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Virginia High Court Rejects Case Against Climatologist Michael Mann
ananyo writes "The Virgina Supreme Court on Friday tossed out an investigation by the state's conservative attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, into Michael Mann, the former University of Virginia climatologist whose work on the now-famous hockey-stick graph has become a lightning rod for climate skeptics. 'In a dense and conflicted 26-page ruling (PDF) covering a century and a half of case law — including references to kings as well as modern "functional incongruities" that divided the judges themselves — Virginia’s high court ruled that the university is not a "person" and thus is not subject to Cuccinelli’s demands under the state’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act.' The 'climategate' scientist has been cleared of wrongdoing by a number of investigations."
Everybody's got an agenda.
There is no fact.
Hopefully it at least sends a warning to academics in a similar position -- keep your nose clean when spending taxpayer money, and don't conspire to avoid complying with FOIA requests.
Interesting-- so corporations are persons, according to the Supreme court, but universities aren't, according to the Virginia court.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” – Ernest Rutherford
And that is if you're using statistics without hiding the decline and thus distorting the alleged science claims.
I'm sure CERN will be thrilled to know that they're disqualified from being scientists.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
The decision is made, but the university had stated before the case that they could not find documented asked for via FOIA.
During the case the university magically found them.
So now they can be asked again for those documents and more information can come to light on how this 1 study magically invalidated 1900+ pieces of peer reviewed science over the course of 300 years. A win for science in the end.
If a scientist at CERN fabricates data to support their claim then yes he/she/they would be committing scientific fraud and if that fraud gets them more grant monies, as in the case of Dr. Michael Mann, then it graduates to financial fraud.
Most scientists actually show their work. Mann did not. Heck he can't even reproduce it. He can't even show others his work. It took years of sleuthing by many to uncover the details and depths of Mann's frauds in his Hockey Stick Statistical Lies.
If as a scientist you fabricate data to support your claims then you're not qualified to be a scientist, a con artist maybe, but not a scientist.
Everybody's got an agenda.
There is no fact.
Yeah, and everyone has a bias.
But that's absolutely no reason to ignore what folks have to say and many times, there's a system in place to compensate for one's bias - like peer review.
From the decision:
Government is above the law. All hail the king. Welcome to Braveheart.
"If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment." - a stupid sentiment, regardless of who said it.
Anyhow, your assertions have been investigated and found to be false.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
No, political whitewash investigations did not even get into the actual frauds committed by Mann et al.. In fact they went out of their way to ignore and avoid the facts. The very questions asked in the inquiries showed that.
Obviously you've not followed the case beyond the fluff political whitewash.
You do know how easy it is to lie with statistics don't you? Oh right scientists can do no wrong in your world view and we should dispense with reproducibility of their claims and take them on faith. Right.
Mann is a master at lying with statistics.
As is Dr. James Hansen of NASA GISS, fabricating many temperature readings using 1,200 km and 250 km radius circles for a temperature station as if it's temperature represents accurately all the area in those circles. Then he passes off these graphs as if they are accurate representations of his alleged Arctic CO2 Climate Doomsday Rapture aka CAGW. It's not just he arctic either. Where ever there are no temperature stations they commit these frauds rather than working to put in more actual temperature stations. They have disqualified themselves as scientists by their scientific and financial frauds.
The climate models speak for themselves. If you look at 10 year old and 20 year old models, they couldn't predict current temperatures - which stopped rising 14 years ago. If you look at arctic ice models, they neither predicted the decline in 2007 before 2007 nor did the post-2007 models predict the absence of further decline. Quite the contrary, according to the opportunistic papers (based on linear trend extrapolation, no doubt) published at that time, the arctic ought to be ice-free next summer. According to the IPCC report 2007, the glaciers ought to have melted in 2035. Thousands of climate science peers couldn't muster the common sense necessary to doubt that figure. Today, we know that even the revised figure is a figment of distorted data, taken from about a dozen out of thousands of laciers in the area, selected not by randomized sampling, but by the convenience of measureing them. In fact, the amount of water is Himalayan glacies stayed the same over the last 10 years.
None of that changes anything about the fact that coal and tar sand mining, oil drilling and shale gas are destroying huge tracks of nature and have severe consequence for human health. It doesn't change the fact that it is a good idea to replace fossil fuels wherever possible, if only to get away from the political troubles that Middle Eastern and Russian oil are causing, or the fact that reserves are running out.
Overstating your case only makes you look silly in the end, even if you currently enjoy a lot of public support.
Facts do exist. The only role that "agenda" and "bias" play are when accepting said facts. Any agenda and bias have absolutely no impact on the factuality of the fact, however.
Let me give you an example. Take JavaScript. The fact is that it's a shitty programming language. When you analyze it objectively, every single aspect of it is a failure or is horribly wrong in some way or another. Of course, there are people with bias and an agenda (usually people who only know JavaScript, and nothing but JavaScript) who insist that it's not a shitty programming language. But their ignorance or bias does not change the fact that JavaScript is a shitty programming language.
The same goes for many other subjects, including climate change. There are facts that will exist regardless of what one or more people believe about them. Nothing will change that these facts are factual. They just inherently are.
This does have all the trapping of a witch hunt, but damn, if the science can't withstand the scrutiny of full publicity...
That's what really bothers me about the climate debate: why can't we see the raw data? Why can't we see the source code for all the climate models?
With that in mind, why spend literally trillions of dollars trying to prevent the climate from changing, when it's going to change anyway? Maybe not in the exact same way as it would sans humanity, but it's going to change. Better to use the resources and effort to address that, than using it tilting at the useless windmill of trying to make the Earth's climate static.
No sorry. This conservative witch hunt against this work has been clearly shown to be politically biased and non factual. Stop perpetrating the myth.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
It's not a witch hunt when Mann fabricated scientific data and with it committed financial frauds. Being honest in science is a must and Mann violated that basic scientific principle. He has received millions of dollars in funding subsequently, all based upon that successful hide the decline fraud. So by supporting Mann you're supporting a criminal scientist who'll lie and cheat at science, heck he can't even produce the means to have other scientists reproduce his work. How much more pounding on your politicized brain do we have to do in order for you to get that fraud in science is not acceptable?
It can easily be seen by your reference to "hiding the decline" that you simply don't understand what youy're talking about. One doesn't "hide" anything by publishing papers about it that get hundreds of citations. A piece of advice: read less denialist propaganda, more actual scientists' work. Michael Mann didn't "hide" his work, reproduced it more than once, and his results have been supported by all other work in this area -- with decentered PCA, without it, using other statistical methods etc. Heck, even Wegman trying to discredit Mann had to remain content with the "bad method, good results" diagnosis. You're just throwing the same old mud that didn't stick the first time -- while each year, as more reserach is done, Mann's work is more vindicated. No wonder the denialosphere is getting openly hostile to science in general -- there's no other way to ignore the fact that science unequivocally supports Mann, not you.
NO. I am a scientist. It is clear that the climate change "scientists" deliberately ignored data, cherry-picked and conspired -- in written word -- to pursue an agenda in support of a falsity in order to further the IPCC UN-dictated agenda.
This was deliberate and criminal.
The Wikileak emails show this directly as does the wonderful series of expose that ran in the UK Telegraph.
Clearly the court didn't want to pass judgement on the nature of the case (no pun intended) and instead chose to throw it out on an Angelina Jolie-ish thin concept.
It also sets an interesting precedent. If, as the court claims, the university is not a person as a requirement for a legal claim on the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, then one could argue that no university should be allowed to get taxpayer funding because there can be no oversight.
Excellent news. Its a BS case anyway.
You do know how easy it is to lie with statistics don't you? Oh right scientists can do no wrong in your world view and we should dispense with reproducibility of their claims
You are aware that right now six different independent groups are analyzing the temperature records, using ground, ocean, balloon, and satellite measurements, and getting very consistent results?
You are aware that an independent analysis, "BEST" (by U.C. Berkeley), was set up (and funded by, among other things, many skeptics) with the explicit purpose of doing an independent analysis without the purported "biases" that critical claim other temperature groups had.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/10/climate-skeptics-perform-independent-analysis-finally-convinced-earth-is-getting-warmer.ars
Here's a quote from leading skeptic Anthony Watts about that BEST study (March 2011):
Guess what-- the results are still the same. The data showing the planet is warming is real.
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111020/full/news.2011.607.html
How much "reproducability of their claims" do you want?
Satellite measurements, ground station measurements,ocean measurements, balloon-sonde measurements, microwave measurements-- very different techniques, same answers.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Wait, I'm confused. Corporations are persons that can be sued but universities aren't?
If, as the court claims, the university is not a person as a requirement for a legal claim on the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, then one could argue that no university should be allowed to get taxpayer funding because there can be no oversight.
This is nonsense. You can oversee a university just as you can oversee a person. It has nothing to do with the Act.
It took years of sleuthing to find the "hidden decline", and it wasn't found by official peer review.
Peer review isn't magical saint hood for a paper people, it just means that a few peers (the number varies) looked at it and couldn't find anything wrong with it. Papers and the ideas in them are tossed into the dust bin of science all the time. That is the way science works.
It's you AC who doesn't get it. The number of references means nothing about the accuracy of the paper and it's concepts. Nature rules as the final judge not how many frigging references to the paper you fool. In the case of Mann's frauds he has been caught lying in a scientific paper and plotting to subvert the scientific process.
As a scientist myself I find that repugnant. Heck even Professor Muller, a noted Co2 Climate Doomsday Rapturist, says that he'll never read another paper from Mann et al. again since they can't do what they did in science, it's not acceptable.
So get your brain out of your politicized hole in the ground and wake up.
If you can't disprove a theory go after the messanger?
When was the last time a Rebublican read a science book? First, carbon dioxide is a heat trapping gas. It absorbs infrared and converts to kinetic energy. This is the basis of IR spectroscopy. Alternatively, read about the planet Venus. Then, burning fossil fuels will dump carbon dioxide that has been fixed by living things over the last 500 million years. That is why they are called fossil. Putting that together, things are going to warm up if we keep burning the fuel. I dont need a Phd to figure that out
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Horseshit. McIntyre proved empirically that the "hockey stick" algorithm was written to generate a hockey stick by pumping in noise and getting - a hockey stick.
No witch hunt, Mann used shaky technique, poor method and outright fraud *at best*.
No sorry, this is clearly a witch hunt.
Read here: http://spectator.org/blog/2010/05/17/top-mann-nemesis-hes-not-a-fra
it was an extremely odd audience reaction: McIntyre received a standing ovation upon his introduction, thanks to his dogged research and unrelenting demand for information and accountability, but then his blase' attitude about scientists' behavior -- particularly Mann's -- left most of the audience cold and some even angry. The applause for McIntyre was tepid upon the conclusion of his remarks.
Clearly the supporters of the audit are not interested in the truth, they are only interested in seeing Mann fail, regardless of the evidence. Get off your high 'this is fraudulent use of tax dollars!' horse and actually look at the evidence and conclusions - not what the crackpot right wing tells you to think.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
There is no independently verifiable evidence that CO2 is the cause of the slight warming that has occurred since the Little Ice Age in the real atmosphere. There is a slight Linear+Cyclic Warming since at least the 1880, 132, years ago and significantly despite CO2 being pumped out in vastly increased quantities since the 1940s/50s the temperature has not deviated from the slight Linear+Cyclic Warming. CO2 has not caused Temperature to deviate!
To show warming is not to show the cause of the warning. That is the mistake you alarmists make. You think that the warming is the whole ball of wax. It isn't since you've not shown causation in the REAL ACTUAL ATMOSPHERE.
Girma Orssengo's analyses using the standard observational temperature and CO2 data sets shows that Mother Nature has falsified the alleged CAGW Hypothesis. It's well worth your time to comprehend this elegant and clear analysis.
" *Effect Of CO2 Emission On Global Mean Temperature*
Examination of Figure 3 shows that the Global Mean Temperature Anomaly (GMTA) for 1940 of 0.13 deg C is greater than that for 1880 of –0.22 deg C. Also, the GMTA for 2000 of 0.48 deg C is greater than that for 1940 of 0.13 deg C. This means that the GMTA value, when the oscillating anomaly is at its maximum, increases in every new cycle. Is this global warming caused by human emission of CO2?
The data required to establish the effect of CO2 emission on global mean temperature already exist. The global mean temperature data are available from the Climate Research Unit of the Hadley Centre shown in Figure 3, and the CO2 emission data are available from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre [8]. *For the period from 1880 to 1940, the average emission of CO2 was about 0.8 G-ton, and the increase in the GMTA was 0.13+0.22=0.35 deg C. For the period from 1940 to 2000, the average emission of CO2 was about 4 G-ton, but the increase in GMTA was the same 0.48-0.13=0.35 deg C. This means that an increase in CO2 emission by 4/0.8=5-fold has no effect in the increase in the GMTA. This conclusively proves that the effect of 20th century human emission of CO2 on global mean temperature is nil.*
*Note that the increase in GMTA of 0.35 deg C from 1880 to 1940 (or from 1940 to 2000) in a 60 year period has a warming rate of 0.35/60=0.0058 deg per year, which is the slope of the linear anomaly given by Equation 1. As a result, the linear anomaly is not affected by CO2 emission. Obviously, as the oscillating anomaly is cyclic, it is not related to the 5-fold increase in human emission of CO2.
Figure 4, with high correlation coefficient of 0.88, shows the important result that the observed GMTA can be modeled by a combination of a linear and sinusoidal pattern given by Equation 3. This single GMTA pattern that was valid in the period from 1880 to 1940 was also valid in the period from 1940 to 2000 after about 5-fold increase in human emission of CO2. As a result, the effect of human emission of CO2 on GMTA is nil.* "
http://pathstoknowledge.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/predictions-of-gmt.pdf
Furthermore the conclusive counter evidence analysis based upon *observational data* by Girma Orrsenago puts a nail in the coffin of the AGW Hypothesis as promoted by the CO2 Climate Doomsday AGW Rapture proponents. *Orrsenago shows that Nature falsified the CAGW hypothesis*.
Hole in Man Made Global Warming.
a) Global Mean temperature (GMT) => http://bit.ly/zISeEo
For the period from 1880 to 1940, GMT increased by about 0.35.
For the period from 1940 to 2000, GMT increased by about nearly the same 0.35.
b) Human CO2 emission => http://bit.ly/wD1SZj
For the period from 1880 to 1940, CO2 emission increased by about 150 G-ton.
For the period from 1940 to 2000, CO2 emission increased by about 840 G-ton.
How come the increase in CO2 emission by 460% has not caused any change in the GMT?
You mean this one? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8282028/Michael-Mann-vows-to-keep-up-the-street-fight-against-climate-change-deniers.html
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Oh give it up. Even McIntyre says it wasn't fraud.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Nonsense. McIntyre generated 10 000 random runs and then picked up a hundred that showed an upward blade:
http://deepclimate.org/2010/11/16/replication-and-due-diligence-wegman-style/
If you seriously believe that disproves Mann's hockey stick graph, you need a 101 on statistics.
Listen, the tactics of repeating a lie until it becomes perceived truth has gotten a bit stale since the times of Goebbels. You might want to search for an alternate strategy. At least give us something more creative. It has become annoyingly boring at this point.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Say whatever you want to support the DNC, and you don't have to show your work at all. If you can get the government to pay for it(local, state, fed), and you get the army of brainwashed hipsters to support your opinions masquerading as facts, then you have pulled off the Intelligentsia trifecta.
"UVa is a state school, not a private entity. As such it enjoys sovereign immunity."
Sovereign Immunity is such a crock, it's what the ruling elite use to enslave the rest of us and what they use to literally get away with mass murder death killing on a vast scale around the globe and here at home.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbp6umQT58A
I doubt your word that you're a scientist.
1) Who are you, and what are your qualifications, published papers, credentials, etc.? A scientist should be proud of his work and reputation.
2) Which field are you a scientist in? If you're not a climatologist, you're not qualified.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Actually, no. McIntyre proved that there was a technical flaw in Mann's method of statistical analysis that could occasionally cause an artifactual upturn (or, with equal probability, a downturn) at the end, but despite analyzing a large number of noise data sets, he was not able to find even one case that generated an upturn that approached the magnitude of Mann's "hockey stick" analysis. So, correctly interpreted, McIntyre's results proved that it was highly unlikely that Mann's Hockey Stick curve could result from the artifact. So it is not surprising that numerous subsequent studies, using analyses not subject to this error, and also looking at other types of climate data, have confirmed that the hockey stick is correct.
So in the end, McIntyre's technical criticism of Mann's approach (which at worst involved a subtlety of statistical analysis that no reasonable scientist would have called a "fraud") turned out to be correct, but irrelevant to Mann's conclusion.
Guess we just lost the whole field of statistical thermodynamics. The theory guys in the next building over will be thrilled...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Falsification of AGW
Why there is no valid evidence that justifies accepting the AGW hypothesis
The Null Hypothesis is a well-established foundational element of the scientific method as currently practiced by professional scientists [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis]. It requires no proof.
In the context of AGW, the Null Hypothesis is that changes in global temperature are dominated by unspecified natural causes other than the human emission of CO2, such that any contribution of human CO2 emissions to changes in global temperature are too small to be worth the costs of mitigating human CO2 emissions by political means. The Null Hypothesis is formulated that way precisely because the issue to be decided isn't whether human emissions of CO2 have any effect at all on temperature, but whether the effect (if any) is large enough to justify political action. Whether there's any effect at all is a valid scientific question, but it's not the point of the political controversy.
Skeptics (all scientists are skeptics, by definition) have no need to prove what causes nature to do whatever it does naturally. Some AGW skeptics do prefer other specific hypotheses which are not the Null Hypothesis (e.g., the Sun is the principal driver to terrestrial temperature,) and those hypotheses do require proof. But most skeptics make no such claims.
What should skeptics be required to prove? Their only common claim is that there is no valid proof of AGW. Valid proof must withstand criticism in general, and valid proof must especially withstand the criticism that it fails to show at least a 3 sigma probability that AGW fits the evidence better than the Null Hypothesis does.
Note that the claim that 'there is no evidence for AGW' is a negative claim, and a negative cannot be proved, only falsified (as is true of any scientific hypothesis, by the way.) AGW believers should be able to easily disprove it, if it's false. But that's properly and necessarily their burden, not that of the skeptics.
AGW believers would falsify the skeptics' claim by demonstrating that valid proof of AGW does in fact exist. The only responsibility of the skeptics would be to show why any such claimed proof isn't valid--or to accept the evidence of the AGW believers as valid, and admit that the claim that no valid proof exists has been falsified.
Of course, most of those reading this are neither scientists nor climatologists. But others are, and they should already have published one or more peer-reviewed papers which show, step by step and point by point--quantitatively, not qualitatively--that there is at least a 3 sigma probability that AGW fits the evidence better than the Null Hypothesis does. So if you are an AGW believer, go find those peer-reviewed scientific papers. That should be easy to do, shouldn't it?
Shouldn't it?
So why can't you find any such papers?
You can't find any because the observed warming is fully consistent with the Null Hypothesis. Which means there is not at least a 3-sigma difference between the probability that the Null Hypothesis explains the evidence and the probability that AGW does so. Which means the observed warming is not evidence of AGW.
Were there to be cooling of sufficient magnitude for a sufficiently long period of time, that would falsify AGW. Pinning down "sufficient magnitude" and "sufficiently long" requires a full, scientifically and mathematically rigorous quantitative analysis. An AGW believer would of course demand to see that formal analysis in a peer-reviewed scientific paper before accepting any claim that AGW has been falsified. So you will of course understand that we skeptics must do the same before accepting the claim that AGW should be accepted as sufficiently proven to be worth the costs of mitigation--which are extremely expensive, and not just in terms of money.
But if warming is not evidence for AGW, then there is no evidence for AGW (by "AGW," we mean the hypothesis that there is positive feedback in the climate system
Cuccinelli loves the Koch.
The American south is really a pathetic backwater.
Protip: in America only NYC, SF and LA are civilized. Outside of those metro areas your results may vary widely.
Well, to be consistent, you should extend that claim to all the following studies that reached the same conclusion. With different methods, differnet datasets, different observations. By different researchers.
Otherwise you at least also have to admit that Mann actually did a brilliant fabrication, since people have been able to replicate the result with real data.
Anyway, until you tell us what you mean by "hide the decline" fraud (what decline was hidden, from who, and where?) there's not much point continuing. You seem to be the kind of sceptic who can't be convinced otherwise (which, you should know, is very anti-sceptic behaviour).
Meanwhile we could get back to the normal scienctific process, where fabrications and frauds are relatively easy to point out, since they won't stand on their own. If the DA really believes Mann is wrong, he can publish his research and get the Nobel, he don't need all old correspondence of Mann to do that, now. Especially since Mann, so I've been told, fabricated all the data...
Is there any more ways to repeat the same message for you to see the utter undefendability of your position?
"It took years of sleuthing to find the "hidden decline", and it wasn't found by official peer review."
If you actually took the time to read the email, instead of the usual denialist echo chamber, you would've found that the decline that was hidden was in a specific proxy record that suddenly diverged from actual real world measurements. The decline was "hidden" by throwing out the bad data and replacing it with actual real world measurements.
And I gather that your reasoning for the entire climategate PR assault was investigated multiple times finding no fraud, academic or otherwise, would be an organized conspiracy among, basically, the entire scientific community of the industrialized world? Tell me, are the greys or reptoloids involved? Are they providing support by heating the planet from the hollow interior? Idiot.
Oddly, I'm not sure which side you are on...
Statistics can be a scientific tool, if you're careful. Calling a model with a statistical certainty of 99% "virtually certain", however, is unacceptable. For the simple reason, that out of 100 models or experiments, at least one will unavoidably produce such results. Given the amount of data available and the number of models being created, a mere 99% is just not enough. Particle physicists insist for very good reason on 6-sigma-signals - a certainty of 99.9999% that your result is not just a statistical figment. And even then, it is plausible that your result may merely be the result of systematic errors, rather than statistical ones. The faster-than-light neutrinos were the result of such an error - the measurment itself easily had that 6-sigma certainty. (I seem to remember it being something as absurd as 15 sigma.)
For a scientist, you have a remarkable lack of understanding how scientific work is done, what peer review is, what references mean and what statistical analysis is. I'm pretty sure you're lying about your status as a scientist, which means you're probably lying about a whole lot of other things as well.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
That was a very loud and powerful NO you started with, followed by an assertion of fact that had no evidence. Followed up by what can only be called slander, and a vague reference to some emails and an article series by a rag UK newspaper, which you didn't even link to.
Please demonstrate some credentials that give you the right to speak about climate change. Please take just ONE of the studies published over the last 20 years about climate change and show how they are entirely wrong. Please...
You can't? Ok, shut up!
Have you even been in a university, and made the comment that the domain you're the expert in directly contradicts climate change ? (just take one of the many mathematical problems that affect applied sciences) See the effect. At once people who work in administration claim that they know your domain. People from biology know with certainty that combinatorial mathematics can't possibly have anything useful to say about statistics, and that you're wrong anyway. And they actually band together on this ! It is so unbelievably stupid.
Oh and point out that the first 2 IPCC ARs (ie. the basis for the Kyoto accords) were flat-out wrong ... and you've just caused a shitstorm. Yet there can be no mistake. They predicted A, and ~A happened. Simple, testable, and, according to just about the entire scientific community, wrong. WTF ?
And the worst of it is, by stating that you will have made a few enemies.
For those who don't know, there's gaping holes in the mathematical underpinnings of pretty much every science with only one small exception (it's not maths, only a very small subset of maths, sadly). And yes, climate change is particularly bad for a supposed exact science, being only based on indirect historical non-repeatable observations and not even claiming to have the laws that govern the climate. I said "climate", the only laws we have that apply are about interactions of very small numbers of molecules, in situations with extremely low entropy. Yet climate science applies those laws to a system that has so many secondary effects it isn't even funny and literally enough entropy to entire villages of the map on a monthly basis.
Technically we "know the laws", but the laws prohibit drawing conclusions once you pass a certain rather trivial volume or complexity (the so-called chaotic behaviour). Needless to say, the atmosphere is so far beyond that limit that it's not at all funny. The measurements are so extremely limited it's just plain sad. The athmosphere is a 100km shell above the earth's crust. We measure (and this is being generous) a ~ 1m shell, and have point measurements, spaced far apart in both space and time outside of that tiny shell. It's like the nuclear fusion problems. We are perfectly aware of every possible interaction that can occur in the reactor vessel, just as long as it involves less than a few thousand ions and neutrons. Of course a real reactor vessel involves billions of billions of billions of ... of ions and slightly less neutrons (initially we thought neutrons would stay out of the way ... seems almost funny today. Believe it or not, reactor vessels have edges, superconductors have to actually exist somewhere and when neutrons meet either of those, hilarity ensues). We have models, simulations, laws, supercomputers, ... you name it. And every time they turn on that vessel a few hundreds of billions of ions decide to band together and try to blow it up in a new, very exciting, very bad and very unexpected way.
In reality the workings of climate science, never mind it's hypotheses and theories, don't pass the standards of most applied sciences. They certainly don't have anything like the rigour that is applied to fusion designs or lhc experiments. Climate scientists should be laughed out of conferences, yet just about everywhere I go one such presentation is made to make the conference "socially relevant". It is without exception a bunch of pretty pictures, accompanied by mathematics a first-year high school student should know to be horribly wrong. Yet lo and behold : ... at these presentation you get the questions like "what can we do to help this ?". Every single speaker at a maths conference gets torn to shreds, either because they're wrong, or because they bruised the ego of one of the senior researchers (very easy to do, just prove something that just might be useful for proving their research is never going to work). Just by comparison, in one of my present
"Guess what-- the results are still the same. The data showing the planet is warming is real."
Guess what? Not the real question and everyone knows it including you.
I was responding to a parent post stating that data showing that the planet is warming is "lying with statistics," stating that one of the scientists who measured this warming "fabricating many temperature readings" and "commit these frauds" and "have disqualified themselves as scientists by their scientific and financial frauds" and that " in your world view we should dispense with reproducibility of their claims and take them on faith."
OK. The scientists who measured global warming are not "lying with statistics;" these data have been reproduced by many different institutions, using many different data measurement methods. The scientists who collated surface temperature readings did not "fabricate many temperature readings" nor "commit frauds". It is not my "world view" that we should "dispense with reproducability" because every attempt to reproduce the temperature data by every independent study has shown the same overall result.
I will agree that this does not show a cause for warming. That needs to be done by measuring forcing functions and response functions, which is also done. However, the claim that I am addressing, that temperature measurements are a "fraud" and "not reproducable," and therefore the greenhouse effect is a scam, is blatantly false
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
read the latter part of the summary - michael mann has been vindicate twice. Theres a link to this slashdot story
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/25/1640224/michael-mann-vindicated-again-over-climategate.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Why don't you put your real name to your slander of Michael Mann in the open by writing a letter to the Washington Post and state he's a fraud and/or committing fraud. (and copy him in so he knows you've written and its been published.)
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Haha, Virgina!
Correct me if I am wrong but in simple terms the planet warmed a little over 10 years ago and at which time the warming leveled off.
Not much point in replying to posts by anonymous coward, since even if, as you say, "I am willing to listen to evidence that refutes it," how would I know? I don't even know what data you're willing to look at, and what data you have decided to ignore because you claim it is (quoting from the previous post) "...lying with statistics... fabricating temperature readings... committing scientific and financial frauds."
However, taking you at your word for just a moment, here is the data for the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project:
http://berkeleyearth.org/images/berkeley-earth-land-surface-average-temperature-60yr.jpg
Would you say, based on this data, that "the Earth warmed a little ten years ago and the warming stopped"?
What about if you draw a line from the 1998 data point to the 2008 data point? Would you say that this line is, or is not, representative of the data?
This despite the fact that present day CO2 levels are now even higher than worst case scenario predictions 10 years ago.
Actually, no; check your data source. It turns out that the global recession had a negative impact on the CO2 emission growth rate. It's not "higher than worse case predictions," it ended up being "slightly less than predicted." (Not enough to make much of a difference in the predictions, though).
That graph came from the BEST FAQ, which can be found here: http://berkeleyearth.org/faq/#stopped
You can also try the NASA data, NOAA data, CRU data etc. The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) graphs, for example, compare data taken by several different methods; they are here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The 'climategate' scientist has been cleared of wrongdoing by a number of investigations."
In other news, mortgage banks have been cleared of wrongdoing by a number of investigations ... by the MBAA, the NAMB, investigators at the Federal Reserve and the IMF, and many other independent organizations.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The problem with environmentalism isn't the actual facts.
The problem is that once people try to use these facts to justify policies that will harm other people, the victims of those new policies will try to dispute the facts in order to discredit the policies that are harming them.
Yes, exactly: a good deal of the criticism that is purported to be skepticism of the science (and the scientists) is actually aimed at discrediting the policy implications.
The unexpected consequence is that, since it apparently much easier to cast doubt on the science than to rationally discuss policy, there has been almost no discussion of the proposed policies.
Of course, policy discussions are so full of boobytraps and ideological landmines in the US, that's not surprising.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Appeal to authority is bad enough, but appeal to anonymous authority is worse.
WTF? Just about every field of research uses statistics; from physics to biology. I don't have time to look up the entire quote, but I'll wager Rutherford didn't mean what you think he meant, because if he did, then that was just about the most retarded thing he may ever have said.
I mean, how the fuck would you describe quantum interactions without statistical tools? How do you describe radioactive decay? How do you describe genetics or population distributions?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
He didn't fabricate data and he didn't commit fraud. You, however, are a liar.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This is something I always wondered. How do you define climatologist?
I don't consider it a valid proof of your thesis to proove based on a lack of peer reviewed papers. As long as the publications fail to publish under threat of lawsuit, such a claim amounts to nothing more than proof by threat of violence. `
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Hmm, starting with "someone who works within the field of climatology" would be good...
I'd suggest people from the disciplines of atmospheric science, meteorology, with a statistics background, maybe some physics and chemistry? But those last three wouldn't be sufficient conditions - merely necessary ones.
Basically, people who work in long-term modeling of climate, not short-term like weather bureaus.
The 6-sigma business basically applies to fields such as particle physics that pore through huge amounts of data looking for subtle statistical correlations. In this case, it is not possible to make the appropriate statistical corrections for multiple comparisons as scientists in other fields do, so they compensate by setting a very high criterion for statistical significance.
"As it is, governments do just enough to appear to be doing something." How it is that this is not a Sir Humphrey Appleby quote astounds me!
Perhaps one of these quotes could work in its place:
"Two kinds of government chair correspond with the two kinds of minister: one sort folds up instantly and the other sort goes round and round in circles."
"'The Government's position' means 'the best explanation of past events that cannot be disproved by available facts'."
"In government, many people have the power to stop things happening but almost nobody has the power to make things happen. The system has the engine of a lawn mower and the brakes of a Rolls Royce."
"A Civil Service computer strike would bring government to a standstill if it were not for the fact that it is already."
***
Topically speaking, I've notice the biggest problem to accepting a scientific understanding comes in the form of two anti-science options: 1) A scientifically sounding think tank or lobbyist's research seems directly in conflict with reality but fits well other people's preferred realities and 2) All scientific understanding is really an indoctrination technique, and only the ignorant can see reality.
Of course, neither is particularly exclusive in any field.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
I think it is more a practical issue. There are so many confounding variables when studying complex systems (biology, climate) that no one would ever publish if a low criterion for "significance" was not used.
Yea but then it gets sticky. Published one paper on that topic? 10? A graduate student in the lab of a well published PI? What is the cut off?
This is why I prefer to just ignore the argument from authority approach altogether.
The choice of a threshold for statistical significance is dictated by the acceptable likelihood of a false positive or false negative result. Reducing the risk of false positives increases the risk of a false negative. The standard in many fields is less that a 1 in 20 risk of a false positive and less than 1 in 5 risk of false negative, but the actual choice is dependent upon the impact of a false positive or negative on the conclusions. I would not publish a paper (and likely would find it hard to get acceptance) where the conclusion was entirely dependent upon a single result that barely met the p less than 0.05 criterion
So, I think we agree. It is often cheaper to look at multiple lines of evidence with weak criterion for significance than to do one study and require a strong criterion.
Heck even Professor Muller, a noted Co2 Climate Doomsday Rapturist, says that he'll never read another paper from Mann et al. again since they can't do what they did in science, it's not acceptable.
So get your brain out of your politicized hole in the ground and wake up.
The irony is mind-boggling.
I'd find it funny if it weren't so depressing. The denialists of the human influence on climate use these two talking points over and over, not even understanding enough science (or more likely, not caring about truth as opposed to winning economically) that they are simultaneously contradictory!
Point 1) Water, not CO2, is the dominant greenhouse forcing!!!
Point 2) All those evil computer models that them hoaxing climate modelers put out are lying, because they stuff in these mumbo-jumbo complex feedforwards to the sensitivity computed by God's-honest-truth-Bolztzmann, in order to make the problem "alarming" instead of insignificant.
In scientific truth, yes water is a major greenhouse effect. And that's just the point of those supposedly 'mumbo-jumbo' feedfowards---it's the fact that as air warms up, it can absorb more water vapor, and yes this extra water vapor (clear, not clouds) certainly does ADD to the greenhouse effect. D'oh!
So the more you push #1 (which is true), the more you justify including the feedfowards which result in the mainstream estimate of climate sensitivity which points to a serious problem in the future. In fact it's misleading NOT to include these feedfowards.
lintzen is persuasive. Agree: 1) CO2 is a green house gas 2) Adding CO2 warms, predicted at about the 1deg C we have recorded. Problem is, IPCC and other Climate models overstate projected temp gains because the theorized "positive feedbacks" are not happening. It is getting trivially warmer. No catastrophe. Until someone produces a model that correctly predicts, I will remain skeptical.
Yes, water is the dominant greenhouse gas, and all of them together add 30C to the Earth's average temperature. We are worried about CO2 forcing another 3-6C. The Moon, which is at the same average distance from the Sun as we are, has a global average temperature of -15C (yes, it's much hotter on the day side, but it's also much colder on the night side). The Earth has an average temperature of +15C. The difference is due to our atmosphere slowing down heat leaking out. So merely saying water is the main greenhouse gas means nothing without the context that the worry is only 10-20% *more* greenhouse effect.
Oh, and we can prove the CO2 is man-made. Plants prefer Carbon-12 to Carbon-13, because the lighter atoms participate in reactions slightly faster. Thus they have 2% less C-13 than other sources (volcanoes and carbonate rocks). The C-13 ratio in the atmosphere is changing along with the total CO2 amount. Therefore the added CO2 comes from plants. The only sources of plant-derived CO2 large enough are fossil fuels and deforestation, both man-made sources.
So therefore you claim to weight the word of an actual climatologist the same as any old person who could be interested in hoodwinking you?
That's denialist talk.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I choose option C. The best thing is to go read the IPCC reports and peer-reviewed literature. If I am unable to completely understand the methods, etc, I will have to take the interpretation provided for me, knowing that I am using the argument from authority heuristic.
That's funny because the greatest deniers of AGW are white evangelicals: http://www.pewforum.org/Science-and-Bioethics/Religious-Groups-Views-on-Global-Warming.aspx
What part of religion is it that some atmospheric gases absorb infrared? Ever notice how on cloudy nights the temperature falls less than on clear nights? That's the greenhouse effect in action. More greenhouse gas (water) means less heat escapes to space, thus it stays warmer. Water is the main greenhouse gas, mainly because there is a lot more of it, about 1% of the atmosphere, vs 0.04% CO2. But you cannot ignore the CO2 contribution, because water vapor concentration is highly non-linear with temperature. Thus any temperature effect caused by CO2 is magnified about 3 times by added water vapor. The reason so much more vapor can get in the air is because the Earth is mostly covered in water, and even the land parts are mostly covered in wet objects (soil and plants).
The extra CO2 is demonstrably from humans, because the Carbon-13 ratio is changing along with the CO2 level. Plants have a 2% lower C-13 ratio than inorganic sources. The only source of enough plant-derived CO2 to explain the ratio shift is fossil fuels plus deforestation, i.e humans. Where is there belief in this chain of logic, rather than observation and deduction?
That is the correct tack. I understand "believe a climate scientist" as shorthand for what you're proposing, as opposed to the crap being shoveled out by oil companies and the like.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Appeal to authority means using the word of an authority figure to establish a fact, the truth value of a particular statement.
No ONE person can establish a fact. Facts are established by experiment, testing, REPRODUCIBILITY, etc.
Someone can be an expert in a field, and still get a specific fact wrong (See Einstein, Bohr, etc., etc., etc).
Appeal to authority is a fallacy NOT because the conclusion is wrong, but because it is not a valid form of argument. IOW the conclusion does not follow directly from the premises.
A is an authority in field F
A makes statement S about field F
Statement S is TRUE
This is NOT a valid form of an argument - thus the fallacy.
Fallacious appeal to authority is not a fallacy, but self-important way too say that the authority in question is not actually an authority.
Society use your Sciences
The extra CO2 is demonstrably from humans, because the Carbon-13 ratio is changing along with the CO2 level. Plants have a 2% lower C-13 ratio than inorganic sources. The only source of enough plant-derived CO2 to explain the ratio shift is fossil fuels plus deforestation, i.e humans.
Go back and read the ONE peer-reviewed study on this. You're misinterpreting the results. Human deforestation and fossil fuel are only SOME of the sources, and all any of it does is confirm that, yes, humans are contributing to increasing CO2 concentration. It's not the smoking gun you religious types try to make it out to be, any more than the duckbill platypus is the smoking gun that the "intelligent design" idiots try to make it out to be.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Well, it isn't necessarily "belief", I know the conclusions found in any individual paper may be wrong, same for reviews (like the IPCC reports). The key is at least understanding the sources of uncertainty and what a variety of "experts" think about it before forming a strong opinion. For example, I know that there are no good models of cloud behaviour. The IPCC reports account for this and the authors have estimated a lower bound on negative feedback due to clouds. This is based on paleo-climate data, which relies on various proxies for climate conditions. There is some disagreement on how much confidence should be placed in these proxies. For now I will accept the IPCC number as the best available, but I do not "believe" it.
Hmm, I don't think that particular question is relevant when the discussion is about Michael Mann or Gavin Schmidt. Whatever the cutoff is, they're definitely above it.
Similarly, the question doesn't even come into play for most of those who signed that obnoxious article in the WSJ - most of them even had a single paper published in the climate field (Lindzen was the exception).
Don't accept an argument from authority. I wouldn't, either. But the opposite is NOT argument from ignorance.
I wouldn't take Mann's word on something without verifying it, but the verification has to be done by someone who can understand the paper he published in the first place. A particle physicist or a mechanical engineer are not the best people to verify a paper in climate science. Someone with a better understanding of statistics, atmospheric science or similar fields would be a better bet...
-Phil Jones
It was you who posted this excerpt of Phil Jones talking about stats somewhere in this thread... What that guy was saying shows a deeply and fundamentally flawed understanding of statistics. I mean it is scary that someone of such high standing in a politically-important field would say anything about "almost getting a significant p-value of .05".
It is things like that that make me put " " around experts. I really hope I am misinterpreting his statement.
Then where are the Physicists? Mann, Jones et al are not Physicists and have never claimed to be. Care to revise your blanket assertion?
Is it a lie if the liar truly believes the falsehood?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Co2 Climate Doomsday Rapturist
There's no freaking way you're a scientist. At least not in any remotely related field, and not working in academia, where the PR liability of someone who flaunts such astounding ignorance could not be risked. If you're any kind of "scientist" at all I'd bet you're working in business in a completely unrelated field, similar to Burt Rutan.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Haha I know, search through his posts in this thread for more perfect delicious irony.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It appears the Right is using the same tactics used by the Left to silence those they disagree with. Mann has been found innocent of any wrong doing and the data is valid *twice* now, yet they continue to to to prosecute him. As some one in a different thread commented to me; If you go far enough either tot he right or left you will find yourself on the other side. OTOH I do consider the Left's stated tactics to be a bit more violent.
What, no Miami Vice reference?
Do you even know what "hide the decline" refers to?
Most scientists actually show their work. Mann did not. Heck he can't even reproduce it. He can't even show others his work. It took years of sleuthing by many to uncover the details and depths of Mann's frauds in his Hockey Stick Statistical Lies.
Here is the data and methods from Mann, et. al. (1998/1999), the "Hockey Stick Graph". Mann's temperature reconstruction is pretty much in agreement with at least 10 other reconstructions done since then by different researchers using different data sources and methods. His hockey stick is the blue line in this comparison graph of 11 temperature reconstructions.
I think when you say "he can't even reproduce it" you are conflating Mann with Phil Jones.
The fundamentals of climate are mostly physics/thermodynamics. It's the transfer of energy through radiation, convection (and maybe a little conduction) that drives the engine of climate. James Hansen is an astrophysicist who started out studying the atmosphere of Venus then applied what he learned to the other planets/moons with atmospheres, including Earth.
That point needs to be emphasized, and it was clearly explained what Mann did in the published paper.