He says in the article (read by everybody) that the only evidence is a 1 martian year trend and then links to an article (which few will follow) that admits it's a 3 martian year trend. What, exactly, is supposed to be getting better when I read more?
You're not supposed to say something in your blog text that's contradicted by your own links. I'm being charitable by saying that he got his facts wrong. I'm not touching his motivation in my parent post. I'm not saying he's using an old propaganda trick (intentionally or not, he is). I'm saying he got the facts wrong. I'll even go so far as saying he got them wrong in an unfortunate way that doesn't look good because the link, at least, gets the basic facts right, though I don't agree with the interpretation.
So why do you think the text is wrong and the link is right? Did *he* read his own link? Is such a flawed post something people really ought to be referring to?
There's an awful lot of propaganda out there that has the correct facts in the links (which few follow) but misleads in the text, like this "The only evidence out there that I am aware of is a series of photographs of a single icey region in the southern hemisphere that shows melting over a two year (~1 martian year) period."
On the study, you're referring, I think, to Colaprete et al, published in Nature (12 May 2005) which tried to bend a climate model not designed to study local phenomena (grid sizes 200-300km large) and use it to conclude that what's happening at the cap is a local phenomena. They might be right but I think I'll wait for a few confirmatory studies now that the MGCMs are starting to have their grid sizes shrink down to more reasonable values.
One thing it will certainly change is that people won't be whining about how data isn't checked. You're not going to have embarrassing things like MBH98's errors hang around uncaught for 5 or 6 years and I don't care if you believe Mann's assertion that they didn't matter or not. Errors should be found and corrected. That's basic science.
Economists may have spotty prediction track records, true, but they do tend to know what doesn't work and when they see political analysis that depends on economic theory that was discredit decades ago, they're right to scoff, and we should to.
Sorry, your link doesn't prove what you say it does. You become a professional statistician by being paid to do statistics. What you're talking about are his academic credentials.
McIntyre's sheepskins say pure mathematics, philosophy, politics, and economics much as Hansen's say physics, mathematics, and astronomy. Hansen's U of Iowa while McIntyre's U of Toronto and Oxford (McIntyre turned down MIT).
Again, this is not about whether McIntyre or Hansen did the data right. Hansen made an error, McIntyre found it. That's not in dispute. The controversy is how easy should Hansen have made it for McIntyre to check his work. McIntyre would like (and he's been on about this since the MBH98 controversy) would like to see more information released, quicker, and in a standardized manner. I think he's on to something.
Hansen isn't a statistician. Hansen's acknowledged the error in this controversy so McIntyre's work quality is not at issue in this case.
The problem is that instead of making it easy for McIntyre to check, Hansen made him work at it which reduces the number of things that can be checked. I, and an awful lot of other people, think that this is not good science.
Yet in this case we found the error without having to resort to recrunching the numbers using fresh data from a mass spectrometer. Just because some data sharing won't likely appreciably help does not justify the refusal in this case.
Put it all in standard format because at some point a mass spectrometer on a chip (they're starting to go to market now) is going to be within the financial reach of high school science labs and even the stuff you need to remeasure is going to be widely checkable. Make it trivial to share and be open about sharing your science and you get more science, some of it good work from unexpected places. Now of course some of it is going to be bad work coming from the hoi polloi but the correction of that bad work is going to improve general scientific literacy, itself a good result.
OK, let's try this again. I was not saying that there were not countervailing negatives that wouldn't swamp these. It was a 'top of the head, shoot from the hip' list, not something I'd researched seriously. The post I responded to was saying that there were no good effects, couldn't even think of one. Real policymaking is about balancing positives and negatives and trying to find the reachable optimum. If you say there are no positives, you lose credibility because anybody with half a brain who isn't a blind partisan can think of at least a few. Those positives need to be catalogued and studied so we can generate accurate net costs because eventually nobody listens to you if you refuse to give out accurate information.
The problem with your response is you're primed to go after some businessman/political evil axis when all I was trying to do was knock some guy out of the fantasy that there are not any positive factors whatsoever. There are positives even though some of them are swamped by larger negative effects and it's quite possible that the positives overall are swamped by the negatives.
Yes, we could be heading toward wild swings. Or we might not be. That's the fun about chaotic systems. We don't really know where they're going and when you have increasingly unhinged predictions like "when humanity can't breath the air" it doesn't really help get the great mass of humanity on board for sensible action.
The reality is that the political class in the PRC doesn't want to die at the end of a rope at the hands of a mob and to pull that trick off they need a certain amount of economic growth, 8% or so until they've gotten about 800M more people past the point of $3000/year income. That's going to take decades. Any polluting economic activity you regulate out of existence anywhere else is going to simply relocate in the PRC where the political class needs it for their personal, physical survival. Net effect = more greenhouse gas production because PRC economic production tends to be much more dirty than the same production in the US or EU states.
So be alarmist by all means, just realize what the fuck you're doing, helping desensitize the political system to scientific warnings.
Optimum is the point at which you achieve a global peak. You can do transfer payments to make those injured whole while the remaining surplus provides real benefits. There's the separate issue of rate of change which also needs to be answered. The problem is that too many people, especially among policymakers and the popular press are not thinking in terms of trying to figure out the "right" temp and "how fast" we should change but fetishizing the earth and creating some quasi-religious "don't change anything" ideal.
Global warming is both an issue of scientific discovery and public policy making. So long as it's honest and has no "no go" research zones, I've got no problems on the science end. It's the policy making end which is largely SNAFUd
Sorry but according to the published standards, you are simply not supposed to have burn barrels next to your temp station. You are simply not supposed to put one of these things in the middle of pavement. These and other problems have been photographically demonstrated by the surfacestations.org effort. That's not a potential siting problem, that's a siting problem, period because the published standard that everybody agreed on many years ago says so.
If those are not actual problems, you should take out the language stating that such things are problems from your site standards. If they are problems, you should take out the stations that have those problems from your "high quality" list of sites.
Inconsistently applying data quality standards means your data is quite likely crap.
I believe we consume 20% of the fuel and provide 25% of the economy. That's quite efficient. For a place like the PRC which produces only $1 for every $7 produced in the US on the same quantity of fuel, we should be working very hard to get their efficiency up instead of hadnicapping efficient producers in the US and shipping more work over to the PRC.
But the PRC is far more polluting. They have 6-7 times more pollution for every $ of GDP produced than the US. The PRC government is in a race against time trying to get their people rich enough not to have a new revolution and string the CCP up by their fragile communist necks and to hell with the environment.
The easy gains in terms of reduction of pollution per dollar are to be found in the PRC, India, and the rest of the 3rd world. If you want to spend more and get less improvement, concentrate on the 1st world including the US.
It's only poisoning the well when you get "you can't trust him because he had to correct data" which hasn't happened. The cure for that is to publish your data and a vmware image of the machine used to analyse it (release of code has been resisted because making it not hardware dependent is considered too expensive) and the effort to discredit the data fails.
See, openness can *help*.
I've no doubt that there are politically motivated people who would not be above poisoning the well. Openness short circuits that.
More people=more pollution all other things being equal. They are not equal. We behave far differently than our great-grandparents a century ago and that makes a significant difference in pollution levels. NY City couldn't stand the number of horses needed to support its population if we went back to horse and buggy technology. The question is which effect predominates.
The problem doesn't make any difference to the results because we're all just assuming that the error was only in the US. We don't know that.
We just had a bridge collapse in MN. Every other bridge of that type was inspected immediately to see if there wasn't a larger problem with the design.
We just had a data analysis collapse. There's zero effort rechecking elsewhere inside the community to see if it's just the US. Instead it's just baldly asserted that it's only a US problem.
The link was written in 2006 (look at the URL) and claims that it's only a 2 year (1 martian year) trend. The original Mars polar pictures were shot in 1999 so it's been 8 years and the trend continues. Other than getting the facts wrong, nice link.
Actually, there are two methods of countering global warming (AGW), modify or halt the human activities that cause it or change the inputs so that we null it out. The skeptics don't want the former because it tends to put big dents in the economy and, at the margin, kill people. The AGW proponents tend to not want the latter because... well, I can't seem to get a straight answer why geoengineering is a bad idea other than semi-religious rants about how man should not meddle.
There's not a lot of study on what would be the optimum global temp even though it's a core data point needed by policymakers who are juggling how many 3rd world people they're going to kill by sucking up capital into global warming schemes instead of economic development. This is serious stuff and no matter what's done and who wins the debate, there's a very good likelihood that people are going to die. I'd like as little of that as possible.
A large bit of the brouhaha over MBH98 (the original hockey stick study) was over Michael Mann's refusal to release data. The salutory effect of all this publicity is to encourage people not to have a multiyear rerun of the controversy (which eventually led to a correction because there were problems with the data).
Oh yes, let's hold our data and algorithms in as much secrecy as possible consistent with maintaining our funding. That'll show those know nothings about how open and reliable science is and will advance our quest for... a new priesthood?
Openness helps science. It doesn't help particular scientist factions but I don't really care about that.
A professional statistician (which is what McIntyre is) might not be able to check the underlying science but he might be better than the original climate scientist in applying cutting edge statistical analysis because that's *his* expertise.
An awful lot of science is multi-disciplinary that way, with data gathered for one field but bits and pieces of other fields being brought in to make sense of it. And those bits and pieces tend to be outdated. Economists, for example, regularly shake their heads at the economic analysis applied by political scientists. Mathematicians and evelotionary biologists have some similar friction.
So while the problem of analysis of data exists, there are plenty of cases where eyes from outside the specialty would do a lot of good. We should be very happy to see that sort of professional knowledge silo breakdown. Some people are less than happy.
My understanding is that the request for the full data dump was refused and the error was determined by reverse engineering what was public and finding out that the formula that fit the published curves was erroneous. Then the reverse-engineered formula was sent over to NASA, checked against the actual formula that was not released and found to be identical. They copped to it (to their credit) and fixed it, though we don't know how well the fix was going to propagate absent all the noise that Hanson is complaining about.
If there's no standard storage format, it would seem to be a good use of funds to *make* a standard description of how you store data, have a grand international conference, and have all the major grant making bodies adopt the standard so this problem doesn't crop up. This isn't a political thing. Data quality improvement and ease of checking raw data are bedrock science issues that should be attended to no matter what the field. I would love to make it a high school level act to pull unchecked data, the formula used for analysis, and do basic level data checking. Every once in awhile, they're going to find errors, even if only data entry, trivial type stuff. They can then submit a note, get a real correction and have it drilled into their heads in a very practical way what real science is about, experiment and verify.
1. fewer people dying of cold. 2. easier/quicker ocean navigation due to new polar routes 3. less road/bridge corrosion due to less salt usage 4. coral reefs can be planted in new areas that haven't had them before 5. New agricultural lands in Asia and N. America will open up that should be a net positive on food balance
In general, there has been little to no work done on what would be an optimum average temp for the planet. In general, when we get colder (as in the little ice age) the economy goes in the tank and getting warmer (as in the MWP) provides an economic boost. There's likely a peak or series of peakes at some point(s) on the graph but we don't know what they are. The changes in global GDP numbers are pretty enormous.
I am in favor of finding out what the peak is and getting us to a level of space technology where we can launch shade/lense/mirror systems that will keep us at or near that peak, something of a global thermostat in order to maximize the utility of our environment. Once you get out of the "warm is bad" mentality and start searching for the optimum peak so we can get there, your brain will start to more easily register the upside.
Slashdot Mirror
He says in the article (read by everybody) that the only evidence is a 1 martian year trend and then links to an article (which few will follow) that admits it's a 3 martian year trend. What, exactly, is supposed to be getting better when I read more?
You're not supposed to say something in your blog text that's contradicted by your own links. I'm being charitable by saying that he got his facts wrong. I'm not touching his motivation in my parent post. I'm not saying he's using an old propaganda trick (intentionally or not, he is). I'm saying he got the facts wrong. I'll even go so far as saying he got them wrong in an unfortunate way that doesn't look good because the link, at least, gets the basic facts right, though I don't agree with the interpretation.
So why do you think the text is wrong and the link is right? Did *he* read his own link? Is such a flawed post something people really ought to be referring to?
There's an awful lot of propaganda out there that has the correct facts in the links (which few follow) but misleads in the text, like this "The only evidence out there that I am aware of is a series of photographs of a single icey region in the southern hemisphere that shows melting over a two year (~1 martian year) period."
On the study, you're referring, I think, to Colaprete et al, published in Nature (12 May 2005) which tried to bend a climate model not designed to study local phenomena (grid sizes 200-300km large) and use it to conclude that what's happening at the cap is a local phenomena. They might be right but I think I'll wait for a few confirmatory studies now that the MGCMs are starting to have their grid sizes shrink down to more reasonable values.
One thing it will certainly change is that people won't be whining about how data isn't checked. You're not going to have embarrassing things like MBH98's errors hang around uncaught for 5 or 6 years and I don't care if you believe Mann's assertion that they didn't matter or not. Errors should be found and corrected. That's basic science.
Sorry, that anonymous post wasn't me so please don't imply it was. I sign my stuff.
Economists may have spotty prediction track records, true, but they do tend to know what doesn't work and when they see political analysis that depends on economic theory that was discredit decades ago, they're right to scoff, and we should to.
Sorry, your link doesn't prove what you say it does. You become a professional statistician by being paid to do statistics. What you're talking about are his academic credentials.
McIntyre's sheepskins say pure mathematics, philosophy, politics, and economics much as Hansen's say physics, mathematics, and astronomy. Hansen's U of Iowa while McIntyre's U of Toronto and Oxford (McIntyre turned down MIT).
Again, this is not about whether McIntyre or Hansen did the data right. Hansen made an error, McIntyre found it. That's not in dispute. The controversy is how easy should Hansen have made it for McIntyre to check his work. McIntyre would like (and he's been on about this since the MBH98 controversy) would like to see more information released, quicker, and in a standardized manner. I think he's on to something.
Hansen isn't a statistician. Hansen's acknowledged the error in this controversy so McIntyre's work quality is not at issue in this case.
The problem is that instead of making it easy for McIntyre to check, Hansen made him work at it which reduces the number of things that can be checked. I, and an awful lot of other people, think that this is not good science.
Yet in this case we found the error without having to resort to recrunching the numbers using fresh data from a mass spectrometer. Just because some data sharing won't likely appreciably help does not justify the refusal in this case.
Put it all in standard format because at some point a mass spectrometer on a chip (they're starting to go to market now) is going to be within the financial reach of high school science labs and even the stuff you need to remeasure is going to be widely checkable. Make it trivial to share and be open about sharing your science and you get more science, some of it good work from unexpected places. Now of course some of it is going to be bad work coming from the hoi polloi but the correction of that bad work is going to improve general scientific literacy, itself a good result.
OK, let's try this again. I was not saying that there were not countervailing negatives that wouldn't swamp these. It was a 'top of the head, shoot from the hip' list, not something I'd researched seriously. The post I responded to was saying that there were no good effects, couldn't even think of one. Real policymaking is about balancing positives and negatives and trying to find the reachable optimum. If you say there are no positives, you lose credibility because anybody with half a brain who isn't a blind partisan can think of at least a few. Those positives need to be catalogued and studied so we can generate accurate net costs because eventually nobody listens to you if you refuse to give out accurate information.
Of course, because linking to one bad effect of a complex system change means that no good effects are even possible.
Right.
Prat.
The problem with your response is you're primed to go after some businessman/political evil axis when all I was trying to do was knock some guy out of the fantasy that there are not any positive factors whatsoever. There are positives even though some of them are swamped by larger negative effects and it's quite possible that the positives overall are swamped by the negatives.
Yes, we could be heading toward wild swings. Or we might not be. That's the fun about chaotic systems. We don't really know where they're going and when you have increasingly unhinged predictions like "when humanity can't breath the air" it doesn't really help get the great mass of humanity on board for sensible action.
The reality is that the political class in the PRC doesn't want to die at the end of a rope at the hands of a mob and to pull that trick off they need a certain amount of economic growth, 8% or so until they've gotten about 800M more people past the point of $3000/year income. That's going to take decades. Any polluting economic activity you regulate out of existence anywhere else is going to simply relocate in the PRC where the political class needs it for their personal, physical survival. Net effect = more greenhouse gas production because PRC economic production tends to be much more dirty than the same production in the US or EU states.
So be alarmist by all means, just realize what the fuck you're doing, helping desensitize the political system to scientific warnings.
Prat.
Optimum is the point at which you achieve a global peak. You can do transfer payments to make those injured whole while the remaining surplus provides real benefits. There's the separate issue of rate of change which also needs to be answered. The problem is that too many people, especially among policymakers and the popular press are not thinking in terms of trying to figure out the "right" temp and "how fast" we should change but fetishizing the earth and creating some quasi-religious "don't change anything" ideal.
Global warming is both an issue of scientific discovery and public policy making. So long as it's honest and has no "no go" research zones, I've got no problems on the science end. It's the policy making end which is largely SNAFUd
Sorry but according to the published standards, you are simply not supposed to have burn barrels next to your temp station. You are simply not supposed to put one of these things in the middle of pavement. These and other problems have been photographically demonstrated by the surfacestations.org effort. That's not a potential siting problem, that's a siting problem, period because the published standard that everybody agreed on many years ago says so.
If those are not actual problems, you should take out the language stating that such things are problems from your site standards. If they are problems, you should take out the stations that have those problems from your "high quality" list of sites.
Inconsistently applying data quality standards means your data is quite likely crap.
I believe we consume 20% of the fuel and provide 25% of the economy. That's quite efficient. For a place like the PRC which produces only $1 for every $7 produced in the US on the same quantity of fuel, we should be working very hard to get their efficiency up instead of hadnicapping efficient producers in the US and shipping more work over to the PRC.
But the PRC is far more polluting. They have 6-7 times more pollution for every $ of GDP produced than the US. The PRC government is in a race against time trying to get their people rich enough not to have a new revolution and string the CCP up by their fragile communist necks and to hell with the environment.
The easy gains in terms of reduction of pollution per dollar are to be found in the PRC, India, and the rest of the 3rd world. If you want to spend more and get less improvement, concentrate on the 1st world including the US.
It's only poisoning the well when you get "you can't trust him because he had to correct data" which hasn't happened. The cure for that is to publish your data and a vmware image of the machine used to analyse it (release of code has been resisted because making it not hardware dependent is considered too expensive) and the effort to discredit the data fails.
See, openness can *help*.
I've no doubt that there are politically motivated people who would not be above poisoning the well. Openness short circuits that.
More people=more pollution all other things being equal. They are not equal. We behave far differently than our great-grandparents a century ago and that makes a significant difference in pollution levels. NY City couldn't stand the number of horses needed to support its population if we went back to horse and buggy technology. The question is which effect predominates.
The problem doesn't make any difference to the results because we're all just assuming that the error was only in the US. We don't know that.
We just had a bridge collapse in MN. Every other bridge of that type was inspected immediately to see if there wasn't a larger problem with the design.
We just had a data analysis collapse. There's zero effort rechecking elsewhere inside the community to see if it's just the US. Instead it's just baldly asserted that it's only a US problem.
The link was written in 2006 (look at the URL) and claims that it's only a 2 year (1 martian year) trend. The original Mars polar pictures were shot in 1999 so it's been 8 years and the trend continues. Other than getting the facts wrong, nice link.
Actually, there are two methods of countering global warming (AGW), modify or halt the human activities that cause it or change the inputs so that we null it out. The skeptics don't want the former because it tends to put big dents in the economy and, at the margin, kill people. The AGW proponents tend to not want the latter because... well, I can't seem to get a straight answer why geoengineering is a bad idea other than semi-religious rants about how man should not meddle.
There's not a lot of study on what would be the optimum global temp even though it's a core data point needed by policymakers who are juggling how many 3rd world people they're going to kill by sucking up capital into global warming schemes instead of economic development. This is serious stuff and no matter what's done and who wins the debate, there's a very good likelihood that people are going to die. I'd like as little of that as possible.
A large bit of the brouhaha over MBH98 (the original hockey stick study) was over Michael Mann's refusal to release data. The salutory effect of all this publicity is to encourage people not to have a multiyear rerun of the controversy (which eventually led to a correction because there were problems with the data).
Oh yes, let's hold our data and algorithms in as much secrecy as possible consistent with maintaining our funding. That'll show those know nothings about how open and reliable science is and will advance our quest for... a new priesthood?
Openness helps science. It doesn't help particular scientist factions but I don't really care about that.
A professional statistician (which is what McIntyre is) might not be able to check the underlying science but he might be better than the original climate scientist in applying cutting edge statistical analysis because that's *his* expertise.
An awful lot of science is multi-disciplinary that way, with data gathered for one field but bits and pieces of other fields being brought in to make sense of it. And those bits and pieces tend to be outdated. Economists, for example, regularly shake their heads at the economic analysis applied by political scientists. Mathematicians and evelotionary biologists have some similar friction.
So while the problem of analysis of data exists, there are plenty of cases where eyes from outside the specialty would do a lot of good. We should be very happy to see that sort of professional knowledge silo breakdown. Some people are less than happy.
My understanding is that the request for the full data dump was refused and the error was determined by reverse engineering what was public and finding out that the formula that fit the published curves was erroneous. Then the reverse-engineered formula was sent over to NASA, checked against the actual formula that was not released and found to be identical. They copped to it (to their credit) and fixed it, though we don't know how well the fix was going to propagate absent all the noise that Hanson is complaining about.
If there's no standard storage format, it would seem to be a good use of funds to *make* a standard description of how you store data, have a grand international conference, and have all the major grant making bodies adopt the standard so this problem doesn't crop up. This isn't a political thing. Data quality improvement and ease of checking raw data are bedrock science issues that should be attended to no matter what the field. I would love to make it a high school level act to pull unchecked data, the formula used for analysis, and do basic level data checking. Every once in awhile, they're going to find errors, even if only data entry, trivial type stuff. They can then submit a note, get a real correction and have it drilled into their heads in a very practical way what real science is about, experiment and verify.
1. fewer people dying of cold.
2. easier/quicker ocean navigation due to new polar routes
3. less road/bridge corrosion due to less salt usage
4. coral reefs can be planted in new areas that haven't had them before
5. New agricultural lands in Asia and N. America will open up that should be a net positive on food balance
In general, there has been little to no work done on what would be an optimum average temp for the planet. In general, when we get colder (as in the little ice age) the economy goes in the tank and getting warmer (as in the MWP) provides an economic boost. There's likely a peak or series of peakes at some point(s) on the graph but we don't know what they are. The changes in global GDP numbers are pretty enormous.
I am in favor of finding out what the peak is and getting us to a level of space technology where we can launch shade/lense/mirror systems that will keep us at or near that peak, something of a global thermostat in order to maximize the utility of our environment. Once you get out of the "warm is bad" mentality and start searching for the optimum peak so we can get there, your brain will start to more easily register the upside.