by Judith Curry
A Disgrace to the Profession: The World’s Scientists – in their own words – on Michael E Mann, his Hockey Stick and their Damage to Science – Volume One
The book can be purchased at the SteynStore, or it will be available at amazon.com (kindle edition available Sept 1).
The backstory on Mann vs Steyn is described in previous posts [link] and links therein. The short story is this. Mann is suing Steyn (and others) for defamation regarding a statement about ‘the fraudulent hockeystick’. Steyn is countersuing. The lawsuits have been tied up in DC courts for years. The new book compiles what is presumably evidence obtained by Steyn’s lawyers regarding whether ‘fraudulent’ is defamatory here. And this is only Volume 1; apparently there is a Volume 2 in the works.
Mark Steyn has 3 blog posts (so far) on the book:
Two bloggers have already written about the book
- Anthony Watts
- SOU: Vicious attacks on Michael Mann: More smears from Mark Steyn and Anthony Watts’ lynch mob
Anthony Watts reminds me of this statement I made in a previous post: “Mark Steyn is formidable opponent. I suspect that this is not going to turn out well for you.” This book certainly supports my statement.
The book is organized around quotes from Ph.D. scientists (100+) that have made remarks about Mann, either publicly in interviews, on blogs, or in private emails that were revealed through FOIA or unauthorized releases (e.g. Climategate, SkS). This is not just a compilation of quotes from the ‘usual suspects’; I was unfamiliar with many of these individuals, and impressed by their credentials. Each chapter begins with an overview and context about the particular theme, then each subsection is devoted to a particular scientist, beginning with a brief biosketch of that scientist and including backstory and context.
There is much wit and plenty of zingers in Steyn’s narrative (not sure if anyone helped him with the technical aspects of this; seems pretty solid). However, for my post on this book, I decided to focus on snippets from climate scientists who generally support the consensus (explicitly, or lacking any evidence of the opposite), including Mann’s collaborators. It was not simple to cull this down to ~1200 words (so as not to steal thunder from potential buyers of the book), but the quotes below I think give a pretty good representation from the climate scientists that were quoted. Note, I focus particularly on the Hockey Stick (and subsequent incarnations), rather than broader issues about Mann that were raised in some of the quotes.
From climate scientists, all of whom support the general consensus on climate change:
Wallace Broecker: “The goddam guy is a slick talker and super-confident. He won’t listen to anyone else,” one of climate science’s most senior figures, Wally Broecker of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York, told me. “I don’t trust people like that. A lot of the data sets he uses are shitty, you know. They are just not up to what he is trying to do…. If anyone deserves to get hit it is goddam Mann.”
Eduardo Zorita: Why I Think That Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf2 Should be Barred from the IPCC Process. Short answer: because the scientific assessments in which they may take part are not credible anymore. These words do not mean that I think anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. On the contrary, it is a question which we have to be very well aware of. But I am also aware that editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed.
Atte Korhola: Another example is a study recently published in the prestigious journal Science. Proxies have been included selectively, they have been digested, manipulated, filtered, and combined – for example, data collected from Finland in the past by my own colleagues has even been turned upside down such that the warm periods become cold and vice versa. Normally, this would be considered as a scientific forgery, which has serious consequences.
Hans von Storch: A conclusion could be that the principle, according to which data must be made public, so that also adversaries may check the analysis, must be really enforced. Another conclusion could be that scientists like Mike Mann, Phil Jones and others should no longer participate in the peer-review process or in assessment activities like IPCC.
Bo Christiansen: The hockey-stick curve does not stand. It does not mean that we cancel the manmade greenhouse effect, but the causes have become more nuanced… Popularly, it can be said that the flat piece on the hockey stick is too flat. In addition, their method contains a large element of randomness. It is almost impossible to conclude from reconstruction studies that the present period is warmer than any period in the reconstructed period.
David Rind: Concerning the hockey stick: what Mike Mann continually fails to understand, and no amount of references will solve, is that there is practically no reliable tropical data for most of the time period, and without knowing the tropical sensitivity, we have no way of knowing how cold (or warm) the globe actually got. I’ve made the comment to Mike several times, but it doesn’t seem to get across.
Tom Wigley: I have just read the M&M stuff criticizing MBH. A lot of it seems valid to me. At the very least MBH is a very sloppy piece of work – an opinion I have held for some time. Can you give me a brief heads up? Mike is too deep into this to be helpful.
From Mann’s collaborators and coauthors:
Phil Jones: Keith [Briffa] didn’t mention in his Science piece but both of us think that you’re on very dodgy ground with this long-term decline in temperatures on the thousand-year timescale. It is better we put the caveats in ourselves than let others put them in for us.
Keith Briffa: I have just read this letter – and I think it is crap. I am sick to death of Mann stating his reconstruction represents the tropical area just because it contains a few tropical series. He is just as capable of regressing these data again any other “target” series, such as the increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage he has produced over the last few years
Edward Cook: I will be sure not to bring this up to Mike. As you know, he thinks that CRU is out to get him in some sense. I am afraid that Mike is defending something that increasingly cannot be defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the science move ahead.
Raymond Bradley: I would like to disassociate myself from Mike Mann’s view. As for thinking that it is “Better that nothing appear, than something unnacceptable to us” …as though we are the gatekeepers of all that is acceptable in the world of paleoclimatology seems amazingly arrogant. Science moves forward whether we agree with individual articles or not.
Matti Saarnisto: In that article [Science], my group’s research material from Korttajärvi, near Jyväskylä, was used in such a way that the Medieval Warm Period was shown as a mirror image. The graph was flipped upside-down. In this email I received yesterday from one of the authors of the article, my good friend Professor Ray Bradley …says there was a large group of researchers who had been handling an extremely large amount of research material, and at some point it happened that this graph was turned upside-down. But then this happened yet another time in Science, and now I doubt if it can be a mistake anymore. But how it is possible that this type of material is repeatedly published in these top science journals? There is a small circle going round and around, relatively few people are reviewing each other’s papers, and that is in my opinion the worrying aspect.
Rob Wilson: I want to clarify that my 2 hour lecture was, I hope, a critical look at all of the northern hemispheric reconstructions of past temperature to date. It was not focused entirely on Michael Mann’s work. The “crock of xxxx” statement was focused entirely on recent work by Michael Mann w.r.t. hypothesized missing rings in tree-ring records. Although a rather flippant statement, I stand by it and Mann is well aware of my criticisms (privately and through the peer reviewed literature) of his recent work.
Some of the harshest criticisms come from physicists; I’ve selected this one from Jonathan Jones, who I had the pleasure of meeting with last June while in the UK:
Jonathan Jones: My whole involvement has always been driven by concerns about the corruption of science. Like many people I was dragged into this by the Hockey Stick. The Hockey Stick is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence, so I started reading round the subject. And it soon became clear that the first extraordinary thing about the evidence for the Hockey Stick was how extraordinarily weak it was, and the second extraordinary thing was how desperate its defenders were to hide this fact. The Hockey Stick is obviously wrong. Climategate 2011 shows that even many of its most outspoken public defenders know it is obviously wrong. And yet it goes on being published and defended year after year. Do I expect you to publicly denounce the Hockey Stick as obvious drivel? Well yes, that’s what you should do. It is the job of scientists of integrity to expose pathological science. It is a litmus test of whether climate scientists are prepared to stand up against the bullying defenders of pathology in their midst.
Two of the most surprising statements (to me) are from two young scientists associated with Skeptical Science:
Neal King: My impression is that Mann and buddies have sometimes gone out on a limb when that was unnecessary and ill-advised. Mann, for all his technical ability, is sometimes his own worst enemy. Similarly, with regard to “hiding the decline” in Climategate, I am left with the impression that the real question is, Why would you believe the tree-ring proxies at earlier times when you KNOW that they didn’t work properly in the 1990s? Mann et al spent too much time defending what was incorrect, and allowed the totality of the argument to become “infected” by the fight.
Robert Way: I don’t mean to be the pessimist of the group here but Mc2 brought up some very good points about the original hockey stick. I’ve personally seen work that is unpublished that challenges every single one of his reconstructions because they all either understate or overstate low-frequency variations. Mann et al stood by after their original HS and let others treat it with the confidence that they themselves couldn’t assign to it. The original hockey stick still used the wrong methods and these methods were defended over and over despite being wrong. He fought like a dog to discredit and argue with those on the other side that his method was not flawed. And in the end he never admitted that the entire method was a mistake. They then let this HS be used in every way possible despite knowing the stats behind it weren’t rock solid.
This selection of quotes does not include the strongest ‘zingers’, which come from scientists that are somewhat further afield or have made public statements that are critical of the AGW consensus.
JC reflections
So, back to the topic of the lawsuits. In light of these quotes by Ph.D scientists, does Mark Steyn have a strong defense against the charge of defamation for stating ‘fraudulent hockey stick’? This certainly looks to me like the basis of a strong defense. With regards to Steyn’s countersuit, if he makes a lot of money off this book, that would rather argue against large damages from his countersuit. JC message to AGW alarmists and Mann’s supporters: buy Steyn’s book, this will help diminish Steyn’s case against Mann for large damages.
I have written many posts about Michael Mann – apart from my own concerns about the hockey stick (Hiding the Decline), I am greatly concerned about Mann’s bullying behavior inserting itself into the scientific process (collaboration, peer review, public communication). My concerns go beyond the general strategies of adversarial science. to what I regard as unethical behavior.
It is a sad state of affairs for climate science that this book had to be written (it was brought on by Michael Mann’s lawsuit – without the lawsuit, Steyn obviously wouldn’t have bothered). At a time when the U.S. and the world’s nations are trying to put together an agreement to tackle climate change (for better or for worse), Steyn’s book reminds everyone of Climategate, why the public doesn’t trust climate scientists and aren’t buying their ‘consensus.
How will all this play out? Hard to predict, but I hope that everyone will learn that adversarial science as practiced in its pathological form by Michael Mann doesn’t ‘pay’ in the long run.
As someone who worked in the field of Atmospheric Fluid Dynamics back in the 1970s, my heart just sinks as I read about this. I could never have imagined pure science being corrupted to this degree. I am still astonished by it.
When I feel the need for relief from our troubled times, I go and watch videos from the ISS. This side of NASA still represents what pure science should be, and the international cooperation shines through our troubled times. So it is painful to see the GISS side of NASA playing a part in this debacle.
Mann continues to dig down .. and give credence to the ‘fraud’ charges of politicians toward climate science. Mr. Mann: ‘When you are in hole, stop digging.’
Good post on a really interesting book.
The section on Judith Curry was particularly damning of Mann.
The section citing Mann’s defenders was hilarious.
I hope Mark Steyn makes enough money on the book and the other stuff he sells at “Steyn Online” to pay his lawyers defending him in a lawsuit that should have been thrown out by the court on day 1.
Thanks for that, Dr. Curry. Your position, of separating Michael Mann’s pseudo-scientific behaviours from the science of AGW, is defensible, but it remains to be seen whether Mann’s apologists and acolytes, not one of whom has supported Mann with an amicus brief, are capable of of such nuances. This site could get very busy over the next few days, I’ve ordered in the popcorn.
“It is a sad state of affairs for climate science that this book had to be written (it was brought on by Michael Mann’s lawsuit – without the lawsuit, Steyn obviously wouldn’t have bothered). At a time when the U.S. and the world’s nations are trying to put together an agreement to tackle climate change (for better or for worse), Steyn’s book reminds everyone of Climategate, why the public doesn’t trust climate scientists and aren’t buying their ‘consensus.”
How true. I see why Steyn wrote the book. It needed to be done. But, I’m sad because Professor Mann’s irresponsible, dishonest and unethical actions reflect on all of the scientific community.
Just when you think Judith might be easing off on the Mann obsession…..
Can’t you do any better than play the person, not the message? Most unimpressive to any but Alinsky followers.
A book of self-servng quote mining from a gutter journalist, trying to save his own skin.
Judith debases herself by rolling around in this sh!t.
Imagine what an interesting book we would have by quote mining comments about Judith Curry, taken from private/stolen emails?
What a hoot that would be!
yeah, stuff from sou, michael tobis, anna haynes, etc – sure to be a bestseller. go for it.
Yes, Judith, let’s play the Steyn game;
Joe Romm, physicist, and former lecture circuit colleague of Curry said;
“Dr. Judith Curry, … has now taken the crown as the most debunked person on the science blogosphere, which is quite a feat considering the competition. But she invites debunking by her tendency to make scientific-sounding pronouncements without having actually read the relevant literature, and then backing down the minute she is challenged by someone who has or who has actually contributed to that literature.”
and Stats expert James Annan on Curry’s attempt to talk up some wrong-headed stats aproach;
“(S)He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense“, … “Judith, when you find that everyone else is out of step, it is probably appropriate to worry about the intellectual foundations underpinning your whole argument. But somehow I don’t think you meant that ”
Yep, that’s how we play the Steyn game.
Silly jello flinging, but Judith wants to play jello-flinging……
wow Joe Romm. a really unbiased guy.
If the book had some glamor shots from her lab and her talks to go along with her undoubtedly deep and thought provoking e-mails, I’d buy it in hardback and stick it on the shelf next to the Feynman lectures.
I didn’t buy Mann’s own book, but if I did it would be on the shelf next to An Inconvenient Truth, Shirley McClain’s Out on a Limb, and the complete works of Jenny McCarthy.
I’m smelling a direct hit or at least a damaging blow….
That’s one possible interpeatation Michael.
Another is a certain someone allowing his huge ego to pick a fight with a guy whom it should have been obvious was going to eat his lunch.
But let’s not forget that Dr. Mann is a warrior, manning the trenches in the noble attempt to save mankind from catastrophe. He should have no problem with a little bit of flack.
curryja | August 13, 2015 at 1:24 pm |
“wow Joe Romm. a really unbiased guy.”
Says Judith who, on Steyn’s ranting against Mann has this to say – “There is much wit and plenty of zingers”.
Judith is the gift that keeps on giving.
Michael,
So, according to you Dr. Curry is guilty of promoting “gutter journalist” and “rolling around in this s%$t.” I suppose you are comparing her with the eminently dignified post by SOU on hotwhopper here.. Actually, I think it is very informative for anyone coming here to find out what the climate debate is all about to read this CE blog and then go to SOU to see how the other side lives.
Ron Graf | August 13, 2015 at 11:32 pm |
So, according to you Dr. Curry is guilty of promoting “gutter journalist” and “rolling around in this s%$t.” I suppose you are comparing her with the eminently dignified post by SOU on hotwhopper here”
Nope I wasn’t comparing, but if i was, I’d say that one was a climate scientist well known for lecturing other scientists on their behaviour and tut-tutting name-calling, all the while displaying some rather questionable behaviour herself and throwing epithets around …and the other is just some blogger.
Michael, I think it’s clear that your aim here is to try to find fault any way you can for the sake of “the cause.” What Dr. Curry has done, in my opinion, is to voice her dissent with the bending and breaking the rules of scientific behavior in her field. She has had the courage to do so in the face of ferociously political group who have established their identities as champions of social justice. Unfortunately, some of them are scientists. Climate justice does not help to validate models or correlate temperature proxies. I see Dr. Curry communicating in exemplary fashion and promoting civil discussion. But, if you want to attack her as a scalawag, or whatever, you can feel safe to do so here on her blog. That should say something.
Ron,
I’m just voicing my dissent at the way Judith bends and breaks the rules that she caims other scientists should follow.
When I was taught science they emphasized the importance of questioning theories and replicating results. The “modern” method of science is to sue any journalist who questions the dubious results. I liked the classic version better.
Michael: A book of self-servng quote mining from a gutter journalist, trying to save his own skin.
Steyn is defending himself from a libel suit. His quotes are on point and accurate. Of course he is trying to save his own skin; Mann is doing likewise, with a much poorer case.
Michael: Joe Romm, physicist, and former lecture circuit colleague of Curry said;
“Dr. Judith Curry, … has now taken the crown as the most debunked person on the science blogosphere, which is quite a feat considering the competition. But she invites debunking by her tendency to make scientific-sounding pronouncements without having actually read the relevant literature, and then backing down the minute she is challenged by someone who has or who has actually contributed to that literature.”
Did you put that in your amicus curiae brief in support of Mann in Steyn v Mann? As I understand it, Mann could use some help there.
Michael: Says Judith who, on Steyn’s ranting against Mann has this to say – “There is much wit and plenty of zingers”.
Yes. Besides being generally well-informed, Steyn can write with wit and zingers — beyond the ability of most people to do the same.
matthewrmarler | August 15, 2015 at 12:00 am |
“Yes. Besides being generally well-informed, Steyn can write with wit and zingers”
Yes…if angry ranty old whiteman tickles your fancy.
Michael: Yes can you show that anything Steyn has written is either ill-informed or wrong? “Wit is reason to advantage dressed,” as everyone knows.
old whiteman
Gracious, overt age, race and sex bias?
Matthew,
Pretty much every thing he writes is ill-informed…..or to put it another way, conforming to his very narow ideological views.
And you didn’t like my description? – can you show anything I wrote was wrong?
Michael, you should have no trouble giving, say 10 examples – since almost everything Steyn writes is ill-informed.
Go for it.Or maybe it’s Michael.
db,
See pretty much anything Steyn wrote about the Iraq war.
Nothing much remarkable, just the standard hardline conversative blinkered view, characterised by a crushing inability to display any independent critical thinking.
So nothing then Michael. You can’t imagine my shock.
Not very impressive examples. Joe Romm is not remotely in the same league as Wallace Broecker (or most of the other examples Judith gave, for that matter).
Quoting criticism by someone who advocates strangulation of those who disagree with him says more about the quoter than the subject of the criticism.
Remind me, all these ‘debunking’ that Rom claims on Judith. Would they be of the sou class of debunking, ie ‘but this person is a denier, so we can safely ignore whatever they say’.
Perhaps Michael would like to provide some evidence for this debunking. Seeing how Judith is the queen and all, there must be mountains of it.
Anything Michael? Or were you just taking it as granted from one of your political masters with no evidence?
Michael | August 13, 2015 at 11:54 am | Reply
Just when you think Judith might be easing off on the Mann obsession…..
Yes, when will the silly woman learn to just accept with grace what is politically correct, and drop this ridiculous insistence that science needs “integrity” ?
Science needs integrity, but it certainly won’t learn much about it from Judith Curry.
Michael: “Science needs integrity, but it certainly won’t learn much about it from Judith Curry.”
Oh come off it!
Science has infinitely more chance of learning about integrity than it has from learning it from you.
And take that bag of chips off your shoulder.
Catty, I’m not claiming to be the queen of integrity, or lecturing others about it.
Actually, you are.
Unfortunately, fraud is a strong and libelous claim. None of these quotes support it. Mann is a stubborn and unpleasant person but that is not a crime, as fraud is.
“Atte Korhola: Another example is a study recently published in the prestigious journal Science. Proxies have been included selectively, they have been digested, manipulated, filtered, and combined – for example, data collected from Finland in the past by my own colleagues has even been turned upside down such that the warm periods become cold and vice versa. Normally, this would be considered as a scientific forgery, which has serious consequences.”
“Forgery. The creation of a false written document or alteration of a genuine one, with the intent to defraud. Forgery consists of filling in blanks on a document containing a genuine signature, or materially altering or erasing an existing instrument.”
All that is needed is intent.
“I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she think’s she’s doing, but its not helping the cause.” Michael Mann climategate 2.0
Jeez Judith, even Wojick gets it.
Get a clue.
Actually, no. Nice try, though.
We get it as well Michael.
The part about you not being able to counter point Dr Curry and having to resort to attempts to demean her.
To defeat a libel case it is sufficient to show that the accused did believe what he said, that he wasn’t knowingly lying. The quotes illustrate why Steyn would believe that the Hockey Stick was a complete and utter fraud, since so many other esteemed climate scientists were thinking quite similar things about it.
For example, Arthur Laffer could never win a libel lawsuit against an entertainer like John Stewart for calling Reaganomics “bunk”, because the accused could cite a hundred economists who’d said essentially the same thing. I doesn’t matter if the Laffer Curve is unquestionably true, such a suit can’t be won.
The object of the law suit may not have been to “win” in court but to silence the din in the crowd for a few years or longer. If there is a trial and Mann loses in a fashion that is sort of the reverse of the Scopes Trial it will not only hurt climate science but all science.
“hide the decline”
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/mwp-lia/hiding-the-decline-hockeystick-mann-600.jpg
That’s got to hurt! Love the side-by-side!
The word fraud in common usage doesn’t necessarily mean a criminal act…
Definition #2 from mirriam webster –
a : a person who is not what he or she pretends to be
I would hazard that a sizable portion of the Phd’s in the world pretend/believe their are substantially smarter/more skilled then they really are..
I.E. Dr Mann at one point appeared to believe he could divine 1,000 years of global temperature to within a few tenths of a degree from a relatively small sample of tree rings.
As anyone with a brain knows…divining global temperature for the last hundred years to within a few tenths of a degree using thousands of actual thermometers is a complex task.
I was taught extrapolations are incredibly dangerous and the smart scientist simply doesn’t do them.
https://youtu.be/VbR0EPWgkEI?t=1790
Oh, I beg to differ. As a former litigation attorney, they are very definitely relevant. Remember, Steyn doesn’t have to prove that the hockey stick is a fraud. (and even if he did, these statements are by no means his only or even his best evidence). Mann has to prove that Steyn’s statement was false and that Steyn knew or was extremely reckless in not knowing it was false.
I haven’t followed the suit much at all. Do you know if
1.) the “hide the decline” email is in evidence? or
2.) the analysis as described Richard Muller above is in evidence?
To Turbulent Eddie: not much is in “evidence”. It has not gotten to trial yet. Mann has made claims about being defamed/libeled. Motions have been filed and the court has goofed it all up and started over. It is a mess.
Mann doesn’t have to prove Steyn was false or ignorant. He only needs to point to the several independent academic investigations that have not found fraud in what Mann did. The fact that people can repeat his results showed that he did not fabricate data, which would have been academic fraud. Choosing a method to process data was not fraud, even if some other scientists might have chosen a different method or data. That is a valid scientific difference in how to process data and scientific differences are not punishable as academic fraud. A court will not overturn the findings of academic investigations because they are not qualified to judge the science, and if they defer to the prior academic investigations they would have to say that Steyn did wrong with his defamatory statement.
Jim D: The problem here is the word “fraud”. In common parlance, someone who bloviates, exaggerates, never admits they are wrong, acts like they are smarter than everyone else, and is a bully might be called a huckster, a fraud, a phoney, a fake. This is not the same as the legal definition of a financial fraud. The legal requirement for defamation is to knowingly say something false. Steyn had X reasons (the number of quotes in his book plus Y number of posts at Climate Audit) to believe the hockey stick was not valid and that promoting it was not valid and thus was fakery. That is all he has to prove. Mann must prove Steyn called him a faker even though he knew Mann was an angel doing perfect science. By the logic of Mann, no one can call Freudian analysis or astrology or claims that vaccines cause autism “fake” or invalid if the defendant is a university professor.
C.L. ++
JIm D,
And what jurisdiction are you making up law for? And bending logic.
As a matter of logic, the fact that other people may get identical results does not prove that A did not commit fraud. Indeed, one of the reasons some people fabricate or otherwise commit fraud is so they can show the results that others have gotten.
As a matter of logic, investigations of any kind do not ‘prove’ that someone did or did not do something. Obama could announce that his investigation of the IRS shows that no one did anything wrong. That would not, in any way, prove that agents did not harass and abuse innocent citizens. It might however, show that the investigation was corrupt.
In academia, fraud has a much more serious meaning and proven academic fraud can cost tenure, but at the same time it is more narrowly defined than the general usage. Is Steyn implying academic fraud? That is the question. If he is, that is the defamation case. Academic fraud includes things like fabrication of results and plagiarism.
Jim has been shown over and over again how his claim of ‘independent academic investigations’ is simply untrue. Yet he continues to make this fraudulent claim every time Mann comes up in a discussion.
There is no fraud because he can show the data and the methods that led to his results. You may disagree with the data and/or methods, but that comes down to a difference of opinion which does not rise to the level of academic fraud. This is probably how the committees saw it. It doesn’t mean they thought that his methods were the best possible, just one way to deal with the data, which he is allowed to publish. Other people have other ways, and can publish those too.
He’s writing opinion, in an opinion-dominated venue. He’s speaking metaphorically, at least. If he claims he was doing only that, that the “fraud” was a metaphor for a deliberate deception (provable) that in his opinion was the moral equivalent of “academic fraud”, my guess is that would be not-actionable.
IIRC the methods he claimed he used, against the data he claimed he used, was demonstrated not to produce the results he claimed.
When it comes to Steyn, IIRC at the time that statement was made, Mann was continuing to refuse to produce all the necessary information to allow a successful “clean-room” replication of his claimed results. In which case a presumption of guilt for “academic fraud” would have been entirely in order in an opinion piece.
As I mention elsewhere, his best chance of winning would be the judgment that any reasonable person would not believe that Steyn is qualified or knowledgeable enough about the issue to make his statement, so it should not be taken seriously and more as some form of satire.
It seems that he aims to show he is knowledgeable enough to take on the anti free speech racket the suit entails. Oh well, he must have blown the case.
Jim D: Mann doesn’t have to prove Steyn was false or ignorant. He only needs to point to the several independent academic investigations that have not found fraud in what Mann did.
The more I read your posts, the more I suspect that you just plain do not know or understand very much.
The investigation of Mann by Penn State that did not find fraud was a travesty. It was the same committee, the same chairman and mostly the same members, that failed the Sandusky investigation; and it failed in the same ways, for example by counting the income for PSU that those men were partially responsible for, and by taking testimony only from the defendants.
Steyn’s briefs, responding in part to Mann’s mutually contradictory briefs, in Steyn v Mann (and some commentaries at Climate Audit) address the “exonerations” of Mann in detail.
Yes.
people who over charge the fraud case make it harder for people who just want to criticize the science
There haven’t been any “independent academic investigations”. There have been a couple of snow jobs in the UK that never even mentioned Mann by name and one “in-house” one in tne US.
And fi Mann wants to open up that particular can of worms/Pandora’s Box as part of his case he will surely live to regret it!
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Especially an opinion writer.
I personally don’t think an opinion writer needs to worry about whether their opinion piece makes the job of people who want to criticize Mann harder or not.
But you are certainly entitled to your opinion also.
Steven Mosher: people who over charge the fraud case make it harder for people who just want to criticize the science
Maybe.
Or maybe the accumulating quotes in a widely read (I expect) and well-documented book will give encouragement to those (many?) scientists who have been keeping quiet about their own criticisms.
I think we shall find out going forward.
David Wojick: Unfortunately, fraud is a strong and libelous claim. None of these quotes support it. Mann is a stubborn and unpleasant person but that is not a crime, as fraud is.
Mann v Steyn is a libel suit. If Steyn can show, as he has, that the accusations of “fraud” were already widely known in Mann’s community, then Mann is going to be hard-pressed to win a libel suit. He can hardly prove a “reckless disregard for truth” or “actual malice” against someone who can quote a lot of honored scientists in his support.
Steyn is not trying to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mann committed fraud; he is trying to establish that the accusations of “fraud” (the offending phrase was actually “fraudulent hockeystick”) and “sloppiness” are defensible.
Steyn’s wording (he was quoting a prior publication, at that) was impolite almost in the extreme. Whether that was libel is what is at issue.
It is an accusation of academic fraud, which, while not a major crime, can be used as justification to remove tenure since most universities would have a zero tolerance policy for academic fraud. This is why Mann separates this particular accusation from the smearing and name-calling that is generally rampant in the blogs. Steyn is the only one who has made this accusation as explicitly. Steyn calls it free speech, but this accusation is not like name-calling that is protected. Free speech doesn’t allow people to go around saying someone has done things that are prosecutable when they have not or have already been cleared.
“Fraud” is not a crime. Some types of fraud are, but not fraud in the general sense.
Exactly. In the general sense, many people who puff themselves up, pad their cv, get boob jobs, too much makeup, claim they give to charities and rescue puppies when they don’t…..are frauds. Not illegal, just being a jerk.
Oh, and I don’t believe there is even an academic crime of “fraud”. You can get in trouble for making up imaginary patients or other data and for plagiarism. The only time it even becomes criminal involves taking government grants and then only pretending to do the work, though if this was strictly enforced…
Doing terribly sloppy and wrong work? Widely practiced, sadly, and not punished.
Love it.
Stern gets it. “Watermelons”.
http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/steyn-environmentalists-are-communists
Steyn. Oops.
==> “There is much wit and plenty of zingers…”
What is the line of differentiation between “wit” and “zingers,” and smears in your book, Judith?
Seems to me that your line of differentiation traces back to the side of the climate wars from which the comments originate.
Are you really accusing 120 of Mann’s academic peers of “smearing” him?
Perhaps the Climate Science Defense (attack?) fund will help him to sue all the bastards :-)
I was wondering that myself. Is Mann now going to go through the book and sue everyone quoted by Steyn?
foxgoose –
==> “Are you really accusing 120 of Mann’s academic peers of “smearing” him?”
Do you think that the “wit” and “zingers” Judith referred to were the quotes supplied my Mann’s academic peers, or in Steyn’s editorial comments?
Maybe you’re right about tha…..
…
Oh.
Wait.
<blockquote<"There is much wit and plenty of zingers in Steyn’s narrative”…
Maybe not, eh?
Numbnuts,
Point to a single smear among the quotes Judith borrowed from the book.
And btw, here’s a saying from my service days: “Sometimes you gotta call a spade a f …ing shovel.” Appears that some of the folks being quoted understand that maxim.
foxgoose,
I ordered Steyn’s book 2 days ago from SteynOnline. Still waiting for arrival to read it.
You said you read an advance copy of the book. Question to you: Is 120 the number of people with PhDs that Steyn uses quotes from in his book?
John
Di gustibus… Joshua. I thought you were the undisputed king of arbitrating what is motivated reasoning? And here you ask Judith? I’m surprised at you. But don’t worry. We’ll read all about it over at ATTP, unless we’re smart enough to speed scroll.
Joshua, Steyn is a shock jock and a pretty funny wordsmith. Does Dr. Curry’s struggle on behalf of science have to extend to Jon Stewart and Rush Limbaugh?
Steyn’s strongest argument is that his opinion piece was an opinion.
Opinion is protected speech and cannot be considered defamation.
If the court finds that Steyn’s piece is opinion it is case closed for Mann.
In addition, Steyn never actually called Mann a fraud (at least in the complained about subject matter – he may have later) – he called the hockey stick fraudulent. This may seem like a trivial point, but is actually a very important distinction legally (in my opinion).
Finally, truth is a defense to defamation. And the hockey stick graph is fraudulent for many different reasons, which Steyn will be able to articulate. The WMO cover version didn’t even explain that the temperature record was being tacked onto the proxy record (I believe). Not to mention the R2 statistic which was censored or the censored folder or the PCA issues, or the hide the decline, and on and on.
You can’t really argue something is an opinion and claim truth as a defense at the same time. The point of claiming something is an opinion is to say it cannot be verified as true or false, thus it cannot be defamatory.
You can’t say something cannot be verified as true or false thus it isn’t defamatory then turn around say it is true so it isn’t defamatory.
Sure you can. Attorneys argue in the alternative all the time.
Brandon S:
I agree with Stanton. The argument would be that this is an opinion. Then you would say that even if it is found not to be an opinion and a statement of fact – it is true.
We lawyers do it all the time.
Judith, your blog post provides a perfect summary of the scientific weakness of Mann’s work in a way that would be understandable to judges. Hope that the DC Court of Appeals sees it. The problem with Hansenite “climate science” is that the underlying science is so complex that it is easy for an adversarial scientist to quote a true buy irrelevant scientific principle to deflect from the many faults of Hansenite “science.”
American libel does provide protection for people accused of libel by public figures by virtual of the malice standard. On the other hand, some judges would be greatly impressed by Mann’s superficially good academic qualifications, notwithstanding the poor quality of his work. As I have posted multiple times, it is very important for the Mann defenders to puncture Mann’s undeserved bubble of respectability.
JD
Thank you!
I’m inclined to think that in his heart of hearts – or at the very least at the back of this little bully’s subconscious – Mann has to know how very wrong he is. And if he doesn’t … Well, I can only conclude that he’s even less intelligent and/or self-aware than he’s repeatedly shown himself to be.
To my mind, Mann’s inexplicable – and deplorable – decision to team up with 3rd rater, Lewandowsky (and play 2nd fiddle, to boot!) strongly suggests (to me, anyway) that he was desperately seeking a diversion from the very deep hole into which he has indisputably dug himself.
More power to your pen, Mark Steyn … as more than a few years your senior, I just hope I live long enough to see your victory in court:-)
One of the reasons I have never accused Mann of fraud is that it is perfectly possible that he is quite simply stupid, His behaviour in this law suit broadly supports that view,
Jonathan: I hear my tutor speaking!! ;)
Is the ignorance (stupidity) of an author a defense against fraudulence in his publically available work product?
Ignorance/stupidity seems the weakest of all possible defenses.
John
Would the Court accept a plea of ignorance/stupidity as a mitigation?
Surely honest stupidity or ignorance IS a defence against fraud ?
Previous comment should have referred to Mann DEFENDANTS
The most horrifying aspect of this whole situation is that been used as a part of the foundation for an attack on Western society. Economies of developed countries to be held to ransom; economies of developing countries to be restrained. Funds to be transferred from one to the other to assist “sustainable progress” while substantial rents rub off on the good and the great as recompense for having granted us plebeians the privilege of their grace and favour.
They and their political facilitators are equally culpable.
That first sentence should read: “The most horrifying aspect of this whole situation is that it has been used as a part of the foundation for an attack on Western societies.” Sorry!
To me the most horrifying aspect is the destruction of science and its replacement with ideology.
When the CAGW crowd talks about CO2 regulation as an “insurance policy” and as there being “no downside” if they are wrong. How hard does one have to think before on realizes one down side could be that CO2 regulation is costly and ineffective. And, yet another downside could be a cry wolf scenario that sullies the brands of science and modern western civ. These brands belong to a broader group than the ideologues that did little to build them. Perhaps that is why we see more gray hair (except in career politicians) on one side of the debate.
I have never followed the ins and outs of all this and my eyes have glazed over at the idea of wading through more stuff.
Having met Josh I think the cartoons are interesting and maybe they provide a focal point for Steyn’s case that the writing may lack.
However, I think I will wait for the court case before diving back in. IF proven, and its a big IF, then climate science will be turned upside down as the hockey stick remains iconic.
tonyb
tonyb
Steyn is funny and caustic. You should skim After America and America Alone by him as both go into EU and Great Britain falling under onslaught of immigration and political correctness. Funny and sarcastic.
How Steyn got started on the CAGW sarcastic comments is his reading blogs and asking what the heck is going on with temps.
Still open to your response on JoNova and Marohasy Australian temperature adjustments and the HadCru4 recent adjustments to take advantage of Karl etal and raise the baseline temps. You seem to take the Met staff at their word that adjustment to history are in the worlds best interest irrespective on the impact on the Long Slow Thaw.
Scott
Scott
I replied to your earlier comment to me about hadcrut on the original thread you posted it.
Do you remember which one it was , if not I will see if it shows up on the word press profile on my main computer. I am currently on my iPad.
I don’t think I said that I agree with the met office tampering with history was a good idea, but that I don’t believe for a moment that they are involved in a hoax or conspiracy.Neither is BEST or GISS.
Tonyb
Tonyb
Thanks for the response on the other thread. Pielke Sr responded about Schmidt and GISS not being open to discussions but HadCru4 got right in line with GISS changes. A person more cynical than me might suppose they are trooping in line for the Paris conference. they are changing historical records in an ad hoc manner to support a political position, or so it seems. . So sad for science. How much has your Long Slow Thaw changed? Since the net change is small these adjustments are big.
Scott
Scott
So did you find my comment from a week or so ago posted in response to your original comment?
To amplify, I think many climate scientists are overconfident with their data which is often pretty thin.
However, The idea of the met office or mosh slyly tampering with data to advance their own agenda I find impossible to believe. They are their own worst enemies though with regards to intelligible transparency. After a meeting with DR Richard Betts at the Met office (who I have the highest regards for) I suggested they could nip these claims of data tampering by producing a single page response for their website which directly rebutted the claims in an intelligible format I.e understandable to mere mortals,
I took the trouble to also directly suggest to Mosh that he could usefully do the same for BEST. I often find mosh’s replies cryptic in the extreme but again I can’t see him deliberately tampering with figures to forward his own agenda.
It is up to both of them to explain why they change figures but they need to do so in an intelligible fashion.
It would enable people such as me to link to these clarifications when someone plays the hoax card.
Amazingly, neither of them have taken any notice of me. :)
Tonyb
The reason for change has been explained numerous times. In numerous ways. To numerous people.
Again. You can not understand the reason for individual changes when you use an automatic algorithm. The algorithm IS the explanation.
Steven,
Are not algorithms base on logical rules? Could not those be listed?
SOU on Climate Reason: “Denialists and the conspiracy nuts you hang with aren’t worth the time of day. You all deserve each other.”
Thanks for taking all that for keeping with your convictions. (I promise Tony is not getting any checks from us, SOU. He does it for free.)
“Steven,
Are not algorithms base on logical rules? Could not those be listed?”
It’s based on both math and logic.
the code lists it all.
Ron Graf: “Are not algorithms base on logical rules? Could not those be listed?”
That depends on whether you mean scientific algorithms or post-normal science Algoreithms.
The latter appear to dominate in modern climate “science”.
The Computer says so.
Sorry; Mark Steyn is incomparable. He is well-tuned to the issues of the age and excellent at expressing all of the facts, the trends, his views, and his predictions for the future on many issues. Plus, he does Sinatra and the passing parade. I, for one, am looking forward to the apparently hard-to-find links to all of the corrections he’s had to publish, particularly about his characterization of the posts that seemingly launched the lawsuit. His indictment was of Penn State’s review committees with only a secondary shot at the plaintiff in his DC court case. He does not pussy-foot around and is not overly self-serious; it’s true. His case is not about science on trial; it is about free speech (that is, the ability to critique those in power and those associated with those in power).
His best defense may be that he is just being a comedian. Comedy should be protected.
Satire is legally protected against defamation suits on the grounds that it is not done with malice and it is not coming from someone that a reasonable person would believe on the subject. However, Steyn isn’t claiming it is just satire, which is why this is going so far.
Steyn filed an anti-SLAPP motion and things promptly went off the rails. That’s when he tried to take it to merits. The other side went for delay. It has gone this far only thusly.
Steyn’s lawyer has been pushing for trial while Mann’s other two defendants had pushed for dismissal.
All right jim, I have to admit, that thing you just did were you post your strawman in one post and then demolish it in the next was real cute. Someone who wasn’t paying close enough attention might not have notice that no one else actually was making the argument that you had a perfect comeback for. ^¿^
This is for Steve Mosher.
If the logic of the Pair Wise Homogenization Algorithm is so perfect how come it managed to add 1.2C of warming in 2 steps to Santiago, Chile.
http://clivebest.com/world/pics/station-855740.png
The red curves are the result of the NOAA automated offset detection. The top graph shows the correction applied by the algorithm. Even CRU (in green) didn’t make such a large mistake. The blue curves are the raw measurements.
tonyb
By the way, I accept adjusting temperatures is not a hoax or conspiracy. More like a thumb on the scale to slant the results in time for Paris or increased profits at the deli. Austalian Rutherglen long term temperature adjustments change slight long term cooling trends into slight AGW heating trends. That is all we have at this point. What are adjustments doing to your data? Paul Homewood seems to thing they are not trivial.
Scott
tonyb
Missed the above reply. thanks for your courtesy.
Scott
Scott
The met office don’t tend to use the original CET to 1659 and as my own data precedes this their adjustments really make no difference to me.
They are responsive to correcting errors. Vukvecic, who posts here sometimes, pointed out a mistake to them which affected the whole of the CET database and they corrected it.it both raised and lowered temperatures.
I think another article from mosh might help us understand these adjustments, alternatively if Judith was interested I could ask Dr Betts if he would like to contribute something on temperature adjustments.
His colleague John Kennedy has posted here on SST’s but I am not sure if Richatd has ever contributed anything here. He got in trouble with the faithful for his article over at WUWT a little while ago, do once bitten…
Tonyb
Thumb on the scale?
we developed an algorithm.
it doesnt have thumbs
we tested it double blind.
it worked.
look ma no thumbs
Here’s a climate “science” algorithm, courtesy of Harry, the UEA CRU’s coder, found in HARRY_READ_ME.txt
;
mknormal,yyy,timey,refperiod=[1881,1940]
;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
(…)
;
; APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,x)
densall=densall+yearlyadj
FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\briffa_sep98_d.pro
Several misspellings on Mann’s last name as Michal, I’m sure you want to fix that.
thx
If it wasn’t for his ego arguing otherwise, Dr Mann might want to change his name to Michal Man, grow a full beard and start wearing a hat and sun glasses, by the time Steyn gets through with him.
That’s fine by me. There’s another Michael up-thread who I wish would change his name.
Stein defeated the Islamists in Canada who were trying to silence any criticism of Islam using Canada’s then all powerful Human Rights Commission. Mann is small potatoes compared to them. It would be interesting to know if Canada’s Mr. Science and Environmentalism go to guy David Suzuki is still helping to pay Mann’s legal bills.
I bought Mann’s book and while I was at it I bought Tim Ball’s book too. Tim Ball is the Canadian scientist Mann is also trying to silence with legal action and last time I checked it was stalled by Mann at the British Columbia supreme level, with Mann also funded, at least in part, by David Suzuki and his minions.
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
———
Judith Curry selects “The quotes below [that] I think give a pretty good representation from the climate scientists that were quoted [by Steyn].”
———
Judith Curry, wouldn’t your review exert greater logical force if it provided dates for these quotations?
Observation The Mann, Bradley & Hughes (1999) article is now sixteen years in the past. It is legitimate to enquire, what portion of the selected Steyn/Curry quotes are recent, versus more-than-a-decade old?
Alternative 1 Early scientific criticism of Mann has grown stronger; the majority of later scientific studies have discomfirmed the “Hockey Stick”; early allegations of misconduct by Mann have been affirmed by subsequent investigations; Steyn’s choice of quoted anti-Mann passages is representative of subsequent scientific criticism; Steyn’s allegations against Mann are broadly right-on-the-facts.
Alternative 2 Early scientific criticism of Mann has largely abated; early critics have fallen silent; the majority of later scientific studies have affirmed the “Hockey Stick”; early allegations of Mann misconduct have been investigated and disconfirmed, Steyn’s choice of quoted anti-Mann passages is unrepresentative of subsequent scientific criticism; Steyn’s allegations against Mann are broadly wrong-on-the-facts.
Based upon the objective evidence of dates, which alternative is more nearly correct?
Judith Curry, by providing dates for your quotes, you (and Mark Steyn and Anthony Watts too) can make a factual, good-faith, science-respecting contribution toward helping the world to decide between alternatives.
And if you continue to choose not to provide quote-dates … at least say why not.
Dude, read the book. She quoted from it. If you want more detail, look at the source.
Concerning your Alt 2, the majority of those are just as dodgy as the original. Upside down varves. Continued use of stripbark bristlecones. Clear academic misconduct by Marcott. Practically a full time job for McIntyre to expose all the repeated, willfully knowing bad science for which Mann is the posterchild/ringleader.
John — how about Alternative 3. The Hockey Stick was discredited quite a few years ago. The statistical formula was shown to be incorrect. It produces a hockey stick shape output regardless of input. In addition, there’s much criticism of the data used — some upside some, some cherry-picked, etc. The Hockey Stick no longer of much interest. So one would expect few recent criticisms of it.
David Skurnick:
That’s not true, and I wish people would stop saying it. Unfortunately, the problem has been too oversimplified so people won’t.
Michael Mann’s faulty implementation of principal component analysis was heavily biased toward creating hockey stick shaped proxies. His subsequent step, where various proxies were combined, was similarly biased toward creating a hockey stick reconstruction due to weighting proxies by their correlation to the temperature record. Both resulted in extreme amounts of weight being given to tiny amounts of data.
But neither could produce a hockey stick out of nothing. Both steps could cherry-pick hockey stick series out of a data set which largely didn’t show a hockey stick, but they couldn’t pick hockey stick series out if there were none to begin with. That means if Mann et al hadn’t had any series with hockey stick shapes, they wouldn’t have gotten a hockey stick. But they did have a hockey stick stick shape… in ~5% of their data.
So their methodology cherry-picked that ~5% of the data, smoothed out the noise in it to make it look even more certain and made Mann famous. But it didn’t pull the hockey stick out of nowhere like so many people like to claim. It pulled it out of real data. It just pulled it out of a tiny amount of tree ring data from one part of North America. Those tree rings weren’t magic thermometers, so they should never have been used as the sole basis for a major PR campaign in the global warming debate. But they were.
Just for the record, there was no upside down data in the original hockey stick. Upside down data only became an issue in Mann’s follow-up paper in 2008.
Mann oh Mann,
Sitting on a branch,
a long flat limb,
unaware that, figuratively
speaking, he’s skating
on thin ice.
Brandon
Weren’t Mann’s methods also capable of producing a Hockey Stick from red noise ?
Punksta: “Brandon
Weren’t Mann’s methods also capable of producing a Hockey Stick from red noise ?”
Here is a comment from Professor Richard Muller in the October 2004 Technology Review.
McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.
Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called “Monte Carlo” analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!
That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen?
Punksta:
Sure, but that’s because if you generate enough series with red noise, some of them will have modern periods with an uptick compared to their earlier periods. Mann’s methodology will give those series inordinate amounts of weight, with the rest of the series effectively doing nothing but contributing noise (which because it is equally distributed, will actually cancel out and reduce overall variance, increasing the flatness of the “shaft” of the hockey stick).
The same sort of thing can be said of other paleoclimatic reconstructions. It’s not that you can’t find any data series with a hockey stick like shape. It’s that the vast majority don’t have one. It’s only by cherry-picking, either via a bogus methodology like Mann’s or more directly (see Jacoby and D’arrigo’s work, where they openly state they cherry-pick their data series), that you can get a hockey stick like result.
The hockey stick graph is from 1998 MBH98 – so of course some of the quotes about the work will be more than 10 years old.
Two Exemplary Book Reviews This month’s Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society has published reviews of two climate-science books:
(1) Peter Kuchment’s review of John B. Drake’s Climate Modeling for Scientists and Engineers (2014)
(2) Gerald R. North’s review of Hans Kaper and Hans Engler’s Mathematics & Climate (2013)
Two Rational Conclusion
(1) Anyone who reads these two books will develop a thorough appreciation of the strong scientific foundations, that have evolved in recent decades and are continuing to strengthen, in support of Mann’s 1999 “Hockey Stick” climate-change worldview … scientific foundations that (as it seems to me and many) are largely absent from Mark Steyn’s book.
(2) Anyone who reads these two reviews will develop a thorough appreciation of the strong scientific and academic traditions, founded in reasoned scientific discourse and verifiable quotations from the scientific literature … traditions that (as it seems to me and many) are not entirely respected in Judith Curry’s review of Mark Steyn’s book.
Conclusion A simple-yet-substantial step forward toward reasoned tradition-respecting scientific discourse in regard to climate-change would be for Curry/Watts/Stein to make a practice of supplying dates with their anti-Mann quotations.
Where’s FOMD?
Marketing a New Formula! for enhanced whiteness?
Andrew
Hey Fan-
Yeah, I noticed that lack of dates…as well as absence of links that might help understand context for the quotes.
I wonder what was up with that.
Couldn’t possibly be anything about attempting to spin (like an advocate), I would imagine. So what could the explanation be?
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-HicKZSkrqvw/VHX3Tzrh4nI/AAAAAAAAL14/H8sqV4DVT-E/s679-Ic42/nino%2525203.4%252520emile-geay%2525202012.png
Mann was a co-author on that, find where he use it in his current hockey stick.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-OvQHzJy8gFU/VLF3XHImAqI/AAAAAAAAMGM/lcW6ogEHxbA/s689-Ic42/oppo%252520over%252520mann.png
That would be in the background with the Oppo et al. 2009 Indo-Pacific Warm pool in the foreground. The 2015 version of the Mann Hockey stick does use any paleo after 1902, only instrumental spliced to the handle.
http://climateaudit.org/2015/01/08/more-mann-grafting/
Got anything more current than 2015?
Capt Dallas, can paleo data really exist since 1900, since “paleo” means ancient, early, prehistoric, or primitive? They need a new term for proxy data that is more recent, such as “antique”, “vintage”, or “classic”, and perhaps they could use the term “genuine” to denote raw instrumental data that hasn’t been adjusted two-dozen times by NOAA’s NCDC.
You’re flogging an entirely phantom horse here. In my book all quotations are dated and footnoted with references to the original source and (in the eBook version) Internet links. You could always try reading it before announcing your “conclusion”.
george, “Capt Dallas, can paleo data really exist since 1900, since “paleo” means ancient, early, prehistoric, or primitive? They need a new term for proxy data that is more recent, such as “antique”, “vintage”, or “classic”, and perhaps they could use the term “genuine” to denote raw instrumental data that hasn’t been adjusted two-dozen times by NOAA’s NCDC.”
How about modern paleo :) Mann avoided the instrumental adjustments by not using the new modern instrumental by letting his 2015 version end in 1999.
The “climate change worldview” in these 2 books does nothing to prove that Mann’s work or the attempt to reconstruct climate from tree rings in particular (by anyone) is a valid scientific effort. You are attempting virtue by association.
FOMD! :)
“Climate Modeling for Scientists and Engineers” author, from Amazon:
” John B. Drake was a researcher and group leader at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for 30 years and led the climate modeling efforts there from 1990 to 2010. His research has included an exploration of new algorithms for high performance computing that could be applied to the simulation of climate on decadal to century time scales; the implementation of a full atmospheric general circulation model on distributed memory message passing computers; and a two-dimensional domain decomposition and parallel spherical harmonic transform algorithms which enabled some of the highest resolution climate simulations ever performed and pioneered the algorithms and methods that are now used on what has become the dominant parallel computing architecture. Through collaborations with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and sister DOE national laboratories, Drake led the SciDAC projects that resulted in the Community Earth System Model (CESM1.0) released in 2010. Drake continues his involvement with the ORNL Climate Change Science Institute as a research professor at the University of Tennessee. He has taught graduate courses on climate modeling in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and conducted research into the impacts of climate change.”
“Mathematics and Climate” by Hans Kaper and Hans Engler.
Clearly both Hans have an excellent grasp of climate mathematics! Both are at Georgetown! I would like to know more about Hans’ Kaper. Did he get away with it?
From Amazon:
“Hans Kaper is affiliated with Georgetown University and is Co-Director of the Mathematics and Climate Research Network. He spent most of his professional career at Argonne National Laboratory and served as Program Director for Applied Mathematics at the National Science Foundation. He is a Corresponding Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and was named a SIAM Fellow in 2009. He is the (co-)author of four books and more than 100 articles in refereed journals. Dr. Kaper is Editor-in-Chief of SIAM News, a member of the SIAM Committee on Science Policy, and Chair of the SIAM Activity Group on Dynamical Systems. He is interested in the mathematics of physical systems.
Hans Engler is Professor of Mathematics at Georgetown University, where he has been since 1984 and served as Department Chair in the 1990s. He has also served as Program Director for Applied Mathematics at the National Science Foundation. He was the Founding Director of Georgetown University’s MS program in mathematics and statistics. His research interests are in mathematics, statistics, and computing and their applications to physical and societal problems. He also does mathematical and statistical consulting work for government agencies and private companies.”
John Sidles
Having now read these reviews (one of which is simply a quote from the fly leaf and the contents) I’d say they say little in support of the Mann issue, in fact Hans Kaper and Hans Engler appear to explicitly warn about the kind of problems that arise from limited data sets and their misuse by researchers.
Perhaps then useful literature for Mann to learn from?
John Siddles
What bearing does your claimed progress of climate science as a whole, have on the disputed integrity of Mann ?
Judith Curry, by providing dates for your quotes, you (and Mark Steyn and Anthony Watts too) can make a factual, good-faith, science-respecting contribution toward helping the world to decide between alternatives.
The notable lack of these basic requirements thus far (date, context, source or citation) suggests the reasons belong in your Alternative 2 scenario.
Or they show you didn’t read the book either.
Another numbnutted response.
You know, Alarmists really need to be more careful when jumping on each others bandwagons. At the very least try checking if it has wheels first. ^¿^
the majority of later scientific studies have affirmed the “Hockey Stick”
Watch the Richard Muller video above again.
What Mann did was not affirm that there was warming per the thermometer record. Rather, Mann’s violation was that he summarily rejected the tree ring data ( which indicated a “decline”, not an incline ) at a point of his choosing, and then “glued on” the thermometer record, without indicating two different data sets to maximize the desired effect.
When Phil Jones wrote the email about “hide the decline”, in my opinion, it indicated fraud, first by Jones who obviously knew the effect, and second, Jones obviously learned this intent from Mann.
The fact that this does not occur to you makes me suspect you are defrauding yourself, and like many, chosing what to believe to defend an preconceived position.
For the majority of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, the chain-of-evidence is composed of three strong links.
• Global CO2 levels plainly show a lengthening “hockey-blade” rise, and
• Global heat-energy and temperature plainly show an lengthening “hockey-blade” rise, and
• Thermodynamics and transport theory plainly predict that the former lengthening “hockey-blade” causes the latter lengthening “hockey-blade.”
Neither Steyn’s book nor Curry’s review of it substantially compromises any of these three links in the lengthening “hockey-stick” chain of evidence.
Conclusion Mathematicians, scientists, and engineers (and Popes too) are rationally unsurprised that fifteen years of post-Mann research have broadly affirmed Mann’s lengthening “hockey-stick” of climate-change.
Contrarians, ideologues, and special interests all espouse the opposite view to the mathematics, science, and engineering communities … needless to say!
Sidles: none of this says that Mann’s methods are right or that the paleo-reconstructions he created are informative. You are trying to say that since the other areas you cite agree that it should be warming therefore Mann was right. But right-answer-wrong-methods is still wrong (as McIntyre is wont to say).
John,
Your second “link” depends on whether you accept Mann’s work or not. I can’t speak for mathematicians, but most engineers will tell you that we can determine past temperatures accurately enough from a few proxies to establish as fact that the last 100 years are far warmer than any previous period of the last 1000 years, (let alone last 10,000) is blowing smoke up your ass. (Or inhaling it.)
John Sidles,
“…Mann’s lengthening “hockey-stick” …”
Maybe we should call it the Pinocchio Stick!
The blade is correct.
The shaft is too smooth.
This is not that hard.. ah well some skeptics miss the point as well
Steven: “The blade is correct. The shaft is too smooth.”
If the shaft is noise along with tails of 5% of the proxies, (cherry picked for 20th century rise,) some having been proscribed by their studies to be used as temp proxies due to being known to be CO2 sensitive, with those conforming being weighted for amplification, with those amplified but not conforming after 1960 arbitrarily chopped off (in deceptive fashion to hide the decline), all attached to a bright red blade of mercury thermometer readings, then I think one has described the MBH98/99 hockey stick accurately.
But that’s a mouthful for a court sound-bite.
Mosh: isn’t the real issue is the shaft of the stick consists of proxies which lack the resolution and accuracy to catch high frequency variance, like on a scale of a hundred years or so, and the blade consists of instrumental records?
@Ron Graf – well said, very succinct description, in my opinion.
David
That was precisely the problem. The novel proxies were a very coarse sieve through which real world annual and decadal temperatures fell. The sharp upturn at the end is because the real work temperatures were then used.
It can seen in my graph here of CET in annual decadal and 50 year segments.
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/clip_image0041.jpg
The temperature around 1540 appear to be at least as warm as today.note that the period from 1538 to 1659 is my own reconstruction.
Tonyb
John Siddles
You seem to have overlooked your own earlier point that subsequent climate science as a whole has in effect comprehensively debunked the Hockey Stick.
And hence also that, actually, it is those who doggedly still espouse it who are the ideologues and special interests going against mathematics, science, and engineering communities … needless to say!
Tonyb, If your reconstruction is accurate that would mean that greater than 0.8C swings in 100 years is the norm, not the exception. Seeing as pre-1860 means pre-AGW, do you have an opinion the major forcings that are normally at work at a centennial frequency? I realize there is obviously no consensus but I am interested in your personal take if you see this late comment.
As engineer I can tell that CAGW theory is biased as fully based on 2 rotten pillars :
(1) Unvalidated climate models, that have never passed any Verification & Validation process, and would actually never be in the position to pass such a V&V process, since unable to faithfully hind-cast 20th century climate variations.
(2) Fraudulent MHB Hockey Stick that has been rebutted by R. McKitrick and S. McIntyre, as well as by Wegmann Report, and is not supported by paleoclimate reconstuctions, especially those based on ice-core data highlighting that :
a/ Previous interglacial period was 2 to 3°C warmer than current one
b/ During current Holocene interglacial period, Warm Periods and optimums have been reported – Medieval Warm Period about 1Ky ago / Romanian Warm period about 2Ky ago and Minoan Warm Period about 3Ky ago – that have been actually warmer than current warm period.
There are also growing evidences that NASA-GISS and HAD-CRU are manipulating and falsifying modern climate data (20th century), in order to “hide the decline” (hiatus) observed since about 1997 (cf. AR5 WG1 box 9.2), and make those data closer to climate models outputs.
Yes everyone agrees that CO2 is going up. Well done, you finally got something right.
Global heat-energy and temperature plainly show an lengthening “hockey-blade” rise, and
Since we don’t have robust global data (only surface temps are robust), noone can credibly say if there is or is not a hockey stick. Only pretenders make such claims.
And even with the surface temp, once Mann’s fraud of removing the MWP is reversed, even they plainly do not.
Thermodynamics and transport theory plainly predict that the former lengthening “hockey-blade” causes the latter lengthening “hockey-blade.
1. Only if you blithely assume that there are no negative feedbacks. Which of course presumes an understanding of feedbacks supported by measurments. Which we don’t yet have.
2. But will it be decades, centuries or millenia before it starts to matter?
Only ideologues, frauds and half-wits who mistake the pope for a climate scientist take the word of a the disgraced climate science profession at face value.
John sidles with Michael and Mann.
Dates would be nice, as the reader can get a better feel for context. But as so many of the quotes used above are pretty damning about Mann’s behavior and not just the quality of one or two early papers, not sure if it would make any significant difference.
As for Alt 2 – not sure subsequent research has confirmed the Hokey Stick, unless you want to refer to Gerguis (sp?) which was retracted or Marcott, which was slammed. As for criticism subsiding, that hasn’t happened. If anything more folks are coming around to that viewpoint.
BTW John, almost didn’t recognize you without the emoticons. It is a pleasant change.
————
Mark Steyn opines “You are flogging a dead horse [by wondering about dates of the Steyn/Curry anti-Mann quotations]”
————
Won’t some Climate Etc reader assist Mark Steyn, by filling-in and date-sorting this list of Judith Curry’s preferred anti-Mann quotes?
YEAR AUTHOR
• _ _ _ _ Wallace Broecker (per Steyn’s page _ _ _)
• _ _ _ _ Eduardo Zorita (per Steyn’s page _ _ _)
• _ _ _ _ Atte Korhola (per Steyn’s page _ _ _)
• _ _ _ _ Hans von Storch (per Steyn’s page _ _ _)
• _ _ _ _ Bo Christiansen (per Steyn’s page _ _ _)
• _ _ _ _ David Rind (per Steyn’s page _ _ _)
• _ _ _ _ Tom Wigley (per Steyn’s page _ _ _)
• _ _ _ _ Phil Jones (per Steyn’s page _ _ _)
• _ _ _ _ Keith Briffa (per Steyn’s page _ _ _)
• _ _ _ _ Edward Cook (per Steyn’s page _ _ _)
• _ _ _ _ Raymond Bradley (per Steyn’s page _ _ _)
• _ _ _ _ Matti Saarnisto (per Steyn’s page _ _ _)
• _ _ _ _ Rob Wilson (per Steyn’s page _ _ _)
• _ _ _ _ Jonathan Jones (per Steyn’s page _ _ _)
• _ _ _ _ Neal King (per Steyn’s page _ _ _)
• _ _ _ _ Robert Way (per Steyn’s page _ _ _)
Question To what degree (if any) are these quotes representative of the contemporary scientific literature relating to the lengthening “hockey-blade” of global climate-change?
Resolved The completed Steyn/Curry citation-list would rank among the greatest-ever Climate Etc contributions to the climate-change debate.
John,
Mark has informed you where the dates you seek are located. Buy the book and fill in the blanks yourself.
Nice to see you back John. I rather miss the emoticons…
Tonyb
John
Your position appears to be that sixteen year old lies are not lies.
Regards,
Richard
Here ya go, Sidles:
YEAR AUTHOR
• Feb 9 2010 Wallace Broecker (per Steyn’s page 43)
• Nov 27 2009 Eduardo Zorita (per Steyn’s page 23)
• Oct 2 2009 Atte Korhola (per Steyn’s page 207)
• Nov 25 2009 Hans von Storch (per Steyn’s page 143)
• March 2 2009 Bo Christiansen (per Steyn’s page 61)
• April 27 2005 David Rind (per Steyn’s page 93)
• Oct 1 2004 Tom Wigley (per Steyn’s page 111)
• May 6 1999 Phil Jones (per Steyn’s page 105)
• June 7 2002 Keith Briffa (per Steyn’s page 107)
• Apr 3 2002 Edward Cook (per Steyn’s page 109)
• Apr 19 1999 Raymond Bradley (per Steyn’s page 191)
• Feb 6 2010 Matti Saarnisto (per Steyn’s page 209)
• Oct 21 2013 Rob Wilson (per Steyn’s page 217)
• Dec 3 2011 Jonathan Jones (per Steyn’s page 31)
• Oct 1 2011 Neal King (per Steyn’s page 65)
• Oct 1 2011 Robert Way (per Steyn’s page 71)
That’s it, Sidles. You want anymore, read the book. But from the spread of dates, I think you’ll agree that loathing of Mann has an impressive multidecadal robustness.
John
What is your response to marks litany of Apparent dislike by so many people over so many years? I am not sure what point you were making in asking for dates. Perhaps you can enlighten us?
Tonyb
John
I love when people ask stupid questions.. or questions that they think are Gotcha’s
Like Chris Darden asking OJ to put the gloves on. Rookie Mistake.
i will repeat my advice.
Do not argue with questions.
Period
Full stop.
No exceptions
Hmmm … let’s try to fix the formatting …
Thank you, Mark! Here are the sorted Steyn/Curry quote dates:
Five years since the most recent anti-Mann quote?
Average age of anti-Mann quotes approaching one full decade?
It’s nice to attach numbers to these considerations.
Conclusion Contrarians, ideologues, and special interests are still flogging a “hockey-blade” debate that — for an ever-growing majority of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers — was decided one full decade ago … in favor of Michael Mann’s climate-change worldview.
Looks Like Mann’s lawsuit had the intended effect of silencing critics
Looks like the Mann criticisms fall steeply after the lawsuit. Maybe intimidation works.
Are you dyslexic, johnny?
Oct 21 2013 Rob Wilson
That’s not five years ago. And Judith did not include all the quotes in the book. Why don’t you actually read the book and get back to us. Or just troll someplace else.
John Sidles, you said:
The most recent quote listed was Oct 2013, which is less than two years ago, not five.
Mann’s paper was MBH98 was published in April, 1998, which was 17.3 years ago, so even if the criticism has been constant ever since, the average attack on it would be 8.6 years old.
John
the date you want to calculate is the delta between the
quote and the last publication.
so 1999 would be 1 year.. 1 year past 1998.
for the other quotes you want to do the same thing.
The case was mounted in 2010 so it seems that only contemporary comments would be evidence upon which Steyn could rely on in court. Most of the comments cited by Judith were from the period from the time of publication of the HS paper to the time that the case was mounted and therefore seem relevant.
John
You don’t seem to realise that, whether honest mistake or fraud, Mann’s HS has been dropped even by rabid alarmist advocacy groups like the IPCC.
Alternative 3 scientific criticism of Mann has appeared throughout his career. There is no clear, statistically significant , increase or decrease. Mann appears to be no different than any other working scientist. Everyone is criticized. What is different is his whining about it.
Steven Mosher, to the extent that the vociferous ongoing Mann-criticism originating from Steyn/Watts/Heartland, etc.. is not considered to be scientific criticism, your point is entirely valid.
Conclusion Many mathematicians, scientists, and engineers — and likely even Michael Mann himself — will agree that the scientific criticism of Mann’s work has indeed been comparable to that directed toward “any other working scientist.”
Yes and the personal attacks actually make the scientific attacks harder to make.
————
Steven Mosher observes “Personal attacks [on scientists like Mann] actually make the scientific attacks harder to make.”
————
Steven Mosher’s very acute observation has has a surprising corollary.
Steven Mosher’s (implicit) advice to Mark Steyn Begin immediately to praise the integrity of James Hansen (as a person) so as to strengthen your credibility in arguing (rationally) against Hansen’s striking prediction (along with 16 coauthors) of a lengthening “hockey-blade” of accelerating sea-level rise-rate in coming decades
And hasn’t Judith Curry already begun to embrace Steven Mosher’s (implicit) praise-Hansen advice?
Conclusion The most controversial “hockey blade” in contemporary climate science — by far — is neither the (well-established) CO2-level hockey-blade, nor the (well-established) ocean-heat hockey-blade, nor the (well-established) global-temperature hockey-blade, but rather the predicted hockey-blade of accelerating ocean rise-rate.
I challenge you to find another scientist as prominent in the IPCC as Mann who has been criticized in such scathing a manner.
” Begin immediately to praise the integrity of James Hansen (as a person) so as to strengthen your credibility in arguing (rationally) against Hansen’s striking prediction (along with 16 coauthors) of a lengthening “hockey-blade” of accelerating sea-level rise-rate in coming decades”
Yup.
I may not like hansens advocacy, but if folks think it biases his science then the bias should be easy to find.
Plus he is pro nuke which means he actually believes there is a threat and is willing to deal and compromise.
John Sidles: the majority of later scientific studies have affirmed the “Hockey Stick”;
You are obviously not familiar with the details. The early “hockey stick”, that was displayed on the IPCC web page for a time and later removed, had chopped off the Medieval Warm Period — the “stick” of the hockey stick was flat. The later “affirmations” showed a Medieval Warm Period, with the “stick” of the hockey stick slanted downward.
There is no longer any support for the first hockey stick, which had been developed in a probably misleading way (“Mann’s trick to hide the decline” — the evidence is summarized in Steyn’s brief, and his commentaries on Mann’s briefs, and at McIntyre’s web page.)
John Sidles: ” the majority of later scientific studies have affirmed the “Hockey Stick”;”
No they haven’t, very much the opposite in fact.
Stop making stuff up.
Fan of more Sidles –
Even the IPCC, constitutionally bound to ‘prove’ CAGW no matter what, knows the Hockey Stick is a fraud, and so dropped it. You are the only gullible truebeliever left now.
Restore the foundations
Science is built on seeking truth and testing/weighing everything against objective data.
Paul admonished: “test everything; hold fast what is good.”
Great to see Steyn restoring that standard.
Jesus: Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Mann is in a big hole with Steyn when this finally gets in front of a competent judge. First complaint contained knowingly false assertions (Nobel Prize winner). Amended complaint contains clear misrepresentations of (a) use of hockeystick by WMO and (b) ‘exonerating investigations’. And, ‘hide the decline’ was clearly fraudulent in a non-criminal sense. Robert Way’s comment will play well in court. If you know your proxies don’t work recently, you question how could they have worked previously rather than conceal the problem by using ‘Mike’s Nature trick’. All innthe Climategate emails.
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http://berkeleyearth.org/air-pollution-overview/
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/air-quality/map.php
lots of busy ports.
Take a look at the SO2 over China, above,
then look at the total column SO2 over China at:
this ssec site
Then look at SO2 over the Southern Ocean.
I’m not so sure the sulfate aerosol estimates we have are correct.
ssec site?
I’m not sure what that satellite data is showing other than the bands that indicate it’s in a near-polar low Earth orbit with about a 90 minute period.
I’m not sure what that satellite data is showing other than the bands that indicate it’s in a near-polar low Earth orbit with about a 90 minute period.
It’s the “Total Column Sulfur Dioxide”.
The maximum values are around the Southern Ocean. The values over the industrial areas don’t appear any different than the remote areas.
That doesn’t mean these estimates are necessarily correct, or that SO2 hasn’t had an effect, but I think there should be big error bars around sulfate aerosol estimates.
We collect concentrations near ground level hourly from many stations.
Emissions are estimated using GFS wind fields in the now forcast
along with a residence time estimate.
Flux is estimated using the PBL as a ceiling.
Hmm. one job I will probably pick up is reconciling the satillite view with the ground view of things.
Great work!
The increased mortality rates are shocking, and it doesn’t look like it is going to change soon.
From the paper:
“Though most of China is subject to potentially harmful levels of PM2.5, some large population centers (Chongqing, Wuhan, Chengdu) emit less than half the PM2.5 of others. Among northeastern cities, Beijing has relatively low emissions except for NO2. Low SO2 fluxes may indicate cities that benefit from lower coal usage or better smokestack pollution controls. Compared to natural gas, coal produces 150 to 400 times more PM for the same energy delivered (34,35). China has plans for new coal plants in the next decade that could effectively double their coal consumption (36), potentially exacerbating the problem of air pollution. “
“The increased mortality rates”
What increased mortality rates?
China’s mortality rates continue to fall.
Evidently access to electricity and economic development are much greater positives than unhealthy pollution is a negative.
That doesn’t mean that PM is not a problem, but perspective is critical and it would have been criminal to deny China advancement that they achieved with ‘dirty coal’. Scrubbers would be good. Or natural gas. But it’s undeniable that coal save lives and prevented suffering.
http://berkeleyearth.org/mitigation/
404…
So Dr. Curry dabbles in law now? And in satire too, it would seem.
My concerns go beyond the general strategies of adversarial science. to what I regard as unethical behavior… Steyn’s book reminds everyone of Climategate, why the public doesn’t trust climate scientists and aren’t buying their ‘consensus’.
Judith Curry isn’t suing anyone for defamation – unlike Mann. Talk about dabbling in law – Mann is suing at least two people for defamation. He would be better served correcting his erroneous science.
Mann of war on two fronts …
@Richard … it would take too long.
Apparently you are so proud of having graduated from Dr Suess that you think you can converse with adults.
Once your reading comprehension improves you will be able to decern the fact that Dr Curry is 100% serious with her concerns, no satire involved.
You might also pick up on the fact that she gives no legal opinions, sort of the prerequisite for “dabbling in the law”.
You are sharp tonight sir! I’m enjoying your commentary. Tell me please (new to some of this), is Mr. Sidles at all credible or is he the cretinous troll he appears to be?
Reading issues, timg56?
JC reflections
So, back to the topic of the lawsuits. In light of these quotes by Ph.D scientists, does Mark Steyn have a strong defense against the charge of defamation for stating ‘fraudulent hockey stick’? This certainly looks to me like the basis of a strong defense. With regards to Steyn’s countersuit, if he makes a lot of money off this book, that would rather argue against large damages from his countersuit. JC message to AGW alarmists and Mann’s supporters: buy Steyn’s book, this will help diminish Steyn’s case against Mann for large damages.
Mann lives in the wrong country. Free to leave. Maybe to a country where deniers are thrown in jail, would probably suit.
Geez, I wonder why the terminology ‘deniers’ was adopted for the Anti-CAGW crowd…..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial
More free speech angle:
Not that the ADL has any credibility, but:
“We have Holocaust deniers; we have climate change deniers. And to be honest, I don’t think there’s a great deal of difference.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/03/the-silence-of-the-anti-defamation-league-suggests-they-endorse-defamation-of-climate-skeptics/
“I believe we understand them correctly [deniers] when we know them to be not only corrupt and deceitful, but criminally negligent in their willful disregard for human life. It is time for modern societies to interpret and update their legal systems accordingly.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/13/despicable-climate-ugliness-courtesy-of-lawrence-torcello-assistant-professor-of-philosophy-at-rochester-institute-of-technology-ny/
I personally think it would have been much better if climate deniers had been called Stalin lovers, since the communist atrocities were orders of magnitudes more horrendous than the holocaust. But I guess that would have conflicted with their Stalinist plans.
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1439565119&sr=8-1&keywords=black+book+of+communism
Judith Curry,
Thank you for the well done article reviewing Steyn’s ‘A Disgrace to the Profession’.
You conclude your article with,
I have long thought that Michael Mann has a scorched earth strategy for his end game concerning defending his work product. If he has a scorched earth strategy, it might mean that as his work is shown wrong he wants the whole field of climate science to be seen as wrong too. It seems that kind of strategy fits the mindset of a person with narcissistic behavior tendencies.
As to ‘adversarial’ and ‘pathological science behavior, those terms should exclude the concept of extremely argumentative science. I think extremely argumentative science is the pure form of science behavior.
John
I believe that in the field of climatology, argumentative science is like the social psychosis of mainstream media’s advocacy journalism.
Wagathon,
Rather, a totally open society with total freedom of expressing reasoning is an extremely argumentative one.
That is why a totally open science culture, within a totally open society with total freedom of expressing reasoning, yields an extremely argumentative science community.
John
Wow, the alarmists are out in full force today! The book and Prof. Curry’s review must really hurt. Poor babies.
For something that doesn’t matter they sure came out of the woodwork.
Thank you, Professor Curry, for this post. I believe Mark Steyn has performed a great service to society and to the scientific community.
Regardless of the outcome, it will better reveal the extent of the problem in government-sponsored science today.
I am convinced the US National Academy of Sciences and many federal of the research agencies have been corrupted. If that is correct, Mark Steyn may well lose this case, although I hope the corruption does not extend that deep into the judicial system.
Either way, we will benefit from Mark Steyn’s efforts.
I am convinced the US National Academy of Sciences and many other federal research agencies have been corrupted.
Judith,
I normally do not care to look at posts on topics such as this. However looking at the path you have traveled, opinions you have stated, and barbs hurled at you, you have handled this potential tarball of a post very well–content and tone. Nice job! Even a, “Thanks for this post.”
I second that motion. But have to wait to 9/1/15 for my pre-ordered Kindle version to arrive in order to enjoy. Meanwhile Steyn toasts Sidles upthread. What fun.
Ebooks are so much more useful than the paper versions.
And, will Steyn sell ringside seats to Mann’s deposition under oath?
Better, video the whole thing and let Steyn sell suitably edited copies. My last deposition for a jury trial (a complex patent matter) was videotaped in addition to the court reporter’s transcription. ‘My side’s’ attorney knew just what he wanted out of the video, a roughly 3 minute snippet of a 6 hour deposition. An anecdote about a decision. I knew in advance what his general question would be, and even roughly when it would come in the proceeding. (In an adversarial deposition to which you have been summonsed by subpeona, the other side controls the questioning and your side only gets to cross examine.)
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Regarding the law suit: I once asked an attorney how a legal problem I had would turn out in court. The reply: “The first thing they teach in law school is that one can never predict what a judge (or jury) will do.”
It isn’t just climate science that is tarnished by Mann’ performance. All graduates of Yale’s Department of Geology & Geophysics from which Mann earned his PhD should be and are embarrassed. I’m one of them and I am sorely angry at Mann’s science and the fall out. If it were possible to recommend that Yale consider rescinding Mann’s degree, I would seriously consider it. Perhaps Steyn could send a copy of his book to the President of Yale with such a recommendation. Forget about sending one to Penn State. The president there is a climate scientist!!! (Lucky Mann).
It’s a sad day for science and scholarship in general that Steyn had to write the book at all.
George Devries Klein, PhD, PG, FGSA
If Yale was somehow forced to pick between you or Mann, the result might not be to your liking. In mid-career, Mann has now authored or co-authored 25 papers that have already each been cited more often than your own single most-sited paper, published over 30 years ago. In ten or fifteen years, could that number reach 100?
Magmacc
Is this George Klein?
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=by4pA8wkn90C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
He appears to have written 350 refereed papers and 9 books and headed up various societies so seems a big hitter to me. Is this the right guy?
Tonyb
Magmacc
You ignore that all those papers authored and co-authored by Mann are disgraceful distortions of the evidence. The graduates of Yale might be less embarrassed if they had been never written.
Richard
And the more Mann’s papers are cited, the harder the whole CAGW house of cards will fall. Because most of his papers are junk pseudoscience. Last year, he managed to pretend to predict changes in the North Atlantic circulation from tree ring proxies, in an effort to rebut a Curry paper.
Anyway, if Yale picked Mann, that would just demonstrate how far the corruption had reached. As the quotes demonstrate, most scientists privately know Mann’s an egotistical fool and a bully, no matter how much they might defend him in public.
Magmac, you are right, that’s me. Here are two more links that will clarify details for those who need more information.
http://www.sepm.org/CM_Files/SedRec-Book%20Reviews/217-JSR-review-DevriesKlein.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3jt0eXzAYA
FYI: I early retired from academe (UIUC) in 1993 to pursue other interests including 18 years as a geological consultant in the petroleum field in Houston Texas. I permanently retired in 1984 to Guam for family reasons. It would be a little difficult to ask Yale to rescind my degree when I am now retired.
George Devries Klein, PhD, PG, FGSA
correction. Retired in 2014
George Devries Klein, PhD, PG, FGSA
George are these yours? Google Scholar George Devries Klein
Every arrogant, self-rigtheous warmist should be forced to read Steyn’s book… or at least the quotes that you cited above. The “science is settled” my @$$. Maybe the scientific method can still be saved.
Mark Steyn put a face to official government global warming orthodoxy and labeled it for what it is: a betrayal of science, undermining logic and suspending conscience. Danger: self-defeating bureaucracy at work: driven by a nihilism that would condemn the third and developing worlds to misery, poverty and death. The Left has denied nature. Still, the global warming hoax persists so long as the alarmists succeed in treating scientific skeptics like the church treated Galileo, the Greeks treated Socrates and German academia treated Einstein and the Jews.
To those defending Mann here: you seem to forget that the hockey stick has played a central role in a very political debate in which calls have been made to remake the world economy, shut down capitalism, and jail disbelievers. Mann has relished his central role and never once disavowed the hockey stick as this central symbol of humanity’s doom. Thus Mann is not “just” another scientist who we should not make fun of because of his sciency status.
Furthermore, which of Mann’s practices are you defending (and which Steyn has been criticizing for many years): the use of strip-bark trees in spite of warnings by prominent people (including the NAS panel) not to? The use of upside down data? The weird and unjustified statistics? Using results with absurdly low measures of fit? Hiding declines multiple times? Ignoring the significance of the divergence problem and evidence that tree rings have problems as you go back in time? Suing those who make fun of you? Are you really defending all of this, or just mindlessly circling the wagons around your hero?
Craig
I am sure that many of dr Mann’s defenders will be along soon to answer your questions. Any time now….
Tonyb
Amen Brother! The social damage that this person has abetted will take another decade to eradicate.
Amen bro!
http://41.media.tumblr.com/e032044284e5bd8a73c8c50feee41758/tumblr_nifk8aRh4Y1qkt6yoo1_500.png
John Sidles: the truth or not of global warming or the IPCC has NOTHING to do with how good Mann’s science is. Just because someone gets the answer you like does not mean anything about it is necessarily right. There is lots of crappy science out there and it is not to IPCC’s credit that they made the hockey stick their icon. The importance of Mann’s work is that it claims to show that for 1000 years nothing much happened to climate (very flat, featureless, the handle of the stick) and then BOOM humanity caused a change. But his methods get such a stick from random data. This is critical because if the “normal” condition is stasis then change is much worse than if climate has always been changing. If you actually look at the latest IPCC report, they show a bunch of reconstructions which indicate lots of variation over time and lots of disagreement between the different reconstructions AND THEY DON”T FOCUS ON MANN.
“Go watch football instead. It will make you feel better.” The name has changed but you still ooze unctuousness.
Judith Curry
“How will all this play out? Hard to predict, but I hope that everyone will learn that adversarial science as practiced in its pathological form by Michael Mann doesn’t ‘pay’ in the long run.”
If climate change were about science, then Michael Mann’s behavior towards others and his manipulating data to justify himself, would have been toast a long time ago. Science would have worked and Penn State would have another scandal with which to deal.
But, climate science is about President Obama and his leadership in a progressive agenda for wealth redistribution through an imperial by fiat executive process. He has demonized the 1%ers who pay 46% of all personal income taxes to squeeze more taxes and include the remaining middle class. The 56%, whose taxes are returned entirely, plus a little something extra, are the Progressives voting base. Getting something for nothing is nice work if you can get it, coming gratis of someone else’s money.
Funding one’s political campaigns through entitlements may be a winning strategy as long as there is a pot of honey to dip your paws into. When the honey-pot is empty, that is someone else’s problem, not your own. By that time, you are out of office and on a pension entitlement or writing books or giving speeches or call in the chits that you had dispensed at an earlier time.
Climate change is a honey-pot (and if you are old enough to know what the honey-pot and honey-wagon were in reality) Progressive agenda.
Yep. See Greece …
Forget Mann, we have to worry about Godzilla El Nino.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-el-nino-20150813-htmlstory.html
““If this lives up to its potential, this thing can bring a lot of floods, mudslides and mayhem.”
Floods and mudslides and mayhem, oh my!
Gee, if enough people die, will we get a discount on rooms in Paris for COP21?
Jonathan Jones really hit the nail on the head when it came to understanding what Mann’s hockey stick is about and what it really means when it comes to the integrity of Western science: It is a litmus test of whether climate scientists are prepared to stand up against the bullying defenders of pathology in their midst.
I can see Judy hit the soft spot in the middle of the target this time. Joshua and FOMD are back in spades. ATTP’s all over it. All the CAGWer Acolytes are here to save the Global Warming Totems from the Jaws of the Deniers. She must have had her weapon on FULL AUTO!!!
I’m in moderation.
it happens
If you’re never put in moderation, it means you’re boring and unprovocative.
I first noticed that Steyn had a different opinion of Climategate and Mann to the prevailing skeptic view from his talk at Heartland this year. Up till that point the meme was that what was wrong with science was that nobody within the community criticized Mann on scientific grounds for his tree-ring evidence papers. Steyn’s tack is that almost everybody in the science community has criticized aspects of Mann’s work or the way he presents his case, which is the opposite to the closing-ranks/circling-wagons meme previously used. In fact, the lesser known Climategate emails were full of other scientists not particularly happy with Mann’s way of doing things, but that did not fit the previous all-climate-science-is-corrupt meme, so this aspect was generally left out of the discussion. I think now that skeptics are finally seeing that there was a range of opinions about the tree-ring evidence, and they have to rethink how the climate science community treats its own controversial results even when they support the alarmist case. Tree rings for sure were one of the less certain aspects of the paleo case, especially as it was over ten years ago when those papers were being published and discussed.
Nope. The primary reason for thinking that most of “climate science” is corrupt was/is that almost all “scientists” closed ranks around Mann in public despite their private misgivings.
I am fairly sure Steyn has also included public statements in his book, not just the stolen emails. While the hockey stick was later supported by other evidence as seen in AR5, at the time of AR3 over ten years ago it was still controversial because it was new and the only evidence going back that far. No one trusts a first study without independent confirmation and a lot of scientists were rightly skeptical in the early 2000’s, but later they got more results in that direction, and the skeptics found nothing to publish against the new results in the meantime either, which is important to notice. I think they conceded this ground in the last ten years because of the weight of additional evidence.
AFAIK no “hockey stick” has actually survived an audit. Either it included data it shouldn’t, or it wasn’t really a “hockey stick”.
The only difference is that the newer studies go back further.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6wBAv15Jw44/UstzvfhePiI/AAAAAAAAErg/V1-RUU6fMhk/s1600/Fig5-7.png
Doesn’t look like a “hockey stick” to me. And where’s it from, anyway? I’d like to see whether it’s been audited.
It is from AR5. The hockey stick also had that general upward trend as you go back towards 1000 AD. This is from AR3 to compare. The difference is hardly worth a controversy.
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/hockey_stick_chart_ipcc_large1.png
Jim D: “not just the stolen emails”
I believe the police investigation into the so-called “stolen’ emails concluded that they were in fact leaked by a member of staff at UEA CRU. Certainly the only person to have been interviewed by the police was one such.
So they were his personal property?
That’s like saying it’s from some sky-dragon’s fantasy fisicks post. AR5 is a completely political process that doesn’t do science. If they took it from some “peer reviewed” paper, what paper?
Sure it is. The difference is night-and-day.
JimD, “The only difference is that the newer studies go back further.”
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-OvQHzJy8gFU/VLF3XHImAqI/AAAAAAAAMGM/lcW6ogEHxbA/s689-Ic42/oppo%252520over%252520mann.png
http://www.atmos.albany.edu/facstaff/blinsley/home_page/Oppo,Rosenthal%20&%20Linsley%202009.pdf
https://marine.rutgers.edu/pubs/private/yair_2013.pdf
Really?
OK, Figure 2 in your Yair link is this. Look at the top left red line. That’s global. More interesting from a climate perspective than the select regions you want to plot.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6qkGIddkI1k/UnM81uYU-RI/AAAAAAAAFgs/JUbIRYBf5VU/s1600/Fullscreen%2Bcapture%2B10312013%2B102358%2BPM.jpg
JimD, “More interesting from a climate perspective than the select regions you want to plot”
That would be the Marcott et al. recon. When you use the missing “cap” reconstruction that Marcott couldn’t be bothered with you get something like this for the tropical regions.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3k7UcdrOfRU/VLgkkI95IPI/AAAAAAAAMKU/vsje2z28wys/s676-Ic42/tropical%252520holocene.png
The Marcott et al. short comings have been discussed at length, very low resolution recons, poor methodology, avoiding readily available data etc.
captd, still doing regions. Try global. They would not put Marcott in there if they didn’t back it.
“JC advice to Marcott and Shakun: I understand how tough it is for a young Ph.D. scientist to make their mark in academia and obtain a desirable permanent position.”
http://judithcurry.com/2013/04/02/were-not-screwed/
Summary of Marcott et al at the link.
“The modern record is sampled continuously and as a result is able to register short-term trends and variability. The proxy model, by the authors’ own admission, is heavily smoothed and does not pick up fluctuations below a time scale of several centuries.”
http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/were-not-screwed
Seems the better graph would as heavily smooth the modern record as much as the proxy data is smoothed. We can detect yearly changes easily now. With their data and methods, it is much harder to do that with the proxy data. When change is easier to see, we see it. The proxy data may be masking similar levels of past change. Seems they inserted an uptick at the end of the thesis. That would have been an interesting decision to make. Certainly brought a lot of attention.
Ragnaar, some people look at Marcott with no forcing context to explain it, but when you add in the forcing context, this shows what is expected. It shows the long-term Milankovitch trend which peaked 8000 years ago, and then just as we added a significant spike in forcing in the last century or so, the temperature climbed away from the downward trend. So, no surprise there, which is why people are not struggling to explain the reversal of the Milankovitch cycle. Maybe the “skeptics” are struggling quite a bit to explain this, but the rest find its reason quite obvious in a quantitative forcing kind of way.
JimD, I agree the paleo record makes it now clear that the Holocene Optimum was about 7ka-8ka and the trend has been of decline since. In the 1970s the low resolution ice cores first began to give this picture confirming the Milankovitch Cycle theory for glaciation. This led them to realize that we were treading closer to a certain and growing danger of falling into the abyss of the next 100ka+ glaciation, with catastrophic consequences that needed an alarm sounded. The alarm was reinforced by not only the paleo record but the recent trend of cooling from 1938 to the early 1970s. (That trend has mostly been “adjusted” out now.)
The alarm was quickly muted almost before being noticed due to an increase in GMST recorded in the late 1970s. This lent support for the budding AGW group led by Hansen, whose alarm would have met the same fate as the ice age group’s had the GMST trend gone down. But by 1998’s sweltering El Nino the global warming field was rich with grants. Natural variability was out. Milankovitch was unimportant distant memory and the rise would continue to be in lock-step with Keeling’s CO2 chart. All that was needed was to create models to predict the continuation of the trend that was already happening, everything had to be static in the past and curved up in the future. Mann’s hockey stick was a snapshot of the exact bias of that moment that was yearned for and embraced by the field.
Now, 18 years later warming has proven for the time being not to be as steep as the models predicted, even if we are in a natural cooling phase (that the models do not know about.) There is good evidence for a multidecadal oscillation as well as a millennial one, and perhaps others. The downward march of the Holocene temps was not a steady one. The recent Little Ice age was likely the 10ka low. There is a some case that CO2 may have reversed the start of run-away glaciation, saving millions from a plunge of pre-biblical proportion.
The point is that MBH98/99 methods were not robust. There is evidence of bias at best. And, even if the conclusions are better than 180 degrees wrong that is not the measure of good science. And the support of such work and politicization of it is not the sign of a vibrant, transparent field, which is why MBH98/99 has gotten my attention along with many others. And, their are plenty of other good reasons to advance energy technology.
The Marcott et al hockey stick is discussed in Steyn’s book from page 185. He quotes in full my comment posted at Science
http://comments.sciencemag.org/content/10.1126/science.1228026
two years ago, raising questions that none of the authors have attempted to answer.
JimD, “captd, still doing regions. Try global. They would not put Marcott in there if they didn’t back it.”
Comparison and contrast isn’t “backing”. Since they included 30N-90N and 30S-90S regions, I did roughly 30S-30N using Marcott SM and the available higher resolution caps not used by Marcott including Oppo et al. 2009. 30S-30N is about 50% of the globe and a higher percentage of the “global” energy. Call me silly, but I consider it to be an energy problem.
What makes the fraud case is not that there is warming, as indicated by thermometers, or even a hockey stick.
It’s that the tree ring data don’tindicate warming. The tree ring data indicate a decline – the decline which was hidden.
Jim D: “So they were his personal property?”
I believe it’s called “whistleblowing”, Jimbo.
Although I suspect you only approve of that when it’s carried out by Lefties and AGW alarmists, right?
David Hagen,
Thanks for the inquiry. The papers that are mine are identified by my full name, or George D. Klein, or G.D. Klein and only if they deal with geological topics. If they deal with biology or medicine, they are by Georg Klein, a distinguished bio-scientist and no relation to me. I noticed also other papers with citations to my work, and different people with no connection to me or the work I did. That’s the trouble with the Google scholar approach using partial names under one rubric.
George Devries Klein, PhD, PG, FSA
Greeting from Nova Scotia. You may remember the Bay of Fundy fog.
Richard Quigley,
I sure do remember the fog on the Bay of Fundy, as well as Lobster Rolls at Adrian Leblanc’s little restaurant in Five Islands, Glooscap, getting stuck in the mud a few times, nearly loosing some equipment when the tide turned too fast, fantastic geology, fantastic views along the shore, trying to be careful because as they told me locally, “The Bay of Fundy does not give up its dead,”and friendly people. My summer field seasons in Nova Scotia were some of the best in my life.
George Devries Klein, PhD, PG, FGSA
Glad to hear that. I’m living near the fault zone in that Triassic/Jurassic ridge known locally as the Digby Gut. Lobsters & scallops on the menu!
I mapped Digby Gut as part of my PhD thesis back in 1958 so I remember the place very well.
Is the fish meal plant still operating in Digby?
George Devries Klein, PhD, PG, FGSA
BREAKING BLADES
James Hansen’s thirteen hockey-stick blades of climate-change
The following thirteen figures from Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming is highly dangerous predict hockey-stick blades of climate-change in coming decades.
• fig 08a (freshwater melt flux)
• fig 08b (sea-level rise)
• fig 18a-d (forcing scenarios)
• fig 19a (surface air temperature)
• fig 19b (energy imbalance)
• fig 24d-g (greenhouse forcings)
• fig 29 (sea level)
Key question In coming decades, will sea-level rise-rates start bending upward, past the present 3mm/year, to form a new “hockey-stick blade”? To join the ever-lengthening “hockey-stick blades” of atmospheric CO2 concentration, surface temperature, ocean heat-content, and mountain glacier ice-loss?
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2015_rel3/sl_ns_global.png
Hansen predicts This line will bend upward.
Conclusion The hockey-blade that matters to our children is Hansen’s (predicted) sea-level blade, not Mann’s (well-validated) blade surface-air blade.
Mark Steyn, if you’re going to fire rhetorical cannonballs of skeptical criticism, at least point your canons in a relevant direction!
Steyn is being sued by Mann, not Hansen.
If climate science were hockey Hansen would get a penalty for high-sticking.
What I really do not understand is why anyone would buy this book, or say one of Mann’s war books. I can see why the books are blog topics. Time, energy, and money are too precious.
It’s a tribalism thing.
Mark Steyn is very funny. If his book is anything like his radio shows it will be a hoot.
Steyn is very funny and sarcastic.
Scott
When CAGWers demonstrate belief in their projections, I will take them seriously. Just look at past human migrations. People moved from the topics to the temperate, ssubarctic and arctic regions. So, where is James Hansen enjoying his retirement? Hudson Bay, Northwest Territories? Al Gore bought a house in sea view Montecito CA. Why didn’t he buy a sea-view house in Juneau, AK? Are climate alarmists in Australia flocking to Patagonia, and demanding settler openings in Antarctica? Where is James Hansen? Does he have a new house on Hudson Bay? Why not a move to Whitehorse, NWT? Or buying land there for his grandchildren?
Is “the pause” a temporary interregnum before further global warming? Or is it a plateau before global cooling? Does anybody know?
Most likely, IMO, according to the best theory, the pause has 10-20 years to go: last year was just a blip. After that, more likely up than down, but either is plausible.
This comment section is quite long, so I am unlikely to get responses. But I hope someone could please answer the following question:
What paleoclimate temperature reconstructions are acceptable to use for the purpose of trying to estimate climate sensitivity over the Holocene?
I ask this because many people suggest that Mann’s reconstructions are flawed. How about Marcott et al 2013? But some seem to take issue with that as well. So which reconstruction should I use?
Is it possible that one can know of dramatic events and broad shifts in climate over the last 12000 years but that one cannot know in much detail? The great dendro work done by the likes of Douglass and Schulman never made facile conclusions about temps, though it was thought that in the more constantly humid Pacific NW some idea of old temps might be garnered. “Might” needing emphasis.
Even much representation of modern temps is just a record of how much cloud drifted in or hung about at max or min time. Max and min records don’t have to be hopelessly superficial, but they often are. What hope for tree rings etc? What use is a global temp anyway when an “Australian” or “American” temp is already a frivolous factoid. (Temps thousands of miles apart in utterly different climate zones evened out because of political boundaries!)
Believing that a worthwhile reconstruction has to be out there somewhere is a bit like Elvis spotting. Probably it’s just not there and can’t be there.
“How about Marcott et al 2013?”
As noted above I posted a very critical comment under that Science paper two years ago. IMO that paper is worse than MBH. The spike is a complete fabrication, since for example Marcott’s thesis uses the same data and plots graphs showing no spike at all.
Its getting tedious having to point this out.
What paleoclimate temperature reconstructions are acceptable to use for the purpose of trying to estimate climate sensitivity over the Holocene?
None of them?
Seriously, paleo proxy data immediately increases uncertainties.
We don’t seem to be very good at estimating temperatures, even with thermometers in place and satellites orbiting ( witness all the ‘corrections’ ).
But a big problem with tree ring data is that trees respond to their environment. All biological proxies suffer from this. It would seem best to exclude biologicals.
And remember, the problem with the Hockey Stick graph is not what the temperature record was, it was that the tree ring proxy didn’t cooperate near the end because the tree ring data indicated a decline, which had to be hidden.
@ Paul – Why would it be expected to have a spike? That the data has a poor time resolution and doesn’t cover the past 200 years very well.
@ Turbulent Eddie
“None of them?”
Really? Given all of the paleo reconstructions, it’s not possible to give an unbiased estimate of temperature changes over the Holocene plus their uncertainty? I find that hard to believe.
“But a big problem with tree ring data”
I was under the impression Marcott et al. did not use tree rings.
pie, there are a number or critiques of Marcott and various ocean temperature proxies. http://climateaudit.org/tag/marcott/
My biggest problem with Marcott was not using the available data. He uses a long term, low frequence Lake Tanganyika but not the shorter term high frequency recon of the same location by the same author to extend the recon into the 20th century. Not using the more recent “cap” data was part of the reason for the spurious spike. There needs to be some continuity from the calibration period (instrumental) to the bulk of the reconstructions and the binning method needs to be consistent with the average frequency. Unfortunately, low frequency reconstructions aren’t that useful unless you want to make hockey sticks.
Use them all. you will get a spread of sensitivity.
Climate sensitivity probably isn’t a very meaningful concept. It is probably variable and somewhat chaotic on many timescales and also very dependent on biological changes.
I don’t think have good temperature estimates, let alone forcing for a relevant time period.
Lubos Motl has some interesting, but ultimately not helpful policy-wise, posts on pink noise and self-similarity in temperature data. Basically, it is unlikely we are in energy balance on timescales less than 100,000.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/03/self-similarity-of-temperature-graphs.html
To be more accurate, I want to estimate the impulse response function, not just climate sensitivity. The instrumental data set is good for measuring fast feedbacks, but not slow feedbacks since we have less than 2 centuries of data. Paleoclimate estimates of the Holocene might be terrible at estimating the fast feedbacks, but might help better constrain the slow feedbacks. Combined they might give a decent picture of the impulse response function.
-1=e^iπ
To be more accurate, I want to estimate the impulse response function, not just climate sensitivity. The instrumental data set is good for measuring fast feedbacks, but not slow feedbacks since we have less than 2 centuries of data. Paleoclimate estimates of the Holocene might be terrible at estimating the fast feedbacks, but might help better constrain the slow feedbacks. Combined they might give a decent picture of the impulse response function.
Well said, but there is an important complication. The impulse response function is probably not constant — at least there is no evidence that it is constant, and there are reasons to think that it isn’t. All three of the mechanisms for cooling the Earth surface (advection/convection, evapotranspiration, radiation) have responses to temperature increase that depend on the initial temperature (among other initial conditions, such as initial cloud cover, etc.) The GCMs already produce “decent” estimates, but those decent estimates are not sufficiently accurate to be depended upon.
Pie, Tropical ocean reconstructions should provide some of the information you are looking for.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-0Ljwh9NTkS0/Ubx9dAfZtAI/AAAAAAAALWE/KuCQqL8ISHU/s800-Ic42/giss%252520and%252520ersst%252520with%252520ipwp%252520from%2525200%252520ad.png
Oppo et al. 2009 use Mg/Ca G. ruber ratio for the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool which has a few advantage as far as a global ocean energy proxy would be concerned.
Emile-Geay 2012 is a higher resolution corals reconstruction of the Nino 3.4 region which would have global nino implications.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-HicKZSkrqvw/VHX3Tzrh4nI/AAAAAAAAL14/H8sqV4DVT-E/s679-Ic42/nino%2525203.4%252520emile-geay%2525202012.png
For comparision, Linguist, 2009 is a multi-proxy NH reconstruction that is interesting.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-F7C4538ir3Q/VAUbfr9hyOI/AAAAAAAALcI/bPN-zmtFRGc/s774-Ic42/2000%252520years%252520n.%252520extra%252520tropics.png
Multi-proxy recons seem to get general trends fairly well but the combinations appear to reduce range which might be due to limited temperature response of some of the different proxies. The tree ring divergence problem for example.
“The impulse response function is probably not constant”
This is true, and I would have to assume that it is constant in order to get an estimate. So the the validity of the result will depend on how reasonable the assumption of a constant impulse response function is. I think if I only look at temperature changes over the Holocene, it might be a reasonable assumption since most of the Holocene climate was similar to today. Though if I were to use data over the entire Pleistocene, the assumption of a constant impulse response function would be strongly violated since the ice-albedo feedback is far stronger over most of the Pleistocene than it is today. That’s why I restrict myself to temperature changes over the Holocene.
Anyway, I have put off doing the analysis until my Master’s is completed. But the approach I plan to use is similar to Van Hateren 2012, but more advanced. I was planing to use Marcott et al 2013 & the Cowtan & Way data sets, but I wanted to gauge how well accepted Marcott et al is since there seems to be some criticism. Certainly, I think I want to stay away from Mann’s temperature reconstruction.
@ captdallas – thanks for the info. :)
Yes, but even more difficult than temperature reconstruction is deciding on forcing reconstructions. Ice extent, volume, and distribution likely varied wildly and shifted among stable, cyclical, and chaotic regimes during the Holocene. Ocean currents, mineral and nutrient resources flows and releases… Biological responses to all of these changes probably also varied considerably. Water cycles efficiency over land an sea. Transport from sea to land. Soil color. Cloud changes.
Random major shifts in unknown aspects of the biosphere probably happen all the time.
@ CaptDallas –
What about coverage bias? If I were to use a tropical SST or a NH reconstruction, that will have a different sensitivity than global temperatures (tropical SST will vary less and NH reconstruction will vary more than global temperatures).
pi, “What about coverage bias? If I were to use a tropical SST or a NH reconstruction, that will have a different sensitivity than global temperatures (tropical SST will vary less and NH reconstruction will vary more than global temperatures).”
That is one of the things I was trying to figure out. Tropics have an advantage in they have a greater weight as far as total energy. You can use local instrumental correlation with global and global oceans to get a fairly good idea of how sensitive they are to that region’s reconstructed temperature and estimate an amplification factor. Unfortunately, that correlation isn’t going to be consistent through all regimes, so you have to figure some way to apply reasonable error ranges.
There are plenty of opportunities.
It’s fine to have a temperature record, but you also need a forcing record. The good news is that most of the Holocene forcing change has occurred in recent centuries, so when you plot temperature against forcing you will get something like this from Lovejoy (2014). The CO2 and GHG forcing change is already 2 W/m2 while the best Milankovitch has done in the last 8000 years is probably tenths due to changing polar albedo, so the signal is all recent.
http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~gang/Anthro.simple.jpeg/Simplified.Anthro.forcing.jpg
That’s true. Luckily there are decent reconstructions of CO2, CH4, N2O, Milankovitch cycles and even solar irradiance over the Holocene.
@ Jim D – It’s not just total radiative forcing that matters to global temperatures, but the distribution of that forcing. By the Stefan-Boltzman law, if the Earth’s temperature distribution becomes more uniform, it’s average temperature will increase; and increase in forcing in polar regions will have a larger impact on global temperatures than an increase in forcing in equatorial regions. Changes in the Earth’s obliquity for example has significant changes on global temperatures, but if you just look at total radiative forcing, nothing will chance.
The last word in the above post should read change not chance.
Darn post-concussion syndrome. :(
Also when looking at the transient state, a forcing change leads to an uneven temperature change. Currently we are in a rapidly changing transient state where the land is warming twice as fast as the oceans, and the Arctic even faster. Different regions have different response rates.
Reblogged this on The Arts Mechanical and commented:
The case that catastrophic anthroprogenic global warming is an extraordinary one requiring hard data and rigorous science. Instead, over the last 30 years or so we have had clown show with prominent scientists screaming “DENIER!!” at anyone who dared question the claims made and shoddy methods that seem to prevail in climate science. This is a tragedy for science.
Where do you live? Is your climate too oppressive? Move north (or if you live in the Southern Hemisphere, move south). Has Christiana Figueres, a native of Costa Rica, moved to Prince Rupert,BC, or Nome’ AK? If not, she’s not serious about climate change.
I remember living in the Portland, OR area in 1988. The temp dropped to -3 F /-20 C. We were without power for three days. We gathered our REI down bags and our family of 5 snuggled together. It aaas a total blast.Then the power came on, which was also good. CAGWers want the power never to come on. Booh!
If Christiana Figureres ever says, “I lived at -19 C, andI had a blast,” let’s see her say it.
Great Lakes had nearly complete freezes, Hudson Bay nearly frozen over into July. This may be the “new normal”. People who live in North America,eastern half,should be thinking about rejecting “global warming”.
The prediction of future global warming is a fraud: Since the 1963 paper by Edward Lorenz, “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow” showed that Navier Stokes systems are nonlinear, chaotic, and show sensitive dependence on initial conditions, it has been known that predicting distant future states from any finite record of past states is not valid. Of course predictions can be made, by frauds or the incompetent, but they are not justified by any finite data set.
——–
Don Meaker asserts [without reference to observational data or thermodynamic [principles] “The prediction of future global warming is a fraud.”
——–
Observations report “The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for June 2015 was the highest for June in the 136-year period of record, at 0.88°C (1.58°F) above the 20th century average of 15.5°C (59.9°F), surpassing the previous record set just one year ago by 0.12°C (0.22°F). The 10 warmest 12-month periods have all been marked in the past 10 months.”
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/glob/201506.gif
Conclusion The climate-changes that Mann and Hansen (and hundreds of colleagues) predicted decades ago have come true.
Marc Steyn (and Anthony Watts, Judith Curry, Heartland Institute, etc), it’s time to face up to the plain reality of global climate-change.
John
we can disregard the first two graphs as we have no idea whatsoever of the global June temperatures of the ocean since 1880 . Where does that data come from?
Even challenger only graphed a tiny one off proportion of the ocean.Most readings from that era are one off readings of dubious provenance then interpolated to adjacent grid squares
As for land temperatures, not everywhere has been warming from 1880 to today but any consistent or widespread warming that we can discern started way before 1880 . General but sporadic warming started from 1695 with glacier melt being noted from 1750 . But you know that of course.
Tonyb
You miss the point, which is not whether or not there was warming.
The point is that the recent decades of tree ring data indicated cooling, not warming. That was the decline to be hidden:
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/mwp-lia/hiding-the-decline-hockeystick-mann-600.jpg
Don Meaker argues:
Climate is chaotic and long term prediction is not possible.
John Sidles retorts:
It has warmed so you are wrong.
Logical nonsense John.
Short term data are NOT indicative of any long term trend. The recent temp, CO2, SLR data do not show high rates of increase at the decadel level yet alone at current monthly levels.
John Sidles: Conclusion The climate-changes that Mann and Hansen (and hundreds of colleagues) predicted decades ago have come true.
Warming since 1880 has occurred, in an irregular pattern (unless the “regularity” expressed by Fourier analysis represents persistent underlying processes) not predicted by anybody. The warming predicted decades ago by Hansen and others has not occurred, and there are many (testable, at least in principle) explanations for why not.
NOAS is pleased to help answer your questions TonyB.
Conclusion All three links in the chain-of-reasoning that explains climate-change are scientifically strong.
The 20th century predictions of Michael Mann and (earlier) James Hansen and (even earlier) John von Neumann — and hundreds more climate scientists — have come true.
Mark Steyn (and Judith Curry, TonyB, Anthony Watts) … it’s time to look responsibly to the future … the future of accelerating anthropogenic climate-change.
Pope Francis’ brand of moral conservatism is entirely right to insist upon this responsibility, isn’t it?
John
I used to have this conversation with someone called FOMD. He had a Hansen fixation. He was often wrong as well :)
As you know I wrote an article on the subject of SST’s and did a great deal of research, including looking at the original ships logs.
The problem we have is two fold.
The data was extremely sparse-the vast majority of the oceans surface was not travelled let alone scientifically sampled. Many of the grids had a single observation in a year or have been interpolated.
Secondly the methodology was very inconsistent. This is with regards to the type of bucket, the type of thermometer, calibration, the depth of the sample, time between sampling and measurement, was the water sample kept in a bucket in the shade or the sun. Was the thermometer in a properly ventilated position prior to insertion in the water . Did the observer immediately write down the observation?
There are so many variables that it is impossible to know the answer to several degrees let alone tenths of a degree. I did some of my own sampling locally and the difference between depths and the position of the sample (sun/shade) length of time, thermometer type was up to 10 Degrees C. Water pulled at 15C became commonly 25C in the sun after a short period. Water temperature varied by up to 3 degrees c according to position and depth
The idea that we have a thorough knowledge of the Global temperature of the Ocean back to 1880 is all very well in theory but in practice it is not a worthwhile matrix. John Kennedy of the Met Office has a number of interesting papers on the subject. We have crossed swords on the subject but he is a fine scientist and his papers worth reading. Generally at this time on a Friday he might come out of hibernation to protest. We shall see.
tonyb
John Sidles: Conclusion All three links in the chain-of-reasoning that explains climate-change are scientifically strong.
The 20th century predictions of Michael Mann and (earlier) James Hansen and (even earlier) John von Neumann — and hundreds more climate scientists — have come true.
You are confused. Warming has occurred since 1880, and multiple mechanisms have been hypothesized and studied. Each attempt at a complete explanation and accurate corresponding mathematical model has liabilities. Nobody’s 20th century prediction has been confirmed by subsequent data.
Your writing style is reminiscent of someone else who used to post here regularly.
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I think it’s important to distinguish where the comments were made. I’m not sure if Steyn’s book does this. In particular, some were made in public, some in private (climategate) emails.
The last two comments from SKS come from their leaked ‘private’ forum.
The comments from RInd, Wigley, P Jones, Briffa, Cook, Bradley are all from CG emails so were intended to only be read by a few people.
But the comments of Broecker, Von Storch, Zorita, Rob Wilson, J Jones were made publicly.
The bigger story line is this
Mann sued Styne and of course will claim damage to his reputation.
Styne can argue.. your Peers didnt think much of you anyway
here’s the proof.
mann might argue that his HS was settled science.
Styne can argue.. your peers didnt think so
so the context doesnt really matter that much.
Truth is wherever you find it. So, yes, some remarks were in private. That’s unfortunate, but the theft has been done. But the fact it was “stolen” or leaked, does not negate the content of the payload.
It doesn’t matter how many people read the comments, if you are talking about whether something said is defamatory, or not.
PS: The candid comments in the Climategate emails, meant only for the eyes of insiders, are even more damaging to the little snake’s rep than those criticisms from people not in his clique.
Paul Matthews: The comments from RInd, Wigley, P Jones, Briffa, Cook, Bradley are all from CG emails so were intended to only be read by a few people.
Yet they were all well-known and widely discussed by the time Steyn wrote the article for which he has been sued for libel.
Stolen emails can’t be used for defamation suits, for obvious reasons. Defamation consists of a deliberate public statement, not a stolen private statement. Without seeing the book, I am not sure if any of the statements would be like accusations of academic fraud anyway.
Jim D: “Stolen emails can’t be used for defamation suits,”
There is no evidence that they were stolen, nor is there any ruling to that effect.
The police investigation did not reach that conclusion, the probability is that they were leaked by a member of staff.
Don’t try to be a lawyer, yimmy. You aren’t even a good anonymous little troll.
Jim D: Stolen emails can’t be used for defamation suits, for obvious reasons.
Really?
How do you know that?
Nobody (?) denied that the reproductions of the emails were accurate. Instead they directed attention to the facts that the emails were private, and stolen (unless releasing them was “whistleblowing”). Interpretations of “Mike’s trick to hide the decline” have been provided, but no one has denied that the writer actually wrote it.
Defamation consists of a deliberate public statement, not a stolen private statement.
You are confused again. No one is claiming in court that the emails contained “defamation”.
This exchange confuses me:
While I don’t disagree with the response, it seems to miss a significant point – defamation doesn’t have to be public. Defamation merely requires the defamatory material be “published” (basically, said to) a third party. As in, anyone other than the person being defamed.
Whether a statement was made in public or in private has no bearing on whether or not it was defamatory. All that it affects is potential damages.
If defamatory material is published, it would be the publisher that should be sued, because that is the point that it becomes criminal. On the first point, obviously if you record person A saying something defamatory about person B to person C that is not public until you release the recording. Same with private emails. People are allowed to say anything to anyone else in privacy. The law does not, thankfully, reach into private conversations when it comes to how defamation is defined.
Civil, not criminal.
Jim D: The law does not, thankfully, reach into private conversations when it comes to how defamation is defined.
Let me try again. Mann sued Steyn for defamation, not the publisher of the emails, not the people who wrote the emails, not the people who commented on the emails; Mann sued Steyn, for defamation. At the time that Steyn wrote the offending editorial, the emails had been publicly discussed for years by eminent scientists. In order to win the defamation suit, Mann has to prove “reckless disregard for truth” or “actual malice” (things along those lines, “clarified” in the record of court judgments). “Actual malice” is hard to prove and is not the same as “scathing and disrespectful wit”; and the large assembly of publicly available criticisms of Mann, by climate scientists, at the time of Steyn’s offending opinion, discredits the claim of “reckless disregard for truth”.
As I posted, here, if it is not malice, it was said in jest. Steyn has not claimed that it was just satire implying he meant his defamatory statement to be taken literally. The other part of the case, which maybe Steyn has a better chance on, is credibility: whether a reasonable person would believe him on this statement.
http://judithcurry.com/2015/08/13/mark-steyns-new-book-on-michael-mann/#comment-724975
Jim D: As I posted, here, if it is not malice, it was said in jest. Steyn has not claimed that it was just satire implying he meant his defamatory statement to be taken literally.
If it was “not malice”, then it was “not malice.” What it really was is something in the large category of “not malice”. What Steyn has “not claimed” has no bearing on what exact subclass of “not malice” it belongs to.
Are you having trouble accepting that Mann will have a hard time ever proving “defamation” based on the body of overt evidence that is in the public domain? A large body substantially enlarged by the Steyn book that is the topic of today’s post by Prof Curry?
Brandon S: While I don’t disagree with the response, it seems to miss a significant point – defamation doesn’t have to be public.
This is not purely an abstract debate, it is a debate about a particular pair of law suits, called Mann v Steyn and Steyn v Mann, and especially focused today on Mann v Steyn. The issue isn’t whether something in the emails or other published commentary may have been defamatory, the issue is whether Steyn’s caustic comments on Mann were defamatory. That depends on whether Steyn’s comments showed reckless disregard for truth or actual malice. If there were, at the time Steyn published his comment, hundreds of public comments by noted scientists that were derogatory of Mann, particularly critical of sloppiness or incompetence in data analysis, then proving reckless disregard for truth will be difficult.
I am interested to know from anyone who gets the book, how many of those other people publicly said Mann’s work was fraudulent or worse? Sure, if someone else has claimed as much as Steyn, he can raise that in his defense, as just a requote. If his defense is that it is not malice to suggest fraudulence, then he has to explain why the accusation is not intended to be malicious. I suggest that an out for Steyn is that he is only qualified as a theater critic, well known for wit and satire, and it was just jest and not malice, and that any reasonable person should have known that he has no deep knowledge of the accusation he made. That is his way out. To basically suggest that Mann should not have taken him seriously.
Poor little yimmy once again exposes he is woefully ignorant:
“If his defense is that it is not malice to suggest fraudulence, then he has to explain why the accusation is not intended to be malicious”
The snake’s case against Steyn has several rocks on which it should founder. The ultimate killer rock for the snake’s case is that as a public figure he has to prove “actual malice”. It’s not what you think it is, yimmy. Look it up, if you got time. Stop making a fool of yourself.
Don M, that is what I said. If it not malice it is satire, and yes that would be a good defense.
You are pathetic, yimmy. That is not what you said. You don’t know what the legal term “actual malice” means, and you don’t have enough sense to look it up.
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, yimmy. If you want to keep at this without repeatedly making a complete fool of yourself, read it. BUT FIRST LOOK UP “ACTUAL MALICE”! I am trying to help you. Look up “actual malice”, yimmy. You will thank me.
The clown will probably look up “malice”.
Here it is:
Actual Malice
In a legal sense, “actual malice” has nothing to do with ill will or disliking someone and wishing him harm. Rather, courts have defined “actual malice” in the defamation context as publishing a statement while either
knowing that it is false; or
acting with reckless disregard for the statement’s truth or falsity.
It should be noted that the actual malice standard focuses on the defendant’s actual state of mind at the time of publication. Unlike the negligence standard discussed later in this section, the actual malice standard is not measured by what a reasonable person would have published or investigated prior to publication. Instead, the plaintiff must produce clear and convincing evidence that the defendant actually knew the information was false or entertained serious doubts as to the truth of his publication. In making this determination, a court will look for evidence of the defendant’s state of mind at the time of publication and will likely examine the steps he took in researching, editing, and fact checking his work. It is generally not sufficient, however, for a plaintiff to merely show that the defendant didn’t like her, failed to contact her for comment, knew she had denied the information, relied on a single biased source, or failed to correct the statement after publication.
Not surprisingly, this is a very difficult standard for a plaintiff to establish. Indeed, in only a handful of cases over the last decades have plaintiffs been successful in establishing the requisite actual malice to prove defamation.
Steyn’s anti-SLAPP defense that was rejected was that his wording was just exaggeration. This does not speak well for whether he actually believed what he said as opposed to just satirically playing around like the other people he was quoting at the time on the Penn State jokes. It was rejected because Steyn made quite a specific accusation of wrongdoing that Mann does not consider a joke, and he still has not withdrawn it.
Now come on Don, play the game!
Who gave you permission to introduce FACTS into a debate with little Jimmy D?
You either didn’t read what I just gave you, or you are incapable of learning, yimster. You still don’t know what “actual malice” is. You don’t know anything about this case, defamation law, or even how to argue your lame position. All you have is ill-informed and uninformed BS heavily polluted with your silly biases.
The burden is on the plaintiff to prove “actual malice”. That’s why public figures are fair game for the supermarket tabloids. Unless the little snake has something up his sleeve that shows Steyn’s state of mind at the time of the alleged defamation amounted to “actual malice” he loses, period. This is a classic SLAPP. They know they aren’t going to win. It’s harassment and intimidation. Sooner or later a decent judge will get a hold of the case and it will be over, in favor of defendants. I predict that the little snake will never submit to discovery, or appear at a trial of the case. That’s all I have for you yimmy. Please continue with your clowning.
Yeah cat, and this joker bombards us with this kind of mindless crap just about 24/7. Shameless. I hope Judith has a rule about someone being the most prolific and annoying commenter, two years in a row.
Don M, as in your definition, actual malice is saying something defamatory without regard to whether it is supported by facts. This is what happened in this case.
Jim D says:
This is completely and utterly false. Defamation does not have to be public. Please stop making things up.
matthewrmarler:
You can say “the issue” is whatever you want, but that doesn’t mean Jim D should be allowed to just make things up about the law and go unchallenged. I don’t think we should ignore wildly untrue claims simply because they’re not dispositive to the issue at hand.
Analyses like False Claims by McIntyre and McKitrick regarding the Mann et al. (1998) reconstruction (4 December 2004) and a follow-on On Yet Another False Claim by McIntyre and McKitrick (6 January 2005) thoroughly support Mann’s methods and conclusions.
Conclusion It is hard to understand why Judith Curry has not see fit to remark upon these now decade-old critiques … which stand-up reasonably well in light of subsequent research.
Brandon, give an example where someone has sued for defamation due to a slander or libel that was not public. The whole case for defamation is based on the reputation of a public person and reputation is not ruined if it is a statement only known between two people.
You are a dunce, yimmy. That is not my definition, it’s a very plain and understandable explanation of the law. Look up “ACTUAL MALICE”! Stop clowning! Look at New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. Are you afraid you will find out how freaking wrong and silly you are to continue arguing about something on which you are fundamentally clueless? I like it when you show your true colors, yimmy. Keep it up.
Don M, he was “acting with reckless disregard for the statement’s truth or falsity.” That uses your quote, and is almost identical to what I said. Who are you trying to kid?
Jim D:
Um, no? That’s not how this works. I’m not obligated to show an example of the law being applied to show what the law says. And additionally, what you say is just silly. Reputation doesn’t have to be “ruined” for defamation to happen, merely harmed. And one’s reputation can certainly be harmed by private communication. If you privately communicate defamatory material with a person’s employers, such as by spreading false rumors, and that prevents them from getting a promotion, you can be sued for defamation. You aren’t protected simply because the damage was done via private communication.
If you want me to provide documentation showing this, a basic truth of the law you’ve been making pronouncements about, I will, but I’m not going to spend time looking for specific cases where the law has been applied simply because you choose to make things up.
Brandon, here we are dealing with a public person (Mann) and defamation was a publication of a controversial statement by Steyn that he took to harm his reputation. This is classic defamation. If the statement was not made public, but remained private (e.g. if Steyn sent that to Mann as an email) it would not have been defamation. That is the critical distinction that I was making.
Jim D:
Whether Mark Steyn had said what he said in public or private is absolutely irrelevant as to whether or not it is defamatory. There are only two things it would affect. One, if Steyn had said what he said only to Mann, it wouldn’t be defamation because defamation requires a third party. What you say about a person to that person obviously cannot harm that person’s reputation. Two, the amount of damage caused by a private communication is often less than that caused by public communication, so the amount Mann could sue for would be less (potentially so little as to not warrant a lawsuit)
But other than that, the distinction you claim to be drawing is irrelevant. If Steyn e-mailed people accusing Mann of having committed fraud, that could potentially be grounds for a lawsuit. When Skeptical Science group members have e-mailed people accusing me of having committed felonies, that could have been grounds for a lawsuit. These things do not have to be said in public to be the basis for a lawsuit.
The public vs. private distinction only matters insofar as it helps determine how much damage was done.
Brandon S: You can say “the issue” is whatever you want, but that doesn’t mean Jim D should be allowed to just make things up about the law and go unchallenged. I don’t think we should ignore wildly untrue claims simply because they’re not dispositive to the issue at hand.
I don’t disagree, but I think it is helpful to focus. I think Jim D intentionally tries to obfuscate the legal discussion (unless he is merely confused) by distracting attention from the details that are dispositive. I compared another regular commenter to the Tar Baby; I think that Jim D is like a wild goose, or perhaps a DDT fogger (for the readers who are old enough to remember those) — if you keep firing toward every distraction, you can’t hit any target.
On the other hand, you might be right.
Jim D: If the statement was not made public, but remained private (e.g. if Steyn sent that to Mann as an email) it would not have been defamation. That is the critical distinction that I was making.
That is either confused or obfuscatory — there was never a question of whether Steyn’s comment was public or private. The issue raised was whether comments by other scientists, initially private but later made public and widely known, could be assembled and made useful to Steyn’s defense.
Is it that you really do not understand all this, or are you prevaricating on purpose?
matthewrmarler: “Is it that you really do not understand all this, or are you prevaricating on purpose?”
You might find this piece on the Post-Modern Mamba by the greatly esteemed MemoryVault informative.
http://libertygibbert.com/2010/08/09/dobson-dykes-and-diverse-disputes/
I believe it describes little Jimmy D to an absolute Tee.
Nor is he the only one…
I was making a distinction with Climategate emails, mentioned so far back that everyone has forgotten, for which no one was sued for defamation, and it is clear that defamation does not extend to private emails. Steyn quotes a lot of private emails, but I am not sure if any made the same accusations he did anyway. Did McIntyre ever go as far as publicly calling it fraud? He was the person most involved, and if he didn’t, there really isn’t a good case for Steyn who knows much less about it.
==>Don M, he was “acting with reckless disregard for the statement’s truth or falsity.”
You don’t know what “reckless disregard for the truth” means in the context of defamation law, yimmy. You think that the legal meaning of words is the same as your understanding of the common colloquial meaning of the same words. You are utterly clueless.
The little snake plaintiff has to PROVE that, yimmy. How the freak is he going to that? You must have missed this stuff:
“Instead, the plaintiff must produce clear and convincing evidence that the defendant actually knew the information was false or entertained serious doubts as to the truth of his publication.”
How is the little plaintiff snake going to prove what Steyn knew, or what doubts he had? Will he put Steyn on the stand and beat it out of him with a rubber hose?
“Not surprisingly, this is a very difficult standard for a plaintiff to establish. Indeed, in only a handful of cases over the last decades have plaintiffs been successful in establishing the requisite actual malice to prove defamation.”
Keep going, yimmy. We are still more amused than disgusted.
Thanks, yimmy. This is really funny:
“Did McIntyre ever go as far as publicly calling it fraud?”
Defamation cases now depend on what McIntyre said about it. You are like the Energizer Bunny of malaprops, yimmy. Keep em coming.
Jim D, Everyone here is correct. You are mistaken thinking there is a legal distinction between private and public defamatory statements. The legal theory stems from civil damages that can be shown as the result of a vandalism or theft of one’s property, their reputation. How that is done is immaterial except for demonstrating the intent of the defendant. There are then two standards. If the plaintiff deemed in the private sphere the test of intent equates to proving negligence (they could have easily found it was not true and it was obviously harmful). For plaintiffs in the public sphere, or, if the defendant is a member of the press or a journalist, the requirement elevates to proof by preponderance of evidence of “actual malice,” as Don M correctly defined by NYT v Sullivan. Of course, the defendant can also, alternatively and in parallel, make the case that the statement was true or commonly thought to be, or that the plaintiff already had a bad reputation and thus suffered no damages.
Yimmy has a million of these:
“it is clear that defamation does not extend to private emails.”
No it isn’t! There are two parties to an email. You absolutely refuse to pay attention to the facts and the law. Is it those wires that huffpo uses to control your little mind? Pull the electrodes out and break free, yimmee!
I didn’t follow this from the start and the continual ‘he said they said’ is very confusing.
When is this case actually getting to court?
tonyb
tony b, the case will get to court sometime after the 2C rise is reached. Don’t wait up.
Faustino
Is that the 2c rise as measured from the warm 1940’s, the warm 1850’s, the warm 1730’s, the very warm 1540’s, the extremely warm 1320’s or the 300 year long Medieval warm period? No need to mention the Roman or Minoan warm periods either.
Your guidance is awaited as I need to know when I should order the popcorn
tonyb
This seems to be the latest word on the status of the case, Tony:
http://www.steynonline.com/6910/mann-vs-steyn-the-state-of-play
Don
Thanks for the link but it appears the case is stalled and Steyn himself doesn’t know when it will proceed. It reminds me of the circular and unlikely plot lines of the satirical sitcom Soap!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QejBwptSQZc
tonyb
Jim D: wrong. It is not necessary for it to be “in jest” for Steyn to be innocent. It is only necessary that he believed it to be true and it was his opinion. The climategate emails and McIntyre’s website gave Steyn plenty of reasons to have his opinions.
Ironically, Mann could lose under the judgement that no reasonable person would believe Steyn as a theater critic was making a serious statement on scientific fraud. In other words, they judge that it is just as ineffective for defamation as satire is. It’s not just jest but the qualifications or lack thereof of the accuser to make the accusation and the degree to which reasonable people know that.
I remember that one, Tony. Very silly, but moderately amusing. The character seated at the far-right of the picture (far-left in reality) was called Huff Po. The little guy sitting on his lap was Jimmy something or other.
Who you are as a person is an integral part of the work you produce.
A d!ck will often have too much confidence in assumptions. This overconfidence shuts down debate. A nicer person will provide caveats that opens up their work for interpretation resulting in productive back and forths.
Even more effective at shutting-down debate are these elements: (1) quibbling, and (2) cherry-picking, and (3) personalization, and (4) abusive rhetoric.
The vast majority of working scientists disregard these elements. And once these elements are removed, the rational skeptical case against Michael Mann and his work evaporates.
Mark Steyn, it’s time for skepticism to grow up.
John, Most of science seems to be about the art of quibbling. Science cannot advance without finding some technical nits that could be improved upon. How many significant digits are there in the speed of light again? Cherry picking is used to highlight nits.
From John’s “abusive rhetoric” … take a look at the emphasized sentence. From this one sentence alone, one can see the author lives in la-la land. It’s BS.
Characteristics of Demagoguery
By Trish Roberts-Miller
…
Demagoguery is a discourse that promises stability, certainty, and escape from the responsibilities of rhetoric through framing public policy in terms of the degree to which and means by which (not whether) the outgroup should be punished for the current problems of the ingroup. Public debate largely concerns three stases: group identity (who is in the ingroup, what signifies outgroup membership, and how loyal rhetors are to the ingroup); need (usually framed in terms of how evil the outgroup is); what level of punishment to enact against the outgroup (restriction of rights to extermination).
Demagoguery is always polarizing, and always relies on binaries. It is not distinguished by emotionalism or populism, not only because lots of very good and helpful methods of deliberation are emotional and populist, but because it is often not emotional at all, and quite often elite discourse. Demagoguery can look “rational” in that it can provide a lot of data, numbers, assertions, and even analyses (as in Grant’s Passing of the Great Race, or Laughlin’s report for the 1924 Immigration Act).
It has certain characteristics:
Binary paired terms. A concept described by Chaim Perelman, paired terms are sets of binaries that are assumed to describe a logical relationship. So, for instance, a common set of paired terms in demagoguery is:
…
Thus, one either punishes or rewards others. To punish others is strong and manly; to reward them is weak and girly.
…
The problem with the “abusive rhetoric” article is that it does not comport with experience. What we learn from our first hand experience is sometimes referred to as “common sense.” We on this board have in most case decades of experience with others. Almost no one I know approaches others with a punish/reward dichotomy. I can say there are very few commentators and posters on this blog that are that way. Dr. Curry, as a prime example, believe ACO2 does have an impact on climate. So do I and so do many other skeptics. That’s not a dichotomy.
The arguments found here fall all over the spectrum.
Thus, the “abusive rhetoric” article is based on a false premise, i.e. it’s BS.
You know John, I am sure that all feels like thinking to you, and you might even believe it to be persuasive. The only explanation for that that I can think of might be that you so strongly believe in “the cause” as they called it in the Climategate emails, that that faith colors your judgement.
Shorter answer, you aren’t convincing anybody.
Having witnessed many of John’s antics on this blog, I have concluded his shtick (modus operandi) is to obfuscate and divert attention from good points made here against catastrophic policy actions that attempt to mitigate global warming when the science, including whatever knock-on effects warming might have, isn’t settled.
John Sidles: (1) quibbling,
When you buy gasoline, do you quibble over the minor differences among among octane levels? Do you quibble over the minor differences between ethanol and methanol? Quibbling over the best mathematical descriptions over the best mathematical representation of the motions of the planets was a great episode in the history of science? Great outcomes have in fact often depended on tiny, almost immeasurably small details. Why did it matter whether the door to Rutherford’s lab was open or closed during his experiments? Why did it matter that Newton’s equations did not accurately predict the precession of the perihelion of Mercury?
Mann’s first hockey sticks had flat sticks, and his later hockey sticks had sticks (or “handles”) that sloped down to the right. The “quibbling” that led to the IPCC removing the early stick from its web site showed eventually that the Medieval Warm Period was supported by the evidence.
I think that the gullible acceptance of the “flat blade” of the Hockey Stick is what got climate scientists caught out by the Pause.
They underestimated natural variability based on Mann’s rhetorical graph. (Definition of rhetoric: Sounds like logic, but isn’t)
This has led to a second disaster after Climategate for their credibility, being that they did not anticipate the possibility the pause and build it into their scenarios.
Now all they can do is go back and re-write history so that they can pretend that the Pause doesn’t matter to their models, or even doesn’t exist, and that the Hockey Stick is rock solid science, and that IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT!
Regardless the outcome of the case, the book provides further damning evidence to those who dislike Mann. I doubt whether the actual outcome of the case will affect opinions at all. Supporters of Steyn already know what that they think of the case, and are already building their case against the justice system in the event of a loss (Mann court shopped, the venue is liberal, the judges are incompetent, etc….think the Andrew Weaver case up in Canada). If Mann’s supporters lose, they will have their story of corrupted justice (…think Supreme Court Bush/Gore). The fight will go on unabated.
All very true. Still the Mann case does provide plenty of entertainment. And it is fun for lawyers like myself to read all the other non-lawyers commentary. Most non-lawyers don’t seem to understand that the DC anti-slapp law that the motion to dismiss was based on required the Judge(s) to presume that every assertion in the complaint was true. I hope the appeal is decided soon so we can if all the non-Steyn defendants are dismissed (or not) and get on with discovery. A deposition of Mann is what we are all waiting for!
“can see if”
Some of Mann’s defenders seem to forget what was actually said in the initial post by Steyn that got him sued. The “tree-ring circus” quote was a criticism of the IPCC, which is allowed. The reference to Sandusky was to show that if Penn State couldn’t even investigate something that serious, why should we believe their “investigation” of Mann. Then there was the reference to torturing data. This is a common phrase used to indicate post-hoc statistics, which one should not do but lots of people do.
Since Steyn got sued for things not remotely “defamation” it is clear that Mann is simply trying to shut down criticism.
Either you and I have different interpretations of the meanings of words in a particular order, or he made the comparison more than once, or this quote in this American Spectator article is wrong
The original article.
In the wake of Louis Freeh’s report on Penn State’s complicity in serial rape, Rand Simberg writes of Unhappy Valley’s other scandal:
“I’m referring to another cover up and whitewash that occurred there two years ago, before we learned how rotten and corrupt the culture at the university was. But now that we know how bad it was, perhaps it’s time that we revisit the Michael Mann affair, particularly given how much we’ve also learned about his and others’ hockey-stick deceptions since. Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.”
Not sure I’d have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker-room showers with quite the zeal Mr Simberg does, but he has a point. Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change “hockey-stick” graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus. And, when the East Anglia emails came out, Penn State felt obliged to “investigate” Professor Mann. Graham Spanier, the Penn State president forced to resign over Sandusky, was the same cove who investigated Mann. And, as with Sandusky and Paterno, the college declined to find one of its star names guilty of any wrongdoing. If an institution is prepared to cover up systemic statutory rape of minors, what won’t it cover up? Whether or not he’s “the Jerry Sandusky of climate change”, he remains the Michael Mann of climate change, in part because his “investigation” by a deeply corrupt administration was a joke.
It would seem to me the Muller, McIntyre, and many others who actually looked at the data demonstrate the fraudulent nature of the chart, but lawyers and judges don’t necessarily understand these things the same way.
That was a quote of Rand Simberg – one of the other defendants.
Steyn – in quoting Simberg said:
“Not sure I’d have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker-room showers with quite the zeal Mr. Simberg does, but he has a point. Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change “hockey-stick” graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus. And, when the East Anglia emails came out, Penn State felt obliged to “investigate” Professor Mann.…
If an institution is prepared to cover up systemic statutory rape of minors, what won’t it cover up? Whether or not he’s “the Jerry Sandusky of climate change”, he remains the Michael Mann of climate change, in part because his “investigation” by a deeply corrupt administration was a joke.”
So you are talking about something someone else said (Simberg) not what Steyn said. I think you are confused.
Okay, I stand corrected. I didn’t read the preceding paragraph carefully enough.
This is the meaningful part of the jab at Mann, kenny: “he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science “.
He wasn’t accused of molesting children. That would have been libel. Try to catch up.
ATTP
‘[Mann] could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.”
The easiest way to understand what this writing says is to switch it up
[Mann] could be said to be the jesus christ of climate science, except that instead of saving souls, he has saved the planet.
Now imagine if a skeptic objected to this by saying that you had claimed that mann was a deity.
… and then there’s physics: Either you and I have different interpretations of the meanings of words in a particular order,
there’s this: except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.
I think that the “except that” is sufficiently important
You do not have the full quote. In context, I think that the Sandusky reference was a slap at the Penn State committee that “exonerated” both Mann and Sandusky based on a superficial investigation and the observation that each enhanced Penn State’s reputation and monetary income.
Unless Mann’s suit is dismissed, I would like to see it go to a jury. People complain that juries lack expertise on the technical issues, but this is an issue of defamation according to the law (“reckless disregard” and such ), and I think that juries can catch on to that, and the importance of all those quotes, in public media, at the time Steyn wrote his opinion. They are good at recognizing arrogance, prevarication, explicit self-contradictions and such, and Mann has a lot of those riding on him.
… and then there’s physics: Okay, I stand corrected.
I apologize for piling on. I hadn’t read that until after posting my comment.
Pingback: Judith Curry’s Latest Bat Droppings on Michael Mann | Steven S Goddard (aka Tony Heller), Exposed
jorgietom, what we are seeing here on Climate Etc is not the continuation of the Steyn/Mann hockey-stick fight, but rather its ending.
• For millions of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, the main open question nowadays is not Mann’s old hockey-stick blade of accelerating temperature rise, but rather Hansen’s new hockey-stick blade of accelerating sea-level rise.
• For billions of practicing Catholics, the main social question nowadays is not Steyn’s old hockey-stick blade of stale politics-as-usual rhetoric, but rather Francis’ new hockey-stick blade of enlightening economic and moral activism.
Prediction Few citizens, and even fewer mathematicians, scientists and engineers, will have much regard for the eventual outcome of Steyn-vs-Mann (except for Steyn and Mann, that is).
Advice Mark Steyn would be well-advised to personally apologize to Michael Mann, and Michael Mann would be well-advised to accept that personal apology.
Because apology or not, soon it will be “game over, well-ended, and good riddance” … to a Steyn/Mann circus that has always been more about juvenile terms-of-abuse than scientific substance.
Meanwhile atmospheric CO2 is increasing, the oceans are heating, the land is baking, the waters are acidifying, the mountain glaciers are melting, the ice-caps are sliding, and the sea-levels are rising … while the land and the communities on that land suffer ongoing ecological, economic, and social devastation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgfMu2NxtZI
Conclusion Nowadays fewer-and-fewer citizens, mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and religious leaders are quibbling about these amalgamated realities.
Yes – I am sure Mann does deeply regret having sued Steyn.
However Steyn will never apologize and is looking forward to his day in court.
I predict Steyn will win and Mann will lose.
Why do you suppose that mikey keeps avoiding discovery, johnny. The case can’t end with little mikey dragging his little feet for years on end. What is that little putz afraid of? Steyn wants to fget his wide butt in court. Who is the chicken here, johnny?
Wendell Berry – a great man! Good on ya, John!
“Meanwhile the land is baking”
At a temp increase of + 1degC in a little over a century?
I take it your wife doesn’t let you do any cooking.
What part of citizen scientist is hard to understand?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN2-a82_3mg
Conclusion Climate change already is affecting the range and behavior of many North American birds.
Climate-change is real, serious and accelerating … the birds already know this … and so does every outdoorsman, conservationist, naturalist, and citizen scientist.
Sidles
Climate-change is real, serious and accelerating … the birds already know this
Seems like we’d better stop using all these unreliable man-made thermometers that now midlead us into thinking temperatures have plateaued for the last 18 years, and start using birdmometers. After all, Mann showed just how good treemometers work.
Climate-change is real, serious and accelerating … the birds already know this
Birds have a neat defensive trick,called evolutionary adaptability that allows them to adapt to new problems and solve them very fast.
Lol … yes, even if thermometers had never been invented, citizen-scientists would observe today’s changing patterns of bird migration, plant flowering, and insect-hatching. … and understand that climate-change is real, serious, and accelerating.
http://ucdavis.edu/local_resources/images/hpbg/2014/February/gradstudies/mason_bee_male.jpg
Thank you punksta, for reminding us that nature has its own, highly reliable, non-technological ways of showing us that climate-change is real!
So given
1. Birds are allegedly changing their habits (say) die to global warming.
2. The thermometers say there has been no terrestial warming of late.
Sidles logic : Therefore the thermometers are wrong.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/lo-hem/201506.gif
Poem for Punksta
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Bees/Images/bees_title.gif
The birds …
the bees …
the trees …
and the thermometers …
… all agrees!
John Sidles: “the birds already know this”
Given that the swallows flying round up here in the Yorkshire Dales have flown all the way from South Africa to breed, I think the birds will be able to cope, somehow!
If global stock prices had declined as much (during, say, 1970-2015) as biodiversity indices have declined (typical declines are 30%-50% and accelerating, yikes) …
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41169000/gif/_41169441_living_planet2_gra416.gif
… then extremist ideologues like Marc Steyn would be screaming.
As it is, Steyn and his allies have remained inexplicably silent … in the face of grotesque and accelerating planetary biome degradation.
As a result, thoughtful conservatives have to come to depend upon the likes of James Hansen, Katherine Hayhoe, Pope Francis, Wendell Berry, and even the indispensably inimitable Randall Munroe (of xkcd)
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/land_mammals.png
Fortunately these< responsibly conservation-minded citizens are doing a terrific job of sustaining reasoned conservative discourse.
Conclusion Every thoughtful conservative owes an immense debt of gratitude to Jim, Kathy, Francis, Wendell, and Randall.
What evidence for static bird populations and migration patterns in the past? Why temperature and not land use likely factors?
John Sidles: • For millions of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, the main open question nowadays is not Mann’s old hockey-stick blade of accelerating temperature rise, but rather Hansen’s new hockey-stick blade of accelerating sea-level rise.
Maybe, but that is not the question in Mann v Steyn and Steyn v Mann.
Poor John. He really doesn’t seem to have the faintest idea that publishing a study does not equal revealed truth. A note — we are all aware of the fantasies your heroes have published. Citing them here does nothing to make your case more persuasive. Actually, it lessens your case.
When people are laughing at your arguments, they tend to be unpersuasive.
Steyn seeks this court hearing because he intends to gut MM in public.
Wait a minute Judith… Mark Steyn has published a book in order to help defray his legal costs defending a suit brought by Mann. Sure, he’s filed a counter-suit too which is pretty common in such situations.
Under what legal theory should the success of Steyn’s book diminish any damages awarded against Mann?
If Steyn can show he suffered damages, he’s entitled to compensation. The fact that he was able to derive some revenue from the pursuit of his normal occupation (as a writer) should have no bearing on the amount awarded.
I think and hope you are mistaken.
You are no doubt correct. Maybe she was going for humor, Mike.
Yes – I am not sure this is legally correct either.
I think Judith is thinking that if Steyn makes money off his book, that this will somehow be net against his damage award and therefore reduce it.
If he made more money than his total damage would he owe Mann money?
I don’t think so.
Anyway – I will have to think about this issue more.
Well I should have put a /sarc on that comment. The idea was to see if i could fool any alarmists into buying (and reading!) the book
Ha Ha. That is funny.
Hi Mike, this was a sarcastic comment, hoping i could fool some Mann supporters into buying the book
I got it, Judith. But I didn’t want to give you away. It probably worked on some of those monkeys.
well on amazon, stein’s book is selling very well. Not that many skeptics out there so I hear, so must be Mann’s supporters buying the book :)
Yes, the alarmists are trying to buy them out so they don’t fall into the hands of the general public. I don’t think it will work with the e-books.
Don,
are you denying evolution with the monkey comment?
Scott
I think that Mark should spend a little time, a very little time, and write a book about those scientists (not just any old pundits) who think that Dr Mann is a scientific giant.
Perhaps entitled “A Disgrace to the Profession – NOT!”, it would epitomise brevity (or is that wit?) and would, whether in dead-wood or eBook format, have a similar, i.e.minimal, carbon-footprint.
Did you mean scientific “gnat”? Autocorrect is frustrating!
Judith, Referencing Sou is probably counterproductive. She has gotten more and more shrill and can really now be characterized as just angry and hateful. Such bigotry and tripe should not be advertised.
Voices that are “shrill, angry, and hateful” … hmmmm … RedState’s Erick Erickson is indubitably right that “anger at unhealthy levels” is “poisonous to debate, to democracy, and to the soul itself.”
That was well-said, Erick Erickson!
Come to think, the quibbling dodging rhetoric of willful scientific ignorance increasingly loses elections too.
Conclusion The era of Steyn-style angry, hateful, quibbling, dodging, juvenile, willfully ignorant climate-change rhetoric is ending.
This is good news for the reasoned voices of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers!
Yes. Authoritarians always prefer quiet submission. Well said.
Yes, the professions of mathematics, science, and engineering do require quiet submission to the discipline of logic, natural law, and engineering reality, and to the associated traditions of reasoned respectful collegial discourse.
http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2012/02/images/640_workplace-ethics-640.jpg
And it is a matter of record that political pundits (like Mark Steyn) commonly have chosen not to pursue any of these careers.
Yes, the professions of mathematics, science, and engineering do require quiet submission to the discipline of logic, natural law, and engineering reality, and to the associated traditions of reasoned respectful collegial discourse.
Any suggestions on getting climate ‘science’ into that way of working ?
John, “Yes, the professions of mathematics, science, and engineering do require quiet submission to the discipline of logic, natural law, and engineering reality, ”
When this part is used.
“and to the associated traditions of reasoned respectful collegial discourse.”
You can expect this.
However, when you use “novel” methods you have to defend those “novel” methods since they are not a part of the “discipline”.
Example,
Scientist ” A doubling of atmospheric CO2 should cause and increase of approximately 3.7 Wm-2 of atmospheric resistance to heat loss provided all things remaining equal.”
Chorus: Sounds reasonable.
Scientist ” Every possible response with make it worse and hell awaits us.”
Chorus: “what a dumba$$”
Yes they do sort of go togehter – a credulous truebeliever in the supernatural and a credulous truebeliever in climate models. Experts at building certainty out of nothing.
“shrill, angry, hateful, quibbling, dodging, juvenile, willfully ignorant”
That is indeed an impressive, almost desperate, array of adjectives.
He is merely taking the fight to the climate Stasi (and the left in general) with the cheerful vigor that that enterprise rightfully entails. I love to see him hit a nerve. As for the end of an era, you could be prematurely optimistic. This is Volume 1.
Reblogged this on pdx transport.
Just to keep the techniques straight, “quote mining” must be akin to “swift-boating” – that is, telling an unpleasant truth about a public figure liked by lefties. And “shorn of context” like “out of context” and “selectively edited” translates to “It’s true; so what?” Sort of works sometimes in politics if media is on your side; in properly functioning courtroom in the boundaries of the US – even in DC – not so much.
John Sidles: Conclusion The era of Steyn-style angry, hateful, quibbling, dodging, juvenile, willfully ignorant climate-change rhetoric is ending.
“Willfully ignorant”? Can you show where something Steyn wrote is incorrect, and then that it is willfully so?
Steyn has a bad tendency to get things wrong, at least when it comes to details. I discussed one example not too long ago because a user quoted some text to me.
In another case, Steyn wrote an article in which he said nobody had ever compared Michael Mann to a child molester. I don’t have a link handy for that one, but he only corrected it after I made some jokes about it. I can’t say these sorts of mistakes are willful, but given he’s spent hundreds of hours on a lawsuit over an article in which he helped compare Mann to a child molester, it is a bit remarkable he would somehow come to believe nobody compared Mann to a child molester.
Brandon S? (@Corpus_no_Logos): In another case, Steyn wrote an article in which he said nobody had ever compared Michael Mann to a child molester.
I put up the exact quote elsewhere in this discussion. The phrase “except for …” makes clear that it is not a “comparison”. Others have quoted the editorial at greater length. The use of “Sandusky” and “Mann” in the same sentence draws attention to the incompetence and venality of the Penn State committed that “investigated” and “exonerated” the two men.
Everyone knows now that the investigation of Sandusky was a travesty; does not the investigation of Mann by the same people likewise require a re-investigation by an independent agent (e.g. a federal district attorney v via a grand jury)?
matthewrmarler:
I put up the exact quote elsewhere in this discussion. The phrase “except for …” makes clear that it is not a “comparison”.
No, it doesn’t. Especially since the phrase “except for” was never used.” The actual phrase was “except that.” The quote was:
Which is unquestionably a comparison of Michael Mann to a child molester. It’s not calling him a child molester. That’s the whole point of phrase “except that.” It’s to say he isn’t a child molester, he’s just like one in certain ways.
There is no basis for claiming Mann wasn’t compared to a child molester. Please don’t even try. Not only do I not want to have to deal with a semantic argument on such an obvious point, I think it’s disgusting anyone would deny that Mann was compared to a child molester. He was, and it was disgusting. Accept that and move on. You can defend the right to free speech while still acknowledging the speech in question was gross. And before you respond, consider this: Mark Steyn himself has since agreed Mann was compared to a child molester. That means if you don’t agree, you’re the only one.
It does that and a whole lot more. Mann had every right to be offended at the comparison that was drawn. I was offended on his behalf. I’m still offended. I just happen to recognize that offensive speech happens to be part of what’s allowed when you have free speech.
“It’s to say he isn’t a child molester, he’s just like one in certain ways.”
That is really dumb, brandoon. The little snake wasn’t being compared to Sandusky because Sandusky is a child molester. It was because the little snake was exonerated by a phony Penn State investigation, just like Sandusky was exonerated by a phony Penn State investigation. The point being if the Penn State Admin will turn a blind eye to child molestation, relying on the integrity of their investigations of their money generating employees would be stupid. The only way they are saying or implying that the little snake is like Sandusky is that the two of them were exonerated by bogus Penn State ersatz investigations. Unless there is some other comparison that you haven’t told us about, yet.
You seem to be inserting yourself into these controversies, or you are manufacturing controversies, with no rhyme or reason for some of your positions, other than to get attention. Grow up.
Brandon S?: No, it doesn’t. Especially since the phrase “except for” was never used.” The actual phrase was “except that.”
I stand corrected.
You raise a fascinating question, Matthew R. Marler!
For the convenience of voters, the non-partisan League of Conservation Voters aggregates extended, fair, in-context quotations by political candidates for US President in regard to climate-change
Open question That the candidates’ quotes, as aggregated by the League of Conservation Voters, display a disturbingly high level of Steyn-style climate-change ignorance is inarguable.
But can this dismaying level of ignorance reasonably be said to be willful?
Working answer Climate-change ignorance, no matter whether willful or (alternatively) arising as a compulsion associated to ideological fixation, irresistible political temptation, contrarian mental defect, or simple laziness, cannot reasonably be held to be legally wrong.
Yet for the reasons that Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ explains plainly, the present-day levels of climate-change ignorance are politically and morally wrong.
John Sidles: matthewrmarler wonders “Can you show where something Steyn wrote is incorrect, and then that it is willfully so?”
You raise a fascinating question, Matthew R. Marler!
…
Open question That the candidates’ quotes, as aggregated by the League of Conservation Voters, display a disturbingly high level of Steyn-style climate-change ignorance is inarguable.
Well, …, can you show where Steyn wrote something that is incorrect, and then that it is willfully so? Or is it the case that you have no basis for your claim that Steyn is “willfully ignorant”? Is it the case that the League of Conservation Voters is willfully one-sided and mostly ignorant of the flaws of the consensus view (as I think it is)?
You drew an unwarranted inference from a poor source. Would you like to return to discussing the merits of Mann v Steyn and Steyn v Mann? Do you want to stand by your allusion to “attention to detail” as “quibbling”? It would not be fair to say that “the world wonders”, but a few of us regular and irregular readers do wonder.
Answer For the overwhelming majority of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, the simple answer is “no”.
Because:
• The legal merits of Mann vs Steyn and Steyn vs Man are contingent upon arcane legal minutiae that have no scientific interest whatsover.
• The scientific merits (if any) of these two cases are unlikely to be credibly decided in any court of law … and to date, haven’t even been argued.
That’s why sensible mathematicians, scientists, and engineers (and sensible citizens too) are devoting far more attention to the scientifically credible and ethically mature ideas that Jim, Kathy, Francis, Wendell, and Randall are expressing … than to the juvenile legal and personal squabblings of Mark and Michael.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ffWvTuqg-AY/UAZGR3GVUNI/AAAAAAAACas/-L7QFvVBQE8/s1600/clowns.png
Sensible conclusion Mark should apologize and Michael should accept that apology … because nowadays not many sober science-minded folks care at all about their two-clown legal circus.
“Sensible conclusion”?
Johnny boy, you wouldn’t recognise a sensible conclusion if it scampered under your foetid, slimy bridge, leapt up, and bit you on the snout.
But hey, keep up the good work, every good blog needs a comedian, and you fulfil the function beautifully.
It is a case about free speech. So there’s that. Enjoy yours while it lasts.
catweazle666, the information provided by citizen-science web-sites like the indispensable Explain xkcd/Land Mammals will greatly help in expanding your biomic horizons to encompass the broader, more mature scientific, economic, and moral landscape of Laudato Si’.
http://payload324.cargocollective.com/1/5/184360/8782584/Saint-Francis-of-Assisi-stained-glass-roundel-LR_780.jpg
Enjoy your newly begun scientific, economic, and moral journey toward a broader, more enlightened conservatism, catweazle666!
John Sidles: Answer For the overwhelming majority of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, the simple answer is “no”.
Because:
• The legal merits of Mann vs Steyn and Steyn vs Man are contingent upon arcane legal minutiae that have no scientific interest whatsover.
You wrote that Steyn was “willfully ignorant”. You ought to back it up or retract it.
The arcane legal minutia (“burden of proof”, definition of “defamation”, freedom of speech and such) are the topic of the thread to which you are responding. They are of great interest to Michael Mann, Mark Steyn and diverse denizens here.
Matthewrmarler, the outcome of Steyn-vs-Mann is far more likely to rest upon existing law and precedents, than to set new precedents, because Steyn-vs-Mann is an “edge case” in the following sense: had Steyn’s rhetoric been slightly less abusive, it would plainly be protected speech under existing case-law; whereas had Steyn’s rhetoric been slightly more abusive, it would plainly be defamatory under existing case-law.
The outcome of the Steyn-vs-Mann is likely, therefore, to hinge upon tiny (even inadvertent) minutiae of the phrasing of Steyn’s abusive rhetoric.
Such minutiae-dependent “edge cases” commonly exert little or no lasting impact upon upon case-law … and (more important) the associated legal wranglings manifestly will exert no influence whatsoever upon climate-science.
That’s the common-sense reason why sober-minded citizens are paying far more attention to the ongoing works of Jim, Kathy, Francis, Wendell, and Randall than to the arcane wranglings of Mark and Michael.
That’s the reason, too, why Mark Steyn would be well-advised to apologize, and Michael Mann would be well-advised to accept the apology. Because regardless of the legal outcome, no substantial issues (in case-law, scientifically, or morally) are likely to be decided by their case.
Conclusion It may be that Mark Steyn likes to live “on the edge”, rhetorically speaking … but perhaps in this case he would be well-advised to pull back from it.
John
Sounds good sense to me. However both characters have big egos and I can not see steyn apologising nor Mann graciously accepting it.
The situation becomes more complicated however as, from what I can understand , this is aso being portrayed as a matter of free speech.
Tonyb
You are too funny, johnny-fanny. You know about as much about defamation law as little yimmy. If you want to know why Steyn will prevail, read the Amici briefs filed on his behalf. If you want to see the arguments for the snake, read the Amici briefs filed in support of his loser of a case.
John Sidles: Matthewrmarler, the outcome of Steyn-vs-Mann is far more likely to rest upon existing law and precedents, than to set new precedents, because Steyn-vs-Mann is an “edge case” in the following sense:
Taken together, I think that your presentations are incoherent. Now you introduce the irrelevant issue of setting precedents, and want Steyn to apologize to someone who has sued him for exercising his right to free expression. Steyn’s book will, I think, go far to defend him against the charge of defamation. What you call the “minutiae” here are the details that matter. That’s for Mann v Steyn.
For Steyn v Mann, Steyn has documented a pattern of prevarication and sloppiness in Mann’s brief, and has a lot of amicus curiae briefs on his side.
John Sidles: and (more important) the associated legal wranglings manifestly will exert no influence whatsoever upon climate-science.
Maybe so, maybe not. The outcomes will probably have an influence on the policy debates about what to do, and the related issue of how much trust anyone can place on claims made by individual scientists and groups of scientists.
But advancing the science wasn’t the goal when Mann sued Steyn, and it wasn’t the goal when Steyn sued Mann.
Back to your claim that Steyn is “willfully ignorant”: Well, …, can you show where Steyn wrote something that is incorrect, and then that it is willfully so?
Pundit-rhetoric Climate Etc readers are free to parse for themselves the legal minutiae of Steyn’s anti-Mann rhetoric (which are a matter of public record), with due regard to that rhetoric’s level(s) of “ignorance”, and whether that ignorance is “willful”.
Politician-rhetoric Climate Etc readers are free too, to parse the minutiae of the rhetoric of presidential candidates, with due regard to that rhetoric’s level(s) of “ignorance”, and whether that ignorance is “willful”.
The ending of an ignorant era And yet forward-thinking science-respecting Climate Etc readers will appreciate that the era of climate-change discourse dominated by pundit-ignorance and politician-ignorance is ending … thankfully!
The beginning of a new era In its place, a wonderful new era of scientifically credible and ethically mature climate-science discourse has begun, very much in the style of Jim, Kathy, Francis, Wendell, and Randall.
An open question Perhaps even Mark Steyn himself — and (more importantly) perhaps even the US Presidential candidates themselves — will embrace the emerging new style of scientifically credible and ethically mature climate-change discourse?
Now, *THAT* wonderful change-in-rhetoric would be GOOD for EVERYONE!
John Sidles: Climate Etc readers are free to parse for themselves the legal minutiae of Steyn’s anti-Mann rhetoric (which are a matter of public record), with due regard to that rhetoric’s level(s) of “ignorance”, and whether that ignorance is “willful”.
No readers here need reminding that they are free. However, it was you who made the (as yet) totally unsubstantiated claim that Steyn was “willfully ignorant”.
The freedom to assess Climate Etc readers are free assess for themselves whether Mann’s legal complaint sufficiently documents numerous matters-of-fact that Steyn’s anti-Mann rhetoric disregards.
Open questions Did Steyn’s disregard-of-fact (as documented by Mann’s filing) arise through ignorance? Was the ignorance willful? Was the intent malicious?
Broad answers Although the details of the answers to these questions are legally contentious — involving minutiae of phrasing and intricacies of defamation law — it is none-the-less evident that, broadly speaking and judging by the traditional standards of rational discourse among mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, there are no answers to these questions that reflect very credibly upon Steyn’s brand of public discourse.
Better discourse Absence-of-credibility is particularly evident, when Steyn’s rhetoric is compared side-by-side with the scientifically credible and ethically mature climate-science discourse of Jim, Kathy, Francis, Wendell, and Randall
http://www.christian-miracles.com/4081925516_9fb2c7c861.jpg
Rational conclusions The era of angry, hateful, quibbling, dodging, juvenile, willfully ignorant climate-change rhetoric is ending.
Not by the tedious wranglings of lawyers in courtrooms, but by sustained vigorous growth in scientific understanding and acceptance of moral responsibility.
John Sidles: “Rational conclusions The era of angry, hateful, quibbling, dodging, juvenile, willfully ignorant climate-change rhetoric is ending.”
So what are you doing here, posting screeds of otherwise pointless semi-literate twaddle that in fact fulfils that criterion to absolute perfection?
John Sidles | August 16, 2015 at 7:29 am
There will be no such ‘new era’ sans ignorant / adversarial / dodgy rhetoric regarding climate change, while the climate domain continues to be dominated by a cultural narrative based on the certainty of imminent (decades) calamity. A narrative that enslaves the science with heavy bonds of cultural and emotional bias, and drags it where people’s fears and anxieties and hopes (e.g. of a new order), prosper the most.
There is a definite need for people like Steyn. Because, at this point anyway, “climate change” is a political issue. Politics in the US has a long and honored history of satire and pointed criticism of the opposition. Steyn shines the harsh, but badly needed, light of publicity on, being generous, sloppy scientists like Mann and others. That reminds me, I need to go buy something from the Steyn store again.
We all know who’s to blame …
http://4umf.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Pope-Francis-.jpg
… it’s those godless commies!
The era of angry, hateful, quibbling, dodging, juvenile, willfully ignorant climate-change rhetoric is ending. Not by the tedious wranglings of lawyers in courtrooms, but by sustained vigorous growth in scientific understanding and acceptance of moral responsibility.
Not while the likes of Mann continue hide data, work to sabotage peer review and destroy the evidence of what they’re doing.
And not while the institutions within which they operate not only don’t expel or punish them, but use tax money to bribe some of their pals to run elaborate coverups of it all — thereby providing incontrovertable evidence that government-funded climate science is rotten from top to bottom.
Jim D
the lesser known Climategate emails were full of other scientists not particularly happy with Mann’s way of doing things, but that did not fit the previous all-climate-science-is-corrupt meme
What?! Their public agreement despite private disagreement fits the meme to a T. Could there be any better example?
Perhaps after this series, Steyn would consider writing Climate Science : a Disgraced Profession ?
Reblogged this on CraigM350.
I’m still wondering, if this goes to trial, will it be heard by a judge or a jury? Also, I’m wondering who decides which it will be?
Pingback: As the World Burns, Episode I: Judith Curry & Mark Steyn, Partners in Slime | Tony Heller (aka Steven Goddard), Exposed
I am no expert on US law, but I understand that in defamation cases, one of the issues is the extent to which the reputation is being disparaged. The person who seeks to allege that he has been defamed must establish that the putative defamatory comment has caused the accuser a loss of reputation.
If that is so, then the quotes from the other scientists are particularly relevant, since whilst these may not prove that what Mann did was fraudulent, they show the poor esteem in which Mann is held by his peers. In short, he already has a poor reputation such that he has no reputation to lose.
Based upon those quotes, Mann will find it difficult to argue that what Steyn said about Mann has caused Mann to lose reputation, at any rate a loss of something more than de minimis/trivial extent.
Matters of fact
• Mann’s dissertation was awarded the Phillip M. Orville Prize in 1997 as an “outstanding dissertation in the earth sciences” at Yale University.
• Mann’s co-authorship of a scientific paper published by Nature won him an award from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in 2002, and another co-authored paper published in the same year won the NOAA’s outstanding scientific publication award.
• The American Geophysical Union awarded Mann its Editors’ Citation for Excellence in Refereeing in 2006 to recognize his contributions in reviewing manuscripts for its Geophysical Research Letters journal.
• In 2012, Mann was awarded the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union for “his significant contributions to understanding decadal-centennial scale climate change over the last two millennia and for pioneering techniques to synthesize patterns and northern hemispheric time series of past climate using proxy data reconstructions.”
• Following election by the American Meteorological Society Mann became a new Fellow of the society in 2013.
• In January 2013 Mann was designated with the status of distinguished professor in Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.
• In September 2013, Mann received the National Wildlife Federation’s National Conservation Achievement Award for Science.
• On 28 April 2014 the National Center for Science Education announced that its first annual Friend of the Planet award had been presented to Mann and Richard Alley.
Conclusion Mann’s scientific reputation has objective professional value.
So who hired Mann to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period?
Perhaps it was the ghost of the English citizen-scientist Guy Stewart Callendar …
https://www.aip.org/history/climate/images/GSCallendar1934.jpg
… who was the spiritual ancestor of TonyB!
John
I am flattered to be compared to the ghost of Guy Callendar who in a remarkable coincidence came to me in a dream last night and admitted he had been entirely wrong about the effects of co2.
tonyb
More matters of fact (from http://www.worldsci.org/php/index.php?tab0=Scientists&tab1=Scientists&tab2=Display&id=1026) :
On May 16 1994, a distinguished physicochemist, a Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Boris Vtadimirovich Deryagin deceased at the age of 91. A whole epoch in the development of the physical chemistry of surface phenomena is associated with his name. Classical works on the theory of the stability of colloids and thin films of liquids brought him world-wide fame. B. V. Deryagin made a considerable contribution to the development of the theory of surface forces, diffusiophoresis, and thermoosmosis. Being a brilliant experimenter, he was the first to accomplish direct measurements of long-range molecular forces. The concept of disjoining pressure of thin interlayers and its various constituents introduced by B. V. Deryagin made it possible to pass from the two-dimensional Gibbs thermodynamics to three-dimensional thermodynamics of multiphase systems, which takes into account finite thicknesses and peculiar properties of interface layers.
While studying the processes of adhesion of solids, B. V. Deryagin discovered that disruption of an adhesion linkage results in the formation of fresh surfaces covered with oppositely charged dense layers, which leads to the appearance of electronic adhesion. The theory of the forces of the interaction of nonplanar surfaces, which was developed by B. V. Deryagin as early as in 1934 and found wide application, occupies a special place in tile science of colloids and surface phenomena. Under the leadership of B. V. Deryagin, a series of work on the synthesis of diamond at low pressures was begun in 1950. The development of experimental methods and theoretical views on the influence of atomic hydrogen on gasification of non-diamond forms of carbon enabled preparation of diamond from the gaseous phase on various supports. Single crystals and polycrystalline films of diamonds were produced.
Boris Vladimirovich left a great scientific heritage. More than a thousand of works were published; some monographs were published abroad. As a token of recognition of great merits of Prof. B. V. Deryagin, the Pergamon Press Publishers put out three volumes of his selected works. For his scientific activity, B. V. Deryagin was awarded the USSR State Prize and the Lomonosov Prize of the Academy of Sciences. For many years, B. V. Deryagin was the Head of the Division of Surface Phenomena of the Institute of Physical Chemist~ of the Academy of Sciences and the editor-in-chief of the Colloidal Chemistry journal, was a member of Editorial Boards of foreign and Russian Journals. He was a Full Member of the International Academy of Naturalists “Leopoldina” and of the New York Academy of Sciences. The uncommon talent of Boris Vladimirovich attracted to him many scientists who became his pupils and followers. The blessed memory of him will be preserved by many people who honored his talent and were fortunate to work together with him.
(Jim2 note: this is the man who “discovered” polywater.)
Mike Mangan | August 16, 2015 at 8:37 am |
“So who hired Mann to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period?”
Also, do we know yet, who hired Mann, fresh with his Phd, to be a lead author at the IPCC? AFAIK, the selection of lead authors from the USA was suppose to be done by the US government, but it did not do so in the case of Mann.
Richard
Point being re Boris Vtadimirovich Deryagin. It’s not too difficult to find gushing reviews of scientists. One must always dig deeper.
John Sidles: Open questions Did Steyn’s disregard-of-fact (as documented by Mann’s filing) arise through ignorance? Was the ignorance willful? Was the intent malicious?
Mann’s filings (note plural) contain contradictions and errors. It was you who made the unsubstantiated charge that Steyn displayed “willful ignorance”.
Broad answers Although the details of the answers to these questions are legally contentious — involving minutiae of phrasing and intricacies of defamation law — it is none-the-less evident that, broadly speaking and judging by the traditional standards of rational discourse among mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, there are no answers to these questions that reflect very credibly upon Steyn’s brand of public discourse.
The details matter. Calling them “minutiae” does not make them not matter.
“• On 28 April 2014 the National Center for Science Education announced that its first annual Friend of the Planet award had been presented to Mann and Richard Alley.”
All mann’s awards received after Steyn’s defamatory statements indicate one thing:
Sticks and stones.
That all these outfits gave Mann all these awards shows that they have become politicised and are engaging in propaganda and can’t be trusted. They need to follow Mark Steyn’s advise and denounce Mann and his crappy hockey stick for a fresh start:
Perhaps NCSE was hedging their bet picking two winners, just in case Mann’s FOP has to go the same way as his Nobel.
John Sidles: Matters of fact
• Mann’s dissertation was awarded the Phillip M. Orville Prize in 1997 as an “outstanding dissertation in the earth sciences” at Yale University.
…
Nevertheless, the phrase “fraudulent hockeystick” was not defamation; the “fraudulent hockeystick” was based on “Mike’s trick to hide the decline” (said about a different graph, but acknowledging Mike’s priority), and was removed from the IPCC web page because of it. Likewise, the phrase “tortured data” was not defamation.
Your strategy is analogous to pointing out that not everything that Scooter Libby said was perjury or obstruction of justice. Libby’s trial was not about everything else that he said, but about a small number of sentences, and the jury (and I) agreed with the prosecution in that case.
You are correct to note that the outcomes in Mann v Steyn and Steyn v Mann depend on what Steyn and Mann wrote, and on American law. You persistently denigrate the foci of the case and attempt to draw attention away from them. This is analogous to pointing out that Pons and Fleischman did a bunch of other work.
Meanwhile, you have provided no evidence to support your claim that Steyn was willfully ignorant. You have not even shown Steyn ever to have been in error.
BTW Naomi Oreskes was NCSE’s 2015 FOP winner. Who’s next? … John Cook? … Stephen Lewandowsky? Bill McKibben?
Gee, with James Hansen and even Wendell Berry having won high-rank scientific awards too, a reasonable candidate for the next high-rank scientific award is Climate Voice spokesperson …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyJdgjl8Y0I
… Katherine Hayhoe!
Reasonable prediction For so long as long atmospheric CO2 still is increasing, the oceans still are heating, the land still is baking, the waters still are acidifying, the mountain glaciers still are melting, the ice-caps still are sliding, and the sea-levels still are rising … while the land and the communities on that land still are suffering ongoing ecological, economic, and social devastation …
… very few mathematicians, scientists, engineers (and thoughtful citizens too) will be paying much attention to angry, hateful, quibbling, dodging, juvenile, willfully ignorant climate-change rhetoric…… or to lawyers’ interminable wrangling in courtrooms about that rhetoric.
John Sidles brings up an interesting question: If one is able to profit from making politically popular yet unsubstantiated statements by building a public following, becoming a “rock star,” is their rightfully recoverable damages if another knocks down their attractiveness by making them “uncool” by lampooning them? Let’s assume even that the lampooning was willfully ignorant and with malicious intent. Are political satirists immune? Comedians? Cartoonists? But what if a humorists makes and unfunny remark or cartoon?
In the case of Deryagin’s polywater what if Richard Feynman had voiced harsher skepticism yet the polywater canard had lasted because Deryagin was the leader of a circle of scientists all profiting from the notoriety. Could Deryagin have sued and won damages just put in the bank before the canard was finally exposed?
John, you did hurt Mann’s case for damages by showing he is still profiting from the same trough he was profiting from before Steyn’s comment. The value of reputation is hard to measure. By suing Steyn, Mann surely increased Steyn’s reputation among Steyn’s followers, thus aiding him. Likewise could be said of the effect of Steyn’s comment on Mann’s readers. If so should they owe each other royalties?
Perhaps the classical English law theory of defamation should no apply at all to anyone who has access to self-publication…which is everyone now.
Lol it’s entirely plausible that Steyn’s book helps sales of Mann’s book (and vice versa).
For the general public, the lessons are different:
Lesson 1 Nowadays Mann’s old “hockey stick” is very far from the strongest climate-change hockey-stick in the scientific literature … that honor plausibly is held by Marcott, Shakun, Clark, and Mix, “A reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the past 11,300 Years“ (2013).
Further “hockey-stick” affirmation is provided by the many thousands of scientific studies (conducted by both professional scientists and by citizen-scientists) that show atmospheric CO2 is increasing, the oceans still heating, the land still baking, the waters still acidifying, the mountain glaciers still melting, the ice-caps still sliding, and the sea-levels still rising … while Pope Francis himself (among many sober-minded citizens) affirms that the earth and its communities are suffering ongoing ecological, economic, and social devastation.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/map-percentile-mntp/201501-201506.gif
`Cuz the world is just plain getting hot, ain’t it?
Lesson 2 Nowadays Steyn’s old “fraudulent data molestation” accusations are … hmmm … well when all the rhetoric gets peeled away, not much “new news” is left, is there, regarding Steyn’s anti-Mann accusations?
Furthermore, for all its vehemence, Steyn’s book does *NOT* effectively address the accumulating climate-change evidence that Pope Francis (among many) finds to be convincing … does it?
Conclusion The rising tide of climate-science has strikingly affirmed the sobering reality of Michael Mann’s “hockey-stick” climate-change worldview.
And no amount of interminable legal wrangling and rhetoric can effectively negate this affirmation.
John Siddles: “Conclusion The rising tide of climate-science has strikingly affirmed the sobering reality of Michael Mann’s “hockey-stick” climate-change worldview.”
Utter absolute unmitigated twaddle.
Stop making stuff up.
John Sidle: Conclusion The rising tide of climate-science has strikingly affirmed the sobering reality of Michael Mann’s “hockey-stick” climate-change worldview.
Michael Mann’s hockey stick, the fraudulent one that Mark Steyn called “fraudulent”, was thoroughly publicly discredited and removed from the IPCC web site in consequence. That was the one that exhibited “Mike’s trick to hide the decline”.
Subsequent research has strikingly affirmed the occurrence of the Medieval Warm Period that Mann was trying to discredit.
Wow. I didn’t think anyone commenting on this site would be dumb enough to cite Marcott for 20th century warming.
Talk about losing credibility.
• Mann, Bradley, and Hughes, “Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries” (1998): 1805 citations in 17.4 years (about 104 citations per year)
• Marcott, Shakun, Clark, and Mix, “A reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the past 11,300 years” (2013). 226 citations in 2.4 years (about 94 citations per year)
On the evidence Since the birth of the “hockey-stick”, neither the “hockey-stick shape” nor the “hockey-stick citation-rate” has changed all that much.
Conclusion The literature gives mathematicians, scientists, and engineers ample reason to simply not care about the interminable legal wranglings associated to Steyn-versus-Mann.
No wonder thoughtful folks like Pope Francis and the Hayhoes (along with many more thoughtful citizens) are convinced of the sobering reality of a “hockey-stick blade” of accelerating climate-change.
Siddles, are you a relative of Fan? If so welcome back.
John Sidles: • Mann, Bradley, and Hughes, “Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries” (1998): 1805 citations in 17.4 years (about 104 citations per year)
Makes you wonder (unless you know, that is) why the IPCC removed the fraudulent hockeystick from its website after extensive public criticism of it.
Matthewrmarler, it is easy for Climate Etc readers to verify that the most recent IPCC Synthesis Report (2014) includes four hockey-stick blades:
• globally averaged combined land-and-ocean temperature anomaly, and
• globally averaged sea-temperature change, and
• globally averaged greenhouse gas concentration, and
• global anthropogenic CO2 emissions
http://www.ipcc.ch/report/graphics/images/Assessment%20Reports/AR5%20-%20Synthesis%20Report/SPM/SPM.1_rev1-01.png
Perhaps for reason of space, the IPCC did not include the (wonderful!) *FIFTH* hockey-stick blade of globally averaged borehole temperatures (the thick red line below)
http://www.earth.lsa.umich.edu/climate/gst5.gif
You will note, too, that the globally averaged borehole data has affirmed the relative flatness of the “hockey-stick handle” of Mann, Bradley, and Hughes, “Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries” (1998).
Conclusion Marc Steyn’s book would be rationally stronger if it more extensively appreciated this extended body of “hockey-stick” scientific evidence.
Hypothesis Perhaps Steyn’s “Hockey-Stick Volume II” will survey this ever-longer & ever-stronger “multiblade” of scientific evidence?
John Sidles: Matthewrmarler, it is easy for Climate Etc readers to verify that the most recent IPCC Synthesis Report (2014) includes four hockey-stick blades:
Well yes, Climate Etc readers are an independent and energetic bunch. Those hockeysticks are not the fraudulent hockey stick over which Mann has sued Steyn.
We have beaten this horse pretty much to death. It is clear to most of us that you really, really, really and truly, sincerely and intensely, want to avoid the details of Mann v Steyn and Steyn v Mann absolutely.
I’ll let you have the last word to our readers (the few, the proud, etc.)
Mann’s HS was like a first draft. Imperfect, but basically correct. Later drafts have improved the picture, but there is still a cottage industry in complaining about the imperfect aspects of the first draft, as though everything we know 15 years later, should have been known in 1999.
Mann’s work wasn’t some imperfect “first draft.” It was a fraudulent piece of work promoted with claims the authors knew were false that was only accepted because the authors intentionally hid unfavorable results, ultimately dependent entirely upon a tiny amount of tree data from a single location in western United States even though the authors explicitly said they didn’t need tree ring data to get their results.
If anyone disputes this, I’d be happy to gift them a free copy of my short eBook which lays out clear proof of all this so they can offer a rebuttal. We’re talking maybe an hour read, and you can even have an unedited guest post to rebut it at my site if you’d like. If I’m wrong, it should be easy to show.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RE7K3W2/
Jack Vance’s celebrated short story “The Moon Moth“ (1961) is commended to your attention, Brandon S.
http://www.readaboutcomics.com/images/2012/032112_moonmoth02.jpg
Conclusion By his protracted struggles, and by his scientific vindication, Michael Mann has earned the right to wear Vance’s “Sea Dragon Conqueror.”
Even M&M despite all their criticisms, and others who repeated it and tried to improve it according to their own data preferences, were never able to substantially alter Mann’s HS result. A short summary is here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy#Principal_components_analysis_methodology
John Sidles, you have more than established you know nothing of substance when it comes to Michael Mann’s work, but please, don’t let that stop you from participating in this discussion. If actually having any understanding of the material being discussed was a requirement for discussing it, we’d never get to talk about anything here.
Jim D, what you say is completely and utterly untrue, and if you were actually forced to try to make an argument rather than just wave your hands at some link, you’d be forced to admit it. But please, feel free to mindlessly parrot talking points you can find on the internet. Actually needing to understand the material or arguments you refer to should never be a requirement for participating in discussions.
In case it wasn’t clear, that was me being facetious. I think it is pathetic people like you go around making bold pronouncements about subjects you have put absolutely no effort into understanding and will put no effort into understanding, especially when confronted with people who have spent significant amounts of time into laying the issues out in a clear manner so anyone who is interested can understand them.
But by all means, feel free to keep doing it. Anyone with a half an hour and 99 cents to spare can purchase my short eBook and see all the many ways in which you are wrong. Or they can ask for a free copy and do it for free. Or they can just believe your mindlessly parroted talking points. It’s a free world, after all.
Brandon S, perhaps you should devote your energies to writing eleven more books, concerning the shocking professional inadequacies of:
• Loránd Eötvös and his gravitation experiments
• Robert A. Millikan and his oil-drop experiments
• Arthur Eddington and his stellar displacement experiments
• Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley and their interferometry experiments
• Walter Reed and his yellow fever experiments
• Alexander Bell and his telephone experiments
• Galileo and his telescope experiments
• Isaac Newton and his gravitational calculus theories
• Wilbur and Orville Wright and their aeronautical theories
• Lord Kelvin and his electromagnetic theories
• Sabin and Salk and their vaccination theories
In every case you will discover shocking instances of marginal scientific incompetence, dubious scientific collegiality, and (especially) outrageous personal vainglory … derelictions that far exceed anything that Mann’s hockey-stick science can offer.
http://www.derbymuseums.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Hero_WhatsOn.jpg
Truly we live in a dark age of scientific immorality.
Conclusion Vast opportunities for scientific debunking await exploitation essentially all of modern mathematics, science, engineering, and medicine can be show to have been created by persons whose professional competence and personal scrupulosity are vulnerable to the most severe criticisms.
Jim D: Mann’s HS was like a first draft. Imperfect, but basically correct.
It might have been like that but it wasn’t. Mann tortured the data on purpose to try to remove the Medieval Warm Period, wrote a lot of contradictory propositions about it after the fact, and intentionally produced a fraudulent hockeystick graph (the first use of “Mann’s trick to hide the decline”).
I am beginning to appreciate why some commenters call you “yimmy” and such. You are either thick as a brick or something less respectable.
Jim D: Even M&M despite all their criticisms, and others who repeated it and tried to improve it according to their own data preferences, were never able to substantially alter Mann’s HS result.
More of the “thick as a brick or something less respectable”. Surely you know that wikipedia is untrustworthy on this topic. Subsequent work has restored the Medieval Warm Period that the handle of Mann’s fraudulent hockeystick had attempted to flatten.
Mann’s HS was like a first draft. Imperfect, but basically correct.
Wrong!
What part of “hide the decline” did you not hear about?
Mann was wrong, not because there has been warming, but precisely because the tree ring data indicated COOLING since 1960, not warming!
And according to Phil Jone’s email, hiding this decline was the intent!
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/mwp-lia/hiding-the-decline-hockeystick-mann-600.jpg
Matthewrmarler and Turbulent Eddie, it’s good that you’re coming to an appreciation that the community of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers is far less concerned with Michael Mann’s scientific integrity, than with the scientific integrity of (for example) Loránd Eötvös, Robert A. Millikan, Arthur Eddington, Albert A. Michelson, Edward W. Morley, Walter Reed, Alexander Graham Bell, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Wilbur and Orville Wright, Lord Kelvin, and Jonas Salk and Albert Bruce Sabin (and hundreds many more).
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/upload/img/wright-experiment-bird-air-pump-NG725-fm.jpg
Conclusion History shows plainly that scientists — even the *GREATEST* scientists — are very far from saints … neither are their experimental methods impeccable nor their theories infallible.
Climate Etc readers are free (of course) to reject the entirety of mathematics, science, engineering, and medicine … on the well-justified grounds that the modern scientific worldview was not created by infallible saints.
But very few (if any) modern-day mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and physicians will join you in this arch-skeptical worldview!
The data speak and is worth listening to.
https://youtu.be/PgnMuKuVXzU
Please do keep listening to the data, Turbulent Eddie.
Judith, how about some blog rule to deal with this fanny-johnny character’s hogging up the real estate. Taking up a lot of space with a lot of extraneous BS.
i just checked the comment stats – sidles is tied for 5th (tied with you actually). So far, his commenting frequency hasn’t been too high. I will check for duplicate comments.
Judith, he’s taking up way too much space and scrolling time. What’s with the 47 bullet points on random and irrelevant topics , videos, photos, and all that blue crap in every comment. It looks like some computer generated clap trap meant to annoy people and disrupt the discussion. Also, you add fanny’s and yimmy’s comments together. They are a tag team.
ok i don’t see the images in my dashboard, i will take a look
I was going to suggest Fan quit while he was ahead, unfortunately he never was. Perhaps the better cliche would be. … stop digging!
BREAKING NEWS from WUWT
Willis Eschenbach’s Excellent Apology
Postulate The resources of the DC court system might be advantageously conserved if Mark Steyn were to similarly apologize to Michael Mann, possibly along the following Eschenbach-inspired lines:
Conclusion The Willis Eschenbach/WUWT apology and retraction was well-reasoned and well-crafted. Mark Steyn might reasonably reflect upon lessons to be learned from it, and Michael Mann might reasonably accept such an apology and retraction.
John sidles links are nearly always worth following although can often be a little peripheral to his arguments.
The splendid painting he linked to needs explanation as it concerns a bird air pump experiment from 1768 and is interesting in itself
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/joseph-wright-of-derby-an-experiment-on-a-bird-in-the-air-pump
Tonyb
John sidles
I fear the eschenbach apology is not what you believe it to be. He has apologised for the use of the word deceptive but remain resolute that the piece is misleading
If steyn was to ”apologise’ to Dr Mann in this fashion there would be yet another court case.
Tonyb
Thank you TonyB!
Yes, the painting by Joseph Wright of Derby shows us a scientist who is dispassionately unaware of the fear and horror that the reality of air-pump science inspires in young children … just as Michael Mann and his colleagues are dispassionately unaware (presumably) of the fear and horror that the reality of climate-change science inspires in political ideologues.
Conclusion A little more understanding on both sides would go a long way toward restoring rationality and respect to public discourse.
climatereason:
For what it’s worth, it’s still a huge step back, especially for Willis Eschenbach, who initially refused to back down at all. Eschenbach has now retracted any and all accusations that the authors intended to deceive anyone. There is a world of difference between work being misleading and it being intentionally misleading.
The remarkable thing is it took him this long. I pointed out Eschenbach’s accusations were ridiculous within a few hours of his post going live. He defended them for days. For days, he literally accused authors of a paper of deceiving people by doing an analysis they explicitly described doing in their paper.
It’s really depressing that this sort of thing is considered okay by so many skeptics. As I pointed out, it seems like that level of behavior is normal at Watts Up With That. Not as in, normal with some off the wall commenters, but with the people leading the site.
John sidles
Yes, the great thing about linking to Joseph wright enables us to ponder the curious notion that, being born in 1734, meant he was born in as warm a decade as the current one, according to CET
Tonyb
tony
“I fear the eschenbach apology is not what you believe it to be. He has apologised for the use of the word deceptive but remain resolute that the piece is misleading”
The paper IS MISLEADING. Full stop.
Just look at how people discuss it and think its about the sun.. when its not.
• The (global) borehole data say “the global hockey-stick handle was flat”;
• The (local) CET data say “the European hockey-stick handle had a bump in it”;
• Occam’s Razor says “plausibly both data-sets are right.”
That makes sense, doesn’t it TonyB?
I am laughing
How many times have skeptics been lectured to avoid the word fraud and lie and deception because the problem of intentions?
more than a few times.
But now that its Niv the sun nut on the recieving end..everybody gets all wound up about the difference between “misleading” and decieving.
Here’s a bet.
betcha brandon would have called this a deception if he spotted it before Willis.
Billions and billions of things are interesting, Tony. However, what’s interesting in one context can be distracting extraneous BS in another. The fanny-johnny character seeks to dazzle, distract and mock with his/her flamboyant performance art. I find this highly contrived stylistic propaganda to be very tedious and a complete waste of time.
Steven Mosher:
Uh… no. Never. Anyone who thinks I would doesn’t know me at all.
So what if it took Willis a few days to re-read and re-understand the paper? He did apologize and exchange more information. This is as it should be. The exchange may not be over, but still Willis gets points for trying. Right Mosher?
Where the wikipedia paragraph I linked left it, M&M had run out of rebuttals and failed to prove the non-existence of the HS. All their attempts, and other people using the same data, led to only minor changes. I am sure M&M went on to better things (McIntyre is now focused on deflategate for example). It was already 2005 after all, and many more studies had confirmed and refined the HS by then, so they probably saw the futility of still going after the 1998/1999 papers. As we see, some people still are interested in those first HS papers, but the science has moved on to the extent that these are considered outdated nowadays.
jim2:
It doesn’t take days to look at a paper and see the paper spends a significant amount of time describing the very analysis you claim the authors deceived people by hiding, especially not when you spend time talking to a person who quotes the paper for you.
Anyone who had read the paper with anything resembling an open mind would have seen that the authors described what they did. Even if they somehow failed to, when confronted with direct quotes showing the authors described what they did, they would have realized their mistake. Somehow, he didn’t. Instead, he defended his false accusations for days. That’s not how it should be.
I’ll give credit to him for retracting his false accusations. I think it’s good he did. I just don’t think that excuses him having made them in the first place, or him having defended them, or Watts Up With That having run what was obvious libel without making any effort to verify it.
Jim D:
Nope. On every factual point, McIntyre and McKitrick’s results were confirmed. Everything they said was verified as true. Specifically, McIntyre and McKitrick demonstrated Mann et al’s biased methodology gave inordinate weight to a small amount of tree ring data, and that gave rise to the hockey stick. The “rebuttals” merely reframed this point, claiming to find reasons it is okay that you only get a hockey stick by giving that small amount of tree ring data an inordinate amount of weight.
McIntyre and McKitrick “went on to better things” because at that point, there was nothing left to disagree about. Everybody agrees on that point now. Michael Mann himself has said it is true for the entire world to see in his published book. If you rely entirely upon a small amount of tree ring data from one part of western North America, you can get Mann’s hockey stick. If you don’t, you can’t.
And that’s true even though Mann’s paper explicitly said its results were robust to the removal of all tree ring data. It’s true even though the IPCC report, which Mann helped write, said his reconstruction passed cross-validation tests, which he knew to be a lie.
Mann has admitted in his book he and his co-authors performed tests which showed their results were dependent entirely upon a small amount of tree ring data, despite the fact they published a paper which said their results were robust to the removal of all tree ring data. That book was published only a couple years ago.
Of course people are still going to be interested. This is a guy who has all but openly admitted to having lied in his published work, and people like you are still going around defending his work as okay.
“So what if it took Willis a few days to re-read and re-understand the paper?
1. Assumes facts not in evidence,
He did apologize and exchange more information. This is as it should be. The exchange may not be over, but still Willis gets points for trying. Right Mosher?
1. I’m not assigning points.
2. I’m just noting how various people change their tune depending
on who is being attacked and who is doing the attacking.
The paper was crap to begin with. Everybody need to remember that.
People like Niv either know better or should know better. Willis is going beyond the call of duty by slapping this crap down.
what is hilarious is that skeptics let this kind of analysis slide
Look, If I took an exponential curve instead of the actual c02 data
and if i THEN explained temperature as a function of that curve,
and then said that temperature was explained by C02..
Willis, brandon, you, most people people in this debate would have a COW.
put put in a stupid sine wave that doesnt even come close to solar data and call it an analysis of solar..
why… that’s just ok to do.
Willis gets huge kudos in my book.
JimD, MM “… failed to prove the non-existence of the HS.”
Remarkable. MM never attempted to “prove” anything or try to replicate the HS. They just showed that Mann’s original METHOD, that would be the entire sequence, was good at producing HS out of random noise. In other words, Mann’s method could be biased to get anything you want.
They just showed that Mann’s original METHOD, that would be the entire sequence, was good at producing HS out of random noise
Indeed Berger 2010 for example suggested that.
Using inconsistent reconstructions to approximate the
temperature curve has one particular visual consequence.
Whether overlaying them in one figure or forming an average,
the result tends to be a cancellation of larger amplitudes,
because inconsistency here means to be indistinguishable
from random covariations. Together with the mentioned
synchronization through the instrumental calibration period,
such “synthesis” figures automatically resemble a hockeystick.
More troublesome is the incoherence in the case of Mann99 vs Mann 08l.
By avoiding the (calibrating) instrumental period, and by using
a fairly robust spectral measure for low-frequency performance,
the above coherence analysis has uncovered several
inconsistencies among the group of millennial reconstructions
that figured prominently in the latest IPCC report and
elsewhere. An immediate lesson from this is that simple visual
inspection of smoothed time series, grouped and overlaid
into a single graph, can be very misleading. For example,
the two reconstructions Ma99 and Ma08L, which have
previously been described to be in “striking agreement” (cf.
Mann et al., 2008), turned out to be the most incoherent of
all in our analysis.
http://www.clim-past.net/6/515/2010/
Thanks maks
Don Monfort: Judith, how about some blog rule to deal with this fanny-johnny character’s hogging up the real estate. Taking up a lot of space with a lot of extraneous BS.
I made the analogy of Jim D and John Sidles being like the early 50s DDT foggers. But I don’t see any reason for John Sidles to be banned or edited. As he wrote, Climate Etc readers can make up their own minds about his toxic fogs. I conjecture that most denizens skip his stuff outright.
We can see how Mann’s data has been supported by later broader studies like Marcott. Clearly it was not entirely wrong, and would have been hard to prove wrong. Any such effort was doomed to failure in the light of later evidence.
https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/marcott-fig-1b-annotated.jpg
Climate Etc readers are invited to read for themselves the reasons by which the history of the American Institute of Physics assesses the anti-Mann literature as having been comprehensively refuted.
Dyed-in-the-wool hockey-stick skeptics regard the AIP consensus as further evidence of conspiracy … but is there any objective evidence that die-hard anti-Mann skeptics wouldn’t regard as evidence of conspiracy?
Conclusion As Willis Eschenbach’s recent apology has demonstrated, sometimes even dyed-in-the-wool skeptics are better-off simply admitting they were wrong.
Take notes, Mark Steyn!
JimD, “We can see how Mann’s data has been supported by later broader studies like Marcott.”
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/comic_rollercoaster_610.jpg
You should really use the NASA version. That version right there will probably get more “scientists” fired than any of the other cartoons. When the NASA budget cut hearings get started, it will likely be front and center.
John Sidles, I have to admit, for a scientist you make one damn fine comedian.
captd, the skeptics are saying that the last rise is not unusual and nothing to do with the extra 2-2.5 W/m2 of GHG forcing we pumped into the energy balance in that same coincidental period. Amazing stuff.
JimD, “captd, the skeptics are saying that the last rise is not unusual and nothing to do with the extra 2-2.5 W/m2 of GHG forcing we pumped into the energy balance in that same coincidental period. Amazing stuff.”
What the heck does that have to do with the Marcott cluster pluck?
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6124/1198/suppl/DC1
there is a link to the supplemental materials. The data is in XL format. Have fun. Get back to me when you have a clue what is wrong with his method.
Political science A political landscape in which anti-science rhetoric reliably wins primaries, yet reliably loses main elections …
http://www.motherjones.com/files/imagecache/top-of-content-main/trump630.jpg
… is every political party’s greatest nightmare.
Take notes, Mark Steyn!
captd, you tell me what it has to do with Marcott since you posted it. The bit at the end comes from thermometers, so I commented on that part.
John Sidels, Have you ever actually read MM05? Now will warn you they have a bit of dry Canadian humor in there, the Hockey Stick Index.
You could if you like use a bowtie index. Just take your BTI and select the random “proxies” that best match your BTI and call that your calibration period. You are allowed to trim those proxies a tad should they happen to diverge from your BTI. As long as they match the BTI, it does matter if you invert a few here and there.
What’s amazing is people grafting data with a 1 year resolution on a graph where the data resolution is 200 years and then claiming that grafting makes some sort of point.
JimD, ?
“Jim D | August 17, 2015 at 10:16 pm |
We can see how Mann’s data has been supported by later broader studies like Marcott. Clearly it was not entirely wrong, and would have been hard to prove wrong. Any such effort was doomed to failure in the light of later evidence.”
Followed by Marcotts Planned Parenthood effort.
https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/marcott-fig-1b-annotated.jpg
With some unknown vesrion of Mann et al. overlaid.
JimD, “captd, you tell me what it has to do with Marcott since you posted it. The bit at the end comes from thermometers, so I commented on that part.”
The Marcott et al spike is 100% spurious during the instrumental period per the bleeding author.
https://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/2014-bas-hockey-stick.png
The Mann et al. 2015 version includes zero temperature proxies from 1902 and ends in 1999. Your chart is a joke so you might as well used the cartoon version, which I provided.
Now, let’s consider those remarkably astute NASA climate scientisst that created the cartoon including the 100% spurious spike without any documentation of how they might have come up with that spike other than not actually reading the Marcott et al. paper.
A practice that the borehole paleo-climate analysts and ocean-heat analysts routinely invoke to good scientific effect …
https://www.aip.org/history/climate/images/heat_content.gif
… and to considerable scientific acclaim!
Conclusion Either the hockey-stick blades of observed climate-change are getting longer … or else the global conspiracy of fake climate-change science is getting bigger-and-bigger.
Needless to say, no amount of science can convince the conspiracy-believers.
John Sidels , my sides are starting the hurt :)
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-6Tf2glKTcu0/VG330klOFZI/AAAAAAAALxM/uUtOM1d3aNE/s800-Ic42/curry%252520talk.png
there is OHC with Oppo et al 2009 which is a remarkable fit with the bore hole recon.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-OvQHzJy8gFU/VLF3XHImAqI/AAAAAAAAMGM/lcW6ogEHxbA/s689-Ic42/oppo%252520over%252520mann.png
Now that is the Oppo et al 2009 overlain on Mann 2015.
I hate how people like Steven Mosher draw conclusions about people out of basically nothing. Not in the up in arms rage kind of way, but in that weary exasperation, “Why is the world so stupid” kind of way. He says:
I agree with this assessment. The only reason I even read the post was I saw it was about work by Nir Shaviv, one of the people said to have been misclassified by the John Cook and the others of Skeptical Science for their consensus paper. As I read the post, I thought it sounded really damning of him. I was going to post a comment to the effect of, “I guess skeptics shouldn’t be holding this guy up as a figure for their side, huh?”
But that doesn’t mean:
No! What Willis Eschenbach did was horrible. What he did was literally libelous. He could be sued for it. I wouldn’t defend or support him if he were. I would say it was probably an overreaction, but otherwise, he got what he deserved.
I think Shaviv’s work is utter garbage, and I won’t hesitate to say so, but I’m not going to talk about problems with his work to a person who is calling him a liar simply because they don’t like what he did in his work. You say his work is garbage, I’ll be right there with you. You say he’s a liar, I’m going to be on the other side of the room, and the only reason I’m going to stay in the same room is so I can tell you that was wrong of you.
captd, the upward part at the end of your roller coaster graph is not spurious. There is 150 year thermometer record that says the temperature rose 0.8 C, possibly even more since the LIA minimum. Having said that, how can one spike of 0.8 C be spurious while another isn’t? I don’t see what you are getting at.
JimD, “captd, the upward part at the end of your roller coaster graph is not spurious. There is 150 year thermometer record that says the temperature rose 0.8 C, possibly even more since the LIA minimum. Having said that, how can one spike of 0.8 C be spurious while another isn’t? I don’t see what you are getting at.”
Well obviously you don’t which is why I find your and Johns comments so entertaining. I hate to end a good joke, but the Marcott et al reconstruction has about a 200 year average resolution. So for apples and apples you would average about 200 years of instrumental to one data point and stick that on the end of their paleo recon, after of course ditching the spurious part that never should have been there to begin with. Don’t you think a budding world class climate statistical wizard should do that.
Now Mann et al, is it still et al.? is a little trickier. His method produces an unknown smoothing to go along with its unknowable confidence interval. So he just abandoned any common calibration period and tacked on the instrumental. I mean really, if you are going to cut off the divergence might as well get it all right?
Imagine if I took the last fifty years of the NASDAQ and averaged it as a straight line then tacked on a few months of gains in monthly format.
Now unlike the NASDAQ example where someone would be indited or possibly fall out of a window, scientists are supposed to police their own, “Say old boy, perhaps you should check your work a bit more closely.”
captd, OK, so you are saying this 0.8 C is a spike and in the next 100 years it will more likely drop back than continue to rise to 2 or 3 C by 2100, so we cannot compare what we are doing to the temperature to the past until it has already been happening for 200 years. If the temperature reaches 2 C above preindustrial by 2100, the 200-year average for 1900-2100 is about 1 C, which you could compare with these paleo records if you want to put even a mitigated 2 C in the same context. Is that what you were looking for?
JimD, “captd, OK, so you are saying this 0.8 C is a spike and in the next 100 years it will more likely drop back than continue to rise to 2 or 3 C by 2100, so we cannot compare what we are doing to the temperature to the past until it has already been happening for 200 years”
that is a pretty interesting interpretation of what I might be saying. What I said was that you cannot just tack on a high frequency data set to a low frequency data set. If you do, you either have no business messing about with data or you are attempting to influence using with unsound methods. .In other words, you are a dumba$$ or a fraud.
Now Mann could be a dumba$$ and not understand why his methods really and truly suck, that actually is my impression.
political landscape in which anti-science rhetoric reliably wins primaries, yet reliably loses main elections
Anti-JUNK-science you of course mean.
John, if you had the same resolution prior to the modern warming period then you may have found a trend line considerably lower than that indicated by the Marcott reconstruction. Since it was called the Little Ice Age and since many reconstructions indicate it was a very cold period, I see no reason to toss that hypothesis away. Now when you take a period of time below the Marcott trend and some period of time above, say 0.5 C below and then 0.5 C above, and you smooth that all out with a 200 year resolution you could very well end up right on the Marcott trend line. It wouldn’t even be noticable in the reconstruction.
John, I am paid by EXXON to avoid any semblance to being anti-science or conspiracist. How did you catch me? You are so clever.
captdallas2, we hope you appreciate that essentially no modern-day mathematicians, scientists, or engineers agree with this statement.
In essentially every branch of science, data-rates are radically increasing. For example, astronomers originally collected data on timescales of hours and days (by eye), then on timescales of minutes and seconds (with photographic film), then on timescales of milliseconds (with CCD arrays), and nowadays on timescales of microseconds and even nanoseconds (with synthetic aperture arrays).
In consequence, astronomers routinely glue-together ancient slow-rate data with modern fast-rate data … that’s how NASA creates the high-precision solar-system ephemerides that navigate the world’s robot spacecraft.
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/images/ssd_banner.jpg
And this slow-to-fast acceleration in data-rates is happening not just in astronomy, but in almost all data-driven scientific disciplines.
Conclusion The world’s mathematicians, scientists, and engineers regard a great portion of anti-Mann rhetoric to be ill-founded faux-mathematical bafflegab.
Mark Steyn, take notes!
John Sidels, “Conclusion The world’s mathematicians, scientists, and engineers regard a great portion of anti-Mann rhetoric to be ill-founded faux-mathematical bafflegab.”
Nice, it only takes one. You have read MM05 right? Here is another,
http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/6/659/2010/cpd-6-659-2010-print.pdf
That paper suggest comparing uni-proxy reconstruction to multi-proxy reconstruction.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/–sQaqVGQEVo/VKloPB1CnQI/AAAAAAAAMEs/edyZ3rq6AYU/s757-Ic42/Tropics%2525204000%252520years%252520individual.png
Those are the Marcott et al close to Uni-proxies plus what “cap” reconstructions I could find to extend lower frequency members , I did include two TEX86 though. Kind of hard to see the average.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3k7UcdrOfRU/VLgkkI95IPI/AAAAAAAAMKU/vsje2z28wys/s676-Ic42/tropical%252520holocene.png
Now I welcome you to actual read about the issues, but I find it refreshing that you have such faith in your peers. Reminds me of my childhood.
The world’s mathematicians, scientists, and engineers regard a great portion of anti-Mann rhetoric to be ill-founded faux-mathematical bafflegab
Not so. NOT A SINGLE ONE could be found to give him a good reference in the court case. Not even a reallt rabid politically motived one. His arrogant and blatant hiding and fiddling data and abusive attitude is even too much for them to stomach. And his Hockey Stick even the IPCC has long since beem dropped.
The Court Renders Its Verdict
The court of mathematical, scientific, and engineering judgement has rendered its verdict: Mann’s 1998 hockey-stick of climate-change is judged to be broadly correct.
That’s why the IPCC’s most recent Synthesis Report (2014) includes plenty of hockey-stick graphs
Conclusion No amount of courtroom wrangling about legal minutiae can alter the scientific verdict … which is why the overwhelming majority of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers are uninterested in courtroom wrangling.
These are realities, Mark Steyn!
I say we take a break from it all and just have a good chuckle together, shall we?
https://tonyhellerakastevengoddardisnotasociopath.wordpress.com/2015/08/18/judith-currys-text-messages-hacked-deniergate-begins/
tonyhellerexposed | August 18, 2015 at 12:31 pm:
Doesn’t pass the smell test.
Looks like just wishful thinking to me.
I got a chuckle out of it but only because I’m assuming an adult wrote it. Was it really an adult?
CD:
Agree with tacking the modern record onto the paleo record. We take insensitive stable data and at the end of that, add sensitive and seemingly unstable data. Probability of a hockey stick is high. The old data should have flatter slopes and modern data may have a steeper slope because of the short time frame. Spencer portrays his monthly data with a 13 month running average I believe, that stops 13 months from the present, I assume for a good reason. Jim D mentioned waiting 200 years to reach a conclusion. We want to say no to that, but what compromises have to be made to not wait the 200 years?
Tony Heller – What is a “climate action denier”? Someone who is possibly knowledgeable about climate but not the actions to take? I see the term has been used a few times before and I find it on odd choice, unless the word “denier” just has a huge appeal as a pejorative. Is Judith suspected of denying the existence of “climate action”? I’m thinking you mean “Climate action impeder”.
I also said that if you feel compelled to use 200-year averages with Marcott, make a guess at the 2100 temperature, and use the 1900-2100 average. Conservatively we might manage to keep the perturbation at only 2 C by 2100, so the average temperature perturbation centered on 2000 is about 1 C on Marcott’s scale. This puts current and future warming in the Holocene context. The end of that “tacked on” line would be accurate, possibly a best-case scenario, as a 200-year average by 2100.
JimD, “I also said that if you feel compelled to use 200-year averages with Marcott, make a guess at the 2100 temperature, and use the 1900-2100 average.”
There should be no feelings or guessing involved. The data is what it is. The discussion is supposed to be about how much can you reasonably glean from the data. So far we have determined that the data doesn’t support your feelings or guesses anywhere as strongly as you feel they do..
What is reasonably known is that a doubling of CO2 SHOULD produce about 0.8 to 1.2 C of warming on its own. Another thing that is fairly obvious, is that none of the paleo methods used so far are adequate to support a 100% plus anthropogenic impact. That 100% plus “guess” assumes strong aerosol forcing that is less and less convincing.
John Sidles just fell in love with the Pages 2K reconstructions which are still being revised and only show about 0.2 C of temperature change from 1000 AD to about 1990 AD versus 0.9 C using the Mann-o-matic.
captd, sure you can balk at putting long-term projected warming into the Holocene context. You are just not interested in this connection. Fine.
I agree with you Ron that without Jim D, FAN and Vaughan P(who engage with other commenters) Judith’s blog would indeed be just another echo chamber for sceptics of AGW.
Remember people, we are not obligated to take fanny-johnny and yimmy dee seriously.
Don Monfort | August 17, 2015 ” Remember people, we are not obligated to take fanny-johnny and yimmy dee seriously.”
so why does fan pretend to be something he isn’t with his scrapbook montage, capitals and underlining? Is it to deliberately give a less appealing visual effect to readers of this blog, that would be my initial impression. This would give him extra brownie points in the skulduggery component but put him at some risk of the wind changing.
enough. you are right Don.
I will concentrate on correcting Jim D’s worst assertions of fiction.
Don Monfort: Remember people, we are not obligated to take fanny-johnny and yimmy dee seriously.
Maybe, but someone might take him seriously. Brandon S? and Maksimovich wrote useful rebuttals to his claim that Mann’s original fraudulent hockey stick had been confirmed by subsequent research.
Someone has to force the people here to examine their assumptions. Judith sure won’t.
And you, Jimmy D, who are you waiting for to force you to examine your assumptions?
Or do you consider yourself to be above all that?
Over the years there have been thousands of serious rebuttals to yimmy’s foolishness, matt. The little joker is impervious to serious rebuttals. He’s like those punching bag clowns. Hit him and he bounces back for more. Capt. D has got yimmy’s number:
“In other words, you are a dumba$$ or a fraud.”
He keeps repeating the same old rote alarmist propaganda over and over, year after year. He never concedes when he is proven wrong, even on the most minor point. He just shines it on. It’s like arguing with a two year old. I think the appropriate way to deal with yimmy is with ridicule. But everybody is free to do what they want.
It’s not must Jim2 … the entirety of the modern scientific establishment bounces back.
That’s why Pope Francis’s new On Care for Our Common Home (Laudato Si’) is calling, not just upon the Catholic faithful, but “every person living on this planet,” to appreciate the moral and economic implications of this century’s new scientific understandings.
http://archbishopcranmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Pope-Francis-Climate-Change.jpg
Mark Steyn, pay heed!
We ain’t much impressed with the ill-informed patronizing prattle of the Pernicious Peronista Pope, fanny-johnny. Or should we call you, johnny-fanny?
Teflon Jim is imprevious to reasoned argument.
But I’ll give him his due, he is fearless in his willingness to make statements which more often than not are divorced from reality.
Don Monfort, in your mind, who are the persons presently comprising the “we” who view Jorge Mario Bergoglio as “an ill-informed patronizing pernicious peronista”?
http://media.philly.com/images/600*450/20150817_lampedusa_1024.jpg
Conclusion Most thoughtful citizens have a different view.
Your formulaic and gaudy clap trap is way boring, fanny-johnny.
Don
You may remember that with johns little homilies yesterday we were able to point out that the year of the experiment he cited was in the very warm decade of the 1730’s very similar in warmth to the current decade according to CET.
His reference to the Pope enables us to point to Henry the eighths rejection of the pontiff and henrys marriage to Anne of cleeves in 1540 .
The Years surrounding this period appear to be the warmest in the entire reconstructed CET period with Phil jones acknowledging the great warmth of 1540 itself.
Tonyb
“Remember people, we are not obligated to take fanny-johnny and yimmy dee seriously.
Without JimD, John Sidles, etc, there would be no representation of the opposing view, which we have to remember is important to have. Otherwise, would be like ATTP, essentially and echo chamber of bias. When JimD is well informed the lukewarmer viewpoint must withstand that. When he is ill-informed or illogical he is doing the blog a service by exposing poor (and common) arguments.
Jim D, for example, appears to believe the Chinese Marxist model is the correct one for humankind and has pollution problem due to subversion of western greed. here. Correct me if I am wrong, Jim, because you didn’t quite affirmatively acknowledge that.
This would be informative I believe for the readers of this blog to know. How about you, John Sidles, do you believe that central planning should be more trusted than free enterprise? Is corporate greed the real problem and climate change just one of many illnesses from it?
You are wrong on my politics, Ron. You are the one who mentioned Marxists, and I tried to correct you but to no avail, apparently. The Chinese form of government (like Russia) is their way or the highway with no real grassroots elections or say from their people. If you need to categorize me, I would like a system where elections count, where the government represents actual majority interests within the population, and without wealth being influential in elections.
I see what you are saying, Ron. Like it would be no fun swatting flies, if there were no flies around.
I am really tired of dealing with these flies. They get squashed and it’s like nothing happened. They are up and incessantly buzzing around again.
The big gaudy one with the iridescent colors and the too cleverly formatted line of BS is particularly annoying. The horsefly type. The little common housefly can be entertaining at times. Anyway, I think I will be spending the bulk of my time on bigger game. A man of my talents shouldn’t be swatting flies.
Sorry. My post in response to Ron Graf’s has been put in the wrong place. I agree with you that without Jim D, FAN, Vaughan P, Joseph and a few others who actually engage on Judith’s blog, it would just become another sceptic echo chamber.
It’s still an echo chamber, Peter. We got the two major opposing echoes, and we got the faint lukewarmer echo coming from the back row of the chorus. The occasional Skydragon goofball that drops by adds another echo. At times, it’s a cacophony of echoes. And never the twain shall meet. Maybe there should be a disclaimer:
For entertainment purposes only.
My point is that we are not obligated to take trolls seriously. They are here to give Judith and her denizens a hard time. I choose not to elevate them to respectability by treating them as honest participants in the discussions. I am not suggesting that they be run off. They serve a useful purpose as foils. Hey, I wonder what happened to willy. I hope he is OK.
Don: I am really tired of dealing with these flies.
Don, without you dealing with these flies I think CE would lose half its interest, including some of mine.
I agree that when flies become trolls and protesters obstructing debate or making it making it uncivil they should be warned and then given a time out. It’s up to our moderator where that line is, but personally I wouldn’t change a thing, including giving J a time out. He went to another lukewarmer blog for a couple of weeks and now has a time out there too. Ironically, it wasn’t ignorance that hurt him, IMO, its that one’s intelligence displayed in certain forms raises the expectation in others, like being succinct and insightful. When that falls short plausible sincerity also falters. Forgive me J for saying this much since you cannot defend yourself now but I wish you the best and to comment with you again sometime.
JimD “The Chinese form of government (like Russia) is their way or the highway with no real grassroots elections or say from their people.”
They actually do have elections Jim. But when people surrender their authority to government in exchange for promises to spread the wealth, take from the “greedy” who don’t need money anyway, or whatever, the unsophisticated voter can easily vote away their vote. We need regulation and non-corrupt enforcement. But the more regulation the more potential for corruption. It’s a tricky thing. My love of science stemmed in part from it’s lack of corruptibility. MBH98/99 was a rude awakening for me. I respect you believe otherwise and I know we will touch this again sometime.
I did order a copy. I’ll get a t-shirt and mug later.
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Adults write studies for young children.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/sexual-orientation-uk-half-young-people-say-they-are-not-100-heterosexual-1515690
Today science is not good at answers, all the while they tell us how children need to be raised. Strange. All this education and still young people are confused. What is your guess as to why? Today people need to work more study less.
If Steven Goddard is right, Michael Mann is a leader in the field:
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/08/17/the-majority-of-noaa-land-temperature-data-is-fake/
Well, SG is a little over the top sometimes, he is right about one of the tools used to create CGAGW.
The graphic presentations of post 1900s warming show:
1 W/m2 CGAGW (Computer Generated Anthropogenic Global Warming)
1 W/m2 ALW (Anthropogenic Local Warming) – UHI etc. etc.
1 W/m2 AGW ((Anthropogenic Global Warming) – mostly GHG
1 W/m2 Natural Warming from [insert sources here]
CGAGW is also known as “virtual” warming.
Since both CGAGW and AGW are dependent on the CO2 level and ALW is generally temporally increasing, temperature will appear to have some correlation with CO2 levels in PPM, despite the forcing due to CO2 since 1900 being about 1 W/m2.
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Steyn has MM right where he wants him. That is why Steyn has tried to urge the proceedings along, and why MM continues to stall.
I hope you are right, but the depths of corruption run very, very deep now. Anyway, this case will show us if the judicial system has retained any more integrity than the National Academy of Sciences.
hmm, so, Eduardo Zorita hates Michael Mann…he must hate the Hockey Stick too….odd then that he’s last author (and important place) on this recent proxy reconstruction paper confirming it (at least up to year 2000, because it’s a proxies-only analysis) : http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n5/full/ngeo1797.html#group-1
Thank you, sullis02, for pointing Climate Etc readers toward the *SPECTACULAR* PAGES2K confirmation of the straight-handle/lengthening-blade of the 1998 Mann hockey-stick.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n5/images_article/ngeo1797-f4.jpg
Note that summary graph “b” plainly exhibits *both* a 2000-year-straight, gently Milanković-descending, “hockey-stick handle” *and* with a sharply-ascending 20the century “hockey-stick blade”. Note also the red-line overlay (in graph b) of the HadCRUT4 with the hockey-stick blade.
Marvelous!
Conclusion By diligent, scrupulously thorough scientific work, the Mann-critic Eduardo Zorita, together his 76 PAGES2K coauthors, has strikingly affirmed the hockey-stick consensus.
Mark Steyn, perhaps now is a reasonable time for *you* to join “Team Rational” (and Pope Francis too) in affirming the reality of a climate-change hockey stick?
Because isn’t an admission of error a small price to pay, for the considerable virtue of being right-on-the-facts?
It is good to reflect upon this principle, Mark Steyn!
John Sidels, The 2000 end point in b is at +0.1 C, the 1000AD point is ~minus 0.1 C, that is about 0.2C of temperature rise from 1000AD.
https://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/2014-bas-hockey-stick.png
Mann 2015 ditches the proxy data to show a 0.9 C rise in the same period. Which planet do you call home again?
Lol … I live on the same planet of “hockey-stick climate-change” as the overwhelming majority of professional mathematicians scientists and engineers, and the overwhelming majority of citizen-scientists, and the overwhelming majority of thoughtful religious conservatives too.
http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/37/ad/37adaab8462094a839d89a504cd3d429.jpg
That’s why I surely *WON’T* be offered a Cabinet position by *this* Presidential candidate …
http://www.ontheissues.org/America_We_Deserve.gif
… but plausibly, captdallas … dyed-in-the-wool skeptics like *YOU* have got a dang good chance for one!
John Sidles,
It is of course true that almost all informed people know that the climate is warmer today than it was two centuries ago: my great-grandmother, who dropped out of school after fourth grade, told me about this way back in the ’60s — this was common knowledge long before the CAGW hysteria. This is not a discovery of Mann, of GCMs, etc.
It is also true that the scientific argument that anthropogenic CO2 makes temperatures higher than they otherwise would be is very solid: my great-grandmother did not know that, but the point does go back to Svante Arrhenius when my great-grandmother was an adolescent.
But the details, ah, the details!
I am pretty sure you do know that reconstruction of past climates and modeling of future climates is very, very hard, and that there are not yet quantitatively definitive results in those areas.
To pretend otherwise is disingenuous.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
It’s true that the detailed dynamics of climate-change are dauntingly complex.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCmTY0PKGDs
And yet, for almost all mathematicians, scientists, and engineers (both professional and citizen), the three main links in the chain of evidence are convincingly strong:
• Global CO2 levels plainly show a lengthening “hockey-blade” rise, and
• Global heat-energy and temperature plainly show an lengthening “hockey-blade” rise, and
• Thermodynamics and transport theory plainly predict that the former lengthening “hockey-blade” causes the latter lengthening “hockey-blade.”
Neither Mark Steyn’s polemical book, nor any of Judith Curry’s selected quotes from it, substantially compromises any of these three links.
That’s why thoughtful citizens, like Jorge Mario Bergoglio, are convinced by the evidence. Donald Trump, not so much.
Mark Steyn, perhaps you should be convinced like Pope Francis, not skeptical like Donald Trump? Which of these two represents a better path forward, for 21st century conservatism?
John Sildes,
You wrote “plainly shows” or “plainly predicts.” Well… yes and no.
Indeed, the fact that there is some effect is indeed “plain” to anyone who is scientifically competent. But, as I said before, the details, ah, the details, are anything but “plain.”
We are talking about very, very complex data analysis for past climate reconstructions and very, very complex computer models for future predictions. Any serious scientist who has done that kind of data analysis or computer modeling knows that, with so many choices as to how to analyze the data, so many parameters to tweak in the models, it is all too easy to get any answer you want, even with the most honest of intentions. I could go on and on citing examples from my own work experience, going back to work I did on a large modeling program as an undergrad over forty years ago.
Note that I am making no claim that the climate reconstructors or the modelers are intentionally dishonest. It is simply the inherent difficulty of the task which is the problem. I have found that most competent physical scientists or computer scientists with whom I discuss this see it as obvious: always, always be very skeptical about data analysis that require complex, arcane crunching of the numbers, always, always be very, very skeptical of models that are highly complex and that involve huge numbers of “fudge factors” that have to be tweaked.
People who will not acknowledge that may not be liars or crooks, but they certainly are not competent scientists.
As my own mentor in physics, Dick Feynman, liked to say, “The first principle [of science] is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Too many people who have managed to get prestigious positions in the climate-science community have forgotten that.
Dave
physicistdave,
There may be some ambiguity in the message in the past, but the decision in this case will tell me:
The judicial system has retained more integrity than the National Academy of Sciences if Steyn wins, or
The judicial system has sunk as low as the National Academy of Sciences if Mann wins.
Physicistdave, it’s good that you and James Hansen 100% agree that big dynamical codes are the WEAKEST elements of climate-science.
Proposition the STRONGEST elements of climate science DON’T depend upon big atmospheric codes, but rather are grounded in:
• Fundamental thermodynamics grounded in energy conservation and entropy increase.
• Fundamental energy transport grounded in statistical mechanical and quantum radiation theory.
• The paleo record grounded in rocks, sediments, and fossils, and
• The historical and observational record that is grounded in modern direct global-scale observations of temperatures, ice-mass, and sea-level.
Hansen’s common-sense science Science-minded/computer-skeptical Climate Etc readers will find these pieces assembled in free-as-in-freedom scientific articles like Hansen’s et al. “Scientific Case for Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change to Protect Young People and Nature“ (arXiv:1110.1365) and “Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications” (arXiv:1105.1140) and “Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change” ( arXiv:1105.0968) and most recently “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming is highly dangerous“ (Atmos. Chem. Phys., 2015).
Ian Joughin data-driven affirmation Recently too, James Hansen has also commended Ian Joughin, Benjamin E. Smith, Brooke Medley’s “Marine ice sheet collapse potentially under way for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica” (Science, 2014), as one more crucial climate-science analysis that does *NOT* depend upon large computer codes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8SPrR4K-tM
Conclusion Among climate scientists both junior and senior, increasing skepticism of large dynamical models is associated to GREATER on-the-evidence alarm in regard to climate-change.
Thank you, physicistdave, for helping Climate Etc readers to a common-sense appreciation of the fundamental principle that stronger climate-science skepticism is associated to greater climate-change concern … not because of dubiously reliable big atmospheric codes, but rather for the plain-and-obvious fundamental scientific reasons that James Hansen’s articles have been patiently explaining.
John Sidles wrote:
>Proposition the STRONGEST elements of climate science DON’T depend upon big atmospheric codes, but rather are grounded in…
John, I am beginning to suspect that you are engaged in some sort of a con.
Look, I agree, Judith agrees, Richard Lindzen, et al. agree on the basic underlying physics. As far as I know, everyone who is scientifically literate (including Judith and Lindzen) agree that the climate is warmer today than it was two centuries ago and that anthropogenic CO2 makes the climate warmer than it otherwise would be.
That is not at issue.
What is at issue is whether or not it is likely that there will be catastrophic consequences if we continue to pour out CO2 into the atmosphere. For you to suggest that the answer to that question is somehow obvious is wrong: you are at best being disingenuous.
I realize that you are pursuing a rhetorical ploy here of making a bunch of statements that are, indeed, not in dispute among scientists, and then trying to slide from those statements to claims that are not (yet) scientifically established: e.g., “Among climate scientists both junior and senior, increasing skepticism of large dynamical models is associated to GREATER on-the-evidence alarm in regard to climate-change.”
That is not honest.
No. Evidence has to be evidence: you need to make do-or-die, no-fudging-allowed predictions of future observations. If you succeed, we start to take your theory seriously.
If you fail, one more beautiful theory dies an ugly death at the hands of some obstinate facts.
That is how science progresses, and so far the progress in climate science has been that the predictions have done badly. That is normal and really is progress: most proposed theories in science turn out to be wrong.
John, do you have a legitimate Ph.D. in any are of physical science? If you do, you should know all of this, which would cast an odd light on your postings here.
Dave
Dave the Physics Guy, “John, I am beginning to suspect that you are engaged in some sort of a con.”
You should probably stick with your first instinct. :)
Physicistdave, it is a pleasure to remind you — and Climate Etc readers too — of James Hansen’s sterling track-record of “do-or-die, no-fudging-allowed predictions”, with include:
• Hansen’s 1981 prediction of “a shifting of climatic zones, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage”
Gosh-golly Hansen’s “do-or-die, no-fudging-allowed prediction” of the “opening of the fabled Northwest Passage” for 2015 has just came true (again) this very week!
And of course Hansen is not done with “do-or-die, no-fudging-allowed predictions” … his “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms“ (2015) gives a “do-or-die, no-fudging-allowed prediction” that the curve of sea-level rise…
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2015_rel3/sl_ns_global.png
… will bend sharply upward in coming decades.
Skeptics are right! Skeptical emphasis upon scientific prediction is reasonable and even commendable.
In particular, skepticism of IPCC predictions is entirely reasonable, in light of Hansen’s reasoned arguments that the IPCC estimates of future climate-change are too conservative, for the reason that the IPCC approach relies overmuch on large computer models, and too little upon fundamental thermodynamics considerations, the paleo record, and observational data.
Mark Steyn, isn’t it time for rational skeptics to heed the rational climate-change conservatism of James Hansen and Pope Francis?
The new brand of climate-change skepticism, which weights rational analysis, founded upon direct observations and fundamental scientific principles, more heavily than the affirming-yet-fragile IPCC evidence of large-scale dynamical codes?
Thanks for your efforts. The drowning also struggle mightily before sinking.
John Sidles wrote to me:
>Physicistdave, it is a pleasure to remind you — and Climate Etc readers too — of James Hansen’s sterling track-record of “do-or-die, no-fudging-allowed predictions”, with include…
Okay, so you are engaged in a con job, aren’t you, John?
Predictions in physical science are expected to be quantitative, to follow in a way anyone can calculate for himself from the explicitly stated theory, to predict observations in a way such that everyone can agree as to whether or not observations confirm those predictions, and to cover a range of predictions (i.e., no cherry-picking post hoc).
I leave it as an exercise for the student to note that the examples you give fail to meet those criteria.
Now, if you or Hansen had predicted, quantitatively and in advance, the recent “pause” in apparent surface temperatures based on an explicit model of heat disappearing into the ocean depths, and if your detailed quantitative predictions agreed with detailed observations… well, then I’d be impressed.
But, neither you nor Hansen did. No one did.
This does not show you are bad people. It merely shows that this area of research, like most significant areas of research, is really, really hard. I am merely suggesting that everyone openly admit that no one has definitive results.
What makes me almost certain you are a con artist is this whopper:
>In particular, skepticism of IPCC predictions is entirely reasonable, in light of Hansen’s reasoned arguments that the IPCC estimates of future climate-change are too conservative, for the reason that the IPCC approach relies overmuch on large computer models, and too little upon fundamental thermodynamics considerations, the paleo record, and observational data.
The IPCC — and Judith and Lindzen et al. and I and all legit scientists — are not ignoring “fundamental thermodynamics considerations.” I have a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford, John (1983): I know “fundamental thermodynamics.”
And, no competent scientist thinks, to use your words, that “fundamental thermodynamics considerations, the paleo record, and observational data.” is sufficient to give valid predictions of future climate. The system is way, way too complicated — complex and not fully understood feedbacks, non-linearities, time lags, etc.
For some reason, you are playing a game here, John.
What’s going on?
I note that you chose not to respond to my question about whether you have a legitimate Ph.D. in some legitimate field of physical science.
I’ve been googling you: a lot of stuff has come up, and an awful lot of it does not quite smell right, John. Tell me where you got your Ph.D. and give basic evidence of your bona fides, please.
I would hate to have to get in touch with your employer and present some basic facts to them, but if it becomes evident that what I have seen of you on the Web is indeed a case of massive scientific fraud, I may have a professional obligation to do so.
Please provide the information to show that my suspicions are misguided.
Dave
Climate Etc readers — and Judith’s climate-science students in particular — are invited to reflect for themselves the worth of Jim Hansen’s arguments relative to physicistdave’s arguments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS8W_gs58ls
Thank you, physicistdave, for helping everyone to appreciate the scientific grounds and rhetorical methods of climate-change skepticism relative to climate-change science.
Richard Feynman would be proud of your teaching effectiveness!
physicistdave, it would have been as hard to predict the early 21st century pause in 1981 as the large 1998 El Nino on which it relies, as you should be fully aware. What Hansen could predict in 1981 is a general trend from the forcing change. Remember 1981 was at the end of a long pause, so it was bold to say that 30 years later in 2010 the temperature would rise 0.5 C (pause and all), which is much more than it had risen so far to that point and greater than any natural variability in the temperature record, but it did. In that paper, he said that in the 90’s the warming would rise above the background variability in the global temperature, and it did.
Jim D wrote to me:
>physicistdave, it would have been as hard to predict the early 21st century pause in 1981 as the large 1998 El Nino on which it relies, as you should be fully aware.
Yes, Jim, I am of course fully aware of that: that is my central point: neither our coy friend Sidles nor Hansen nor you nor I can definitively predict the future of climate (yet): the problem is too hard (so far).
But that means that people who claim they can are being dishonest.
Jim D also wrote:
>What Hansen could predict in 1981 is a general trend from the forcing change.
Indeed. But the problem is, that prediction is just not specific enough to let anyone know if Hansen just guessed well or actually understands future climate.
The way science works is that you have to really, really stick your neck out with predictions that will almost certainly fail — that is, unless your theory is on the mark, in which case your stunning success will rightly impress all of your fellow scientists.
What our coy friend Sidles (do you know if he has a Ph.D.? her seems to claim one in places on the Web, so why won’t he answer my question?) has quoted from Hansen is just not good enough by the standards of real science to show Hansen’s theory is solid.
I know that it is hard to make this point to non-scientists, but the scientific method consists of assuming any theory is guilty until (provisionally) proven innocent.
A couple qualitative predictions just does not cut it.
Dave
I’m just a cowboy, and I found his dissertation.
I didn’t predict the pause, but I did let everybody know it was going paws up.
physicistdave, you don’t give any credit at all for a theory’s explanatory power of the temperature rise so far. If someone 60 or 100 years ago had used the CO2 value of that day and stuck their neck out to predict what the temperature would be at 400 ppm, using 2 C per doubling as a transient rate, they would have been right. These would have seemed rather extreme predictions at those times. People will say, oh, that’s just lucky that this theory works out so well with the temperature record. No, it is just physics, and a lot of scientists understand that. What would have been remarkable would have been if it had not been near 2 C per doubling.
Jim D –
Not it is not “just physics”, but rather an as yet uncorroborated speculation that there will be any given rise in temperatures per a doubling of CO2.
When we finally have the ability to directly and reliably measure the radiation budget, and the ocean heat content, and perhaps some other things besides, and the models stop getting caught out, then we’ll be able to call it physics. And then be in a position to decide what if anything needs to be done.
How well does this brand of adament skepticism work in the real world?
Conclusion The overwhelming majority of mathematicians, scientists and engineers — and astronauts and Popes too and young students especially — understand that Feynman got it right about O-rings and Hansen got it right about climate-change … despite adamantly skeptical rhetoric to the contrary.
Bonus historical fact Richard Feynman was denounced as a political radical; these anonymous smears cost Feynman any chance for appointment as Presidential Science Advisor.
And needless to say James Hansen too has staunchly endured decades of smearing, threats, and political pressure seeking to silence his unwelcome voice.
Bonus conclusion Feynman and Hansen (and Pope Francis general public too) have been entirely right to staunchly ignore non-scientific attacks.
Most skeptics do not agree with each other, except that we all agree with Dr. Michael Crichton’s decision that we each have a moral obligation to object publicly to FALSE government propaganda disguised as “97% consensus science”.
My objections are based on scientific evidence of errors that were inserted in the Standard Nuclear Model and the Standard Solar Model after WWII.
Please see Dr. Crichton’s statement, “In his own words,”
http://www.michaelcrichton.com/state-of-fear/
Who cares about PhD’s?
A Breakthrough in Imaging: A New Way to See a Virus
John Sidles receives 2011 Guenther Laukien Prize
Which doesn’t he doesn’t let his flaming red politics dictate his policy notions.
Punksta, a positive imbalance on top of a large temperature rise indicates a major change in forcing and that the global temperature is having a tough time keeping up with it. This is what the physics says, and not only that, it tells us why the forcing changed so much.
JimD, “Punksta, a positive imbalance on top of a large temperature rise indicates a major change in forcing and that the global temperature is having a tough time keeping up with it. This is what the physics says, and not only that, it tells us why the forcing changed so much.”
umm, the “current” best estimate of the positive imbalance is about 1/3 to half of the original estimate of the imbalance based on the “physics”. There is evidence that the imbalance has been positive for close to 300 years which wasn’t included in the “physics”. See Rosenthal et al 2014 I believe.
When the “physicists” assume a “normal” i.e. equilibrium/steady state and system isn’t actually in equilibrium/steady state, that assumption should be revisited.
The imbalance remains despite all the warming we have had. That’s the forcing pulling up the temperature along with the imbalance. The temperature rise could have offset about 1-2 W/m2 of forcing change, but clearly that has not been enough yet.
JimD, “That’s the forcing pulling up the temperature along with the imbalance.”
That sentence is what is called a WAG. Currently the imbalance is in the southern hemisphere, Stephens et al. 2015 I believe and about 0.6 Wm-2 in the hemisphere with the least GHG forcing. That particular paper has an issue or two, but that part seems to be fairly accurate. Kinda of remarkably, most climate science papers have issues, probably because the “physics” are a bit complex. To physics nerds, that is the interesting part not the “let’s defend the theory” WAGathon.
Good physics nerds, that would be people like Dave the physics guy, can smell BS from threads away. Not paying a fisherman much mind is fine, Rothenthal et al., Stephens et al., our “Dr. Judy” and Physicistdave however might be on to something doncha know.
Support for AGW is crumbling:
http://notrickszone.com/2015/08/21/study-german-scientists-conclude-20th-century-warming-nothing-unusual-foresee-global-cooling-until-2080/comment-page-1/
captd, if the imbalance is in the southern hemisphere it is because the ocean is only warming half as fast as the land (but still warming) and the Arctic is warming even faster, so again physics has an explanation with thermal inertia and feedbacks. It is very tough for skeptics to make their energy budgets add up in their favor because it points to a remaining deficit in the heating despite all the heating so far. GHGs have put us into a debt and the warming is our payment.
John Sidles wrote:
>Bonus historical fact Richard Feynman was denounced as a political radical;
John, you have finally gone over the edge!
If you had bothered to read the post you linked to, you would see that the poster presents strong evidence that the accusations were just an outburst from an ex-wife.
C’mon, John!
I knew Dick Feynman over several years, and had a chance to see him on a weekly basis.As the post you linked to pointed out, Dick voted Republican. Dick was certainly not an unthinking ideologue of any stripe; most specifically, he was certainly not a leftist. His views leaned in a moderate to conservative/libertarian direction.
I knew Dick Feynman,, John. Stop repeating false statements about a man who leaves you in the dust.
John, just stop it!
AK wrote to me:
>Who cares about PhD’s?
AK, here and there around the Web, Sidles seems to claim to have a Ph.D. Yet, I cannot find any evidence he actually does.
And, his “research” has all the signs of crack-pottery.
I strongly suspect that something is very, very wrong with our coy friend, Sidles, something that goes way, way beyond an uncritical adulation for Hansen.
If my suspicions are correct… well, I have a professional obligation to blow the whistle on scientific fraud if convincing evidence shows up.
Dave
Since you’re old enough to have known “Dick Feynman over several years” I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re a little Internet-challenged. You can put his name in here, and verify his “Doctor of Philosophy (Physics), earned March 18, 1983 (Seattle)” His Doctoral thesis is Quantum chromodynamic predictions for selected mass-finite measures
Well, there are some pretty cracked pots with PhD’s, which is why I don’t regard them. However the links I found above show that his work was considered valuable by the general medical community. He would appear to be a polymath, and people like that are often hard to understand.
So do I, but I seriously doubt it has anything to do with his scientific credentials. Now politics…
John Sidles wrote to me:
>physicistdave opines “What makes me almost certain you are a con artist is this whopper: “Skepticism of IPCC predictions is entirely reasonable, in light of Hansen’s reasoned arguments that the IPCC estimates of future climate-change are too conservative”
Ah, there you go again, John! You deleted the section that I was actually claiming was a whopper: i.e., your implication that we scientists (unlike Hansen) were relying “too little upon fundamental thermodynamics considerations.”
Of course, anyone surfing the Web can discover that your views on thermodynamics are, let us say, eccentric. (For anyone who doe not want to bother to look up John’s stuff, let’s just say that it reminds me of the “Sky Dragon” nonsense.)
John also wrote to me:
>Thank you, physicistdave, for helping everyone to appreciate the scientific grounds and rhetorical methods of climate-change skepticism relative to climate-change science.
So, let’s see: I claim that the globe has indeed warmed and that warming is partially due to anthropogenic CO2 and that makes me an example of “climate-change skepticism”?
Okay, makes as much sense as your “work” floating around the Web.
John also wrote:
>Richard Feynman would be proud of your teaching effectiveness!
Dick would, at least, be proud of my honesty.
Speaking of which, you keep forgetting to tell us if you have a legit Ph.D. in some area of real physical science, John!
Dave
AK,
By the way, the NYTimes article you link to (“A Breakthrough in Imaging: A New Way to See a Virus”)ends with the following admission:
> Correction: January 16, 2009
Because of an editing error, an article and a headline on Tuesday about an advance in microscopy overstated the significance of the advance. Researchers at I.B.M. captured a three-dimensional image of a virus using, for the first time, a technique called magnetic resonance force microscopy; it was not the first time a three-dimensional image of a virus had been made.
>The article also described the basic structure of the DNA molecule incorrectly. That structure is based on nucleotides, not proteins.
The Times often has good science reporting: by the Times own admission, this article was not an example of that.
@physicistdave…
Now you’re acting like John Sidles. The advantages of the new technique should be obvious to anyone familiar with the science, regardless of whatever the reporter(s) understood:
[…]
JimD, “It is very tough for skeptics to make their energy budgets add up in their favor because it points to a remaining deficit in the heating despite all the heating so far. ”
It isn’t particularly tough at all for “skeptics”, non-skeptics, unaffiliated or whatever to compare “projections” with observations and note that the projection are high. Pretty much anyone that is willing to spend a little time researching the subject will find that out. It isn’t really a mystery.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-zze1q_HItsQ/VLRROSXgglI/AAAAAAAAMIw/pb113OzMqyI/s800-Ic42/curry%252520talk.png
What is a mystery is how some “physicists” cannot have an honest conversation with respect to numerous divergences between theory and reality.
AK: John Sidles receives 2011 Guenther Laukien Prize
Well, well, well!
Thank you for the link, and congratulations to John Sidles!
2011 Daniel Rugar, John Mamin, and John Sidles; Conception, implementation and application of Magnetic Resonance Force Microscopy (MRFM).
It may be the case that John perceives himself to be so smart and the rest of us to be so stupid that we will fall for the rather amateurish propaganda that seems to be his favorite MO.
AK,
\Earlier this evening, I posted a detailed post relating to Sidles’ Ph.D. and his recent “research”: it seems, alas, to have disappeared. I do not know if this is a website malfunction or if Judith does not want facts about John posted here.
I will not try to repost that post right now, but will merely say that anyone who wants to know what John has been doing should look over Roles of Universality and Naturality in Performative Service to Regenerative Medicine: The ISH/UW/St Martin’s Soldier Healing Seminar (SHS) ( a.k.a., the “Green Sheets” of the ISH/UW/St Martin’s varietal thermodynamics seminar).
Something is very, very, very wrong with John’s “work.”
Dave
Trying to ‘out’ anonymous commenters or criticizing what a commenter does off blog is against blog rules. If a commenter brings up their own credentials in a directly relevant context, then the topic is fair game.
Judith,
Thanks for your explanation: it is your blog, and you can set the rules as you wish.
I would point out, though, that John Sidles is not anonymous and that I was merely commenting on work he and his colleagues have made publicly available. Furthermore, since postings here had linked to positive reports on John’s work, it seemed fair to bring up other aspects of his work.
But, again, it is your blog and you can do as you wish.
All the best,
Dave
Thanks Dave, I appreciate your contributions here
AK,
To correct a misunderstanding, let me make clear that I was not criticizing MRFM but rather other “work” of Sidles that Judith does not want discussed here: she thinks that people’s behavior outside of this blog is not relevant to their behavior here.
I disagree, but Judith and I will have to agree to disagree — it’s her blog.
In any case, after learning more about Sidles, I have had my fill of him.
Dave
AK wrote to me:
>Well, there are some pretty cracked pots with PhD’s, which is why I don’t regard them. However the links I found above show that his work was considered valuable by the general medical community.
That may be true: have you seen any signs that his work is valued among physicists?
I have a close family member who is a physician, and I have therefore had a chance to interact with a lot of physicians: most of them, I have found, have forgotten much even of their high-school math and physics — i.e., they are not in a position to judge work in physics, any more than I am in a position to judge work in molecular biology.
And FYI, the “Guenther Laukien Prize” is awarded by a relatively small (~6,000 enployees) private company, the Bruker Corporation, to honor the company’s founder, using whatever criteria suit their fancy.
I could, were I so inclined, fund a “Feynman Memorial Prize” to honor my mentor in physics, and be as arbitrary in awarding that prize as I chose: I can even afford to hand out the amount of money our friend received.
It is unwise to be impressed by that sort of thing.
There are in fact various social and professional circles in which the “in-crowd” award each other prizes because it looks nice on the resume. Meaningless. But it fools a surprising number of people.
Dave
Punksta,
As a general rule, it is quite hard to measure the value of a variable by measuring the rate of change of the variable and then adding up the changes to find the current value: To give a concrete example, this is one of the major difficulties in using inertial guidance to find your position (vs., say, GPS super-triangulation).
It is not impossible, as the inertial-guidance example proves, but it is very difficult.
Measuring the radiation budget vs. measuring global temperature is an example of trying to measure rate of change vs. absolute values. Since the radiation budget is going to come close to balancing in an average year, it is small differences that we need to measure. That is going to be very, very hard.
I’m not going to say it is impossible, but I would want compelling evidence that the experts have successfully handled the enormous difficulty of the task before I took such results seriously.
Which is my long-winded, pedantic way of saying that I agree with your implication that it may be a long time before the results of radiation-budget analysis can be accepted as robust and taken seriously.
Dave
Punksta opines “It [climate change] is not “just physics”, but rather an as yet uncorroborated speculation
Sidles, understandbly unable to produce alleged corrorating measurements that would refute this (since they don’t exist), simply ducks the issue and blusters off elsewhere …
… to this masterpiece : because other speculations in the past have later proven correct, so will the CAGW one.
Yeah, the pope says so, must be true.
Yes Punksta, that is indeed how science works! For sure, a massive and still-increasing body of scientific evidence has affirmed that mid-20th century ideas of climate change are broadly correct. So it’s best to sports writer Damon Runyan’s wise tip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWInyaMWBY8
Mark Steyn, isn’t it time for you to start betting with the “smart money” on the “fast horses” of 21st century climate-science?
“Because other speculations in the past have later proven correct, so will the CAGW one.”
Sidles : Yes Punksta, that is indeed how science works!
Oh! now I get it – science works by assuming speculations can never be incorrect.
Yup, there’s never been an incorrect one. The sun revolves around the word after all. And so too CAGW just must be correct.
No robust data on OHC and radiation budget? Who cares, we have models now.
Right, John. Polywater is a bulwark of science now.
Jim2 1, Sidles 0.
Polywater wins the match.
Reblogged this on UnderstandItAll.
Judith,
A minor correction: Neal J. King is not a “young scientist” — he is about the same age as you and I are.
Neal was a fellow student of mine for a year at Caltech in the early ’70s: the ’72-’73 year, I think. He would probably be 61 or 62 now. Neal did his freshman year at Cal, sophomore year at Caltech, then returned to Berkeley after his sophomore year.
Neal was a bright guy, who was able to handle the workload at Caltech. However, he told me at the time that he just did not feel like working as hard as you had to at Caltech and so returned to Berkeley where, he said, the workload was much lighter.
If anyone thinks I am confusing different Neal J. King’s, well, the guy I knew was Chinese (not clear from the name, but clear from various photos current on the Web), and here ) is Neal mentioning his year at Caltech.
Of course, I suppose you could argue that you, Neal, and I are still all young at heart!
Dave Miller in Sacramento
Jim D –
The real question here is : How robust is the radiation budget data?
Once it is robust, the CO2 issue really would be getting to a point reasonable people could call “settled”. We could then clearly see whether/how_much the planet is warming in step with CO2 levels.
But my understanding is that it is not yet robust. Unlike surface temperatures or CO2 levels, say.
Cap’n
the “current” best estimate of the positive [radiation] imbalance is about 1/3 to half of the original estimate of the imbalance based on the “physics”.
Due to the 60% of “missing” CO2 emissions hiding in previously unconsidered CO2 sinks?
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/desert-aquifers-hold-missing-carbon-19320?utm_content=bufferb113c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Or some other mistake – what?
Punksta, “Or some other mistake – what?”
A combination of things which isn’t all that unusual with complex problems. What is unusual is the lack of desire to refine estimates in order to get better grasp of uncertainties, meaning trimming the fat tails.
There isn’t any advantage in reducing uncertainty when using the precautionary principle to drive policy. Not that “warmists” have an agenda or anything.
The Hansen/Sato/Kharecha/von Schuckmann review Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications (2011) will go far to answering your questions.
Robust theories The thermodynamic theory (including quantum theory of radiative energy transport) that explains the earth’s present energy-imbalance is of course among the best-validated and mathematically robust theories in the history of science.
Robust observations The observational data that robustly affirms the earth’s present energy balance includes the ongoing steric rise of global sea-levels, notably without decadal pause (as observed by satellite altimetry); accompanied by the ongoing accumulation in thermal energy in the global oceans (as observed by ARGO); accompanied by steady-state thermal output of the sun, as observed by satellite radiometry; and accompanied by rising greenhouse gas concentrations (as evident in the Keeling curve).
Gradations of climate-science skepticism
• Alternative (1): Climate-change is underway beyond all logical doubt This is believed by essentially NO practicing scientists (because NO scientific finding is entirely beyond doubt).
• Alternative (2): Climate-change is underway beyond all “reasonable” doubt (for “reasonable” defined as “95% confidence or higher”) This is believed by an ever-increasing majority of scientists.
• Alternative (3): Climate-change is “plausibly” underway (for “plausibly” defined as “substantially higher than 50% confidence”) This is believed by the overwhelming majority of scientists.
• Alternative (4): Science has little or nothing “substantial” to say regarding confidence in climate change (for “nothing substantial” defined as “no credible theory and no relevant data”) This is believed by essentially NO practicing scientists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chjmIy_gxT0
Conclusion Mark Steyn (and many other skeptics) would be well-advised to accept that climate-change is plausibly underway, based upon evidence so strong that for the majority of scientists, climate-change is real beyond any reasonable standard of doubt.
I asked how robust energy budget data was.
You didn’t answer.
And tried to cover up your question-ducking with a load of unrelated cheerleading drivel.
Says it all.
If the data was robust, the debate would be over. The debate isn’t over, John, precisely because the radiation budget data is NOT robust.
Why don’t you drop the cheefleading and instead start tryng to think ?
And you should have at least glanced at the reference you tried to palm me off with in place of an answer.
It plainly refers to the “inferred planetary energy imbalance” (my bold). Inferred, not measured.
So not only did you duck the question, you gave me a question-ducking reference to boot.
Time to face the music, John : if even a precommited radical activist like Hansen can only speak of an inferred imbalance, it must surely be that there there is NO robust data on the radiation budget.
Multiple independent studies have affirmed the Hansen/Sato account (of arXiv:1105.1140, 2011). See for example (recently):
• Smith et al., “Earth’s energy imbalance since 1960 in observations and CMIP5 models“ (2015)
• Trenberth and Fasullo, “Earth’s energy imbalance“ (2014)
• Stephens et al., “An update on Earth’s energy balance in light of the latest global observations“ (2012)
Conclusion For the overwhelming majority of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, the evidence is convincing that the earth’s energy budget is persistently out-of-balance, in consequence of increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (mainly CO2).’
That’s why the oceans are heating, the land is baking, the waters are acidifying, the mountain glaciers are melting, the ice-caps are sliding, and the sea-levels are rising.
It’s a pleasure to assist your appreciation, punksta — and the appreciation of Climate Etc readers too — of the immensely strong scientific reasons for the overwhelming scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate-change is real.
Mark Steyn, diligent study of the science will assist you to abandon wrong ideas!
John said
‘It’s a pleasure to assist your appreciation, punksta — and the appreciation of Climate Etc readers too — of the immensely strong scientific reasons for the overwhelming scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate-change is real.’
So, what are you personally doing to combat it?
tonyb
Not nearly as much as Jorge Mario Bergoglio …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tYdOIqvpqg
Mark Steyn, please take notes on effective actions (both scientific and practical) to combat ignorance (both willful and otherwise).
John
We are not talking about Jorge. We are talking about you.
tonyb
Exceedingly few rational folks consider me (or my ideas) to be more interesting than Pope Francis (and his ideas), or James Hansen (and his ideas), or Michael Mann (and his ideas).
Because science is mainly about ideas (not people), isn’t that the main point of science, TonyB?
Historian Naomi Oreskes explains the cognitive mechanisms of denialist personalization very plainly and simply:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suz_13pXgEw
Mark Steyn, pay heed … perhaps there are more interesting climate-science topics than Michael Mann’s personality?
John
Ideas are all very well, but if they are to be achieved they need people to implement them.
Therefore, whilst I have little interest in what the Pope is doing, I am interested in knowing what, in practice, John Sidles is doing in order to follow the ideas and ideals of the Pope. Specifically, what actions are YOU (not the Pope, Elvis or Obama) taking, in order to prevent climate change?
it’s a simple question but one you seem strangely reluctant to answer.
tonyb
tonyb, what you can do as an individual is elect people who take this as seriously as the Pope and scientists.
It is irrelevant what an individual person is doing. I call my personal strategy Emit to Victory!
Tonyb, why do you suppose that Judith Curry imposes this rule (wisely, as it seems to me and many?). Could it be that she has suffered, herself, from those who violate it?
Jim D: “tonyb, what you can do as an individual is elect people who take this as seriously as the Pope and scientists.”
I am going to vote for those who take the environment seriously but who also see that spreading false information for “good causes” is bad idea. And, when it comes down to it all of our challenges are measured by how we play the game. Character matters.
You apparently disagree with that last thought or you feel M. Mann has shown great character as opposed to J. Curry. Thoughts?
Ron, I think Mann has the science on his side, and while the skeptics continue attack him, he does not need to respond, but he does. Sidles posted a 2014 video of Mann just below. It is worth watching. He makes the science case to the public, and talks about skeptics too, because he just can’t ignore them. I suspect his audience now expects that of him, and would be disappointed if he didn’t go there.
John
Where have I criticised you? I merely asked a question. I see no criticism in that. The fact you won’t answer I will interpret in a number of fanciful ways.
tonyb
Sidles –
Once again you have failed to even glance at your own references, which again show no evidence of ROBUST MEASUREMENTS of the energy budget.
And again you try and cover up your evasiveness with mindless five-year-old-style cheerleading drivel, plus many patent falsehoods (eg implying we have ROBUST MEASUREMENTS of ohc.)
The question is about MEASUREMENTS John. MEASUREMENTS. You know, taking readings from instruments. Repeat that to yourself a hundred times (should suit your five-year-old mentality here), lest you again just evade the question amidst yet more vaccuous pomposity.
Just for a moment then, forget about being politically correct, and imagine you’re actually interested in finding out what is really happening, and how much/little we know about it. See too physicistdave’s comments on the technical challenge this presents).
—
And why might this be an important issue?
Because even if turns out the planet as a whole is in fact warming, that doesn’t mean man is the cause. But if the DIRECTLY MEASURED radiation budget is seen to closely track CO2 levels, that would suggest man is implicated.
The free-as-in-freedom article by James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha, and Karina von Schuckmann titled “Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications” (arXiv:1105.1140) will go far toward answering your question, punksta.
Conclusion It’s reassuring to appreciate that Hansen and colleagues (along with hundreds of NASA scientists) have already thoroughly addressed the observational concerns of punksta and physicistdave.
Mark Steyn, please join with punksta and physicistdave in appreciating the in-depth MEASUREMENT basis of energy-budget climate-change.
I ask about the robustness of radiation budget measurements.
After his earlier, evasions, John now comes up with something that does little more than mention the words “Measuring Earth’s energy imbalance”, and feels this response “in-depth”.
Just another evasion John, born of deep desparation to stick to a precommited position rather than think a bit and trty yo get to the bottom of things.
(Punksta, I accidentally posted this to the wrong thread above. Sorry.)
Punksta,
As a general rule, it is quite hard to measure the value of a variable by measuring the rate of change of the variable and then adding up the changes to find the current value: To give a concrete example, this is one of the major difficulties in using inertial guidance to find your position (vs., say, GPS super-triangulation).
It is not impossible, as the inertial-guidance example proves, but it is very difficult.
Measuring the radiation budget vs. measuring global temperature is an example of trying to measure rate of change vs. absolute values. Since the radiation budget is going to come close to balancing in an average year, it is small differences that we need to measure. That is going to be very, very hard.
I’m not going to say it is impossible, but I would want compelling evidence that the experts have successfully handled the enormous difficulty of the task before I took such results seriously.
Which is my long-winded, pedantic way of saying that I agree with your implication that it may be a long time before the results of radiation-budget analysis can be accepted as robust and taken seriously.
Dave
John Sidles wrote:.
>• Alternative (2): Climate-change is underway beyond all “reasonable” doubt (for “reasonable” defined as “95% confidence or higher”) This is believed by an ever-increasing majority of scientists.
No, John, it is not just agreed by “an ever-increasing majority of scientists”: it is agreed to, by as far as I can tell, everyone, really *everyone* — all scientists, all “climate skeptics,” even my dear late great-grandmother back in the ’60s. who, though she dropped out of school after fourth grade, told me that the climate had been much chillier when she was young.
You are still playing extremely disingenuous games: everyone agrees that climate changes and is changing: the earth has been coming out of the Little Ice Age for the last couple centuries, and yes, it is warmer today than it was when my great-grandmother was young.
The point at issue is to what degree those changes are due to anthropogenic CO2 and, most importantly, how much we can trust various conflicting predictions as to the future effects of anthropogenic CO2.
Based on looking over your “work” on the Web, it is becoming apparent that your life consists of playing games like this, but at least we can call you out on it.
Dave
The more things change …
Straight from Richard Feynmann’s FBI files:
Sure reads like a irrational denunciation from a bitter, angry, clueless person who perceived that Feynman’s views “did not quite smell right”, eh physicistdave?
Kinda like the bitter, angry, clueless denunciations that climate-scientists like James Hansen (and religious leaders like Pope Francis too) nowadays receive all the time?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZsQqAQxh_Y
Advice to Mark Steyn Please contemplate the proven utter futility of irrational personal denunciations of science-respecting citizens like Richard Feynman, James Hansen, and Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
`Cuz serious science talks, while irrational denunciations walk … isn’t that the plain verdict of history?
John,
As I pointed out above, if you had bothered to read the post you linked to, you would see that the poster presents strong evidence that the accusations were just an outburst from an angry ex-wife.
I knew Dick Feynman over several years, and had a chance to see him on a weekly basis.As the post you linked to pointed out, Dick voted Republican, at least according to his accuser. Dick was certainly not an unthinking ideologue of any stripe; most specifically, he was certainly not a leftist. His views leaned in a moderate to conservative/libertarian direction.
I knew Dick Feynman,, John. Stop repeating false statements about a man who leaves you in the dust.
Anyone who reads your recent “work” and who knows math and physics is going to see what you are up to.
The game is over, John.
Dave
Physicistdave, it’s been a pleasure to assist your understanding — and the understanding of Climate Etc readers too — that it’s not much-honored researchers like Feynman / Hansen / Mann / Oreskes who are in the wrong … it’s their poorly informed, abusively inclined, ideology-blinded, and (commonly) irrationally angry denouncers who are in the wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLbMguoHphY
Mark Steyn, please continue taking notes.
John, Mann shows observations following ahnsen’s scenario B. I stopped watching at that point. Shall we call this Mike’s presentation trick of hiding the divergence?
steven, go to the Denial101 video above for more on the context of this projection.
Jim D, nah nah nah nah boo boo? Have anything else?
Don’t be put off by the video name. It is much to the point of the question. Those are all the early climate forecasts I know about too.
Jim, state clearly what in that video what will explain why the graph in Mann’s presentation shows observations following Hansen’s scenario B.
He explains that the 1988 model had a higher sensitivity than the consensus. Other models did better including Hansen’s 1981 one. Mann showed the same lines, but did not go into such details. Study them both and see what they say about them. It is not an identical interpretation for sure.
Jim, so the argument is if Hansen didn’t have so many wrong it would have matched up almost perfectly like it does in the graph Mann shows. Perhaps that argument should have been presented along with the explanations for why some climate scientists think there was a divergence instead of just redrawing the graph without explanation.
Nuccitelli had a lot more time to explain things in a focused talk on this subject. Mann breezed through it as part of a much longer talk with a lot more diverse content.
Jim, if he didn’t have time to give an accurate representation of what really is the situation then perhaps he shouldn’t have included it at all.
It was accurate enough to mention as an early effort. He was not saying it had to already be perfect back then, but it was part of the historical development. The 1981 Science paper would have been my choice. That had a sensitivity of 2.8 C per doubling and that still holds up well.
We weren’t discussing the accuracy of the projection. We were discussing the accuracy of the presentation in depicting the accuracy of the projection.
The game is over, John. People know you for what you are.
John the only type of sentence that warrants having Feyman and someone like Oreskes, Mann, or Hansen in it is one like “Oreskes certainly isn’t in Feyman’s league”
or something to that effect.
Interestingly, there is a Ph.D. physicist named Feynman who is still alive and who has done research on climate-change issues: Dick Feynman’s younger sister, Joan. Joan’s work has included looking at the connection between solar variation and terrestrial climate: see this news announcement from JPL from a few years ago which says, in part:
Judith can address the significance of this far better than I, but it does sound as if the younger Feynman, like her more famous brother, is willing to think outside the box and consider alternative explanations for climate change, i.e., the way science is supposed to be done.
I don’t know what Joan Feynman’s guess is for future climate, and it does not really matter. What matters is evidence.
Dick Feynman, alas, died right about the time that Jim Hansen succeeded in making “global warming” (back before we changed to the politically correct term “climate change”) a major issue, so I suppose we will never know what Dick thought about current climate science.
However, I myself was at the ceremony where Feynman gave his famous speech on “Cargo-Cult Science”: the whole point of the speech is that the goal of any scientist should be to try to challenge and disprove any suggested hypothesis. It is pretty easy to guess what Dick would think of the ongoing attempts to silence anyone who suggests that the “official” climate line needs to be questioned.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
What Joan Feynman is onto is something that I think is correct. The NAO does not fit in with the stadium wave, and seems to have a solar link.
Among scientists, two common reactions are: (1) disdain for the futile smearing, and (2) pity for the infantile smearers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh2Ih712fbk
Jim Hansen accepts the Ridenhour Courage Prize: “We Are Only Beginning to Feel Climate Change’s Impact”
Mark Steyn, please take lessons in the futility of anti-scientific smears.
Quoting Feynman
“The tiniest irregularities are magnified so that we get complete randomness. We cannot make predictions for that long a time This length of time is not very large, It is a very,very tiny time in which we lose all our information. We can no longer predict what is going to happen.”
His autobiographer explained it as “Tiny errors, tiny gaps in our knowledge are amplified by the interactions of complex systems until they reach large scales.
In other words John , you are as blind to our eventual fate as everyone else and making assertions which have no credibility will continue to make you happy but not right.
One feels tempted to give a free horoscope for all your helpful advice.
in view of your favorite color, blue?, favorite number 7? and addiction to google. Do not back a horse with this color and number in the Kentucky derby for 5 years but if it comes up after this time put the house on it. Try to have an electric media free day once a week and do not make any important decisions on a Saturday for 3 weeks. Hope this is helpful for you.
The post of a putz. the world has been warmimg for about 175 years, since the end of the little ice age, called that because it was literally, a little ice age
So…would you wish to return to that climatic state? some place in between then and now?
You are truly an obtuse commenter.
Lol … and from this starting principle Feynman carefully derives the orthodox atmospheric physics of Hansen/Mann/Oreskes (etc.) … entirely contrary to what the arch-skeptical Sky Dragons assert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyssfKRsgMU
Mark Steyn, take heed that Mann-style climate-change hockey-sticks are solidly grounded in Feynman-style physics of statistical mechanics and transport theory.
PS Nowadays, young scientists and engineers learn more universal and natural thermodynamical frameworks than Feynman’s generation … the physical ideas behind climate-change have remained pretty much the same, but the computational power has gotten far stronger.
See for example, the free-as-in-freedom preprint of Bei Zeng, Xie Chen, Duan-Lu Zhou, and Xiao-Gang Wen, Quantum Information Meets Quantum Matter — From Quantum Entanglement to Topological Phase in Many-Body Systems (2015).
Math, science, and engineering don’t stand still, yah know!
Little fanny-johnny fancies himself to be the Drudge of climate alarmism propaganda. But he ain’t an aggregator, he be the aggravator. It’s easy to skip his gaudy commentary, links to random alarmist BS, and the tedious gallery of Hansen and Mann videos. You will feel better about yourself.
Lol don’t just skip Jim Hansen’s scientific theory, Michael Mann’s scientific observations, Oreskes’ history of science, and Berry’s analysis of technology-driven economics … skip Pope Francis’ moral synthesis too.
http://www.besttopnews.com/image/article/1/6/5/16165.jpeg
Yep, the ensuing ignorance definitely helps folks feel lots better about yourself.
http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.110525!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/article_970/alg-donald-trump-jpg.jpg
This guy sure has got it going on!
You are not doing the cause any good here with your gaudy claptrap, fanny-johnny. You seem to be smart enough to know that. It looks like it’s self-gratification and animosity that motivates you to spend so much time pumping out the gaudy claptrap. Don’t you some crank theory of something or other that you could be working on? That’s my last word for you, fanny-johnny.
The majority of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers do not consider lengthy well-cited multi-author articles to be “gaudy claptrap”.
http://www.whorunsgov.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2016-republican-debate.jpg
We reserve “gaudy claptrap” for other, less rational spectacles.
John Sidles wrote:
John, why do you keep lying? I am asking that in all sincerity. Really, why do you keep lying?
You know that no one in the scientific community who is questioning the over-blown claims people like you are making about global warming — certainly not Judith, Lindzen, or, for that matter, me — condones the “Sky Dragon” nonsense. Judith has been outspoken in pointing out what nonsense the Sky Dragon stuff is (as have I).
I did my bachelor’s at Caltech: the Feynman Lectures on Physics, to which you link, was my freshman textbook: obviously, I know the book better than you do. I knew Feynman personally: I had a chance to chat with him on a weekly basis.
Why do you keep lying, John? What do you get out of this? Why do you do this?
John Sidles wrote:
>Lol don’t just skip … …Pope Francis’ moral synthesis too.
Pope Francis lacks scientific standing.
Personally, I have no respect for the man as a human being, but reasonable people (I assume most Catholics) can differ on that. But his views are just as irrelevant to matters of science as your repeated lies.
Don Montfort wrote to John Sidles:
>Don’t you some crank theory of something or other that you could be working on?
As a matter of fact, yes, he does.: he seems, unaccountably, to be rather fond of it, in fact — he links to it via his name here. Just click on his name, sit back, and enjoy.
Dave
That’s what I was talking about, Dave. It’s in some kind of indecipherable code, so nobody can steal his ideas. I hope Judith gives him a guest post. Or maybe a three part series, like the one we had before from some oscillator dude. Buts lets not talk about it, Dave. House rules.
John Sidles, I think Richard Feynman’s Question to you would be “what observations or analyses are inconsistent with the AGW theory proposed by Hansen, and so vocally… and repetitively… supported by you?”
DT,
I would refine that a bit: Feynman would say look for observations or analyses that are inconsistent with the current version of the theory. There is nothing wrong with saying “Oops! Back to the drawing board! We’ll try to do better next time!”
The problem with the publicly outspoken advocates of CAGW is that they are too arrogant to admit when their models have failed to accurately predict the climate and thereby admit that the models cannot yet be trusted.
I strongly suspect that there are quite a few in the climate modeling community who are trying to play the game honestly, who know the current models are inadequate for accurately predicting future climate change, and who are doing the right thing — i.e., taking past failures as indications of how to move forward. But they are outshouted by the con artists and their pathetic hangers-on, such as Sidles.
And, alas, if the honest ones speak out, the con artists have proven sufficiently adroit politically that they can wreck the career of any young scientist who blows the whistle. It is, I think, very like that the famous “Climategate” emails were leaked by one of these honest people who feared to come forward publicly.
Fortunately, there are some senior people such as Judith who are in a position from which they feel safe in telling the truth.
What does interest me is why hangers-on like Sidles lie? What does he get out of lying?
Dave
PDave, your version is of course correct in a scientific setting. My version, or variations on that theme, is the question I use to determine whether I am talking to a scientist or an advocate. I don’t know that a temperate response
has ever convinced an advocate to rethink their position and adopt a more scientific approach, but at least I get the satisfaction of separating the fish from the fowl.
I suspect I know where our manic friend upthread falls in this spectrum, but I also know that the question causes a certain dissonant discomfort in certain types of people.
Which is always fun to watch. Feynman knew this, I imagine!
DT
PDave, I agree with your other points as well.
I see the abuse heaped on Dr Curry and others who are at the very least representing rationality, logic, clear thinking and the scientific method against the Pharisees of the consensus, I think that such is the path of truth…never easy.
But when the zealots start calling Andy Revkin a denier, I think it’s time to admit that the inmates have taken over the asylum.
Cheers!
Judith Curry’s been doing a terrific job of purging gratuitous personal abuse. That’s a lot of work by Judith, for not much public credit. Thank you Judith Curry, for this outstanding public service.
To factually address a few open questions:
Hansen himself is pleased to answer your question! From “Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications“ (arXiv:1105.1140)
General advice Please join with James Hansen in candidly, dispassionately, and comprehensively acknowledging weaknesses in our present understanding of climate-change, and especially, join Hansen in publicly calling for expanded NASA observations of climate-change data.
————–
Hmmmm … what about Feynman-style personal apologies?
Historical fact Just as Feynman famously apologized to Robert Hanbury-Brown — for Feynman’s disgraceful (and wrong) ridicule of the Hanbury-Brown and Twiss Effect — James Hansen’s recent communication (of July 27, 2015), titled “Ice Sheet 200-900 Year Time Scale“ publicly extends a similarly handsome apology
More general advice Please join with Richard Feynman and James Hansen in the excellent practice of extending no-quibbles apologies.
Everyone (including Mark Steyn) take notes.
John Sidles: Please join with James Hansen in candidly, dispassionately, and comprehensively acknowledging weaknesses in our present understanding of climate-change, and especially, join Hansen in publicly calling for expanded NASA observations of climate-change data.
What an extraordinary comment! I and others have written persistently about the weaknesses in our present knowledge and understanding, and have been advocating more research and study. Hansen has argued repeatedly that we already know the results of extra CO2 are going to be disastrous, catastrophic, and worse for sure, the only unknown (or at least inconsistency) being whether they will happen immediately or merely almost immediately. Where has Hansen argued that too little is known for us to reliably change climate; or admitted that all of his temperature projections to date have been too high to be reliable indications of future temperature?
Do you admit (join with us in acknowledging) that too little is known for us to confidently expect that specific CO2 reduction measures will produce specific desirable outcomes? Or do you stick with your previous pronouncements that the climate is changing exactly as Hansen predicted in the 1980s?
Y’know, John, I do not hate James Hansen. Although I think Hansen dramatically jumped the gun in publicizing his results as settled science, has been far too uncritical towards his own work, and has let publicity go to his head, yes, I have seen indications that Hansen is trying to be honest: for example, his recent advocacy of nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions is what an honest believer in CAGW would propose.
So, you see, John, sometimes you and I can find a small point of agreement.
However, you are the one who has kept referring to Hansen as if he were God, and we should all bow down before his wisdom. I view him as simply a man who has some all-too-human weaknesses (how many of us are always as self-critical as we should be?).
I am reluctant to cut the same slack for Michael Mann: the lawsuit against Steyn is the breaking point for me: lawsuits are not the right way to settle either scientific or political disputes. I realize that Steyn can be an incredible jerk, as well as, sometimes, being funny or insightful — think of him as the illegitimate offspring of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor (somehow, I think Steyn might even like that comparison!).
But a lawsuit? No. The solution to bad speech is more speech.
Dave
Regarding more general advice, voicing the word “apology” does not have direct bearing on character. Just as voicing 1000 apologies does not. A sincere and relevant apology can be one example however. Character comes down to doing the right thing even when nobody is looking and even when it is not in your own favor.
Thus the voice of twenty whistleblowers should be heard as being more significant than the voice of twenty maintaining the establishment line given the weight of evidence on both sides being equal in the cross claims. The Climategate whistleblowers were anonymous but were supporting the few. They were authentic and powerful evidence of collusion to conceal truth from the public. It blew the honest mistake defense of the hockey stick out of the water.
The notes of the IPCC Lead Authors’ Meeting, Sept 1999, covered in detail here,showed that Briffa’s reconstruction was a thorn in the IPCC’s shoe. There was knowledge and collaboration of Jones, Folland and perhaps other with Mann to persuade him to deal with the embarrassing decline. Mann, in turn, put pressure on a protesting Briffa, who eventually caved.
It may be determined in a DC court exactly what hiding data means in legal terms but there is no question it was not science.
What else is not science is making predictions after a very destructive hurricane that man is causing the hurricane as will be evidenced by an increasing number of them to come. Then a historic lull in severe hurricanes follows. But you still stick to your claim without blinking that man is behind every destructive weather event.
What else is not science is when you have a streak of significant increases in global mean temp and you proclaim this is the beginning of the new normal trend caused by man. You build the trend into 52 models offered by dozens of countries in a the world organized climate panel to prove this new trend and then the trend stops. And stops for 18 more years. Then you have a new theory that a natural cooling spell is counteracting man’s warming, forgetting that 15 years earlier your logo featured a static sideways climate before man’s influence. And, that hockey stick would still have been your logo if it hadn’t been for a meddling lay person who got a hold of the data somehow and revealed your science was anything but that.
Heresy! The High and Low Priests of the Consensus will see to it that you don’t go to Heaven, Ron. Only four more days to save the earth! You better repent. Does that check from Big Oil mean more to you than the children, Ron? And the polar bears?
And, of course, Ron, the most fundamental point is that neither scientific nor political debates should be resolved via a lawsuit.
Considering the amicus briefs on Steyn’s side, I suspect that Mann will come to view this lawsuit as the biggest mistake of his life (I’ve always been intrigued by the legal doctrine of “collateral estoppel”: Mann may come to learn what it means).
Dave
The present discourse here on Climate Etc certainly illuminates why the work of Hansen / Mann / Oreskes / Berry / Bergoglio (etc.) is much-debated.
———-
Reason 1 A world that abuses and silences Hansen / Mann / Oreskes / Berry / Bergoglio (etc.) is a world in which no mathematician, scientist, or engineer is safe.
Consequence 1 That’s why the overwhelming majority of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers (and their professional organizations) respect and honor the works of Hansen / Mann / Oreskes / Berry / Bergoglio (etc.)
———-
Reason 2 A world that respects and honors the works of Hansen / Mann / Oreskes / Berry / Bergoglio (etc.) is a world that disdains and rejects abusive ideology-driven demagoguery.
Consequence 2 That’s why ideology-driven demagogues (and their astroturfing organizations) personally abuse and seek to silence Hansen / Mann / Oreskes / Berry / Bergoglio (etc.).
———-
Reason 3 Citizens seeking a stronger public appreciation of climate-change study the strongest and most-honored works of climate-science; these most-honored works include Hansen / Mann / Oreskes / Berry / Bergoglio (etc.)
Reason 3 Ideologues seeking to foster a weaker public appreciation of climate-change commonly focus their discourse upon personal abuse; this personal abuse is most commonly heaped upon Hansen / Mann / Oreskes / Berry / Bergoglio (etc.).
———-
Summary Every mathematician, scientist, or engineer has ample reasons — reasons so strong as to amount an ethical and professional obligation — to respect and publicly honor the works of Hansen / Mann / Oreskes / Berry / Bergoglio (etc.), while adamantly rejecting the personally abusive ideology-driven rhetoric that seeks to silence their voices.
And meanwhile Atmospheric CO2 is increasing, the oceans are heating, the land is baking, the waters are acidifying, the mountain glaciers are melting, the ice-caps are sliding, and the sea-levels are rising … all while the earth and the human communities on that earth suffers ongoing ecological, economic, and social devastation.
http://www.heritage-history.com/books/sellar/nelson/front1.gif
Conclusion Humanity can’t rationally afford to turn a blind eye to these accelerating climate-change realities; neither can humanity rationally afford to turn a blind eye to the ideology-driven demagoguery that denies these realities … these are the dual realities that most mathematicians, scientists, and engineers have come to understand.
The present discourse here on Climate Etc certainly illuminates why the work of Hansen / Mann / Oreskes / Berry / Bergoglio (etc.) is much-debated
Indeed yes John – because these blatant frauds and ideology-driven demogogues are dragging the good name of science through the mud with their antics.
Readers here are divided into those who are pro- or anti- their. I’m sure many here are curious about what attracts you to such systemic deception. Did a bad uncle do something to you as a child maybe? Still is?
Punksta, don’t you think today’s The Onion totally nails the reason why most mathematicians, scientists, and engineers care about climate-change discourse?
The entire hilarious-yet-serious Onion analysis is well-worth reading.
Yes, looking at the blurb above I have no doubt that other credulous infantile truebelievers that have also never managed to articulate an idea. will fully share your need to pronounce it “hilarious”.
John Sidles: skeptics reportedly unveiled a vivid artist’s rendering of the vast expanse of parched earth that each of them must see through the windows of their homes before reversing their opposition to public schools teaching children about global warming.
It’s funny enough, but the humor comes from a gross exaggeration. My son gets his philosophy from The Onion, as well as his political news. How about you? Are they as reliable on everything else as they are on the debates in climate political science? Do they, for example, rank with the Pope in the matter of public policies concerning abortions and the merchandizing of baby parts?
Oops, typo …
… Readers here are divided into those who are pro- or anti- Mann et al’s junkscience
Punksta, unfortunately, it seems by virtue of being anti-Mann et al’s junkscience, people have decided to become pro other kinds of junkscience. For instance, I doubt a single Mark Steyn supporter, or even a Michael Mann critic (they’re not all the same), will call Steyn out for having a section in his book which claims Mann and co-authors fiddled with the modern instrumental record, in papers reconstructing past temperatures, to increase the amount of modern warming by 50%, all based on the fact the northern hemisphere warms faster than the southern hemisphere.
Of course, that’s not how Steyn or the person he quotes, David Legates, worded it. What Legates did was take global temperature values and compare them to the northern hemispheric instrumental record in Mann’s paper and find the series in Mann’s paper showed far more warming. A normal person would go, “Well yeah, the northern hemisphere warms faster than the southern hemisphere, so of course it warms faster than the planet as a whole.” Legates isn’t normal though, so he all but accused Mann of having committed fraud, claiming Mann had done something to the global temperature record. And Steyn quoted him in his book as one of the scientists who showed he was right. In fact, Legates is #3 in the book.
It’s crazy. A person somehow mixes up “northern hemisphere” and “globe” and overreacts. Pretty much nobody takes note because the guy says lots of things that are just silly, but 10 years later, Mark Steyn finds it and doesn’t stop for even a second to wonder why why nobody else has ever talked about this same story in the last 10 years. He doesn’t spend five minutes to look into the story to see if it makes sense, or if there has been any response or rebuttal to it. Nope. He just runs with the story because it sounds sexy, and who cares that his book now uses the words “Northern-Hemisphere” and “earth” to refer to the same temperatures only two sentences apart.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe people will realize you can be anti-Mann and still admit that Mann’s critics make mistakes.
http://www.hi-izuru.org/wp_blog/2015/08/crackpots-and-lunatics/
John Sidles: Reason 1 A world that abuses and silences Hansen / Mann / Oreskes / Berry / Bergoglio (etc.) is a world in which no mathematician, scientist, or engineer is safe.
For a smart guy, you sure do write a lot of junk. “Abuses and [my emphasis] Silences”? They have been insulted and criticized, but not abused or silenced. Mann thinks he was libeled, but has been slow to move his suit through the courts, as though he does not actually want to prevail, or thinks he would lose, or something. He has certainly not been silenced.
It hasn’t been for lack of trying, has it?
A less-dedicated less-brave scientist would have been silenced.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt3D1aE4Sug
On the evidence James Hansen amply earned his 2013 Ridenhour Courage Prize.
” A world that respects and honors the works of Hansen / Mann / Oreskes / Berry / Bergoglio (etc.) is a world that disdains and rejects abusive ideology-driven demagoguery.”
Leftist thinking. Utopian.
People on the right are fully aware of human nature and understand that ideology drives everything and always will. That includes the positions of Hanson, Mann, and everyone else.
Please insert another quarter….
“neither can humanity rationally afford to turn a blind eye to the ideology-driven demagoguery that denies these realities”
Nor can rational humanity afford to turn a blind eye to the ideology-driven demagoguery that falsely claims such realities:
“At the New York event, many people noticed that gee, there sure are a lot of communists at this march. But in Oakland — always on the cutting edge — the entire “climate change” movement at last fully, irrevocably and overtly embraced communism as its stated goal”
http://pjmedia.com/zombie/2014/09/23/climate-movement-drops-mask-admits-communist-agenda/
The stakes are simply too high:
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1440434424&sr=8-1&keywords=black+book+of+communism
Seldom has anti-scientific cognition been more bluntly expressed.
• Corollary Climate-change isn’t real because “communism”. Or “catholocism”. Or “environmentalism”. Or something.
Question Is rational climate-change discourse feasible with dyed-in-the-wool ideological relativists (like nickels)?
This week’s The Onion hilariously affirms that the answer is “no”.
Mark Steyn, take heed. The world’s mathematicians, scientists, engineers, naturalists, farmers, outdoors-folks, farmers, conservationists, Popes-to-Quakers, and now even Onion-readers are allied in a massive (and ever-growing) conspiracy against you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw2sex1mJNI
Either that, or you’re just plain wrong-on-the-science and wrong-on-the-facts, about climate-change?
Wow. Sorry you spent all that time typing this reply.
It has 0 content.
I guess that makes you a troll.
John Sidles wrote:
And which imaginary world is that, John?
Have you forgotten that it is the crooked Michael Mann who is trying to silence Steyn??? (Why do I call Mann “crooked” — because he is using a nuisance lawsuit to try to suppress free speech. In my book, that makes Mann a fascist pig, as we used to say back in the ’60s. I like the First Amendment: Mann doesn’t.)
Mann and Hansen are fondly embraced by the mass media and are not silenced at all, John, and you know it. Far from being silenced, it is their side that is trying to silence others: again, the proof of the pudding is Mann’s lawsuit.
Again, John: I know the globe has warmed in the last two centuries. I know anthropogenic CO2 has contributed to that warming. Contrary to your lies, I am not a “denialist.”
But, I do believe in free speech and an open scientific method: that is why I am critical of people such as yourself and Michael Mann.
We know what you are, John, a devotee of the fellow who invented the “Big Lie.”
You and I are both old enough to remember what all of us used to call people like you back in the ’60s: you have become the person all of us kids in the ’60s were warning against.
Shame on you.
I will try to take your criticism seriously, physicistdave … Hmmmm … and the “fellow” you have in mind would be (pick one, two, or all three) …
http://www.covermyfb.com/media/covers/thumb/7012-spongebob-rainbow.jpg
http://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/9780691160184_p0_v1_s192x300.jpg
http://www.geekation.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Geekation_DontTakeMyWordForItReadingRainbowLavarBurton.jpg
Question Is it perchance “happy hour” where you are, physicistdave? If so, please enjoy the “rainbow of learning”!
John Sidles, to be honest, I fell asleep about halfway through your evasion of the question. Never mind. I believe that I have all the data that I need to correctly assess your rigor on the topics under discussion.
Please do continue. You are now on my auto-ignore list…which I truly wish was an automatic function. Perhaps the other denizens would be kind enough to issue an alert should you have something interesting to contribute.
Question What’s the difference between “auto-ignore” and “auto-ignorance”?
Answer In regard to the scientific literature, there’s no difference.
Take notes, DataTurk (and Mark Steyn).
John Sidles: Question What’s the difference between “auto-ignore” and “auto-ignorance”?
Answer: ignoring John Sidles and The Onion when reading about climate science and climate political science at Climate Etc. Enough denizens check your sources that everyone else can safely ignore you when trying to acquire knowledge.
John
Truth is stranger than Onion fiction.
Forget the criteria of drought of only 7 months. Europe has already had an 11 month mega drought and the hottest summer on record by some margin.
When? I hear you ask. In 1540
‘Based on widespread documentary evidence in Europe concerning weather in 1540, we demonstrated that the drought in 1540 was likely more extreme than similar events in the instrumental period. The meteorological drought was more persistent (11 months), leading to a
cumulative annual deviation of NPD to about 90 to 95 days compared to the twentieth-century Western and Central European average.
The hydrological drought was similarly extreme, with an assessed discharge deficit of about 90 % for rivers Rhine and Elbe and the complete
desiccation of smaller watercourses. The record-breaking dimension of the Megadrought also corroborates the earlier result of Wetter and Pfister (2013) that the heat wave, respectively spring-summer temperatures in 1540, were likely more extreme than in 2003.
http://www.euroclimhist.unibe.ch/media/filer_public/2014/08/04/wetterpfisteretal_-_the_year-long_unprecedented_european_heat_and_drought_of_1540__a_worst_case_-_climatic_change_2014.pdf
—–According to my own CET reconstruction the 1530’s were the warmest decade on record and the three years 1539/1540 and 1541 the hottest consecutive tree years on record.
Presumably at some point we will beat the 500 year old record, although bearing in mind it wasn’t even part of the MWP modern values still have some way to go
tonyb
I read your link. It states:
“Their goal is to convince that there are sufficient grounds to reject the case for taking action to tackle threats to health. This phenomenon has led some to draw a historical parallel with the holocaust, another area where the evidence is overwhelming but where a few commentators have continued to sow doubt. All are seen as part of a larger phenomenon of denialism.”
*******************
In fact what climate denialism has to do with the holocaust is much simpler. The holocaust has long been a lever used by the left to squash any tendency towards the right, and to throttle free speech.
The strange thing is that these same people (Oreskes included) are very patently anti anti-communist. Which would seem odd since communist murder far exceeds that of the Nazis and represents an atrocity of equal or worse scale. It also included the genocide of entire classes of people.
“I could easily multiple such cases of the suppression of politically incorrect speech in other “liberal democracies” throughout Western and Central Europe, having already published several books on this depressing subject.”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/179755/how-communist-left-killed-free-speech-west-paul-gottfried
If you want to play with the big boys you need to do some more reading.
climatereason: http://www.euroclimhist.unibe.ch/media/filer_public/2014/08/04/wetterpfisteretal_-_the_year-long_unprecedented_european_heat_and_drought_of_1540__a_worst_case_-_climatic_change_2014.pdf
thank you for the link.
OMG … now it turns out that Ray Bradbury’s a COMSYMP too!
http://www.ala.org/bbooks/sites/ala.org.bbooks/files/content/BBW14_CoverArt_op1.jpg
Thank goodness for secret informants and anonymous denouncers! Otherwise, how would we know whose books to ban?
John,
The FBI collected data on people the way a lint trap collects lint — uncritically and in quantity.
I was heavily involved in the anti-draft movement at Stanford: there is no doubt an FBI file on me, too (probably says something like “loudmouthed physics student, of no real danger to national security,” probably a bit like your FBI file, eh?).
No one tried to ban Bradley; certainly, no one is trying to ban him now.
The book banners today are the fools on the left who want to ban Huckleberry Finn because it uses the “N-word” and because they are too ignorant to realize that the book is one of the most anti-racist works in American literature (the only sane person is the book is the escaped slave Jim).
For heaven’s sake, John, grow up: it is your side that is today trying to gut the First Amendment, e.g., by Mann’s illegitimate lawsuit against Steyn.
Thanks to the FOIA and the diligence of modern historians, we now know a great deal about secret informants, anonymous denouncers, smearing, and suppression …
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51uhoO3BlsL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
… and the historical evidence isn’t pretty.
Conclusion To a certain class of mind, ideas are threatening.
It is a pleasure to help slake your thirst for historical knowledge, physicistdave.
https://muckrock.s3.amazonaws.com/news_photos/fireman.png
Well…
The Venona Project proved that McCarthy was essentially correct.
There are some stylist issues with his approach. But in the 50s the Soviets informed their US handlers to stop recruiting from the Commerce department because they had too many spies already. The people who claimed McCarthy was wrong were liars.
Given the number of weapon designs and other information stolen there was an issue and is still an issue with spying.
Global warming is a perfect example of the sort of lunacy the Russians would encourage if they wanted to undermine the US.
John, I hope in your communist utopia they don’t have any conformity rules, political correctness, mandatory “political re-education” programs or secret police files. I’m sure you have already thought this all through before devoting your life to it.
Climate Etc readers seeking a science-respecting account of the hopes and tragedies of the Soviet era will find a wonderful source in Francis Spufford’s highly acclaimed account (by pundits of all political persuasions) Red Plenty
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “The battle-line between good and evil goes right down the middle of every person’s heart.” Spufford’s Red Plenty shows us (in very great detail) how Solzhenitsyn’s humility-inducing principle applies to even to the best-hearted mathematicians, scientists, and engineers … both past and future.
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“Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.”
I think that Jerry Sandusky’s character has been defamed here.
Very interesting. I just bought Mark’s book and can’t wait to read it. Heard him on Glenn Beck last week. Saw Dr. Curry’s name on the first page and thought it was familiar. Have been reading her posted articles and blog. I have been skeptical of the hockey stick and other “schtick” that Al Gore presented in “An Inconvenient Truth” from the start. That he’s a politician should have been anyone’s first clue that something was fishy. Anyway, please keep up the good work, Dr. Curry, etal.