Slashdot Mirror
Second Inquiry Exonerates Climatic Research Unit
mvdwege writes "After being cleared of charges of misconduct by a parliamentary committee, now the CRU has the results of the inquiry (PDF) by a panel of scientists into their scientific methods. Here is the CRU press release. Criticisms: The statistical methods used, though arriving at correct results, are not optimal, and it is recommended future studies involve professional statisticians if possible; and the CRU scientists are lacking somewhat in organization. A very far cry from the widespread allegations of fraud. It seems 'Climategate' is ending with a whimper."
All the skeptics are just going to cry cover up. All the people who accepted climate change will just go on accepting it. And nobody will do anything about anything because apathy rules.
1. Make all your data available to anybody.
2. Make all your analysis software available to anybody.
The point of science is to let other try to replicate your experiments and analysis to see if they get they same answer. When CRU starts doing these things, wake me up. I'm not really interested in what blue-ribbon committees of politicians think of their science.
Woo-hoo!
HAND.
...when they're exonerated by a panel of scientists who are NOT connected to renewable energy sources, environmentalist groups, conservation movements, carbon trading etc. That is to say, physicists, statisticians, and real mathematical modellers. In general people who are not doing science because it suits the environmental fancy they picked up in the 1980s and who are not willing to overlook glaring problems with their results (like a disappearing medieval warm period) simply because the results confirm their preconceived notion of impending catastrophe.
It's ending with a whimper all right - a whimper is all that will show up on the news media outlets that trumpeted the e-mails to high heaven.
This is what always happens. "Amazing discovery! Free energy within five years!" gets front page headlines, but "Scientists retract bullshit claims that nobody in the field believed in the first place" gets put on page 40, right after the obituaries.
That's okay though, because the e-mails have already served their purpose; I'm sure we'll be hearing that moronic refrain of "hide the decline! Hide the decline!" for the next three or four years, regardless of its basis in reality. All that really matters is that the initial narrative was sufficiently plausible to gain a life of its own.
Who cares?
This ain't rocket surgery.
No matter how much evidence you provide for the innocence of these researchers, the paranoid will simply decry the people conducting the investigation as "part of the conspiracy".
That's the major problem with the anti-AGW group. If they could point to any legitimate research that was submitted to peer review and survived dissection by experts which punched holes in AGW, they would have done so by now. Instead they rely on simply muddying the waters with screams of deceit and conspiracies, essentially propaganda to confuse the laymen. And unfortunately those who are simply inclined to not want to spend any more money, whether it be to save the environment or provide for the health of the poor, will lap up the lies and spit them out as if they were gospel.
I see the same ridiculous, already debunked arguments used by anti-AGW people on this forum every time one of these articles comes up. They don't read for information. They post and run away. There are many moderators who simply mod informative posts down just because the science completely disagrees with what they want reality to be. There's no pleasing them.
... where to get off on multi-trillion dollar decisions.
This is a whitewash. Like the other recent "investigation", they didn't bother asking any of the IPCC's substantive critics what was wrong with their methods, failed to observe that, years after the Wegman report, that their recommendations still hadn't been heeded, and that fundamental problems with process, data, and code remain.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Check out the recor from GE where man made climate change is explained in all detail http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuV0crHDkmY#t=7m38s Support me http://www.rincker.nl/index.php?Page=147
The Panel was not concerned with the question of whether the conclusions of the published research were correct. Rather it was asked to come to a view on the integrity of the Unit's research and whether as far as could be determined the conclusions represented an honest and scientifically justified interpretation of the data. The Panel worked by examining representative publications by members of the Unit and subsequently by making two visits to the University and interviewing and questioning members of the Unit. Not all the panel were present on both occasions but two members were present on both occasions to maintain continuity. About fifteen person/days were spent at the University discussing the Unit's work.
So... we didn't look into whether their numbers were right. We looked over their published papers and chatted with them a couple of times and they seem like forthright folks. We won't tell you who was there each time - that would be too much disclosure.
No whitewash here. Oh, no. Further:
We have not exhaustively reviewed the external criticism of the dendroclimatological work, but it seems that some of these criticisms show a rather selective and uncharitable approach to information made available by CRU.
So people who want hard numbers, underlying datasets and provenance of data are being "uncharitable".
In the latter part of the 20th century CRU pioneered the methods for taking into account a wide range of local influences that can make instrumental records from different locations hard to compare. These methods were very labour intensive and were somewhat subjective.
The methods were subjective? This is science? Maybe it's me. Maybe I don't understand the term "science".
We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians.
Here we go. That's an axe to the groin there.
We agree with the CRU view that the authority for releasing unpublished raw data to third parties should stay with those who collected it.
Ah, but then they don't need to provide provenance or data. That's so comforting.
I am so mollified by this report I'm left without speech. It seems perfectly reasonable, rational and diligent to me. Let's close this case and begin the Cap&Trade.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
1. Make all your data available to anybody. 2. Make all your analysis software available to anybody. It's called science. Show Spock the money.
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
Hans Reiser led the police to body of the ex-wife he murdered.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Making all their data freely available is impossible, because they "misplaced" it.
Seriously, we've got mirrors of centos and maven that must be terabytes upon terabytes of ISOs...you think CRU has too much data for the world to handle? Really?
Fraud you say ? Don't you think your view lacks a bit of perspective ?
From the report, on dendroclimatology:
"Although inappropriate statistical tools with the potential for producing misleading results have been used by some other groups, presumably by accident rather than design, in the CRU papers that we examined we did not come across any inappropriate usage although the methods they used may not have been the best for the purpose. It is not clear, however, that better methods would have produced significantly different results. "
"With very noisy data sets a great deal of judgement has to be used. Decisions have to be made on whether to omit pieces of data that appear to be aberrant. These are all matters of experience and judgement. The potential for misleading results arising from selection bias is very great in this area. It is regrettable that so few professional statisticians have been involved in this work because it is fundamentally statistical."
"After reading publications and interviewing the senior staff of CRU in depth, we are satisfied that the CRU tree-ring work has been carried out with integrity, and that allegations of deliberate misrepresentation and unjustified selection of data are not valid. In the event CRU scientists were able to give convincing answers to our detailed questions about data choice, data handling and statistical methodology. The Unit freely admits that many data analyses they made in the past are superseded and they would not do things that way today."
On historical instruments reports:
"Like the work on tree rings this work is strongly dependent on statistical analysis and our comments are essentially the same. Although there are certainly different ways of handling the data, some of which might be superior, as far as we can judge the methods which CRU has employed are fair and satisfactory. Particular attention was given to records that seemed anomalous and to establishing whether the anomaly was an artefact or the result of some natural process."
"The Unit has demonstrated that at a global and hemispheric scale temperature results are surprisingly insensitive to adjustments made to the data and the number of series included. "
"Recent public discussion of climate change and summaries and popularizations of the work of CRU and others often contain over-simplifications that omit serious discussion of uncertainties emphasized by the original authors."
In the conclusions:
"We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it."
The issue was that emails from insiders showed that the CRU was sufficiently politicized that the credibility of the institution was destroyed, and that put the research of the CRU in question. Instead of releasing the data, methods and code for their analysis, we are being asked to believe experts, paid by the institution, that the CRU's work is beyond reproach.
All we are given is a press release and a report that contains little to no real data, but does ironically suggests in conclusion 2 that the CRU should release more data and work with professional statisticians. This is the PR equivalent to the Jedi Mind Trick (tm), and will only result in even more scrutiny, and will result in climate change being questioned by even more people. This is why personal integrity and decorum is important in science: this research could be important to humanity's survival but the public now does not believe the research because the researcher's motives and communications seem questionable. Not because the research was bad, but because the way the CRU carried itself.
-- $G
... but I've already commented and haven't had mod points in months, maybe years.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Then again CRU could have been one cell in a world wide scientific fraud conspiracy group intent on world domination.
Clearly it was! First it was the environmentalists. We knew they were up to no good because, well there environmentalists!
Then the scientists said the environmentalists were actually correct. Now we knew the scientist (except for the brave few who agree with us) had joined the conspiracy (if they weren't in on it all along.)
Then when our Russian hacker friends in the Kremlin helped us expose these evil conspiring scientists by cracking the email serves. First a UK parliamentary inquiry clears them. So the UK parliament and the independent judges are also clearly in on the conspiracy.
Now an academic inquiry also tries to white wash joins in. So we know all academics (except for the brave few who agree with us), are in on the conspiracy too!
I'm telling you man, this is BIG!
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
...but they haven't exactly denied it. Strange, hmmmmm?
Show me a scientific field that *wouldn't* be improved by having professional statisticians. Having done neuroimaging studies, I've often been unsure whether we truly were using the best research methods and statistics available. I did, of course, believe that we were doing the studies well, but improvement is certainly possible - this is true in many fields.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
If you listen to Faux "News"
There. Fixed that for you.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
but then if you act stupid no one can confidently claim you're evil... even if you are.
Ellie Arroway: Is it possible that it didn't happen? Yes. As a scientist, I must concede that, I must volunteer that.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I don't care about the environment and I don't care about fraud, just stop putting "gate" at the end of everything!
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
It's not surprising that the climategate allegations have been shown to be false on examination.
The whole thing was a manufactured crisis, in exactly the same sinister sense that the 1 year "WMDs hand-wringing" lead-up to the Iraq War was a manufactured crisis.
It's not surprising that this sort of tactic happens, in a high-stakes political battle (there's trillions of oil dollars at stake after all, hmmm. Sound familiar?)
What is lamentable is the rampant gullibility/willful ignorance of the mainstream media, and hence of much of the general public.
Remember when you couldn't fool all the people all the time? Well, fooling people is now a highly paid, highly skilled profession, so maybe you can now at least fool the majority of the electorate for a long enough time to accomplish the goal, whether you are engaged in an illegal war for control of some oil resources, or a global warming denial disinformation campaign, for control of the right to keep burning as much oil as you feel like.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
We’re all waiting for your next article of course. Dubrovnik Holiday
You have some pretty interesting and novel theories there, why don't you attempt to get some papers published based on your research.
We might find out how optimal your science is too.
I'd like to recommend the book "The Chilling Stars" by Svensmark and Calder. That book explains the role of cosmic rays in cloud formation and how more clouds cool down the planet. The amount of cosmic rays reaching Earth's lower atmosphere depends on our solar system's location in the Milky Way (if there are supernovae in the vicinity or if we're passing through a spiral arm of the galaxy) and the Sun's and Earth's magnetic activities. Magnetic fields repel the electrically charged cosmic rays. To cut it short, it doesn't matter what the CRU emails contained because the whole theory of CO2 being the driver of climate change is incompetent.
1. The panel said their conclusions where correct, yet where is the methodology they used to prove this? Or are they relying on the CRUs methodology to confirm the results of the CRU methodology? Sounds like post hoc ergo propter hoc.
.tar/.zip/.rar whatever and upload it to bittorrent/rapidshare/wikileaks whatever so anyone can access it. At the very least, do not become an impediment to the data's release, as has been shown beyond any reasonable doubt here.
2. Why are they suggesting they need professional statisticians if the conclusions were correct? Are they going to become more correct?
3. How can they know if their conclusions are correct without themselves reconstructing the experiments using the raw data that is now lost?
4. How can they on one hand say that there was no fraud, yet there was obviously an effort to subvert the FOA laws? Is this act somehow made ethical because it cannot be prosecuted?
5. And last of all, if this data and program that created the statistics are as "publicly available" as proponents of the CRU believe, then show me the link. This is the internet; just show me the URL to the data that convinced you that this data really is "publicly available".
6. If raw data is missing, how can they, or these auditors, even check their own calculations to see if the statistical models they used are correct?
And to the obvious responses to 5: Don't give me the run around "oh you can download it from the various sources that they got it from" bullshit, it's not my job to prove the CRU's theory, it's the CRU's job to prove it, all anyone else has to do is sit back and poke holes in the abundant logical fallacies. And if it's so damn important, the fate of the world and all, I would expect some talented CRU proponent, hell, the CRU themselves, to have packaged the whole dataset, including the "deleted" parts, into a XXXgb/tb/pb whatever b size
While I may not be a climatologist, I am a computer programmer, and I can tell when someone has written a program that will produce invalid data, for a non programmer to write a complex computer program, and have the countries of the world base their economies on it just seems insane to me. Would you have a stock broker write the code for the stock exchange? What if they are doing something like adding up temperatures as floats e.g.:averageTemp = (75.88+37.77+22.77...+200 more)/203 to get an average. A layman will look at the calculation and say "that looks great to me!" but even a first year CS student will see the huge problem adding so many floats, maybe the climatologist at the CRU didn't see a problem... But then nobody can really check to see if they have a problem, because they won't show anyone their source code, and subsequently how they even arrived at their conclusions, this alone makes this inquiry suspect. I would like to hear people say "You're not a computer programmer, you don't understand" as frequently as I hear people say "You're not a climatologist, you really don't understand..."
After wading through a hundred posts I can't help but suspect that if we are honest with ourselves, the vast majority of opinions here are merely expressions of confirmation bias: the majority of people posting or moderating are being skeptical or accepting based entirely on whether or not it agreed with their pre-existing model of the universe.
Surely Thom Sawyer & his friend Huck both had to have had a hand in wielding so large a brush as to try to exonerate the scum of the CRU.
And of course Slashdot posts this when I am still asleep.
Not surprisingly, I see a lot of posts from people who didn't bother to read the report and just parrot the standard talking points.
And surprisingly, given the amount of flak he gets, kdawson cleaned up my typos, formatted my URLs a bit better and found a catchier title.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
There are too many falsehoods in this post to correct them all. So just a few outstanding ones.
I guess all those climate change die hards missed Dr. Jones admission that there's not been any evidence of global warming since 1995.
You need at least in the order of 30 years data before you can make a statistically significant statement about the warming (or cooling) trend in climate data. 1995 is not yet 30yrs ago. Jones' "admission" was a simple statement of this statistical fact. Even though most years since 1995 have been warmer, we aren't yet able to make any reasonable statement about the trend.
So much for scientific scepticism that poor Dr. Jones just couldn't find his original hockey stick data that made him famous.
Hockey stick was Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1999. But yes some data at CRU was lost.
You know the one that fails to show any Midevil [sic.] warming period
The "medieval warming period" was a phenomenon localised to northern Europe. Obviously it won't show up on a reconstruction of global temperatures. Duh!
The same BS was going on by some of the same people in the 70s, then predicting this hell all freezing over.
The BS here is that "the same people" or even many/most climate scientists predicted any such thing in the 1970s. Half a dozen papers suggested an ice-age might be imminent against 44 papers which already raised the conjecture of global warming due to anthropogenic carbon.
We agree with the CRU view that the authority for releasing unpublished raw data to third parties should stay with those who collected it.
In the ordinary scheme of things, where science proceeds at a slow and deliberate pace, and the stakes rarely exceed ego and pride and lifetime accomplishment, it would be fine to allow scientists to manage their walled garden as they are accustomed to doing.
In the extraordinary scheme of things where fluctuations so minor they are hard to measure are beating the drum on global policy, and recourse to sober reflection has been staked through the heart with language of imminent "tipping points", this is not good enough.
According to the respected tradition of science, the scientists will soon come to a sober and reliable consensus on AGW 1980-2010, where soon is somewhere between 2050 and 2100.
Cripes, Einstein wasn't awarded a Nobel prize until 1921, sixteen years after his annus mirabilis, roughly the equivalent of winning all four majors in the same year by ten strokes each. Tiger never had a year that good. Gretzky never had a year that good. At the pace that science traditionally moves, Gretzky would be a recent induction to the Hall of Fame, after a sober cooling off period, rather than handing his final game jersey and jockstrap to a burly Scotsman handcuffed to a velvet trunk. The tradition in science is to allow the sweat to dry before inviting posterity to drop in for a look see.
Now that the stakes are so high (apparently), Big Science has slapped 2,500 signatures on a fat report in total contravention of every word of wisdom in Brook's "Mythical Man Month": you can't accelerate solid results by piling on resources or amassing "looks good to me" chits by the basket load. It doesn't work in software, and it doesn't work in science.
If they think this is a viable route to sober consensus, they deserve a level of outside scrutiny that would make NASA blush.
Where did this idea come from that science can function as a miracle short-order chef, just because it has to? I hate to parrot Thomas Kuhn, but he did point out that error in science is weeded out of the system on a generational time scale. Personally, I don't see a huge difference between Harry Markopolous and Stephen McIntyre, Both have a long history of having a sharp eye for dubious claims.
If science thinks they can produce results on a Wall Street time frame, welcome to Wall Street scrutiny, er, I mean the scrutiny we now wish had been in place before it was too late.
Right now we have a natural order and an economic order that are working at cross principals. We can't apply the precautionary principle on both sides of the fence simultaneously. So the debate devolves to which of the two should we F with, and in what proportion? Clamping down on the current economic order out of fear that an effect is major and immediate rather than moderate and mid-horizon has real effects on global standards of living.
It's possible that the environmental scientists are right, which would make their urgency good politics, but still not good science, not until the day that fully disclosed data subjected to the best possible analysis fully supports their conclusions.
Maybe this issue is too important to wait for good science. Nevertheless, under no conditions am I buying into this revisionist agenda as to what good science looks like. If we have to turn to lame science, and that's the best we have, so be it. Meanwhile, I'd be quite pleased to dispense with all this faux identity maintenance by scientists who have clearly overstepped the tradition of sober reflection, no matter if for the best of reasons.
Big Oil has a billion dollar a day turnover and they don't have FOIA. Big Climate has to spend 90% of their millions a year on satellites which aren't cheap and they have to deal with FOIA.
As a footnote, I read this the other night and was quite impressed with it. This will mostly appeal to slashdotters with low digit IDs and mild Aspergers, if such a creature exists.
The Art and Science of Cause and Effect
Note that he takes a long view of science as I do. The key slide that just popped into mind is slide 49 with the text:
However, carve a chunk from it, say the object part, and we can talk about the motion of the hand CAUSING this light ray to change angle.
The precautionary principle is fundamentally interventionist. However, the focus of precaution is necessarily a human construct, which depends upon how the image is sliced. This claim is heavily supported in the presentation as a whole.
This insight courtesy of Judea Pearl, who is becoming known as one of the giants of AI. He's a major influence on the recent work of Daphne Koller. Under no circumstances check out the accomplishments of Daphne Koller if you're feeling low about your productivity in the recent week or decade. She's just polished off a nice 1,200 page tome http://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Graphical-Models-Principles-Computation/dp/0262013193/">Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning). I'd rush out to buy this, but I'm not sure my ego can handle the blow.
One of the big problems with this inquiry was the papers the examined. They examined a small subset chosen by an unpublished method which conveniently didn't include any of the most controversial papers.
OK, so I read the file the parent linked and what a shocker.
Some quotes
OH FUCK THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm :
hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform
data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found.
I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can't get far enough
into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and
semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog.
I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections - to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more.
Now, this is a clear indication that the standard deviation limits are not being applied.
Which is extremely bad news. So I had a drains-up on anomauto.for.. and.. yup, my awful
programming strikes again. Because I copied the anomdtb.f90 process, I failed to notice
an extra section where the limit was applied to the whole station - I was only applying
it to the normals period (1961-90)!
Probably the worst story is temperature, particularly for MCDW. Over 1000 new stations! Highly
unlikely. I am tempted to blame the different lat/lon scale, but for now it will have to rest.
If I fix that, I get:...14 stations LESS than the previous exercise. That'll do, surely? It's not going to be easy to find 14 missing stations, is it? Since the anomalies aren't exactly the same. Should I be worried about 14 lost series? Less than 2%. Actually, I noticed something interesting.. look
at the anomalies. The anomdtb ones aren't *rounded* to 1dp, they're *truncated*! So, er - wrong!
The problem is that the synthetics are incorporated at 2.5-degrees, NO IDEA why, so saying they affect ;0)
particular 0.5-degree cells is harder than it should be. So we'll just gloss over that entirely
So, under /cru/cruts/version_3_0/fixing_tmp_and_pre/custom_anom_comparisons, we have a
'manual' directory and an 'automatic' directory, each with twelve 1990 anomaly files. And
how do they compare? NOT AT ALL!!!!!!!!!
46137
I'm a compulsive liar, your insensitive clod!
Title should be "*second* inquiry wastes more time and research energy legitimising continued intellectually bankrupt sceptic campaign against climate change science". Why are we expending so much energy engaging with people who will not engage with the research, besides to nitpick? The more legitimacy we give to these idiots the more they gain credibility with the public, the more governments lose the political willpower to do anything whatsoever, the more we screw ourselves over.
Well, i looked through (a few) files of the code which was released with the other emails. And if that coding style and clarity says anything it's this: We're totally fucked.
Never attribute to malice that which can be equally explained by incompetence
Sadly, mud sticks.
The denialists know this.
But that's not how 99.9% of people will remember it. It's the 'bang' that got their attention. And that's really all that matters anymore.
This is a sig. It is like every other sig in the world, except that it is mine, and it is different.
I bet there isn't a sciencetific group in the world whoose statistical methods would look great under scrutiny hindsight is always 20/20
Sadly, a lot of damage is already done to the climate cause. The idea that these (and therefore, by extension, other) scientists are prone to manipulating their data to get the answers they want is now firmly entrenched in the public mind.
As an example, just he other day some colleagues of mine were discussing climate change, and when someone mentioned climategate, and how "those scientists" had tampered with their data, the response was a chorus of agreeing, everybody-know-THAT kind of nods. And these were all college/university graduates. Pretty depressing.
He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning)
There, I feel better now.
Here's another postscript. Edge Foundation way back in 1999 ran a question with some historical depth.
EDGE: What Is The Most Important Invention?
From my notes: Joseph Traub, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, David Shaw, David Myers, Milford H. Wolpoff, John McCarthy, Philip Brockman, Howard Rheingold, Samuel Barondes and John Rennie all put forward the scientific method or some variation on scientific progress, alongside all the usual votes for the pill, the printing press, the a-bomb, digital electronics, and hay.
Around the time of that survey, a lot of people convinced themselves that this new model for managing a company (or a software product line) made sense, because that was how the world worked now. No, actually. Even in the dotcom stampede, bad management was bad management. This will hold true of science as well.
The scientific method is way too important in the history of modern civilization to have the IPCC make lite of this tradition in order to win a political grudge match.
Too bad Wolfram used up the title "A New Kind of Science". We could have saved it for IPCC committee reports with 2,500 eminent signatures.
I say this with full conviction that the central human activity of the 21'st century will be paying the piper for high living. I still harbour a dim hope that we'll pay off these days less rashly than we entered into them. Yes, I can see it now. This will all come to pass through a non-contentious political process involving scientific walled gardens, incestuous peer review, and sanctified data hoarding.
in the new york times comment section under the times square blast, i was floored by the number of people seriously believing the bomber was a fall guy, that he was set up, ostensibly by someone with an agenda in the government, to say something malicious about islam, or pakistan, or immigrants, or obama, or whatever
in other words, even when presented with solid evidence contrary to their beliefs, people will still adhere to their beliefs, and invent outrageous hollywood b grade movie plots to explain away solid evidence contrary to their beliefs. in order to preserve their beliefs, even when their beliefs are being directly challenged. instead of rethinking, people push back, even if it means pushing back against reality, with bizarre paranoid schizophrenic conspiracy theories
sometimes i think we're doomed
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Did you just invent two numbers?
Big Climate represents the sources of funds available for climate researchers in an environment where there is alarm. Many of these sources are government organisations. The government effectively has unlimited funds, and will move funds to whichever area seems to present concern. Where you get "90% of their millions a year on satellites" boggles the mind.
If the money that goes to universities and the hiring of underlings and assistants and conference travel grants is 10% of the sattelite money, then this article should indicate that the UK alone has spent far more than £100m on satellites alone: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/search/?queryText=phil+jones+awarded (the £13m which mysteriously is inaccessible here). When you are the head of a unit, having your budget increased by £13m is quite a lot.
And although 'Big Oil' has billions in revenue, you haven't made the case that they provide millions and millions of this to global warming researchers.
While I don't have any numbers, your bizarre numbers are even worse than not having any, which just shows how fruitless even discussion is.
"The statistical methods used, though arriving at correct results, are not optimal, and it is recommended futures studies involve professional statisticians if possible"
You would think that given the gravity of their findings, the seriousness they attribute to the situation, the huge nature of the changes they propose, the affect the actions will have on everyone, the potential devastation to the world economy, etc. etc., that they would have bothered to fucking hire a few professional statisticians . Shoddy and careless is what this is.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"Environmentalism" at the expense of human progress is a hobby that only well-heeled liberal yuppies give a shit about, and after this last recession, there aren't as many of them left...
The standards used by the scientists at the CRU would have barred them from being published in the journals of any rigorous scientific discipline.
That link, HARRY_READ_ME.txt, certainly is a trainwreck of bad organization, bad policy, bad procedure, bad communication, etc., but it's not an example of bad code. We'd have to see the code to say that. What I see from this document is not bad data or incorrect results - just horrific effort getting tools to work.
I see this with developers all the time who don't care enough about their code, its organization and its data - or are ignorant of why that's even important. I can totally see scientists being ignorant of IT and development best practice. Not excusing, just saying it's not as uncommon as many would think.
I agree with the CRU exoneration, however, that likely the results were correct but procedures were horrific. It looks like those guys were hacking around legitimate problems in their tools to produce their data - not manipulating their data.
Selah.ca. Pause, and calmly think on that.
So instead of being dishonest, we are told they just aren't very good at their job. So much for maintaining credibility.
is gullible.
and found we did nothing wrong.
Surprise surprise.
Yeah, they never conspired to lock out research that cast doubt on their piss poor research.
And while acting as reviewers for publications, they never leaked out research papers to AGW parties so they could have an advance shot at rebuttals.
They never conspired to not release their data.
No, these are not the droids you are looking for.
This news will be all over the TV, blogosphere and Internet discussion groups in a matter of hours.
Oh, wait...
(Apologies for using the word "blogosphere")
No sig today...
Here goes my good karma here.
Centuries ago, scientists were oppressed by religion.
Now this area of science has become a religion. Objectivity is gone. We see what we want to see. Discard raw data that doesn't support the hypothesis. Discredit anyone who objectively questions the faith.
Congratulations! You have become that which your greatest dignitaries fought mightily against!
the IPCC reports are the primary driver behind AGW believers. And while there definitely is some peer reviewed science in the IPCC reports, much of it isn't.
one sided?
not peer reviewed?
The one thing climategate did was expose just how "unsettled" the science actually is. The fact that they can't explain the recent temperature decline, and the fact that they've manipulated the presentation of the data to make the 90's heat wave appear drastic, when it actually falls within normal historical bounds, shows us that a much better understanding is required before they can conclude that we're doomed because of CO2 emissions.
The mathematician said, "Never."
The physicist said, "In an infinite amount of time."
The engineer said, "Well... in about a minute and a half, they'll be close enough for all practical purposes."
For example, "chaotic climate" doesn't mean "completely unpredictable climate". It means "prediction precision is limited to a particular range, though maximum and minimum expected values can be derived". Look at the Lorenz Attractor. You can't predict exactly what it'll do, but you can say "It'll be somewhere in this region of phase space."
For some mathematicians, anything less than an exact analytic solution is unacceptable. But engineers and others who have to actually deal with the real world tend to be more accepting of ranges of uncertainty and working heuristics.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
The problem is that the media made it such an big issue it will be hard for people to accept it or even acknowledge it. The huge issue that was made about it has already shaped the thoughts of people and this little footnote will hardly erase that. The thought of fabricated results on climate change regardless whether they accept it or not already exist strongly in people's minds. Its been given such a strong weight by the media it may be the more likely choice when it comes time for decision making on it, i.e. votes, etc.
( Original Post )
Is reduced to a superannuated pop gun, that has lost its cork, the string is frayed and the wood is riddled with dry rot and termites.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
After wading through a hundred posts I can't help but suspect that if we are honest with ourselves, the vast majority of opinions here are merely expressions of confirmation bias: the majority of people posting or moderating are being skeptical or accepting based entirely on whether or not it agreed with their pre-existing model of the universe.
So you are basically saying that nothing can change anyone's opinion and that the efforts of this panel is wasted.
Let me disagree.
Some scientists in some university have been "outed" by some Russian spies and that is supposed to carry some clout about an important debate?
Here we have a panel of trustworthy people duly mandated to investigate the matter. I reproduce Phantomfive's overview of the authors of the report in case you have not read it above. It is well worth it :
From page 7 of TFA:
APPENDIX A
PANEL MEMBERSHIP
Chair: Prof Ron Oxburgh FRS (Lord Oxburgh of Liverpool)
Prof Huw Davies, ETH Zürich
Prof Kerry Emanuel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Prof Lisa Graumlich, University of Arizona.
Prof David Hand FBA, Imperial College, London.
Prof Herbert Huppert FRS, University of Cambridge
Prof Michael Kelly FRS, University of Cambridge
* Prof Ron Oxburgh FRS: a geophysicist, strongly worried about climate change. Worked with Shell and has ties to a number of alternate energy companies.
* Prof. Huw C. Davies: Works in the Institute of Atmosphere and Climate, is a climate modeler. Couldn't find any industry links for him.
* Prof Kerry Emanuel: Professor of Atmospheric Science, is extremely interested in hurricanes and cyclones. Seems to disagree with the IPCC position that hurricanes are increasing because of global warming.
* Prof Lisa Graumlich: Director of the school of Natural Resources and the Environment. Doesn't seem particularly an expert on global warming, but if you want to know what effect a changing climate would have on agriculture, ask her.
* Prof David Hand: a statistician. He's done statistic work for a lot of companies. Doesn't seem to know much about climatology, but he knows more about statistics than I even dreamed existed.
* Prof David Hand: Professor of Theoretical Geophysics. Has publicly criticized the Mann Hockey Stick graph. Also really likes math.
* Prof Michael Kelly: spent a lot of time researching semiconductors. Seems to have no relation to climate science at all, but he is the part-time Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department for Communities and Local Government, whatever that is.
All opinions are not equal. Opinions on the matter of climate change might be difficult to change, and many dishonest persons might choose to believe anything fed to them by professional manipulators, but honest people seeing how dishonest the whole climategate circus has been, might begin to reconsider their views about the large issue.
Given the gravity of their findings, the seriousness they attribute to the situation, the huge nature of the changes they propose, the affect the actions will have on everyone, the potential devastation to the world economy, etc. etc., the AGW crowd has to meet the Gold Standard of scientific evidence.
They have to document every last fact, provide access to all the data, provide the means and methods they used to draw their conclusions, account for every oddity, inconsistency, and anything else that would cast doubt on their conclusions. Their case must be iron clad. They have answer their critics, no matter who they are, thoroughly and in a timely manner...again and again if necessary.
Every aspect of their work has to be meet the highest level of professional standards and scrutiny. You have a conclusion based on statical analysis? It had better be done by a PhD in Statistics. You have a conclusion based on thermodynamics? Only someone with a PhD in that discipline is acceptable. Preferably with decades of experience and unquestionable standing. Cobbling together a little bit of skills here and there is unacceptable, unprofessional , shoddy and careless. Too much you say? Too bad. The stakes are too high for anything less.
You want to change the world? You better fucking bring your A Game.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Last I heard, it was the Physicist who was willing to assume the cow was a sphere...
The statistical methods used, though arriving at correct results, are not optimal, and it is recommended future studies involve professional statisticians if possible; and the CRU scientists are lacking somewhat in organization.
This reminds me of when 60 Minutes ran a story about how George W. Bush had gone AWOL and never completed his flight requirements. The story was based on a rumor and documents that were "forged" clumsily with Microsoft Word. Dan Rather claimed that although the evidence was totally bogus, they supported what was true. So in other words, Rather, as a journalist, believed the story even with no evidence.
Is science becoming faith-based as well? What is science, but the pursuit of knowledge using scientific methods?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
This is like the "no transitional fossils" argument against evolution. Every time you point out one, the deniers insist it's not a transitional fossil and continue the zombie meme of denial. Or the "evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics argument". It doesn't matter how many times you refute this, it will continue on and on as a zombie.
Both climate change and evolutionary biology are similar, right? Both fields are given millions in funding, right? If either one discovers the truth (that neither climate change nor evolution is true), they will lose all that money for their work. Hence, they are suppressing negative data. Neither evolution nor climate change is really science.
Well, that's the argument anyway.
You are right, but so what? If this study were completely wrong, it wouldn't invalidate the mountains of other evidence for global warming. Science exists so that it doesn't matter whether someone agrees with you or not; go to the evidence.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Here's my straw man of AGW, in terms of falsifiability:
1) The warming trend in the late 20th century is unprecedented. This can be falsified by any historical record which shows CO2 rises lagging temperature rises;
2) The warming trend in the late 20th century is caused by man-made CO2 emissions, which create a tipping point with a positive feedback loop. The critical point is 350ppm. Any higher, and we will have constantly increasing temperatures. This can be falsified by either a plateau in the increase of temp or a decrease in temp while we increase CO2 levels, or by showing that any time we had > 350ppm in the fossil record, the temperature ran away into a positive feedback loop and left the earth a burning husk.
Let me state once again, finding more data that supports your theory does not protect it against even a single bit of data that refutes it. Science != consensus. Scientists in the Renaissance could have insisted that gravity accelerated heavier masses more than lighter ones, and gotten loads of evidence to support them. A bowling ball and a feather. Paper and a stone. A bigger paper and a bigger stone. Ad infinitum. None of that data would refute the large bowling ball and small bowling ball falling at the same rate off of some tower.
Science is the highly rigorous application of skepticism. If you can't be skeptical of your own ideas, you really aren't cut out to do science, or even think scientifically.
I don't get this whole global warming thing. Could someone explain it with a car analogy?
And if you look at the NSF's [nsf.gov] board who approves scientific grant research money, you will find that many of the have ties to "green" technologies and have a financial interest in AGW. For example, the first guy on the list, Dan E. Arvizu:
Arvizu serves on a number of Boards, Panels and Advisory Committees including the American Council on Renewable Energy Advisory Board; the Energy Research, Development, and Deployment Policy Project Advisory Committee at the Harvard Kennedy School; the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Alternative Energies; the Singapore Clean Energy International Advisory Panel; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group III; the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Award Corporation; and the Colorado Renewable Energy Authority Board of Directors.
Is it just me or does that look like a list of non-profit/governmental/academic groups? I recognize most of them as such (HENAAC is a nonprofit, even though it has "corporation" in it's name). Please point out which ones are for-profit corporations or associations that represent corporations and provide sources. I can't find any info on ACREAB or SCEIAP.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It's a bit more complicated than that: many are posting not on what agrees with their pre-existing model of the universe, but their pre-existing model of the scientific establishment. For example, I generally believe what the overwhelming number of X scientists say about X, unless there's strong evidence to the contrary.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
...or are you also skeptical of evolution? Then you're just as gullible; you've likely been fooled by your church, or by the Discovery Institute's media machine.
Perhaps you're skeptical of gravity, also? That might be easy to disprove -- just fly.
Yes, scientists are asked to be skeptical of everything, and never claim to have proven anything. If you're skeptical in the scientific sense, of theories in the scientific sense, that's a good thing. If you're skeptical in the philosophical sense, that's some deep thought. But in a practical sense, if you're skeptical of one theory and not another simply because of personal preference, you're a moron.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
No kidding, I can't believe how lightly the whole issue it taken.
The fundamental issue is this, carbon dioxide adsorbs infrared radiation better than the stable constituents that make up the majority of our atmosphere (other than water, of course) so increasing the concentration of CO2 should increase the temperature of the atmosphere (on average, since having a stable climate means there needs to be an equilibrium between radiant energy received and radiant energy emitted).
But, from there we basically know nothing. Moreover the effects of water vapor and weather might mean a reduction temperature, or simply no change, or a much larger effect than we expect. Basically, they have no clue what will happen and they are using unreliable computer models to sell the worst-case scenario in order to justify reductions in CO2 emissions. To me, that is disgusting. They ought to say that the unknown effects of increasing CO2 concentrations warrant efforts to reduce or eliminate CO2 emissions and leave it at that. Anything else is fundamentally dishonest (not to mention completely unscientific).
It would be a stretch, however, to imagine that an engineer would accept global climate models as "good enough" since they are basically wild-ass guesses that have no ability whatsoever to model climate as far as we know.
Theres a few sites on the net that look at the corporate backgrounds of most of Fox's "Experts". Almost all of them are in some way linked to the corporations they comment positively on ...
Given that the way you become an expert in something is to do a lot of it, and these corporations are the ones that do it, it's hardly surprising that the experts in the subject tend to have ties to the companies in question.
And it's also hardly a surprise that the "experts" who testify against the companies in question tend to either have little experience in the field or to be government funded academics - both of which have similar conflicts of interest. The former get support from others opposed to the corporations' activities, the latter have an incentive to keep their government sponsors happy, which involved promoting the expansion of their power.
Expertise - real or perceived - comes with life experience that tends to create conflict of interest and always creates the perception of it.
This is similar to the phenomenon of "regulatory capture" - where the governmental organizations with oversight authority for an industry hire experts in the industry - and end up with people who have ties to the companies and/or an incentive to regulate in their favor to avoid crashing their own careers and/or to get a cushy payoff job once they leave the regulatory organization.
Because you'll always find the perception of conflict of interest when dealing with an "expert" you'll have to make your own determination whether any given one of them has the integrity to tell the truth rather to look out for his own interests, and has the knowledge to know what the truth is.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
However, there are many "fake" skeptics. For fake skeptics, any flaw (and there is always a "flaw" if you look hard enough), no matter how minor, is sufficient to invalidate a result they don't not like (you'll recognize them in this discussion; they're the guys ignoring the fact that the inquiry found CRUs conclusions to be correct and condemning CRU for not having used state-of-the-art statistics to do it.
Yet when it comes to evidence that seems to support their preconceived ideas, fake skeptics are utterly gullible. These are the guys who will tell you, for example, that warming on Mars invalidates global warming, even the evidence that Mars actually is warming is quite weak, and anyway the atmosphere and orbit of Mars is radically different from Earth's.
Please quote the climate change "proponents" who have allegedly said that "the earth has been cooling for the last 15 years."
It shouldn't matter. If the conclusions are robust, they should not depend critically on data from any particular stations. If the conclusions change when a small fraction of the data is deleted, then something is seriously wrong. Of course, every other group that has analyzed climate data, even if the data sets were not exactly identical, has reached comparable conclusions, so it doesn't look like like of robustness is a problem here.
So let's see ... one pack a' agenda_driven neo.Stalinist jazbos finds another pack innocent. "May I be excused yer Honor for observering that a dogs bloody fangs and feathered paw do **not** establish his consumption of Polly parrot. Even tho the dog now crows ---- WRAKKK WRAKKK POLLY WANTACRAKKER --- every time a cracker is passed in front of him. "
So you are basically saying that nothing can change anyone's opinion and that the efforts of this panel is wasted.
I don't think he was making that claim. I think, more than anything, he was just pointing out that slashdot, like so many other discussion venues, has become so polarized that hot-button issues like climate change bring out a lot of dubious claims and ego-stroking on both sides of the debate. I know I've heard some 'dotters older than myself talk about the good ol' days of this website like folk used to have level-headed, rational, discussions in comment threads. I don't know if that was ever the case, but it seems like the OP was simply pointing out that, for some topics, that most certainly is not the case anymore, if it ever was. I don't know that the parent was posting anything about whether or not this inquiry was a wasted effort or not. I think he was just making an anthropological observation of the state that a particular group of his peers (slashdotters) are in right now.
If nothing else, it's an interesting claim to make as polarization tends to be the mode that so many folk in society adopt when discussing certain topics. For some reason, it seems like a lot of folk always buy into a dichotomy-model of politics/religion/philosophy/whatever where they act like discussion has to take the form of, "If you say black, I say white, and there is no grey!"
In a forum like slashdot, where many of the members claim that the general population of the website is, in some way, more scientifically or intellectually capable than the average social population, it is an interesting note to make that, on some topics, said capable population also adopts a dichotomy black vs. white mentality. Personally, I find it fascinating and have observed the same trend myself.
That said, I don't think the parent was trying to claim that nothing should be done about climate science or inquiries regarding climate science. I think he was simply making an observation of the general mentality of the forum. I appreciated the comment.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
I see a ton of posts that point out the review said they came to the "correct conclusion" despite invalid methods.
Aren't we really trying to find out what the "correct conclusion" is?
As such, how can this panel know whether the results are indeed correct?
What is their Oracle for determining that the original research came to the "correct conclusion"?
It is axiomatic that you cannot prove an Oracle with itself. Of course it agrees!
There appear to be numerous serious issues with the underlying data sets involved, from the availability of the raw data used in the models, to the data transforms and justifications of ALL of those transforms, to the actual model they use.
If you care about science, I don't understand how one could just hand wave all that away.
You have possible garbage in, possible garbage heuristics. To top it off, the model produces the same result with noise.
From the outside this all appears technically incorrect. If they would release the raw data, their transforms and reasons for each of them in each step of the process, and their model we could put all this behind us and be on solid ground.
We could then debate the actual merits of the model and the data set used to generate it.
Without that, they may be doing science, but not the kind to base any Policy on.
Massive upheaval of the world's economies, redirection of funds from current humanitarian efforts, the proposed effort to stop global warming has serious consequences in itself. Many will die.
I see people all the time argue about the slow pace of science. And it's true, it does take a long time. But I have to wonder how well they follow the science related to climatology when they use "slow pace" as argument against anthropogenic global warming.
The greenhouse effect was discovered in the early 19th century. Climate sensitivity due to CO2 was first estimated at the turn of the century. The Keeling measurement of atmospheric CO2 was begun in 1958.
Even if we only go back to Hansen's first global temp paper, that was in 1987--now 23 years ago. That's a generation. A kid who was 5 years old when that paper was published would today be old enough to hold a Ph.D. in climatology.
My point is that the science behind climatology has proceeded at a slow and deliberate pace. If you read the ending of the Arrhenius page, you'll get a sense of how far biology has come during the same time period.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The CRU has in their power to silence their critics by full release of the methods, data and code used to perform their analysis. Without all three, there can be *no* independent verification of their results.
I understand that outside of non-scientific "sceptical" community, nobody cares. Because there have been multiple independent studies of similarly obtained data, all of which giving agreeable results. You may take it as evidence of vast conspiracy, but most reasonable people just seem to conclude that it worked, and they didn't make anything up. And, as I said, there are data sets out there, go ahead and run the numbers.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
mvdwege writes
"After being cleared of charges of misconduct by a parliamentary committee, now the CRU has the results of the inquiry (PDF) by a panel of scientists into their scientific methods. Here is the CRU press release. Criticisms: The statistical methods used, though arriving at correct results, are not optimal, and it is recommended future studies involve professional statisticians if possible; and the CRU scientists are lacking somewhat in organization. A very far cry from the widespread allegations of fraud. It seems 'Climategate' is ending with a whimper."
I don't care whether a panel of CNN journalists "exonerates" "clears of charges" "approves" "disapproves" or even "suggests" or "recommends" or a national parliament (the very people who do nothing but shaft us all day, come on!).
-> Fact is the blatant admissions of fraud as well as THREATS made about other scientists who point out the fraud are in the emails. The emails talk candidly about the complete absence of a warming trend the past decade or so and EXPLICITLY how to hide this really "unconvenient truth" from the public. - There are also rants in there what some of the climate cons would like to do to debunkers - those re in terms of taking a baseball bat and beating and kicking the crap out of them.
Not even a panel of mutually accredited accreditors can help with this, even if they're sitting on a panel of accredited boards of accredited councils of accredited task groups (accredited by the self-same accreditors of course).
SO NO: THIS IS NOT going to "die with a fizzle"... ir's a blazing incendiary phosphor blaze that just burns so much brighter and hotter the more you dump whitewash on it.
You're really down to the last few moves on the chess board here, mvdwege und Konsorten.
> the vast majority of opinions here are merely expressions of confirmation bias
Did you do a proper statistical analysis on the data (the hundred posts that you could see at the time), or are you cherry picking through them to confirm your bias towards the theory that people let their biases control their perceptions?
Your straw man of AGW is a bit odd in its emphasis:
1) The warming trend in the late 20th century is unprecedented. This can be falsified by any historical record which shows CO2 rises lagging temperature rises;
First off, this isn't a prediction, but rather a question of historical fact. Second, I'm not sure "unprecedented" is a fundamental aspect of the theory of AGW -- popular media presentation notwithstanding. It seems to me that CO2 concentration is unprecedented however. Third, what does the lead/lag of CO2 vs temperature have to do with the magnitude of the warming trend? Finally, I would just mention that the rate of change is probably the important metric here, not the absolute temperature.
2) The warming trend in the late 20th century is caused by man-made CO2 emissions, which create a tipping point with a positive feedback loop. The critical point is 350ppm. Any higher, and we will have constantly increasing temperatures. This can be falsified by either a plateau in the increase of temp or a decrease in temp while we increase CO2 levels, or by showing that any time we had > 350ppm in the fossil record, the temperature ran away into a positive feedback loop and left the earth a burning husk.
Warming-trend-is-created-by-man-made-CO2 is basically a re-statement of AGW itself, not any prediction thereof. And the "critical tipping point" aspect doesn't again seem to be a fundamental part of the theory. Again, it seems more like the kind of thing that's trumped up in the media. I don't recall any scientists claiming that the earth will end in a burning husk.
I'm really wondering where you're getting these ideas from. They seem like a strange mash-up of anti-AGW memes with no organizing principle and no intention of checking your impressions against any facts.
Also I'm wondering why you're not mentioning some of the clearly obvious falsifiable predictions: Like the fact that earth-climate-models are generated using assumptions about how CO2 affects radiation in the atmosphere, and the implications of models can be compared with current climate data?
finding more data that supports your theory does not protect it against even a single bit of data that refutes it
So what's that "single bit of data" that just kills all hope of AGW? I'm intensely curious.
Give me just one. The real kicker. I don't want a spamming of scattered nitpicks. Go ahead and kill AGW for us once and for all.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
Yes... Nixon's own investigation finds sloppy record keeping...
The investigation determines that Nixon needs to hire a more professional secretary in the future who will be less prone to accidentally erase tapes and he needs to better communicate with the general public who tend to be so ignorant of politics that they suspect the professionals might be up to something.... that whole "tricky Dick" thing... that just refers to a clever and completely above-board technique... nothing to see here... move along
Looks like that whole "watergate" thing will probably end with a whimper rather than a bang...
Hint to the Climate so-called-scientists:
It's always the cover-up that gets you
Stay tuned for all the prosecutions that may arise as people start to follow the money trails...
Sorry, but these CRU clowns make "creation scientists" look respectable and honest
I'm just full of quips today, I guess.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Click the score and it shows right now Moderation +4: 20% insightful, 30% overrated, 10% flamebait. So far that post was modded down 13 times and up 17 times - 30 moderations for one post isn't a record for me but it's got to be in my top 10. I imagine for slashdot as a whole you would have to get several hundred to be in the top 100 most moderated comments. Whatever the merits of this fine article or the comment are the mood is running hot - this is obviously a divisive issue. There will probably be more moderations in the days ahead. That this one post gets so much attention when there are others more worthy of it is interesting to me.
I rarely get mod points anymore either - but when it rains, it pours. I've given up trying to figure it out - I don't really like to moderate anyway, and the moderation system seems to be working ok without my input. I guess if it didn't seem to be working I'd metamod for a few days.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Well, strictly speaking, you can make predictions on what you would find in the historical record (like the rabbit fossil in the Cambrian era that would falsify evolution). I would assert that any theory of AGW should have something interesting to predict about the history of climate.
Actually, it isn't. We're at around 350ppm, and we've got historical evidence showing it as high as 6000ppm (granted, hundreds of millions of years ago, but we've seen as high as 1000ppm during the last geological era.
Causality. You cannot have a lag of CO2 levels if it is a cause, just like you cannot assert that children create their mothers.
Agreed, and the rate of change is not unprecedented either.
The fact that computer models are built with assumptions could possibly lead to falsifiability, if it was asserted that a failure of the model to predict let's say, next year's temperatures, falsified the theory. Unfortunately, the typical response is an ad hoc adjustment (a hard coded fudge factor), which severely reduces the utility of the model in the first place. I would submit that sufficient ad hoc adjustments have been made to the climate models to make their utility minimal at best, and completely misleading at worst.
The killer for me? Well, I'd vote for the lag of CO2 levels, but a close second, which isn't exactly a "single" bit of data, but you could consider it a fatal flaw, is the surface temperature record - http://surfacestations.org/ for more details on that. I'd also lump in with the surface temp record the CO2 ppm metric being used -> Mauna Loa is our standard, which I think is probably a poor way to do the science, since CO2 concentrations, like other gases, are not even throughout the globe. I would expect any model which didn't take into account CO2 concentration variations wouldn't be able to make accurate predictions at all.
GIGO, so if you've got a temperature record that has a maximum resolution of 1 degree C, you certainly can't discern trends of .3 degrees C (just like you can't take any arbitrary digital camera footage and zoom into see that fuzzy guy in the background in full detail).
Now, I'll admit the second one is essentially a spamming of scattered nitpicks, but death by a thousand paper cuts is death nonetheless.
Representative trees came from all the forests around the world to vote on changing the tree aspiration method in order to randomize the growth of bark and rings relative to temperature. This was done to discourage the dendroclimatologists' proclivity for penetrating trees - even the sick, elderly and endangered ones - with painful disease-inducing coreborers in order to extract their data. The keynote speech was given by an extremely revered elder Brislecone pine who had been so raped even though it was an endangered strip-bark tree and its rings had been long known to not contain any useful climate data whatsoever. As is his wont he closed his sparkling 9-day oratory with a joke about a blind squirrel. The vote was 700:5 in favor of moving to a blended available water, fertilizer, sunshine and temperature model with seasonal parasite threats variables that vary by tree species and offers no meaningful climate data. 1238 trees either abstained or were unable to get their votes in on time.
A subcommittee meeting will be held again in 2750 to determine if the practice was effective. (Trees don't travel much, and prefer infrequent meetings.)
Help stamp out iliturcy.
i love how every time i point out the shame these so called scientists should shoulder for their lack of ethics, i'm moderated to -1 with "overrated"... nothing untrue or inflammatory with my post... you just think it is rated too high when it's currently rated AT ZERO.
IGNORANT DENIALIST GARBAGE.
HOW IS ZERO OVERRATED?! RETARDS.
Such is UK government. A third body is looking into the issues. It doesn't look to be packed with warmists, and it is funded and has promised to look into the actual data.
Hopefully we'll see some truth yet.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Read the CRU's own data mangler commenting on his massaging of the data. You can not read that log and not assign the credibility of reports built on that data any more confidence than "rough guess" - barely better than "complete swiff". Certainly not enough to assert that "the argument is over, the science is proven, there is no doubt." By his own account he's making stuff up in the worst case and curve fitting in the average case.
Curve fitting is fine when you're developing a theory for what happened to be validated by further observations. When your data is temporal (point in time observations that can't be replicated because the time of observation is part of the data) and the further observations don't agree with your curve you don't save the theory by saying it doesn't work with forward observations, but only with temporally backward ones but it still creates a cause for action NOW. When that happens you throw out the disproved theory and try to build a new one that agrees with the available data, and wait for some time to get confirmation from future events before moving forward with an action plan. If necessary it's OK to abandon prior temporal third-party measurements as inaccurate if that leads to predictable future phenomena. At least that's how science used to work back when I was in school. Maybe we have New Science now and I'm not up to date.
And yes, I have some serious questions about the validity of measuring the mean temperature of a day by two datapoints - the minimum and maximum. I have even more serious questions about the quality of such observations in periods prior to the invention of the datalogger that measures data continuously because in that time we rely on timed measurements by people who checked their thermometers twice each day at the same time when they were able to read the thermometer in the appointed place and at the appointed - and inconvenient - hour. With measurements that vary by one degree per century on the average, there must necessarily be some questions about rounding versus truncating also.
At best the quality of this data is not good. At worst it's not representative of the thing they're claiming it measured.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Over time the observation stations move closer to city cores or cities move closer to them - and cities are known to be warmer than rural areas. It's called the Urban Heat Island effect, or UHI. The observation stations also move lower in elevation, and south. There are even serious questions about the physical locations where the historical data was gathered. The charts don't adjust for these known biases, and the motivation behind that lack is the reason people suspect the provenance of the unpublished data.
These folk aren't building nuclear weapons. They're measuring the temperature of the day at various points. The temperature of the day today isn't a state secret, and it most certainly isn't for days in the distant past. There is no reason why they cannot publish the observations they use to make their models, except that they promised not to share observations of temperature in the distant past. They should not use data derived from such sources because it is not credible.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The data is known to be bad. Their own data mangler said so in his log.
Today we have awesome temperature measurement tools. I can, for example, prepare a collection of 16 T-type thermocouples calibrated with NIST instruments to within .05C, and use those to sample the air temperature at a point two meters above ground on the verge of a forest in the shade at intervals of once each second. Doing so I can derive the averaged measured air temperature at that point in those conditions within .01C but those 1.4 million measurements per day would not give me a lock on the climate of the day, let alone the era if discarded all but the greatest and the least. Almost certainly neither the median nor the mean temperature of the day will be (Max+Min)/2 within three degrees C. If the next day a city moves closer to me, that's an input not measured on my log. Most certainly the resolution of this measurement will not bear extrapolation over 35000x (a century) to within fractions of a degree C.
You see, air temperature is a very fungible thing. The temperature of the air tells you very little about its energy potential unless you also know the barometric pressure and the humidity - and the net energy potential of the air is the actual thing that climatologists should be hoping to measure. We're ignoring those factors now because the climatologists don't have historical records for them. Well net energy potential and the CO2 percentage that helps drive photosynthesis are keys to understanding what is happening in climate.
As for the change in tree behavior in 1960, I've posted about that.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Sorry about the truncated subject. Character length limits and all.
Here's the post you had issues with:
Even modern climate scientists agree that the Earth should now be cooling. That's a huge part of their objection - that manmade warming is preventing the onset of a global ice age that is due. We should, according to them, embrace the natural reality of shrinking arable land and expansion of glaciers because that is the natural course according to their calculations. The warming of the Earth must be prevented even if we benefit from it.
And of the billions who would starve to death in that course? They don't figure. Rounding errors. Casualties of math.
Explain that to them.
I said it then and I'll say it again: the warmist problem is that Men are by their activity preventing an ice age that is due, and they think that's not natural and so it is bad. As for the billions who would die in the onset of an ice age - they consider them collateral damage - insignificant in the course of restoring the natural balance of ice.
Whether the warmists win or not, the ice will come. The Earth's orbit ensures it and what CO2 we blanket ourselves with can only delay the inevitable. It were best if we got off the dependency on terrestrial air temperatures - preferably somewhere in the Asteroid beld.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'll give you a 10 of 10 for factual, and another 10 for depth of inference even if they were somewhat oblique. Perhaps you were projecting an audience from a prior era of slashdot - today the audience is more common. For accessibility you get a 2 because that was difficult to work through and long. Also for references you get a 0 because there are no links.
Your post was brilliant even though it was painful to read and unreferenced. A solid 7 out of 10.
Start next time with an intriguing hook and use it to draw us into your thinking, and put your links in your comment rather than in the replies.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The steps that these scientists would have us make involve trillions of dollars. It's not enough that they are confident of their numbers. They must offer proof. The word "proof" obviously involves a more rigorous standard than that to which you are accustomed, at least in the financial case.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Bullshit. You said "modern climate scientists agree that the Earth should now be cooling", which is a blatant lie.
What serious problems? None, that's what.
Neither were FOIA avoided illegally.
Neither was data hidden.
Neither was reproducibility blocked.
so says the high priest of Global Warming. Do some independent research, and you will see:
1. temperatures have declined for the past decade.
2. how many articles the IPCC has referenced that weren't peer reviewed.
3. how many peer reviewed articles the IPCC ignored because they cast doubt on the "science is settled" mantra.
4. how they removed the medieval warm period from the charts because it was as warm or warmer as the '90s.
So your and his work is pointless. Cool. Stop doing it then.
Or at least remember your words when next you ask for a grant and are cut or refused. Your work isn't as important because it won't affect much.
How many times can an AC be wrong? Before you can call him a troll?
1) We know they weren't leaked: leaks are protected by whistleblower and leakers don't hack into other machines to seed their leaked info
2) you do know because the "we've fiddle this" program puts "this is fiddled data" in the graph it prints. No such report has that label on its data
3) how do you hide a decline in temperatures by using a proxy of temperature rather than a thermometer?
4) the trick is well known and accepted. "Trick of the trade" doesn't imply mendacity.
As to your claim of newness in the emails, they contained no new information except that there were more words said. Nothing new was found.
Holocene Optimum.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'll just mention a few things quickly about the CO2 lagging temperature issue:
1) Basic logic: If you're trying to disprove "A if B" you can't use "A and not B" -- you need to have "B and not A." In other words, temperature rising without CO2 rising first does not disprove that CO2 rising wouldn't cause temperature to rise. But if you saw CO2 rising *without* temperature rising, it would (well, it would be a stronger argument -- it's still a complex system and would need more analysis). AFAIK, that doesn't exist in the record.
2) There are many things that can cause temperature to rise, CO2 concentration being only one of them. This is reflected in the climate models and current theory. In the ancestral record, IIRC, orbital variations trigger the initial rise in temperature. Rising temperatures then cause the oceans to release more CO2, and according to models, that CO2 has a feedback effect making the hot periods longer and hotter than they would be without it.
3) After the industrial revolution, you DO see CO2 rising first, then temperatures following. The whole point is that every climate model ever made cannot account for the recent rise in temperature without using the greenhouse effect from that CO2 rise, even taking natural non-man-made forcings into account. That's the essence of AGW.
If someone could create a complete earth climate model that predicted all observables as well as the AGW models but did not show a large effect from man-made CO2 (ie, take it out of the model and most of the warming is still there), then I'd be interested. As far as I know, this does not yet exist.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
And stop putting words in my mouth. I said it's COMPLEX. I didn't say it behaved DIFFERENTLY. Just as an example, how does CO2 circulate through our atmosphere? Does the circulation of CO2 play a role in transportation of heat into the upper atmosphere? How about when compared to how other greenhouse gases circulate? Is it possible that CO2 can transfer heat into the ocean? Or from the ocean? What about other greenhouse gases? Are there so many other effective GHG's in our atmosphere, that CO2 doesn't realize it's full potential as a GHG? What if the increase in CO2 in our atmosphere is offset by the accompanied increase in surface area of our atmosphere. What if the increased surface area and corresponding increase in heat loss EXCEEDS the increased greenhouse effect?
The point is, there are far too many variables in our atmosphere to account for. The only way to determine how the system works is to measure as much as we can, observe, measure some more, correlate, and hope we can find a model that's accurate. That hasn't happened so far, which means there's more to consider than just the fact that "CO2 is a greenhouse gas when we put it in a jar".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Garita_Caldera
http://www.junkscience.com/images/paleocarbon.gif
Although the resolution isn't close enough to hundreds of years to really see anything comparable to the ice core data we have that shows an 800 year lag, you can get an idea of the lack of temp change after such an enormous amount of CO2 released circa the La Garita Caldera supervolcano. I understand that this is only a preliminary refutation based on your assertion that this kind of data would be a problem for AGW, but it certainly shows it is possible.
That's not true, and you know it. The standard AGW talking point is that after taking all known drivers into consideration, we cannot explain all the observed warming, therefore it must be due to man.
PV = nRT. The temperature on Venus has nothing to do with runaway global warming, it has everything to do with atmospheric pressures. Try again.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/08/venus-envy/
Again, a model cannot be its own proof. Statistics can tell us a certain number of rocks dropping into a pond will be correlated with a certain number of ripples, but it does not show us that ripples cause dropping rocks.
On the contrary, the observed warming is consistent with the known and modeled effects of CO2 on climate, so it is not unexplained. Indeed, nobody has yet managed to come up with a model that is consistent with historical climate data and does not predict warming in response to such an increase in CO2. Other data--the chemistry of combustion, statistics on energy derived from combustion, changes in the isotopic composition of atmospheric CO2, confirms that the increase in CO2 is attributable to human activity.
You aren't seriously trying to explain the temperature of Venus based on the ideal gas law, are you? That is scientifically illiterate. Yes, if you compress a gas, it will warm up, but it will not stay warm unless it is in a perfectly insulated container. Venus is not in a perfectly insulated container--it radiates energy to space, so its temperature must be described by an energetic steady state--and there is no way to explain the high temperature of Venus other than the greenhouse effect of CO2. Once again, you have been led astray by a handwaving argument. This is the sort of flagrant error that people fall into when they do not subject their ideas to the "sanity" check of a detailed mathematical model.
I would caution you against getting information from a crank site like wattsupwiththat. It is a laughing stock among scientists, because it frequently publishes this kind of scientifically illiterate nonsense, and because it censors any criticism from real scientists, it is easy for nonscientists to be fooled. To anybody with a basic understanding of thermodynamics, pV=nRT as an explanation of the temperature of Venus is pretty funny.
Mathematics can prove a theory wrong--such as your own belief that "If CO2 has the same effect no matter where it comes from, you can't have lags -> CO2 emitted, whether from oceans in response to solar changes, or from supervolcanoes or model T fords, always acts as a positive feedback effect and raises temperatures. Lags wouldn't exist if CO2 amplified the increase in temperature, since whatever triggered the initial CO2 release, you'd end up with a positive feedback effect."
You can inspect the actual models, and run them yourself. You will find that they do include this positive feedback, do not make some sort of magical distinction between "natural" and "human" CO2, and do not necessarily result in "runaway" warming. What you are expressing is an example of the sort of error that people fall into when they do not subject their thinking to the discipline of careful mathematical modelling.
The major role of modeling in science is not to "be its own proof," but rather to help to provide a sanity check to detect errrors. There are many ideas that sound superficially plausible, but can readily be shown to be false mathematically.
Obviously, you have been duped by the Vast International Conspiracy to Make American Conservatives Feel Bad!
When 90% of scientists from the related field and 90% of all scientists agree on something, we call that a "scientific consensus". When the "skeptics" can only counter the prevailing view with laughably bad "research" that hinges on "honest mistakes" like getting degrees and radians mixed up, it's hard to take the conspiracy theorists seriously.
BZZZT. Wrong. The modeled effects are derived from the assumption that any unknown drivers must be due to human emitted CO2. Again, the model cannot be its own proof.
Historical climate data shows increase of CO2 in response to warming, not the other way around. Your prediction does not match the observations.
BZZZT. Wrong. RTFA again: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/08/venus-envy/
And another one if you dislike WUWT: http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/05/hyperventilating-on-venus.html
Regardless if an atmosphere is a insulated container or not, the pressure versus temperature relationship of an atmosphere still holds - gravity acts as your container here. Now, have fun explaining how Mars has 95.2% CO2 atmosphere, but never had any runaway global warming. Have fun, think hard, it helps.
Which model is your favorite? And you were the one making the distinction between lags and leads of CO2 based on whether or not it was "added" or "not added", not me.
Ah, Mencken, "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. " AGW seems to fit that bill perfectly.
Look, if you can accept that the model is simply a sanity check and not proof, you're half way there. A proof of causality requires a falsifiable proposition, not simply statistical correlations (sketchy or not). Accepting your statement at face value, yes, you may not have a model that proves your theory of catastrophic AGW driven by CO2 emissions wrong, but your model does not give us any confidence that it is right either.
Repeating a falsehood does not make it true. When the ability of CO2 to produce global warming was predicted more than a century ago, well before the big rise in CO2 and the warming that accompanied it, it is ridiculous to refer to this as an "unknown driver."
See the reference cited above. The prediction that an increase in CO2 would warm the climate long predates the big rise in CO2 and the modern warming.
Read it. ROFL. For some comments from people who actually understand elementary physics, see here and here
Only if you are inside a black hole does gravity prevent heat from escaping in the form of electromagnetic radiation. So the notion that the temperature of Venus can be explained by adiabatic heating is in violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics (Conservation of Energy).
Think hard? This is pretty trivial. This sort of thing is confusing only if you don't actually do the math. It's not the percentage of the atmosphere that is CO2 that determines the warming effect, but the partial pressure. The partial pressure of CO2 in the Martian atmosphere is over four orders of magnitude lower than on Venus, because even Mars's atmosphere is mostly CO2, there is less CO2 than in the Earth's atmosphere.
Doesn't really much matter, since they are all based on the actual physics, without the flights of fancy you've been advocating. All have a positive feedback between CO2 and temperature, so that CO2 will follow warming if solar output increases, and warming will follow CO2 if CO2 is added to the atmosphere (e.g. from combustion). And none of them give a runaway greenhouse with anticipated levels of CO2.
Yes, so far all we have is a theory that passes the sanity check of mathematical modeling (which none of the objections to CO2 induced global warming have managed to do) plus a prediction, over a century old, that increased CO2 would produce warming, and observed warming that matches predictions, plus a large mass of historical and prehistorical data that also is consistent with the theory.
It's not surprising that the anti-AGW people avoid coming up with an actual model, because they probably know, subconsciously (and I suspect in some cases consciously) that it would sound ridiculous. It would have to go something like this:
1. There is some, as yet undiscovered, mechanism that limits the warming effect of CO2 on the atmosphere.
2. The apparent increase in average temperatures that has accompanied the modern rise in CO2 is either
a. The result of multiple separate statistical errors in land measurements, sea measurements, and satellite measurements; the fact that they all seem to show warming is sheer coincidence, or
b. The result of some as yet unidentified (but NATURAL!!) warming mechan
How about "unknown quantity". The common refrain of catastrophic AGW folks is that any "left over" warming after accounting for other natural drivers and their magnitudes is that human created CO2 is therefore responsible for the rest.
The prediction doesn't match the observations. Continually increasing CO2 has not been lock step with temperature increases. Furthermore, the ice core record shows a CO2 lag, rather than lead.
You're confusing cause and effect here, and ignoring the external heat source. The planet holds its atmosphere, which reaches an equilibrium of temperature based on solar input and escaping radiation (small quantities are probably due to geologic activity as well, but let's put that aside for the moment). The atmosphere, just like any other gas, obeys the law PV=nRT. Fluid dynamics aside of convection and heat transfer intra-atmosphere, the law still holds. The thought that simply the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere is what drives hundreds of degrees of temperature is simply foolish, and falsified by Mars.
Think again, a little harder :)
Okay, pick one and stick with it. You're arguing my point now -> it's about pressure, not ppm of any given gas.
Doesn't really matter? Wow, way to hedge your bets :) Look, positive feedback working when CO2 increases following warming if solar output increases will cause further warming, so it should look just like warming caused by "added" CO2 -> in both cases, you're going to see a lead, in fact an ever increasing lead.
Consistent only because you want it both ways -> if you see a lag, it's "consistent", if you see a lead, it's "consistent". You've made no predictions.
It's called negative feedback effects like cloud albedo.
Actually, it's most likely due to UHI.
Hard predictions? Which one? And since when does your statistical model determine causality if any observation fits your model?
It is, as you say, a "sanity check", one that generally applies quite well.
You're playing causality now when you shouldn't be -> pressure is related to temperature. Whether or not you increased pressure with more mass (and it takes a while to radiate the heat out of the atmosphere), or if you heated up the temperature (which therefore increases pressure), is irrelevant to the basic relationship, which well accounts for observations of temperature on Venus. This relationship doesn't assert causality, it simply is.
For insulation purposes, you simply have to quantify the heat radiation from Venus to understand that the temperature/pressure relationship is a good sanity check.
Agree with the first one with just a few caveats -> primarily from the sun but also a bit form the interior of the planet. The second one is pretty much making my point though -> CO2 is hardly an inefficient radiator compared to say, water vapor. The catastrophic AGW story is that a small adjustment in CO2 causes forcings of water vapor (while ignoring things like cloud formation and negative feedbacks).
You do realize that ppm == parts per million, right?
Thank you, finally, we've gotten back to Popper. Understanding that idea is very important. Now, explain which observations would disprove your theory. Be specific and include quantities, not just direction.
Which has been done. Certainly out of the dozen or so models out there, only one has been "true" for the past 20 years, say, and the others must be "false", right?
Oh wait, if the models don't make any real predictions, then no observation is inconsistent with them, right? So we could have every model "true" for any set of observations! Cool science, huh? :)
And the same relationship holds between Earth and Venus -> the partial pressure of CO2 on earth is much much less than on Venus. Temperatures as they exist on Venus would be impossible on earth, even if the earth's atmosphere was 100% CO2. Our gravity well will only hold so much atmosphere, and we could never reach the pressures necessary to have the kind of temps Venus has.
So tell me, what's your upper bound of average global temperature if you had a 100% CO2 atmosphere? Pick your favorite model, and walk us through your assertion.
And no atmosphere -> like I
Here's a post you might like tgibbs:
http://www.ianschumacher.com/greenhouse_effect_maximum.html
His analysis of the saturation point saw tooth of warm periods and ice ages is particularly interesting.
Although probably not applicable to our generation or even thousands of generations down the line, eventually humans are going to have to try to stop the next long ice age.
More on the saturation limit of any greenhouse effect on earth:
http://met.hu/idojaras/IDOJARAS_vol111_No1_01.pdf
Enjoy tgibbs!