Thanks, but it was just perspicacity not heroism. I would have been a hero if I had managed to do something about it. Which obviously I didn't.
I get some points for seeing it coming, but so what?
Maybe I should have tried harder to talk some sense into those people, but I doubt it would have made much difference either to them or to the current more dangerous batch of anti-scientists.
Yup.
I warned the hippies about this years ago, actually. See http://www.swin.edu.au/chem/complex/vp/vp04/vp04.h tml
Search the page for my name, "Tobis", and read what I wrote about this in 1996. And don't say I didn't warn you.
mt
Whether or not Mann's work should stand is something the normal scientific process can and should work out.
All that stuff at climateaudit.com is the sort of hairsplitting that actually does go on all the time within science, normally without the sour misanthropic contempt that is being drummed up there.
The attention to this particular paper is obviously politically motivated. The fact that the world is in trouble because of greenhouse emissions is a physical fact. It is not a fragile proposition that falls apart if one tree ring study is incorrect. However, many people would like it if the theory were that fragile and if that pillar on which it supposedly rests were unsound.
What is extraordinary about Mann et al is not the quality of the work or the rigor with which it was performed. (It may well be wrong. Von Storch seems to think so, and he is surely a man to reckon with in such matters.) Left to its own devices, science will converge on truth.
What is extraordinary about the paper is the amount of hostile attention directed toward it, mostly from outside science.
It's about politics, not about r-squared, and a very unfortunate type of politics as well. It's usually called mudslinging, and its not really a novelty, but its use in science is an unfortunate new development. The participation in this degrading spectacle by a publication as influential as the Wall Street Journal and by a congressman are especially discouraging.
Everyone is drawing inconclusive conclusions with a sub-Nyquist dataset. All in violation of Shannon's Information Theory.
A clever criticism, but actually untrue for a number of reasons. The one you will understand most readily is the Vostok core records.
here's a nice presentation of that part of the picture. Plenty of samples here.
What most people don't understand is that a very small minority in the scientific community believe that one, global warming is a threat, and two, global warming is totally or mostly man-made. You have a small number of unscrupulous scientists who massage data, make up data, and use weather models that are known to be flawed who are able to convince NGOs and the mainstream media that not only is the sky falling, but the scientific community is in total agreement with them. In reality, it's only about 1-2% who are true believers.
it was so out of line that I manufactured a "not", so in my mind it read
What most people don't understand is that a very small minority in the scientific community don't believe that one, global warming is a threat, and two, global warming is totally or mostly man-made.
which is true, basically. I responded the to the idea that those people (the very small minority) had some models they were misinterpreting. Which they don't. There are no such models. Nobody knows how to make one.
I was so eager to make the point I completely flipped the meaning of the original post. Another case for not being too trigger happy... Had I read all the way to the end I would have seen the error of my ways.
Yes, surprisingly good links, those, but they don't really answer the request for any serious study or simulation that shows that the consensus picture won't happen. As far as I know, there isn't one.
Er, the paragraph I quoted in turn contained a quote from a Republican congressman.
The main point, though, is to read this before jumping to any conclusions.
Since you responded within two minutes I am reasonably confident you didn't.
Here, let me save you a step. How would you like to be minding your own business (in Mann's case, in the process of moving to a new university in a different state) and suddenly from out of the blue receive a letter like one of these?
It's worse than that. When you say and use weather models that are known to be flawed you indicate that there are computations which do say something nontrivial about climate but that somehow don't show an accelerating heating at the surface when you pump CO2 into them.
There is, to my knowledge (and I am a professional in the field, yes) no such computation. There were a couple of conceptual models bandied about in the 90s, but they didn't pass observational tests, and no one has been able to make them work in a computational climate model.
No, it's just sniping. There isn't a coherent alternative theory as to why rapid and accelerating increases in greenhouse gas concentrations should magically have no serious effect on the surface temperature.
Some main points that don't seem to have come out so far in the Slashdot discussion so far are that
the congressman is parroting criticisms from a certain Canadian gadfly who has been proven on several occasions not to be well educated on matters of physical climatology.
these criticisms have been picked up by the Wall Street Journal (in an editorial piece that was severely flawed in other ways as well), but carry no weight in the scientific community, and any serious investigation would show this to be the case.
The letter was accusatory in tone and onerous in its demands. It wasn;t the request for clarification that is at stake, it is the punishment for results that are out of line with what the congressman wants
The individual result is illustrative of the seriousness of the situation, so it has received a lot of attention, including from the IPCC. Opponents of the scientific consensus, being political rather than scientific, decided this was an opportunity. They are attempting to tar the entire field with the brush of this purportedly bad article
It's not clear why the authors took so ling to release the code. However, if this means that conservative elements in congress are going to support a mandate for a purely open source tool chain in non-military science, that will certainly be a silver lining!
Anyway, follow the link and read what the main scientific institutions think of this episode before you come to your own conclusions please.
Also, if you don't mind signing in, see the recent
editorial in the New York Times. It includes the following:
Sherwood Boehlert of New York - a fellow Republican who is chairman of the House Science Committee and an enlightened moderate on environmental issues - seemed much closer to the truth when he described Mr. Barton's inquisition as "an effort to intimidate scientists rather than learn from them, and to substitute Congressional political review for scientific peer review."
Tom DeMarco should be mentioned in this discussion.
He did formal studies (assigning the same task to a large number of programmers) and compared productivity. The ability to turn the telephone ringer off and having a private office with a large desk were the biggest predictors of productivity.
This is an older study, predating IM, and probably back when email wasn't such a part of daily life, but it seems to me obvious that the same principle applies.
Hardware is cheap, but as we all know most of the margin from these sales goes to microsoft. Talk about unfair. The people responsible for the mess get the benefit.
The other thnig that bothers me is this constant reference to Apple's "3 per cent" market share. I swear the *majority* of computer users I see outside corporate settings are on macs; this includes a significant sampiling of 1) open sourcerers 2) cafe denizens 3) academics and 4) self-employed/very small business people. So what gives?
Well, Apples last a long time. Suppose Apples last 3 times as long as PCs. (On the basis of this story, the ratio is probably increasing.) Then the actual market share in computer-months is about 9%, not 3%. Now suppose that Apple people actually LIKE their computers, and spend three times as much time with them. Then the user share is about 27%. About a quarter of the actual minutes people spend with computers would be with Macs. Accounting for hidebound corporations and government agencies this looks more like real life to me.
No, the point is that *even though* the Arctic is getting wetter the lakes disappear as soon as the permafrost melts. Since the permafrost is in retreat, that is expected to dominate.
Both the warming and the wettening of the Arctic have been anticipated for about twenty years; the abrupt decline in lake area is new and unexpected.
Yes, your headline is less dramatic, but it also is less descriptive of the main new information.
The purpose of a headline is to summarize, not to tell the whole story. That's why there is text under the headline.
I still doubt that the advertising model is sustainable. If I'm right, that would mean that eventually Google as we know it will go away, not the Times.
Paying a few cents for good content is much better than having everything driven and distorted by advertising. Microtransactions can drive creativity and are the best hope for sustainable free speech.
Until they come around, I can settle for subscriptions.
me. I click nytimes.com and slashdot.org in that order about four times a day. for whatever that's worth.
I think I'll pay, even though it's only the op-ed page that's going away for nonsubscribers. Maureen Dowd alone is worth a dollar a week.
mt
Normally, 10 millenia is a short time in geophysics. Watch out for the next few centuries though. They'll be among the most exciting highlights of the entire multi-billion-year record.
Note that we only have this guy's word for why he was rejected.
For what it's worth, in my experience hovering around the edge of this field, the consensus is in line with the IPCC report, which is not surprising, since the IPCC's task is to report the opinion of the relevant sciences.
I saw it on opening night in Madison WI. People laughed a lot and there was even some appplause at the end.
I liked it more than I expected, but given the reviews here I wasn't expecting much. I think it has a different *type* of humor than the previous installments, more visual. Some of the effects were *very* funny. The inexcusable bobbling of the Prosser incident (if they were going to do it that badly they should have left it out) and the lame underplaying of Ford were disappointing but the casting and performance of Zaphod and Trillian were so brilliant I very much forgive them.
I will forever think of W as President Beeblebrox from now on, which alone was not only worth the price of admission but somehow softens the pain of actually seeing the man.
I think this is an important movie in the history of silly movies actually, the first where big budget effects were played as comedy.
Is there any reason to suspect that triplets of ten digit sequences of pi might be correlated? Why should someone use tax dollars to investigate? What on earth does "this random sequence is more random than that one" mean?
I dislike the question intensely. Let me give the boomer answer, since nobody else has.
Study what you are interested in. Do what will make you happy. If money is the thing that will make you happy pick a third option like sales or bank management or plastic surgery.
If you are making a strategy in quest of money by being an IT professional for some foolish reason, you will likely be abused, and likely disappointed too.
If you don't love some aspect of computing for itself, you will probably not succeed in it. Certainly there are easier and more reliable ways to make more money.
Figure out what you can do for the world and set out to do it. If you're smart enough to get into a CS or EE program you are smart enough to avoid starving while doing what you want to do. If that's CS or EE or boatbuilding or macrame or whatever, just do that, and figure out how to get paid for it as you go.
If you don't know what you like, drop out for a year or two and figure it out.
A hundred years of prosperity and we get slave mentality questions like this. Dammit, in the standards of human history you'll be a rich bastard if you manage to get a job at the Quickie Mart.
Relax, do the right thing, pull your weight in the world, and stop being so hung up on money.
Life is the cake, money is just icing, and far too many people end up with too much icing and not enough cake.
I carefully did not say it was a zero-sum game. Of course it isn't. On the other hand, the steel suppplier is ahead.
All I'm saying is you can't add costs linearly ignoring benefits or vice versa, an error which macroeconomic arguments seem to commit all the time.
The economy is not helped when company makes incorrect decisions, it is harmed, along with that company.
I think this is a flavor of the same fallacy, if stated as above in absolute terms. For example, a spammer making microeconomically incorrect decisions which reduce his ability to spam helps the economy by not wasting everybody's time and patience. Many microeconomically unsound decisions benefit the common good.
Almost all grass-roots environmentalism is microeconomically unsound, to take another important example. Some of the less superstitious versions, though, actually do contribute positively to the general well-being of the world. I explicitly refrained from buying a car AC in the period before freon was phased out, for instance. I took a noticeable penalty and the entire world shared an unnoticeable but probably larger benefit.
Y'know, if company A loses 150K through a management error, most often their competitor is going to gain 150K.
I hate this kind of reasoning. It comes up in poliics. "This measure will create thousands of new jobs in our area". "No, this measure will cost the regional economy hundreds of millions of dollars!" Yeah, like those aren't exactly the same statement. Even if spreadsheet errors really do cost real money (which is unsupported), you can't just add them up.
As far as spreadsheets go, no serious company of any consequence makes serious decisions on the basis of spreadsheets as used by the average spreadsheet jockey. Spreadsheets are ok for back-of-the-envelope calculations and quick graphics. They're definitely the very oppposite of a proper software develpoment environment, though, and any business that uses them in the decision making process can't expect more than they get.
Please feel free to send me 10% of what you were going to spend on that "spreadsheet consultant" (smirk) for this advice. I suggest you use the rest to hire a good coder and replace any mission critical spreadsheets (snort) you might have, like soon, okay?
Slashdot Mirror
I get some points for seeing it coming, but so what? Maybe I should have tried harder to talk some sense into those people, but I doubt it would have made much difference either to them or to the current more dangerous batch of anti-scientists.
Yup. I warned the hippies about this years ago, actually. See http://www.swin.edu.au/chem/complex/vp/vp04/vp04.h tml
Search the page for my name, "Tobis", and read what I wrote about this in 1996. And don't say I didn't warn you.
mt
All that stuff at climateaudit.com is the sort of hairsplitting that actually does go on all the time within science, normally without the sour misanthropic contempt that is being drummed up there.
The attention to this particular paper is obviously politically motivated. The fact that the world is in trouble because of greenhouse emissions is a physical fact. It is not a fragile proposition that falls apart if one tree ring study is incorrect. However, many people would like it if the theory were that fragile and if that pillar on which it supposedly rests were unsound.
What is extraordinary about Mann et al is not the quality of the work or the rigor with which it was performed. (It may well be wrong. Von Storch seems to think so, and he is surely a man to reckon with in such matters.) Left to its own devices, science will converge on truth.
What is extraordinary about the paper is the amount of hostile attention directed toward it, mostly from outside science.
It's about politics, not about r-squared, and a very unfortunate type of politics as well. It's usually called mudslinging, and its not really a novelty, but its use in science is an unfortunate new development. The participation in this degrading spectacle by a publication as influential as the Wall Street Journal and by a congressman are especially discouraging.
A clever criticism, but actually untrue for a number of reasons. The one you will understand most readily is the Vostok core records. here's a nice presentation of that part of the picture. Plenty of samples here.
What most people don't understand is that a very small minority in the scientific community believe that one, global warming is a threat, and two, global warming is totally or mostly man-made. You have a small number of unscrupulous scientists who massage data, make up data, and use weather models that are known to be flawed who are able to convince NGOs and the mainstream media that not only is the sky falling, but the scientific community is in total agreement with them. In reality, it's only about 1-2% who are true believers.
it was so out of line that I manufactured a "not", so in my mind it read What most people don't understand is that a very small minority in the scientific community don't believe that one, global warming is a threat, and two, global warming is totally or mostly man-made.
which is true, basically. I responded the to the idea that those people (the very small minority) had some models they were misinterpreting. Which they don't. There are no such models. Nobody knows how to make one.
I was so eager to make the point I completely flipped the meaning of the original post. Another case for not being too trigger happy... Had I read all the way to the end I would have seen the error of my ways.
Yes, surprisingly good links, those, but they don't really answer the request for any serious study or simulation that shows that the consensus picture won't happen. As far as I know, there isn't one.
Ah, I was assuming you knew which side was corrupt here. I'm sorry I did not read more carefully.
Er, the paragraph I quoted in turn contained a quote from a Republican congressman.
The main point, though, is to read this before jumping to any conclusions.
Since you responded within two minutes I am reasonably confident you didn't.
Here, let me save you a step. How would you like to be minding your own business (in Mann's case, in the process of moving to a new university in a different state) and suddenly from out of the blue receive a letter like one of these?
There is, to my knowledge (and I am a professional in the field, yes) no such computation. There were a couple of conceptual models bandied about in the 90s, but they didn't pass observational tests, and no one has been able to make them work in a computational climate model.
No, it's just sniping. There isn't a coherent alternative theory as to why rapid and accelerating increases in greenhouse gas concentrations should magically have no serious effect on the surface temperature.
Some main points that don't seem to have come out so far in the Slashdot discussion so far are that
Anyway, follow the link and read what the main scientific institutions think of this episode before you come to your own conclusions please.
Also, if you don't mind signing in, see the recent editorial in the New York Times. It includes the following:
He did formal studies (assigning the same task to a large number of programmers) and compared productivity. The ability to turn the telephone ringer off and having a private office with a large desk were the biggest predictors of productivity.
This is an older study, predating IM, and probably back when email wasn't such a part of daily life, but it seems to me obvious that the same principle applies.
This is reported in a book called Peopleware.
Hardware is cheap, but as we all know most of the margin from these sales goes to microsoft. Talk about unfair. The people responsible for the mess get the benefit.
The other thnig that bothers me is this constant reference to Apple's "3 per cent" market share. I swear the *majority* of computer users I see outside corporate settings are on macs; this includes a significant sampiling of 1) open sourcerers 2) cafe denizens 3) academics and 4) self-employed/very small business people. So what gives?
Well, Apples last a long time. Suppose Apples last 3 times as long as PCs. (On the basis of this story, the ratio is probably increasing.) Then the actual market share in computer-months is about 9%, not 3%. Now suppose that Apple people actually LIKE their computers, and spend three times as much time with them. Then the user share is about 27%. About a quarter of the actual minutes people spend with computers would be with Macs. Accounting for hidebound corporations and government agencies this looks more like real life to me.
In point 1 you missed an important detail. It should be "1. Make the hardware *and* the software and *make it excellent*!"
The new ice age for Europe won't happen, but the serious concern is that something like the Younger Dryas even will recur. Start here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
mt
No, the point is that *even though* the Arctic is getting wetter the lakes disappear as soon as the permafrost melts. Since the permafrost is in retreat, that is expected to dominate.
Both the warming and the wettening of the Arctic have been anticipated for about twenty years; the abrupt decline in lake area is new and unexpected.
Yes, your headline is less dramatic, but it also is less descriptive of the main new information.
The purpose of a headline is to summarize, not to tell the whole story. That's why there is text under the headline.
Paying a few cents for good content is much better than having everything driven and distorted by advertising. Microtransactions can drive creativity and are the best hope for sustainable free speech.
Until they come around, I can settle for subscriptions.
me. I click nytimes.com and slashdot.org in that order about four times a day. for whatever that's worth. I think I'll pay, even though it's only the op-ed page that's going away for nonsubscribers. Maureen Dowd alone is worth a dollar a week. mt
Welcome to the anthropocene.
here
Note that we only have this guy's word for why he was rejected.
For what it's worth, in my experience hovering around the edge of this field, the consensus is in line with the IPCC report, which is not surprising, since the IPCC's task is to report the opinion of the relevant sciences.
I saw it on opening night in Madison WI. People laughed a lot and there was even some appplause at the end.
I liked it more than I expected, but given the reviews here I wasn't expecting much. I think it has a different *type* of humor than the previous installments, more visual. Some of the effects were *very* funny. The inexcusable bobbling of the Prosser incident (if they were going to do it that badly they should have left it out) and the lame underplaying of Ford were disappointing but the casting and performance of Zaphod and Trillian were so brilliant I very much forgive them.
I will forever think of W as President Beeblebrox from now on, which alone was not only worth the price of admission but somehow softens the pain of actually seeing the man.
I think this is an important movie in the history of silly movies actually, the first where big budget effects were played as comedy.
Is there any reason to suspect that triplets of ten digit sequences of pi might be correlated? Why should someone use tax dollars to investigate? What on earth does "this random sequence is more random than that one" mean?
It all looks pretty random to me.
I dislike the question intensely. Let me give the boomer answer, since nobody else has.
Study what you are interested in. Do what will make you happy. If money is the thing that will make you happy pick a third option like sales or bank management or plastic surgery.
If you are making a strategy in quest of money by being an IT professional for some foolish reason, you will likely be abused, and likely disappointed too.
If you don't love some aspect of computing for itself, you will probably not succeed in it. Certainly there are easier and more reliable ways to make more money.
Figure out what you can do for the world and set out to do it. If you're smart enough to get into a CS or EE program you are smart enough to avoid starving while doing what you want to do. If that's CS or EE or boatbuilding or macrame or whatever, just do that, and figure out how to get paid for it as you go.
If you don't know what you like, drop out for a year or two and figure it out.
A hundred years of prosperity and we get slave mentality questions like this. Dammit, in the standards of human history you'll be a rich bastard if you manage to get a job at the Quickie Mart.
Relax, do the right thing, pull your weight in the world, and stop being so hung up on money.
Life is the cake, money is just icing, and far too many people end up with too much icing and not enough cake.
All I'm saying is you can't add costs linearly ignoring benefits or vice versa, an error which macroeconomic arguments seem to commit all the time.
The economy is not helped when company makes incorrect decisions, it is harmed, along with that company.
I think this is a flavor of the same fallacy, if stated as above in absolute terms. For example, a spammer making microeconomically incorrect decisions which reduce his ability to spam helps the economy by not wasting everybody's time and patience. Many microeconomically unsound decisions benefit the common good.
Almost all grass-roots environmentalism is microeconomically unsound, to take another important example. Some of the less superstitious versions, though, actually do contribute positively to the general well-being of the world. I explicitly refrained from buying a car AC in the period before freon was phased out, for instance. I took a noticeable penalty and the entire world shared an unnoticeable but probably larger benefit.
I hate this kind of reasoning. It comes up in poliics. "This measure will create thousands of new jobs in our area". "No, this measure will cost the regional economy hundreds of millions of dollars!" Yeah, like those aren't exactly the same statement. Even if spreadsheet errors really do cost real money (which is unsupported), you can't just add them up.
As far as spreadsheets go, no serious company of any consequence makes serious decisions on the basis of spreadsheets as used by the average spreadsheet jockey. Spreadsheets are ok for back-of-the-envelope calculations and quick graphics. They're definitely the very oppposite of a proper software develpoment environment, though, and any business that uses them in the decision making process can't expect more than they get.
Please feel free to send me 10% of what you were going to spend on that "spreadsheet consultant" (smirk) for this advice. I suggest you use the rest to hire a good coder and replace any mission critical spreadsheets (snort) you might have, like soon, okay?