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Michael Mann Defamation Suit Against National Review Writer to Proceed
From Ars Technica comes this update in the defamation case filed by climate researcher Michael Mann against political commentator Mark Steyn of National Review magazine, who rhetorically compared Mann to Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky and accused him of publishing intentionally misleading research results.
"The defendants tried to get it dismissed under the District of Columbia's Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) statute, which attempts to keep people from being silenced by frivolous lawsuits. The judge hearing the case denied the attempt and then promptly retired; Mann next amended his complaint, leading an appeals court to send the whole thing back to a new trial judge. Now the new judge has denied the SLAPP attempt yet again. In a decision released late last week (and hosted by defendant Mark Steyn), the judge recognizes that the comparison to a child molester is part of the "opinions and rhetorical hyperbole" that are protected speech when used against public figures like Mann. However, the accompanying accusations of fraud are not exempt:"
It's about time the courts had a say about whether splicing 2 times series in the graph that is presented to the general public rises to the level of fraud. He did explain in the content of the paper that the hockey stick figure was not the actual claim, but the cover and the subsequent presentation to the general public made it look the hockey stick graph was supported by data. Is that fraud? That's is not a bad question to ask in a court room.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Mann isn't a fraud, his observation an have been confirmed and refined, and you and Steyn are cowards incapable of facing the universe as it is. The only difference is at least Steyn is man enough to put his name to his libel.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The hockey stick has stood the test of time. The facts hold. The data continue to support it. Here's Mann recently, and discussion.
Here are myths about the hockey stick debunked.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
It's okay to call someone a child molester but not a fraud or a thief?
WTF?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Because it's an official meme of the Heartland Institute that scientific concern about radical climate change constitutes a "religion."
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
We look forward to your publication of the flaws you have discovered in Dr. Mann's math. Ah, but you can't publish them, because you're just making this stuff up. Or is it because every single reviewer for every scientific journal is a member of a deep conspiracy to undermine the fossil fuel industry because ... well if you have to ask you don't understand how these dark conspiracies work!
Here's Mann's new book on The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
The statistical technique used is called Principle Component Analysis. Prof. Ian Jolliffe, of the University of Exeter, UK is the acknowledged world expert in this field.
And he is on record as saying that what Mann has done is 'rubbish'. Mann modified the technique to ensure that graphical analysis would suppress any variation in the bulk of the graph, while driving the final data high - a hockey-stick, in other words. Jolliffe could see no other reason for introducing this modification beyond producing hockey-stick output.
It is essentially this mathematical trick - this, and pre-selecting datasets, which drew the accusation of fraud. I assume that Jolliffe will be submitting evidence for Steyn's defence...
What has been done is quite clear. I cannot see the hockey-stick surviving this case, especially with the current warming pause...
"That should teach others to defile our religion"
Haha!
Well, religion or not, one thing it should do is reinforce the principle that you should be careful what you say about people, even online, and regardless of whether you are a journalist. In most cases the libel laws are no different for Joe Shmoe than they are or a syndicated columnist.
Generally, opinions are fine... as long as they're clearly opinion and not stated as fact. Because even "You're an asshole" is commonly accepted as an opinion, that's probably okay... especially if you make it clear that it's only opinion.
But "fraud", and other such claims? Usually over the line, unless you can show that it's true.
...
who couldn't think worth a dyne,
he accused the one Mann,
who has Truth in his plan,
and we hope the court rules him a slime.
It's the best I can do on short notice - but there's not much else we can do as long as long as his advertisers keep making money.
So I'm really glad Mann is standing behind his work.
He is debating Steyn in court about whether he is a fraud. If Steyn can just prove he is a fraud, he wins, if not, he is in a lot of trouble.
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It probably does. Let's see if Steyn can prove any of that.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
It's reads like a marketing hype rather than as a scientific discussion.
I think you are being a bit optimistic if you expect to find actual scientists having proper scientific discussions with each other on a popular web site.
Realclimate.org is primarily for lay people. I do not believe that marketing hype is the right description for it, but neither is scientific discussion.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Got any links to denier sites that read like scientific discussions? I'd love to see them. Or just one.
http://climateaudit.org/multiproxy-pdfs/
Scientific concern about climate change isn't, of course, a religion. However, there are an awful lot of True Believers who act as though it were. And no, I'm not a member of the Heartland Institute, I'm just a skeptic who accepts the fact that the climate is changing (It's always changing, sometimes getting warmer, sometimes cooler.) but doubts that the main driving force at the presence is anthropogenic because I don't, personally, find the evidence sufficiently persuasive and prefer to think for myself.
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In other words you have a cognitive bias that leads you to reject one of the largest bodies of modern scientific research.
Good!
Fraud has a legal definition, and so does libel. Mann's research has been found to be scientifically accurate and no allegations of fraud have been found worthy of recognition in the academic community. Steyn's writing is purely political, and his assertions of fraud against Mann, being without merit, clearly show that the author's intent is to discredit Mann's presentation. Steyn clearly went beyond reason when he impuned Mann's character by comparing Mann's character to that of a sociopathic child abuser. My hope is that that Steyn and the National Review, it's editorial staff and publisher are all found guilty and whipped within an inch of their dubious credility using the pulpit of the court. They should be bludgeoned with its gavel for the failure to afford their readers a reasonable opinion or the benefit of moderating their overzealous attackdog, and they should be fined within the limits of the law so as to hold their action up in the light of its own outrageousness.
William F. Buckely went to his grave lamenting the current state of Conservatism and its discourse.
I've had my view on the whole climate change/global warming thing for a while. First up, I accept that temperatures have risen on average in recent times. The numbers are holding up to scrutiny, although very recent numbers may be suggesting we've hit a plateau, depending who you believe.
Where there doesn't seem to be a strong consensus is whether it's entirely man-made (I'm awaiting the flames to start on that commment...). We know Earth's climate has gone through cycles (medieval warm period, little ice age etc) before mankind was industrialised; are we sure this isn't happening now?
However - regardless of whether climate change is man made or natural, there's a hard fact that we're burning up fossil fuels (gas, oil, coal) far faster than it can be created in the ground. They're going to run out at some point, so we need to reduce our usage of them somehow. Add in the pollution argument and surely it would have to be a no-brainer to be trying to cut down our usage of fossil fuels? The exception seems to be those heavily tied in to the oil & gas companies who don't care about what happens 40 or 50 years down the line, they just care about their profits now.
Unless you have personally done the research, you also have a cognitive bias to accept one of the largest bodies of modern scientific research. It's only a matter of which side you believe, in the end.
Both sides act like drunken schoolyard bullies beating up the smaller kids for their lunch money.
Steyn didn't assert that Mann is a fraud, but rather that Mann "tortured" the data. You may recall that Principal Component Analysis was used on a limited and secretly-adjusted data set to come up with the alarming "hockey stick" chart.
It's pretty much indisputable that there was significant warming from like 1930-1996, but very little since then in spite of more or less linear increases in CO2 concentrations since like 1850. The anthropogenic component of global warming is poorly understood, and the appropriate interventions even less so. But diverting taxpayer dollars so wealthy people can get a Tesla as their third or fourth auto is probably suboptimal.
The actual source code is this, from briffa_Sep98_d.pro http://wattsupwiththat.com/200... - you can decide for yourself whether this is "torture" or not, and whether this particular debate should be squelched:
Mann isn't a fraud, his observation an have been confirmed and refined, and you and Steyn are cowards incapable of facing the universe as it is. The only difference is at least Steyn is man enough to put his name to his libel.
How is Steyn a "coward" when he is standing up in court, rather than fleeing?
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
Isn't realclimate.org just his advocacy site? I've had people point to it before. It's reads like a marketing hype rather than as a scientific discussion.
Are you looking at the same link I am? Other than using the "Myth #1" style of summarization used by many people (including marketing) if I have a criticism of realclimate.org it's that they write too much like scientists. Their writing is full of caveats, asides, and long winded explainations because the subject is inherently messy. Frankly I think their writing is just too dry and analytical to reach a general audience. Just look at this excerpt from the link in question:
MYTH #4: Errors in the "Hockey Stick" undermine the conclusion that late 20th century hemispheric warmth is anomalous.
[...]
The second falsehood holds that there are errors in the Mann et al (1998, 1999) analyses, and that these putative errors compromise the “hockey stick” shape of hemispheric surface temperature reconstructions. Such claims seem to be based in part on the misunderstanding or misrepresentation by some individuals of a corrigendum that was published by Mann and colleagues in Nature. This corrigendum simply corrected the descriptions of supplementary information that accompanied the Mann et al article detailing precisely what data were used. As clearly stated in the corrigendum, these corrections have no influence at all on the actual analysis or any of the results shown in Mann et al (1998). Claims that the corrigendum reflects any errors at all in the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction are entirely false.
Realclimate.org isn't marketing, it's dry scientific writing directed to laypeople, what the AGW community needs is an advocacy site written by non-scientists which is less concerned about the science and more concerned about the debate. Realclimate.org fills an essential niche in the debate but it's not the kind of hand wavy tabloidish mass audience style of blog that's needed to counter Watts Up With That?.
I stole this Sig
If some journalist for Mother Jones got into legal trouble, I'm pretty sure they'd have his back. But the National Review just throws people aside when it's convenient. It would be one thing if what Steyn argued (that global warming is BS) wasn't conservative dogma, but it is. He pretty much just strongly worded their position.
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Before everyone gets all exited that the big bad Mark Steyn is getting nailed, this is really more about free speech. In the US (unlike mother England and some other European countries) political speech has pretty wide protections. The difference between libel/slander/defamation and sarcasm/hyperbole have generally weighed heavily in favor of free speech. Does anyone really want this to change?
The next time Debbie Wasserman Schultz calls Rush Limbaugh a liar, do you really want that to be a court case?
This isn't about whether the (very) widespread claims that current evidence supports 'global warming', it's about whether Mann committed scientific fraud.
For instance, George Bush's commander really did think of Bush the way a fake letter (put forth by CBS as real) said he did; presumably the faker was frustrated by his inability to get that fact in the news, so he resorted to fraud, no doubt thinking that the real truth made it morally OK. But he still committed fraud, and the news that the secretary who would have typed the letter if it were real, said it was the commander's opinion, even as she debunked the letter was quite lost in the scandal over the fraud.
So global warming could be real, and Mann still a fraud, or it could be all a huge mistake by thousands of scientists, and Mann NOT a fraud, simply in possession of data that was mistaken or didn't mean what he thought.
Steyn is no doubt happy about the trial, because it will give him grounds to subpoena great heaps of Mann's work, looking for the same thing that the climategate E-mail thieves looked for: any kind of out-of-context quote they can find that they cam drum up into a "scandal" - a fraudulent one, of course...
By the standards of science, peer-review and SEVEN INVESTIGATIONS.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Mann's research has been found to be scientifically accurate by an investigative team appointed by the same University President who could not be bothered to investigate allegations of child molestation against Sandusky, a University President who had a vested interest in Mann's research being found to be scientifically accurate to the tune of several million dollars in research grants.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Well, regardless of whether the climate is changing or whether humans have anything to do with it, consider CO2 and the acidifying oceans because of it. Man pumped up the extra CO2 over a very short time frame, short enough where species will have a hell of a time coping. Don't forget that one of the bases of the food chain is the ocean.
Acidifying oceans as a result of man-pumped CO2 in a short time frame is enough reason to stop it.
Found scientifically accurate by the University of Pennsylvania. Where he teaches and which receives the income from the funding to his climate research. Which by coincidence or not is the same university involved in the Jerry Sandusky trial. That's the joke BTW.
I would say that they both stand to lose personal credibility - is credibility not important for radio stars?
No. This is a site where several prominent & practising climate scientists post.
For example, here's a translated one from Stefan Rahmstorf
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Try SkepticalScience.com or ClimateCrocks.com
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Don't be ridiculous. Government funded scientists have lots of proper scientific discussions. Practically all of CERN is government funded by various governments, just to pick an example off the top of my head.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
No, he means calling child molesters a fraud. Priests are people too, you know.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
The anthropogenic component of global warming is poorly understood, and the appropriate interventions even less so. But diverting taxpayer dollars so wealthy people can get a Tesla as their third or fourth auto is probably suboptimal.
Straw man.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Acceptable though tacky because "as bad as" is a subjective judgement, an opinion. If you call someone a liar, they've either lied or not.
extreme pedantry = tortured logic = disingenuous conversation
The hockey stick has stood the test of time. The facts hold. The data continue to support it. Here's Mann recently, and discussion.
Here are myths about the hockey stick debunked.
I'm not denying that the climate is changing, or that we should burn every combustible material we can get our hands on. But we also don't need to throw society a tailspin either. From your link:
after a single study I co-wrote a decade and a half ago found that the Northern Hemisphere’s average warmth had no precedent in at least the past 1,000 years. Our “hockey stick” graph
Which would be pretty scary if the planet was 6,000 yeas old. But it's not, and this type of warming is not new. Even during the time that Homo Sapiens has been on the planet. Also from your link:
James Hansen, who has turned to civil disobedience ... ...in 2011 and 2013 in Washington protesting the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Texas Gulf. He has warned that the pipeline, which awaits approval by the State Department, would open the floodgates to dirty tar sands oil from Canada, something he says would be “game over for the climate.”
This is such over the top hyperbole it's ridiculous. The tar sands in Alberta are going to be extracted whether the XL pipeline is built, or not. IF it's not built, then the oil will be sent by another pipeline to the coast to be shipped to China. It will also be shipped to the US via rail instead of pipeline. Which means more fossil fuels will be used in transporting it by train and ship; and the likelihood of an accident will be increased as well as there will be a pipeline, trains and ships hauling it. .
Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia’s Earth Institute, and other scientists, making a compelling case that emissions from fossil fuel burning must be reduced rapidly if we are to avert catastrophic climate change. They called for the immediate introduction of a price on carbon emissions, arguing that it is our moral obligation to not leave a degraded planet behind for our children and grandchildren.
How scientific of them. We have a "moral" obligation? Yes, very scientific. Even if the planet is warming entirely because of man, there is no definitive proof that it will reach worst case. How do we know it will reach a cataclysmic event(s) if we don't' stop right this very second? I've been hearing that "if we don't fix things right now, we are all doomed" (from one thing or another) for almost my entire life. If that's the case, we're already too late. So if we can't leave our children a non-degraded planet, we must give them a pile of cash? Or who is supposed to get this money?
Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science, who has argued that “the only ethical path is to stop using the atmosphere as a waste dump for greenhouse gas pollution,”
You know what else is a greenhouse gas? Water. So should we support the Stop Dihydrogen Mono-Oxide people too? What about CO2? Do we need to stop expiration by all animals on the planet? Should we all go on the Atkins diet? After all, herbivores expel more methane. Hmm, that's probably very sustainable.
This virulent strain of anti-science infects the halls of Congress, the pages of leading newspapers and what we see on TV, leading to the appearance of a debate where none should exist
Insurance companies are now doing their long-term projections based on the truth of AGW, and their profits depend on those projections.
I don't care what you think of Mann, but you'd be a complete idiot to bet against the insurance industry.
Captcha: vulgarly
The "hockey stick" agrees closely with the average of IPCC models. Yet none of the models comes close to matching real measurements. Perhapsthe hockey stick only stands the test of time when compared against other models, not real data...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I'm not one of those guys. Never thought much of Reagan except that he could fool people but didn't cheer when he was shot.
As for Buckley, he was smart and had integrity and would be ashamed of the modern American right wing.
If you know anything about the man, you'll recall that he took pains to exclude the radicals he deemed unworthy.
The Ayn Rand-lovers, the thinly-disguised white supremacists practising voter suppression, etc - they would have gotten short shrift from him.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
There aren't that many scientists in any particular field. There are only small communities of people with personal, hands-on, in-depth work on the raw data indicating that the Cosmic Microwave Background exists, or that atoms have nuclei made of protons and neutrons, or that portions of general relativity hold up in the lab. All scientists "piling on" to every single aspect of modern science are "just laymen" with regard to the bulk of human knowledge outside a very specific sub-field that they personally work on. Would you give credit to some dentist funded by a creationist think-tank claiming that the CMB was a fraud, despite the claims of all the scientific researchers working on it? If not, why are your reasons different for denying plausibility to the community of climate scientists, while giving credence to corporate shills (who are also not climate scientists, and demonstrate poor levels of reasoning that make them a laughingstock of the vast majority of scientists)?
Unless you have personally done the research, you also have a cognitive bias to accept one of the largest bodies of modern scientific research. It's only a matter of which side you believe, in the end.
Both sides act like drunken schoolyard bullies beating up the smaller kids for their lunch money.
I saw what you did there.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
How is Steyn a "coward" when he is standing up in court, rather than fleeing?
The cowardness being discussed is Steyn's inability to "face the universe as it is," i.e. accept that climate change is man made.
One could argue that the denial of man made climate change is an extensive attempt to flee from the facts and their consequences.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
National Review had it's lawyers defending Steyn, until at least a public attack by Steyn against the case's judge embarrassed them.
So they quit the case and are talking about dropping the National Review as a client.
Steyn didn't assert that Mann is a fraud, but rather that Mann "tortured" the data.
The judge disagrees that there is a distinction. Since the dozens of temperature reconstructions using different methods and different proxies all come up with the same answer it will be difficult to understand how Mann's work could be considered wrong, let alone fraudulent.
you can decide for yourself whether this is "torture" or not
Probably you cannot. Probably the most you can do is concoct conspiracy theories based on code comments. Leaving aside the fact that this code was authored by someone completely unrelated to the Mann temperature reconstructions (but why let facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory?), it may be worth noting that the code was used in a paper that calls tree rings proxies into question : Trees tell of past climates: but are they speaking less clearly today?
So if you want to dismiss the results of the paper that used this code, then you are dismissing work critical of one of the proxies used in Mann's reconstruction.
It's only false equivalence if the other guy is doing it.
Not sure I'd have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker-room showers with quite the zeal Mr. Simberg does, but he has a point. Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change "hockey-stick" graph.
- Mark Steyn
While I don't expect you to really be bothered by such things as facts, you might be surprised to learn that the University of Pennsylvania is different and distinct from Pennsylvania State University, the university where Jerry Sandusky committed his crimes.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
How scientific of them. We have a "moral" obligation? Yes, very scientific.
Scientist are also human beings with feelings and compassion for their fellow inhabitants of Earth. What's so surprising about them speaking in terms of a "moral" obligation? It may not be their ultimate decision on what constitutes the best moral decision, but they're allowed to have an opinion like anyone else.
Even if the planet is warming entirely because of man, there is no definitive proof that it will reach worst case.
Suppose we wait until the proof is, in your eyes, definitive. Methinks it will be too late to do anything.
How do we know it will reach a cataclysmic event(s) if we don't' stop right this very second? I've been hearing that "if we don't fix things right now, we are all doomed" (from one thing or another) for almost my entire life. If that's the case, we're already too late. So if we can't leave our children a non-degraded planet, we must give them a pile of cash? Or who is supposed to get this money?
Overly simplistic. It's not about non-degraded planet vs. cash. It's about changing the path we're on.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
William F. Buckley may have never agreed with Mark Steyn's style. But I hardly would believe that he would agree with you that "the National Review, it's editorial staff and publisher are all found guilty and whipped within an inch of their dubious credility". The National Review was and is his crowning achievment. Really, do you think that for one minute Michael Mann was really injured by anything that Mark Steyn said? Or do you think that a die-hard liberal is using this opportunity to take a legal shot at people he views as his enemy? Even more than current state of Conservatism and its discourse, William F. Buckley went to his grave lamenting the current state of the legal system and how it is currently used as a tool to silence political discussion.
What I'm imagining is something like the face-melting scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
Actually, it was Pennsylvania State University that found Mann's research to be scientifically accurate, not the University of Pennsylvania (although you were correct that it was the University where he teaches and that receives income from the funding of his climate research. The interesting thing is that the person who put together the group to investigate him was the President of Pennsylvania State University, the same President who put together the group which initially "investigated" the allegations of sexual misconduct against Sandusky (that found no reason to contact the police about those allegations, even though the law clearly required them to do so).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Even so, climate research gets a lot of scrutiny and the work of Mann, Hansen, and the other big names gets seen by a lot of eyeballs, most of them looking for flaws.
There's a lot at stake and anyone who can topple the pillars on which AGW stand is going to be very, very rich & famous.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Do you have the same concerns about evolution?
By the standards of science, peer-review and SEVEN INVESTIGATIONS.
Welcome to Slashdot, haruchai, where posting simple truths brings out the deniers, to silence you.
To mod your post flame bait? Come on.
It's sad, that many of those who deny AGW will complain vociferously about censorship of their view, but are quick to try to bury anything they disagree with.
And yes, Mann has been investigated many times, and found innocent. Wait to see what they do to my post.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It's only false equivalence if the other guy is doing it.
Doing what? And who's the "other guy" here?
This sounds like the "I know you are but what am I" retort from the same schoolyard that taustin hung out in.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Steyn didn't assert that Mann is a fraud, but rather that Mann "tortured" the data. You may recall that Principal Component Analysis was used on a limited and secretly-adjusted data set to come up with the alarming "hockey stick" chart.
I'm not sure about "alarming" - perhaps you've let your fear get the better of you. A good description would be "accurate" since the modelling accurately reflected what happened to the climate in the years succeeding.
It's pretty much indisputable that there was significant warming from like 1930-1996, but very little since then in spite of more or less linear increases in CO2 concentrations since like 1850.
And if we do not artificially split the period 1930-2013 into 2 chunks for no reason, we can see a clear interdecadal signal from CO2 induced warming - as predicted by Fourier, Arrhenius etc. If we artificially selected a region, say 1980-1996, we can see a significant warming trend somewhat above the long term trend predicted by GCM models, and then if we selected the period 1996-2013 we can see a definite warming trend, somewhat below the long term trend predict by GCM models. The data is so clear that the climate scientists were able to reduce the uncertainty (per AR5) of long term predictions of CO2 forced warming.
The actual source code is this, from briffa_Sep98_d.pro http://wattsupwiththat.com/200... [wattsupwiththat.com] - you can decide for yourself whether this is "torture" or not, and whether this particular debate should be squelched: ; ; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!! ; yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904] valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,'Oooops!' yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
Looks pretty innocuous. Perhaps you either (a) Posted the wrong section of the model (b) Misunderstood the meaning of the comment "Apply a very artificial correction for decline" per the quite embarrassing mistakes made by some conspiracy theorists with respect to the word "decline" used in the CRU emails.
So, allowing that Mann is correct, for the sake of argument, then why don't Mann's verifiably true facts trump Steyn's invective?
You may not like Steyn, but he's nothing if not a fair-minded thinker.
Clearly there is some sort of contradiction afoot.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Don't worry; I'm used to it. After 15 years reading & posting here, there's not much that can faze me. But the climate deniers do seem to have gotten as thick as thieves in the past couple years.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I'm sure there are "fair-minded thinkers" who don't believe in AGW - but Mark Steyn is NOT one of them.
I don't really give a damn whether he believes in global warming or not but he smeared a scientist purely out of political spite.
A "fair-minded thinker" would have stuck to a scientific critique. Steyn is a polemicist by nature, has been sued before and should be aware that he was straying into deep waters.
It's not a foregone conclusion that Steyn will lose, far from it, but it's telling that the National Review refuses to support him.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
consider CO2 and the acidifying oceans because of it.
Indeed. And, as I've written here before, you don't have to buy into AGW, or whatever they're calling it today, to think that pouring endless amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere to see what happens is a bad idea. I grew up in Los Angeles, and I can remember what the air there was like before we started putting in all of the pollution controls. I'd like to see some of the other developed/developing nations start doing something about their air quality (Mexico City and Beijing are good examples here.) because in the long run, I think it's in their own best interests, and I'd like to see the US start building nuclear power plants again so that we can stop being so dependent on fossil fuels.
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but doubts that the main driving force at the presence is anthropogenic because I don't, personally, find the evidence sufficiently persuasive and prefer to think for myself.
Then, with probability 1.0 a.s. (almost surely), you get your information from blogs, and you think know better than career scientists who actually study the issue.
Political tribalism is at the heart of most of the denial, including (mostly) wingnut fears of TEH SOCIALISM!!!!. This, of course, has nothing to do with the science either.
Be honest with yourself: how many real climate scientists have you listened to other than Lindzen, Spencer, and a few contrarians? If you think you know so much about the issue, then why do you pick and choose your sources of information?
Just sayin'
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Haha, projection is the last resort of the ignorant mind. Yeah, it's the other guy who's ignorant!!! It's always someone else, isn't it =0.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Intent is what makes it libel. The additional missing element is that you call them a liar while knowing they are telling the truth.
You should check out http://climatechangenationalfo...
One of the key features of the Climate Change National Forum is the comment section. Below each entry, and above the general comment section, will be comments made by other contributors. Rather than presenting a unified face to the outside world, contributors are encouraged to question, debate, dispute, expand, and otherwise discuss other contributions. The public rarely gets to see scientists debating each other, outside of the fake debates that are set up by news shows. As scientists know, what scientists eventually tell the outside world in publications, presentations, and committee reports gives little or no clue (or even the wrong impressions) about how scientists judge scientific claims, evaluate evidence, develop hypotheses, and reach conclusions. I know of no web site, inside or outside of climate science, that allows the public to experience true scientific discussions on a regular basis.
- http://blog.chron.com/climatea...
Mann's data can be fraudulent without being wrong. That is, he may have deliberately manipulated the data, even if his results turned out to be correct later.
If you think you know so much about the issue, then why do you pick and choose your sources of information?
Of course, that's nothing more than a straw-man argument, and can be ignored. I do my best to stay informed on the subject, but I don't like (among other things) the way that the AGW people have done everything they possibly could to deny that the Medieval Warm or the Little Ice Age happened or that they were anything except "local phenomena." I also have a friend who requested the raw data from the CRU back when Climategate was raging and had his request refused because "he didn't know enough about statistics to understand it." What they didn't know, and my friend was too much of a gentleman (and probably too disgusted) to mention was that he has, among other things, a Masters degree in Statistical Inference, and probably knew more about statistics than whoever refused his request. There's been too much cherry-picking, too much using peer review to suppress contrarian papers and too much playing around with funding to make sure that nobody who doesn't agree with AGW can get the money they need for me to believe that there isn't something funny going on. However, if you think it's been proven, go right ahead and don't let my viewpoint stop you.
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Even if the planet is warming entirely because of man, there is no definitive proof that it will reach worst case.
Right. We have to do a rational cost/benefit/risk analysis and take reasonable steps. The only thing standing in the way of rational policies is the hyperbole from the political ideologs.
Do we need to stop expiration by all animals on the planet? Should we all go on the Atkins diet? After all, herbivores expel more methane. Hmm, that's probably very sustainable.
Sigh....
I'm not sure that's true. There are three factors. Of which I am aware, that is... IANAL. And of course I'm talking about U.S. Libel laws are different in UK.
[1] The statement must be of a defamatory nature (likely to cause others to have a lower opinion of the subject or otherwise damaging, as to professional reputation for example). [2] It must be untrue, and [3] the person stating it must know, or reasonably should know, that it is not true.
I could be wrong, but I don't think intent per se is a requirement. For example, someone could write something damaging about someone else, genuinely believing it to be true, but if they reasonably should have known it was not true, then they can still be guilty of libel. So it's possible to run afoul of the law without intending to tell lies about somebody.
There have been two judges so far... In any case, the essential question of fact to be determined at trial is whether it is libelous to use the word "torture" to describe the adjustments made to the various data series, and the parameter choices used for the PCA, and the various choices in the final graphical presentation. I spent two years feeding repeated PCA runs into a general optimization model. With the right parameter choices I could pretty much get any answer I wanted.
Large parts of science (physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics) are easily reproducible, there are numerous independent sources of raw data, and the data analysis is simple enough that any scientist can do it and do it correctly. In high school and college courses, I could verify for myself that quantum mechanics, relativity, evolution, and many other results work as advertised; I didn't have to believe or trust anybody, specialist or otherwise. None of that is true for climate science.
Skepticism is not the same as "denying plausibility". Many things are plausible but nevertheless false.
Given that, unlike much of the rest of science, I can't independently verify climate science results, I'm much more skeptical of those results.
You can verify climate science claims to the same high-school/college level that you verified all other branches of physics. You can demonstrate, e.g., the greenhouse effect, and the spectral transmission characteristics of carbon dioxide, with simple equipment. You can check that burning carbohydrates releases H20 and C02. You can build simple toy-model radiative transfer models that show trapping more heat in a system (via greenhouse gas) increases the temperature. I doubt you did significantly more "conclusive" tests of gravity, particle physics, or quantum mechanics in high school or college --- you were just willing to trust that extending the same procedure that predicted the simple toy model results also works in the "damn, that's too hard to do in my garage" systems.
You probably haven't personally worked on squeezed light states or quantum entanglement or production of exotic particles in TeV-scale supercollider experiments; do you assume the scientists doing these are frauds pulling the wool over your eyes? Yes, the finest details of global climate modeling are too messy for high school students to pin down; but the science does make sense on the crude level accessible to college-level experiment. Data sets and models are available and shared between qualified researchers --- but, just like raw data from the LHC, they're not always easy for an "outsider" without extensive subject-specific training to evaluate. So, why do you assume that somewhere along the way (at the levels too complex for an Excel spreadsheet) the system suddenly turns fraudulent? Just because paid industry shills have told you so?
So... where do you get your information on the Medieval Warm and Little Ice Age?
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
"Accusing someone of being a child molester is OK, but you can't call someone a liar. Can you call the person who called you a child molester a liar?"
Huh? Where did this come from? What is it supposed to mean?
Wait. I see. Steyn "comparing" Mann to Sandusky. Which he really didn't do. What he did was repeat a comment that had been made by someone else about Mann:
"He has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet."
So Steyn didn't actually compare him to Sandusky, or call him a child molester. He repeated someone else's comment, which was kind of a parody of the Sandusky affair.
Because it IS a kind of parody, in my opinion Mann has no chance at all of convincing a judge that he was actually "compared to a child" molester. Instead he was accused of molesting important data.
The problem is that because Mann is a public figure he has to show actual malice to win his case.
But re: the tongue-in-cheek reference to Sandusky, keep in mind that libel is pretty specific.
Oops. I was cut off in mid-reply.
As an example of what is libel and what isn't, consider a rather famous case from the 17th Century. Back in those days, innkeepers typically brewed their own beer.
According to the documents, a visitor to a popular inn complained loudly in front of the other patrons: "My horse can Pisse better beer than you serve here!"
The innkeeper sued the customer for slander (libel, except that it is spoken). The judge's ruling said that the visitor was not guilty of slander, because the customer had not defamed the bartender at all. He had merely complimented his horse.
Nope. This isn't about whether there are better methods. Dozens of other papers get the same hockey stick with different methods and different proxies. They would all argue that their methods are better. That is science, not law. At issue here are the allegations of fraud. Here is what the most recent judge has said:
A reasonable reader, both within and outside the scientific community, would understand that a scientist who molests or tortures his data is acting far outside the bounds of any acceptable scientific method. In context, it would not be unreasonable for a reader to interpret the comment, and the republication in National Review, as an allegation that Dr. Mann had committed scientific fraud, which Penn State University then covered up, just as some had accused the University of covering up the Sandusky scandal. For many of the reasons discussed in Judge Combs Greene’s July 19 orders, to state as a fact that a scientist dishonestly molests or tortures data to serve a political agenda would have a strong likelihood of damaging his reputation within his profession, which is the very essence of defamation.
No, I cannot. I can verify the existence of the greenhouse effect, but that tells me nothing about AGW, since the greenhouse effect is insufficient to account for AGW.
Furthermore, I can directly observe the impact the results of other branches of physics have on my life: after verifying basic nuclear science, I can visit nuclear reactors and see the remnants of atomic bomb blasts. I can buy and use devices from numerous vendors based on quantum mechanical effects that I couldn't reproduce myself. Therefore, I can experimentally verify a lot of things that go far beyond what I can do in a high school lab, using lots of different sources.
I suspect a lot of those results are probably wrong. But those people aren't asking for radical changes to our global economic system based on their results, so I frankly don't care.
I have worked in three different areas of science and engineering. Bias, error, and fraud were widespread in all three of them. Therefore, it is reasonable for me to assume that they are widespread in climate science as well.
Why do you assume that climate scientists are any less prone to fraud, bias, and error than other scientific fields?
Why do you assume that climate scientists are any less prone to fraud, bias, and error than other scientific fields?
There are many instances of individual lab / group level fraud in sciences across all fields. However, instances of entire fields committing fraud are unheard of. There aren't many climate scientists, but there are enough --- in academically competing groups --- that systematic fraud is implausible. We're not talking about just one PI's personal domain here; when isolated fraud gets committed, it also gets caught when other people in the field closely scrutinize and attempt to reproduce the results. If Michael Mann was the only lead climate researcher in the world, one might be skeptical of his claims. However, when dozens of independent institutions and research groups --- who would secure immense fame and funding for themselves by making a breakthrough discovery that contradicts climate science consensus --- all agree on the broad generalities, then I'm inclined (based on the history of how conspiracies work --- they don't last when too many people are involved) to assume there is vanishingly small chance of field-wide fraud.
How scientific of them. We have a "moral" obligation? Yes, very scientific.
Scientist are also human beings with feelings and compassion for their fellow inhabitants of Earth. What's so surprising about them speaking in terms of a "moral" obligation? It may not be their ultimate decision on what constitutes the best moral decision, but they're allowed to have an opinion like anyone else.
Morality is pretty ambiguous and not something that belongs in this particular debate. Oh, wait. Anyone disagreeing with, or even questioning AWG is "immoral". This is not what I call scientific in any way. Some would say much of the research done on animals is immoral. Or that using the knowledge gained from it is too. I'm not in this camp. But do you see the problem? Once this becomes a discussion about morality, it looses it's scientific merit. It then becomes a religious discussion, nothing more.
Even if the planet is warming entirely because of man, there is no definitive proof that it will reach worst case.
Suppose we wait until the proof is, in your eyes, definitive. Methinks it will be too late to do anything.
Not at all. If you read my post, you would notice that I'm all for developing renewable and nuclear energy. I'm not for knee jerk "the end is nigh, ye must repent and denounce the pagan, fossil burning ways!" hyperbole.
How do we know it will reach a cataclysmic event(s) if we don't' stop right this very second? I've been hearing that "if we don't fix things right now, we are all doomed" (from one thing or another) for almost my entire life. If that's the case, we're already too late. So if we can't leave our children a non-degraded planet, we must give them a pile of cash? Or who is supposed to get this money?
Overly simplistic. It's not about non-degraded planet vs. cash. It's about changing the path we're on.
I thought it was about saving the planet for future generations. And if we can't do that, then we must pay our penance in currency. You're telling me it's just about choosing a different path? I agree with you on this, by the way. But I do have a problem with the hell fire and brimstone predictions that are in the article I was talking about.
No, but there are plenty of instances of entire fields getting it wrong for decades at a time.
Scientists in any field don't get famous by showing that the "scientific consensus" is erroneous, they get their grants turned down and their papers rejected. That's why it usually takes decades for major scientific errors to get corrected, and few people have the stomach and stamina to do it.
Career-wise, scientists choose to do experiments that are likely to support the current consensus, and to selectively show only data consistent with the consensus and dismiss data inconsistent with the consensus as experimental error. That's something we observe in many fields, and there is no reason to believe that climate science would be any different. People are slowly coming to realize this, e.g.
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/0...
http://www.scilogs.com/next_re...
I agree: the chance of deliberate field-wide fraud is indeed vanishingly small. The chance of field-wide error persisting for decades and remaining unchallenged, however, is very high, in particular given that "there aren't many climate scientists" and the statistics, computations, and models are highly complex and interdisciplinary.
Where did *you* get your information on the MWP and the Little Ice Age?
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
That should have read "Scientists in any field don't usually get famous by..."
Trying to upset the scientific consensus is a very high risk and very costly strategy for a scientist. Of course, if you succeed, you get rewarded, although you're usually retired or dead by the time people recognize your contribution. Not a good career move.
"Railroaded"? For "outing a CIA newspaper reading bureaucrat"?
Here, this is from Wikipedia:
The only one who believes Black was "railroaded", is his good buddy and pederast, Mark Steyn.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, but there are plenty of instances of entire fields getting it wrong for decades at a time.
Can you cite examples of fields getting it wrong on large scale details accessible to contemporary levels of experimental evidence? The "big revolutions" in science have always been about the tiny details. Einstein didn't radically overthrow Newton; his theory indicated only microscopically tiny deviations from classical physics that could barely be measured by the most sensitive apparatus (and they were, and the rest is history). Quantum mechanics didn't destroy classical physics; it only showed strange things happening at the most sensitive boundaries of technology. Fundamental shifts in understanding --- things that shift the foundational basis for entire fields --- occur at the extreme margins of experimental evidence; it's never "the old guys are 90% wrong," but rather "the old guys are 99.9% right, but we've just found that 0.1% discrepancy."
Scientists in any field don't get famous by showing that the "scientific consensus" is erroneous, they get their grants turned down and their papers rejected.
Really? You just stated that drastic changes in scientific understanding have occurred before. Who built renown and careers off those? The guys who stuck with the old, discredited theories? Being the revolutionary discoverer of new physics overthrowing old theory has always been the way to get maximal renown --- you just need to be able to back up your stuff with solid evidence. Anthropogenic climate change deniers aren't discredited because they oppose consensus views; they're marginalized because they have zero solid evidence and rely on sloppy, unscientific, long-ago-disproven rhetoric instead of intellectual rigor.
The chance of field-wide error persisting for decades and remaining unchallenged, however, is very high, in particular given that "there aren't many climate scientists" and the statistics, computations, and models are highly complex and interdisciplinary.
That's why climate scientists report very broad confidence intervals. They can't tell you the weather five years from now in Minneapolis, or even precisely where between 1.1 degrees and 6.4 degrees average warming will be over the next century (depending hugely also on emissions levels). IPCC warming estimates fall in a large uncertainty band, estimated by best practices to cover the complexity in fine details of figuring out exactly how a strongly-coupled complex system is going to evolve. On the other hand, climate change denialism --- that there is no effect within the broad range of uncertainty cited by climate experts --- is based on nothing but anti-scientific corporate shill craziness. There is zero scientific evidence that a guess at where the climate is heading falls in the "no change produced by anthropogenic emissions" regime, though there is room for uncertainty in the band between moderate and extreme climate impacts.
To the extent that there is field wide error, such errors (based on historical precedent) are likely to be in the small details rather than the "big picture." Also, such errors are, a-priori, no less likely to over-predict anthropogenic impacts than to under-predict them, so the hard-line "there's nothing to worry about" stance is simply politically-motivated intentional ignorance (the antithesis of a scientific "skeptical" approach).
It seems that Michael Mann spends half of his time suing people for defaming him, and the other half defaming others on Twitter.
h/t Judith Curry
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
One random bit of code without any context doesn't prove shit.
However, there are an awful lot of True Believers who act as though it were.
Weasel words.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What fields have you applied for grants in? I'm not in climate science, but at least I particle physics, I can assure you that "everyone already knows this, and we're going to get the same results" is not a winning grant proposal or path to career success. If you want funding, you find an issue with lots of uncertainty (or one where you know you can do better than everyone else), and highlight how different your approach will be, with the possibility of finding new results. Trying to upset the consensus is the entire name of the game --- the only limit to doing so is demonstrating that you're competent to do so. Every scientist I know loves the principles of "underdog" experiments, using crazy new ideas that just might work to make new discoveries --- indeed, replication of results in many fields suffers because nobody is interested in just "confirming the consensus." There is no shame in the scientific community (at least the portion I've seen) about challenging the consensus with boundary-pushing work (negative results on well-performed experiments contribute to career success) --- you just have to be competent, rather than a nutjob spouting ignorance (the typical state of climate-change-denying "experts").
What's so surprising about them speaking in terms of a "moral" obligation?
Corruption, as such, is not following the mandate of one's accepted role. For example, if a defense attorney decides to help the prosecution to put his client (a criminal) in jail, he would be corrupt even if he is doing society a favor. His accepted role is advocating for his client. Once he abandones his mandate, the whole structure of the institution becomes corrupt and untrustworthy. A scientist's station is truth-finding. If he abandons his commitment to accuracy (even a little bit) in favor of advocacy, he becomes corrupt. And his entire disciple suffers from diminished credibility as a result.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Suppose we wait until the proof is, in your eyes, definitive. Methinks it will be too late to do anything.
Wait, are we talking science or religion? This is the traditional scare tactic proof of necessity to repent.... just in case. What it conveniently sidesteps is that the corrective behavior carries a huge cost with it. Not only is it not free, it requires an almost dystopian change to society. Better be sure before taking a step like that.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
We look forward to your publication of the flaws you have discovered in Dr. Mann ....
Here's Mann's new book on The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.
Is it claimed that Dr. Mann won the Nobel Prize in that book?
Nobel Committee Rebukes Michael Mann for falsely claiming he was ‘awarded the Nobel Peace Prize’
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Whoops.
He admits in the comments below after this is exposed that in fact the polar regions are expected to warm faster than the tropics (hard not to, since we've observed it) and thus, temperature rises in the polar regions will be higher then the projections of the models, but handwaves this away. No, Roy, this is what maths is for. Don't handwave.
Can we skip the name calling in favor of some references, please?
How can it possibly be weasel words to point out that some of the AGW advocates are acting like religious fanatics?
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No, I didn't agree with you: people don't wire grant proposals to confirm consensus, they write grant proposals to challenge or disprove it. If you assume consensus is unchallengeable and true, then you have nothing to write a grant proposal on. Only if you find something new --- that previous researchers overlooked, or got wrong, or didn't have the tools to measure --- are you going to get research funding. "Confirm" and "test or challenge" are not the same things. You're saying that people can only get funding to do experiments that look for and find the same answers everyone got before ("the consensus"), which is simply false. People get funding to do things that might produce new results that change previous understanding ("test or challenge").
These things are rarely resolved in court. Rather they are a test of wills. You'll have two sides dicking with each other until one or the other gets tired or fed up enough to give up.
Its like those long drawn out divorce cases. Who is right and who is wrong? The courts don't care. It just rolls along until one side or the other makes a mistake the courts care about or shows any lack of resolve... and then that side collapses.
If both sides are equally unwilling to compromise... take the Apple VS Samsung issue... then get used to that case going on... FOREVER.
These things are pointless.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
What's so surprising about them speaking in terms of a "moral" obligation?
Corruption, as such, is not following the mandate of one's accepted role. For example, if a defense attorney decides to help the prosecution to put his client (a criminal) in jail, he would be corrupt even if he is doing society a favor. His accepted role is advocating for his client. Once he abandones his mandate, the whole structure of the institution becomes corrupt and untrustworthy. A scientist's station is truth-finding. If he abandons his commitment to accuracy (even a little bit) in favor of advocacy, he becomes corrupt. And his entire disciple suffers from diminished credibility as a result.
A scientist can follow the mandate of her/his role, and then, after the evidence is presented, can change hats. They are no longer being scientific after they change hats, but there is nothing un-scientific about changing hats. What is important is for scientists, and their audience, to be clear about when the hat-switch happens. In virtually all cases, this should be obvious.
Perhaps the real issue is that science has a deserved reputation for providing well-considered evidence and explanations for natural phenomena. It is important that such authority not be misused. Nevertheless, it is also important for science to inform and advise on public policy where appropriate. Scientists who have invested effort in arriving at important conclusions may need to go beyond the conventions of scientific presentation in order to communicate to a non-scientific audience. This may include rhetoric that includes talk of morality or public interest.
In short, there's nothing wrong with a scientist playing the role of an advocate, as long as it is clear that they are not simultaneously playing the role of a scientist. If they cross the line, their fellow scientists will call them out, even if the non-scientists don't.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I asked for examples; please enlighten me. What in the history of science shows field-wide errors in things related to big deviations from experimental evidence, rather than surprising things in fine, tiny details? And, what is your view of experimental particle physics that I've just confirmed (or, are you confusing this with string theory)?
As I recall, the raw data was also released to the scientific community and competing peers also agreed with the conclusions from the data.
Unless you're going to suggest that it's some big conspiracy where all climate scientists are in on it?
The actual source code is this, from briffa_Sep98_d.pro http://wattsupwiththat.com/200... - you can decide for yourself whether this is "torture" or not, and whether this particular debate should be squelched:
I really must disagree here. You can't infer anything worthwhile about the data just by reading some snippets of source code. If the analysis is convoluted and you don't trust it then the only way to "decide for yourself" is to analyse it for yourself. A bellicose blog ("arrogant programmer" and similar terms appear) doesn't count for much. A few lines of code don't tell you what the raw data look like, if the processing is reasonable based on the data, or if anything is being hidden. In this case, for instance, that code may be just a badly written attempt to produce a smoother curve.
soylentnews.org
Whether or not "avoiding boring replication" conflicts with "challenging the consensus" will depend a lot on the breadth of questions being studied in a field.
For example, there's a lot of trouble with non-replicable results in biomedical fields. The issue here is that there's a zillion different questions being asked about a zillion different topics. If one research group has claimed that chemical A results in a 23% change in very specific biological response B (some obscure disease in rats), then no one else is likely to bother following up (since every other research group has different work to do about chemicals C,D,E,F on diseases G,H,I,J). Where there are a combinatorially large number of hypotheses being tested, so no two research groups are working on the same specific problem, then there is room for fraud to get by without check by replication.
On the other hand, some fields are intensely focused on a few major, well-defined problems. How much will global average atmospheric temperatures rise? What is the mixing angle between neutrino mass states? In these fields, you end up with a bunch of independent research groups all focusing on the same specific questions. You'll get funding for testing and challenging the exact same things everyone else is working on (using your own approach). There is very close scientific scrutiny of results between different research groups. Careers will be made by scientifically rigorous examination of new angles on the same problems that no one has examined before. Climate science is one of the fields with very narrow and focused "big picture" results, that a lot of different people are looking at --- unlike research areas with very broad and diffuse subjects, where no two research groups are likely to scrutinize the same system.
Trying to upset the scientific consensus is a very high risk and very costly strategy for a scientist. Of course, if you succeed, you get rewarded, although you're usually retired or dead by the time people recognize your contribution. Not a good career move.
Can you cite many examples? Most instances of "revolutionary" scientists I can think of, in modern history (e.g. not going back to Galileo), had reasonably rewarding careers (despite controversy and vitriol directed against them). It's not like Schrodinger, Dirac, Einstein, Fermi, Pauli, Feynman, Higgs, Lee, Yang, etc., etc., weren't well respected or unable to maintain rewarding careers within academia. Recognizing the full scope of a scientist's contribution sometimes takes longer than their lifetime (since it requires the work of many other brilliant minds to confirm), but achieving moderate success (as much as most any living scientist hopes for) within a lifetime is fairly frequent. The only bad career move is doing sloppy, indefensible work. I know plenty of tenured professors at top institutions who made their careers doing good work on research that didn't pan out with new discoveries (chasing "non-consensus" possibilities, failing to find new physics, but doing a rigorous job of it).
The accuracy of Mann's claim is a fitting matter for scientific investigation, not legal investigation.
Similarly, Steyn's analysis of it is a matter for commentary, not a lawsuit.
Steyn should have every right to say that Mann is full of shit without being dragged into court over it. The same crowd that was all confused over what the meaning of the word "is" is now thinks that Steyn's rant on the "Nobel Prize WInner" (the *fraudulent* claim that Mann has made all over the place, including in his complaint against Steyn) can only be interpreted in one particular legalistic way. Scientists call interpretations of data in ways they disagree with "torturing the data" all the time. It means "I don't agree", it's not the specification of a grand jury indictment.
This is always the Left's way - shut up the opposition through force. Disgusting that it's increasingly effective.
Is it claimed that Dr. Mann won the Nobel Prize in that book?
You don't need to read a book to find that out. He did contribute to the winning of a Nobel peace prize. He received a certificate from the IPCC thanking him for his contributions. Various people, desperate people, thought this certificate was the Nobel peace prize, they never asked him, he never claimed it was. They made up a story about him faking the certificate - he didn't fake it, it was real. Much embarrassment was heaped upon Anthony Watts, and other worthies, including our favourite Lord-who-is-not-a-Lord Monkton, for these spurious and quickly debunked claims.
He never made any claim to have been a Nobel Laureate. He did win a Nobel peace prize, as one of many who shared the prize. He never claimed anything that was false, this was a rumour made up by a number of people who apparently can't read or otherwise lack basic comprehension skills.
But the climate deniers do seem to have gotten as thick as thieves in the past couple years.
Much thinner than they were a decade ago, IMO most of those that are left are trolls and astro-turfers who like to get in quick on AGW stories.
Mann has been character assassinated by "for hire" lobbyists, he has had numerous death threats and has appeared before several political inquisitions. The coal industries effort to discredit Mann and ruin his life is lead in congress by US senator Inhofe. It's about time Mann, Hansen, Schmidt, and others, fought back against political persecution and those who created the army of useful idiots intent on doing them physical harm. They should not have ignored the threat this long, I wish them the best of luck.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Yet we are still in a global temperature stall - and not a single model comes close to predicting it. The best worldwide dataset we have (the satellite data that Dr. Spencer uses) doesn't show the heating (where modern climate theory says it should happen the strongest - mid-troposphere). No data confirms the models. So which do you believe? Data or models?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Actually, those in academia who question global warming come under intense pressure: no funding, threats of firing, denial of tenure, social ostracism. Anyone who looked like he was about to come up with proof that global warming was a fraud would receive death threats: the population of college students contains a substantial number of people with no compunction against violence.
Much existing funding for climatologists comes from organizations that have a vested interest in demonstrating global warming, particularly the government which is interested in increasing its power and keeping its base of voting envirofreaks.
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whether this particular debate should be squelched:
On the one hand: That particular debate was the subject of a US senate inquisition lead by hostile senators from coal rich states. The national academies stepped in as arbitrator and reviewed the work, they agreed with Mann's methods but criticized some of his certainty levels, these minor criticisms were addressees in a subsequent "hockey stick" paper from Mann (circa 2005) that was published by the national academies in their own journal (Science).
On the other hand: Anthony Watts is a well known denier with strong links to the same anti-science lobby groups as Steyn, he has never published a single peer-reviewed article or paper. He simply ignores any and all contra-evidence to his claims because he knows that some people will believe him if he repeats the same bald assertions ad-nauseam.
more or less linear increases in CO2 concentrations since like 1850
I think you are using an unconventional definition of "liner", probably one invented by Watts. The facts are it took ~250yrs to pump 500 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, on current consumption trends it will take less than 50yrs to double it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Here are 3 videos, Mr. McIntyre's dissection of the hijinks of climate academics, given at the 4th Int'l Conference on Climate Change. 1/3, 2/3, 3/3 , merely academics' bias or more ?
The Earth is the center of the universe.
Phlogiston
The "ether"
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> debate people who disagree with him, they would prove him wrong
If only disagreeing with people were enough to prove them wrong, you climate change deniers would have it much easier.
Science is not a democracy. If I had a nickel for every time when "95% of scientists" believed something that was later proven wrong, I'd have at least 25 cents.
Yet we are still in a global temperature stall.
false.
and not a single model comes close to predicting it.
false
The best worldwide dataset we have (the satellite data that Dr. Spencer uses) doesn't show the heating (where modern climate theory says it should happen the strongest - mid-troposphere).
false.
No data confirms the models.
false Sensing a trend here?
So which do you believe?
Oh gee, dunno.
What is missing is the proxy data from post 1980. Mann used proxy data for temperatures up until 1980, at which point he switched to using thermometer readings. He has, as far as I have been able to locate, never released the data that would allow a comparison of his proxy data to thermometer readings (that is, what the proxy readings would have shown since 1980). My recollection is that you are mistaken and Mann has never released his raw data, but I was unable to confirm or deny that understanding in the amount of time I was willing to spend looking.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Are you referring to that un-funny joke that played out in Canada?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
So your logic is that because there was a rape scandal at the school, therefor climate change is bogus? Good job. And in order to show that Styrn didn't accuse Mann of fraud you include a quote that says: "Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change “hockey-stick” graph"? Interesting argument.
>the way that the AGW people have done everything they possibly could to deny that the Medieval Warm or the Little Ice Age happened or that they were anything except "local phenomena."
And there you went and proved your opponents point about observation bias. In fact, the medieval warming period is well known in climate science circles - and was discovered BY them.
I was once in a debate about climate change where a denier tried to use the medieval period to prove that climate science is a fake and Michael Mann is a fraud - to prove his point he linked me to a scientific paper about the medieval warming period... and proved he hadn't actually READ the paper because if he had opened it he would have seen, right on the front page, that the lead author was Michael Mann - the very scientist he was trying to discredit by bringing it up wrote most of the research we have on it !
The medieval warming period doesn't discredit modern climate science - that we know about it at all is a PRODUCT of modern climate science !
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You can't tell industrialized countries they have to revert to the dark ages now,
Wow! Thanks for dialing down the hyperbole and coming back down to Earth!
There is a fourth - the work must be presented in such a way that a reasonable reader is likely to BELIEVE the claims , this can both raise and lower the likelihood of guilt depending on circumstances.
The clause exists to predict obvious satire and humor from being targeted, and it was based on this clause that Jerry Fallwell lost his libel case against Hustler Magazine (he made the mistake of testifying in court that no reasonable person who knew anything about him was likely to believe what they wrote in their satirical article).
On the other hand - it also increases the likelihood of guilt for a professional journalist in an opinion piece over what it would be for say, a lay blogger, as reasonable people are far more likely to believe that the journalist would have researched his facts and acted professionally.
This actually means it's doubly important for journalists to stating "facts" (even in an opinion piece) to make sure those facts are provable because a reasonable member of the public will assume they did and the claims are true which removes this "no one would take it seriously" defense from the table.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The judge already threw out the child molester claim as simple journalistic hyperbole (which is protected speech) so who cares ?
The only issue now is the accusations of fraud - which is not.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Mod this guy up! Great example of tortured logic. Your narrative must really need an antagonist.
It has been tested in court, three times already since the manufacture of climategate - and on each occasion Mister Mann was found not-guilty of any wrong-doing.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Look, don't try to weasel out. You yourself said that "replication of results in many fields suffers because nobody is interested in just 'confirming the consensus.'" Your words.
As for your comments on climate science and what is and isn't a "consensus", you have identified yourself as an experimental particle physicist; you simply aren't qualified to determine this at all.
So you'll believe Mann's site. How about famed pro-AGW NASA scientist James Hansen who is on record as confirming the stall in temperatures? When the data doesn't fit the models nor the claim - it's the models and claims that fail, not the data. Perhaps Mann and Hansen need to have a little "chat"...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Yep, nobody has ever discussed science at the Manhatten Project, or at NASA, or at DARPA or the NIH or the CDC or any of those government funded radio telescopes or the astronomers who work on them, or at any of the millions of government funded universities and laboratories around the world.
No, my friend, I think you will find that almost ALL scientific discussion happens where government funding is involved... it's the corporate-funded ones you should distrust, they are the ones who get paid to hide annoyingly inconvenient or unprofitable results.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Precisely. And that means that they don't get funding for experiments that they expect to produce the same results previous researchers have found. Therefore, if an erroneous or fraudulent research result sounds plausible and conforms to current theories, people will not apply for funding to test it. You keep proving my point.
I know the need for repeated replication of experiments without the expectation of getting new results must be hard for an experimental particle physicist to understand, given how simple the systems you deal with are, but in other disciplines it is absolutely necessary.
Mann referred to himself as a Nobel prize recipient - which the IPCC has stated he's not allowed to do. Why are you posting obvious falsehoods in his defence throughout this thread?
Dr. Mann is a climate scientist whose research has focused on global warming. In 2007, along with Vice President Al Gore and his colleagues of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
https://www.facebook.com/Micha...
It is one thing to engage in discussion about debatable topics. It is quite another to attempt to discredit consistently validated scientific research through the professional and personal defamation of a Nobel prize recipient.
http://legaltimes.typepad.com/...
PS: I'm also a "Nobel laureate" if Mann is:
A peace prize made possible by the people has now been passed on to the people. The EU won the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize, but the European Parliament believes this honour belongs to everyone. During a special ceremony in Strasbourg, the prize was symbolically handed over to 20 citizens of different ages and nationalities to represent the people of Europe.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/...
it's in my head
You can try how far "I committed a crime, but nobody ended up getting hurt" will get you when you get dragged into court.
"Manmade climate change", particularly "manmade global warming", is a colossal fraud.
[citation needed]
Can you say "railroaded"?
Sure, I can. Oddly, most railroads are CO2 producers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It is a straw man, but you're then linking to a self-selected group of people who bother to post on fora, which proves nothing. Or should I just respond with "Selection bias" so as to speaka your language?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
>a number of people who apparently can't read or otherwise lack basic comprehension skills.
In the interest of brevity, you should be informed that I am petitioning the Oxford English Dictionary to have the above added as a definition for "conservatives".
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You can't tell industrialized countries they have to revert to the dark ages now,
Wow! Thanks for dialing down the hyperbole and coming back down to Earth!
Considering the amount of hyperbole in the article I was responding too, it seemed appropriate to respond in kind. This is the entire issue. Everyone on both sides of this "discussion" seem to dial it up to 11 and do nothing but shout each other down.
All mammals are CO2 producers. All plants are CO2 consumers. Maybe we just need to plant a lot of trees instead of corn for ethanol.
You won't get an argument out of me there. Hemp and bamboo are both excellent fixers of CO2, and you make them into stuff and plant more in the same space, so they are also great candidates. Some trees fix more CO2 when young than when old, so planting trees is great. Not cutting down some trees to begin with is the other key, though; for example, a stand of mature redwoods actually fixes more CO2 than a stand of growing ones; it puts on more mass per year, and plants are made mostly out of carbon, almost all of which comes from the air.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How about a car analogy?
10 mechanics examine a vehicle to determine if it is overheating. 9 of them agree (after running diagnostics) that the water pump is failing. One says everything is great, in fact, the engine is supposed to run hot, hell, it'd be better if it ran even hotter!
Consensus is built around the data, not people.
Yes, but we already know that hockey stick graph was misleading. Mann left off the warming and cooling trend of the Medival warming trend, aka, the right side of the valley, to show a hockey stick, not an elongated U.
We also know he had code problems, and his results are bad.
Fraud? Probably not.
Confirmation Bias? Probably.
Steyn is stating his opinion, so I am not sure it rises to libel
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Can you cite examples of fields getting it wrong on large scale details accessible to contemporary levels of experimental evidence?
How about Dark Matter? We didn't know that we couldn't account for about 95.1% of the universe's mass until recently. This first hints of it's existence came in the 1930's, but it didn't burst on to the mainstream cosmological scene until this century. We still don't know what it is. Same deal with dark energy.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
And PSU was notified several times about Sarduski's conduct and didn't see anything wrong. Or let's try another one: GW Bush has been investigated by several organizations for wrongdoing in the Iraq war conflict and they never found anything. Or the Warren commission found that JFK was assassinated by a lone gunman.
"Science" apparently believes that after certain "investigations" are concluded, free speech has to stop.
The Vatican was more open minded....
Praise Science! Those who disagree with Scientific Faith must be punished!
Key word: accessible to contemporary levels of experimental evidence. We have very little idea what dark matter is, and know we have very little idea what dark matter is, because the stuff is so hard to measure anything about. It's not showing up in laboratory experiments --- it apparently interacts extremely weakly with matter --- so all we have to go on is mystery clumps of gravitational material. It accounts for the majority of the universe' mass, but a tiny minority of "stuff doing things that make a difference" in the universe --- we know very little about it because it hardly impacts observable processes at all.
Climate science isn't working on principles on the far margins of experiment to detect. It's based on well-established principles from a hundred years ago, plus some new observational and computational capabilities. There's nothing in the mix that's "we haven't the slightest idea how this stuff interacts with the known world at all," which is the case with dark matter. That's why the scientific community is skeptical of particular dark matter models --- there is no strong consensus that anyone's particular dark matter theory is correct, since everyone (the theorists included) know it's highly speculative --- but can hold a moderately high level of certainty that the basics of global warming are correct.
Welcome to Slashdot, haruchai, where posting simple truths brings out the deniers, to silence you.
There is so much research, investment and interest in getting rid of oil and coal, its inevitable that oil and coal will not last that much longer. There are more alternatives every day.
But oil companies have some money to lobby with. It would make sense that they would spend on some PR agents to propagate their ideals and objectives into the public conscience.
Follow the money. Who stands to gain by climate-denialists crazy arguments? Oil and coal. Auto companies perhaps, but not so much. They already power cars from many other sources, even if it costs more. But oil and coal companies stand to simply die if too many people switch to other power sources.
Who is funding the climate-deniers? Oil and coal. Where are the climate deniers concentrated? Oil and coal states. Who are the politicians that go along with climate-denier positions? Politicians from oil and coal states.
And this crazy argument that there is some "lobby" who "finances" and "creates false science" to "profit from global warming"? Who, the scientists lobby? We wish scientists had political power. Everything they say basically falls on deaf ears. What, the battery makers lobby? The electric car lobby?
There is no large green corporation, or group of companies, there is no central profit center. Power can be generated in an infinity of ways, and many, many of them are more efficient, cost less, and are (gasp!) cleaner than oil and coal, in many ways. They haven't quite gotten enough traction yet to completely replace oil, coal, and gas, largely due to lobby, PR scams, and protectionism of the oil lobby. Still, it seems inevitable.
If anyone really likes oil power so much, tell them to buy a generator, and power the house with oil. See the absurd noise, maintenance and costs. Quickly come to the - quite common sense - conclusion that oil power is not so great.
Which is likely to be the interest of the population in non-oil-and-coal-power - common sense. Not some imaginary "green lobby", a fictitious invention of the oil corporate lobby.
Oil and coal is not only affecting weather. It's making air unbreathable in many cities. Its not infinite. Many nations don't have enough and are vulnerable by depending on imports too much, like China and US. Europe is also dependent on Russian gas imports.
Militaries around the world don't like being vulnerable on supply lines for energy and gas, any group generating their own power is far more autonomous. The same argument goes for industry, commerce, transportation, cities, remote locations, and pretty much anyone.
Car and truck transportation are being questioned for many reasons - global warming, air pollution, noise pollution, traffic, safety, costs, raw inefficiency, and urban planning. Each of these arguments have their own, huge, groups of supporters.
If there is an environmental lobby, it appears to be most of the population, pretty much.
The surprising part is how much the world politicians have bent over for oil, gas and coal monopolies.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
If your source is WUWT, you've already lost.A nd no, there is nothing malicious about that piece of code. This has been gone over multiple times on several different sites.
Quoting WUWT as a source in regards to climate science is like quoting the nutters on OverUnity in regards to energy research.
~X~
Would it make sense to be energy-independent, produce your own power? Of course - it's an expense, a supply headache, and a risk factor.
How can you generate your own power? Oil-dependent generators are not cost efficient. Coal is large investment. Extract your own oil and refine it? Insanely complex and costly. Nuclear is impossible, politically tough.
The reason we are dependent on oil and coal is because corporations profit from it, they can monopolize it.
If you're a nation or corporation, you can think of safe nuclear, like thorium-based nuclear power.
Otherwise, to generate power yourself, you're likely to end up looking at the wind, hydro, sun, waves, or something else you can get yourself for zero cost, simply because you can do it.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Actually, his original lawsuit introduced a complaint for defaming a Nobel Prize Recipient. Legally, he made that claim. Hell, his FaceBook post about the suit still describes him as a co-recipient.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
accessible to contemporary levels of experimental evidence.
I consider series of photographs of galaxies to be accessible. It took someone looking at the distribution of matter in a galaxy or two to notice there was a discrepancy between the observed and predicted rotational rate and matter distribution. Remember, hints of dark matter popped up in the 1930's - if they could see it, any current high school or college student could've seen it in the intervening years.
Another example is how everyone ignored radio static until Jansky discovered radio waves coming from our galaxy's heart. Static/noise had been around since the first radio receiver was developed in the late 1800's, so anyone could've dug into it - directional antennas were not unknown even in the olden days.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Can we skip the name calling in favor of some references, please?
So what do you want the deniers to be called? Gotta have some reference name.
Mann's initial investigation was regarding the infamous Hockey stick diagram.
There was broad and general support by the science community in the year's since. I'll include some citations of freely available work:
Really long url, so I provided a tinyurl
Stalagmite records http://tinyurl.com/m2yhtgl
Reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the last 11,300 years. http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
Millenial Temperature Reconstruction. http://www.clim-past.net/3/591...
Borehole heat flux data. http://www.earth.lsa.umich.edu...
There is a lot more, but you might be able to do a little research after digesting this initial stuff.
After hackers stole the emails with the University of East Anglia, Penn State made two investigations of Mann. They cleared him of misconduct, but criticized him for sharing unpublished manuscripts.
Virginia Attorney Ken Cuccinelli, then Attorney General of Virginia (before this gets too contentious, yes, the Ken Cuccinelli that wants to make oral sex illegal) demanded that the University of Virginia release documentation of Mann's work via a Civill Investigation Demand.
The first demand was overruled by a judge. Cuccinelli revised his subpoena, and appealed to the State Supreme court. He lost there also, with the judgement that he had no authority to demand the work.
Note that Mann aided in the subsequent election efforts of Terry McCauliff, who was running against Cuccinelli in the 2013 Gubernatorial election.
Mann was investigated by the Office of the Inspector General of the National Science foundation in 2011, and exhonorated Mann of any professional misconduct.
http://www.science20.com/uploa...
At this juncture, I doubt that those who would deny AGW will accept any evidence, and would simply accuse Penn State and the National Science Foundation of corruption or worse. Note that there are many who likewise think of that University as a tool of the energy industry. Some interesting irony there.
Cuccinelli's failure to subpoena University of Virginia's records is probably the groundwork for claims that Mann refuses to share data with others. However, a pretty compelling case can be made that it was blatant politicizing of science.
Furthermore, Mann's campaigning for Cucchinelli no doubt really raised some hackles. Pretty much all out war. I suspect Mann would say he is just fighting back against those who have made it a mission to destroy him.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Mann is a scientist. Steyn is a guest host for Limbaugh. Steyn is a typical GW denier. No facts, just character assassination. Quoting others with facts taken out of content or focused on tiny details that have no basis in fact. If he works for the Heartland Institute then anything he says will be a distortion of facts.
For those with an open mind, consider auditing this MIT course on climate http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/...
SLAPPstick Farce by Mark Steyn January 25, 2014 http://www.steynonline.com/601...
"Meanwhile, in the same period [the two-year anti-SLAPP hearing], Dr. Mann has been brandishing his hockey stick out on the campaign trail against Republican candidates. In Virginia, he appeared in the Democrats' attack ads against Ken Cuccinelli, and helped get Clinton's bagman Terry McAuliffe elected governor. When his candidate Mark Herring also prevailed over the GOP in the attorney general's race, Mann crowed and published tweets from his acolytes congratulating him on "two fresh notches on your hockey stick."
Global warming is apparently not a bipartisan research effort, but more of a Democratic National Committee sponsored science project which initially was given National coverage by Al Gore.
No,
because his writing would suck if he did that.
He is a political writer and sometimes satirist, not a scientist, so any statements he says about scientific matters is exactly that: an opinion with no hard grounding in the sciences. In fact, most of his commentary about the whole thing is observations on how political the situation is and that it might be interfering with the investigations
If say, Neil Tyson said it, it could be taken as a statement with a gravitas.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Yes, but we already know that hockey stick graph was misleading. Mann left off the warming and cooling trend of the Medival warming trend, aka, the right side of the valley, to show a hockey stick, not an elongated U.
We also know he had code problems, and his results are bad.
Fraud? Probably not.
Confirmation Bias? Probably.
Perhaps you aren't aware that at the time Mann produced the hockey stick, the nature of his research was to investigate underlying natural cycles of climate (e.g. El Nino); he wasn't particularly interested in the AGW aspect of it. His initial graph went back as far as the data available at the time would allow and be statistically valid.
I'd suggest people read Mann's book "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars".
This is the entire issue. Everyone on both sides of this "discussion" seem to dial it up to 11 and do nothing but shout each other down.
And your contribution addressed this how?
Balance. ;-)
In all honesty, I agree, we do need to change how we produce energy, and use it. But I also understand that these changes have consequences and not necessarily economical. I've seen proposals for adding reflective aerosols to the atmosphere to decrease the amount of energy reaching the Earths surface. That's a nice band-aid, but unless something else is done, it's a stop gap at best. But the climate is a very complicated system. Even the experts don't really know what unexpected results could come of trying to re-engineer our climate in this way. As I posted earlier, we can't even find a good solution for defining the kilogram, I don't think climate change is easier to figure out than that.
Additionally, it's kind of hard to take people seriously regarding doomsday predictions. Especially when so many have made wild ass claims in the past that never came to fruition. Even when these people are not even related to the serious scientists, or have the best of intentions, it is hard to get all panicky about anything.
Here's a partial list of some of the crap that we were told we need to fear, or have in the past:
Yes, many of those were intended as a joke, but it's far from a complete list of scary shit I've had to hear about. Nuclear war scared the shit out of me as a kid. We were told all about those crazy Soviets and how trigger happy they were with thousands more nukes than us. And how the blast from a modern nuke was thousands of times more powerful than the ones dropped in Japan. But "duck and cover" would save you. Part of me likes to play devils advocate as after you spend a lifetime of politicians and the news media trying to scare the shit out of you, you do become somewhat jaded. It's more of a defense mechanism I suppose. So please forgive me for not freaking out, even though I actually do agree with you.
" so who cares ?"
Apparently the person to whom I was replying does.
Then he has nothing to worry about but still makes me wonder why he was requesting a dismissal when he's so eager to defend "free speech".
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Yeah. Overturning the Newtonian consensus really screwed up Einstein's career.
So why didn't he sue Al Gore?
At least he has a heap of money. The shutupola from would have exceed anything Steyn would make in a lifetime.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Er, no. One of the claims of the global warming faithful is that a "consensus" of scientists agree with it's dogma while those who disagree are branded as heretics, er, non-scientists. Looking with one's eyeballs to criticize Mann is a good way to lose funding or status in the politically correct academic community.
New Scientist did a story on the scientists who disagreed with the global warming consensus. There were about a dozen of them (and some of them have since gone with the consensus). They get a respectful hearing, when they do scientific work, present it at conferences and submit it for publication. Scientists do not normally look to the National Review for scientific critiques.
Most of the critics of global warming are not scientists. They were published prominently on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, where I read them. Most of them were economists, not scientists. They didn't address the main issue, which was whether the climate (not weather) was warming as a result of human activity, and how much. They merely argued that (1) there was no man-made global warming and (2) if there was, the cost of reducing it would be greater than the benefits (using supply-side economics).
Mark Steyn is not a scientist. He is apparently a literary critic who writes in popular media about politics and culture. If he descends to insults, by comparing scientists to child molesters, it's easy to understand why scientists won't pay attention to his arguments.
It looks like the National Review has come down quite a bit since William Buckley (although I may have idealized Buckley).
The actual source code is this, from briffa_Sep98_d.pro http://wattsupwiththat.com/200... [wattsupwiththat.com] - you can decide for yourself whether this is "torture" or not, and whether this particular debate should be squelched:
Climate scientists are often accused of using misleading, uncorrected data : typically a blogger or forum reader writes that temperature datasets are invalid because of urban island heat effects, for one thing. But what actually happens is scientists discard such invalid data or apply a correction to it, when such effects are known. Enters "climategate" where a climate scientist uses corrected data not raw data, and he's reviled for doing so. Yes the correction is "artificial" and the published results are just an estimate, and it's just one piece of work that may make sense in a limited context and may be superseded by later, more accurate works.. because that's the nature of the work that could be done.
Really, random bloggers and lobbyists can chastise scientists for not using raw data in all times and contexts, but that shouldn't matter : the idea is nuts. Other times, the same people complain that the raw data is slanted. So which is it?
Scientists in any field don't get famous by showing that the "scientific consensus" is erroneous, they get their grants turned down and their papers rejected.
What!?!? Your assertion is completely absurd. Every famous scientist is famous precisely because they proved the standard consensus to be wrong.
Galileo for his work on a model of the heliocentric solar system.
Newton for his work showing that planets are governed by the same rules as an apple falling to earth.
Darwin for his work showing how animals can evolve over time.
Einstein for his work showing that energy, mass, space, and time are all interconnected.
Hubble for showing that the universe is not static but instead expanding.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
I'm expecting dystopian changes to society, too : those caused by the occurrence in my lifetime of massive famine, war, disease due to AGW. That is plausible, or even probable.
I'm sitting in the central Midwest where it's currently 10F degrees and has been below zero many times this winter. Would everyone please start your car and just let it idle... for a month, start a bunch of foreset fires, tickle some volcanos into erupting, light Saudi Arabia's oil wells on fire. Let's kick this AGW party into overdrive, I'm freezing. This 0.5C degree rise per century just ain't cut'n it.
Mann referred to himself as a Nobel prize recipient - which the IPCC has stated he's not allowed to do. Why are you posting obvious falsehoods in his defence throughout this thread?
Care to elucidate what these falsehoods were? Are you saying the sequence I described (That is, some denialists mistook a certificate that Michael Mann had on display for a Nobel peace prize, claimed it was fake, only later to find it wasn't a Nobel Peace prize, but a real certificate he really received from the IPCC, thanking him for his contributions to winning the Nobel Peace Prize) did not actually occur?
Dr. Mann is a climate scientist whose research has focused on global warming. In 2007, along with Vice President Al Gore and his colleagues of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
https://www.facebook.com/Micha... [facebook.com]
He WAS awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Vice President Al Gore and his colleagues of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
It is one thing to engage in discussion about debatable topics. It is quite another to attempt to discredit consistently validated scientific research through the professional and personal defamation of a Nobel prize recipient.
http://legaltimes.typepad.com/... [typepad.com]
Presumably this was written by a legal counsel, not by Mann himself. Perhaps he had an opportunity to correct the wording and didn't, when he should have. Perhaps not.
Notably, this piece of paper, which appears to the heart of your concern, was tested via an appeal against the lawsuit in question. The appeal was thrown out, because Steyns lawyers admitted it had no substance: see here.
Accordingly, your own argument is spurious and without substance.
PS: I'm also a "Nobel laureate" if Mann is:
A peace prize made possible by the people has now been passed on to the people. The EU won the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize, but the European Parliament believes this honour belongs to everyone. During a special ceremony in Strasbourg, the prize was symbolically handed over to 20 citizens of different ages and nationalities to represent the people of Europe.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/... [europa.eu]
Well, this is a matter of discussion between yourself and the Nobel Peace Prize committee.
See here.
He WAS awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Vice President Al Gore and his colleagues of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
No, he was not.
Thus it is incorrect to refer to any IPCC official, or scientist who worked on IPCC reports, as a Nobel laureate or Nobel Prize winner.
The above quote is from the IPCC official statement on the matter: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/nobel/N...
To freshen your memory - this is the exact statement still available in a post by Mann on his own Facebook page:
Dr. Mann is a climate scientist whose research has focused on global warming. In 2007, along with Vice President Al Gore and his colleagues of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
Presumably this was written by a legal counsel, not by Mann himself.
Irrelevant - that's what he or someone under his guidance submitted to a court - "a Nobel prize recipient". Whatever happened later to that submission does not change the wording that was used.
I fail to understand what benefit you see from posting falsehoods into a discussion. Are you often in denial to proven facts?
it's in my head
Mann's initial research is from the mid-1990s. That's like claiming Big Bang cosmology can be questioned because assumptions made by the scientists who discovered CMBR may have been off, or insisting General Relativity is wrong because Einstein didn't produce a quantum theory of gravity.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You'll be probably dead in 30 years and I'll be probably alive in 50 years. Maybe it's just that you don't need to freak out anyway, and not freaking out is a more healthy lifestyle no matter what. BTW a really huge coronal mass ejection would do quite a mess, there was one such in 1859 only the only stuff it could knock down was telegraph lines. The horses and contemporary steam engines were safe.
Well, thanks for planning my funeral, but I'm not freaking out. That was kind of my point. AWG is the current bogyman that you must go ballistic about. If you don't, you are some kind of planet killing Luddite. Or so the adamant proponents of AWG seem to keep telling us.
Yes, I've read about the CME in 1859. Operators were shocked, some telegraph stations stayed functional despite being disconnected from their intended power sources. Lines were throwing sparks and others even melted. The industrialized countries would be in deep shit if we had an event like that today.
What data series do you use to make such claims? Because HadCRUT, GIS, WTI, UAH, and RSS all show completely flat (or negative) trends over the last 14+ years.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I'm having real trouble following this twisted plot. I can see his coauthors objecting: "But Michael, we get the same answer even if you don't torture the data!" Mann: "Everysings vorking according to plan!"
Mann didn't know what kind of result he'd get; he just wasn't a very good statistician. He fiddled with the data in inappropriate ways until it showed what he thought it should show and then published. By "torturing the data", Mann managed to produce the feature he cared about and that he intuitively felt should be there, the recent rapid temperature rise, but other parts of his graph seem to be wrong.
It happens a lot in the sciences: a combination of poor skills in data analysis and publication bias. Usually, other scientists just look at the paper, look at the methodology, roll their eyes, and ignore it. The difference in climate science is that politicians take it seriously and are using it to justify huge tax increases and spending programs.
You're confusing the probability of having upset the consensus given that someone is famous with the probability of achieving fame given that you are trying to upset the consensus. The fact that a lot of famous and wealthy people are actors and basketball players doesn't mean that choosing acting and basketball as careers is going to make you rich and famous.
Also, fame for upsetting the consensus is often only achieved after they are dead, and they may have paid a big price during their lifetimes. Galileo was subjected to the Holy Inquisition. Einstein didn't receive the Nobel prize for relativity but the photoelectric effect. Darwin was famous long before The Origin of Species, and others with similar theories had simply been ignored. Etc.
If you want a low probability of great posthumous fame (i.e. a lottery ticket), try to upset the consensus. If you want a safe, productive scientific career, don't.
He got the Nobel prize for the photoelectric effect and initially became famous for other papers. For decades, many people didn't believe in relativity and considered his papers in that area weird and eccentric, and most didn't understand them. If relativity was all he had done, he probably would have been working at the Swiss patent office until his death.
People in free societies have generally been able to create mechanisms for adapting to natural conditions. In fact, the less free societies are, the less they have been able to adapt. Problems usually spell out opportunity in a frees society -- opportunities to solve the problems. They spell out doom in planned societies -- because they haven't been planned for.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
In short, there's nothing wrong with a scientist playing the role of an advocate
There is if they insist on still calling themselves scientists when they do that. You know that the "climate science" gang went much further than that. They used popular sources to intimidate their skeptics. Just read through majority of responses about this topic in this thread. Most are foaming at the mouth. This is a religious level of fervor -- it's not a scientific advocacy. There is any number of questions I have on the topic, but I promise that with this level of fervor by this number of nuts I, with my PhD, would still be afraid to ask them out loud. They have denigrated pre-eminent physicists with life-times of achievement -- people to whom not a single one of the "climate scientists" could hold a candle when it comes to the level of their insight and intellect.
Anyone who suggests even for a second that the pro-AGW side is reasonable is blind. They are nothing of the sort. They are not even in the same ball park. This is the result of a political process being used to advocate for a scientific position. I don't see how you can claim that it hasn't corrupted the scientific inquiry.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Mann: "Now ve vill torture you!"
Co-Authors: "But Michael! This is literally the same result you would get anyway!"
Mann: "But ve like to torture... Zat is vhy ve became mad scientist..."
Mann and his co-authors were too incompetent to know "what result they would get anyway", they just "tortured the data" until they got what they wanted.
You know, like the Spanish Inquisition stopped torturing people when they confessed to having had congress with the devil.
I know it's a hard concept to grasp, but you'll get it eventually. Unfortunately, Mann probably still isn't a good statistician.
No this is pure denial. According to you Mann and many countless others deliberately changed data and somehow got the right results that were later supported by other research. Either they are the luckiest SOBs in the world of sciene or you have to admit you simply don't know that the hell you are talking about. Contrast that with Andrew Wakefield who fraudulently published a paper that linked autism with vaccines. You know how many subsequent papers supported his initial assertion? 0. After years wasted, investigators found the inconsistencies in his study. The paper was later retracted which is very rare.
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Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change “hockey-stick” graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus.
Sounds like he accused him of fraud. That could be good enough for a libel suit win.
Learn to love Alaska
Oooh, I like car analogies. Difficulty: the car is three billion years old, nobody has seen the service manual, and the maintenance records for its first 2,999,990,000 years are missing.
I'm saying exactly what the experts who looked at his research are saying:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
Mann was not qualified or capable of performing the statistical analyses he did. The analysis he did was objectively wrong. And the resulting graph he got was quantitatively wrong. The only thing that was right about it was the qualitative behavior in the part of the graph used to justify political action against AGW; that is not a vindication of his work or methods.
The issue here (as with much of climate science) is one of lack of competence and publication bias, not deliberate scientific fraud. You ridicule people for supposedly alleging deliberate fraud by climate researchers, but that's a straw man. I am sure there is fairly little deliberate fraud in global warming research; I'm also sure that poor use of statistical methods and publication bias make most of the published results on global warming worthless.
I'm sure because that's the same in most scientific fields. Usually, these problems work themselves out over the next few decades. For climate science, however, politicians and activists want to rush into action based on results that are only a few years old, and that's a serious problem.
So you'll believe Mann's site.
Perhaps I would, but you'll never know, since skeptical science is not Mann's site. Not sure why you are immigrating to the land of speculation.
How about famed pro-AGW NASA scientist James Hansen who is on record as confirming the stall in temperatures [wattsupwiththat.com]?
Whoops. Your mistake. Turns out in the actual paper written by Hansen (rather than a misquote by that idiot Watts) there is no indication of an actual stall in temperature rise, he is just addressing the myth that there is a stall, and explaining the reason for the slowdown. Serves you right for getting your information from a blog (a blog written by a paid employee of the Heartland institute) rather than from a scientist. In order for denialist theory to be right (i.e. the warming is attributable to a natural cause) the observed warming trend would have to be zero. This means not going back to the temperature in 2012, but going back to the temperature in 1901. So tell me, how long until the warming trend reverses itself? How long until we return to the average temperature from 1901?
Care to elucidate what these falsehoods were? Are you saying the sequence I described (That is, some denialists mistook a certificate that Michael Mann had on display for a Nobel peace prize, claimed it was fake, only later to find it wasn't a Nobel Peace prize, but a real certificate he really received from the IPCC, thanking him for his contributions to winning the Nobel Peace Prize) did not actually occur?
[ No response]
I take it then that you accept this actually happened?
No, he was not. Thus it is incorrect to refer to any IPCC official, or scientist who worked on IPCC reports, as a Nobel laureate or Nobel Prize winner. The above quote is from the IPCC official statement on the matter: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/nobel/N... [www.ipcc.ch] To freshen your memory - this is the exact statement still available in a post by Mann on his own Facebook page: Dr. Mann is a climate scientist whose research has focused on global warming. In 2007, along with Vice President Al Gore and his colleagues of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
Regardless of your ranting, the allegation that Dr Mann was/is being deceptive by his reference to winning the Nobel peace prize was tested in a court of law and found to be false. Opposing counsel admitted it was false and had no substance, leaving nobody of any significance arguing that it had substance. Oddly, on such matters I'm inclined to stick with legal judgements rather than the word of some random guy on the internet, particularly since I already pointed this out to you, and you studiously chose to ignore it.
Likely Mann is leaving that statement on his facebook page because it really annoys the denialists, it gets them frothing from their slack jaws and mouth breathing even harder than usual. Good for him. I'd do the same thing in his place.
it gets them frothing from their slack jaws and mouth breathing even harder than usual
I'd say that's a good description of your argumentative style in this thread :)
Fact of the matter: Mann has referred to himself on several occasions as the winner of a Nobel Prize. He is not.
it's in my head
These short-term global fluctuations are associated principally with natural oscillations of tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures summarized in the Nino index in the lower part of the figure.
HTH
And how do you become a famous scientist for conforming to the scientific consensus? Name one famous scientist whose only accomplishment was confirming what the scientific consensus already was.
Without showing that light can be bent by gravity, Einstein would have just been some schmuck we've never heard of. He gained a hell of a lot from his fame after that work. His rewards were by no means posthumous. Same with Darwin, whose fame was achieved from his chronicling of his voyages in which he developed evolutionary theory. Galileo was only persecuted because the "scientific consensus" of the time was a religious one, making his work blasphemous. It's in no way similar to what a scientist would experience today.
The reason science moves forward at all, and I think you can agree with me that it has, is because scientists challenge the scientific consensus. In fact, even an experiment which aims to prove that the scientific consensus is correct is a challenge because it exposes weaknesses in the standard model when the experiment fails to produce the expected results. See, for example, The Michelson-Morely Experiment.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
Do you have a cite for opposing counsel admitting it was false? Your cite to wottsupwiththat a couple of comments above does NOT provide any mention of this. Probably because it didn't happen except in your fevered imagination. Mann's counsel withdrew the claim in an amended complaint.
I'll state for the record that some of the skeptics did in fact assume that the certificate he had was false, but that was NOT the only source for the assertion that he claimed to be a Nobel Prize recipient. It's a stupid little detail the placed in his original defamation claim, and like or not stupid little details are important in the court. That doesn't make his entire claim false, but it shouldn't be that hard for you to admit that he presented a false claim. Hell, an argument that he didn't understand the distinction sounds plausible to me, except he's never acknowledge that it was a false claim as far as I can see.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
So you're saying first understand the current state of climate research before you try and overturn it? Seems like pretty solid advice.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
I'm saying exactly what the experts who looked at his research are saying:
Your reading comprehension is poor. In the link you provided: However the review, led by Lord Oxburgh into the research carried out by the centre, found no evidence of ''deliberate scientific malpractice".
Mann was not qualified or capable of performing the statistical analyses he did. The analysis he did was objectively wrong. And the resulting graph he got was quantitatively wrong. The only thing that was right about it was the qualitative behavior in the part of the graph used to justify political action against AGW; that is not a vindication of his work or methods.
So Mann didn't do the statistics one way means he fraudulently manipulated the data. Also a statistician came to the opposite conclusion of the panel: "I would note that our '98 article was reviewed by the US National Academy of Sciences, the highest scientific authority in the United States, and given a clean bill of health," he said. "In fact, the statistician on the panel, Peter Bloomfield, a member of the Royal Statistical Society, came to the opposite conclusion of Prof Hand." At this point, we have scientists arguing whether something was done the best way.
The issue here (as with much of climate science) is one of lack of competence and publication bias, not deliberate scientific fraud. You ridicule people for supposedly alleging deliberate fraud by climate researchers, but that's a straw man. I am sure there is fairly little deliberate fraud in global warming research; I'm also sure that poor use of statistical methods and publication bias make most of the published results on global warming worthless.
You seem to be using the same flawed approach that creationists use. Only cite whatever little proof you have that backs your side and ignore the large body of work that contradicts you. Also cite the proof in a way that contradicts what it actually proved. Also your statements above say he "tortured" the data. That is fraud. As for competence, there is a debate among scientists about the best way to do things all the time. For you, that means incompetence if one way was done over another. It's not always the case. Sounds like you have strong opinions, and you are entitled to your opinions but realize that scientists in the field disagree with you.
In a counter-example of a scientific debate about data: The Homestake Experiment. Raymond Davis in trying to measure solar neutrinos detected 1/3 of the neutrinos that was predicted by the Standard Model. Subsequent experiments by Kamiokande, SAGE, GALLEX, Super Kamiokande, and SNO backed up his numbers. No one could figure what was wrong with the experiment; but no one could figure what was wrong with the calculations that predicted the neutrinos. No one, however, called Davis incompetent. Especially someone not in the field. Later experiments showed that Davis and Masatoshi Koshiba of Kamiokande were right; it was the Standard Model that was wrong. For their work, they shared in the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Are you dumb or something? I have repeatedly stated that I'm not accusing Mann of fraud, I'm accusing him of incompetence. And that was established by the Royal Commission (picking the wrong statistical analysis methods in such an important paper is incompetent).
My "side" is that AGW research is interesting and plausible, but that it isn't mature enough to base global economic policy on it; no scientific field is after only a few decades. The theory of evolution, on the other hand, is backed up by more than a century of research.
Davis' results contradicted predictions, but presumably his methods were found to be correct. Mann is the opposite case: his results agree with prediction, but his methods were found to be incorrect. That's what makes Davis competent and Mann incompetent.
Are you dumb or something? I have repeatedly stated that I'm not accusing Mann of fraud,
Well one of us is. Here is what you said: "Mann's data can be fraudulent without being wrong. That is, he may have deliberately manipulated the data..." and: "You can try how far 'I committed a crime, but nobody ended up getting hurt' will get you when you get dragged into court." and "they just 'tortured the data' until they got what they wanted."
Is that in any way consistent with "I have repeatedly stated that I'm not accusing Mann of fraud"?
And now you are saying that Mann didn't use the best technique but got the right answer - either because his technique was 'good enough', or because the hockey stick is so inherent in the underlying data that you would get the same result no matter how you combined the proxies.
AGW research is interesting and plausible, but that it isn't mature enough to base global economic policy on it; no scientific field is after only a few decades. The theory of evolution, on the other hand, is backed up by more than a century of research.
Gotcha, but we've only known about the greenhouse effect since the 1800's, so that's clearly not a mature science.
Yes. I pointed out that Mann could have committed fraud even though his results were correct. I didn't accuse him of having committed fraud. Nobody knows whether he committed fraud or not. What we do know is that his analysis was wrong.
Torturing the data until they got what they wanted is not considered scientific fraud; people rationalize it as trying different statistical methods and cleaning up the data. And Mann did that.
Yes, the recent temperature rise is a strong signal that probably would have survived a lot of bad analyses. But since Mann sought to produce that signal anyway, he stopped when he had produced it, in the process producing a graph that was otherwise wrong.
The point is that Steyn's accusation against Mann is justified, and the whole thing calls into question the competency of the climate research community. The fact that this kind of analysis was allowed to stand and people still keep defending his paper means that I trust very little that that community has produced.
If you believe demonstration of the greenhouse effect is sufficient to justify and prove the predictions of the IPCC report and scientists working on climate change, you really are completely ignorant of the subject.
Ok. The theory of evolution is backed up by over a century of research, so we can trust it. The theory of greenhouse gasses is backed up by over a century of research, but the initial research done in the 1800's is not enough to prove the most recent findings so we cannot trust it. Sound.
I pointed out that Mann could have committed fraud even though his results were correct. I didn't accuse him of having committed fraud. Nobody knows whether he committed fraud or not.
In one sentence, then in the next:
since Mann sought to produce that signal anyway, he stopped when he had produced it,
You may be a liar or you may be a fool. You may be deliberately fooling yourself or you may have a loose grasp on reason. You torture logic until it bends to your whim. Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not accusing you of anything.
That's why most Americans are unbelievers in Global Warming.
Thankfully, that's yet another thing you are wrong about.
"Americans' belief in the reality of global warming has increased by 13 percentage points over the past two and a half years, from 57 percent in January 2010 to 70 percent in September 2012. At the same time, the number of Americans who say global warming is not happening has declined nearly by half, from 20 percent in January 2010 to only 12 percent today.
"For the first time since 2008, more than half of Americans (54%) believe global warming is caused mostly by human activities, an increase of 8 points since March 2012. Americans who say it is caused mostly by natural changes in the environment have declined to 30 percent (from 37% in March)."
- See more at: http://environment.yale.edu/cl...
To deny SS isn't a pro-AGW/Mann-supporting site is pretty bold... But perhaps you can point to data that shows we're not stalled (not "slowing down - stalled)? Because every dataset shows we're either stalled or dropping in temperature. Mann does have his solitary tree (Yamal-06), but the dozens, even hundreds of other trees in the dataset, and the ground and satellite records show the opposite.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Yes, and as I explained: that's not fraud. Fraud involves an element of intent, but Mann probably simply didn't know what he was doing so he thought this was OK. As I also explained, stopping when you get the results that you want is common in the sciences; it's a form of publication bias.
All of this is a huge problem in the sciences in general and why it takes a long time until we an trust scientific results in any field.
Look, you obviously don't know much about science, so your "accusations" amount to nothing.
Correct. You cannot make useful climate change predictions based on the greenhouse effect that was discovered in the 19th century. Predicting climate change requires a huge amount of research results that are very recent and largely untested. Furthermore, evaluating approaches to mitigating climate change (carbon taxes etc.) require economic models that are speculative and even less tested.
Are you dumb or something? I have repeatedly stated that I'm not accusing Mann of fraud, I'm accusing him of incompetence. And that was established by the Royal Commission (picking the wrong statistical analysis methods in such an important paper is incompetent).
Do you read your own statements? You have have said Mann manipulated the data then he "tortured" the data. That is accusing him of fraud. Does English and words mean something in your world?
My "side" is that AGW research is interesting and plausible, but that it isn't mature enough to base global economic policy on it; no scientific field is after only a few decades. The theory of evolution, on the other hand, is backed up by more than a century of research.
Again citing what non-evidence as evidence. Global warming research is newer but it is backed up by more than a century of evidence which is the fatal flaw in your argument. By your arbitrary level of evidence, we can't trust theoretical physics as some of it has less than a century of research. Einstein's can barely be trusted because he seminal works are slight more than a century old.
Davis' results contradicted predictions, but presumably his methods were found to be correct. Mann is the opposite case: his results agree with prediction, but his methods were found to be incorrect. That's what makes Davis competent and Mann incompetent.
You missed the point. The point was no one called Davis incompetent just they disagreed with his results. As for agree with Mann results, you immediately jump to the conclusion that he was incompetent. His techniques were not as strong as it should have been or he should have done things differently (in a very new field) are not your first thoughts. The man must be incompetent because you disagree with him.
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All of this is a huge problem in the sciences in general and why it takes a long time until we an trust scientific results in any field
No it doesn't. Time isn't the problem. The amount of evidence is. It takes a long time to gather enough evidence. Clearly you don't seem to understand this part of science.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
By your tortured logic, atomic physics doesn't really work.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Fraud requires intent. Repeatedly applying incorrect statistical procedures until you get the result you want ("torturing the data") may be fraud, or it may be merely incompetence. In Mann's case, we don't know. I just point out that even if his results had been perfectly correct, it wouldn't exculpate him.
The effects from a century ago by themselves predict very little global warming in the future; based on that evidence alone, climate change simply isn't an issue. Global warming only becomes an issue if you assume the existence of feedback mechanisms, and those are based on recent results and theories, and they haven't stood the test of time yet.
You aren't listening. I agree with Mann's primary conclusion about recent increases in temperature, as does the Royal Society. I disagree with his statistical methods, just like the Royal Society did. What he did wrong is what many scientists get wrong in any field. It's common statistical mistakes. Usually, those things get corrected through a few decades of additional work, but it takes that amount of time.
But as you just admitted yourself (contradicting your earlier statement), AGW "is a very new field", so there simply hasn't been time for people to go through this process. Many papers in AGW probably use incorrect methods, most of them are far more complex than Mann's paper, and many of them contain far more serious errors in their conclusion than Mann's paper.
Fraud requires intent. Repeatedly applying incorrect statistical procedures until you get the result you want ("torturing the data") may be fraud, or it may be merely incompetence. In Mann's case, we don't know. I just point out that even if his results had been perfectly correct, it wouldn't exculpate him.
Again, do you read your own statements? These are your words: " That is, he may have deliberately manipulated the data, even if his results turned out to be correct later." It would be one thing if you said, he used the wrong technique. As for using the wrong technique, a statistician agrees with him and disagrees with you. Doesn't that make you incompetent?
The effects from a century ago by themselves predict very little global warming in the future; based on that evidence alone, climate change simply isn't an issue. Global warming only becomes an issue if you assume the existence of feedback mechanisms, and those are based on recent results and theories, and they haven't stood the test of time yet.
First of all you clearly have reading comprehension issues. I said the evidence goes back more than a century. Some of it goes back millions of years. None of which has anything to do with "feedback mechanisms." Again do you read what you write?: "My "side" is that AGW research is interesting and plausible, but that it isn't mature enough to base global economic policy on it; no scientific field is after only a few decades."
What he did wrong is what many scientists get wrong in any field. It's common statistical mistakes. Usually, those things get corrected through a few decades of additional work, but it takes that amount of time.
No, you aren't listening or reading. From above: "I would note that our '98 article was reviewed by the US National Academy of Sciences, the highest scientific authority in the United States, and given a clean bill of health," he said. "In fact, the statistician on the panel, Peter Bloomfield, a member of the Royal Statistical Society, came to the opposite conclusion of Prof Hand."
But as you just admitted yourself (contradicting your earlier statement), AGW "is a very new field", so there simply hasn't been time for people to go through this process. Many papers in AGW probably use incorrect methods, most of them are far more complex than Mann's paper, and many of them contain far more serious errors in their conclusion than Mann's paper.
Um, no. You aren't reading again. Davis wasn't incompetent; neither was Mann. I said nothing about AGW. As far as I'm concerned they haven't proven their case at all.
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