There’s a new group in Scotland: Scotland Against Spin.
Whilst I’ve not been involved myself, I know some of those involved and it has been a difficult process getting it going. Trump … well Trump is the kind of person who sucks goodwill out of voluntary organisations and that may well have been the end for CATS.
So, Scotland Against Spin. has been left picking up the pieces after CATS went home to sup on milk.
But Scotland Against Spin. is the best chance of bringing back some common sense to Scotland, I urge every Scottish Sceptic to donate.
So, I went to Bishop Hill looking to contribute to the discussion he would be having … and nothing was there.

It was my wife’s parent’s 50th and it seemed a nice idea to get a few old pictures scanned for a book. But then seeing the state of some of the pictures and knowing that in a few years many may be beyond repair and/or lost as lives moved on, I thought it would be sensible to make a digital copy of the best pictures to share with everyone.
But who were these people? Where were they taken? When were they taken? Being my wife’s family, I didn’t even recognise my wife as a child let alone cousins and long dead relatives. So, it was obvious I had to record these details.
And the answer seemed obvious. My Canon camera came with software called Zoombrowser Ex which had a facility to add tags or keywords.  There are four categories “people, places, events & Other”. So, I started adding a few tags … then I wondered how anyone I sent the pictures to would see the tags … or failing that, how I could list the details of the pictures I sent. Which is when I realised that Zoombrowser doesn’t store this information in the picture but instead creates another file, which cannot be read except by the same version of Zoombrowser. Which makes it all but useless for my purpose.
But, redemption seemed to come from Google Picasa. Picasa is fantastic fun as it has face recognition software which means it tags the pictures with the name … and after a little research I found it has the option to store the tags in the picture. GREAT! … no! After trying it out, Yes! it tags the pictures, but NO!!!!! it seems all but impossible to get it to tag the pictures.
But worse! If you can persuade it to store the tag in the picture … and I did manage it once by editing the picture … but I’ve now lost the knack. It stores it in an incompatible was as follows:
In the pictures is a region, this region is defined by a rectangle, and it may have the following properties, …. of which one may be a name.
This according to google is the way they will tag the photos because “it is the standard which everyone will be adopting” BULLSHIT!!! Why? Unless you have automatic face recognition software, which can automatically works out the rectangle no one else is going to go through the exercise of detailing the precise region occupied by each individual. Almost everyone else is going to just have a list of names in the picture. So, to use the google “standard”, you have to create a fake “region” as a region is the only way to store a person’s name DAFT TWATS!!!  ANY SANE person would do it the other way around. They would record the names of each person of which SOME, MAY (if you are lucky and perhaps added later) may contain a region locating their face. So, I am absolutely sure no one else is going to follow the insane ideas of google. So, even if I could get picasa to update the file, in a few years time when everyone else has adopted a more sensible approach, the files records used by picasa will be redundant and unreadable by most software.
Which made some new software from Canon called “imagebrowser” seem really good, because this one works with what are called IPTC fields in images such as jpg, ti. This stores information in the picture, and that must mean other software can access?  (Note, it does not work with png as I found out to my cost and had to convert everything to tif).
And, so I sat down to write down the basic details in the comment field in imagebrowser … even though imagebrowser is some of the worst software I have seen for browsing images (most reviews give it five 1stars out of 5) … but that wasn’t the worst of it. When I got some software called EXIFtool, just to check how the information was being stored, I found that imagebrowser only stores some information in the IPTC or XMP fields. And unfortunately, the one key field which I thought might be common (comment) doesn’t get stored. (head in hands moment)
And let me not forget to mention before I forget, my original interest arose because I have some software on a website that automatically displays a title from the IPTC information … with the only small problem being I’ve yet to find any software to create the title!
So what do I really want?
Which brings me to the purpose of this post. Google are notorious for not listening to customers, so I’m not bothering to contact them. Canon are notorious for intentionally (at least that is what it seems to me) preventing their cameras working with third party lenses … so the idea of Canon listening to pleas to get their software working with anyone else seems daft. So, I’m left with a wish list and no one I think will listen …. but perhaps being the web it might just be found??

1. First, let’s start with the basics: I want to connect my camera and download images to a folder on my laptop called 2013 with subfolders called 2012-1-7 (for today). This is so that when I view them in explorer, when displayed alphabetically they are in date order.
2. Next, as I run out of space, I want to store some photos on a shared network drive (and it allows others in the family to see them)
3. Next I want to add notes to each folder. Perhaps I even want to tag folders, but I also need to be able to find folders and to do this I’ve had to start using “Agent Ransack” as windows search is appalling (at least since XP). At the moment folders just get a longer name e.g. 2012-12-13 Visit to park
4. Now for the important part, I want some software to quickly and easily go through my photos reviewing them, categorising them and deciding which ones to delete (or more usually, which ones to keep). The only way I’ve managed to do this is to use the star rating giving photos tagged for deletion a one star. This however means I can’t use the one star rating … and e.g. if I’ve taken a lot of very good pictures, I may actually end up deleting dozens of five-star pictures and if I really need a picture as it is the only one, I may end up keeping really awful ones.
5. Then I want to create a slide show. Strangely, I don’t always want to display them in the order they were taken!! Sometimes I may even want to take pictures from vastly different folders.
6. Now …. months later, I want to find pictures. At present, the only way I can do this is by searching for the folder name. E.g. “2012-10-25 XXX’s Birthday”. But if it’s a place I visit regularly, I may have dozens of folders … and many have been moved to a network drive to save space on the laptop. But zoombroswer doesn’t work with network drives. Imagebrowser is just awful, picasa seems to have a mind of its own and it’s more like a face-recognition game than useful sofware. NONE OF THEM RECOGNISE INFORMATION CREATED IN THE OTHER APPLICATIONS. And, I’ve not dared to look at Micro$oft — which is always incompatible with everyone as a way of forcing people to go down the Micro$oft root.
7. So, I want a way to quickly and easily tag whole loads of photos. I want to select all the photos in a pariticular place … add a tag. Select all the photos taken for a particular purpose ADD ANOTHER TAG (imagebrowser only allows one tag). I really would like face-recognition to make adding people tags easy (but I want to turn it off when the photo is the village gala!!! Because

So These are the records I want:

• Title (aka caption) … this is short text that would go underneath the image
• Comment (aka notes) … this is longer text or more obscure text.
• Location name (text)
• Location field (lat/long, grid reference, nearest named place)
• Location tag (a selection from a list)
• Event name (text)
• Event tag (a selection from a list)
• Date (for older scanned images this has to be added and is subtly different from creation date)
• Person1 Name (+ if available where they are located &/or comment like “top left”)
• Person2, Person3, Person4 etc.
• Tag1
• Tag2
• Tag3, etc. (i.e. multiple tags)

Note: Actually, the tags might be better organised as “Group1.tag1; group1.tag2; group2.tag1 etc. So, that similar tags are collected together under one grouping rather than being disorganised.
Finding pictures.
The simplest thing is to see all photos which have a particular tag. Or perhaps to find all photos of a particular star rating, with a particular tag in a particular location within a particular date range. More advanced searches would look for specific words in titles and comments.
BUT THE NAMES AND DESCRIPTION ARE MOST IMPORTANT!!!
Why on earth can’t I list the names in a picture and give a brief title to every picture and have every bit of software understand it? Why can’t I look for pictures with certain individuals? Why can’t I search for pictures with certain keywords? Why does google insist on going down a deadend road and call it “the future?” Why haven’t I even bothered to check out Micro$oft because it is never compatible?
We really owe it to future generations!
Let me finish by saying I spent Christmas going through my father’s old 3.5inch floppies. The experience was horrific. Even if I could work out the meaning of the file names, I usually could not read them. Even if I could open them up, often it would be garbage. I ended up getting very angry … with someone who was dead … and who actually did a very good job catalogging them … except in the last decade the catalog has disappeared and no one knows where or even if, there is the “MY DOCUMENTS” kind of disk full of personal things we may want to keep (or perhaps when disks were reused, the only sensible storage was the final printout?)
It took almost a week to go through these 1000 disks only to discover that almost all of it was rubbish and if there had been useful stuff, it was either unreadable or perhaps worse … stored on media like magnetic tapes which we no longer had the means to read. He only died a decade ago, but it is already a nightmare trying to recover the material.
We have a similar problem with old videos, with old slides, with old photos which are now stored in boxes in the loft. I can now see months being taken up trying to recover videos of my own children as babies.
Our generation is creating a nightmare for our children. We are going to have boxes and boxes and disk drive after drive or incompatible material where no one can see the important material from the utter dross. Unfortunately, the easier it becomes to store information, the more it needs to be organised to be of any utility to anyone else.
At least, when you have a small box of precious photos, everyone knows that THESE ARE THE PHOTOS TO KEEP. Now, those precious photos are literally hidden in a haystack of other material.

Unless our generation pulls its socks up and finds a way to ensure that future generations can actually reliably find, read and understand what we produce … we may as well throw it all away! Because the reality is that we are creating a massive massive headache and an enormous heartache for our loved ones.

 

Dear Mike,

you’re in a much better position to know how the last year went … but ignorance is bliss and I’m not cringing at everything I got wrong. But right now things are looking really really good.

The kyoto protocol is looking as dead as bachelor Dodo. Yes, everyone can still hear it squawking and they say it is still alive, but the reality is that this particular species became extinct at Copenhagen. Nothing has changed since – they are no closer to an extension to Kyoto than they were the day the Climategate emails were released.

Scientifically, we are really in the ascendant. I feel like those individuals at the end of WWI who suddenly find 1000s of the enemy walking up to them and asking to be made their prisoner. It’s not so much that I personally fought a heroic battle, it’s just that reality caught up with the other side.

And the BBC, Guardian and the other zealots. They just want to keep quiet now. They are just keeping quiet hoping that no one notices what really amount to criminal misconduct.

Which leaves the politicians. How could they have got themselves into such a mess? They are stuck with a policy which which makes them look like twats. … or like fish flip-flopping on the beech as the tide recedes. It must be very similar with whale strandings. It’s very easy watching to know that the creatures ought to be making a headline rush to deep water, but for some suicidal reason they just keep trying to move into shallow water where they are going to get cut off and left on the beech to be hung up for dog-meat. And nothing seems to convince them to go the other way. Worse, the more one tries to get them to turn, the more they seem to want to go the other way.

So, here are a few of my questions for the year.

• Is Alex Salmond still first minister? I can’t ask sceptics, as none seem to take the question seriously. But as you know, from where I stand it does look like he is being led into a trap.
• Was there a police investigation? Most of the other scares just faded out. But they didn’t have the huge costs, the economic destruction … and bruised egos of the politicians. I can’t see the politicians meekly taking the blame for this.
• What is the current scientific thinking about that “missing warming” in the 20th century they blamed on “feedbacks”? Indeed, I’m really keen to know whether there was any substantial feedbacks and were they positive or negative? I’m tempted to pick either “positive or negative”, because zero would suggest there is none. So, instead, I’m going to guess around 0.3°C feedback, but not give the sign.
• Solar activity. I’d say 95% confidence there is a link. The big question is whether that link could lead to significant global effects. I’d guess eventually this could become a serious issue, but next year is far too soon.
• Did we ever learn who released the climategate emails?
• Questions not worth answering as we know the answer (I hope): Did Michael Mann drop court case? Is John Napier still in post? Did the UK science establishment find a way to say black is white and that they always supported the science that the climate changes naturally.

Just spent most of the day looking over legal papers.
I’m feeling very confident.

Solicitors cost money!

… about as obvious as saying the hockey stick is broken, but given the complexity of this case, even getting one to look at the evidence and advise us is going to cost. SCEF has some money in the tin, but we need serious money.

So Please:  Continue reading →

When climategate hit I was sceptical. When we had inquiry after inquiry, I was sceptical. Even when fakegate hit, I was sceptical. Now I’m not.

ALEA IACTA EST

Latin for “The die has been cast”, the words attributed to Julius Caesar on January 10, 49 BC as he led his army across the River Rubicon in Northern Italy. Having crossed the Rubicon, there was no turning back for Caesar: he had instigated a civil war.
We sceptics are no Caesar, not even a great Roman army. We are just a rabble of individuals who believe in good science and above all else honesty. But never-the-less like Caesar we have no choice now we have the evidence but to engage in battle and win.
Like Anthony Watts, I just cannot see any way an honest person would have removed good data they used in 2006 from the reconstruction in 2008. And, I have no idea how honest people could have run so many inquiries which Nelson-like, turned a blind eye to the evidence and said: “wrongdoing, I see no wrongdoing”.
Every scandal these days gets likened to Watergate. But this really does deserve it. The original crime was almost so trivial that it could have been dealt with by an internal panel. But the cover up of that crime was just breath-stopping. It was not just those involved but the whole UK establishment including the approval of politicians to the highest level. OK, no one has died yet, which is kind of the point … except those who die each winter in the UK and who the politicians don’t think count, but … Continue reading →

When I was young I wanted to be a scientist. It was the time of moon landings, nuclear power, lasers, computers, etc. Britain really did pull above its weight in science. Both my wife and I did science at University and I have nothing but respect for all the lecturers and researchers at St.Andrews and latterly Glasgow University.
There still are some great scientists in the UK and even after this affair there will continue to be great scientists, Continue reading →

Over at WUWT Anthony Watts has accused the UEA of being liars. If like me you went there hoping to get a quick summary and found it very difficult to understand, then hopefully this will help.
It appears this assertion from Anthony Watts comes as a result of a decision by the UK Information Commissioner that the University of East Anglia’s must release details of the sites it used to create the Yamal-Urals regional chronology. This  is the reconstruction of past temperature using the size of tree rings showing the rate of growth of trees in this area.
The reason this is important is because it purports to show a period when temperatures did not change much followed by a rise as we approach the modern time. Many other people have used this regional temperature reconstruction which tends to give them all a “hockey stick” shape. For example, it underpins the infamous “hockey stick” graph of Michael Mann. Whilst Michael Mann’s infamous hockey stick graph relied on bristle cone pine trees and predated Yamel, the similar hockey stick shape of Yamal and all studies using Yamal was cited as validating the hockey stick: in other words “proving” that modern warming was unprecedented.
The nub of the story is that Steve McIntyre has taken the tree-ring records from the 17 sites released by the UEA and used these to reconstruct past temperatures (link). The following graph appears to be a comparison of the UEA reconstruction and Steve McIntyre’s:

Although both the UEA and McIntryre produce similar results from 800 to 1900, there is a very stark and very difficult to explain difference after 1900.
The other important point is that there are very few trees in the Yamal area compared to the total number of trees in the region. If the UEA were being honest, we would expect them to have used all the tree cores in the area. Instead they seem to have picked a few trees cores from an area which create this rise in the 20th century. Now that Steve McIntyre knows which areas were used he is able to quantify this “cherry picking”:-

Modern core counts for the regional chronology are about 20 times higher than core counts in the reported Yamal chronology, reaching nearly 400 cores in the 1960s. In the 1980s, core counts are still around 300, as compared to 12 in the Yamal chronology.

As Steve McIntyre puts it:

The question for CRU defenders is to justify their preference of such a small core count, when they had already calculated a regional chronology with an order of magnitude more cores. Since the original criticism in September 2009, CRU has given a variety of different responses, but none, in my opinion, answer the question. Indeed, none of their responses to date have even admitted or disclosed their prior calculation of a regional chronology, let alone explain why they didn’t report it, preferring instead to attack their critics.

Addendum
After a great deal of effort, I think I understand the basis of the specific allegation. What follows is based on what I read on WUWT & Climate Audit:-
The key is a paper written by Keith Briffa of the Climatic Research Centre of the University of East Anglia (UEA) in 2008 in which he attempted to reconstruct past temperature in the Yamal & Ural regions of Russia. There were very few tree cores available in Yamal. This was a very glaring problem, one with a ready solution which was for Briffa to have used tree core samples gathered in the same area in a locality called Khadyta River by his co-worker Schweingruber.
We know Briffa was aware of Schweingruber work and would know he had tree core samples. This is because Briffa had done another reconstruction of temperature for a nearby on the Taimyr Peninsula using Schweingruber’s tree core data. We also know that the distance was not a problem because the tree cores Briffa had included for Taimyr were much further away (400km) than equivalent tree cores samples for Yamal.
Why would Briffa add Schweingruber’s data to Taimyr which already had enough tree core samples, but did not add them to Yamal where there were far too tree cores?
When Steve McIntyre looked at the reconstruction he noticed this rather peculiar selection and showed that the inclusion of Schweingruber core data from Yamal did not produce the hockey stick graph (which is used to suggest past temperatures changed little until the “unprecedented warming” of the 20th century). McIntryre began to ask the UEA to explain their strange behaviour. The affair rumbled on with various climate scientists associated with the affair criticising McIntyre. Eventual in October 2009 the UEA, changed tack and instead of ridiculing inclusion of Khadyta River, conceded that the site met their criteria. Now however, they claimed that when reconstructing the past temperature for the Yamal & Ural area they had “simply not considered” using the Khadyta River tree cores from Schweingruber.
This assertion seemed to be contradicted by a Climategate email (1146252894.txt) copied to Keith Briffa which discussed the very regional chronology combining “Yamal, Polar Urals and shorter chronologies”. This email revealed that UEA had, after all, calculated a Yamal & Urals regional chronology as early as April 2006. Steve McIntyre thought the “shorter” chronologies very likely referred to the Khadyta River tree cores. So, Steve McIntyre raised an FOI asking for details to see if this was true.
This FOI was refused by the UEA.However, the information commissioner has now ruled that the UEA should hand over the list of sites they used in 2006 when reconstructing past temperatures in the Yamal area. Now we have that list, we can see the 2006 temperature reconstruction for the Yamal-Ural area included the Khadyta River tree cores. So these samples were included in 2006 but excluded by Briffa in 2008. Later the UEA said they had “not considered” them.
How can we square this previous reconstruction in 2006 for the same area using Khadyta River tree cores, with the statement that they “did not consider” using the Khadyta River tree cores in 2008? How did they “not consider” adding data they knew was available when they did not have enough samples to be valid? It seems impossible that an intelligent person with data available who needed that data would not “consider” using it.
Therefore, based on what I have read at WUWT and Climate Audit, it would appear that someone at the UEA has lied.

[PLEASE NOTE. THERE IS NOW A LATER REVISION]
Thanks for those who have contributed. I’ve tried to include the comments and improve the wording. The intention is to put this on scef.org.uk as the introduction to the sceptic view on climate. Indeed, there may be a spread of views, which I’m happy to reflect.
I’ve tried to take account of some comments and shortened the list (for previous see: here)
Revision 0.4

• Carbon Dioxide (CO2) has been increasing: in 1960 it was 0.032% of the atmosphere, today it is 0.039%.
• There has very probably been warming of average global temperatures (about 0.8 C in the past 150 years).
• There is a greenhouse effect, and CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
• Increasing CO2 alone should cause warming of about 1C for a doubling of CO2.
• People think there are mechanisms that could increase warming further than the direct effect of CO2. This is not supported by the evidence.
• Man-made sources have increased global levels of CO2, howecer scientific analysis shows part of the increase is natural and no one is certain how much or little of this rise is man-made.
• The harmful effects of warming have been exaggerated as shown by the absence of substantial evidence for increasing weather extremes.
• Known benefits have been hidden. It is estimated there are more than 20,000 extra winter deaths each year in the UK and increasing fuel costs will make this worse. CO2 is essential for plant growth and increasing levels are beneficial to plants.
• Even under the worst case scenario warming, when the usual method of comparing the cost and benefit of policy is used, it is more cost effective to deal with any problems that occur rather than pay to try to stop them.
• Climate proxies are not reliable. If we consider all the evidence including historical records, the evidence suggests the world was warmer during the “medieval warm period” ( and before 5,000BC) as well as being cooler during the “little ice age”.
• Climate varies naturally. Most of the CO2 rise occurred in the latter half of the 20th century. If this change were man-made the global temperature change for the early and latter 20th century should be very different. They are not. This suggests a natural cause for much of the 20th century warming.
• In 2001 the IPCC stated with a high degree of confidence that global temperature would warm. It has not. In science a theory is not valid unless the data supports it. Climate scientists must accept this theory is not validated and acknowledge that the IPCC confidence in warming was greatly overstated.
• We condemn the many instances of malpractice seen in climate science and those who condone them.

Explanatory note
Sceptics value diversity of views and there are many strands. Some sceptics reject any interpretation of the data beyond a minimal assertion of the facts. Others question the validity of isolated surface stations as representing a global temperature. There is a group of sceptics who look to other planets as a model of the earth’s climate and argue that these contradict the basis of the global warming theory. Sceptics encourage debate based on scientific evidence. We think such ideas and theories deserve consideration and require effort to substantiate or refute them based on the evidence. We particularly abhor any dismissal of potentially good science based on the preconceived prejudice that has dominated climate science and prevented debate.