rickards
I'm half cut so I can't remember who I'm RTing, but this is terribly good fun as an ex-environmental engineer: http://is.gd/5nlKt
Not just any ordinary Mail article either, but the one that's roundly demolished here: http://bit.ly/7zqJi8
Ian G. Stimpson
If you are not yet bored of the climate debate here is IMHO a calm, rational, balanced overview of the recent issues http://bit.ly/7r5Yk0
brittany hughes
Liberal Conspiracy » The Inconvenient Truth about David Rose's …: When they do so, they have to show thei.. http://bit.ly/875VgQ
Chris Rowan
Good overview of CRU e-mail palava. Yes I know, but this one has some nice figs (via @hypocentre) http://bit.ly/7r5Yk0
Mary Beith
RT @Allochthonous: Good overview of CRU e-mail palava. Yes I know, but this one has some nice figs (via @hypocentre) http://bit.ly/7r5Yk0
Chris Townsend
Liberal Conspiracy » The Inconvenient Truth about David Rose's 'Special Investigation': http://bit.ly/71q5bm via @addthis
Zone5 » Checkmate for the Climate Change Deniers
[…] Brilliant debunking of the leaked emails by Unity here. […]
john wyke
the kerfuffle about the climate change email malarky well explained… http://icio.us/wsk34k
Moon Howler
RT @hypocentre If you're not yet bored of the climate debate here is a rational overview of the recent issues http://bit.ly/7r5Yk0
Disneyland Paris: marks out of ten from a six-year-old | Donald's Archive 2.0
[…] can tell us all sorts of things. They can be very complicated. Or they can be simple. But they are best when in the raw. So, here, uneditorialised, unedited, in […]


I took a bike ride today by myself from the Kennesaw Mountain Visitor's Park to the Marietta Square, and back, about 3 miles each way. My plan was to ride to the square for exercise, visit our Hallmark store to purchase a few greeting cards and then ride back. I decided to visit dk gallery, a new art gallery on our square, owned by our good friend, Donna. I knew that ordinarily, Donna was not in on Mondays, but I thought I might get lucky and have an unexpected visit with her today.
The weather was beautiful for a bike ride, not too hot and not too cool…just right!
And as my good fortune would have it, Donna was in and not too busy for us to have a visit.
I had not had a chance to share about Brad's celebration service and all that had happened in the past couple of weeks, so we shared from our hearts for a little while. Again, I considered how very important friendship and fitness are for the 50 something woman! The bike ride was strenuous enough to make me feel like I had some exercise and my time with Donna was just enough to fill me up with love and friendship.
How about you? Are you making sure that you take care of yourself by taking time out for friendship and fitness. If not, why not?
Congrats! I have an award waiting for you. Please stop by my blog and collect your prize!
HAVE A GREAT DAY, and thanks again for thinking of me!


The Resilience Project delivers emotionally engaging programs to schools, sports clubs and businesses and provide them with evidence based practical strategies to build resilience and happiness. The Resilience Project has delivered programs to over 500 schools around the country and worked with many elite sporting teams including Australian cricket, netball and soccer, NRL and AFL clubs. Through presentations, wellbeing journals, schools curriculum, teacher diaries and their App, The Resilience Project seeks to help all Australians become mentally healthy.


text:
GeoPolitics / The News Doctors Spotlight | By Guest Post
State Department Stonewalls On Syria Weapons
TND VideoCast Spotlight: Ron Paul Liberty Report
Why can't the State Department spokespersons give a straight answer when asked a clear and direct question by the media? And when they do give an answer why is it often such a bold-faced lie? Either it's "I cannot comment on that because there is an ongoing investigation" or "'no boots on the ground' in syria has never been our policy." When it comes to US transfers of weapons in Syria that are ending up in the hands of ISIS — particularly when some have possibly been used recently to shoot down a Russian helicopter — the US government needs to do more than cover up. We must demand the truth! That is what we are doing in today's Liberty Report:
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Kevin Warsh Fed Chair Odds Soar After WSJ Report Of Trump Meeting
Chicago PMI Explodes Higher, Beats By 5 Standard Deviations
'Dr Seuss is racist propaganda': First lady's book donation rejected

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text:
Q: How do I make a media player control notification in Gtk? In Rhythmbox (GNOME's music player), when it's playing music, you can open the notifications panel and control the music playback from there. Here's a screenshot. The playback controls are bordered in orange; they have a little music note icon:

This is what I want to make; the media playback controls. Note that, while it is in the notifications panel, it's not technically a notification, because it never pops up on the screen, and you can't make it go away. In the screenshot, you can see the actual notification, which I don't want to make, below the controls.
I know that there's a Gio.Notification, but it's not quite what I need (unless I'm very much mistaken). I searched in Gio, Gdk, and Gtk, but I didn't find anything. I also searched, among other things, [gtk] media control and [gtk] media notification on Stack Overflow, but I didn't find anything there either.
Thanks to the help of BobMorane, I've now figured out that Rhythmbox uses libnotify for its player controls. I know how to create actions using Notify.Notification, and I can make them have images, etc., but what I still haven't figured out is how to:

*

*Make the notification so that it can't be closed;

*Make it so that the action buttons are next to the icon and text, not under;

*Keep the notification on top of all the others in the notifications panel.

Using Python's help() function to look at gi.repository.Notify.Notification, the only methods I see that seem to have potential are add_action() (particularly its user_data parameter) and set_hint() (and its variants). Could these be used to achieve my goal?
How do I make a media-control "notification" in Gtk with Python, as explained above?

A: I think the technology used by Rhytmbox to acheive this is MPRIS (Media Player Remote Interfacing Specification). As they say on their we page:

The Media Player Remote Interfacing Specification (MPRIS) is a
standard D-Bus interface which aims to provide a common programmatic
API for controlling media players.
It provides a mechanism for discovery, querying and basic playback
control of compliant media players, as well as a tracklist interface
which is used to add context to the active media item.

In Rhythmbox, this is implemented as a core plug-in. The code is pretty complicated, but basically implements the MPRIS specification. This implementation then exposes some information and controls out to other applications which want to control the Rhythmbox, like the Gnome Shell in your case. If you deactivate the MPRIS plug-in, the "notification player" will no longer work.
In GNOME Shell, you can see they have their own MPRIS module as well (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/blob/main/js/ui/mpris.js), which is used to:

*

*Respond to player notifications and display information (album art, title, buttons, etc).

*Send notifications to the player (ex.: pause the song).

In this module, the formatting of the buttons and all that stuff comes into life as well. This means that on your part (the player's designer), you should have no UI formatting to do (you don't have control over this, GNOME Shell has). What you need to do is expose what is needed by the GNOME Shell by implementing the MPRIS interfaces.
(As a side note: the calendar.js file is the one implementing the notification list, and you can see it uses MPRIS "notifications", which it puts on top of standard notifications.)
There exist Python libraries to do so, such as Mopidy-MPRIS, bit their support for the GNOME Shell seems not to be working at the moment. You may have to look for D-Bus related libraries on FreeDesktop.org. There exists many bindings, with some in Python.
I hope this points you in the right direction.

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text:
"Indian banks: Tremendous opportunities but even bigger challenges"
(Part 3 of 4) Conversation with MV Nair, CEO, Union Bank of India, on – rise in alternative banking transactions as cost of IT is low – overseas expansion to support Indian corporations – legacy of largest nationalized retail bank in India
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Here is the transcript of the video.
1. Emphasis is on retail customers
Emmanuel Daniel (ED): I'm speaking today with Mr. MV Nair, the chairman of Union Bank of India. Mr. Nair, you've been chairman of the bank now since 2006, and the Indian state-owned banks have a reputation for being solidly well run, conservative, risk averse and so on. Is it possible to maintain that kind of approach to banking today?
MV Nair (MVN): I think you're right that it's a very well run bank. But I would not agree regarding risk aversion. If you look at the type of engagements we have, be it in the space of financial inclusion, be it financing education, be it financing small enterprise, it is a highly risky space, but the banking practices we are developing over the time are closer to the customer and support enterprise, but monitoring them, has picked up some good strength. We'll continue to do that for a simple reason. If we look at the evolution of banking, post 1992, when reform started, there were quite a few complications but they all strengthened the public sector banks. Public sector banks strengthened their technologies and capabilities, strengthened human operation capabilities and today most of the numbers are very good numbers. While then it was fair, quite a few of the public sector banks vanished from the scene because of the competition.
ED: How would you characterize the franchise of Union Bank? Do you have a certain customer pool, a kind of customer category that you're very good at?
MVN: Yes. I think we are very good with retail customers, and we are very good with small and medium customers. The bank has got a national character. We have about 3,000 branches across the country. We have to be in all the different spaces. We are very good in dealing with retail customers. That's where we have been developing our capability for the future.
ED: And given the fact that there are a number of state-owned banks, or state-owned enterprises, if I were to look at your loan book, are there specific sectors you're very strong in, or you're most exposed to?
MVN: If you were looking at the loan book, it would be a reflection of the banking sector in the country, as a side though, we have a market share of 18.5%. It looks small, but then it is the fifth largest national bank in the country, so naturally we have to cater to agriculture, to small and medium enterprise, large corporations. All the major large corporations have a relationship with the bank. So you can't do without some of these spaces.
If you were to ask me where exactly Union Bank is focusing, it is in the retail space. The reason behind that is, the way the Indian economy is evolving, especially given this demographic profile, we are clearly seeing a huge opportunity coming up in the next generation of customers. So we are preparing, or at least trying to be better prepared, to cater to their needs. That's how the bank is evolving, but as a bank, or should I say, government-owned bank in the country, we have to be in all these spaces.
ED: The government almost has this policy where they take career bankers at the very end of their career, almost, to become chairmen of banks. And the tenure used to be shorter, about three years. And now it's about five years. Does this policy by which chairmen are appointed, in itself, maintain the conservative character of state banks, the unwillingness to take risks and so on? Bearing in mind, of course, that you have overseen the development of this bank, you've invested in technology and so on, do you see that character changing the way in which chairmen are selected, and the mandate that's given to you?
MVN: Actually, it's definitely changing. You look at large-sized state banks, who have got about 25% market share, the last four of chairmen of the State Bank of India had between four to five years' tenure, which is not in the past, it's just very changing. And then you have to pass through a particular phase right now where a large number of senior colleagues are retiring. It's a very interesting phase the banks are passing through. So it is quite challenging for the government to choose a chairman or managing director. But then they are clearly focusing on having at least four to five years' tenure for the chairmen. That's why you'll find the larger national banks—Punjab National Bank, the chairman has about five years' tenure. Union Bank, we have five years' tenure. At Bank of Baroda, the chairman has got four, five years tenure.
2. Banks and citizens to benefit from growth in India
ED: I want to capture the essence of how you, as a chairman of a domestic bank, view the economy of India, and the impact that foreign influence is having on the economy of India? How would you read how India's developing today?
MVN: It's a country which is being rebuilt. The activity a reflection of the country, there's a huge amount of activity taking place—airports are being built in small centres. I went to Bangalore a month back, which is where my career was built, but there has been a gap of about one and half years—a new airport, you find ports being built, roads being built, a whole amount of investment taking place in infrastructure, a huge amount of migration to urban cities. Now, we have a focus on education, a focus on so many things. So what you're really seeing is a country being rebuilt. So if you have good governance, the country's economy will grow at about 10%.
If you have some handicaps, then you have 1 or 2% less but on a medium term basis, 20, 30 years, the growth is certain. In such a situation, the banking sector which is a reflection of the economy, the key challenge is to create capacity. And that is where the foreign flows are important. It's an opportunity which any foreign investor should look at. There are issues—with the government, with approvals—but then there are huge amounts of opportunities. A lot is being sorted out. But the fact of the matter is, for someone who is looking at the country, for someone who would like to invest in the country, it is the best time to begin.
ED: That's for the foreign investor coming in. But how much of this development is the average man on the street in India benefitting from? Education levels still remain low—healthcare, mortality rate, there's a lot of work to be done on that front—and it seems that the corporate world in India is speaking one language, and the social world is speaking another language today. Do you think that the corporate world's progress is sustainable if some of the social indicators are not dealt with?
MVN: Let me put it slightly differently. In the last two years, the government has been focusing on an inclusive growth agenda. The inclusive growth agenda encompasses a large number of those who were not touched by growth opportunities in the past. 37% of government allocation is going to the social sector. In effect, it is social security in a slightly different form. If you go to a developed country, you'll find if you are unemployed, you'll get social security benefits. Well here, it is a hundred days worth of work that is being given. Which is actually social security. You are actually given employment by way of social security benefits.
Look at the major initiatives: a right to education, a right to information, a right to employment… Now, these are path-breaking initiatives which will take a reasonable amount of time to have impact. But I, as a banker, when I see a village today, I see migration decrease because there are a hundred days of employment for you in a village. On the education side, it's debatable. There's a huge amount of emphasis to educate the people, so as I said, it's a country in the making, a country being rebuilt. But the intent is very clear, to reach out to all those who have not been reached in the past. That is the reason I said 10% growth is bound to happen because all of this is contributing to the growth process.
ED: How do you view what needs to be done in the agricultural sector in India? Traditional bank lending effectively meant that you write off a lot of that loan which was sort of like a state directed lending policy. In fact, a lot of foreign analysts don't appreciate that element of state-owned banks in India. What do you think needs to change in agriculture sector?
MVN: Actually, a lot of things need to change. Land holdings are small. We don't have good post-harvest capacity, so from the farm to the plate, 50% of the produce gets wasted. Quite a lot of things have to happen. As a matter of a fact, not only banks, but policymakers at all levels are focusing on it and we need to get that right. All of us realize that. In the past we have focused more on subsidy-based lending to agriculture but today it is very clear. We need to create warehouses, godowns, and markets. A lot of action is taking place on that basis. But as I said, in most of these areas it is unfinished work, but the intent to work on this is very much there.
3. Possible benefits from foreign banks and the impact of the Internet
ED: Are you afraid of foreign banks?
MVN: Not at all. I mean there is clearly an Indian banking structure if you look at it. There are 70% with public banks. About 20% of the private banks in which there are two categories, old private sector banks, and new private sector banks. Then you have foreign banks, regional rural banks, and corporate banks. Foreign banks, when they operate, they bring in the best of the products globally available, which is good for us because we learn from them. The private sector banks bring competition, technology capabilities and new practices. And we have picked up on this. So it is good to have this type of structure because it brings the best of all the banks.
ED: How do you read the government's recent moves and desire to get the foreign banks to incorporate in India?
MVN: I was just having this discussion with one my foreign bank colleagues here because he was asking the same question. If a large global bank has to be locally incorporated, what are the pluses and minuses? A minus is that it gets a lower rating, whereas the bank is better rated globally. A minus is they have to raise funds at a local cost which is high. Otherwise globally they can raise funds at a low cost. I made a point to my friend here that if you are looking at India for the next 30 years there are huge opportunities in India as a country. If that is what it is, it is advisable to look at a bank within the country. You have an opportunity. Today, if the offer is made for the foreign bank to come in, and get incorporated locally, or an Indian corporation to start a bank, the Indian corporation will jump on it. t is the same opportunity coming to a foreign bank. The India corporate will jump on it and pick it up because it's a good opportunity. It's the way you look at it. But otherwise, for the regulator, it makes sense to have control of the banks operating, and all the regulators across the globe are preferring this model.
ED: Your balance sheet grew very much on its net interest margin rather than on fee-based business. Does that make you even more of a traditional bank, and do you have any ideas of increasing the fee-based component?
MVN: Yes, that's a very good question. If you look at the last four years, our core fee income grew at a CAGR of 46%, and this year it will end up at about 8%. So after four years of exponential growth, it's getting balanced out because there are one or two corrections that have taken place in terms of fee structure during this year. Going forward, the capability to grow with fee income is intact. There's one year of correction, which is expected after exponential growth of 46% during this year. And we expect to grow at 25% consistently for the next few years. Coming to the net interest margin, it's true that this year it's been very good, but then we intend to maintain that at about 3.1 to 3.2% consistently year after year.
ED: What happens when the regulator finally starts to deregulate interest rates and deregulate the domestic money market?
MVN: The questions mark is if the regulator deregulates the savings bank interest rate, then what will happen? That is the question. It's not that the bankers are not comfortable in deregulating the savings bank rate, but the issue is that this is a country where, if you go to the rural market, those 55 to 60% are the people who should be adequately compensated by the interest rate in saving account. In case the rate gets deregulated it may so happen that my charges on most of these transactions will get added because banks will make money. In case the interest rate goes up, my fee may go up, but today their basic accounts, are not charged. So a bank will find its balance. But the concern that we have is that rural consumers are not that well educated, and that they should not lose out when the interest rate actually comes down. If it goes up, it may go up, if it comes down, it can come down 1%, whereas they now get 3.5%. Otherwise banks will be able to pass on up-and-down interest rates.
ED: How international does Union Bank have to be? Or even you have to be, as chairman of Union Bank?
MVN: It is very much a part. The often-asked question is, when you have such a large market, where should you have global aspirations? How we look at it is that Indian corporations are truly going global and they need banking facilities and if we don't follow them, some of the business that will normally come to us will be missing so that is the reason we opened our Hong Kong branch first, two years back. That bank branch is doing very well. We have approval to open up a subsidiary in UK, and we will also be opening one branch in Sydney, so we are slowly, not aggressively, opening, but we are just following our own clients. And this is a must. While India is as a country growing, we will be following our corporations globally.
ED: And on the technology front, what is the Internet doing to your bank?
MVN: Oh, it's fantastic. I'm extremely happy the way that technology has helped us. When you compare India versus other countries, the technology cost in India is almost only 10% of the cost in many other countries and we are able to pass on that benefit to the customers very fast. What really surprised me is that in 2008 we tracked transactions taking place in alternative channels, and it was just 6%. In just three years, today, it is 47% of transactions and it is growing exponentially. I think it's phenomenal. And the ability to pass on this benefit in the future is going to be fantastic.
ED: Is there any goal ambition to create market share in any one of your key products?
MVN: We have a very clear focus strategy. How we look at it is that there are three segments of customers, looking at the next ten years. One is our existing customers. If we look at the industry, we have 350 million customers as a whole. The next generation of customers, popularly known as Gen Y customers, who are today below the age of 15, are expected to be 350 million in number, an equal number to those today. Another segment coming up is new bankable customers who are unbanked today. Union Bank is well prepared in all three segments. With the unbanked customers, we are ahead of the curve. Our intention is to get 7% market share in unbanked customers, as against our present 3.5% share. The products are in place, the strategy is in place, technology capabilities are in place. I think we should be able to do it.
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After a few weeks of wall to wall college football Bowl Games, Oregon and Auburn will finally face off for the National Title on Monday night to decide it all. Auburn opened up as a -3 point favorite and the line held steady for several weeks before finally moving off 3 within the last week. There are now a mix of -2's and -2.5's at most sportsbooks.
It's an intriguing game on many levels. The title game can also be a very tricky game to handicap. So much can happen when teams are off for so long between games. Heck, the two week gap in the NFL between the end of the conference title games and the Super Bowl has always had an impact. This layoff is over a month! A layoff that long can have a drastic impact on a teams momentum. In some cases, it's easy to pick which team will be affected more, ie lack of experience in big games, etc. But here, these two are in the same boat.
We treat this game just like any other. For us, it's no different than a regular season game. Which is to say, if we handicap this game and find no perceived edge with our approach, we pass. It just so happens that this game qualified as a play based on our methods, so, we play. But again, it's just another game. We want to stress that point because so many novice bettors feel they have to unload on a game like this, or the Super Bowl, because of the magnitude of the game and the end of the college football season. It's just another play. They'll snap the ball again in 6 months and another season will be underway. Don't keep score based on one season. Blend seasons together and keep score based on many, many seasons.
Ok, enough of the preaching. On to the game. We can't imagine that there are many handicappers out there that when they sat down to make their own line on this game, they made Auburn a 3 point favorite. We use several methods when we handicap a game and all of them had Oregon favored by at least a field goal, in some cases more. So from the day this line was posted, this game jumped out at us as a play. Again, doesn't mean it's a lock, or any better than any of our other bowl selections. It's just a play. Albeit, an obvious one. A no brainer for us.
Of course you need to dig in further than just using your numbers. You have to make sure there are no other factors that may affect the outcome from motivational issues to injuries. We can't find any. If anything, we think the motivational, or psychological edge belongs to Oregon here, and we'll explain why.
The team getting all the attention here is Auburn as a result of Cam Newton winning the Heisman. They are without a doubt, under the spotlight. Sure, both teams are getting media attention like they have never seen before, but it's Auburn up front here. Oregon gets to fly under the radar a bit. That in itself can be huge. College teams, and college kids, generally don't handle intense pressure and national media attention well. In fact there was a system in place for several years to simply play against the Heisman winners team in Bowl games and the system was very profitable. Couldn't tell you what that systems record is lately, but it makes sense. The Heisman winner, after all, is expected to come into this game and play like a super human and often can't live up to those expectations. The Heisman factor and all the attention to Auburn is also one of the major factors in Auburn opening as a 3 point fav. The Heisman makes Auburn a "public" team.
Our numbers aside, this game for us is simply a matter of taking the better team plus the points. Oregon is ahead of Auburn in just about every statistical category, in many cases by a large margin. This is a game between two tremendous offensive teams, one of which also has a defense. That team is Oregon. Oregon is 14th overall in total defense. Not too shabby for a team that makes you think of offense. They are much better against the pass than Auburn, with both teams about even against the run.
Both teams get better defensively as the game goes on and it makes sense. With both offenses so explosive, opposing offenses spend quite a bit of time on the field. By the time the 4th quarter rolls around, they are drained. Oregon does a fantastic job of substituting defensive players. They are comparable to a basketball team with a deep bench. This is evident when you look at points allowed by quarter. 86, 58, 54, 24. They get better in each quarter, and in each quarter, those numbers are better than those of Auburn.
Offensively, they are both very good. Among the top in the nation. However, Oregon is THE top.
Call it lady luck, call it destiny, or call it just catching some good bounces, but Auburn has had it this year. They had 5 games that could have gone either way. They could have just as easily lost those games. Granted, they didn't, and good teams find a way to win. But that is where Oregon is different. Oregon had one close game all year, a 2 point win over Cal. The next closest margin was 11 points. No one else came within 17 points. Oregon didn't just win. They won by large margins. They dominated. Just ask another offensive powerhouse, Stanford, a 52-31 victim.
Yards per point numbers favor Oregon. They are 10.9 on offense and a very good 18 on defense for a total of +7.1. Auburn is an 11.7 on offense and 14.8 on defense, which is mediocre. Their total is +3.1. Yards per point edge to Oregon by 4 points.
Turnover margin: Oregon +12 and Auburn +5.
Our score prediction model has Oregon winning the game by a score of 43-30.
Lastly we think the motivational and psychological edges belong to Oregon. If either team is likely to play with a chip on their shoulder, it's the Ducks. Aside from Auburn getting all the attention because of Newton, Oregon can also consider it a lack of respect being installed an underdog in the game.
We always like to point out that when we make a play, we expect we'll win that play around 56 times out of 100. This play is no different. This play may win or it may lose. But Oregon is the "right" side. It has all the ingredients for a nice play. Everything we look for. Some games, we'll handicap, and we'll be on the fence. This game, was a no brainer. There were no question marks. We played the game at +3 right when the opening line was posted and sent it out to our readers.
Those of you who didn't play it, it's still good at +2 or +2.5. The play isn't based on Oregon hanging within 3 and covering. The play is based on Oregon winning the game straight up.
Good Luck if you play. This concludes another successful college football campaign for the Bettorsworld Key Releases. Make sure you sign up for our newsletter. This way, when next year rolls around, you'll be sure to get every single play!


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Christiaan Zwanikken
Bio / Contact
Dutch artist Christiaan Zwanikken (1967) has received international recognition through his kinetic and mechanical sculptures, sound works, performative and responsive installations. Using a variety of sculptural media, robotics, biology, micro-controllers, and sound— his work is both an artistic and technological experiment in which innovation and invention play an important role.
Exploring the relationship between man, nature, science, and technology, Zwanikken overlaps the animate and inanimate. Each sculpture is therefore both mechanical and autonomous with a personal identity created through software, electronic sensory and artificial speech. Although he uses "hard" technologies like machines and control-systems, he always tries to address the human being and "soft" technologies.
His art has departed from the domain of plastic work in order to enter that of plasmic work. At first his pieces are clearly identifiable but as the interaction of the work with the viewer unfolds, they are given other potentialities and they take on new forms. In the hybrid animal installations, they attach themselves to any and all forms of animal life. By additionally hyper-synchronizing the movements of his work to electronic or acoustic sound compositions, Zwanikken creates what he calls 'techno-plasmic entities'. These are new creations that jump along the evolutionary ladder and are not limited by their real-world anatomy.
His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at the Museum of Natural History (NYC), Exit 2011 (Paris), ISEA2012 (Albuquerque), Kinetica Museum (London), Museum Tingeuly (Basel), Kunsthaus Graz (Austria), ICC Centre (Tokyo), National Galerie (Prague), Taipei Fine Arts Museum (Taiwan), Museu del Chopo (Mexico-City), and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (Netherlands). His work can be found in numerous public and private collections. He was the recipient of several Dutch and international grants. In 2014 he had a major retrospective show at Museum Het Valkhof (Netherlands)
He received a BFA in sculpture from the Gerrit Rietveldacademie (1992) and a MFA in New Sculptural Media from the Rijksakademie (1994), both in Amsterdam.
His studio is based in Amsterdam but he also works for extensive periods of time at his family home, a four hundred-year-old former Franciscan monastery, Convento Mértola, Portugal in whose supernatural environs he uses as a lab for studying and experimenting with natural processes.
studio@christiaanzwanikken.com
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHERYL SCHURGERS
WWW.CHERYLSCHURGERS.COM
COPYRIGHT © 2015 CHRISTIAAN ZWANIKKEN


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Home > Business > I-T dept revises format of TDS certificate issued by employers
I-T dept revises format of TDS certificate issued by employers
Agencies16 April 2019 5:43 PM GMT
New Delhi: The Income Tax department has revised Form 16 by adding various details, including income from house property and remuneration received from other employers, thereby making it more comprehensive to help check tax avoidance.
It will also include segregated information regarding deductions under various tax saving schemes, investments in tax savings instruments, different allowances received by the employee as well as income from other sources.
Form 16 is a certificate issued by employers, giving details of employees' TDS (tax deducted at source) usually by mid June and is used in filing I-T returns.
The revised Form, which has been notified by the Income Tax department, will come into effect from May 12, 2019.
This means the income tax returns for financial year 2018-19 will have to be filed on the basis of revised Form 16.
Among other things, the revised Form 16 will also include details of deductions in respect of interest on
deposits in savings account, and rebates and surcharge, wherever applicable.
The I-T department has already notified income tax return forms for fiscal 2018-19. Salaried class and those
who do not have to get their accounts audited, will have to file their ITRs by July 31 this year.
Meanwhile, the income tax department has also modified Form 24Q, which is furnished by employer to the tax department. It will include additional details like Permanent Account Number (PAN) of non-institutional entities from whom the employee has taken loan for buying or constructing housing property.
Nangia Advisors (Andersen Global) Director Sanjoli Maheshwari said the Form 16 and 24Q have been amended with an intent to
make them more elaborative and informative.


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Ottawa is arguably a most unusual city. A former logging outpost, it was chosen to be the capital of Canada specifically because it was out of the way, hard to get to and as a result, difficult for those nasty Yankees to attack and conquer. Because they wouldn't be able to find it.
As a result of Ottawa's humble, out-of-the-way beginnings, it lacks the, um, pomp and grandiose nature of most of the Western world's capital cities. But it's not without its charms, such as the Victoria Memorial Museum Building which now houses the Canadian Museum of Nature.
Nice building, but a little out of place, no?
The building, known as the Victoria Memorial Museum Building and often referred to as the "castle", was built in former farm fields known as Appin Place, the estate of the Scottish-born merchant William Stewart. The neighbourhood became known as Stewarton and residential development started in the area during the 1870s.[4] The government purchased the land in 1905 hoping to develop the site as a sort of 'end piece' to complement the stone structure of the Canadian Parliament Buildings at the opposite end of Metcalfe Street, on Parliament Hill.[5]
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Museum_of_Nature
It's a great building, but the city has failed it in the 150-odd years since it was built. Lack of coherent urban planning and developers of cheap, ugly apartments running roughshod over City Hall and the planning department have ensured that this grand old place finds itself in the middle of a sea of architectural mediocrity.
Eric DeLorme April 6, 2017 canadian museum of natureOttawa, Architecture, Canadian Museum of Nature, Fujifilm X100F, building, urban planning, bleak, drab
Time for a drink
Eric DeLorme April 7, 2017 abstract, Fujifilm X-T1, XF18-55mmF2.8-4 R LM OIS, VSCO Film, dark
Whither sharpening
Eric DeLorme April 5, 2017 knifewearFujifilm X100F, knives, sharpness, B&W