Meanwhile the Prime Minister waxed lyrical today about the semantic web – how “data” would replace files, with machine speaking unto machine in a cybernetic paradise.

It’s really a confluence of two groups of people with a shared interest in bureaucracy.

Computer Science is no longer about creating graduates who can solve engineering challenges, but about generating work for the academics themselves. The core expertise of a CompSci department today is writing funding applications. And the Holy Grail for these paper chasers is a blank cheque for work which can be conducted without scrutiny for years to come. With its endless committees defining standards (eg, “ontologies”, “folksonomies”) that no one will ever use, the “Semantic Web” fits the bill perfectly.

Of course, most web data is personal communication that happens to have been recorded. Most of the rest is spam, generated by robots, or cut-and-paste material ‘curated’ by the unemployed or poor graduates – another form of spam, really. The enterprise is doomed. But nobody’s told the political class.

For real bureaucrats the dangers of self-service government are obvious – most of the civil servants are not needed any more. Therefore the challenge is to make the technology as expensive and bureaucratic as possible. Both IT consultants and civil servants have got rather good at this over the past 15 years: IT consultants fees have exceeded £100m since 1997.

In his latest speech, Broon says:

“[The] next generation web is a simple concept, but I believe it has the potential to be just as revolutionary – just as disruptive to existing business and organisational models – as the web was itself, moving us from a web of managing documents and files to a web of managing data and information – and thus opening up the possibility of by-passing current digital bottlenecks and getting direct answers to direct requests for data and information.”

And I’m sure he believes every word.

The beauty of the “semantic web” – unworkable in anything other than a small, tightly controlled context – is that it will be years before anyone notices. By which time “Web Science” departments will have flourished all over the land, and billions more will have been spent trying to make Big Government small.

So you have two parties with a mutual interest in prolonging the agony. What’s uniquely grim about the appointment of The GLB to oversee all this, is that Tim Berners Lee is probably the last person you’d want advising on your web strategy. He refuses to recognise the many problems with networks, as we discovered three years ago, back when he boasted that Phishing wasn’t a problem – because he’d never been Phished. That didn’t last long.

The Met Office has confirmed it is to abandon long range weather forecasts, finally acknowledging criticism. The most recent forecasts were so inaccurate, that even the BBC is reconsidering whether to appoint an alternative supplier, such as Accuweather, after 88 years of continuous service from the 1,700-strong MoD unit.

The Mystic Met predicted a barbecue summer for 2009, and the third washout in a row, with the wettest July since 1914, duly followed. A mild winter was then given a high probability, only for the UK to suffer its coldest winter for 30 years. Yet Met Office staff received performance-related pay bonuses worth over £12m over 5 years, it was revealed last week, in response to a Parliamentary question.

In a statement, the Mystic Met said:

“We have therefore decided to stop issuing a UK ‘seasonal forecast’ four times a year. Instead, we will now publish a monthly outlook, updated on a weekly basis.”

The reason, apparently, is that the UK is just to big and strange to forecast:

“The UK is one of the hardest places to provide forecasts for because of our size and location.”

But can anyone do better? Britain’s best known amateur Bill Foggitt, of Sowerby near Thirsk in North Yorkshire, used meticulous natural observation for his long term forecasts. A Telegraph obituary noted:

…When swallows come early in April, it will be a good summer; the closing of pine cones precedes wet weather; soporific flies mean thunderstorms; when frogs lay their spawn in mid-pond and rooks nest higher in the treetops, the weather will be warm.

But Bill’s gone now, along with the Telegraph’s full time obituary editor. Meanwhile renegade forecaster WeatherAction came a cropper when it predicted a “green”, or unusually mild Christmas.

In place of observation, or new scientific thinking, the Met has a new £33m supercomputer. Alas this is used for climate modelling – an area that has proved even less accurate over the past decade than seasonal forecasts.

The IOP says the enquiry should be broadened to examine possible “departure from objective scientific practice, for example, manipulation of the publication and peer review system or allowing pre-formed conclusions to override scientific objectivity.”

It deplores the climate scientists’ “intolerance to challenge” and the “suppression of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements.”

The physics institute observes that “unless the disclosed emails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context”.

The IoP’s submissions contrast with the establishment view. The quango Research Councils UK, for example, which represents the seven Research Councils who channel much of the climate research cash, and fund East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. simply reaffirms its belief in the man-made greenhouse theory, but says it’s inappropriate to comment on the affair.

The Royal Statistical Society (est. 1834) also ducks, although it does point out the limitations of peer review and calls for putting data and models in the public domain.

The Information Commissioner from 2002 to last year Richard Thomas calls for the law to be changed and writes: “The issues arising at the University of East Anglia suggest that this should now be addressed as a heading for proactive and routine disclosure.”

Oxford neuroscientist Susan Greenfield was made redundant from her post as the Director of the Royal Institution after failing to balance the books. The full-time post itself is being abolished. In return, the Life Peer and WiReD magazine UK star is the suing the science charity for sex discrimination.

Greenfield’s £22m refurbishment of the Institution’s HQ saw it go into the red by £3m, and it had to sell property to balance the books. The refurbishment saw a new cafe bar and restaurant open at Albemarle Street.

Read more at The Register…

The world’s source for global temperature record admits it’s lost or destroyed all the original data that would allow a third party to construct a global temperature record. The destruction (or loss) of the data comes at a convenient time for the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia – permitting it to snub FoIA requests to see the data.

The CRU has refused to release the raw weather station data and its processing methods for inspection – except to hand-picked academics – for several years. Instead, it releases a processed version, in gridded form. NASA maintains its own (GISSTEMP), but the CRU Global Climate Dataset, is the most cited surface temperature record by the UN IPCC. So any errors in CRU cascade around the world, and become part of “the science”.

Professor Phil Jones, the activist-scientist who maintains the data set, has cited various reasons for refusing to release the raw data. Most famously, Jones told an Australian climate scientist in 2004:

Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.

In 2007, in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, CRU initially said it didn’t have to fulfil the requests because “Information accessible to applicant via other means Some information is publicly available on external websites”.

Now it’s citing confidentiality agreements with Denmark, Spain, Bahrain and our own Mystic Met Office. Others may exist, CRU says in a statement, but it might have lost them because it moved offices. Or they were made verbally, and nobody at CRU wrote them down.

Read more at The Register.

Three of the five researchers disagree with the UN’s IPCC view that recent warming is primarily the consequence of man-made industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. Remarkably, the subtle and nuanced language typical in such reports has been set aside.

One of the five contributors compares computer climate modelling to ancient astrology. Others castigate the paucity of the US ground temperature data set used to support the hypothesis, and declare that the unambiguous warming trend from the mid-part of the 20th Century has ceased.

The report by Japan Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) is astonishing rebuke to international pressure, and a vote of confidence in Japan’s native marine and astronomical research. Publicly-funded science in the West uniformly backs the hypothesis that industrial influence is primarily responsible for climate change, although fissures have appeared recently. Only one of the five top Japanese scientists commissioned here concurs with the man-made global warming hypothesis.

JSER is the academic society representing scientists from the energy and resource fields, and acts as a government advisory panel. The report appeared last month but has received curiously little attention. So The Register commissioned a translation of the document – the first to appear in the West in any form. Below you’ll find some of the key findings – but first, a summary.

see the Translation at The Register.

Listeners to BBC World Service’s Science in Action program got a nasty surprise last week. In the midst of a discussion about the large snake fossil, a scientist dropped this bombshell:

“The Planet has heated and cooled repeatedly throughout its history. What we’re doing is the rate at which we’re heating the planet is many orders of magnitude faster than any natural process – and is moving too fast for natural systems to respond.”

Hearing this, I did what any normal person would do: grab all the bags of frozen peas I could find in the ice compartment of my refridgerator, and hunker down behind the sofa to wait for Thermageddon.

Hours passed. My life flashed before my eyes a few times, and a few times more. But then I noticed that the house was still there, and so was the neighbourhood. And so was I!

Then I remembered something else.

According to our leading climate institutes, global temperatures have been static for almost a decade now. (You have to look the graphs, not the institutes’ own press releases, which typically offer similar spine-chilling predictions) . The climate scientists are now predicting more of the same, or cooler. The latter, they explained, is because natural systems are at work.

So what is some random apocalyptic nutball doing in the middle of a discussion about paleontology. How did he get here? Did he just wander into to the discussion? Did the BBC producers find him on the street? “Say, you – we’ve got a feature about the world’s largest fossilised snake. Can you liven it up somehow? We can’t find Protein Man. Tell everyone the world’s ending.”

The R.A.N. turns out to be Jason Head, a faculty member at the University of Toronto, a palaeontologist with an eye for the publicity. In the media tarts directory for vertebrate palaeontologists, he notes:

“Areas of Expertise for Media Contacts: Reptile paleontology, climate change, dinosaurs, evolution, evolutionary developmental paleontology and morphometrics“

Notice anything odd, there? In the words of the Cookie Monster, “one of these things is not like the other”.

Like so much churnalism, this story originates with a press release. Here it is, and you’ll note Head makes no claims about future temperature – merely that rainforests 58m to 60m years ago were warmer than tropical rainforests are today.

The piece is immediately picked up by British weekly New Scientist, which allows Head to add some creative embellishments. Under the headline proclaims “Giant snake hints at a hotter future”, we learn:

This “refutes the idea of the thermostat”, says Head, and tells us “what equatorial temperatures will be as we continue to warm the planet: very hot.”

Eh?

How, you may ask, does a snake refute the idea of a climate thermostat? The science-free assertion is left unchallenged. The BBC then picks up the story, and Head makes his fridge-emptying soundbite.

But even the BBC producers must have noticed a strange whiff about this story. One of the corporation’s own environment correspondents, Richard Black, is wheeled in to qualify Head’s assertion.

“There may be other factors”, Black admits, that contribute to the size of fossil. A warmer climate he adds mean some species, for example fish, get smaller. So it isn’t possible to infer temperature from body size. Or future temperature from the fossil record.

Jason makes the observation that tropical temperatures were warmer than now 58m years ago. Then, vaulting through all known logic, he extrapolates that the climate must be getting warm now so quickly, natural systems can’t cope. It’s quite a ride, and entirely science free from start to finish.

The broadcast contains one false assertion, and one invalid inference.

We called Science In Action producer Peter McHugh to ask when the BBC would be issuing a correction. But he hasn’t returned our call.

Climate models appear to be missing an atmospheric ingredient, a new study suggests.

December’s issue of the International Journal of Climatology from the Royal Meteorlogical Society contains a study of computer models used in climate forecasting. The study is by joint authors Douglass, Christy, Pearson, and Singer – of whom only the third mentioned is not entitled to the prefix Professor.

Their topic is the discrepancy between troposphere observations from 1979 and 2004, and what computer models have to say about the temperature trends over the same period. While focusing on tropical latitudes between 30 degrees north and south (mostly to 20 degrees N and S), because, they write – “much of the Earth’s global mean temperature variability originates in the tropics” – the authors nevertheless crunched through an unprecedented amount of historical and computational data in making their comparison.

For observational data they make use of ten different data sets, including ground and atmospheric readings at different heights.

On the modelling side, they use the 22 computer models which participated in the IPCC-sponsored Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison. Some models were run several times, to produce a total of 67 realisations of temperature trends. The IPCC is the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and published their Fourth Assessment Report [PDF, 7.8MB] earlier this year. Their model comparison program uses a common set of forcing factors.

Notable in the paper is a generosity when calculating a figure for statistical uncertainty for the data from the models. In aggregating the models, the uncertainty is derived from plugging the number 22 into the maths, rather than 67. The effect of using 67 would be to confine the latitude of error closer to the average trend – with the implication of making it harder to reconcile any discrepancy with the observations. In addition, when they plot and compare the observational and computed data, they also double this error interval.

So to the burning question: on their analysis, does the uncertainty in the observations overlap with the results of the models? If yes, then the models are supported by the observations of the last 30 years, and they could be useful predictors of future temperature and climate trends.

…Read more at The Register.