by Judith Curry
Lets conduct a thought experiment. Consider the differing reactions to the two Ludecke papers if the exact same papers had been written by:
a) Ludecke et al.
b) Michael Mann
c) Isaac Held
d) A graduate student
With Ludecke et al. as authors, the “convinced” made charges of purveying disinformation. The authors themselves were not so accused, but rather I was. The accusation of purveying disinformation seem generally to be associated not with the original authors, but with journalists, bloggers, or advocacy groups discussing or otherwise promoting the papers. Has anyone come across skeptics accusing a “warm” paper, or those publicizing such a paper, as promoting disinformation?
Now consider Michael Mann, favorite whipping boy of the skeptics, as author of these papers. I suspect that the research would be characterized as fraudulent. Fraud seems to be a favorite word of skeptics/deniers for denigrating a paper or author that they don’t like or is found to be deficient. Has anyone come across people from the warm side characterizing a paper with as fraud?
Now consider Isaac Held as author. I suspect that people from both sides would be probing the paper for nuggets of insight, which are expected from a Held paper.
And finally, if the author was a graduate student, and I had featured the paper here, I suspect that people from both sides would be making constructive suggestions and providing helpful hints.
Dare I suggest that Richard Tol reacted much more sharply to these papers than people in the U.S. because of his knowledge of EIKE (German group of skeptics)?
JC anecdotal example
To illustrate this issue, I will relate a personal experience in evaluating papers. During the heyday of the hurricane wars (2005/2006), my emotions were engaged in the debate because of the wild accusations that were being flung at us (Emanuel, Webster, Holland, Curry): we were doing this for the money, publicity, etc.
Following publication of the Emanuel and Webster papers, there was a huge flurry of papers related to the hurricane and global warming issue. I was asked by journalists to comment on most of these, and I was asked to review some of these. My first reaction to seeing a new paper was to assess which “side” the paper was on. I tended to be quite critical of most of these papers: I was inclined to be critical of people that had been critical of my work, and I didn’t want to see shoddy work that was seemingly supportive of our work get torn to pieces and so reflect poorly on our arguments.
This went on for several months before I understood that I was having an emotional reaction to these papers, and that this was getting in the way of an honest evaluation of the papers. Once I recognized this, it was pretty easy to get my objectivity back. In response to queries from journalists, I became critical of papers that seemingly supported our arguments if I felt the paper was weak. Journalists, expecting something different me, stopped quoting me in their articles, but continued to ask for my opinion.
During the review process of my paper Mixing Politics and Science in Testing the Hypothesis that Greenhouse Warming is Causing a Global Increase in Hurricane Intensity, the second round of reviews was extremely hostile (far more hostile than the first round) owing to a very controversial WSJ article that included an egregious misquote. The reviewers perception of the paper changed completely after the WSJ article (while the content of the paper changed only in response to addressing the reviewers’ comments).
Disinformation vs fraud
Basically, I am hypothesizing that the reaction to a paper is very much colored by the authors. Objective reactions are much more difficult if the authors are associated with advocacy groups or some sort of prior controversy.
I am further hypothesizing that the reaction is not symmetrical among people on both extremes of the debate. On the skeptical side, the accusations are focused on the author, whereas on the convinced side, the accusations are focused on people that enable/promote the paper (e.g. journal editors, bloggers, journalists, advocacy groups).
A possible explanation of this asymmetry is provided by the essay Talking Past Each Other, where skeptics are more focused on the science, and the “convinced” are more focused on the solutions. So the skeptical criticism is more focused on the science and the individual author, where as the convinced criticism kicks in if it looks like the paper will influence public opinion (presumably on policy).
Your thoughts?
“Considering the source” is almost inevitable, but easily overdone. In an imaginary universe, purely objective authors and reviewers exist. Not in this one. Consider that purely objective authors and reviewers would have zero or low “autocorrelation” between one article/response and the next.
Doesn’t happen.
I think the issue has not so much been with who wrote the papers, but with you deciding to highlight them on your blog.
I know for myself that the latter is much more interesting. You are going to remain the public figure and focus of interest well after these papers have faded from public and professional view.
I know you have explained your own motives and objectives, but I confess I still personally have a “what on Earth is going on inside her head” puzzle. I’m not planning to write about that myself or made grand critical pronouncements. I read your blog from time to time and have participated a couple of times also (quite a bit in the last few days). I’m not meaning this as a criticism either. You’re perfectly in order using the blog as you choose and it certainly gets a heck of a lot of traffic.
But since you raise the point with this post, I’d just like to comment that the real puzzle isn’t the authors of those papers. The real interest here is Dr Judith Curry.
Cheers and best wishes — Chris
Well done, Chris. I think you just added weight to the hypothesis she presents in her post!!
Lol. Quite so! (Except I’m not making accusations; but I do take your point.)
“I know you have explained your own motives and objectives, but I confess I still personally have a “what on Earth is going on inside her head” puzzle.”
Could you please try to articulate your position a bit? Let me ask you to focus on three terms that can be used to describe Dr. Curry’s activities on this blog. The three terms are ‘posting’, ‘analysis’, and ‘judgement’. After Dr. Curry Posts an article, she invites Analysis of the article, offers some Analysis of her own, invites Judgments of the article, and offers some Judgments of her own.
When you write about Dr. Curry’s activities on her blog, it seems that you address the matter of Posting but never address the matters of Analysis or Judgment. For that reason, all of your comments about Dr. Curry’s activities strike me as radically incomplete. Your comments make me wonder if you understand the concepts of Analysis and Judgment. I will illustrate my point.
Over the last few days you criticized Dr. Curry for posting work by some scientists. However, she not only posted but she offered some Analysis and some Judgments of those works. You said nothing about her Analysis or Judgments. In addition, she invited the world to Analyze and Judge the works. But you have nothing to say about that commentary. If your thoughts are not radically incomplete, it seems to me that you have something of a thesis. You believe that the act of Posting is important but the acts of Analysis and Judgment are not. Could you please explain why?
Dr. Curry often posts articles and then provides Analysis and Judgments that are severely but fairly critical of the articles. In one of my favorite cases, she posted articles by Spencer and Dessler. Her Analysis of the articles was somewhat critical but her Judgement was devastating. She explained that the articles did not advance the topic that they addressed.
When I read Dr. Curry’s blog, I am interested in what she Posted but far more interested in her Analyses and Judgments. You, on the other hand, seem to believe that her act of Posting overrides anything that might be found in her acts of Analysis or Judgment. Could you please explain why? Do you dismiss her Analyses and Judgments entirely? One of my guesses is that you did not grow up in the Enlightenment Tradition. According to that tradition, the very best mechanism for discovering falsehood is publicity. In my view, Dr. Curry places articles on the chopping block and offers no mercy to article or author. For example, she has Posted articles that advocate some thesis of Post Modern Science and, in my opinion, those Posts have done much to hasten the demise of Post Modern Science. I simply cannot understand how you can see things differently, unless you do dismiss her Analyses and Judgments out of hand. I simply cannot understand how you can see her acts of Posting Post Modern Science as in some way advocating Post Modern Science.
The posts that you have commented on are not a good example of what usually happens on Dr. Curry’s site. They are not because Richard Tol would not be denied until he had hijacked the thread. Because of Tol, you will not find much in the way of Analysis or Judgment from Dr. Curry on those posts.
Let me leave you with my main question. When criticizing Dr. Curry, why do you focus solely on her act of Posting but say nothing about her acts of Analyzing and Judging?
“When criticizing Dr. Curry, why do you focus solely on her act of Posting but say nothing about her acts of Analyzing and Judging?”
Because she doesn’t do the latter
Not in this case. The thread was hijacked. Also, consider that another discussion that would have taken place was foreclosed by the hijacking. I really do not like Richard Tol forcing his will upon me and I doubt that Dr. Curry enjoys it. If this sort of thread jacking continues Climate, Etc. will disappear. Ever considered that?
“If this sort of thread jacking continues Climate, Etc. will disappear. Ever considered that?”
I’m sure the world will continue to turn
From http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2011/11/09/is-judith-curry-peddling-disinformation/comment-page-3/#comment-87016
“Roger Pielke Jr. Says:
November 11th, 2011 at 3:36 pm
-120-Jonathan Gilligan says it best:
“People will read these blogs or not as they choose, and when a blog repeatedly calls attention to crap, its credibility and its audience will adjust to reflect this. Climate Etc. is not The Wall Street Journal, so the greater danger in Curry’s gushing over crap is to Curry’s reputation, not to the public understanding of science.”
Amen.”
I can’t recall Dr Curry gushing over anything that has been posted here beyond the odd “wow”. This is a bit of an exaggeration.
Theo – this is the standard situation hee: threadjacking by those with extremist agendas.
I’m outta here
Louise,
You live in your fantasy world. Dr. Curry has never gushed over an article.
Louise quotes:
“Climate Etc. is not The Wall Street Journal, so the greater danger in Curry’s gushing over crap is to Curry’s reputation, not to the public understanding of science.”
When you recycle a slur, you should be willing to defend it. Would you please make a rational case to the effect that Dr. Curry gushes over articles. Otherwise, do the honorable thing and apologize for recycling slurs.
The thread was hijacked.
I think that’s insupportable. Anyone who wanted to could follow the main technical interchanges and skip unrelated tangents.
Theo, I was trying to be careful NOT to express my puzzlement as criticism. I did not intend it as criticism.
If all Dr Curry did was pick out interesting but comparatively minor papers and give them a bit more prominence in a salon where there can be an exchange of perspectives, that would be much easier for me to figure out. These discussions, as people have noted, have turned out to be quite interesting.
Since you raise the question, I must admit that I haven’t been particularly impressed with her analysis and judging, to be frank. It doesn’t seem to be her main or strong point. In this thread, for example, she’s allowed a couple of guest posts and left nearly all the analysis to others. A legitimate choice.
Another example might be the whole “hide the decline” posts. The lack of real analysis there was stark, especially when she addressed questions on the basis for her claim without ever giving what was requested — the actual scientific basis for them. That claim and lack of any supporting analysis was all rather surreal.
I was most impressed when she gave a guest post spot to Chris Colose. Nice counter example to the perspective that she’s just highlighting skeptic perspectives.
When the blog first came online I was initially impressed with the stated objective of “building bridges”, but felt that the actual posts she did were much more tearing down any hope of mutual respect. I said so at the time. Since then, she’s explicitly abandoned that as an aim, as I understand it.
My main point is (and this is, as someone amusingly points out, a confirmation of one of her points in the post!) that the authors of the recent papers are not nearly as much a focus of interest as she is herself.
“Since you raise the question, I must admit that I haven’t been particularly impressed with her analysis and judging, to be frank. It doesn’t seem to be her main or strong point. In this thread, for example, she’s allowed a couple of guest posts and left nearly all the analysis to others. A legitimate choice.”
This post was hijacked and brutally so. Your example is a tad old. How about the one I referenced, the Spencer Dessler debate. Her introductory remarks alone were the best summary of what was at stake in the debate and what was achieved. Care to comment?
I did not read that one, so I cannot comment on it, sorry. I am not a regular reader here.
“I am not a regular reader here.”
Pity you didn’t preface your initial remarks with this admission. We could then all have ignored your views as being based on ignorance.
Alex, I said: “I read your blog from time to time and have participated a couple of times also (quite a bit in the last few days).” That is, I am an irregular rather than a regular reader. I have her blog in my reader feeds, but it’s not one of those where I read every article.
Please do not be disingenuous with me, Dr. You write:
“I know you have explained your own motives and objectives, but I confess I still personally have a “what on Earth is going on inside her head” puzzle.”
That translates as:
I do not deign to address your motives and objectives because you are behaving like an idiot.
Would you care to address her motives and objective or are you just going to play games?
I’m not playing games, and I am being quite honest in saying that I was intending a friendly comment here on what is of interest to me. I have already said that I find her motives to be a puzzle. But it’s no big deal, really. I don’t mean that she is obliged to explain herself further. You’re reading way way too much into my comment, really. The “translation” is totally off the mark.
You write:
“…but I confess I still personally have a “what on Earth is going on inside her head” puzzle.”
I will make this easy for you. What part of that quotation is friendly?
Having made such a comment, the only friendly thing that you could write is “Would you please explain to me what is going on inside your head?” That would at least indicate that you have an interest in her point of view. Your quoted comment dismisses her views but avoids doing so substantively. If you want to criticize her views, Dr. up and make substantial claims.
You really need to look up the word ‘disingenuous’.
Hi, Theo. You should read it in context … that will show you “what part … is friendly.” Such as the end where Chris said, “Cheers and best wishes.”
I agree that you are misinterpreting. There is nothing wrong with expressing friendly puzzlement, I think. On the other hand, it is very, very easy to misinterpret blog posts, and so it’s easy to see how you might have done so. There are no visual or auditory cues to assist interpretation on the ‘net, unfortunately, and it is easy to color such readings with preconceived notions. In the absence of other cues, bias finds it very easy to slip right in. I’ve caught myself doing it any number of times.
Try reading Chris’ posts as collegial comments from a friend; I think you’ll see it makes a world of difference in how they then sound.
Shrug. I don’t see that as unfriendly, and the rest of my comment went to some pains to say this was not intended as criticism. I was not making any substantial claims, or dismissing her views. I am not being disingenuous. You are making that accusation based on reading a whole pile of things into my comment that are just not there.
“Shrug. I don’t see that as unfriendly, and the rest of my comment went to some pains to say this was not intended as criticism.”
As I have learned over the last few days, if you see it that way then you cannot see it another way.
I do offer you a helpful mantra. It goes: “The fact that I believe it is not a reason for believing it.”
Postscript. Theo, you may also have mixed up who’s posting what. Easy to do in an enormous thread. For instance, you said of me that: “Over the last few days you criticized Dr. Curry for posting work by some scientists.”
I think you have mixed up me with someone else. She’s welcome to post work by whoever she likes. There a huge scope for choice there; her choices speak to her judgement and to what she wants for the blog. The variety of guest posters here is considerable.
You have quickly exposed the scope of your ignorance by criticizing Judith’s “Hide the decline series” and I will not stand by and let you insult one of the finest scientists I have ever witnessed. Save your drivel for a different blog, or spend your time reading the thousands of posts she hosted during that series.
I wish the collection could be published. As a teacher I found it to be a stunning collection of the best (and worst) thinking mankind is capable of. I continue to refer to it regularly, especially when I an overwhelmed by the daily evidence I see of widespread epidemic delusional thinking.
A couple of threads ago I was musing how I go about changing my mind about issues. The very first step for me was to be emotionally ready to listen. To be emotionally ready, I had to believe/feel that I would end up being OK if I listened and considered the changes to issues that were being proposed. To listen I also had to turn off my “…. yes, but…” filter. Once I felt emotionally safe and the “yes, but” filter was off, I could listen and listen and listen. From there I just do what I usually do: related to what I already know; try on the idea for a while and then discount the new information; communicate the incorporated information to a dispassionate audience; write it down, mull it over, and go on from there. It all starts however with being able to listen, which presupposes that I am ready to listen.
As far as who tells me something that I should consider and maybe change my behavior/attitude, on a face to face basis, I guess I assess non-verbal cues as to the status of the talker and my own emotional well-being. When the source is audio only, I listen to how it is being presented and the emotional overtones. When I read something, I usually can safely bypass the emotional safety test and go on to mulling and trying on the ideas presented. I am reliant upon many others to feed into the issue though, so I keep trying on and then discarding new ideas multiple times as others say their piece. As for authorities speaking to me, well, I haven’t been convinced by authoritative information very much in my life, science is no different. I do the same process of getting ready to listen and then listening whether to an infant, or the rantings of a demented person. I just listen differently to each, trying as I might to adapt to each situation. Does any of the above make sense?
RiHo08 –
What you say makes a great deal of sense. My suspicion, though, is that most people involved in science – however tangentially – don’t take their emotional dispositions very seriously. They may well be not well connected to emotional processes, or even be unaware how much they influence things like genuine listening, confirmation bias and the giving of credence to perceived authority.
Your central point – that to be able to change your mind you need to be emotionally ready to listen, and to believe you’ll be OK with the new world-view – is particularly insightful. I would go so far as to say that the almost complete lack of people changing their minds about climate is because of the degree of imagination involved – we have all become emotionally identified with our vision, our beliefs and all the trappings – tribal and otherwise – that go with it. To give up such a belief and to replace it with something else requires a letting go of a big part of ourselves. We can be relaxed about the details, as long as we keep a grasp of the central vision.
I simply don’t believe that we as human beings are moved by pieces of evidence – otherwise we would change our minds every other day. We see ‘evidence’ and ‘facts’ through the prism of our world view. The same evidence looks completely different from two separate perspectives, and it is our emotional commitments that keep us where we are. Changing a view doesn’t need reasoning – it needs courage!
RiH008.
You make an interesting point. I’m a sceptic in the sense that:
I believe it’s warming,
I believe it’s possible that increases in CO2 are responsible for part of the warming
I don’t believe the earth is sensitive to positive feedback in the absence of proof
I believe that there is no real evidence of any of the catastrophes forecast by the IPCC coming to fruition.
In order to persuade me I’m wrong the alarmist side of the argument:
Call me a denier
Tell me the science is settled
Tell me the IPCC report is the Holy Grail of scientific reporting (Read Donna Laframboise’s book)
Tell me that if we don’t start to reduce our emissions now we are doomed
Have successfully, in the UK at least, deliberately censored all discussion on the topic of global warming that has an element of challenge to the consensus.
Tell me I’m attacking science
Insist that I live a green lifestyle of their choice.
Add to that the quite clear scientific malpractices at the UEA and the following whitewashes and I ask you.
How persuasive is that in changing my, very moderate, scepticism.
I should add that I’ve been a fan of Judy since she used to come onto climateaudit and defend the consensus views. I believe she was always treated with respect and invited Steve McIntyre to speak to her class at Georgia Tech, for which she was admonished by the NAS (I believe that to be the case, but maybe I’ll be corrected). McIntyre is the epitome of moderation and manners.
You should read the post by Richard Betts of the Met Office on the Bishop Hill blog, it is an examplar of how we should be discussing the AGW issue. Other posters have been trying to get him to shut up because he’s saying the deniers might have a point with the uncertainties in climate science.
And that appears to me to be the main difference, you can argue all you like for global warming on a sceptic blog ( although the proponents seem to stick to insulting the blog’s owners) but any evidence that even hints that the official line is even slightly wrong brings demands for silence.
Do not even extreme statements like “IPCC dogma is more unequivocal than truth itself” convince you? ;)
Of course they do! In fact I almost there as a warmist/alarmist I just have niggling doubts about the models forecasting all the disasters, just little ones you understand as described by the increasingly oddly behaved Dr. Trenberth in his nature blog in June 2007:
“In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers “what if” projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios. There are a number of assumptions that go into these emissions scenarios. They are intended to cover a range of possible self consistent “story lines” that then provide decision makers with information about which paths might be more desirable. But they do not consider many things like the recovery of the ozone layer, for instance, or observed trends in forcing agents. There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess.
Even if there were, the projections are based on model results that provide differences of the future climate relative to that today. None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate. In particular, the state of the oceans, sea ice, and soil moisture has no relationship to the observed state at any recent time in any of the IPCC models. There is neither an El Niño sequence nor any Pacific Decadal Oscillation that replicates the recent past; yet these are critical modes of variability that affect Pacific rim countries and beyond. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, that may depend on the thermohaline circulation and thus ocean currents in the Atlantic, is not set up to match today’s state, but it is a critical component of the Atlantic hurricanes and it undoubtedly affects forecasts for the next decade from Brazil to Europe. Moreover, the starting climate state in several of the models may depart significantly from the real climate owing to model errors. I postulate that regional climate change is impossible to deal with properly unless the models are initialized.”
Just a little more work needed then.
Wow, I would likewise be totally unconvinced.
Has anyone tried this on you..?
Go read the science. Read a whole bunch of papers on each topic/sub-topic, to find out what the general view is on them. See where the weight of opinion is falling. Figure out what is well understood, and what is less well understood.
If you do this fulsomely with a handful of topics, you can then visit the better-known climate blogs to see who is accurately reporting the preponderance of scientific opinion, and thereby learn which sources to cede (provisional) credibility to.
Thereafter, when someone on a blog brandishes an opinion, a study or whatever, you can weigh that against the rest of expert investigation in the field that you’ve familiarised yourself with.
If you do any less than the above, you’ll never know enough to form a worthwhile opinion.
Avoid political thinking and language if you want to understand the science objectively. Eschew words like alarmist, warmist, denier, inactivist. Ignore conspiracy theories. Don’t let anyone tell you what to do, how to be, or what the truth is. Think for yourself. Research with no agenda but to find out what is agreed on as ‘true’, or most valid.
Is the above obvious to anyone else? I so rarely see such an approach articulated.
Once you are dispassionate about the politics and curious about the science, it will be easier to tell who is selling something and who is trying to help you see better.
“Go read the science. Read a whole bunch of papers on each topic/sub-topic, to find out what the general view is on them. See where the weight of opinion is falling. Figure out what is well understood, and what is less well understood.”
A better approach could be providing a name of a paper
or reference which you thought was useful to read.
An internet link could also be of value.
1) Don’t trust me. I may have an agenda. I may not know how to tell a good paper from a a poor one.
2) Ditto for internet links.
I might link to a paper that ‘summarises’ the state of understanding on a given topic, referring to a brace of papers on the subject. But how would the reader trust that the authors of such a paper have fairly represented the field?
Self-reliance, google scholar, maybe a few trips to the library, and some diligent reading is the very best way to find out where the weight of scientific understanding lies. No middle-men to direct your thinking.
Here’s a link
http://scholar.google.com
But let me try an experiment re your comment:
There is a great resource for long lists of papers under various sub-topics to do with climate change. Here it is;
http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/index/
What do you think?
“But let me try an experiment re your comment:
There is a great resource for long lists of papers under various sub-topics to do with climate change. Here it is;
http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/index/
What do you think?”
I bookmarked it.
In a brief amount of time I haven’t found anything as yet which I would call a resource.
Unless it’s resource for particular type humor. E.g.
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1001/1001.4988v1.pdf
Which to be precise, is a farce.
Also this is a resource for students to spot disinformation.
I find it’s format enjoyable.
And yes, the abstract is a summary of this “paper”.
A bit from abstract ” Our purpose is to try to understand the story which the climatologists are telling us through their rather complicated general circulation models”
And this from the body:
“We assume that the atmosphere equalises the temperature so that the absolute temperature in degrees Kelvin is roughly uniform over the globe.”
Wow, that’s an abysmal ‘paper’. Hilariously bad. That entry is definitely a mistake.
“In a brief amount of time I haven’t found anything as yet which I would call a resource.”
I don’t think you’d find anything particularly useful under the general heading. Have you tried the sub-topics?
For instance, under ‘modern temperatures’ you get a bucket load of papers on millennial temperature reconstructions. I think reading them all is a great antidote to the usual hanging of hats on a particular study. Or you can read up on solar influences on recent climate and a host of other familiar notions that get bandied about. But if I pointed you to just one study, as you recommended, you’d only get a slice of the story. It’s like cherry-picking. I could link you to a Loehle or a Moberg paper. Each can be trotted out to prop up a particular argument, but that’s no way to get a reasonably balanced grip on the scientific understanding of millennial temperature reconstructions. This, I think, is one of the biggest problems in the ‘debate’. People line up the studies that say what they want.
The experiment failed because that atrocious paper was what got your attention. No nuances to discuss there. At the (very) least it emphasises the point of being your own arbiter.
BTW, I alerted the blog owner to the paper and he promptly removed it.
Judith,
I was talking past and over heads to everyone who did not understand what I was trying to convey.
Since generating that velocity mapping of our planet…
I have not been snipped once here…hmmmm :-)
Others are actually in conversation and not thinking,,,,”goofball”…
But it really begs the question of “WHAT DID I DO?”
In respect to current theories…
Hi Joe. I think that your ideas are really interesting. Can you please provide links to your detailed expositions.
Hi mondo,
The only links I currently have is to the velocity mapping and the article that Ice Age Now put up on their website.
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/guest/lalonde-joe/world-calculations.pdf
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/guest/lalonde-joe/world-calculations-2.pdf
http://iceagenow.info/2011/11/centrifugal-velocity-points-planet/
The mapping I did on our planet was pure measurement but since the majority of the planets are of the same shape, I can take that measurement at each latitude against the equator equation and generate a calculation number to be used against any rotating orb. All I need is the diameter and the velocity of rotation and I can regenerate the same mapping.
” Journalists, expecting something different [from] me, stopped quoting me in their articles, but continued to ask for my opinion.”
That’s the saddest thing in your post. It speaks volumes about the bulk of journalism. If there is a really big problem here, I think this is it. If people cannot hear the equivocal voice from equivocal scientists, they are led to believe that all scientific opinion falls into binary [opposed] categories. That promotes the view that everything boils down to subjective interests of speakers. Otherwise, how could professional opinion be so polarized?
Very well said.
I think your contention that the difference is one side focusing on politics and the other side focusing on science is correct.
see e.g. Stefan Rahmstorf http://notrickszone.com/2011/11/07/german-court-orders-stefan-rahmstorf-to-cease-and-desist-violating-journalists-personal-rights/
I could not disagree more. There are people (A) who put politics ahead of scientific rigor found on all sides. There people (B) that put scientific rigor ahead of political goals, and these B’s are found on all sides.
The trouble, I think, is that the A’s get the limelight. The B’s are boring — justified and exhibiting exemplary ethics, but they deliver past deadline. B’s are old news.
It is a two-edged sword. If the A’s want the limelight and the fame that goes with it, then when some of the B’s find work of an “A” to be a bit shoddy, the “A”s have no right to complain about polarized opinions following their future work.
Each and every paper does not and cannot stand on its own merits. The reputation of the Authors is carried with the paper. (If this be not so, Why for instance do we refer to papers by “author year, et. al?) Once an author reputation develops a tarnish, the patina will be transfered to each new work. Life is too short for it to be any other way.
Agree very much. There is a huge variety of focus. The preference to focus on politics, or technical science, or ethics, or policy, is found across the board. There are some rough generalizations one might make about people on the various sides, but I don’t think this is one of them.
True that the reputations of authors is carried with papers, and is often the basis for an initial stab at whether it is worth looking further.
The other point which is crucial is the reputation of the journals in which papers are published. I think in this specific case, it was the reputation of journals rather than the affiliations of authors which was relevant.
Speculating on what the reaction would have been had the paper been published by a different author, or in a different journal, has a potential problem; in that if authors and papers really do get reputations that give a good guide to quality, then it is fair enough to say that such and such a paper is highly unlike anything so and so an author would produce; or that it would be most improbable to get that paper into so and so a journal.
On the reputations of journals. I think the internet with its instant feedback and peer+ reviewing will soon make mincemeat of Journals that engage in Pal Review. So long as the Peer Reviewers are unaccountable for what trash gets published and what gems get delayed and smothered, I do not see the Journals’ collective reputation improving.
It’s going to fun to see how that works out. There are a number of ways the whole review process has been improved using the internet.
However, I don’t think there is any such thing as “journals’ collective reputation”, except perhaps with the reputation with a small minority who are not involved with journals or publishing, and distrust the whole science community generally. Journals vary enormously in reputation, and with good reason. (Occasionally with bad reason also, I acknowledge!)
“Now consider Michael Mann, favorite whipping boy of the skeptics, as author of these papers. I suspect that the research would be characterized as fraudulent.”
Only after it was ripped to shreds on Climate Audit.
The Hockey Stick was a fraud. Even hinting it was not is pathetic.
Although I’ve been convinced that the Mann Hockey Stick is a statistical illusion, I kinda think “fraud” is not the right word. There’s a big literature in the behavioral sciences about escalation of commitment. I think the series of papers by the Hockey Stick co-authors smells like escalation of commitment, rather than deliberate falsehood. Sometimes scientists get emotionally attached to conclusions and try to protect them, sometimes investing more and more in an enterprise that looks increasingly dubious. I suspect this is the story of the Mann et al. papers, rather than a deliberate attempt to deceive. I do think they were in over their heads (from the very beginning) with sharp statistical knives they really didn’t understand.
NW, I’ve been a consistent critic of how the entire hockey stick saga has been handled (going far beyond just criticizing Michael Mann), and I agree with you. The original hockey stick was wrong, but I believe the authors thought otherwise at the time. Later, when they published more papers, I believe they genuinely thought they were making their case. This sort of behavior involves deceiving oneself, but it isn’t intended to deceive people.
However, while I don’t think the papers were fraudulent, I do think there is a strong case for saying Mann made fraudulent claims. The most obvious of these is that, in testimony, he claimed to have never calculated the R2 statistic for his original reconstruction. This was completely false, and he had to know so. A similar situation arises with him claiming Steve McIntyre got “bad” results because he had asked for an Excel spreadsheet of the data used, and the file sent contained the wrong data. In both cases, even the most basic of fact checking shows Mann’s claim was false. To me, things like that can safely be called “fraudulent.”
Agreed, and you demonstrate some bravery saying so, considering the litigious turn of Mann’s defenses.
Eh, given my current financial situation, it doesn’t take much bravery. I don’t have enough to lose that a lawsuit could possibly be worthwhile. It’s also worth pointing out such a lawsuit would necessarily get me (some) attention on a national level. I don’t actually find that appealing, but some would consider that a good thing. In that view, I have little to lose and more to gain.
Besides which, Michael Mann wouldn’t have a case against me. He’d have to be able to prove my claims were false, and that would be basically impossible. He’d also have to prove my claims caused some sort of damage, and given I’m just some nobody posting in the comments section of a blog, I suspect that is impossible too.
About the only “bravery” involved here is I sign my real name to my comments, meaning anyone who researches me (my name is not common) can see what I’ve said. I can’t imagine I’d be affected by other posters doing so, but I do realize people who meet me elsewhere might come across comments of mine on blogs. I’m not sure how that would really affect anything in my life though.
Anyway, while I appreciate the compliment, I don’t think I deserve it.
Brandon, I’m not sure you are the most accurate reporter when it comes to Michael Mann, so I am skeptical of your accusation that he knowingly made false claims. Will you provide verifiable evidence?
That depends. I obviously cannot prove what Michael Mann did or did not know at any given point, so in that sense, I cannot prove the accusation. I would, however, be happy to provide evidence he made claims we should reasonably believe he knew to be false.
Now then, this isn’t really the appropriate spot for such a discussion, so I’m going to try to keep this as brief as I can. Michael Mann calculated the R2 verification scores for the original hockey stick. Not only does the code I linked to show this, Figure 3 of MBH98 reports the R2 verification scores for the 1820 step of the reconstruction. There is no argument that these scores were calculated.
The issue of R2 verification was a major battleground issue, and the fact the scores had been calculated was denied. While testifying in front of an NAS panel, Michael Mann said he did not calculate the R2 verification scores. In this case, I do not happen to have documentable proof on-hand (this happened five years ago), and I’m not sure a transcript would actually be available. However, Steve McIntyre has repeatedly referred to this instance, and Michael Mann has never denied it (neither has anyone at RealClimate).
This is only one example, and I accept it is not absolute proof, but it certainly qualifies as strong evidence in support of my claim.
Brandon, thanks for the reply. As you said, you can’t prove the accusation. Maybe Mann did what you suspect, maybe he didn’t. Maybe McIntyre interpreted Mann’s comments correctly, maybe he didn’t.
That’s true M. carey, but I have no obligation to prove any accusation. If I were, I could never accuse anybody of anything. Indeed, it would be completely impossible to accuse anybody of anything involving dishonesty simply because we cannot prove what people think. Indeed, we cannot even prove that people think. Heck, we cannot even prove that we think. Technically, we cannot even prove that we exist! If literal proof is required for accusations, then no accusations can be made.
Fortunately the most any legal system (I know of, at least) requires is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and that’s the standard people generally apply to any accusations they hear (and have no bias on). I’d wager in any fair test of that standard, I could prove my accusations against Mann in my sleep. Give me twenty mock trials of Mann (with the charge of dishonesty), and I’d win at least 19.
But by all means, talk about how I cannot prove Mann lied. Tell people what I say is just an unproven accusation. By doing this rather than disputing anything I say, all you do is create the impression you have no answer. If one side discusses evidence, and another side just repeats, “That’s not proof,” everybody knows which will win.
Brandon, I asked if you had verifiable evidence to support your accusations. I didn’t ask you to prove your accusations, which of course is more difficult than just providing evidence. You volunteered that you can’t prove your accusations.
M. carey, I’m not sure I see any point in your response here. You’ve simply stated the obvious without adding any content. Yes, I was the one who brought up the impossibility of proof.
That doesn’t address the fact you are the one who focused on this impossibility. It doesn’t address the fact you choose not to discuss the evidence you requested. It doesn’t address the fact you made remarks constituting defense against the accusations I made without offering any reasoned support for your position. That doesn’t address the fact I was critical of you for the bias displayed in your comment.
So as I said, don’t know what the point your comment was. I don’t even know what it is supposed to be addressing.
You can find a CA post from shortly after the NAS panel took testimony here.
http://climateaudit.org/2006/03/16/mann-at-the-nas-panel/
——————
Excerpt from Steve’s post:
Christy did ask Mann: “Did you calculate R2?” ‘? Mann’s answer was: “We didn’t calculate it. That would be silly and incorrect reasoning”‘?.
——————
The previous day Steve had shown a Mann generated graphic demonstrating Mann had calculated R2.
Mann has never disputed the accuracy of Steve’s account.
Oops!
Didn’t realize Brandon had already included the link I posted.
I will note that Steve put the query by Christy and Mann’s response in quotes. Sure looks to me like Mann lied.
Bob Koss, the nesting makes it easy to miss things like that, especially since when you get to this level, your comment box can appear above comments, but when you hit submit, you wind up below them.
In any event, that is certainly strong evidence that Mann lied. There are only two ways to say he didn’t. The first is a way I assume nobody will seriously suggest, namely that Mann simply didn’t realize what he had done. The second way is to say Steve McIntyre’s depiction is faulty. This could happen because he is lying (I doubt anyone will suggest this), or it could happen by some sort of error on his part.
However, that would have to be a major error. It seems almost impossible to believe anyone could make it. Beyond that, even if it was an error, McIntyre posted that comment shortly after the event (and has referred to it many times since), and it is known authors from RealClimate read his blog. Claiming he made an error would require us believe Michael Mann and his associates have seen him make the claim in error, but for some reason, chose to never dispute it.
So yeah, Mann lied.
Brandon, my point was directed at your following comment.
“But by all means, talk about how I cannot prove Mann lied. Tell people what I say is just an unproven accusation.”
You are the one who has been talking about how you cannot prove Michael Mann lied. All I did was agree with you.
In a previous post I asked if you had verifiable evidence to support your accusation that he lied. You gave a link to a piece in Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit , where I found speculation about Mann, not verifiable evidence.
I am puzzled by McIntyre’s obsession with Mann. His latest attack, which parallels Mann with an accused pedophile, prompted one poster to declare Climate Audit has jumped the shark. Maybe so.
M. carey, at this point, I think reasonable discussion between us here is impossible. I’ve described something as “strong evidence.” You’ve described it as “speculation.” Such a large gap in interpretation of what should be a simple issue indicates to me trying to discuss more complicated issues would be fruitless. As such, I’ll take my leave.
Brandon, yes, we are different. You are willing to accept what McIntyre said as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I am not.
M. carey
Recommend you examine the evidence for “hiding the decline” where the paleo temperature data showing a modern temperature decline was explicitly deleted from the published graphs. See details under Hockey Stick Studies at Climate Audit. For posts, see ClimateAudit posts on “hide the decline graph”
Similarly, regarding Hansen’s Y2K August 2007 controversy see: NASA: “Hide this after Jim checks it”
These appear to me to show systemic efforts to “hide the decline”, use a “trick” etc. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire”. These explicit actions appear to be the opposite of objective scientific integrity – to the detriment of “We the People” who are paying them.
David, if someone says “hide,” it doesn’t mean they are up to no good.
I wouldn’t have done the chart the way Jones did, but he didn’t hide a temperature decline that actually occurred, and scientists were already aware of the divergence, so it is silly to think he was attempting to hide what was already know.
M. carey, I guess the dog ate the homework excuse always works on you. Pathetic.
M. carey
Re: “he didn’t hide a temperature decline that actually occurred”
He hid the data showing the major modern “divergence” between the declining evidence and the rising instrumental temperatures.
That data invalidated his method. In science that is even worse.
Do that in the financial markets and you land in jail.
NW: your interpretation makes good sense to me. I too think use of the term ‘fraud’ is inappropriate in this context, partly as I think it tends to further polarise and exacerbate ill-feeling. The impression I get from what I have read of and about Mann’s papers (and I am no statistician) is of inexperience and overconfidence. These are features associated with immaturity, and can be regarded normal characteristics of a research student, who can easily outgrow them as s/he matures and learns more. What went wrong with Mann may stem from his premature promotion to be an international arbiter of scientific truth as an IPCC lead author. From then on, as NW suggests, ‘escalation of commitment’ may have taken over, not just with Mann himself but also with his co-workers and with a large part of what Richard Betts might call the ‘climate change science’ community.
I agree that in most instances, ‘fraud’ is inappropriate. What I think is more apt are personal prejudices of the authors impeding their objectivity – just as Judith mentioned in her review process. Those authors, who are predisposed to warming, will see warming in every graph, and those who see natural cycles, will see them everywhere, and so forth. I have witnessed this in several papers where the authors have “proved” their own theory, even though the results could be applied to several other factors, or even chance.
The other issue raised above is also valid. That being that notoriety begets subjectivism. Once a person has entered the limelight, there are expected to continue their commitment to their pronouncements, and are extolled for their expertise. Objectivity becomes difficult in these situations, and they can become blinded by their own ambitions.
The only ‘fraud’ that exists occurs on those websites which proclaim their own version of the science as ‘truth,’ and the other version as ‘lies.’ In the past, scientists welcomed challenges to their theories in an effort to further understanding in the field. These types of challenges were seen as an attempt to validate the science, and not on attack of the individual scientist. Oftentimes, flaws were discovered in the science, the scientists would learn by others work, and be able to further his own research in the process. Better to discover errors in your research early, rather to continue proclaiming success, only to reach a higher level of failure. Today, too many scientists are attempting to defend their work on principle, and see any challenge as a personal attack. Of course scientists are human, and all too often, good theories have been ridiculed by the establishment as being
absurd. Some are, some are not, but true science needs to trudge forward in spite of all obstacles.
I recommend you read Andrew Montford’s Hockeystick Illusion you’ll find that they used a statistical technique called short centering which weighted principal components with up ticks in the 20th century 390 times those that didn’t. The technique they used was not in the statistical literature.
From what I can gather they were having to be creative with troublesome data. They were at the cutting edge of the field – doing multiproxy reconstructions – and had to find new ways to deal with a range of difficulties. It would be surprising if there weren’t flaws in the methodology.
But whether MGH were honest, fooled themselves or conspired to fool everyone else….
I think the whole fixation on MBH98 and 99 is bizarre considering a host of reconstructions that followed, from different groups with different methods, data combos,and even completely independent data, came up with roughly the same conclusions. 12 years on, this obsession with two papers from the late 90s is like a kind of mass psychosis. Science has progressed, people. Deal with what it is, not with what it was.
The thing is that the climategate emails have several emails from CRU where they state that the medieval warm period was probably as warm as the present day and that they didn’t really believe Mann’s work. At some point they agreed to back it but were still unhappy at overegging the pudding.
However while Mann was largely fooled by his lack of knowledge about his data mining algorithm and remains too proud to admit it, Briffa seemed to be quite careful to avoid including the Yamal data that would have invalidated his own hockey stick. They clearly needed the hockey stick and were collectively involved – it wasn’t just Mann – his paper should have failed review or been debunked soon after if there hadn’t been a dishonest cabal of silence about its shortcomings.
I’m sure it brought in lots of funding for both CRU and Manns employers so money was actually made from it, which might put it into the fraud category. It needs to be tested in court. If someone wealthy would back Tim Ball then it might be.
I’d like the fossil fuel companies to grow some balls and actually do what they are accused of doing, Despite the disinformation, we do have an unfair fight here with oodles of cash available for pro agw and nothing for skeptics. Unless this actually goes to court, the scientists can lie as much as they want because there is no mechanism to stop them.
Accusations of fraud without evidence are no better than lies.
How about slanderous accusations without evidence?
That too.
How many times have your read and re-read a paragraph you have written, only to come back to it a week later and find that it doesn’t say what you though it said?
Arguing whether someone intentionally produced a misleading paper is the wrong way to look at the problem. Human beings in large part are driven by their sub-conscious, with the conscious mind serving as more of a traffic cop than the driver of the car.
We get the results we expect to get in our work, because our sub-conscious directs the work towards the finding that it wants to see, consistent with strongly held internal beliefs, and our conscious mind is completely unaware of this when it happens.
The mistake in our analysis is to assume that conscious motivation is what is driving the result.
I agree with that statement and the rest of your post.
And that mistake is exacerbated when we fail to acknowledge that we are all influenced by subconscious motivations. It is further exacerbated when we remain closed to examining our own influences. To do so represents a failure of critical thinking.
Ferd’s subconscious made him comment about other people’s subconscious.
Joshua’s subconscious made him agree with Ferd’s comment.
My subconscious made me make fun of Joshua’s comment on Ferd’s comment.
Let’s see if Joshua’s subconscious makes him respond to my comment on his comment about Ferd’s comment.
Well isn’t this train of thought enlightening.
(And Joshua, you’re welcome… in advance…for my reading your comment.)
@Ferd. it doesn’t say what you though it said The fatal flaw in your argument is what is the response of the author to valid criticism of what was said or written. If said author takes the critique under advisement, admits the uncertainty, weakness, or even the impropriety of the original thought, then the author is to be admired. But if said author responds with even stronger criticisms, greater sophistry, obfustication, even lawsuits, then said author forfeits the benefit of doubt by onlookers.
Case in point: IPCC Conflict of Interest Policy. (2011.06.18) [“Yep, there is a problem. But we won’t do anything about it. So there. “]
So when considering “Fraud” in scientific endeavors, consider “Means, Motive, and Opportunity”. Especially consider who stands to benefit or be harmed by an argument or delay.
Ferd, the mistake in your analysis is to assume that conscious motivations CANNOT drive the undesirable result.
Sorry, Thought I closed the Italic
Repeatedly publishing temperature reconstructions that bent up hockey sticks on statistical lathes working on split bark bristlecone pine trees or upside down Tiljander sediments or both is disinformation or fraud or both.
Consider Michael Mann. Consider the cost. Both of them.
=======================
“Dr Deming reveals that in 1995 a leading scientist emailed him saying “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”. A few years later, Michael Mann and the IPCC did just that by publishing the now throughly discredited hockey stick graph.”
No copy of the email, and the author remains unnamed. How do we know it wasn’t invented, or misquoted?
The MWP still exists. Mann has devoted papers to discussing it (and the LIA). The ‘hump’ can be seen in even his latest reconstructions. Same with many other reconstructions. There’s not a whole lot of daylight between Mann’s millennial temp reconstructions and the majority of others. Molehill/mountain.
So, there is no consensus of opinion anymore?
Shouldn’t this be in the context of the journal chosen? There are not many names that are going to drive a reaction. I’ve noticed some dismissive comments here about Nature being pro-CAGW. Those who think that are not going care about the mostly anonymous scientists who publish there. It doesn’t have to be a Gavin Schmidt to get it written off; it just has to be in Nature. Ditto for the other side.
Not just Nature.
For some “skeptics,” any study that concludes evidence of AGW, that is published in any journal, is categorically dismissed – and considered disinformation by association with the “climate establishment.”
Not just “skeptics”.
Judith,
I am happy to be called a sceptic, I may be a luke-warmer, but I am probably
closest to Steve McKintyre’s agnostic.
Your characterisations ring true to me. However:
Ludecke et al. and EIKE I had never heard of before this serries of posts. So I
would see them no differently that a Graduate Student or Isaac Held ( who I
also han not heard of despite following climate science for about 6 years mostly
Climate Audit,and recently you and WUWT ). I looked him up on WikiPedia so I now
know who he is). My initial impression was that the paper was trechnical and
plausable but that I needed to reserve judgement untill I had seen comments. I
am not a climate scientist or statistician.
Michael Mann wrote it – I would assume poor maths, poor auusmtions and
confirmation biasis. I don’t think that fraud is even close to true. I suspect
that ego and arrogance are ther cause of the problem.
Isaac Held wrote it. I’d now be very interested ( having read his WikiPedia
Entry ) but I would still like to see an auditors opinion.
What I have most learnt from these posts and the comments is that to progress
I now have to learn statistics. at6 the end of the day the only opinion that
counts is my own and I need the skills to form it.
So I think you have pushed this ‘luker’ to become more active.
Regards
/ikh
Judith,
“My first reaction to seeing a new paper was to assess which “side” the paper was on. I tended to be quite critical of most of these papers: I was inclined to be critical of people that had been critical of my work, and I didn’t want to see shoddy work that was seemingly supportive of our work get torn to pieces and so reflect poorly on our arguments.”
That is how the Team has done it deliberately for years. And they ain’t gonna quit.
WOW. The last paragraph of Dr. Curry’s post was the most concise summation the the two side positions and motives I have ever seen. I would suggest that after reading that paragraph a clash of scientific method versus dogma might also be applied
Judith,
I really think I opened “Pandora’s Box”.
You think the skeptics are out now….
“Now consider Michael Mann, favorite whipping boy of the skeptics, as author of these papers. I suspect that the research would be characterized as fraudulent. Fraud seems to be a favorite word of skeptics/deniers for denigrating a paper or author that they don’t like or is found to be deficient.”
Steve McIntyre over at Climate Audit has a new whipping boy in former Penn State University President Graham Spanier, who the University recently fired over failure to properly investigate child molestation accusations against former coach Jerry Sandusky, and who Steve has in the past suspected of failing to assure a proper investigation of Michael Mann for research misconduct, despite Mann’s exoneration by an Inquiry Committee.
You mean the Blind Eye Whitewash Committee. Seems to be standard practice over there.
Another baseless allegation. Well, not baseless. The base is your dislike of the results.
The base is the nature of the investigation and the fact that we know those boys at the state Penn take care of their own earners, even when child rape is involved. Catch up with the news, collaborator-apologist.
Another conspiracy theory. The basis is a conspiracy would please you, so it must be true.
I wonder who has raised some of you people. I didn’t say anything about a conspiracy, you lying clown. It doesn’t require a conspiracy to protect one’s own from scrutiny. It is just standard operating procedure in some organizations.
Blind eye, white wash pretty much fits when 3 out of 4 allegations are dropped without review.
M Carey proves Judith’s point about the ‘convinced’ fosussing on those who promulgate information.
I haven’t really been following the philosophical back and forths between here, collid-o-scope, and other places about this.
Of course it is natural to have expectations of a particular argument’s quality based on an authors reputation, but that expectation doesn’t extend very far when scientists have a chance to poke holes in other people’s methodology (which they absolutely love!!!). I went to a talk by Kerry Emanuel a few days ago, someone who commands enormous respect amongst the graduate students and atmospheric scientists in the audience, but that didn’t stop a number of them from criticizing segments of Emanuel’s presentation. That is what happens at science talks and in the peer-reviewed literature. The difference between that setting and the blog setting, however, is that in the scientific environment everyone has a very solid grasp of the basics (and even many of the technical details), and so we can intelligently dispute details. In the blog atmosphere, it is often rare that you can get so many people to even agree on undergraduate-level physics stuff. This is why, to be blunt, people who work exclusively within the blogosphere virtually never matter (sorry).
Of course, that reputation is different depending on the group you ask (if you ask the majority of bloggers about Mike Mann, then ask the majority of the climate science community, I suspect you will get radically different critiques of his work). The same can also be said of people like Anthony Watts or Pat Michaels, people who have zero relevancy in the academic community (and whom support arguments that are almost always wrong or misleading) and yet somehow manage to stir up a lot of attention on the internet.
Part of the expectation naturally evolves from the publication and contribution record from the speaker/writer. Isaac Held has made more contributions to climate science than almost anyone can hope to achieve, and (aside from some of the contributors at RC) has a publication record unparalleled on the climate blogosphere. His blog is also only dedicated to scientific topics, generally geared toward a graduate student or higher level audience, and thus receives an extremely small readership when compared to user-friendly “talking points” or summary articles. Of course, the flipside is that if Issac Held wrote the Ludecke article, he would attract an enormous amount of negative attention, and likely would have a large number of peers scratching their heads. Of course, the attention would dissipate quickly, as people have to move on with their life and focus on different developments– to the scientist, that is preaprin their next research article, writing a proposal, etc, and to the bloggers that is forming an opinion on the most up-to-date “topic of interest.” If a random person wrote the article, it would get cited on some blogs, and disappear in a week, with far less attention. Really, this is what will happen with the Ludecke article.
The arguments geared toward Judith Curry are no different than many of the ones geared toward her on a multitude of occasions. It boils down to many people thinking she has a different responsibility (based on her credentials) than she thinks she does. Her aim is to create an open forum for discussion, regardless of the quality of work that becomes the focus of that discussion. Others feel she has a responsibility to call out nonsense based on her position as an authority. I can understand that argument, but of course this is her blog, and she is free to do with it as she will…just as everyone is free to make up their mind about why she is doing it.
Chriscolose said: “Of course, that reputation is different depending on the group you ask (if you ask the majority of bloggers about Mike Mann, then ask the majority of the climate science community, I suspect you will get radically different critiques of his work).
Many bloggers don’t follow the science. I wonder how many have read the Hockey Stick related articles in the Annals of Applied Statistics.
http://www.imstat.org/aoas/supplements/issue_5_1.html
I thought that particular series got quite a flurry of attention in the blogs. The original paper there by McShane and Wyner did for sure. I have not read all the associated comments that came with the AAS issue, but my impression has been that McShane and Wyner did not hold up nearly as well as Mann Hughes and Bradley under expert examination.
There’s no sensible basis for “fraud” with either McShane and Wyner, or with Mann Hughes and Bradley; nor was either one free of problems. Neither one marks the finished word. But there have been more useful and more technically well founded criticisms than those of McShane and Wyner, which have been taken on board and lead to continued improvement in the work. McShane and Wyner’s rather sweeping criticisms were themselves too subject to criticism in return to really add all that much.
The science bloggers, as I use the term, DO tend to follow and read the science.
I imagine nobody wants a discussion of the hockey stick issue here, but I have to say, your impression is horribly wrong.
Of course, there are probably those who would say it is right. So this isn’t just a matter of he says, she says, I’ll make this offer. If anyone wants to have a discussion of the merits of MBH, I’ll be happy to participate in any appropriate location. It is my position its conclusions are unsupportable, and I am willing to defend that position.
Brandon, my impression remains as above, and is a comment about how well the two papers hold up respectively under expert review. Not under my review, or yours, or in blogs generally. My exchange with you would be more of the non-expert exchanging views; of which there is no lack.
Thanks anyway. I’m not out to convince you. But of the 13 comments in AAS, how many were saying that the methods of McShane and Wyner didn’t work as claimed?
Of course, if all the experts are compromised then this is not relevant.
Another relevant source for expert review of the work would be the NAS report of 2006.
Write a paper explaining why you think the MBH conclusions are unsupportable. The Annals of Applied Statistics or another recognized journal might publish your paper. If not, Dr. Curry might run it here.
Chris Ho-Stuart, it’s fine if you don’t agree with me, and you have no obligation to try to convince me. I just want to make sure you understand you’re disagreeing with me (and many others) about a subject on which I am willing to have an in-depth discussion with anyone. I am not simply saying your impression is wrong. I am saying I can demonstrate such. If you understand that, and still stick with your impression, so be it.
However, I take issue with the distinction you draw at “expert review.” You cite as an example of expert review the NAS report of 2006. I invite you to look at this page. Describing the remarks of Gerry North, the chair of the panel you referred to, Steve McIntyre says:
You can check the audio for yourself if you don’t believe it. You call this “expert review,” or as you said in your previous comment, “expert examination.” To me, it should be considered neither, no matter what expertise the participants may have had. I am willing to go so far as to discuss technical details about statistical methodologies and code. Your “expert review” is willing to wing it.
Your standards are your standards, but I want to make something clear. Regardless of my qualifications or lack thereof, I would provide more insightful commentary than anything the NAS panel provided.
Aside from that, I want to point something out. You mentioned the issue of how well the papers held up to expert examination. You now ask how many comments on the McShane and Wyner paper said the methods used “didn’t work as claimed.” Your question does not address what you initially brought up. Holding up to examination does not simply depends upon how many people disagree. It depends upon what the consequences of those disagreements are. It doesn’t matter how many comments disagreed with McShane and Wyner. What matters is how the paper “held up” to those disagreements.
You can try to use some sort of “popularity” as a proxy for correctness if you want (though I highly recommend against it), but make sure you don’t mistake one for the other.
Brandon, I have followed some of these discussions; but my own area of focus is physics rather than statistics. The best measure of how a paper stands up to expert review is seen years down the track in the chain of subsequent research. “Popularity” with working experts is a pretty good proxy; for not a simplistic binary like “correctness” but rather for the net value of the contribution to ongoing progress.
As I said, the work was not perfect, and some criticisms did indeed lead to further extensions of the work in subsequent years. There’s a quite a number of other groups also working on these kinds of reconstructions, getting a range of results, with some broadly similar features and some significant points of difference.
I expect the work to keep improving with time, and deficiencies in early work to be gradually resolved. I don’t think the sweeping condemnations and cries of incompetence, fraud or misconduct are sensible.
If you really think McShane and Wyner is going to stand up to the test of time better than Mann Bradley and Hughes, then you may be right, but my guess is that your confidence in your own depth of understanding is … misplaced.
I acknowledge I don’t rely on my own understanding of statistics on this.
There’s a lot more people willing to discuss a topic than those who do so competently. I see your declarations for yourself, I acknowledge your willingness to discuss. I acknowledge I’m not an expert in statistics at all. My stats are somewhere about the level of an undergraduate grunt. The rather over the top protestations by you (and McIntyre, and others) however, doesn’t match particularly well with what I see going on in associated and subsequent work.
McIntyre’s objections to the NAS report are typically silly. Of course it wasn’t research. It was a review of research, by appropriate experts. There was never any real need for the NAS report, if it were not for all the inflated nonsense about this leaking into a science-challenged congress.
In the meantime, as a genuine friendly suggestion for someone with an interest in this area and a level of confidence, there’s a fun project available for professions and amateur enthusiasts. It is the Paleoclimate Reconstruction Challenge. Described as follows:
Since we’re in agreement on where the issues of communication stand, I’ll just offer you a few brief thoughts.
This is a somewhat depressing comment as many of the papers following Mann’s original hockey stick repeat problems found in his work. This is one of the many reasons popularity is a bad proxy. In a sense, the work is autocorrelated. Mann’s bad work help ensure (primarily due to being over-hyped with it’s prominent inclusion in the IPCC TAR) more bad work would get published, and you now use this to suggest his work wasn’t that bad… Still, your standards are your standards, even if I think they’re bad ones.
For what it is worth, “unsupportable” is over the top. Cheers — Chris
That is complete bunk.
Chris if MBH 1998 was so good, why did they change it for 2008? Magically a MWP and little ice age appeared.
So to quote you “The best measure of how a paper stands up to expert review is seen years down the track in the chain of subsequent research.”
Obvioulsly, it hasn’t stood up too well. Try and compare that to some of the physics stuff. I wonder how that e=mc2 is working out? Probably a little better.
Hum, my answer to that is already given above. The original paper wasn’t perfect. The work has continued and developed, and has benefited from a number of sensible criticisms.
I have not read all the associated comments that came with the AAS issue, but my impression has been that McShane and Wyner did not hold up nearly as well as Mann Hughes and Bradley under expert examination.
You should read them all carefully, as well as the rejoinder and the supporting online material. Based on those posts of yours that I have read, you will find the effort worthwhile.
It’s on my to do list. But alas, my library subscription to that journal does not go up to 2011.
“The difference between [the seminar] and the blog setting, however, is that in [the seminar] everyone has a very solid grasp of the basics…In the blog atmosphere, it is often rare that you can get so many people to even agree on undergraduate-level physics stuff.”
In my own experence of empirical seminars, people have varying grasp of the theory involved, and generally less grasp of the statistical methods deployed in analysis. If you are lucky there’s some grump over in the corner that realizes most of the statistical work is flawed, but virtually everyone in the room considers him (or her) a great nuisance and killjoy.
Chris Colose: “This is why, to be blunt, people who work exclusively within the blogosphere virtually never matter (sorry).” Well, it’s good to know that Chris thinks we can stop taking John Cook and his Skeptical Science blog seriously.
Skeptical Science, isn’t that run by a cartoonist?
If that is the same person who also has a degree and post-graduate in Physics, then I suppose you are sort of right. But do you have any links to any recent cartoons ?
Just because he has a post-graduate in physics doesn’t stop his website from being a worthless piece of confirmation bias.
“The arguments geared toward Judith Curry are no different than many of the ones geared toward her on a multitude of occasions. It boils down to many people thinking she has a different responsibility (based on her credentials) than she thinks she does. Her aim is to create an open forum for discussion, regardless of the quality of work that becomes the focus of that discussion. Others feel she has a responsibility to call out nonsense based on her position as an authority. I can understand that argument, but of course this is her blog, and she is free to do with it as she will…just as everyone is free to make up their mind about why she is doing it.”
Very well said. Those who criticize her practices, such as her choices of articles to post, have a duty to address her goals for her blog. If they wish to change those goals then they must offer reasons for the changes. Her critics over the last two days have failed to address her goals yet continue to offer criticisms that are wholly inarticulate. At some point, they should learn that the fact that one Judges Dr. Curry to be mistaken does not count as a reason for believing that Dr. Curry is mistaken.
I can’t think how anyone could have an absolutely unbiassed, objective reaction to a criticism of something he or she wrote. When we write something that purports to improve humanity’s knowledge of something we think is important (and here the context is the scholarly domain) we have invested our knowledge and our acumen in the article/paper. An attack on that piece of work is all too easily seen as an attack on ourself. One has to sit back, recognise that one is not perfect and can make errors, or miss obvious points — and that any paper can be improved. I’m much better at this now than I was when I was a young researcher trying to make my way in the big world of scholarship.
In time I found that if I tried not to react at once, but just listen, and wait for 48 hours, that was a good start. Criticisms seemed to fall into one (or sometimes more) of three groups.
(1) ‘Root and branch’. The critic wishes I had done something else entirely, or starts from a philosophic position that is quite different to my own. For example, as a data-monger and counter-of-things I am what used to be called a logical positivist. So if I find that, for example, only 35 per cent of Australians see themselves as ‘working class’, an estimate based on a good sample and on well-constructed questioning, a quasi-Marxist critic might say that the numbers and methodology are irrelevant, because people suffer from’ false consciousness’ — they are working class whether or not they think so. There is not much you can do to counter such an objection. You and the critic are living in different intellectual worlds.
(2) ‘Yes, but’. Here the critic doesn’t disagree with your main finding or suggestion, but shows how his/her work enhances it, if only you had taken account of that in the first place. As the critic feels you should have. Sometimes the critics are completely right, and sometimes they are half right: you didn’t go down that path, but if you had, you would have used the work in question. Sometimes they are just wrong.
(3) ‘Nitpicking’. Here the critic doesn’t deal with the central point at all, but notes that you missed Bloggs’s seminal paper in your footnote 1, or that the numbers in one column in Table 14.2 don’t add to 100 but only to 99, or that you have an error in one reference. You can take these in your stride.
(If there are in fact devastating errors they will be pointed out, and they will mean that you should not have published the paper in the first place.)
Two days later you will see that there’s nothing much you can do, WRT the paper, to deal with critics in group one, while those in groups two and three can be useful. Humility is a great asset here but, to repeat, it seems to increase in quantity as we age. I can remember my anger at criticisms when I was young…
And we come to see that people who are philosophically in another camp will never like what we do, and vice versa. Nonetheless, it is not sensible to ignore them, because they will have insights from their perspective that you will miss from yours.
It follows, at least to me, that I care little about where people come from, or whom they write for, or what journal they publish in. The question is: are they saying something that I should take notice of? And to answer that question I need to read the paper.
In the climate debate I have slowly begun to fashion my own position about what is likely to be right — not in the sense of its being 95 per likely that something is more than half made of green cheese, but of what is likely to be the case when the hyperbole has been stripped out.
And there is a lot of hyperbole about, on both sides.
Don Aitkin, about the only time I think people can agree on a lack of bias is in cases where there is no emotional attachment to what was said. For example, somebody saying, “That boiling water is hot” can’t really be accused of being biased about the statement. In the same way, being told you spelled a word wrong doesn’t generally provoke a biased reaction because most people don’t care about their spelling (save for functional purposes).
Sometimes, I wonder if a lot of this isn’t related to what I regard as a general decline in honesty as a fundamental value. This is not new, but does seem more pervasive to me. Science was at one time done by wealthy people. Now its done by working stiffs who perhaps secretly want to be rich. Putting money in the background can work wonders
I’m glad the more money you have, the more honest you are. My wealth has grown as I have aged, and now I am more honest than I have ever been in my life. I look forward to getting even more honest.
In the 1960’s Kaufmann wrote “Critique of Religion and Philosophy” and noted that “critique has becpme a word of honor” after thr vogue of theology in the 1950’s. In climate science, critique is NOT a word of honor and that’s the problem in a single phrase
And what a superb book that is! If you can still find a copy, buy and read it. For entertainment, it even has some charming conversations with the Devil, who professes a love for theologians.
David –
Do you have any form of verified or quantified evidence to show a “decline in honesty?” Or is this a purely anecdotal observation of your related to your own personal experience?
Well, yes and no. I seem to recall that the number of retracted papers has been growing. We have had credit bubbles before but this is the first one where mathematical models played a significant role. At least in the 19th century politicians didn’t say much of anything during the campaigns. Nowadays dishonesty is common in politics. In the 50’s theology was an area where dishonesty was not challenged much. In the last 20 years, science has become an area where dishonesty is not challenged much. Climate science has provoked a resurgence of an atmosphere where “critique has once again become a word of honor.” And that’s the positive in all this. Some bloggers are taking on the scientific theology of the day very effectively. What would Walter Kaufman write about today? It’s interesting to speculate.
Climatology is unlikely to make any scientist rich. If that is what you want, biosciences/medicine is much more attractive propopsition. Grant money doesn’t go to the PI, it mostly gets spent on hiring RAs and running the lab. It is helpful for getting promotions, but at the end of the day you are on the same salary scales as everybody else and once you are at the top, you are at the top; they don’t go as far as they do for e.g. actuaries either. Getting a PhD is a bad move if wealth is what you are after.
Nobody but nobody writes of wealth and assumes that scientists live directly on million$ of grant cash. Most often the comment is noting merely that the power/prestige gained by controlling these sums translates at some point to more direct personal gain. Whether this gain takes the form of an eventual cushy directorship somewhere or big $$$ on the lecture circuit isn’t the point, which is that career advancement and grant funding control have the same arc. Surely one would think that this can’t possibly be misinterpreted?
Did you get to that trenberth quote. You asked for the quote. I gave it to you with page number.
“With Ludecke et al. as authors, the “convinced” made charges of purveying disinformation.”
Yes, and I’m pretty sure a certain “expert on quality control” is regretting that charge more by the hour :-)
To be among the “convinced” you have to believe that a relatively small subset of Western academics have the courage to stand up to all of humanity and save it from itself and save the world from capitalism. We would all be in serious trouble now if our putative saviours were more like Castro, Chavez, Lenin, Stalin Al Gore and Jim Jones instead of school teachers in our dropout factories?
If you aren’t a laissez-faire capitalist, you are a communist?
Well, I don’t know about that. I have been a successful capitalist without embracing laissez-faire. I guess I was more interested in money than ideology.
Breaking News: President commemorates victory over the evil empire today by breaking a bong over the bow of a WWII-era destroyer and renaming it USS Karl Marx…
Do I consider the author? Sure, but only for the smell test. The smell test proves nothing. It just points out where to search for something rotten.
The part that is missing in your analysis, Judith, is that some of these folks have lied to us in the past. Not made mistakes. Not been wrong about their results. They lied to us, and they stand convicted of that by their own words.
As a result, you can be damn sure that we apply different standards to their further work … and very reasonably so. We would be fools to do what you suggest, to treat their reported results the same as we treat the work of honest people.
That’s just simple self-defence, Judith. Nothing to do with science. Self-defense.
So I fear that as often happens, you are busy solving the wrong problem … you haven’t even touched on the “should we treat the work of known liars just like we treat say Judith’s work” question at all.
w.
You have never told a lie, Willis? Not even a little fib or two?
Sure, M., who has not told a white lie, or even a gray one?
But I certainly never subverted the IPCC process and then destroyed evidence and lied about doing it to try to cover it up, no …
I’m not sure what your point is. If I were to have subverted the IPCC and then lied about it as they did, you would be right to mistrust me. I have not done so. They have.
So when I read a paper by Judith, I assume that she has not messed with the data or misrepresented what she has done or concealed adverse facts. When I read a paper by Michael Mann I make the opposite assumption. Historically, I’ve generally been right in both cases, near as I can tell …
w.
Willis, I have read enough of your work at WUWT to believe you are biased. So, I would be skeptical of your ability to be objective.
If you had any evidence that my science was biased, you certainly have not provided it.
If you have any evidence that my other claims are biased, you have not provided it.
Perhaps you think unsupported claims are of interest.
In any case, I am skeptical of anyone’s ability to be objective. I don’t know anyone who can pull that off. All of us tend to favor what we believe, how could we not?
w.
Willis, I didn’t have to go far. This following is from you at WUWT:
“In the run-up to the next-to-last big meeting of the UNFCCC (United Nations Frequent Climate Change Carnival)”
Your idea of humor shows your bias. Of course I suspect you did it because corny plays well at WUWT.
Carnival is a appropriate word for a group of 10,000 people who get flown first class to exotic locations like Rio for weeks of fun and eating and drinking in first class hotels.
M. carey, just make sure you apply that all the way around, like James Hansen wanting fossil fuel company CEO’s put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature.
There are many more climate scientists that you may think are objective who have said similar things as Willis against the other side. So if you are skeptical of one person based on what they write, then you should be equally skeptical of all of those on either side when they use similar language.
If you think people like Hansen are objective but Willis is not, then the bias you are seeing is coming from the person in your mirror.
Willis –
When you said that Quakers mostly sit around and quake, was that a lie, or just inaccurate, presumably based in ignorance?
When you then went on to justify that comment by wrongly characterizing the evangelical aspect of Quakerism, was that a lie, or just inaccurate, again presumably based in ignorance?
At what point to inaccurate statements based in willful ignorance cross over into lies?
Willis used what is called artistic license to make his writing more fun to read. You’re a nit picker who misses this purposefully in an attempt to make an absurdly trivial point. Big picture much?
Big picture is that Willis posted an overly-emotional rant, full of nonsense, overgeneralizations, and then backed it up with more inaccuracies.
I think that’s pretty “big picture” wrt Willis’ input. When someone is so sloppy in one area that they let their biases overwhelm their reasoning, and that same person is as partisan as Willis is wrt climate science, it suggest that his writings on climate science should be taken with a grain of salt.
Of course, since you’re a “skeptic,” you do that anyway.
The big picture is that Herr Eschenbach used a humourous throwaway line and you’ve wasted a terabyte trying (and failing) to make a mountain out of it. In “a few good men” there’s a nifty throwaway line from Cruise regarding the practicality of absolute trvth to the effect of the punchline being “… and going blind with the paperwork.” As you get older you’ll learn to pick fights you can win.
Well Jones defended some of his comments as humor or exageration. so beware of the defenses you employ
There’s a difference between the obviously and deliberately absurd and the claims of Jones. The same difference exists between drawing a rifle and walking into a classroom with one. Comparison here is practising the same zero tolerance that gets a bored 10 year old expelled from school after having drawn a picture of a rifle.
Surely the English language can’t be that difficult?
Joshua | November 11, 2011 at 10:51 am | Reply
Fallacy of the excluded middle, Joshua. It will bite you every time. Look it up on Google if you’re unfamiliar with the concept.
It was, as someone noted, none of the above—it was a “throwaway line” which was intended as humor. Look “humor” up on Google if you’re unfamiliar with the concept.
And while you missed the humor entirely, others didn’t … likely a lesson in there for you, Joshua, if you want to stop being mistaken for a bulldog someone accidentally let off his leash.
But your rant about me is a remarkably good example of the kind of prejudice pointed out by our good hostess in this thread.
w.
Actually, Willis – I found your original nonsense description of Quakers, in addition to your lame attempt at justifying that description (in lieu of simply admitting your original error), both to be quite amusing.
Along with RE’s explanation of “poetic license” and your explanation that a thread were you managed to offend a wide diversity of folks was just “humor.”
Please don’t underestimate how much I’m laughing at your posts, Willis.
Ah, someone has heard of EIKE after all. :-)
Then we have the “one-note Johnny”.
“A possible explanation of this asymmetry is provided by the essay Talking Past Each Other, where skeptics are more focused on the science, and the “convinced” are more focused on the solutions. ”
Except it’s completely wrong.
The skeptics on more focused on science- because what else is there to focus on?
And the “convinced” are not focused on solutions. The “convinced” are not even convinced. The only consensus amongst the “the convinced” is CO2 causing warming and warming could be dangerous. They can’t quantify how dangerous and agree upon this. Really only agreement is it’s unknown [scary].
But back to the part about the “convinced” focused on solution. There is no solution that they provide. They want governments to limit CO2 emission, but this is impossible. India or China can’t do limit their emission to 1970 emissions. If all countries did limit their emissions to 1970, it the result would insignificant in terms of affecting future emissions and future temperatures. So this is NO solution.
A solution would be to dramatically increase nuclear reactor to provide electrical energy. This is obvious. And they don’t advocate this solution.
One can only assume they are not serious in terms of solutions.
There are other solutions possible. But solar and wind are not solutions.
This again is obvious.
But there are other solutions other then these bird killing and inefficient and unreliable means of generating electrical.
They aren’t talking about solutions, they aren’t even pretending to be talking about solutions.
gbaikie –
I spotted a cracker in your comment – the most succinct, all-encompassing, and explanatory summation of the about 7/8ths of the consensus devotees. And also why it is impossible to reason them out of their position [because they didn’t reason themselves into it..]
I think it should appear at the top of every page of every alarmist document –
UNKNOWN [SCARY]
Not “unknown”, “uncertain” (but still scary).
Of course if we did claim that the consquences were certain then you would soon complain.
Funnily enough I do think it is the ‘certainty’ that emanates from a lot of people who are worried about global warming that strikes sceptics as so bizarre. I understand it because that is the nature of worry – it is a definite picture of the future. Uncertainty doesn’t come into it.
One of my favourite expressions is from Holly Stick –
‘You guys don’t know how BAD it’s gonna be!!’
Holly is completely, utterly certain – just like a religious believer. This genuinely explains why she thinks we are wilfully stupid, ignorant deniers. How is it that we cannot SEE the coming doom?
As is the way with everything, it is hard for sceptics not to generalise – the Hollys of the world appear to be everywhere. If you have a quiet uncertainty that encompasses a real concern you simply appear nearly invisible to most of us. And of course the reverse is true – a lot of consensus folk tend only to see right wing bigots arguing that AGW is ‘hoax’ even though that is about one in a thousand of those who are sceptical. Hence we all get called ‘fake sceptics’ and deniers.
I think this is only one of the reasons that there is often too big a divide between views for meaningful discussion to occur. Add to that some tribalism, distrust, confirmation bias and closed minds, and it is a wonder communication occurs at all.
Consensus devotees may have some uncertainty about exactly what is going to happen, but my assessment is that the vast majority of them are certain it is going to be BAD.
Well said.
“Dare I suggest that Richard Tol reacted much more sharply to these papers than people in the U.S. because of his knowledge of EIKE (German group of skeptics)?” Yes you dare. As the people of EIKE could attest if they were active in English, I have no problem with them and have helped them on a few occasions. The discussion on climate change in Germany is between the green and the deep green. EIKE provides a useful counterweight.
I’m following the discussion on BEST because I’m wondering whether this is the right time to update Tol and de Vos (1997).
I was taken aback by the quality of the LLE paper. Recall that I argue that they just don’t do what they say they do. They also do it incorrectly but that is besides the point.
LLE try to argue that 2+2=5. There are many who would like to believe that that is true. It is not. We now have over 5 posts and 2000 comments on whether 2+2 is 3, 4 or 5 — and that’s just at Climate Etc.
People do, can and should disagree about climate change, its causes, its impact, and the implications for policy.
We should not, however, fight over mathematics and statistics. That science is settled (excepting its axioms and frontier, but that’s irrelevant here).
Isn’t 2+2=5 usually close enough for climate science?
Richard Tol –
I think that sounds like an incredibly succinct summation of what you have been saying over the last few days.
My first reaction to it was – how differently this would have all played out had you initially said the above rather than an off-the-cuff comment on twitter…
But then we would not have had your guest post, the follow-up post and this thread – which I am finding extremely absorbing. So maybe it has all been a blessing?
Feel free to take the credit :)
If Tol has simply posted his criticisms of the article, all would have been well. In fact, Tol would have been better received. However, he opened early with gratuitous and mistaken criticisms of Dr. Curry which he refuses to discuss.
Well, actually, they are gratuitous unless Tol wants to enter a partnership with Dr. Curry as her censor. In that case, Tol suspect motives are clear.
Richard, do you really still maintain the position that the LLE paper was flawed and worthless? It appears to me that while you may have valid criticisms of it, it was hardly the case that it was as bad as you say. At worst, it may have lacked the clarity needed to ensure that someone like yourself was interpreting it correctly.
From my perspective as an interested outsider, I followed the arguments and counter-argments closely, and whether or not you think conclusions drawn from the paper are ‘safe’ it was definitely a worthwhile exercise doing the kind of analysis they did.
In my view it does your credibility harm to insist otherwise. ( not that much harm, but still….)
Indeed. The papers add nothing.
It doesn’t need to add anything. It just states the obvious, time series analysis is severely limited. You assume that their paper cannot prove anything, but at the same time assume that previous studies “prove” they cannot be correct. There’s a whole lot of assumin’ goin’ on :)
Richard, do you think you could perform an analysis which shows the bounds of what changes one could expect in the presence/absence of man-made atmospheric CO2?
We have reasonable estimates of what atmospheric CO2 levels were historically, we have estimates of what the ‘climate sensitivity’ is (shudder).
Would it be possible to show, statistically, one way or the other if CO2 has made temperature peek its head of the normal fluctuation trench?
In that it adds nothing you wish to see.
Your analysis that using 1200 monthly data points in place of 100 yearly averages add no information is incorrect. Times series analysis using averaged data is at the heart of why climate science has been statistically mislead over climate natural variability.
Mainstream climate science averages the data to remove daily and annual cycles, then computes the trends using this averaged data. This is a huge mistake in procedure, because this averaging process hides the variability in the underlying data set.
This averaging gives the mistaken belief that climate doesn’t vary much naturally, which has mislead climate science into believing that CO2 is driving climate change. They can’t explain it any other way, because they haven’t considered that time series analysis of globally averaged temperatures is at the heart of the statistical problems.
By all means, do your time series analysis on the temperature data, but do the analysis before you average the data.
For example, if I was planning to look at 100 years of data with 1200 monthly data points, I would compare jan to jan, feb to feb, etc. That would give me 12 trend lines, that would give me much more information about variability over 100 years, than if I was to average those 1200 monthly figures into 100 annual figures, then computer the trend.
For example, if we compute 12 trend lines as outlined, then center them on their means, this will give a measure of likely a trend of averages is to match the averaged trend. If all the trend lines are in close agreement this points to low variability, while if the 12 trends lines are all over the place, this points to high variability.
For example, if we looked only at the 12 end points at either end of the 100 years, if they were widely spaced this would tell us something as compared to if they were closely spaced. The same for each of the years in between.
We could for example, draw a trend lines between the low point at the start of the series and the high point at the ends of the series, and argue that this was within the trend of natural variability, though others might argue against this. We could repeat this with the high and low points. This would give us a range for natural variability that would not be apparent looking only at the 100 averaged data points. For example, this type of treatment might explain why current temperatures have leveled off as compared to the 20 years previous.
Thus, by using 1200 data points instead of 100 averaged data points, we have gained more information about the natural variability of the 100 year trend.
Fred: You strike me as the sort of person who can do the math. So, please just work out what you just wrote and see whether you still believe it to be true. (Hint: correlation.)
when you find the data they purport to use let me know
Don’t confuse Ferd with Fred. Ferd is Frank Farkel’s trusted friend and neighbor.
Flawed and worthless are two different things. It’s possible for a paper to be wrong in its conclusions due to flaws, and still present a novel approach that can be perfected into something valuable. I’m sure the first attempt at a lot of valuable approaches are bungled.
Now that McIntyre has shown us where Schmidt went wrong, I was hoping he would have some time to clear up the matter of Lüdecke/Tol. Instead he is occupied with another Penn State/state pen incident. Pity.
It is a pity. He has Mann on the brain, and can’t seem to move on.
And you know this how? And McIntyre’s blog’s content should be determined by you?
Bowden and Paterno are gone (who would have thought they would both turn out to be losers at the end after all they achieved), but Mann is still there, and his achievements are?
Yes it is a shame that SM doesn’t broaden his enquiries a bit more. Should we petition Dr Curry to pester him into looking to the LLE vs Tol? It seems very much his territory. It would be fascinating to have his take on it. He is one of the few commentators I could trust to be as objective as possible.
Why? This row has already been hoed. The surface mid-troposphere relationship he is looking into might actually move things forward.
Richard S. J. Tol: LLE try to argue that 2+2=5.
That is absurd.
Indeed. 2+2=4.
It has been proposed that something in the world, called a, and something in the world called b, add up to something in the world called c.
The estimate of a is 2.375 +/2 1.25
The estimate of b is 1.825 +/ 1.25
The estimate of c is 4.625 +/- 1.75
It can not be determined whether, to 2 significant figures, the proposal is true.
The only solid criticism you have made against the papers is that the confidence limits for the Hurst exponent can’t be computed from a single time series. Your posts seem confused on the nature of null hypothesis testing.
oops, that is supposed to be +/-, not +/2 or +/ .
@Judith C
>So the skeptical criticism is more focused on the science and the individual author, where as the convinced criticism kicks in if it looks like the paper will influence public opinion (presumably on policy).<
Yes, of course.
The convinced become particularly rancid if the publishing medium for some "anti" paper has a large circulation or high audience rating. They are then most concerned to slaughter its' credibility before it becomes widespread – because of the likely knock-on effect to any activist policy
But notice that attacks of the ad hominen persuasion are NOT limited to one side – both indulge in it freely. I find the political intrusions here absolutely despicable. Since intellectual integrity plays no part in the political process, I'm with John Cleese
I'm pleased you have now admitted this. I always thought you knew it but were just too coy
This might be a naive idea, but why should authors submit their names until the paper has been accepted? If what matters is the science, why does it matter who submitted it?
On another point, Chris Ho Stuart says:
“I think the issue has not so much been with who wrote the papers, but with you deciding to highlight them on your blog.”
To which I will cross-post something I said to a related point at KK’s blog that said:
“The Brandon Shollenberger discussion is an example of what is wrong with Curry’s blog. I believe that Curry has the expertise to judge the quality and correctness of his position, but she hasn’t done so.”
My reply was:
That’s not what Judith does. She does something much more subtle and, it has to be said, educational, though not all seem to be able to grasp it.
She’s a facilitator. She’s not didactic (all the best adult educators are like that – education being my professional specialty). Her purpose is not to impart knowledge from a lofty point, but to act as an enabler for open discussion and the development and exercise of critical thinking. She allows anyone with a view to put it out there, and does so without fear or favour. They will stand or fall by the force of their own arguments.
Her views, and I’m sure she has them, are neither here nor there. Genuinely sceptical people do not accept arguments from authority, so what point in her attempting to influence them?
A good adjective for Judith is “humble”. Very few have the moral integrity or intellectual courage not to try to influence through applying their own authority. In the blogosphere, she’s so far above most in wisdom that many can’t perceive what she is doing without getting a crick in the neck.
Michael Larkin –
I was making some very similar points at Keith Kloor’s – albeit with more vitriol :)
What some of the critics fail to realise is that Climate etc is not prescriptive or pedagogical – if it is educational it is in only the best way possible. I think a lot of the criticism is either ignorant or elitist, suggesting that the authors, of course, would never be led astray, but that everyone else needs to have their information vetted and filtered and authorised, Worst of all, they suggest that Dr Curry has an OBLIGATION to do this. Of course this is insulting TO ME, because it implies that I need to have somebody take responsibility for my reading. When I point this out, the reply is “Oh I don’t mean you, just gullible people who are vulnerable to disinformation”
If I may say so in English, that is bollocks. You can’t just hand wave in the direction of ‘some people’ implying something like ‘the great unwashed’. It is I who am uninformed, unintelligent and looking to learn, so if you have a problem with the way Climate etc works, you have to say it will cause a problem FOR ME, or perhaps even FOR YOURSELF. If not, it would be helpful if you kept you patronising condescension where it isn’t going to embarrass you.
[Er, I don’t mean you, Michael. I mean the authoritarian pedlars of the orthodox]
Anteros – You add cogent points with which I very much agree.
This might be a naive idea, but why should authors submit their names until the paper has been accepted? If what matters is the science, why does it matter who submitted it?
(Author) Michael Crichton suggested the same thing many times as a way to kill what Dr Curry calls “tribalism.”
I can see the merits in not submitting authors names until a paper is accepted for most science fields, but climate science?
A demonstration:
Anon1: The effects of a warmer world on the mating habits of the yellow bellied numbat.
Abstract: A warming world will have dire consequences on the biodiversity of……..
ACCEPTED.
Anon2: Climate sensitivity over estimated by a factor of 5
Abstract: Here we present real world observations……
REJECTED.
Following on from my own post above, “genuine scepticism” equates to genuine open-mindedness, and there are, for sure, some pseudo-sceptics who, every bit as much as the convinced, are really motivated by the desire to have their own world-view promulgated.
For the sake of complete symmetry, I also have to allow the possiblity that some of the convinced may also be open-minded.
yes Mr. Larkin, critical thinking is becoming like the Walkman, passe.
Your explanation of this blog is exactly right!
Interesting post Dr Curry.
Firstly, by ‘Graduate student’ I assume you mean someone whose views are not known to us? If not, we might think of someone like a young Chris Colose who has a website which states on its home page –
‘Climate sensitivity is enough to be worried. It will take effort and money, to solve the problem but the benefits outweigh the risks’
I have nothing against this declaration – though I profoundly disagree with it. I think it is clear, honest and admirable. But those two sentences are enough – for good or ill – to completely skew my expectations, because I now know that the person has a world view utterly different to my own, and they will see and understand and interpret every single ‘fact’ they come across in a different way.
I’m aware that some people don’t like analogies to religion, but to me they are appropriate here, because this is so much more about ‘belief’ than it is about ‘scientific evidence’. John Christy and James Hansen have THE SAME information and believe very different things.
I do accept that not everyone has one of the polarised views that I characterise here and that If I knew nothing about the graduate student it would be much much easier to take the paper completely on its merits.
I’m glad you mentioned the assymetry in this Dr curry – and I think you assess it pretty well, although I think many consensus devotees will baulk at the image of ‘skeptics’ being concerned about the science…
I have had some interactions with Joshua about asymmetry and one thing that has become apparent is that our ideas about asymmetry are themselves asymmetrical – which would be interesting to explore in another post but is probably OT here.
it is fascinating to read other readers views on this topic.
…because I now know that the person has a world view utterly different to my own, and they will see and understand and interpret every single ‘fact’ they come across in a different way.
It’s horrifying, actually. This person has now completely shut down even lines of inquiry that aren’t laser focused on “doing something about” that which he takes as Received Wisdom. It would bother me less if said Wisdom was truthful enough to be non-contentious, but something as obviously weak as that… hoo boy.
Do you think such a young scientist could do what Svensmark did? No, because questioning Received Wisdom (CAGW is gawds Trvth dontcha know) isn’t viable and the line of research inquiry will be focused at the end of doing something about this awful problem rather than the science of determining whether or not there is a real problem and if there is, defining it.
Worse yet, the field is attracting people not because they’re interested in science, but because they want to “change the world”. The evidence of this is in the thread a few weeks ago on personality types. Climate science is in danger of going to way of journalism.
It is odd that we even use the word ‘science’..
I’d stick my neck out and say that what Chris Colose (and James Hansen) are doing isn’t science at all – at least in the way that it is commonly understood, and in the way that Dikran talks about it on these pages. Take climate sensitivity – everybody who knows the area knows all the assumptions that have to be made, and they also know the effects of these assumptions. So it is incredibly disingenuous for someone like Hansen with a fundamentalist and dogmatic view to say they have ‘found’ that climate sensitivity is x, y, or z. He didn’t find it – he CHOSE it.
Just imagine if a member of the hockey team ‘found’ an estimate of CS that was less than 2C/2xCO2 – they’d be excommunicated! You’d never see them at RC ever again. Similarly, Roy Spencer couldn’t possibly ‘calculate’ a high or even moderate CS because ‘calculating’ doesn’t come into it. It sounds cynical but isn’t meant to be. Pretty much, we see the world the way we want to see it, which is why people very rarely change their views.
So it is incredibly disingenuous for someone like Hansen with a fundamentalist and dogmatic view to say they have ‘found’ that climate sensitivity is x, y, or z. He didn’t find it – he CHOSE it.
I see this as correct.
Climate science and biblical archaeology are twins. Biblical archaeologists start with the concept that the bible is literally true, no two ways about it, and then hit the desert with kit in hand and set out to prove it.
Re climate sensitivity… Hansen is contending that Noah’s Ark will be found at 12,000 ft. on Mt Ararat in Turkey. Those who have slight disagreement argue for 9,000 ft settling due to the scientific study of 40 days and nights of deluge volume and factoring in the landscape of the day. (Blog denizen Oliver Manuel says no, it’s closer to the Iron Mountain…) This is what that discussion sounds like to my ears.
Meanwhile skeptics are saying “Ark? What Ark? Now hold on just one cotton pickin’ minute…”
Anteros,
I usually find your posts intersting but I don’t understand this one. While it is possible to “posulate” sensitivity, it is most often calculated, whether via GCM or some other source (paleo data, simple models). Can you elaborate further?
Bill
I agree I was very unclear in my reasons for contending that most estimates of climate sensitivity are ‘chosen’. On reflection the hyperbole doesn’t help (as if it ever does..)
What I would say now, perhaps more reasonably, is that there is a large element of choice in how one goes about estimating climate sensitivity. There are obviously some different approaches, but they all fundamentally involve making assumptions – lots of them. Everything from choosing the weighting of various components of forcing, to assumptions about the variability of many unknown parameters – even how to measure and understand the variables themselves, what proxies to choose, whose proxy record to trust…….
One of the ways in which this can be made clear is the sheer range of estimates – extremists like Singer and Lindzen at one end and the likes of Kiehl at the other. Estimates more than an order of magnitude apart! Pretty much everyone who has announced an estimate of climate sensitivity has found one that fitted in with their prior prejudices – remarkable don’t you think?
I think even the ‘consensus’ of somewhere between 2 degrees and 4 and a half degrees indicates that something other than (or in addition to) ‘calculation’ is occurring.
I don’t believe the WHOLE thing is arbitrary and a function solely of things like tribal bias and social pressure. Just that much more than most of us believe – and more than the scientist themselves believe – they make choices and assumptions the effect of which they know very well (or know subconsciously). I think the influence of world view in such an area can be very pronounced.
I’ll repeat the example I gave above of Chris Colose. Right at the beginning of his academic career, at a time where he should have the most open mind of anyone, he makes a public statement of belief on his website.
“climate sensitivity is enough to be worried. It will take effort, and money, to solve the problem, but the benefits outweigh the risks”
Now, if Chris decided to have a personal estimate of climate sensitivity, he would know extremely well the results of each of the assumptions he would have to make. My contention is that certain assumptions (and therefore certain estimates) would involve shattering a whole world view and, by and large, that is one of the last things human beings ever do.
We convince ourselves that we can be objective. My view is that most of us – including scientists – underestimate how much our biases influence what we see.
Perhaps the most extreme example of this is Michael Mann’s book ‘Dire predictions’. Having read that, it is inconceivable to me that he could publish ANYTHING that could remotely suggest that ‘things are better than we thought’. It is now an essential part of his understanding of facts, evidence and reasoning – it would take something akin to a religious conversion for him to SEE something that meant global warming was un-threatening, and one of the key aspects of that is climate sensitivity.
Can you imagine James Hansen saying “I’ve had another quick look at climate sensitivity, and my calculation is now the same as Pat Michaels, which means……..er……..that…..there’s no problem?……..Er did I say that? Oh dear, I probably miscalculated because I was pretty sure civilisation was doomed. Let me look at it again”
I think we know more about people than we do about climate, so its almost true that we can ‘calculate’ what someone’s estimate of climate sensitivity will be better than someone can ‘calculate’ climate sensitivity itself.
And I’ve probably oversold the idea once again (bad habit) but I think you’ll see the influence I’m referring to.
P.S. If scientists are ‘calculating’ climate sensitivity, how come they end up with such a variety of numbers? That always seem to fit their pre-stated views of AGW?
Anteojos,
(Sorry, Anteros, couldn’t resist- then I went and looked up what the name means, I didn’t know).
Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful and clarifying reply. It’s what I would have expected, which confirms my suspicion that you haven’t suddenly turned “hardcore”. I agree with your general sentiments regarding our predispositions.
I do hope that not all future climate scientists go into it based on a personal belief in the necessary policy consequences of CAGW.
Me, I got into environmental stuff out of a desire to work for environmental good. It’s actually the disproportionate emphasis that AGW currently gets in the treatment of environmental issues that got me reading skeptical stuff. Just to see what the counterarguments were. I really hope Hansen’s wrong…
“Has anyone come across people from the warm side characterizing a paper with as fraud?”
Yes, in email 1107899057 Michael Mann wrote to journalist Andy Revkin
“Hi Andy,
The McIntyre and McKitrick paper is pure scientific fraud. I think you’ll find this reinforced by just about any legitimate scientist in our field you discuss this with.”
Paul Matthews –
You suggest Michael Mann comes from the ‘warm side’
Are you sure you don’t mean the ‘dark side’ ?
of the ‘farce’ ;-)
If there’s dark matter and dark energy, why not dark heat?
But that’s a purloined email, so it’s ok. :P
I think it is unhelpful to talk of papers as being fraudulent or to personalise the science and fixate on motives. As I said on the earlier thread this sort of thing is exactly why science on blogs is doomed to failure. An ad-hominem (which is what accusations of fraud or personalisation of the science is) is a rhetorical device, what really matters is whether the paper is correct or not. In this post, IMHO Prof. Curry has done “blog science” no favours at all.
Dikran –
With respect, I think you may have misunderstood what this post is about. It certainly is not about talking about papers as being fraudulent, far from it. It is a reflective, thoughtful post about the way many of us DO think about papers depending on our perceptions of the the authors of them.
You sound like an idealist with regard to objectivity. Does that mean if you have previous experience of an authors work that you found partisan, biased, selective etc it wouldn’t affect your reading of a subsequent paper? At all?
Are you sure?
This what people here are asking themselves – quite self-critically.
It would be better to ask people to question why they use rhetorical devices at all (e.g. winding up opponents by calling them names). Use of any rhetorical device is an indication of bias or prejudice. We all have weaknesses and biases, however we are all rational and can override them, but we have to actively choose to do so.
I’m not an idealist; I am a scientist, that is how scientists generally think (although you wouldn’t get that impression from reading climate blogs, as on blogs you only see those scientists that are willing to mix it a bit in a rhetorical debating forum). Most scientists are genuinely only interested in getting to the truth, and most handle agressive rhetorical debate rather badly becuase it is so alien to them.
If a reviewer has any concern that they would be unable to give an unbiased review, then the correct thing to do is to decline the invitation to review the paper. It isn’t a big deal.
I take your point. And perhaps objectivity is much more prevalent among working scientists than the partisan blogosphere suggests. But do you not recognise Judith’s description of how emotion can creep into a perspective – often without us realising?
Not the “without us realising” bit. If I was aware that I was angry about something I would also be aware of the potential bias. Certainly on climate change I would be only too happy for the mainstream position to be wrong, I like my car as much as the next man, so if anything my bias should be in the other direction.
I DO understand Prof. Curry’s anger though. Most scientists, as I said, are seekers of truth, and rhetoric is fairly alien to us and we are quite easily outraged by transparent rhetorical attacks that a journalist would consider the norm. That is one of the reasons why I am participating in blogs less and less as time goes on, there is too little scientific discussion and too much rhetoric.
An accusation of fraud is not (inherently) an ad hominem. Are you sure you know what that phrase means?
DM, can you explain how an accusation of fraudulent work, is an ad hom ? Fraud in the paper would seem to be an accusation regarding action ( what was done ), not about what the author “is”..
To say the paper is incorrect is not an ad-hominem. To claim it is a fraud is an accusation of deliberate dishonesty against the author and hence an ad-hom. Personally I am a big fan of Hanlons razor, which basically says “always take the least critical view of someones actions that are consistent with the evidence”.
Fraud is a criminal matter, not a scientific matter. If you want to discuss the science, stick to whether it is correct or not, leave motives, accusations of dishonesty or other such personalisations of the argument out of it entirely.
Er, I responded to the wrong fork. Sorry. As I said here:
Dikran, I think commonly used language has lost most of its subtle elegance. Fraud is tossed around with abandon along with many more powerful words that used to be used judiciously. One persons “Fraud” is another’s intellectual naivete.
Science with policy implications needs a bit thicker skin.
dallas, this is an interesting comment given the fact Dikran Marsupial is misusing “ad hominem” in basically the same manner as you say “fraud” is misused.
I am more than just a pretty face Brandon :)
Here’s my newest Quote of the Week, “Non-ergodic systems aren’t really chaotic, they are just misunderstood.” :)
Dikran Marsupial | November 11, 2011 at 5:46 am
Dikran, you totally misunderstand the term “ad hominem”.
It is a debating device, where rather than debate the issues, you attack the man.
However, this is different than calling a fraud a fraud. Every statement about a paper’s author is not necessarily an ad hominem attack.
Because if someone is in fact a fraud, it is not an ad hominem to say they are a fraud … unless you are doing it to distract and divert the discussion from the actual issue.
But sometimes, the fraud IS the actual issue … not because it makes you disbelieve what they have written or because it means they are automatically wrong, but because it puts them under a much greater burden for their work.
This was my point above. The fact that a man lied to us before does not mean that he is lying to us now.
However, it does mean that if we do not consider that he lied to us before, we are acting very foolishly.
This is the issue with e.g. Michael Mann. He has lied to us, we know that, his own words have convicted him. But that doesn’t make his science wrong, to claim that would be an ad hominem argument.
But by god, it sure encourages me to check and verify every word that issues from his lying lips … and that’s not an ad hominem. As I said above …
… that’s just self-preservation.
w.
Sorry, an accusation of fraud is an accusation against the author of the paper of dishonesty. That is an attack on the man, not on the argument, and hence is an ad-hominem. If fraud is the issue, it is a criminal issue, not a scientific one. I have to say that pretty much every accusation of fraud I have seen in the climate blogs has been unsupported, regardless of which direction they went in.
The fact that whenever there is an attempt to discuss science on blogs it ends up in a discussion of every thing but the science, just accusations of fraud, ad-homs about “teams” or politicallty motivated IPCC or big oil funded skeptics, blah blah blah. It is why “blog science” is doomed to fail; the vast majority of participants don’t actually want to discuss the science as far as I can see. It is just the thin end of the wedge.
For example, I have frequently tried to discuss the issue of statistical (in)significance of the “pause in warming”, and I have yet to see anybody even attempt to perform the calculations to support their claims, but plenty of rhetoric.
Dikran Marsupial, earlier I said to you:
I never got a response, but you seem to have answered my question quite clearly with your response to Willis Eschenbach here by saying:
Apparently, you don’t know what an ad hominem is. You can “attack a person” as much as you want without it being ad hominem. I could call Michael Mann a lying fat man whose father smells of elderberries, and it isn’t ad hominem. It’s an insult. The two do not mean the same thing. Please stop acting as though they do.
The very thing you’re doing with your talk of “ad hominem” is what you accuse people of doing with talk of “fraud.”
A lot of people are confused about the fallacy of ad hominem. They believe that any criticism of a person is an ad hominem. Not true at all. An ad hominem occurs when a respondent changes the topic from the argument to the person who gave the argument. The fallacy occurs because an irrelevancy has been introduced.
If one is arguing that someone is a fraud then there is no fallacy in that and the argument might be perfectly successful. Some people do commit fraudulent acts.
Theo Goodwin, unfortunately, your depiction of ad hominem is wrong as well. Changing the topic as you describe is not ad hominem. Introducing irrelevancy is not ad hominem. Neither of these is a fallacy. They may not be the “right” thing to do, but they are both logically sound.
Ad hominem is a fallacy where an argument against the person is claimed as an argument against their position. The reason it is a fallacy is because there is no logical connection between the argument and what the argument is claimed to be. Arguing against a person is not arguing against the person’s position, so claiming it is is fallacious.
Accusing someone of fraud is not ad hominem. Calling someone stupid is not ad hominem. It is only ad hominem if you tack on something like, “Therefore you’re wrong.” It is an insult to say, “You’re a moron.” It is ad hominem to say, “You’re a moron, so you’re argument is wrong.”
Sorry, you are wrong. Taught it all my life. Why do you think an ad hominem is a fallacy of relevance? The fallacy is in the fact that the new argument, against the person, changes the topic and, thereby, fails to address the original argument. The technique is very successful because it can introduce some real rabble rousers. Someone can present an argument on abortion and you can get them run out of town for being Catholic.
My apologies Theo Goodwin, you are indeed correct. I forgot there are distinctions within in ad hominem. What I was thinking of is actually abusive ad hominem, not ad hominem in general. Sorry for the carelessness.
With that said, it’s worth pointing out your description is somewhat inaccurate as well. You refer to ad hominem changing the topic to the person who gave the argument. However, you do not mention that the change of topic must involve a negative portrayal of the person. Ad hominem relies upon creating a negatively biased perspective of the target (through the Halo effect), so changing the topic to positive things about the person does not qualify. For example, bringing up the fact your opponent is really beautiful may qualify as a red herring and non-sequitur, but it is not ad hominem.
In any event, I do apologize. If I had taken more time in making my comment, that wouldn’t have happened as I’d have looked up the definition again to be sure. I been posting quite a bit more on this site than I normally do, and I suspect that’s partially to blame. Even so, that is no excuse.
Brandon,
I always enjoy your posts. You are one good logician.
I’m flattered!
Am I alone in thinking that the science will sort itself in 5,10, 15 years or so?
As more data is collected more observations made, and possibly dire predictions fail to occur, and everyone takes a step back?
My concerns are with the here and now, and climate policies that make no sense to me whether AGW is a minor or major effect? or even just lost in the noise of natural variability.
Barry Woods –
I sometimes think like this but am pulled up when I realise there are still Malthusians wandering around 150 years after his ideas were totally refuted. What one person thinks of as a refutation, another thinks of as a temporary postponement of doom. Paul Ehrlich hasn’t been right about anything in all his long life – has he noticed?
And in another way, the amount of worry and fear [of the future] in the world probably doesn’t change very much, bearing in mind a certain amount of natural variability. After AGW, you can be absolutely sure that it’ll be something else. The fears don’t have a great deal of correlation to reality – they are always utterly convincing to the believers, and dissenters are always demonised. I would call it ‘the way of the world’. Don’t let ’em get you down!
Anteros
Let me suggest one exception: he has been “right” in knowing how to write a doomsday best-seller (The Population Bomb, written in 1968). This books still sells, although all of its dire predictions have turned out to be completely false. Malthusian doomsayers today simply add 40 years onto Ehrlich’s forecasts.
Some people seem to find solace in doomsday predictions: coming ice age, nuclear winter, population bomb, global warming….
The only thing these predictions all have in common is that they never really happen.
Max
Hale Bopp…
Actually, a better analogy would be Y2K, because serious trouble was at least possible, if not plausible. Plus, there were a lot of control systems and generator companies that saw a substantial uptick in sales in 1999. It’s pretty much impossible for there not to be economic winners from any kind of scare.
Manaker,
Good point. Every time I start to think Al Gore is an idiot, I remember how much money he’s made the last several years.
Barry,
dont loose confidence in the truth….. it will all come out one day,
and it will not take 10-15 years, it just needs one person to stumble upon truth….. the idea that it needs a lot of models and simulations is
just a lie of all model simulants involved in order to continue their
mean game…. it just needs one with an extra sharp pencil… and not
dumb feeding of convoluted input into “models”….
JS
What dire predictions are slated to happen in 5 years, 10 years, and 15 years?
…5,10, 15 years or so
How about 50 million climate refugees?
When they didn’t show up in 2010, the UN just adjusted the date to 2020.
Barry
I will accept AGW if in the next decade the global mean temperature lies in the red region in the following graph.
http://bit.ly/oI8dws
The existing practice of climate science shies away from empirical research and relies on computer models and naive paleo-reconstructions. Climate science has produced no reasonably well-confirmed physical hypotheses which go beyond Arrhenius’ work and which can be used to explain and predict climate changes. As a result, climate science really cannot say what objects and events it addresses. If it continues as it is practiced today, it will produce nothing beyond what we have today.
I would rather top the question of “disinformation ” and “fraud” by adding “warmer villains”. Especially here in Germany, were as Mr. Tol put it: The choice is between green and ultra green, many “warmer villains” are around who specialize in bugging, annoying, blocking, trolling, even threatening the skeptics, which are just being sceptical in their own right…… My daugther mentioned in school: My papa is sceptical and she got screemed down….Skeptics in this country must be retired or they will be X-ed by the warmer villains….
….. all worse than disinformation or fraud……
JS
Ex-Vice President Gore calls for the same thing in this country. He wants to make “climate denialism” as socially unacceptable as racism. I think he sees himself as the MLKJr of his movement.
I got a new mobile phone few weeks ago and among the pre-installed games, there’s one called Climate Mission. It starts like this:
– So, you think you know all there is to climate change, eh?
– It’s time to introduce some creative ways to fight it!
– Get ready for…
And so on. Is this disinformation? Propaganda?
Edim, this is propaganda “for FIGHTING climate change, Eh..”
“Eh” stands for, in English :”Isnt it?” As if it were possible to fight
against the climate…… pure AGW-hype…….
Judith,
Ignorance is not fraud when you follow practiced procedures or come up with a new calculation or concept. When those procedures are incorrect, what others is out there that are correct?
Years of traditional teachings and theories that never change even though they are incorrect to the technology available is still being installed in our education. Not allowed to question the teacher as he is only as good as what is in a book.
So, where do you go when the teacher does not have the answer, yet you must follow protocol or fail?
I tried twice with the peer-review system and will not subject myself again to a system that is prejudice.
Now begs the question of who is the expert to review velocity?
Joe, your question is difficult to answer.
But there is an answer: 1. There is a thruth + 2. Time will tell…..
When you are ahead of your time and you are in a hostile environment which does not advance science (as during inquisition and Galileo) you have to be firm in your knowing, even if they make you state that the Sun goes around Earth (as is the case with AGW), that you are on the right track of scientific knowledge and only time will tell: It takes only 6 more years that the CO2-foot-or-finger
print of CO2 (one or the other, as with the Yeti) will be lost, according to warm side Trenberth……, and then we will be rid of the warm side brothers in science……
Please wait 6 years and you will know….
JS
Joachim,
I doubt 6 years will make a difference with politicians.
If they had a crystal ball, you would still be lied to.
There is “for the good of the people and for the good of the country”, peoples lives will always be sacrificed for the good of the country even down to the last person.
http://www-pord.ucsd.edu/~ltalley/sio219/curryetal_nature2003.pdf
These salt changes have been happening for the last 4 decades, yet no one talks about them. Hush…hush…
Quote of the day.
Disinformation=> The cooling from 1940 to 1970 is due to aerosols; the warming from 1970 to 2000 is due to greenhouse gas emissions; and the slight cooling in the first decade of the 2000s is due to aerosols.
Fraud=> “Hide the Decline”, “Delete”, “at our own peril” etc
I think fraud is saying “hide the decline” rather than “hide the decline that never occurred.”
The “slight cooling in the first decade of the 2000s” could be due to your imagination.
I think this is a misreading of the motives behind criticism like Tol’s. The way I see it, people on the pro-science side are constantly trying to find someone on the antiscience side with whom they can reason — there is a strong desire (if I am typical) to identify “skeptics” who have something resembling integrity, who are not utterly ignorant of the science, and are not simply right-wing fanatic conspiracy theorists engaged in aggressive sophistry (the vast majority).
You serve that function for many of the “convinced.” Pielke, Tol himself, Lucia circa 2009 would be other examples. It’s easy to raise such people on too high a pedestal, in the (usually vain) hope that there is someone on the “skeptic” side with whom one can find some common ground, if only in that they exercise basic honesty.
There are obviously many occasions when stinging criticism is leveled at deniers creating the shoddy “science.” But many deniers have so effectively lowered expectations among the science literate that it is hard to get motivated when Willis or Steve Goddard or Watts vomits up their usual bag of infantile dishonest nonsense. That is a “dog bites man” story. When somebody with some tiny shred of credibility remaining takes it upon themselves to promote such stuff, that gets more attention because of the bitter disappointment associated with dashed hopes for rational dialogue.
Robert,
who is on your “pro-science side”?
Are those who muddle in simulations, today called models, the previous simulants, today called modelers? Pro-science are the ones whose results are called by the IPPC ar4 : “likely to very likely”?
This is official, these AGW-simulants cannot even make to the next higher step of “extremely likely”….
The CO2-fingerprint runs out in 2016 (Trenberth: 17 years are needed), in 6 more years you will see you are on the wrong steamer….
Jump ship now to be ahead of your time….. or (all the same to me), stay on AGW and go down with it as staying on the Titanic, I will play
you a happy go down tune…..
JS
That would be the people who are pro-science. The people who spout unscientific nonsense (“The CO2-fingerprint runs out in 2016”) and vilify science and scientists based on their own lack of knowledge about science and the scientific method (“muddle in simulations, today called models”) are the anti-science folks. Glad we clarified that.
Robert,
“glad we clarified that” – exactly my opinion. You will see, in 6 more
years, no further temp increase -temps will stay flat – and then AGW will be back to the wall and you will be on the wrong side…..
If I remember this Email 6 years later, allow me to remind you and we will see who will finally cave in with sorry……
Robert
The kettle calls the pot black!
1) I think we have been too readily explaining the slow changes over past decade as a result of variability–that explanation is wearing thin. I would just suggest, as a backup to your prediction, that you also do some checking on the sulfate issue, just so you might have a quantified explanation in case the prediction is wrong. Otherwise, the Skeptics will be all over us–the world is really cooling, the models are no good, etc. And all this just as the US is about ready to get serious on the issue. …We all, and you all in particular, need to be prepared.
2) Yeah, it wasn’t so much 1998 and all that that I was concerned about, used to dealing with that, but the possibility that we might be going through a longer – 10 year – period [IT IS 13 YEARS NOW!] of relatively stable temperatures beyond what you might expect from La Nina etc. Speculation, but if I see this as a possibility then others might also. Anyway, I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as that’s trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent cold-ish years.
3) The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years [IT IS 13 YEARS NOW!] of data and it isn’t statistically significant.
4) I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago. I do not believe that global mean annual temperatures have simply cooled progressively over thousands of years as Mike appears to and I contend that that there is strong evidence for major changes in climate over the Holocene (not Milankovich) that require explanation and that could represent part of the current or future background variability of our climate.
5) Whether we have the 1000 year trend right is far less certain (& one reason why I hedge my bets on whether there were any periods in Medieval times that might have been “warm”, to the irritation of my co-authors!
6) The verification period, the biggest “miss” was an apparently very warm year in the late 19th century that we did not get right at all. This makes criticisms of the “antis” difficult to respond to (they have not yet risen to this level of sophistication, but they are “on the scent”).
7) I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips — higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from.
8) The fact is that in doing so the rules of IPCC have been softened to the point that in this way the IPCC is not any more an assessment of published science (which is its proclaimed goal) but production of results. The softened condition that the models themself have to be published does not even apply because the Japanese model for example is very different from the published one which gave results
not even close to the actual outlier version (in the old dataset the CCC model was the outlier). Essentially, I feel that at this point there are very little rules and almost anything goes.
9) I would not give them *anything*. I would not respond or even acknowledge receipt of their emails. There is no reason to give them any data, in my opinion, and I think we do so at our own peril!
Who is the real “pro-science” side?
Robert,
Why Lucia circa 2009? Why not just, Lucia?
Bill
Robert,
Like you, I too value “rational dialogue”, “basic honesty”, and “reason” in discussions and in pursuit of those noble ends I sought a clarification from you of your “pro-science” views. Unfortunately, I have yet to receive your reply–an oversight, no doubt.
Let me try again. Within the thread of the “Disinformation and Pseudo Critical Thinking” post you stated:
“You have no right to force CO2 on others; that’s violence and we have a right to protect ourselves.”
In response to your “pro-science” comment, above, I asked:
“Do you [Robert] believe you have a personal, “self-defense” right to use force that is likely to cause others bodily injury or even death, if such force is the only effective means by which to deter unwanted CO2?”
And, once again, I ask you to please answer the above question so that I can better appreciate your superior, “pro-science” understanding of this matter
Incidentally, Robert, if you haven’t viewed the important new “pro-science” video “republicanzombiededefnse.com” (it’s on youtube) then do yourself a favor and pull up that instant film-classic. Lots of “pro-science” and “self-defense” in that little masterpiece of film-making, I can tell yah. Your kind of video, I suspect.
“Do you [Robert] believe you have a personal, “self-defense” right to use force that is likely to cause others bodily injury or even death, if such force is the only effective means by which to deter unwanted CO2?”
Robert has right, but war isn’t very effective. His right doesn’t mean he won’t be put in jail or shot dead.
Non violence war [protests] are better than violent wars [generally].
The problem with non violent war is they tend to become violent.
Police should use force against violent mobs- that is their job. Police of course should not use force against a peaceful protest.
It needs strong and focused leadership on the part of members protesting not to have a group of people become a mob.
As OWS demonstrates without such leadership you left with a bunch of idiots who rape, destroy, and lack any meaningful message or purpose.
gbaike,
You say, “Robert has the right, but war isn’t very effective. His right doesn’t mean he won’t be put in jail or shot dead.”
Let me understand you gbaike, your assert a “right” to injure and kill other human beings who produce unwanted CO2–indeed, you apparently regard that “right” to include the right to make “war” on producers of unwanted CO2. And your only qualification is that such measures aren’t “very effective.”
But let’s get a little hypothetical, gbaike, if you don’t mind. What if it became “effective” to kill millions or even billions of your fellow human beings as the only practicable means to prevent an unwanted CO2 increase? What if you could undertake your greenshirt mass-cull without risk of being “put in jail or shot dead?” if I understand you, gbaike, you would then have no objection to exercising your “right” to “Kill ’em all!” (Neven’s felicitous phrase). Do I understand you correctly, gbaike?
And please be assured I’m not one of those anti-science types that would defame my pro-science betters by suggesting that deep within their watermelon world lurks a nasty, genocidal, “eugenics” streak. I don’t even want to go there.
“Let me understand you gbaike, your assert a “right” to injure and kill other human beings who produce unwanted CO2–indeed, you apparently regard that “right” to include the right to make “war” on producers of unwanted CO2. And your only qualification is that such measures aren’t “very effective.” ”
They aren’t effective. Neither protests or war as general rule aren’t very effective.
Humans have right to war.
Obviously we would like a world where very few wished to exercise this right and on a very rare basis.
One shouldn’t confuse a right as something one always need to “use” or “compelled” to use.
Good wars generally stop other people from doing something stupid.
They are unable [apparently] to make people do what they should do- and hence generally what I mean by not being effective.
And obviously peaceful protests are generally a better form of war.
Though I am not normally a fan of most protests.
I think they mostly overrated on most occasions.
But they have right to protest and even go to war against “human beings who produce unwanted CO2”
Hard for me to imagine them as being good people or even vaguely rational people if they want others dead because they are making CO2.
Any protest has chance of causing harm- and in some sense, protests are always causing some form of harm.
And if police are out to lunch and if two different groups are protesting against each other, one has situation which could quickly get beyond merely peaceful.
Or without an opposing group one still obviously has some threat of a protest moving beyond peaceful.
The possibility of causing harming or causing deaths isn’t a hugely significant matter in terms of whether has a protest or not. There are more important issues.
If there aren’t more important issues regarding particular protest, then it should be pretty simple, don’t do the protest.
Doing a protest because it might be “fun” is immoral.
“But let’s get a little hypothetical, gbaike, if you don’t mind. What if it became “effective” to kill millions or even billions of your fellow human beings as the only practicable means to prevent an unwanted CO2 increase? What if you could undertake your greenshirt mass-cull without risk of being “put in jail or shot dead?” if I understand you, gbaike, you would then have no objection to exercising your “right” to “Kill ‘em all!” (Neven’s felicitous phrase). Do I understand you correctly, gbaike? ”
No.
I want mass murderers dead. And I wouldn’t be overly distressed if Gore drove his car over cliff.
If greenshirts are trying to kill me or others- I will take up guns against them.
Or say we have millions of greenshirts protesting fairly peaceful and basically being retarded. I don’t want them killed nor institutionalized. I don’t like them, but I don’t want to murder any person simply because I see them as horrible creatures. How easy or difficult it may or may not be isn’t the issue.
I see those who want to reduce human populations has dangerous. They dangerous because they are stupid, arrogant and twisted creatures. And dangerous, as in genocide might be natural- but I am not a big fan of all things natural.
I think current human population are too low; not dangerously high.
I would prefer to live in a human population exceeding 1 trillion.
Near term not possible, obviously. But if human populations doubles in a decade or so, I think that would better then current tread,
I don’t believe/think humans are animals [perhaps needing to be culled or have their populations managed]. But that doesn’t mean a I am a fan of government programs that overly reward people who breed children- managing human populations whether reducing or causing them to increase isn’t a function belonging to government or other authorities.
gbaike,
Thank you, sincerely, for the thoughtful and comprehensive character of your reply. Indeed, I can see I misunderstood your original comment–I am sorry for that error on my part. For what it’s worth, gbaike, I consider myself on your side and you’ve opened my mind to a larger view of humanity that I had ever previously considered. For that, I again thank you so very much.
MIke, you have the perfect argument to silence Robert. I hope you bring this up every time he appears. I guess it’s too hard for him to swallow crow.
There are two ‘DocMartyn’ metrics I use as a reviewer to aid me.
1) Incestuous references. If more than a third of the citations in the paper are incestuous, i.e. are papers where one or more of the authors are the same, then one needs a fine toothed comb. Sometimes large amounts of self-citation are reasonable when you are dealing with a pioneering giant, but in a run of the mill paper, you should cite yourselves less than 30%.
2) The methodology chain. If the paper states that ‘dysmogrfication of signal processing was performed as in [6]”, then reference [6] should be a methodology paper that fully describes ‘dysmogrfication’. A review of ‘dysmogrfication’ is not enough, a self-citation where the referenced paper cites yet another paper in its methods section rings alarm bells. The longest methodology chain I have followed is 6, where a grant cited a paper to support a methodology, this paper cited another paper, this paper cited another paper and so on. The actual technique was finally cited in the fifth paper in the chain. The ‘real’ methodology paper was full of caveats, describing how many different effectors cause cause artifacts. As it was, one of the artifacts that could result in a false positive was present in the grant submission.
If, from reading the methods section you do not know how to repeat the experiments presented in the paper, you must believe that the authors do not want you to be able to do so.
If they do not describe how they analyzed the data in a manner you can perform, then you must assume they do not want you to be able to do so.
This is especially important when ratios are used.
Frequently, especially in the case of some statistical method, I see researchers simply grabbing whatever method other researchers in their immediate topical area use. This is how we get these long citation chains back to an actual paper about the method itself. It also accounts for increasingly inappropriate use of the method through the chain. My referee work involves a good bit of guiding authors away from some popular method and toward something else.
Judith –
Is this a joke? Are you kidding? You haven’t seen “skeptics” accusing the entire “climate establishment” of promoting disinformation?
Daily?
At your very site?
Multiple times?
In every thread?
It was a joke, right?
No, they don’t generally use the word disinformation. They talk about hoax and fraud.
Judith – they talk about hoax and fraud as a part of a vast effort to spread disinformation.
Joshua, It is 11-11-11 day!:)
too cryptic, Tom.
now you know how I feel about AGW science, Joshua
Go over to WUWT.
On a daily basis you will find articles assumed to be fraudulent (meaning purveying disinformation) because of association with the “climate establishment.” They are dismissed out of hand on the basis of who wrote the papers. It even goes so far as if a paper agrees with the “consensus” view on warming, the author is associated with the “climate establishment” even when the readers have not a clue about anything related to the background of the author. The author is lumped into a category merely on the basis of the thesis of their paper.
Josh,
Would you be willing to admit that the mistrust of the Big Climate Team has increased substantially since CLIMATEGATE! The unwashed masses have reasons to believe they are being conned.
Don –
I need you to be more specific.
Distrust among whom?
Distrust among those who already distrusted any claims that humans were changing the climate or distrust among those who already dismissed the work of the “climate establishment” because of ideological orientation? Well, yes – but they were simply trolling for reasons to confirm their biases.
Distrust among a relatively very small # of people who either accepted the theory of AGW or were agnostic on the topic? Probably. But in the full context, I don’t consider that to be a “substantial” change.
Distrust among the vast majority of Americans? Possibly – but the evidence that I’ve seen doesn’t support such a contention, do I tend to doubt it. What I know for sure is that I keep asking those who make definitive claims in that regard for substantiating data, and they, so far, have not been able to do so.
What I find particularly interesting is that people who are concerned about quantifying uncertainty make such claims without validating evidence.
Do you find that interesting, Don?
Josh,
How about i answer your question about the change in people’s opinion?
http://www.gallup.com/poll/126560/americans-global-warming-concerns-continue-drop.aspx
Now you could argue that the increase in people who think the concerns are exagerated is not exactly equivalent to “distrust”, but it’s a weak argument. The end result is the same, the public believing what they are being told about global warming, less and less.
Well, that’s OK then.
“No, they don’t generally use the word disinformation. They talk about hoax and fraud.”
ah well, that’s alright then! ;o)
Seriously, blogs would be better off if they just discussed the science on its merits and avoided these terms completely, at least if they have any aspiration of “blog science”. I don’t see any useful distinction between any of those terms, they all imply deliberate dishonesty (or at least disingenuousness).
As they stand, your remarks are ambiguous and not helpful. You need to focus on something specific. When analyzing the science of a paper, do people who comment on this site claim that they find disinformation in the science? I think not. In any case, the important point is that Dr. Curry certainly discourages that sort of thing.
When discussing matters other than the science in an article, such as policy matters, people often make accusations of misconduct. Dr. Curry certainly discourages that sort of thing. Such things are just part and parcel of our political life.
Re graduate students
“I suspect that people from both sides would be making constructive suggestions and providing helpful hints”
Then Judith, I have to suspect you don’t remember your own blog from one post to the next. In both instances in which I have offered graduate student research to consider, your support base didn’t take it seriously; and Steven Mosher described has described it as ‘dragging a student’ into the debate. Iin both examples, students offered highly skilled but as it happens, opposing analysis to yours. Gosh, does that make any difference to your denizens? Seriously. Denizens were completely uninterested.
“Dare I suggest that Richard Tol reacted much more sharply to these papers than people in the U.S. because of his knowledge of EIKE (German group of skeptics)?”
Sure suggest it. It’s relevant. However, contrary to your presentation, it is not about “accusations [that] are focused on people that enable/promote the paper”. It is about the aspect of analysis that examines context (social, political, and occasionally personal since sometimes that too offers a searing contribution to understanding) that is always important to any pragmatic, objective evaluation of information – within and without science. You often fail to recognize a relevant context unless you are discussing it yourself, in which case it is too often attached to self-serving arguments. Sorry to be so blunt.
To be clear, the issues raised are about the quality of the science on the EIKE site, and promoted by EIKE as current and comprehensive scientific understanding. You evaluate some papers by looking at the context in which they are produced. You have done that many times in other scenarios e.g. IPCC, activists, and I have done that when looking at the Bush era science produced by e.g. NAS, in order to understand the parochialism and conservatism of past Right wing efforts to ignore science, climate change and action to address climate change. You have done lengthy posts on the sociology of science, but you toss social and political context out the window as it suits you.
The result is that you lead a boisterous blog that often encourages hostility to analysis. And that is very bad, for anyone who wishes to be seen as engaged, objective and credible, whether you are a scientist, a political activist, both, or neither.
You need to be able to consider all of it, not just what suits you, Judith. Your own personal use of ideology to mask your obedience to conservative ideology and resistance to social change is obvious to most people, yet remains essentially unseen by you. I think you think you are objective, because you see yourself as invested in anti-authoritarianism. However, you have failed to lay bare the sort of counter-analysis that would unmask the ideology and self-interests of many who pose as ‘rational skeptics’.
Tol, on the other hand, does not fail to do this. While I disagree with him on other points and I think he engages in other forms of denial/delay/stalling on needed action, he at least has a grasp of social analysis.
Note that I’m a social scientist.
As to stalling, I have campaigned (successfully) for the introduction of a carbon tax in Ireland. I have also campaigned (unsuccessfully) for an EU ETS that is less susceptible to fraud (the financial kind).
I am sure the Irish public appreciate your successful efforts to screw them.
Dear Richard,
to disinformation, fraud and especially in defense of Luedecke, et al, their latest paper: They might twist and bend statistics so as to fit their message…… but look well : (1) This is not as bad as the hockey stick of Mann – compare the stick and the hugh grey field of uncertainty…..talk about flattening out the facts until only a straight stick line remains……. + (2) more important: LL does not claim to uncover the sources of climate change, they remain anonymus somewhere in the nature….. whereas AGW-papers claim
( AR4 “Likely/very likely”) the CO2 as climate driver – which is nothing else than assumption by the AGW and then presented as
scientific truth……. ??
Which side is worse? The AGW-heyday will be finished in 6 years, the CO2-footprint runs out in 2017…..(Trenberth) You side with the wrong type of people…..
JS
Richard
What was the goal of the carbon tax you advocated?
What were the specifics of the tax legislation that passed?
The tax is on all fuels not covered by the EU ETS, and the tax is roughly equal to the EU ETS permit price.
Richard
Again I ask–What was the goal of implementing the tax you wanted? Was the goal to:
a. Positively impact the climate by reducing CO2 emissions?
b. Raise additional revenue for the government? Ireland’s governemt certainly needs the revenue
c. Send a message that Ireland is trying to be green (sorry-no pun intended)
d. other
all of the above
Richard
LOL. You obviously understand the point of the question.
Many believers of cAGW point to a carbon tax like it is a solution to their preceived problem when in fact it is not. I would estimate that such a tax will actually do very little to lower consumption in Ireland. So the Irish are in effect paying a tax that will cost them billions and would potentially result in atmospheric CO2 20 years from now from being at 422 ppm vs. 423 ppm. LOL Hey they do need revenue
Seriously,you only get to introduce a new tax if it satisfies a sufficient number of constituencies and does not upset too many other constituencies.
Richard said..
I’m guessing you haven’t followed the Australian Carbon (dioxide) Tax situation.
The government only managed to introduce the tax because they promised not to before the election, snuck into government by the skin of their teeth then hit us with it.
They would not have snuck into government if they had of told the truth about a Carbon Tax before the election. In that there is no doubt.
So a 2nd way to introduce a new tax is to lie about it leading up to an election.
I sure would like to know who the ‘not upset constituents’ are in Australia.
Oh, good, you’ve estimated.
This must be why you are constantly asking for other people’s estimates, so as to disagree with them without making your case explicitly.
Now that you’ve come out of the closet, I hope you don’t mind sharing your calculations with us.
It might also help if you share any credentials you have as an economist, any peer-reviewed literature you relied upon in your estimate, and whether you will be submitting your findings.
Robert
BTW- Tol completely agreed with my estimate in another post. Actually he wrote that the tax had no impact on the climate. So again, what I wrote was accurate.
Judith’s interest in context is highly selective.
Judith –
Every single day on this blog you read accusations of “fraud” wrt the climate debate made against the “mainstream media,” the IPCC, scientific organizations, some 1/2 of the American public (you know, “the left”).
When criticism is made against an author for a particular paper, the criticisms are often made on the basis of the author’s supposed association with a massive cabal of frauds.
The asymmetry that you see is a product of your biases.
The real problem here is that people are far too quick onthe draw when it comes to accusations of fraud, disinformation, and so forth. Cliamte papers and their authors trade in statistical concepts and physical laws that few of us understand completely. I certainly do not claim to be competetn to analyze whether obscure statistical techniques have been used correctly or not. That is why the exchange between Tol and Ludecke is interesting. I suspect that the majority of commenters on this Blog are in a simialr position, and yet that does not stop some of them indulging in accusations and ad-hominem attacks.
All in all, I think tha twe need to moderate the language used on the blog. I for one intend to assume that errors in statistical reasoning are honest mistakes ont he part of authors, and not attempts to disseminate disinformation. Assumign that all authors are honest brokers for their ideas unless proven otherwise woudl go a long way towards creating a more informed cliamte of debate, alhtouth I suspect it would be less than satidfying to those who seem to have their noses permenantly out of joint about some aspect of climate science.
Well said.
Judith –
I mean really, this is outstanding.
WUWT has on a regular basis entire threads devoted to personally ridiculing Mann, or Gore, or Trenberth. That’s focusing on the science? You, yourself, post caricature cartoons of climate scientists. That’s focusing on the science?
And “skeptical” criticism isn’t directed at the policy implications?affect on public opinion of the science? Do you not read comment after comment at this site that focus public opinion and policy implications?
Take the reactions to BEST as just one example. “Skeptic” after “skeptic” wrote posts at this very site that criticized BEST, specifically, because of the influence they felt it would have on public opinion.
“WUWT has on a regular basis entire threads devoted to personally ridiculing Mann, or Gore, or Trenberth”
And that is different that ridiculing, Bush, Perry, Palin, Spencer how? There is science, politics and this odd blend. Why would what is acceptable in one not be acceptable in the other?.
Dallas –
I’m not the one who’s saying that there’s a difference. Judith is.
I don’t think that tribalism is “acceptable” on either side of the debate.
I don’t think incompetence in government is acceptable, but I have to deal with it. Membership in the IPCC does not come with a certificate of infallibility. Nor does being elected. Welcome to the 21st century.
I have no idea why you feel the need to direct that statement to me.
Let me clarify what I mean by “acceptable.” I really mean justifiable – in a critical thinking sort of way. In reality, I have no choice but to “accept” tribalism, or non-critical thinking that is influence by “socio-centrism.”
It exists. I do “accept” that it exists. In fact, I prefer Judith’s brand of tribalism and “socio-centrism” to, say, hunter’s, or Robert’s.
And since Judith still hasn’t answered my question about why she left off the following paragraph in her excerpt on critical thinking (while excerpting the preceding and following paragraphs), I will re-post it here.
Joshua,
The infallibility thing is that noting that a portion of a theory may be incorrect is not often taken well in a scientific debate. There will be friction. Once that scientific theory becomes involved in politics, the verbiage can change considerably.
You and I can debate our views online or over a cocktail then play a round of golf or install a pellet stove as buddies. If my life’s work happens to have a minor flaw, things could get a bit tense.
This thread and many others are about minor flaws in the life’s work of others.
I should amend that post.
When I say “I’m not the one…” I should simply say “I’m not…”
Judith certainly isn’t the only one who claims that there’s some vast asymmetry, and it doesn’t only come from skeptics.
There are people all over the various sides of this debate who are claiming vast asymmetry.
I find that amusingly ironic. And quite revealing.
That’s why I follow this stuff, it is hilarious :)
This is shaping up as another all Joshua thread. I will stop reading now.
And will you fail to live up to that vow, as you have many times in the past?
PWAHO.
Joshua Your 9.33
Judith is a very experienced editor. She may have decided that including the piece you highlight was either superflous or exceeded the space she wanted to devote to that subject.
As I know from writing articles you simply can’t include EVERYTHING you might want to, or ought to, or you end up recreating a novel the size of War and Peace. You should not see conspiracies around every corner-there is usually a much more prosaic reason for why things happen.
all the best
tonyb
tony – your 12:44
My assumption was that it was an oversight.
If it was a deliberate omission – my assumption is that she didn’t think that paragraph to be of relative importance. My point is that would be very ironic (coincidental?) – as: (1) he excerpted the article with a hat tip to me – and that was the single paragraph that I found most relevant to Climate Etc., and, (2) I first came to Climate Etc. because of Judith’s discussion of socio-centric influence on the climate debate, and that is the running issue I have had with Judith since that fateful day of my arrival, yet she found it to be less relevant than the preceding and following paragraphs?
She found a paragraph that discussed how understanding that we all run in packs is a key ingredient in critical thinking to be relatively unimportant?
You gotta admit, that is either an amazing coincidence or highly ironic. Don’t you?
Indeed, triabalism is expected in a political debate, but it has no place in a scientific debate, we should all be in one tribe, the tribe that is interested in finding the truth wherever it may lie.
Kumbayah.
Reality has its ironies. A good sense of humor is always beneficial :)
LOL and a good spell checker would be nice as well.
Yawn. Again another post reinforcing my point about “blog science” being a non-starter. Too few willing to discuss the science itself, too many just looking to score points and wind people up, sorry seen it all before, it is no longer original, witty or funny.
Actually, I would love to discuss the science. I find that time series analysis is inadequate in that respect as performed on global averages that tend to mask complex relationship between regional impacts. That a fluid dynamic approach that considers the various thermal boundaries with their inherently differing time constants is much likely to produce accurate results.
The varying time constants involved produce pseudo-chaotic fluctuations which require detailed analysis resolve.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2011/11/learning-equation-kimoto-modified.html
The above is a tool I am working on to help simplify the approach for such a complex system. Yes, it is far from complete.
Joshua,
Stop lying.
You are nothing if not a little tribal troll for AGW.
Indeed, I tolerate extremist skeptics because they offset the extremist greens. Or as LBJ said, he may be an SOB, but he is my SOB. Politics is a contact sport and the climate debate is fundamentally political. The political system is the democratic decision system and we are trying to make policy decisions here. Would that the world were otherwise but it is not.
I think if you speak to Dikran (above) he will profoundly disagree with you. He firmly believes science is about finding out the truth. That is a little bit quaint for me, and not what the history of science is telling me, but nevertheless, is the climate debate ‘fundamentally political?’
I don’t think it is political for me (at all) even though it is rarely about the science either.
Let me put it this way. Of the almost 140,000 comments to date on this blog there would be approximately none if this were just an academic scientific issue. Now add in all the other climate blogs, plus the news reports and comments thereon, op-eds, books, meetings, legislative proposals, government programs, etc, since 1980-something. Show me a scientific issue with no policy implications that gets 0.001% of this action. The delta is the political forcing, as it were. This is what I mean by fundamentally political. It is why we are here. Decisions must be made.
More personally, I have devoted a significant fraction of my life since 1992 to this issue, yet I have no actual interest in climate science whatsoever. My scientific interests lie elsewhere, in human cognition. But I have been forced to waste my life because a political movement that I fear and despise has chosen its interpretation of climate science as its road to power. Is that clear enough?
I am not saying that scientific reasoning does not apply to the scientific arguments. On the contrary, I am fighting to get scientific reasoning applied. It is an uphill struggle.
The history of science isn’t necessarily a good indication of how it should be done. The best thing we can do with history is learn from it, normally how to do better in future and not repeat old mistakes.
It is strange that we are both here for reasons primarily not to do with the science, but our concerns barely overlap. I have some interest in cognition but I don’t see that as the relevant perspective here. I tend to be interpreting a world of emotion, belief, imagination, self-image, social groupings, us-and-them, and something primal about the unknown – the dark and unknowable future. To me it is not about the science, but it’s not much about the poiltics.
I have some conlict with sceptics who rightly decry those who fear a 2 degree temperature rise, but themselves say that a 1 % diversion of GDP will cause a definite economic catastrophe. It seems odd, and then I start to recognise the same fears and imaginings in the extreme sceptics as I do in the extreme believers.
I’m not the biggest fan of inefficient windmills etc but I hardly see the end of the world as a result of wasting some money on them. At the very worst, our children are only going to be twice as well off as our parents, and I suspect they’ll cope.
I suppose this may be a national divide – here in Europe I don’t see quite the polarisation that you have in America, even though we appear to your eyes as very left-wing and green. I’m not sure about that, but I wonder what it is that you ‘fear and despise’ – is it totalitarians? taxers? freedom-takers? As someone blissfully ignoring political dichotomies, it is hard to know.
Anteros: The difference between us is apparently that you are an amused observer while I am a dedicated activist. And to answer your question as to what I fear and despise, it is indeed totalitarianism. Enjoy the show.
A “1% diversion” borders on disinformation. The direct expenditures are not the issue. The crippling of the energy lifelines of both developed and developing nations is. And the impact will/would be far more than “1%”.
How else is the 30-95% reduction in population so heartwarmingly advocated by the lovers of Gaia to be achieved?
Brian H –
I see where you’re coming from, and I understand some extremists are recommending the things you describe. I too hear them much more loudly than their numbers suggest is appropriate. Especially the ones saying that ” there is a cancer spreading across the face of the earth and its name is MAN”
However, if we start taking them seriously, are we not the same as the alarmists who are terrified of a 1 degree rise in temperature and think that it spells the end of civilisation?
I agree that what the fruit cakes are calling for is lunacy, but I don’t see evidence that it is being taken seriously – at least not in Europe. Perhaps I was trivialising with my 1% because UK policies are already starting to be expensive. But in the great scheme of things it is no great concern – our government’s absolute priority is getting re-elected, and first and foremost that means keeping the lights on and the cars filled up.
I suppose I see Kyoto as a truly pointless folly, but I don’t fear economic meltdown or totalitarian governments any more than I do a milder climate. I do have a capacity to be concerned about the enviro-extremists, but I suppose I have faith that there is a naturally limiting process that keeps their numbers small. And in Europe, we can watch our neighbours and see more clearly than they can, the consequences of policies that don’t stack up.
Joshua,
YOur supercilious, “gotcha” style is really quite tiresome. DOn’t you suppose Dr. C’s characterizations are meant to be broad generalizations, and that she’d readily concede there are plenty of exceptions?
pokerguy –
That could very well be. In which case she should amend her language to be more accurate.
I frequently ask Judith to quantify her language, or to quantify her “certainty” on various issues. She usually doesn’t respond.
If she makes broad generalizations and then doesn’t respond to requests for clarification, then how should I interpret her meaning?
Joshua
Our host here does not claim to be an oracle.
I’m sure that she has opinions and beliefs, like all of us. But she appears to be much more open to new ideas than many of us here, especially when it comes to the debate on the science behind the climate change postulations.
There may be those here who would wish for her to quantify her position more specifically.
Some of these may have the ulterior motive to nitpick at the details of her statements to try to find weak spots. Others may simply be curious for information from someone who has more knowledge than they, themselves, do.
But IMO it is wiser for someone like our host to use her knowledge as a catalyst to help others engage in the discussion without entering the debate herself.
Do you understand?
Max
PS Besides, ladies do not revel all their secrets.
I find it difficult to judge how open some people are relative to others – but I would generally agree with that assessment of Judith.
I don’t see why that should mean that I shouldn’t find it interesting to explore the flaws in her analysis.
‘
I assume that was directed at me? If so, I’m not exactly certain what ulterior motivations have have assigned to me. I think that my motivations are pretty clear, and I’ve stated them numerous times. If you’re interesting in hearing what I have to say about that, you can ask. If you think that what I say is irrelevant to your ability to assess my motivations, then that’s your prerogative.
I don’t agree that Judith doesn’t enter the debate herself. She enters the debate explicitly at times, and implicitly either by the sheer act of running a post, or by selectively responding to the over-the-top rhetoric of Martha while not likewise responding to the over-the-top rhetoric of Wagathon. IMO, these are simply realities, and it is either naive or disingenuous to deny those realities.
I don’t differentiate my responses to Judith on the basis of her gender. I tend to doubt that she’d want that anyway.
Joshua
Thanks for your response.
By picking out a part of my paragraph and ignoring the rest, you apparently came to the conclusion that I was accusing you of asking JC for more details so you could “nitpick”. The part you missed was:
I presume that is the case for you, right?
Max
Yes, that is the case. From Judith and others who know more than I do.
Sorry for misinterpreting your meaning. I picked the paragraph apart, in all honesty, because I was trying to clarify your meaning – and yes, I was making some degree of assumption there, incorrectly.
Joshua, you keep saying this about me. I assume you are referring to the powerful ancient sense of rhetoric i.e., the study of how to use language well, for the purpose of justice, politics or calling nobility to account. Thank you for your kind words. :-)
Seriously, I know and discuss the science, and my focus is on social issues related to climate change, such as food security, poverty, maternal health, and children’s rights. I wonder which of these activities, represented in my comments as I see fit, you find ‘over the top’. Maybe I could, in support of what I see as problematic, suggest that you not continue to mistake your own excessive politeness (correctness) and akrasia, with using language well.
Here’s a rhetorical question for you, in the ancient spirit of using language well to make a point of justice: do you think millions of women living in poverty give a shit what you think they should think about climate change? Such ‘over the top rhetoric’ in my brief internet interactions has the value of stating my priorities very clearly to deniers.
Science has provided some insight into emissions, temperature and impacts. I have yet to see a comprehensive analysis on this blog of why that should not be one of the actions for responsibility-taking and justice, and will continue to discuss i.e., without your stamp of approval.
Glad we had this chat.
Joshua, you keep saying this about me. I assume you are referring to the powerful ancient sense of rhetoric i.e., the study of how to use language well, for the purpose of justice, politics or calling nobility to account. Thank you for your kind words. :-)
Seriously, I know and discuss the science, and my focus is on social issues related to climate change, such as food security, poverty, maternal health, and children’s rights. I wonder which of these activities, represented in my comments as I see fit, you find ‘over the top’. Given what I see as problematic, maybe I can suggest that you not continue to mistake your own excessive politeness (correctness) and akrasia with using language well.
Here’s a rhetorical question for you, in the ancient sense of using language well to make a point of justice: do you think millions of women living in poverty give a **** (the spam filter didn’t seem to like a previous version) what you think they should think about climate change? Such ‘over the top rhetoric’ in my brief internet interactions has the value of stating my priorities very clearly, to deniers.
Science has provided some insight into emissions, temperature and impacts. I have yet to see a comprehensive analysis on this blog of why that should not be one of the actions for responsibility-taking and justice, and will continue to discuss this i.e., without your stamp of approval.
Glad we chatted.
Martha
Martha, We all know you to be very regular, as well as active with your movements. Stay in touch with yourself and don’t try to do two things at once. We all know what happenend last time. It’s a dunna.
AGW was always based on a political wish to regulatate and control, the science was retrofitted to meet the wish. When you deal with a collective group of like minded people it’s hard to accept this.
You seem to leave out the fact that warmist control the machines of power and skeptics are the one under a brutal social assault. The paradox shows up in the many fantasies about “big oil” etc. Or take a look at OWS nonsense, why aren’t they protesting against the Fed or Fannie Mae over financial failures or excess??
The narrative is always more important than facts in real life in any community, including the general science Hoi Polli. Climate science is proof of that.
Disinformation versus fraud
dis·in·for·ma·tion
n.
1. Deliberately misleading information announced publicly or leaked by a government or especially by an intelligence agency in order to influence public opinion or the government in another nation.
2. Dissemination of such misleading information.
fraud
n.
1. A deception deliberately practiced in order to secure unfair or unlawful gain.
2. A piece of trickery; a trick.
In view of the multi-billion dollar ramifications of the “climate change business”, the emotional aspects and the heavy involvement of the media, politicians plus lobby groups, there is probably quite a bit of both out there.
Both are “deliberate”
Both involve “misleading information” or “deception”
“Disinformation” is practiced “in order to influence public opinion”
“Fraud” is practiced “in order to secure unfair or unlawful gain”
Looks to me like there is not much difference between the two, whether or not they are done by a “consensus believer” or a “consensus skeptic”.
I think you have to separate them from honest “screw-ups” or simply “misinformation”
mis·in·for·ma·tion
n.
information that is incorrect
There is also a lot if this out there but only a part of it is ”deliberate deception in order to secure unfair gain or influence public opinion”.
Question: The temperature prediction made in 1988 by James E. Hansen turned out to be wrong, i.e. it was a clear example of ”misinformation”. But was it also “fraud” or “disinformation” or was it just an honest “screwup” on the part of Hansen?
Max
But note that Judith ascribes an asymmetry in the climate debate based (at least in part) on distinguishing between the two.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/11/10/disinformation-vs-fraud-in-the-climate-debate/#comment-136695
What’s easier?
Killing the message or the messenger?
The last I checked…in Revolution’s for Dummy’s…taking control of the Radio station is Objective #1.
Of course in ‘Advanced Counter Revolutionary Warfare’ losing control of the radio station just means building a ‘bigger better radio’ station.
I.E. Killing the messenger doesn’t kill the message, it merely provides a short term’ tactical advantage.
One of the more entertaining facets of the ‘Climate Debate’ is that people who claim to be able to predict 50 years into the future seem to expend enormous effort and political capital on short term gains.
Killing the messenger and killing the message are ubiquitous on both sides of the debate.
Joshua
Absolutely.
This is often the case when the “message” conveyed by the “messenger” is perceived to be “disinformation” or “fraud”, regardless of which side of the debate has made it.
Max
Soon to be a Maxim?
Well Dr Curry, if you want an example of a “warmer” making accusations of fraud, here you go: Ethan Siegel accuses you of fraud here:
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/11/exposing_a_climate_science_fra.php
Apparently, you are being accused of fraud because of a graph you didn’t make, and on an accusation of cherry picking which is substantiated by quote mining and misrepresenting you. Or, putting it another, he cherry picks quotes to in an attempt to show you cherry picking, removes all nuance from them and puts his own spin in place, and then shouts fraud.
Although this fits in to your hypothesis of “warmers” preferring to attack the messenger (and being willing to distort the message to achieve that goal).
I have no problem with the use of the word fraud but do not like it to be used lightly. What matters is not the source but the transparency. In the case of Mann, he could have saved himself a lot of trouble by releasing the data and code and by showing his work well enough that people could follow. Had he done that people would have pointed out his errors, criticized him for his cherry picking, the use of inappropriate proxies and statistical methods and that would have been that. Instead he hid everything as much as he could and asked others in the ‘community’ to do the same. It was these later actions that turned what was error into fraud.
My tipping point from CAGW believer to CAGW skeptic was the minimization of the MWP by certain individuals and groups connected with the IPCC. Therefore I will view any individual or group connected to the “hockey stick style graphs” as mistaken. I use the term mistaken in kindness, I can think of much harsher terms, which most likely apply.
I will be always be skeptical of any paper or hypothesis by anyone or any group which does not take documented historical climate changes into consideration. By historical the minimum would be the last 12,000 years or so, I have yet to see any Co2 related theories which do so. Until we can explain the historical climate changes attempting to predict the future is ridiculous.
Mainstream climate science is well aware that temperatures 8000 years ago were higher than they are now, for a period of thousands of years, while CO2 levels were lower.
This points to higher temperatures being within the range of natural variability and it also points to a lack of catastrophic effects resulting from higher temperatures.
This is points to a massive scientific fraud on the part of mainstream climate science in supporting and promoting the notion of CAGW. The main driver of CAGW is grant money, not CO2.
Spence_UK
The Ethan Siegel article you cite is a good example of “disinformation”.
The author is apparently in denial that there has been a 10-year pause in global (land and sea) warming since early 2001.
He uses the BEST (land only) record to make his argument, cherry-picks out a 12-month period of record warmth from the GISS record to underscore his point and berates our host for having stated (the pretty obvious fact) that a 10-year pause would be hard to observe in a graph plotting 10-year moving averages.
Then he accuses our host of “fraud” for not having removed two questionable data points from the BEST record.
Duh!
I’d be more afraid running into this cat in a dark alley than fighting his flawed rhetoric.
Max
Is there statistically significant evidence that there has been a pause in the rate of warming rather than a continued warming that has been temporarily masked by noise? I don’t think it is fair to say that someone is in denial for not agreeing something exists in the absence of statistically significant evidence.
That doesn’t excuse accusations of fraud of course.
Did Dr Curry ever claim the downturn was statistically significant, or anything other than noise?
I think her actual point was that Dr Muller claimed it would be the end of the debate; Dr Curry noted that sceptics would still pounce on the last ten years, and that the debate was no different to where it was before.
I could be wrong though, I don’t speak for Dr Curry.
Agree that accusations of fraud are baseless and typical of the hyperbole that exists in the climate debate. Just to dredge up a cliche, in that respect Ethan is part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.
Judith said the Muller was “hiding the decline,” and she stood behind that statement.
There is an element of accusation of fraud there. Her statement was taken out of context, and she later disavowed accusation of fraud, but she remained (IMO) ambiguous in her statements.
There are different degrees of contributing to the problems and contributing to the solutions.
That word, “fraud”. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Same goes for Ethan.
Spence –
I’m saying that Judith’s statement was ambiguous.
From an earlier thread – I posted this to Judith (Judith previously clarified that when she said “hide the decline” she meant “hide the slowdown.”) :
This was her answer:
I think that was still ambiguous. I asked for further clarification, but got none from her. I got other answers, for example from mosher, saying that a graph itself can hide a decline without such an intent on the part of the person who creates the graph. That seems inadequate to me, but still, Judith herself never clarified what appeared to me as an ambiguity.
And there is solid evidence for the ambiguity of her statement. A newspaper ran a headline saying that Judith’s statement was that of an expert who said that global warming is “over.”
Now, of course, a headline can express an incorrect interpretation of someone’s statement – but I think that clearing up potential ambiguity is always the best way to go wrt questions of fraud.
Mosher’s right. You should listen to him.
“Did Dr Curry ever claim the downturn was statistically significant, or anything other than noise?”
No, but that is very much the problem, she should have, especially since she has explicitly stated some hypotheses, the norm in science is to test your hypotheses before publishishing them. I don’t think it is a good idea to float a hypothesis without having done the groundwork and mention the relevant caveats. All it does is reduce the signal to noise ratio of the discussion.
Note I am not saying that there hasn’t been a pause, there just isn’t good scientific evidence that there has.
An interview with a journalist is hardly publishing a scientific finding, now, is it? Whilst in hindsight the interview might have been handled a little differently, you are hardly going to stop an interview and say, “hang on a tick. I’ll just run some numbers and give a significance score”.
The need to genuflect at the altar of global warming with every statement is also a tedious and unnecessary demand.
Even if you are communicating science to journalists you need to get the science right and not make claims that are not backed up with by the data. In fact that is more important when discussing science with journalists as (i) they are unlikely to know that the lack of statistical significance is an issue and (ii) are more likely to misinterpret the significance of an issue if the caveats are not mentioned.
Sadly your second paragraph makes my previous point about blog-science being a non-starter. Suggesting that scientists should back up their claims and give caveats where the data are at best equivocal is not “genuflecting at the alter of global warming”. It is just scientific method, whereas hypebolic statements about genuflection are pure rhetoric.
The problem is that the discussion was not about hard line aspects about the science but about data presentation and whether the debate was “over” or not. These aren’t questions to which statistical significance tests can be applied.
While I agree that ideally scientific comments should be appropriately nuanced and caveated, there are times when that isn’t realistically possible, and that should not prevent a scientist on having an opinion, especially when the topic (is the debate over?) is hardly one to which a scientific analysis can easily be turned.
The genuflection at the altar of global warming comment is an aside really, a reference to the many media articles that feel the need to add the redundant comment “but this doesn’t disprove global warming…”. Those articles probably also don’t disprove the existence of god, but they don’t feel the need to add that for some reason.
“The problem is that the discussion was not about hard line aspects about the science but about data presentation and whether the debate was “over” or not. These aren’t questions to which statistical significance tests can be applied.”
If you are talking about trends in data, which is the case in this particular example, then statistical significance is central to correct scientific presentation of the data. This is a question where a test of statistical significance can easily be applied, but has not been as far as I can tell by anybody that is making claims about a pause in warming. Claims about trends that are based solely on the data should not be made unless there is statistically significant evidence to support the claim.
Yes, but by my reading (which I’ve already outlined, and which I accept might be wrong about), I do not think Dr Curry was making strong claims about the trends.
Her point as I read it was saying that the sceptics would make a fuss about them, and I think she was correct in that observation. You are imagining that she is adopting the sceptics arguments, rather than merely pointing out they exist.
In a debate over whether a debate exists or not, I do not think it is essential to add a comment over who is right in that debate.
If Prof. Curry was merey pointing out that skeptic would be making this claim, then as a scientist she should also mention the caveats against that argument, as otherwise it is merely decreasing the signal to noise ratio in the discussion.
This isn’t about who is right, it is about providing sound scientific evidence for the claims that are being made. There isn’t statistically significant evidence that there has been a pause. There isn’t statistically significant evidence that there has been warming since 2002 either. That is because there is too little data to be able to draw a conclusion either way. However, as there has been little change in the forcings, the evidence from the physics (rather than solely the observations) leans towards it being an artifact of the noise.
Scientific discussion of this issue is a good thing, but it is hampered by those arguing that there has been a pause in warming being unwilling to discuss the statistical significance of their claims.
If Dr Curry was making the claim in isolation, then I might be tempted to agree with you. But she wasn’t: she was offering an opinion that rebutted a specific claim made by Dr Muller. In that context, I think there is no burden on her to add an opinion on the quality of the debate which is a side issue on the main topic, whether the debate was over or not.
If Prof. Curry was rebutting somebody elses claim then the onus is on her to show that her rebuttal is sound and based on good scientific evidence.
No, I disagree, because she was not explicitly making the claim.
I can recognise that there is a debate between anti-vaccination and vaccination people without having to give an opinion on the debate itself; although if I was the one raising the topic, I would most likely note that I disagree with the anti-vaccination crowd.
But if someone said to me “this new data will end the anti-vaccination debate” I would have no trouble explaining that the anti-vaxxers will not accept the data without the need to add my position on the debate. In that context, the added point is redundant to the issue at hand.
Sorry, a rebuttal means you are making a claim, namely that the original claim is incorrect. In this case there is no statistically significant evidence that Prof. Muller’s claim is incorrect, hence the “rebuttal” was not on a sound footing.
So if someone was to claim the anti-vaccination debate was over because of some new data, I would be wrong to point out this was a naive view of how the anti-vaccination crowd approach debates?
The presence of a debate can be discussed without getting dragged into the rabbit hole of the debate itself. The need to dive off into every rabbit hole does have the ring of religious fervour to it.
Most scientists acknowledge that temperatures have not risen in the past (9, 11, 13) years. Various names have been given this interim (pause, lack of warming, warming hiatus, flattening) by names including Curry, Hansen, Trenberth, and Latif. Several explanations have also been proposed, such as aerosols from China, deep ocean mixing, ENSO or AMO changes, solar minimum, etc. These hypotheses are being floated without statistically significant evidence. Whether warming resumes in a year, two, five, ten or twenty has also been debated. This length of the “pause” will determine its significance in climate science. Currently, this recent “pause” has been longer in duration than the brief episodes during the 1980-2000 warming, but shorter than the 1945-1975 decline.
Some people are confusing the statement “not significantyl significant” with the more correct term, “not significantly different from zero.”
Dan,
the pause is a temp.Plateau, which cannot be seen if you, as the AGW does, prolong the trend 1750-2000 into the future. Prolonging a hindsight trend into the future will lead to wrong forecasts. What is needed (already on the market) is to have the proven physical mechanism, from which the forecast can be derived……
All AGW-forecasts, now waiting for the delayed jump in temps (suggestion for new post: WHEN WILL THE DELAYED TEMP-JUMP SET IN?) due to the ferocious action of CO2 are doomed…..
We are, since 2001, on a temp plateau, from which, after 2043, it can only go downward……..all brohaha from the warming brothers is
stuff for the paper bin…..
Without clarifying the scientific argument for why that view was naive or characteristic of how the anti-vaccination crowd approach debates?
I would say not necessarily wrong, but insufficiently scientific in approach.
DanH there is no statistically significant evidence that there has been a change in the rate of warming (at least none has been brought forward). The fact that the trend is not significantly positifve does not mean there is evidence that it has cooled. Statistical hypothesis tests are not symmetrical. I am asking for evidence that there has been a change in the warming rate.
Dikran,
If you take the slope of the GISS monthly temperature data, the slope (60-month linear regression analysis) was increasing until 7/97 when it peaked at 0.4C/decade. The slope has been decreasing ever since, and currently stands at 0.01C / decade. The last time the slope has decreased for a similar period was 5/36 – 4/46, which was the start of the mid-century cooling.
At this point, we cannot say if this decrease will continue or reverse course and head higher. However, it has caught the attention of many prominent climate scientists.
Dikran Marsupoial
This is the kind of logic that gets people into trouble.
– the observations show that since 2001 there has been a halt to the global warming trend that has been seen since 1976 (the HadCRUT3 record shows cooling of 0.06C per decade).
– GH theory tells us that it should have warmed by 0.2C per decade
So it is clear that there has NOT been a “continued warming”.
To postulate that there has been “continued warming that has been temporarily masked by noise” is purely speculative.
The “noise” is either a) an unknown forcing, which has not yet been identified but is strong enough to overwhelm the GH forcing from added CO2 (as you apparently assume) or b) evidence that the assumed GH forcing from CO2 was grossly exaggerated and that something else beside human GHGs is driving our climate.
Max
Max
Dikran
Sorry for typo on your name.
Max
No this is not correct. If you construct a synthetic time series with a fixed trend of 0.2 deg C perd decade, and noise statistically similar to the observed (detrended) temperature data, you will occasionally get such periods of little or no warming, even though the underlying trend continues unchanged, by construction.
“To postulate that there has been “continued warming that has been temporarily masked by noise” is purely speculative.”
It is the appropriate null hypothesis for anyone wishing to assert there has been a reduction in the rate of warming. The test is straightforward to perform for anyone with a solid grasp of time series analysis.
If you want to show that there has been a change, you need to demonstrate that the observations are not consistent with there having been no change. Likewise if you want to assert there has been warming, you need to show that the data are inconsistent (in the sense of low likelihood) with there being no warming. That is how statistical hypothesis testing works.
Dr. Curry,
Good points, but I think this is in effect a total war of ideas.
In a social mania the promoters of the mania’s obsession (AGW in this case) go after anyone and every organization that stands in criticism of the social goals.
Skeptics point out that confirmation bias/noble cause corruption/profiteering all combine to make the believers see what they want to see no matter how trivial or unreliable the evidence.Since major maedia as well as academe are convinced believers in large part (which has happened in other social manias) almost any AGW supporting report gets great press and any critique is met with the sort of reaction we saw, for instance, your quesitoning some of the orthodoxy or the German papers Tol had such shallow reaction to.
Like any orthodoxy, the beleivers are particularly harsh on people they perceive as trusted insiders (you) daring to question the orthodoxy. Think of Luther, a good Catholic intellectual, daring to post his theses, as a guideline as to how entrenched opinion leaders react to one of their own.
Look at how Feynman is denigrated in many circles for daring to critique AGW as another example.
For an over the top offensive effort to control the AGw discussion, just think Chris Mooney’s and its neo-eugenics approach in his vile claim to be able to identify conservatism as an illness. There is a very good chance that the AGU is so “all in” on the AGW social movement that he will not pay any price for his implication that the AGU is joining him in ironically using pseudo-science of the cheapest order to justify Mooney’s political extremism.
Judith raises points that I suspect will get a great deal of comments from those who visit the site, but probably is not that key to the topic overall.
She asked: “Has anyone come across skeptics accusing a “warm” paper, or those publicizing such a paper, as promoting disinformation?”
My perception: I have frequently commented that papers hypothesizing about the supposedly dire conditions that will result from a warmer world seem to be completely unsupportable based on a fair and reasonable analysis of the data available. Claims from animals getting smaller, ocean acidification, future starvation, more intense future storms, catastrophic sea level rise, etc. etc., you name it an you can find some silly paper attributing a future undesirable potential condition to higher levels of atmospheric CO2 and a warmer planet. What I find interesting this that there are not more papers written purporting to explain how a warmer world will be “Eden like”. (I am not writing that this would be true, but there is certainly as much actual evidence to support the conclusion that a warmer world is better for humans as there is to support it is worse.
She writes: “I am hypothesizing that the reaction to a paper is very much colored by the authors.”
My perception: I guess I agree to a limited degree. Perhaps as an outsider, when I read these papers I generally do not know the authors and simply evaluate the papers based on how their conclusions seems supportable based on the evidence presented. It is true however that when I have read multiple papers written by someone who believe AGW will “certainly lead to this of that dire consequence” I tend to be highly skeptical of the writers conclusion in future papers before I make a through analysis.
Judith writes: “On the skeptical side, the accusations are focused on the author, whereas on the convinced side, the accusations are focused on people that enable/promote the paper (e.g. journal editors, bloggers, journalists, advocacy groups).
My perception: this one seems to be a natural byproduct of the strategy being used by those who initiated and are defending the concept of cAGW. The strategy was to get a large percentage of “scientists” to publically state that they agree with the conclusions, and then to “brand” anyone who questions their conclusions as an “unscientific denier”, who is unworthy of being listened to any further. This strategy would naturally lead to trying to aggressively discredit and “scientist” who publically tries to unravel their core strategy as quickly as possible.
Judith writes: “skeptics are more focused on the science, and the “convinced” are more focused on the solutions.”
My perception- I tend to disagree with Judith here. I believe that skeptics fall into many “camps”, but that they all ultimately disagree with the conclusion that the mitigation actions recommended by the IPCC make sense. “Skeptics” can believe that the IPCC’s case breaks down for a wide variety of reasons, but in truth almost any of these reasons being valid makes the IPCC case invalid. The “convinced” are doggedly trying to hold the line and state that the IPCC’s conclusions are correct because so many “scientists” said so. If you disagree you are branded to have a “Rick Perry like intelligence”. I would say that even a broken clock is right twice per day and Perry happened to have been told to say the right thing on this issue.
Rob,
Good summation.
The AGW community implicity understands this, and so we see many believers defending every detail ofthe IPCC, no matter how discredited or tenuous the claim.
It is similar, in a way, to theological fundamentalists who are strongly convinced that their interpretation of Bible or Koran is the actual true one, and any one who dares to disagree with any part is there by rejecting the entire edifice of belief they proclaim. Notice how fundamentalist literalists tend to also be obsessed with a grand apocalypse sweeping away the old, proving the rightness of their beliefs and bringing about a new world that their enlightenment has forseen.
Rob Starkey:
“My perception: this one seems to be a natural byproduct of the strategy being used by those who initiated and are defending the concept of cAGW. The strategy was to get a large percentage of “scientists” to publically state that they agree with the conclusions, and then to “brand” anyone who questions their conclusions as an “unscientific denier”, who is unworthy of being listened to any further. This strategy would naturally lead to trying to aggressively discredit any “scientist” who publically tries to unravel their core strategy as quickly as possible.”
Absolutely spot on. You see it all the time here and in other similar forums.
Claims from animals getting smaller, ocean acidification, future starvation, more intense future storms, catastrophic sea level rise, etc. etc., you name it an you can find some silly paper attributing a future undesirable potential condition to higher levels of atmospheric CO2 and a warmer planet.
Yes, the numberwatch.co.uk site enumerates this rather well.
I think this also speaks to the concept of asymmetry that Joshua and his fellow travelers seem to struggle with. Thousands of newspaper articles and snippets from armchair science mags and sites claim CO2 and climate change is responsible for everything ranging from neanderthal dentition to malaria outbreak migration; there’s a virtual avalanche of chicken little screeching.
On the skeptic side there’s… nothing. To be symmetrical skeptics would have to write a thousand papers a day, each of which having to specifically focus on and prove that AGW isn’t a factor. The game is rigged.
It was only last week that I read an article showing that neanderthal physiology was probably more a result of their preferred terrain rather than climate changes, and even then after the paper writers made their case, they still seemed to feel a need to throw in the now obligatory “but a changing climate probably had an effect too so we can’t discount AGW.” The obligation to toe the line despite proving that climate change was a non-factor is evidence of asymmetry.
To me the sheer volume of obligatory AGW references alone in articles having nothing to do with AGW itself is amazing, and I find it mind boggling that anyone could question the notion of asymmetry.
Which specific papers do you take issue with, and why?
Have you submitted any comments regarding these flawed papers?
manacker | November 11, 2011 at 9:36 am | Reply
fraud
2. A piece of trickery; a trick.
From: Phil Jones
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
“trick” in the sense of a clever mathematical device is perfectly standard scientific terminology in many fields, for example
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.20.327
“trick” to hide inconvenient findings? That’s pseudo-science and fraud. Tricks are no problem, hiding the decline is the fraud.
How is hiding a temperature decline that never occurred a fraud?
Huh?
Hiding inconvenient findings in science is pseudo-science and scientific fraud. You brought up a temperature.
The ‘inconvenient finding” in this case is the divergence, something that was already know by scientists. How can you hide something that’s already known.
Ask Mr. Jones why he wanted to hide it then. Who was he hiding it from? From public? Scientists who didn’t know about the decline? Is that disinformation? Fraud? You decide.
Jones may have thought it was misleading.
The difference here is that in mathematics, “tricks” exist because the allow you to arrive at an answer without changing the answer. They are better referred to as short-cuts.
A trick that changes the answer is not an acceptable mathematical trick.
A mathematical trick is very similar to a catalyst in chemistry. It speeds things up without actually being included in the result. Mike’s Nature trick didn’t speed up the result, it changed the result. Thus, it wasn’t a “trick” in the scientifically accepted sense.
Mike’s Nature trick is more in the sense of a Magician’s trick, in that it misdirected the attention of the audience away from one part of the data towards another part, so that the audience would not be aware of what was actually happening.
“Mike’s Nature trick is more in the sense of a Magician’s trick, in that it misdirected the attention of the audience away from one part of the data towards another part, so that the audience would not be aware of what was actually happening.”
That’s disinformation isn’t it?
“Mike’s Nature trick is more in the sense of a Magician’s trick, in that it misdirected the attention of the audience away from one part of the data towards another part, so that the audience would not be aware of what was actually happening.”
Yes, this statement is misinformation. It implies a decline in temperature was “actually happening.” It wasn’t.
No, I said disinformation :)
I think that fits the definition of “disinformation” pretty squarely. And nobody spinning this has ever been able to explain what utilitarian purpose it serves (aside from disinformation).
There’s still so much denial about the leaked emails, it’s amazing. So much stuff in there – trickery, funded by big oil, pseudo-scientific attitude, suppression of science, dogmatism… The whistleblower (whoever it is) deserves the Nobel prize for science.
Yes, Edim, I agree with you completely.
Edim,
Yet look how the same journalists who breathlessly report on stolen transcripts, illegally leaked sealed court records, matters of natinoal security, find it abhorent and unethical to even quote in context from cliamtegate e-mails.
You never know…it’s that time of year again….we might get some more!
Edim,
I enjoyed your discussion above on “hide the decline.” I would like to set out the case clearly.
In “hiding the decline,” Jones and friends were hiding the fact that the last forty years (forty years, for goodness sake) of tree ring data did not show an increase in temperature but a decline. Let’s be clear on this. Our main line of evidence is tree ring data but for the last forty years the tree rings have been getting smaller. Two conclusions must be drawn: 1) our data does not support the claim of an increase in temperature and 2) because the decline has been ongoing for forty years it calls into question all tree ring data for this kind of tree.
Rather than report the last forty years of evidence, Jones and friends hid the decline by replacing (replacing) on their graphs the last forty years of tree ring data with thermometer readings. In their published materials, they provided no explanation of what they had done. I will not judge these actions. I will leave that up to you. Anyone care to argue that it is good science and that it is just plain old honest?
Yes, there are all kinds of excuses. Briffa published some papers on the matter around the time. However, if you read the papers, Briffa offered no scientific explanation of the decline. He did not know why it happened. Anyone want to award Briffa a medal for great scientific instincts? I hear that he has a paper in press addressing the matter but I do not recall the specifics. Now fancy that. Only ten years late does he address the actual empirical work necessary to explain what caused those tree rings to shrink. That pretty much sums up the whole sordid story of the so-called science of paleoclimatology.
Actually Theo it is worse than that.
The tree ring proxies are calibrated to measured temperature. The correlation between ring widths/density and temperature provides two pieces of data; the relationship between rings and temperature and also the confidence interval. The larger the confidence interval, then the bigger the range of estimated temperature of the past is. By ignoring the ‘divergence’ part of the relationship the ‘Team’ were able to reduce the uncertainty of historical temperature.
Imagine if drug companies had given a drug to people and found a huge improvement in heart/lung function for 9 months, but found a divergence between 10-15 months when everyone died.
They could plot outcome on a graph that covered 15 months and 9 months. If they did the former, no one would take the drug. If they did the latter, they would be in prison.
What did the ‘Team’ do?
Excellent post. Thanks.
http://climateaudit.org/2009/11/20/mike%E2%80%99s-nature-trick/
Back in December 2004 John Finn asked about “the divergence” in Myth vs. Fact Regarding the “Hockey Stick” -thread of RealClimate.org.
Whatever the reason for the divergence, it would seem to suggest that the practice of grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record – as I believe was done in the case of the ‘hockey stick’ – is dubious to say the least.
mike’s response speaks for itself.
No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstrution. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum.
Do you have a link to the thread at RealClimate.org so we can see the full context of Mann’s statement rather than rely on what McIntyre pulled out?
I guess he assumed his readers have at least a passing familiarity with the subject and so would be aware of what Mann said.
Not so, it seems, M.carey
You could try looking for it yourself.
Unless of course your purpose here is to try to cast aspersion on eithe ferd or McIntyre (who I don’t see mentioned at all in ferd’s comment).
[Response: No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum. Most proxy reconstructions end somewhere around 1980, for the reasons discussed above. Often, as in the comparisons we show on this site, the instrumental record (which extends to present) is shown along with the reconstructions, and clearly distinguished from them (e.g. highlighted in red as here). Most studies seek to “validate” a reconstruction by showing that it independently reproduces instrumental estimates (e.g. early temperature data available during the 18th and 19th century) that were not used to ‘calibrate’ the proxy data. When this is done, it is indeed possible to quantitatively compare the instrumental record of the past few decades with earlier estimates from the proxy reconstruction, within the context of the estimated uncertainties in the reconstructed values (again see the comparisons here, with the instrumental record clearly distinguished in red, the proxy reconstructions indicated by e.g. blue or green, and the uncertainties indicated by shading). -mike]
Judith Re: “Has anyone come across people from the warm side characterizing a paper with as fraud?”
They specifically accuse Fred Singer. e.g.
Fred Singer: Let’s Lie About Global Warming
Global Warming Denier: Fraud or ‘Realist’?
(Unnamed)
At the risk of generalizing, when you understand the argument, but you find it flawed, you call it ‘disinformation’; when you can’t find a flaw in the argument, but also can’t reconcile the conclusion with your emotional attachments, one way to achieve reconciliation is to call it ‘fraud’.
So, if you read Dr. Mann’s original article, he explains how he constructed the graph. Explaining what you are doing is a curious way to hide or deceive anyone about something; it is only because the conclusions can not be reconciled with someone’s emotional attachments that they choose to interpret Dr. Jone’s use of the word ‘trick’ to mean that Dr. Mann did something nefarious.
You also have to consider the audience; Dr. Mann was not writing to the layperson; he was writing to his peers, who were/are familiar with the subject. Does anyone seriously believe that other climate researchers were mislead by what Dr. Mann did?
You can take issue with the technical merits of grafting time series records together, but a claim of fraud is spurious. Fraud involves intentional deceit; where is the deceit if you have explained your methods and sources of data?
Why is anyone still talking about this?
Chris G,
Mann deceived with his explanation, either deliberately or not.
I see. And if you believe that it was a deception, then you think that the recent warming is not a substantial increase over the history of the last thousand years or so. So, I’m curious, how to you reconcile the measured difference between incoming and outgoing energy, the shifting of the seasons, the shifting of Hadley cells, the recent opening of the NW and NE passages, the recent migration of species through this passage, etc., with your concept that there has been no unusual warming in recent decades?
If you believe that there has been unusual warming, and Dr. Mann’s results indicate unusual warming, where is the deceit?
Chris G,
You are correct: the recent warming is trivial, inconsequential and not causing humans or anyone else problems worth anything like the money and attention the AGW movement is demanding to pursue delusions like ‘mitigation’.
Doesn’t the word deceive imply intention?
Non-intentional deceit is an oxymoron, and most who claim that Dr. Mann did something wrong think it was on purpose. In any case, ‘fraud’ does not apply if it was not intentional.
Nice try at shifting the goal posts.
Fraud and Mann: He said that MWP aand LIA is regional confined to the Northern Hemisphere – so he stated that this as fact
whereas, see in latest NIPCC study on the MWP and LIA in the Southern Hemisphere”
reference Bertler, N.AA.N., Mayewski, P.A. Carter, L: “Cold conditions in Antarktika during the Little Ice age – implications for abrupt climate change mechanisms” in Earth and Planetary Sciences 308 , 41-51
stating “the MWP and the LIA have been true global….” – i.e. also simultaneously in the South….
This is how fraud and disinformation comes out after all, clearly to be seen by everyone…….
You are not addressing the question of the time series ‘trick’, and raising a new topic on to the difference between his assertions and other’s assertions. Does that mean that you are giving up on the belief that the ‘trick’ was an intentional deception?
Chris,
I quoted a study, with abstract and comment published today on the NIPCC website. The study is hard-core Deuderium analysis, showing
simultaneous MWP-LIA-Present Epoch warming/cooling on both hemispheres, which MANN denies…thus lying (forget “assertions”.) as if MANN did not know that it also warms and cools on the other half of the globe ….. ..
Chris G,
He misled people into thinking we are dealing with a unique crisis regarding the climate.
History and the current situation shows we are not.
whether he decieved himself sincerely or sought deceeive others deliberately, people have allowed tens of billions to be spent based in no small part on his hockey stick.
His behavior as revealed in cliamtegate and in his sad avoidance of mormal reviews of his work since climategate strongly implies a deliberate effort on his part, but we will eventually know one way or the other.
You haven’t addressed the the observations that I pointed out. It appears you reconcile them by pretending they don’t exist.
Chris G,
You pointed out nothign other than your opinion.
You fool yourself into confusing them with facts.
You are correct; it is my opinion. My opinion is based on information that can readily be verified with a simple search, for instance “hadley cell expansion”.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hadley+cell+expansion
What is your opinion based on?
Wait a minute Judith,
Weren’t there two particular issues that raised doubts about Mann? First was the CENSORED directory which was found on his ftp site and contained adverse data that he did not report in MBH’98; Second was his claim that he had never computed the r^2 in validation and therefore was innocently unaware of the very poor fit–yet again, files and datestamps of this files from ftp site again suggested that he had in fact done this?
I don’t endorse these claims first hand, but weren’t these the claims that led to suggestions of impropriety? You’re suggesting double standards here. That isn’t accurate. The fact patterns are different.
“Mike’s Nature trick is more in the sense of a Magician’s trick”
Of course that’s a flawed analogy inasmuch as we expect a magician to be tricking us.
Judith,
I think you are correct in observing that both “sides” use a different framing (and hence different words) to describe papers perceived to be bad: Disinformation vs fraudulent.
That said, Richard Tol doesn’t strike me as someone to argue based on authorship or activism or lack thereof. His reaction to this affair makes him look quite non-tribal (and if anything, people in the skeptical camp in general seem to appreciate his opinions more than people in the activist camp). So your judgment about his reaction is off the mark I’d say.
I’d never heard of Ludecke. But a pepr that concludes that the warming is all due to natural and unforced variability has quite some ‘splaining to do. It would mean that the climate system is highly unstable (and climate sensitivity to be huge; runaway warming/cooling). It strikes me as unphysical, which sets off my BS detector.
Similar as when a student arrives at an answer tha is unphysical. I tried to teach them to always do a sanity check on their answers. If the answer you got is that you need 10^4 kg of chemical to prepare a solution, chances are the correct answer is 10^-4, for example.
Btw, I would be in favor of double blind review, ie that the names of the authors are hidden from the reviewers. Thia has all kinds of practical problems, eg in many (or even most) cases it’s clear which group wrote the paper, but it would prevent a bias in the review from seeing the authors’ names. I’m thinking more of a bias that relates to seniority/juniority than anything else, but still.
The Hurst phenomenon does not imply instability. It is a stationary stochastic model which has a defined population mean and standard deviation which in turn constrain the system.
I don’t agree with the Ludecke papers attribution, but Hurst dynamics don’t really meet any definition of the word “unstable” that I can think of.
“I’d never heard of Ludecke. But a pepr that concludes that the warming is all due to natural and unforced variability has quite some ‘splaining to do. It would mean that the climate system is highly unstable (and climate sensitivity to be huge; runaway warming/cooling). It strikes me as unphysical, which sets off my BS detector.”
Again, the well-known AGW blind spot. The alleged AGW started significantly in ~1950. Sceptics need to ‘splain that climate warmed (and cooled) due to natural and unforced variability before AGW? Climate changed before AGW and it will change after AGW. Nothing unusual is happening.
I would have thought there is plenty of evidence that climate had plenty of FORCED variability prior to 1950. Attributing climate changes over multi-decadal timespans to UNforced variability would need rather more explaining. If you read the IPCC WG1 report, you will find they say that you need both natural and anthropogenic forcings to explain the observed climate, which seems pretty reasonable to me.
We don’t KNOW the overall net forcing at any point! We’re not even close.
You are missing the point, attributing centennial scale climate change to unforced variability isn’t well supported by physics. If we don’t know the forcings that would make it even more difficult to attribute change to unforced variability, not less, as it would make any attribution uncertain.
The point is that the most plausible explanation for climate variability prior to 1950 is the changes in the forcings prior to 1950.
If we don’t know all the forcings, then we also don’t know which variations are forced and which are not. We can not separate forced and unforced.
Climate changes at all time scales. That’s the only certainty. So much room for science.
Edim, our knowledge of the forcings being uncertain does not mean we have no knowledge. The most plausible explaination based on the information we have and our knowledge of atmospheric physics is that changes in climate are principally due to changes in forcings. Science proceeds via reduction to the most plausible explanations, not certain knowledge for the simple reason that certain knowledge regarding causal relationships in the observable universe is fundamentally impossible (see Hume etc.).
Dikran Marsupial | November 11, 2011 at 12:30 pm
This is like an “anti ad-hominem”, the idea that we understand enough about both the physics of climate and the mechanism of climate to make such a claim.
Dikran, we don’t know why the climate varies the way it has, that’s the whole point. We don’t know why it was warmer in Roman and Medieval times, and cooler in between.
So to claim that something about the climate “isn’t supported by the physics” is getting way ahead of the game. What you may be trying to say is:
Unlike yours, that statement at least has the advantage of being true.
Cf, the current 15-year hiatus in the warming. We don’t know why that happened, Dikran. The issue is not that that the fifteen-year plateau warming “isn’t well supported by physics”.
It is that we do not have a clue why it happened, so whether it is supported by physics is even in question—we don’t even know what physics might apply.
w.
Is there statistically significant evidence that there has been a plateau in warming, rather than it just being an artifact of the noise?
Of course not. Is it statistically significant that science would predict a warming trend during a warming trend? Or that economists would predict market growth during a growing market? You can always find sound fundamentals to reinforce an obvious prediction.
Now, are anomalies in those fundamentals of any significance? The Antarctic is stable which is an anomaly. Stratospheric moisture is an anomaly. OHC is an anomaly. Cloud feedback is appearing to be an anomaly. Solar UV is an anomaly. How many anomalies can a theory not predict before it is justified to question the theory?
The models DO predict that short term variability will result in occasional periods of little or no warming, see the paper by Easterling and Wehner. They can’t predict WHEN they will happen as you can’t predict noise, but the models had predicted that they happen occasionally; however I suspect nobody thought it was an interesting enough prediction to be worth mentioning (as it says nothing about forced climate change).
Yes, they can’t predict when they will happen, and they can’t explain them when they do happen. All they can do is wring their hands over the warming hiatus. The climate science has some growing up to do.
I don’t recall mentioning the hiatus. The Antarctic is not a hiatus, UV, Clouds or OHC. The hiatus would be in the estimate 10% natural unforced variability, which I did not mention. Oh, I did find that interesting. So which topic is it that you really wish to discuss?
Looking at the recent temperature hiatus and saying that because there have been other pauses in temperatures these pauses are similar does not account for the trace gas radiative transfer model whereby escalations in global CO2 are suppose to be coupled to temperature rises. If global CO2 levels are unprecedented, at least over the last 8000 years, and global warming is unprecedented, doesn’t the juxtaposition of the two: CO2 and global mean temperature with the current temperature hiatus say something is likely to be wrong? Either CO2 is not unprecedented, or temperatures are not unprecedented, or maybe the connectivity of CO2 and temperature are really not that tight, or if tight, not that important to a non-quilibrium, non-linear, oscillatory climate system. There are too many unknowns and uncertainties to extract a signal in the data. You just can’t say that this hiatus is like a previous hiatus because it is claimed that at this time temperatures and CO2 levels are unprecedented, unless they aren’t.
The key sentence:
“these pauses are similar does not account for the trace gas radiative transfer model whereby escalations in global CO2 are suppose to be coupled to temperature rises.”
You are putting way to much faith in these models. Dikran danced around this on another thread.
WRT,
“…attributing centennial scale climate change to unforced variability…”
“…the idea that we understand enough about both the physics of climate and the mechanism of climate to make such a claim.”
We have observed ENSO cycles, solar cycles, and others; we have no observations of any physical mechanism cycles operating on centennial timescales, at least none that have changed much in the last century. (Well, actually, the carbon cycle has changed a lot in the past century.) And, we have thousands of years of evidence that the climate is not inherently unstable.
We do have a pretty good grasp on the law of conservation of matter and energy. Without a physical mechanism to attribute the changes to, you are suggesting that there is something wrong with our understanding of this law.
To Chris:
as you say: ….concerning climate——-.” Without a physical mechanism to attribute the changes to, you are suggesting that there is something wrong with our understanding…….”
The mechanism is already out, on small scale published distribution, see more details in my response to Willis…….
dont dispair, all truth will come out one day.wait and see next year….
JS
Willis,
to your opinion:
———” current 15-year hiatus in the warming. We don’t know why that happened, The issue is not that that the fifteen-year plateau warming “isn’t well supported by physics”.
It is that we do not have a clue why it happened, so whether it is supported by physics is even in question—we don’t even know what physics might apply.”
— it is all resolved, but you dont know……..see the German booklet at Amazon.de: ISBN 978-3-86805-604-4
All explained transparently: The physics (astronomical Libration
forcing), the forcing mechanism and the forcing quantities….
It just needs to be translated…..sorry it takes a while……
The physics behind it is the pendulum swinging movement of the Earth around its orbital path……
The IPCC suppressed this at the major LA – meeting 2006 before
issuing IPCC-AR4 in 2007, and “assumed with great happiness” (CLA, wg1, chapter 2) and confined the Earth’s orbit to be STATIC on a millenium scale………
…… therefore all this guesswork and wasted efforts to explain and predict climate…there is one major RF-driver MISSING, therefore,
your clue is also missing and nothing adds up….no wonder…
JS
Joachim Seifert
Might one suggest what may be called an alternative hypothesis, or a clarifying question?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo/from:1975/to:2005/trend/plot/esrl-amo/from:1945/to:1975/trend/plot/esrl-amo/from:1915/to:1945/trend/plot/esrl-amo/from:1885/to:1915/trend/plot/esrl-amo/mean:23/mean:31/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1917/to:1940/trend/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1940/to:1963/trend/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1963/to:1986/trend/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1986/trend/plot/jisao-pdo/to:1917/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2000/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1940/to:1970/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/trend/plot/esrl-co2/mean:5/mean:7/normalise
AMO 60-year oscillating trend consistent since 1885; PDO 46-year approx. (more amplitude-variant, thus less well defined) trend since 1917.
Result: simply adding the two trends produces a 90-year span simulating 60-year period rising wave clearly seen in the global temperature (with some manipulation of dataset, this apparition can be manufactured to extend the apparent period, but I can only get 90 years) from 1910.
Problem: this 90-year trompe l’oiel span ought have turned downward at 70 years if only the PDO and AMO were determining the global temperature. Something around 1980 caused the last ghost-arm of the oscillation to persist 20 more years on the uprise.
I believe AGW is the most viable culprit for the rise since 1980 at least (and probably contributed earlier, at lower levels, too).
What makes the AMO and PDO work the way they do may be related through some teleconnection to the libration hypothesis, though I don’t see how.
Do you?
So, let’s see…
Willis, do you or do you not agree with Joachim’s hypothesis about a change in orbital characteristics being the driving force behind the warming in recent decades?
Do you agree that it is warming?
If so, would you care to respond to Hunter’s assertion that it is not?
It’s all about getting the science right, no?
Willis,
“we don’t even know what physics might apply.”
Well that is not correct, we can narrow down the list of candidates.
1. Look at the list of all positive forcings. your answer might lie there
2. Look at negative forcinsgs, you answer may lie there
3. internal forcings– the great unknow.
So we do know what physics might apply, NAMELy all the physics we know and all the physics ( natural unforced variability)
What we dont have is a closed form solution.
“…our knowledge of the forcings being uncertain does not mean we have no knowledge.”
Dikran, I gladly agree with this. We have considerable amount of knowledge. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to make any conclusions about the net forcing on such a complex physical system. There must be a swarm of black swans behind the boundaries of our knowledge.
It seems to me that the AGW convinced see a change in global climate behaviour after AGW started (~1950). I don’t see that. All I see is climate business as usual. I see nothing unprecedented in climate change.
Whoever first in this debate accused opponents of evil motives, corrupt intentions, crimes against humanity, disinformation or whatever (agnotology and pseudo-skeptical thinking and too many others to list) poisoned the discussion for all of us. It is natural, maybe, but it is a huge distraction from the scientific arguments, and not much contribution to the policy arguments. It is a reminder that, except for their narrow expertise (and sometimes even that exception is not realized), scientists are victims of the same limitations of rationality and goodness as the rest of us.
Prejudices affect everyone. On papers related to climate change the prejudices are often related to the purpose of writing the paper. When a paper is written by someone with little history in the field of science considered, but known views on the climate issue, I cannot avoid thinking that the paper is written to support those views rather than to make a genuine scientific contribution. My prejudices have developed from reading papers that fit that description very well.
I’m not entirely happy with many papers from main stream scientists either. Many of them have published papers that are not presentations of their main scientific work but written to a wider audience. Journals like Science have published such papers although they don’t fulfill the same criteria required from regular scientific papers from the same authors as well as other scientists. Surprisingly many otherwise fully normal papers have also included some sentences that connect the work to the climate change issue in questionable way. Perhaps that helps in getting them published although the right editorial policy in my view would be to remove those sentences.
Very many papers are based on statistical analysis of little scientific value. That occurs on both sides of the debate, and I consider the Lüdecke et al papers to belong to this class. Statistics offers so many methods that are sophisticated enough to appear scientific, but the multitude of the choices means also that most of the possible analyses are of no scientific value. What’s worse many statistical analyses produce spurious results that are tedious to study and prove to be as worthless or misleading as they are. It’s exceptional that the approach is justified well although every use of a sophisticated statistical method should be supplemented by considerations that tell, what are all the assumptions that have gone to the analysis and how reliable the results are, when all the caveats are taken into account. It should be the responsibility of the author to justify all essential points, not of the reader to find out, where the author hasn’t done his task.
Pekka, I would respectfully disagree with your analysis on a fundamental level.
A paper should be thought of as an attempt to try to answer a question. Sometimes that actual question is simple and sometimes it is very complex.
In the two papers we are discussing the authors have asked a good question and attempted to answer it.
It matters not that they have not answered the question to the satisfaction of all. Just by probing they have made people think about how one would define ‘unprecedented’.
That, in itself, is a reason for publication and debate.
Pekka
Can you (or anyone else) point out (provide a link to) a single paper that has described the great net harms that humanity will incur as a result of AGW, that is believed to be an unbiased and valid scientific analysis? If the GCM upon which the conclusions are drawn have insufficient fidelity to justify the conclusion written, the analysis is worth what?
Believed by whom?
There are many, many papers that estimate the harmful impacts expected as a result of global warming.
I’m sure you can find them on your own.
When you do you are welcome to raise any points about them you think are important.
But being accepted by “skeptics” as valid and unbiased is not necessary for science to go on. In fact, it’d say being a paper praised by “skeptics” as valid and unbiased is strongly associated with the quality of being a streaming pile of crap.
Dare I suggest that Richard Tol reacted much more sharply to these papers than people in the U.S. because of his knowledge of EIKE (German group of skeptics)?
I don’t care. Some of his criticisms were germane, and any graduate seminar would have made the same criticisms. He seemed to miss the point of generating a null distribution for null hypothesis testing, which to me was more important than any emotional revulsion he may have felt to the sponsors.
Dikran Marsupial wrote the following: Edim, our knowledge of the forcings being uncertain does not mean we have no knowledge. The most plausible explaination based on the information we have and our knowledge of atmospheric physics is that changes in climate are principally due to changes in forcings.
That’s not unreasonable. Fred Moolton has written messages with the same import.
However, it is possible to know a great deal about a subject, and not know a precise enough answer to some specific questions: did CO2 cause some of the observed rise in temperature in the last quarter of the 20th century? Our knowledge is not sufficient to answer that question, in my opinion. Will reducing CO2 prevent future warming? We do not know the answer to that question, in my opinion. I have tried to draw attention to some of the well-documented limitations in the knowledge.
Are there some psychological, moral, or pecuniary reasons for Dikran and me to disagree? Probably, but what we really need, in my opinion, is a debate focused entirely on the evidence relevant to CO2, not these repeated tangents into hypothetical hidden psychological mechanisms and so forth. On the whole, psychology is less well understood than the climate. Psychologists have published detailed results of exquisite studies of visual perception (analogous to the laboratory studies of the CO2 absorption and emission spectra), but no one knows how people make up their minds on complex issues (analogous to the poor knowledge of cloud effects on global heat flows.) Hypotheses about psychological processes in the climate change debates are mostly uninformative distractions.
I am not a climatologist or a phycist, but our knowledge of radiative physics means that CO2 radiative forcing should be expected to have caused warming of the last quarter of the 20th century, there is little evidence that the change can be explained by changes in other forcings, or by unforced variability. So the best explanation is that CO2 radiative forcing did cause some of the warming of that period. That doesn’t mean that we know for sure that it did, but then again certain knowledge of causal ralationships in the real world is unavailable.
If there are “some psychological, moral, or pecuniary reasons for Dikran and me to disagree?” (for which I see no evidence), they have no relevance to the science, which is indeed what we should be focussing on (not just CO2). See I can agree sometimes! ;o)
Actually, I question our interpretation of the radiative physics of CO2.
If you use TOA emissivity of ~0.61 and assume that with a power series you can calculate the surface impact, you get one number. If you use the average surface emissivity, you get a completely different number. That indicates to me that local emissivity variance is not well considered.
Oh, I am not a climatologist or atmospheric physicist either, I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express once :)
That doesn’t mean that we know for sure that it did, but then again certain knowledge of causal ralationships in the real world is unavailable.
That is what I wrote.
On the psychology of the arguments, I would like to see a debate between those skeptical of AGW who believe it is getting markedly warmer, and those skeptical of AGW who believe it is not.
While we are at it, we can set up a debate between those that think CO2 is saturated and those that think it is such a trace gas an increase in it can have no effect.
Let’s let them hash it out and then come to the table to argue with those who think that human CO2 emissions are causing warming.
I doubt this will happen.
Why? Because these disparate groups exist right here in the people who read and respond at this blog, and they never engage each other in lengthy debates.
Why? Because the conclusions of both of these groups is non-threatening to the other.
What should that tell you about whether the nature of the larger debate is based on science or based on emotion? If it is based on disagreements about the science, why do people from these groups never engage each other?
Chris G –
I think you’re absolutely right. Science, and reason have very little to do with it. Otherwise, people would be changing their views with each piece of new evidence. Seen much of that lately?
The Warmistas don’t like to debate. Let’s look back at the Intelligence Squared debate for an explanation.
http://intelligencesquaredus.org/wp-content/uploads/GlobalWarming-edited-version-031407.pdf
On fraud versus disseminating disinformation…
“…Gavin Schmidt explains that they aren’t ‘saints’ nor ‘Mother Teresa’, a point on which he and Climategate critics can undoubtedly find common ground, as though this were a reason for not providing data to critics:
“’We’re not climate scientists because we’re saints, we’re not Mother Teresa. People who launch off – we’re know you’re a fraud, but give me all your data, all your time and all of this. You know what – people are not going to be well disposed. Given all the things that they could be doing with their time, they’re not going to spend time with these people.’
“Here, as so often, Schmidt, although purporting to be a ‘scientist’ is disseminating disinformation. My suggestion throughout has been for scientists and journals to archive data and metadata at the time of publication. This removes the temptation to give preferential treatment to friends. Archiving code will, in many cases, avoid the need for someone asking a question about the methodology. Scientists have spent far more time thinking up reasons not to archive data than to archive it in the first place.
“In addition, scientists have wasted both their own time and time of critics by giving untrue answers in refusing data.”
~Steve McIntyre (Swedish Documentary on Climategate, Nov 9, 2010)
Would the following be an example of:
A. Fraud
B. Disinformation
C. Misinformation
D. Incompetence
“Authors veteran meteorologists Joe D’Aleo and Anthony Watts analyzed temperature records from all around the world for a major SPPI paper, Surface Temperature Records – Policy-driven Deception? The startling conclusion that we cannot tell whether there was any significant “global warming” at all in the 20th century is based on numerous astonishing examples of manipulation and exaggeration of the true level and rate of “global warming”.
“That is to say, leading meteorological institutions in the USA and around the world have so systematically tampered with instrumental temperature data that it cannot be safely said that there has been any significant net “global warming” in the 20th century.”
“Would the following be an example of:”
E. News.
As in reporting facts.
It seems to me that there has been about a degree of warming since the end of the Little Ice Age. It’s possible it’s been 2 degrees and it’s possible
there has been little or no warming.
I think the strongest evidence of warming is the general glacier retreat. I also have a confidence in satellite measurement, which has should some warming. Also conditions described during the LIA indicate much colder conditions as compared to today.
I also noticed you failed to provide a link to source of quote- that is my opinion is incompetence or disinformation.
I believe what could be quoted in referring to US temperatures, as these land temperature station have been what mostly been being looked at.
It’s possible that US temperatures have been flat or declining in the US in 20th century, this could true and at same time there could be global warming during 20th Century.
I don’t think the land or ocean surface temperature as been reliable enough
to be measuring tenth of degrees of increase or decrease in temperature.
I do believe it’s possible to use inaccurate readings [such as proxy] and as a proxy type temperature reading I think of the land temperature as fairly accurate. Meaning a random selection of land temperature reading [even if inaccurate] can indicate warming or cooling trends- but one must realize that there are significant error bars in the data.
So if you are trying to get data, and result is .3 F warming if your error bars are +/- 1 degree there fair amount of uncertainty. If the person in charge of data set is cherry picking and making unreasoned/unexplained adjustments, your confident in the data gets much worse.
“I also noticed you failed to provide a link to source of quote- that is my opinion is incompetence or disinformation.”
gbaikie, I posted the link at 2:08 PM, almost an hour before your post. I don’t know how you missed it.
You forgot:
E. All of the above
How would you characterise the following:
source: 1254147614.txt (google it)
None of the above?
The link for my previous post is
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/policy_driven_deception.html
“gbaikie, I posted the link at 2:08 PM, almost an hour before your post. I don’t know how you missed it.”
This is said in your link:
“The paper is also a natural progression of the ongoing work of the authors, who have focused on actual data instead of models and theories. Anthony Watts put together a volunteer team to do the due diligence the government said it could not afford on the stations and found the vast majority (90%) to be sited poorly by the governments own standards. He has documented issues with the equipment and shelters and he and his Watts Up With That1
bloggers have documented many station issues created by post—processing of raw data.”
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/policy_driven_deception.html
I have not read all this linked paper, but I believe it’s not the source of your quote. It’s possible it uses your same quote, and actually gives the source of the quote [unlike you did].
I may or may not read it later. Perhaps you could give give some reason why it has merit- other than it may actually give the actual source to your quote.
gbaikie, the link goes directly to the paragraphs I quoted (see paragraphs below the image of the globe).
Ah.
Ok.
Yes what they saying at
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/policy_driven_deception.html
Is kinda disinformation.
Or typical news.
It’s headline type stuff meant to attract attention
to body of their story. Putting a link to the source would distract
from their purpose.
Somehow I thought you were quoting Watts.
Did you read the article?
If so what did you think of it?
Michael Crichton on the age of disinformation in which we now live:
“I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.”
…”The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. ”
And one would think if we had a moderately competent educational system
this would taught prior to high school or at least in high school.
I was taught this in high school and in Collage- but this doesn’t seem to be commonly understood. In collage in my case it was in pol science course, it wasn’t very detailed. One assignment was to look at any news story and find 1/2 dozen or more of this type of disinformation in a page or two. It was very easy assignment. Any news which has little disinformation is unusual.
Speaking of Desinformation & Fraud, a Wolverine impersonating an astrophysicist has this to say:
> Yes, you can see a flattening, if you do the scientifically unethical thing, take an insignificant portion of the data, and present it as significant. You also need to make the huge statistical errors of keeping the bad data points that you know are bad, and to cherry-pick your starting year and month to be April 1998 (or just a couple of months before), which happened to be the hottest month recorded (at the time), worldwide, since the invention of the thermometer. (And even if you do that, you still see warming, just by a slightly smaller amount.)
> But, if you’re the scientist who knows better than to claim there’s a flattening (or worse, a decline that’s being hidden), and you do it anyway, that’s not an honest mistake.
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/11/exposing_a_climate_science_fra.php
What exactly did the whistleblower at the heart of Climategate reveal?
A tiny clique of politicized scientists, paid by unscientific politicians with whom they were financially and politically linked, were responsible for gathering and reporting data on temperatures from the palaeoclimate to today’s climate. The “Team”, as they called themselves, were bending and distorting scientific data to fit a nakedly political story-line profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research.
Climate Research Unit at East Anglia had profited to the tune of at least $20 million in “research” grants from the Team’s activities.
The Team had tampered with the complex, bureaucratic processes of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, so as to exclude inconvenient scientific results from its four Assessment Reports, and to influence the panel’s conclusions for political rather than scientific reasons.
The Team had conspired in an attempt to redefine what is and is not peer-reviewed science for the sake of excluding results that did not fit what they and the politicians with whom they were closely linked wanted the UN’s climate panel to report.
They had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.
They had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures in the paleoclimate.
They had expressed dismay at the fact that, contrary to all of their predictions, global temperatures had not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years, and had been falling for nine years. They had admitted that their inability to explain it was “a travesty”. This internal doubt was in contrast to their public statements that the present decade is the warmest ever, and that “global warming” science is settled.
They had interfered with the process of peer-review itself by leaning on journals to get their friends rather than independent scientists to review their papers.
They had successfully leaned on friendly journal editors to reject papers reporting results inconsistent with their political viewpoint.
They had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase and corrupt science for political purposes.
They had mounted a venomous public campaign of disinformation and denigration of their scientific opponents via a website that they had expensively created.
Contrary to all the rules of open, verifiable science, the Team had committed the criminal offense of conspiracy to conceal and then to destroy computer codes and data that had been legitimately requested by an external researcher who had very good reason to doubt that their “research” was either honest or competent.
~SPPI, December 7, 2009
Wagathon, SPPI should apologize for feeding you a line of BS.
For our Marsupial Friends:
If you are looking at the Earth from say Jupiter, you could figure out that the Earth had an emissivity of 0.61, or only 61% of the energy it should be emitting from the surface is seen coming out of the top of the atmosphere. The surface at 288 degrees K is emitting 390Wm-2, 61% of that is 238Wm-2. That is the whole deal,
the surface is emitting 390 Watts per meter square of energy, but only 238 Wm-2 is getting out from the surface. The rest is scattered or reflected short wave energy, not infrared.
So from Jupiter you see something change then the surface is 1 degree K warmer, but 238 Wm-2 is still coming out. Well, you think that since the surface is now warmer it has to be emitting 5.67e-8*(289)^4 Wm-2 or 395.5Wm-2 to be one degree warmer, so it should be emitting more than 238Wm-2 at the top of the atmosphere. It is not though it is emitting 238Wm-2, so you can say that the emissivity changed to 238/395.5 or 0.602 instead of 0.61. Problem solved so you go have lunch at the alien pub and plan to mess with Mercury in the morning.
Now, if you happen to be on Mars, you might see the same thing on Earth and say, hum, it looks like 3.7Wm-2 of forcing has been added to that planet’s atmosphere. It used to have a surface temperature of 288K with 390Wm-2 and an emissivity of 0.61 so it only emitted 238 at the top of the atmosphere. Here’s is what must be happening on the surface. 3.7Wm-2 worth of resistance was added, that is going to cause 5.5 more Wm-2 to be emitted by the surface which will cause the 3.7Wm-2 to restrict more energy which will cause the surface to emit more energy.
Martians are complicated as Venusians know. So you use a power series with the 0.61 emissivity 3.7/(1-.61)=9.5 Wm-2 more should be emitted from the surface totaling 399.5Wm-2 which means the surface temperature is now 289.7 degrees K or it increased by 1.7 degrees due to the 3.7Wm-2 added resistance that got stuck in the atmosphere some where. Now the complex Martians can catch dinner and a movie while planning on studying Mercury the next morning.
Earthings are that complicated or bright. They dumped a bunch of junk in the air an realized it was getting a little warmer. They hire a bunch of Venusians to measure the average temperature and find that it is 0.8 degrees warmer than it used to be. Not being sure if that is a good thing or not they hire a guy with a balloon to measure the temperature as high in the air as he can go.
The Balloon guy has done this before when the silly Earthing thought that it was getting cold, you he did his job and gave the Earthlings the average temperature at 4000 meters. He also gave them a copy of the numbers he had before at 4000 meters.
The old temperature at 4000 meters was 249 degrees K and the new temperature is 250.2 degrees K. The Earthlings stiff the balloon guy because he never got a better balloon and should have gone higher than 4000 meters.
Short on cash, the Earthlings decide to make do with what they have and figured that if it warms by 0.8 on the surface it has warmed by 1.2 at 4000 meters. Scratching their heads they wander back to the Venusians to ask what the heck is going on.
The Venusian explain that the junk that had been dumped in the air restricted heat flow from the surface like a blanket keeps heat from flowing from your body while you sleep. Just like a blanket, that not only restricts flow out but would restrict flow in. Since the flow from the surface is now 394.4 Wm-2 and the flow at 4000 meters is now 222.2 Wm-2, both increased. The surface by 4.4Wm-2 and 4000 meters by 4.24 Wm-2 which means the resistance now is 4.24/4.4 or 0.963.
The Earthlings ask how can that be? It is all because of that water vapor you have which is why we came here. It is good for the complexion.
Isn’t it more complicated that that? the Earthlings ask. Well, it can be if you hire a Martian, the Venusians respond. Maybe this is better, the temperature difference was 288-249 or 39 degrees with a Flux difference of 390-218 or 172. You can divide those, 39/172 = 0.226 for the old R value. Now it is (289-250.2)/(394.4-222.2)=38.8/172.2 which is your new R value of 0.225, it doesn’t take much change to warm things up a bit.
The Earthlings walk away shaking theirs heads. They know they need to hire a Martian.
Since the Earthlings had bankrupted their entire balloon force, which couldn’t make it to Mars anyway, they manage to get a Martian on the radio and explain the situation. The Martian mentioned that Venusians are known to lie and that the surface temperature had to be warmer than that because there was 3.7 Wm-2 restriction in the atmosphere somewhere that their most brilliant mathematicians had determine using complex series analysis which requires the temperature to be at least 289.7 degrees K and likely higher with water vapor.
The Earthlings, just a bit perturbed, confronted the Venusians with the news that they can’t measure temperature worth a dare, it had to be warmer because the Martians said so.
Did they give you the water vapor bit? The Venusians asked bathing in their new sauna.
Yes they did! Growled one of the Earthlings.
Laughing, the Venusian tell the Earthing that water vapor would warm the surface more if the restriction was below the clouds or if the clouds were not as abundant. You see, the restriction is just that junk you all have been dumping in the air and it restricts more above the clouds than below the clouds. Since it is above, it warms the tops of the clouds which causes the surface warming to be less that Martians would expect.
Except the Neptunians chimed in and informed the earthlings that what was happening was nothing more than the earth returning to its normal warm state after years of anomalous cold, and that “junk” was doing nothing more than returning CO2 to the atmosphere sequestered by life almost starving the most essential life form on the planet – plants.
LOL, I should have included the Neptunians. Saturn and Uranus are on their on :)
Hey, why not include Titanians, Ioians, Europians (under the ice) and others?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Moons_of_solar_system_v7.jpg
LOl Edim, I was think more bedtime story than novel :)
What if the paper were written by Antonio Lasaga?
Joachim Seifert | November 11, 2011 at 1:35 pm | Reply
Dang, Joachim, you sound like Dr. Bronner expounding the virtues of his soap:
“Replace half-true Socialist-fluoride poison & tax-slavery with full-truth, work-speech-press & profitsharing Socialaction! All-One! So, help build 4 billion Hannibal wind-power plants, charging 96 billion battery-banks, powering every car-factory-farm-home-monorail & pump, watering Babylon-roof-gardens & 800 billion Israel-Milorganite fruit trees, guarded by Swiss 6000 year Universal Military Training … ” etc. etc.
In any case, while I’m glad to hear that “it is all resolved” … unfortunately, I don’t believe a word of it.
Finally, you say that my “clue is also missing and nothing adds up”. I would suggest that you get professional help for that, because regarding my clue, well, I fear I don’t have one about your statements, I am, as the saying goes, clueless about your claims.
So my clue is indeed missing.
w.
Oops. There we go; Willis proves me wrong on at least one account.
For those who are unfamiliar with Dr. Bronner and his soap, a label from one of his bottles is reproduced here (PDF).
Enjoy …
w.
When we’ve all gotten this non-science ranting out of our system in this thread, can we go back to science ranting?
Maybe climate-related?
Or is there no point, as the science is settled or something?
Wagathon…your indictment of the Team was compelling and convincing. More importantly, it was the absolute truth.
Wegman on the lack of independent peer review is very compelling and his discussion concerning the public positions taken by a small close social network of paleoclimate reconstructionists comprising at least 43 authors whose climate prognostications cannot be supported by their analysis helps to further elucicate the problem, as follows:
EXCERPT . . .
“We found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of this relatively narrow field of paleoclimate studies are closely connected. Dr. Mann has an unusually large reach in terms of influence and in particular Drs. Jones, Bradley, Hughes, Briffa, Rutherford and Osborn.
“Because of these close connections, independent studies may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface. Although we have no direct data on the functioning of peer review within the paleoclimate community, but with 35 years of experience with peer review in both journals as well as evaluation of research proposals, peer review may not have been as independent as would generally be desirable.
“Figure 8 is a graphic that depicts a number of papers in the paleoclimate reconstruction area together with some of the proxies used. We note that many of the proxies are shared. Using the same data also suggests a lack of independence.
“The MBH98/99 work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility. Overall, our committee believes that the MBH99 assessment that the decade of the 1990s was the likely the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was likely the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by their analysis.”
(Excerpt from the prepared statement of Dr. Edward J. Wegman, Committee on Energy and Commerce, 109th Congress Hearings, Second Session, July 19 and July 27, 2006
You’re not seriously citing Wegman?
You need to read a little more widely…
Translation: you know more about statistics than professor, Edward Wegman and if I read more widely I would be aware of that. Good to know..
One thing that must be remembered about this issue, that appears to not exist in any other science, is that the climate scientists have conducted themselves very unprofessionally. The entire IPCC was set up to influence government policy from the beginning (Maurice Strong). Soon as anyone started to question the conclusions of the IPCC, the nasty ad hominen attacks started in the AGW camp. Those who disliked modern society, who thought we are gluttons of energy, unwilling to “share” with the rest of the world, jumped on the bandwaggon. For years those people we looking for something they could paste on humanity as the “planet wrecker”. AGW gave them what they were looking for. Suzuki is the epitome of this.
So if there is blame as to why the debate degenerated I would land it directly in the AGW camp. Questions about the conclusions were taken as personal attacks against the scientist. “We know better than anyone else, the IPCC says we do, who the hell are you to question us.” Was, and still is, the attitude.
We just want to see the evidence. We have every right to question the mechanism proposed. We have every right to demand proper science be maintained, and expose anti-science attempts by the AGW scientists to change the rules (the null hypothesis).
Yet, we are the ones attacked, personally, equated with Holocaust deniers, suggested we all be put in jail (Suzuki), suggested we have low IQ, and so on. Hell, now the AGW side are claiming we invented the “science is settled”. Unbelievable.
Sorry dude, the Berkeley study has ended the debate. Funded by the Koch brothers and still it confirmed the warming is very real and far too quick for comfort.
All the evidence is now public; the data, the methods, the results. You want to see it? Look on their website!
Any stock trader looking at global temp charts would say that market is flying. Buy, buy, buy. Just because it isn’t a ruler-drawn line, or it occasionally takes a step back before climbing again, or that some bozos exist on all sides of an argument doesn’t change the fact: the trend is up.
As for Ms Curry, not chopping off those known-to-be-skewed data points is just not acceptable. See for yourself – and this guy has no axe to grind: http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/11/exposing_a_climate_science_fra.php
JC started out as a fine option.
Quickly overtaken by climate thuggocracy.
I’m an engineer and, as such, a skeptic
I seeno reason to continue coming here to see the nutcracker suite
Don’t leave. We can beat the thuggocray with evidence and logic, which they lack, hence their reliance on thuggary. I suspect because Judith is stiring the pot too much she is being targeted in hopes of hijacking the blog to shut her down.
What do you think of Roger Pielke Jnr when he supports this http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2011/11/09/is-judith-curry-peddling-disinformation/comment-page-3/#comment-87016 ?
Louise
Imo, that is Pielke’s opinion and he has every right to express it. I may not always agree that all of Judith’s posts are the most relevant to the key issues either—so what?
I know of no other site where I am able to interact quickly with a large number of people who are knowledgeable on the topic and exchange information. As someone educated and experienced in both engineering and economics it has been a great site to increase my knowledge of the key issues related to climate change. Is it perfect? No, but my perfect would not be someone else’s either.
I think Louise is arguing from (skeptical) authority, hoping that skeptics will bow to the experts (in this case skeptic and luke-warmer). Most skeptics (at least who post here) are real skeptics and don’t fall for that falacy.
I see that those who are “CO2-convinced” still don’t understand why skeptics are skeptical and unconvinced.
Fallacy! Sorry.
Edim – not at all – I was genuinely interested in what people thought of Roger Pielke Jrs view.
“I see that those who are “CO2-convinced” still don’t understand why skeptics are skeptical and unconvinced.” Do you mean folk like Bruce and Wagathon?
Louise
“People will read these blogs or not as they choose, and when a blog repeatedly calls attention to crap, its credibility and its audience will adjust to reflect this. Climate Etc. is not The Wall Street Journal, so the greater danger in Curry’s gushing over crap is to Curry’s reputation, not to the public understanding of science.”
Amen.”
I disagree with Mr. Pielke Jr. If it’s “crap”, why the worry? Will it pollute our minds? Curry’s reputation is not in danger even if there is CO2-GW. She is a scientist and acting like one. If it’s not dogma then let it be.
Pielke Jr Also wrote this: Tol’s response to Curry critiquing the paper justifies her post — that is how we learn. If Tol doesn’t like the fact that experts cannot control the airwaves then he is always going to find democratic systems uncomfortable.
M. Carry writes: “Wagathon, SPPI should apologize for feeding you a line of BS.”
It would be a lot more valuable if you’d take on those charges one by one and show us why it’s “b.s.”
yeah, every body loves a game of wackamole
OK, let’s start with the first BS statement.
“ A tiny clique of politicized scientists, paid by unscientific politicians with whom they were financially and politically linked, were responsible for gathering and reporting data on temperatures from the palaeoclimate to today’s climate. The “Team”, as they called themselves, were bending and distorting scientific data to fit a nakedly political story-line profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research.”
Those scientist never bent or distorted anything. The only thing crooked here is the author of this allegation.
But how can that be? MBH98/99/08 (aka, the ‘hockey stick graph’) is a proven fraud.
Proven to be be a fraud to those who want it to be a fraud, because they themselves are frauds and want some company.
The lesson of the McShane and Wyner chalkboard squeak heard ’round the world is not that M&W debunked yet again the MBH98/99/08 `hockey stick’ hoax-graph. Scrutinizing the uninspiring statistics of Mann and his sycophants’ silly-science has become a fun pastime for geeks. The math is not debatable: The more interesting finding was that there is absolutely no ‘signal’ in Mann’s proxy data. The ‘consensus’ is shot and the Medium has become the Message: all who claim there is a consensus of opinion pointing to humans as the cause of global are simply outing themselves as science pariahs.
There is no question that MBH98/99/08 (the ‘hockey stick’ graph) is scientific fraud and not just because lack of ‘backcasting’ ability is demonstrated–that was already proven before McShane and Wyner showed that the data upon which the GCMs are founded contains absolutely no global warming ‘signal’ whatsoever.
Finally, even Phil Jones was forced to admit that that there has never been any statistically relevant global warming since 1995. Even Kevin Trenberth acknowledged that the Earth has been in a cooling trend for a decade and that he considered it to be a ‘travesty’ that global warming alarmists are so incompetent as to be either unable explain the lack of global warming or unable to find out where in the hey it’s been hiding.
Good example of the use of disinformation (and distortion/misquoting)there Wagathon.
“Here is the relevant excerpt from the BBC interview:
BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Phil Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8511670.stm
Louise –
Just out of interest, I wonder what you’ll say in the spring next year when at least two of the datasets show 15 years of cooling? I suppose by extension I’m quite keen to hear what Phil Jones has to say too.
Bookmarked – I’ll get back to you
Paging Anteros. Please show me the datasets that show global cooling and you can then give up wondering what I’ll say.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2012/06/uah-global-temperature-update-for-may-2012-0-29176c/
From The Blackboard (Lucia’s blog) “The linear trend is distinctly positive with “no warming” rejected using any of the three statistical models shown in the figure.”
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2012/roy-announced-uah-june-289c/
32 years, Louise, not 15.
==========
Show me the datasets that show 15 years of global cooling to this spring
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997/trend
Louise –
I’m surprised you couldn’t find the two data sets that show 15 years of cooling. After all, RSS and Hadcrut are both quite well known.
I’ve provided you with links at Lucia’s so you can see two different data sets both showing 15 years of cooling to this spring – exactly as I predicted!!!!!!
It wasn’t that hard, though – as soon as La Nina conditions were established last year it was absolutely inevitable.
Pretty graphs nonetheless :)
Louise – to put you out of your misery, here they are –
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997.25/to:2012.25/plot/rss/from:1997.25/to:2012.25/trend
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1997.25/to:2012.25/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1997.25/to:2012.25/trend
Now I’ve shown you the data sets, you can say what you were going to say :)
Paging Louise –
Datasets well and truly shown………..
What you’re saying is that even using UHI-corrupted land-based data global warming alarmists still must abandon the scientific method if they wish to cling to their beliefs.
Well that’s Wagathon for you. He’s a fountain of disinformation.
And can also catapult the propaganda .
I forgot about that one, Yes, Wagathon’s disinformation fountain does recycle the disinformation.
Wag,
All sadly true. And let us not forget Muller’s devastating critique of Mann’s graph.
pokerguy, it looks like you have already forgot that’s not Mann’s graph.
Is that really the best you can do? How about something that goes to the graph itself?
Well, it’s not Mann’s graph, so why are you calling it Mann’s graph? Is asking you to be accurate too much too ask?
M. carey | November 11, 2011 at 5:29 pm
“…it looks like you have already forgot that’s not Mann’s graph.”
Acutally, in the video, Dr. Muller is discussing Mann’s graph – and in addition, Jones’ and Briffas’. That way we are treated to the ‘scientific consensus’ – a trifecta of hide-the-decline. Steve McIntyre covers this in more detail in numerous posts, but here is a good one.
The chart in the video is Jones’ chart which was used on the cover of a report. I agree with much of Muller’s criticism of this chart. Jones should have shown the decline in the temperature proxy in recent years, even though instrumental records show a rise in temperature. I don’t know why he felt it necessary to not show proxy and instrumental temperatures diverging, when the divergence was already well known to climate scientists. However, in fairness to Jones I should point out that there was a description of the chart in the report, including references, and I don’t believe Muller mentioned that in his video presentation. If he did, I missed it.
The report is WMO STATEMENT ON THE STATUS OF THE GLOBAL CLIMATE IN 1999. It is what Jones is referring to when he makes this comment:
But be fair to Jones. ‘Mike’ (Mann) had already truncated the proxy data post-1980 in the graph used by Jones (Fig.3a MBH99)
Returning to the original putative topic. Dr. Muller is discussing Mann’s graph.
What a luxury it is to be a climate scientist. Since you have certainty about the final answer, you can pick and choose your datasets to prove your case. Engineers and scientists in other fields don’t enjoy this luxury.
Louise,
Hypothetically, what would it take for you to question your beliefs? I get the sense that if the team itself….fMann, Trenberth, Jones…. the whole rogues gallery…. held a press conference tomorrow to declare they’d made a mistake, you’d still be a believer.
You may call me a ‘believer’
I categorise myself as somebody who recognises that additional CO2 in the atmosphere as a result of man’s activities (fossil fuel burning and land use change) will have an effect on the balance of radiation coming into and leaving our atmosphere.
I have a word in mind for people who deny this physics.
I do not have a confirmed view as to exactly what the impact of the CO2 will have (feedbacks etc being uncertain) but I know that it must have an effect – that’s physics.
If Mann, Trenberth and Jones denied this physics then I’d check will the other thousands of scientists looking at this issue before I came to any conclusion.
Louise –
This is extremely reasonable and the position of every reasonable sceptic I know. My suggestion is that if you SEE a large number of sceptics denying what you say, it is in truth a very small number who happen to be right in front of you. It is deceptive!
I try to remind myself of the opposite of this (not enough, I admit) – the number of people who are screaming that the world will end by Monday afternoon is quite small. It just seems to me that they are very loud.
And interestingly, when anyone puts their position at it’s most reasonable, they find that the people they are talking to suddenly become less extreme in return.
Anteros, I think you’ll find that Wagathon, pokerguy and Bruce (and possibly hunter, Don Monford, Edim, Jack McLaughlin, Theo Goodwin, and numerous others from this thread alone) are quite vocal in their opposition to my views.
What makes you think they’re in the minority of skeptics? They seem to be the overwhelming voice of the ‘denizens’ on this blog.
What came first skeptics’ opposition to your views or your skepticism of statistics professor, Edward Wegman’s views about the lack of independent peer review as practiced by a circle-jerk of dendro-sycophants.
Louise –
You slightly misunderstood what I said.
I suggested that you would not find many sceptics disagreeing with you when you say ‘CO2 will have an effect on the atmosphere, but I do not have a confirmed view on what that will be’
You clearly said something reasonable and most people here would agree [OK maybe not Wagathon :) ]
But indeed people are vocal in their opposition to your views – your other views which are much more contentious! And indeed it seems you give as good as you get.
My point was that if we all retreat to the most extreme form of what we believe there is no hope of even having a conversation – if that is what we want.
I accept that you’re in a minority here. But it could be much worse – WUWT in one direction and Tamino a thousand miles in the other. Do people call you a climate change liar every other sentence? Because the equivalent of that happens at malignant fundamentalist sites like Tamino’s. Here there are a surprisingly wide range of views. I hope that’s why you come here.
You must first ignore physics to become a ‘believer.’ That is what ‘belief’ is all about–i.e., opinions about those things that cannot be proven, which is why some have likened climatology to the science of ancient astrology.
“If Mann, Trenberth and Jones denied this physics then I’d check will the other thousands of scientists looking at this issue before I came to any conclusion.”
Louise, sorry for being quite vocal. You don’t have to deny any physics to be unconvinced that CO2 will have an effect. Or warming effect. Or cooling, not to be dismissed yet, but unlikely. It will be physics (for example CO2 radiative effect misestimated, convection and evaporation miscalculated, carbon cycle, unknown forcings/oscillations/variations …) or nature’s phenomena that will agree or disagree with your theory. Science demands scepticism and observation.
@Louise
Your quote:
>I do not have a confirmed view as to exactly what the impact of the CO2 will have (feedbacks etc being uncertain) …<
Until you do, stop proselytising and keep learning – far more constructive
Louise: I categorise myself as somebody who recognises that additional CO2 in the atmosphere as a result of man’s activities (fossil fuel burning and land use change) will have an effect on the balance of radiation coming into and leaving our atmosphere.
I have a word in mind for people who deny this physics.
That physics is incomplete. Most of the energy transfer from the lower troposphere to the upper troposphere is by convection and advection. Most of the radiant energy from the earth’s surface is already absorbed. What exactly will happen to the processes involved when CO2 concentration increases is mostly the subject of untested conjectures.
Mattstat,
It still amazes me why that is so difficult for so many to understand.
I think you’re venturing into psychology. When people know the physics (or at least what the physicists say), and it’s rigorous physics, that gets confused with “nothing else matters”. It’s like the difference between the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The truth is never enough, and the lawyers realized that a long time ago.
P.E. A lot of this seems to be psychology. Earth is a complex system. I mention that changes in conduction and convection are not well considered in a radiant based model and all I get is deer in the headlight looks. There are at least 5 major thermal boundary layers that have to be considered and only one is predominately radiant. Arrhenius’ first paper has ln(Cf/Co) based on an average 255K radiant layer. That is pretty limited. Probably why his unpublished results on are know as 1.6 (2.1) with water vapor. With a more realistic 249K, basicialy the base of average condensation (bottom of the clouds), there is a 20% drop surface impact and no indication of significant water vapor feedback under normal conditions.
It is a Thermodynamic/Fluid mechanics problem with astrophysicists in command. backed up by social scientists..