Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[Corsair 115]

...but I can certainly judge the behavior of climate scientists, as revealed in the e-mail release from University of East Anglia.

I guess it's time for me to point out yet again that six separate independent investigations into the CRU/UEA e-mail affair exonerated the scientists involved from any wrongdoing. The investigations all concluded there was no manipulation or falsification of data. These investigations included ones by the British Parliament and the U.S. Department of Commerce's Office of Inspector General.

It isn't that the data is being kept secret, it is that there is commercial value in the data and while most nations make exception and share their data with academic researchers, they have spent budget funds collecting and compiling this data and are reluctant to give it away freely to any around the world who fancy collecting it.

Sounds rather like capitalism to me.

 

[Halsu]

Nonsense. You won't find any political ramblings at or in a scientific journal or website.

What makes RealCrapClimate.com pseudoscience is basically everything you won't find in a reputable science journal.

Read the website and ask yourself "Is this science? Would I find any of this in peer reviewed literature? Does this contribute in any way to the scientific understanding of climate science?" If the answer to any of these questions is "No" then it's pseudoscience riding on the coat tails of actual science.

Wrong. None of your questions have any relevance to pseudoscience. As an example, here's a site where the answer is "no" to all your questions - would you call this site pseudoscience?

http://knitting.about.com/

Then of course when it comes to Real Climate, the answer to all your questions is "yes". As said, this does not matter as you are so blatantly wrong with the very premise, but:

Yes, the site has science content - mostly in popularized form, but science content nevertheless.
Yes, the site has content that you could find in science journals - especially science journals' web sites.
Yes, the site contributes to the understanding of climate science - especially the public's understanding of it.

Publishing articles that are not hardcore peer reviewed science, or articles that take a clear side on the debate does not make a site pseudoscience. If it did, i guess that makes i.e. NewScientist, Science and Nature pseudoscience journals in your book:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v481/n7379/full/481005a.html
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/12/uk-police-seize-computers-in.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11462

Popularizing science does NOT make for a pseudoscience site either. Distorting or misrepresenting the science would, but there's nothing you have shown that suggests RealClimate does that.

More often than not you will find RealCrapClimate.com cited on the JREF forum instead of the actual journal publication in which the science was published. This is another sign of the pseudoscientific nature on these websites. Clearly the intent is to filter the science and present a distorted view of the actual science in the process.

Wrong again. The reason for linking to RealClimate instead of original peer reviewed papers is usually twofold: first of all, most peer reviewed articles are behind a paywall. Second, most of them are simply beyond a layman's understanding - in other words it's almost more likely to misunderstand than to understand the science in them for most of us, very likely you included.

RealScience often explains the science in the articles in layman's terms - and these explanations are often written by the same scientists that wrote the original scientific papers. Of course, the original research papers are linked to too, so you can check them too if you wish.

As a conclusion, you still have no case. And you did not answer my questions:

Could you please point out what in that text, which is a commentary about a confrence, and in your own words, has nothing to do with climate science....

- makes science and idology unseparable (and/or)
- misrepresents scientific findings to promote or draw attention for publicity (and/or)
- distorts the facts of science for short-term political gain

...because i can not find anything in that article that would fit any of the above??

 

[lomiller]

I think the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature graph is important too.

Personally I don’t find it all that significant. While it’s certainly a good thing for scientists to sit down and say “can I replicate these results” these particular results have already been looked at and replicated by multiple groups.

The latest replication doesn’t really add much to the discussion, but comes off as them saying “Sure it’s already been looked at by multiple groups over the last 3 decades, but now that I’ve done it we can be sure it’s true”, but can’t someone else come along and say the same thing? IOW why can’t someone else come along and say “sure lots of people, including BEST, have looked at this issue, but until I can replicate it myself there is reason to doubt these results”?

Replicating already established results over and over is an important part of the scientific process, but that doesn’t mean we need to personally replicate every result ever produced in order to be confident of their validity. Unfortunately, though, that was the approach BEST took going in. While I give them high marks for admitting they got the same results everyone else did, this should have been their expectation all along because there were multiple resulted for this already.

 

[Krikkiter]

http://berkeleyearth.org/analysis/

Amazing how similar the Berkeley graph is to the others isn't it? Who would have thought?

 

[Trakar]

Thanks for the response. Actually, it's a not just my understanding; it's a quote from a UCSD online course on climate change and CO₂.
It is little wonder that you have such bizarre perspective.

Again, you seem unable to properly quote exchanges here, which exemplifies the dangers and disingenuity of quote-mining and excerpting material out of the context withn which it was originally intended. That said, this is a particularly poorly worded paragraph for any reference on CO2 and computer modelling, even for a grade school simplification of the processes and considerations. Of course it is more than a decade out of date (note the copyright date - 2002) and was originally prepared as an introductory general science information course to help introduce middle school level students with little or no understandings of math and science to some basic terminology and concepts. This handling of computer modelling, however, is disgraceful. I have written to University of California San Diego Dean of Outreach Courses in charge of preparing, overseeing and updating these earth guide courses which were originally produced primarily for elementary and middle school students ( http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/eoc/index.html ). I will keep the board updated on responses and future communications in regard to this issue.

If you are prepared to discuss and deal with the actual issues I outlined from your actual words and not this out-of-date, out of context, snippet of word salad that should be an embarassment to even grade school educators and which you misrepresented as your own words, I am more than happy to engage in that discussion.

 

[Mikemcc]

Amazing how similar the Berkeley graph is to the others isn't it? Who would have thought?

Certainly not Anthony Watts!

 

[BenBurch]

I think the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature graph is important too.

Found here; http://berkeleyearth.org/analysis/

 

[CapelDodger]

I think the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature graph is important too.

It was a turning-point in "the debate". If it was Black Ops by the environmentalist-overrun scientific community, I take my hat off to them. Koch money, known team-friendlies, nepotism - even Watts nailed his flag to that mast. He tore it off afterwards, but it's still going under.

Those that haven't been thrown under the train to encourage some others are claiming that they never even suggested that data was being manipulated or that there was ever anything nefarious going on, and now what about those emails? Since they weren't concealing any data manipulation, and all the data has been released, the question becomes : what were they concealing? I'm not saying they're concealing a One World Gumment conspiracy overrun by environmentalists, I'm just asking. They must have been concealing something or there'd have been no reason to steal those emails would there? Or "leak" them (as is the preferred terminology in some circles)?

It's all downhill for the denier cult from here on in. Even if Romney gets elected he'll drop them like a bloody towel.

 

[Krikkiter]

Certainly not Anthony Watts!

He didn't like it much did he? But then, he's a weather man.

 

[CapelDodger]

So many processes have to be considered in the carbon cycle that it is extremely difficult to keep them in mind, and impossible to calculate without building a computer model to simulate them. Scientists interested in the carbon cycle have built a number of such models over the years. Such models can have between 50 and 100 interacting equations describing all the different processes of the carbon cycle that are relevant to the problem of how carbon dioxide changes through geologic time.

We're not dealing with geologic time here. We're dealing with a couple of centuries so far, and the rest of our lives to come. Not a lot in geological time, but it will leave one heck of an imprint for future geologists to ponder over.

To what extent should the answers generated from such models be trusted? Consider this: if there are a dozen processes which we need to understand, and we only grasp each process within an error of 20 percent, the sum-total of the error adds to more than 200 percent! That is, if we now state that the content of carbon dioxide in the air so many million years ago had to be X, the true answer could be anywhere between 3 times X (200% more than stated) and X divided by 3 (200% less). Even if we make the reasonable assumption that half of the errors will cancel, we still get roughly a factor of two error on either side of the uncertainty statement. Thus, at the present state of knowledge, computing the answers will get us ballpark estimates and overall trends but not much more.

Atmospheric CO₂ keeps rising within expected parameters, temperature keeps on rising within expected parameters, it seems that the intricacies of every element of the carbon-cycle that might impact on even the short-term (like "CO₂ is a fertiliser", you may have heard tell of that one) sub-components are of no great significance.

None of your hopeful cancelling is stopping anything yet, and why should it suddenly start? Methane release in the Arctic may not be significant but it's not going to cancel anything out. Weathering isn't your friend. The cow-fart trend isn't going to have a meaningful impact.

Burning fossil fuels by the tens of billions of tons every year in open atmosphere is going to make a serious difference to the carbon-cycle. That's why we're over 390ppm in the atmosphere now, while the oceans acidify and tundra turns to shrubland.

Your concern about the carbon-cycle over eons may distract you from what's actually going on while you're still warm, and I understand that, but I also remember when a change in cloud-behaviour was just around the corner and was going to save us all from what's happening. You've fallen for a similar fad, I'm afraid.

 

[Furcifer]

Actually it is an observation that you seem to want to put the word Crap into every web site that you talk about.

Nonsense. You either have poor observational skills or are lying. Cite more than 1 website or retract your statement.

Thus it is likely that if you were to talk abut the Nature web set it would be CrapNature. It also imples that your personal preference for the name of JREF would be CrapJREF or some variation.

Perhaps if this was true, but unfortunately it's a complete fabrication.

And how exactly does a web site explaining science using citations to actual scientific papers become a pseudoscience site?

By omitting valid scientific papers that do not agree with their agenda while pushing political garbage.

Then you can link to your posts giving the evdence that RealCrapClimate.com (and maybe CrapNature ) are pseudoscience,.

I've already linked evidence of the pseudoscientific nonsense being purveyed there.

What exactly is the name of the pseudoscience that they are describing?
Is it the Flat Earth theory?

I don't know the particular idiom.

Furcifer,

Please give a list of the "warring, agenda driven,politically motivated and biased websites" and cite your evidence that these web sites are

• warring (and why is that bad?)
• agenda driven (what is the agenda?)
• politically motivated
• biased

There are certainly some web sites on climate change that have the reputation of being "warring, agenda driven,politically motivated and biased", e.g. those run by some biased think tanks.

RealCrapClimate, SoCalledSkepticalScience and WattsUPWithThat, all are pseudoscience sites.

However calling Real Climate agenda driven, politically motivated and biased without evidence is insulting the climate scientists who write for it.

Then maybe they should refrain from engaging in pseudoscience.

 

[Furcifer]

I didn't mean you, you know. I meant the whole group. You only had been lately abusing of the word statistics in a lot of sentences without discussing nothing statistical, clearly trying to frame it as "a guess" that is many steps away from reality.

Oh, OK, I guess.

That's what lead us to the main point: masses are uneducated and they succumb easily to highly verbose chains of text that are presented in a way they look "scientific" but let them "in" -with their prejudices and wishes-.

Masses are obviously majorities, and majorities are needed in any political or PR process.

Masses also like a good fictional piece, music, entertainment and the typical "massite" prefers avoiding intellectual abstraction.

According to the denying camp, a huge amount of people has been conflated to concoct a "fictional state of climate": Very capable chaps in order to promote a "fiction" decided to use math and physics, and all the science the masses reject, in a numerical, formulaic, complicated fashion masses avoid, what has left to the "real and brave scientists" with their "hands full of truths" the hard work of ... communicating in a verbose way with majorities who love it simple and love it close to their prejudices and wishes.

So masses are massively visiting denying sites -the group of all "climategartersohlala.com" websites gathers 10 times more visitors than the group of "climateishard.com"- what would be a proof of its trustworthiness, the same way it is trustworthy a website with a porno version of Romeo and Juliet just because it gets 100 times the visits of another website academically analysing Shakespeare's works.

What had in fact lead us to the same social, behavioural and intellectual background that requires a creationism just to fight evolution.

You're employing a double standard. On one hand you're complaining about verbosity and on the other you're complaining about simplifying the statistical method of approximation to "educated guesses". Your argument is disingenuous because your ideology is completely inconsistent.

 

[Furcifer]

Wrong. None of your questions have any relevance to pseudoscience. As an example, here's a site where the answer is "no" to all your questions - would you call this site pseudoscience?

http://knitting.about.com/

Knitting isn't a science, it's a craft. I'm afraid if you don't see the difference between science and crafts we may have a problem.

Publishing articles that are not hardcore peer reviewed science, or articles that take a clear side on the debate does not make a site pseudoscience. If it did, i guess that makes i.e. NewScientist, Science and Nature pseudoscience journals in your book:

No they don't, not in my book. If you're looking for some all encompassing definition of pseudoscience you won't find one.

Popularizing science does NOT make for a pseudoscience site either. Distorting or misrepresenting the science would, but there's nothing you have shown that suggests RealClimate does that.

RealCrapClimate does distort the science however by selectively presenting the scientific studies of a few scientists.

Wrong again. The reason for linking to RealClimate instead of original peer reviewed papers is usually twofold: first of all, most peer reviewed articles are behind a paywall. Second, most of them are simply beyond a layman's understanding - in other words it's almost more likely to misunderstand than to understand the science in them for most of us, very likely you included.

Nonsense. This the same hand waving homeopaths and psychics make.

RealScience often explains the science in the articles in layman's terms - and these explanations are often written by the same scientists that wrote the original scientific papers. Of course, the original research papers are linked to too, so you can check them too if you wish.

As a conclusion, you still have no case. And you did not answer my questions:

Pure Denialism.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Again, you seem unable to properly quote exchanges here, which exemplifies the dangers and disingenuity of quote-mining and excerpting material out of the context withn which it was originally intended. That said, this is a particularly poorly worded paragraph for any reference on CO2 and computer modelling, even for a grade school simplification of the processes and considerations. Of course it is more than a decade out of date (note the copyright date - 2002) and was originally prepared as an introductory general science information course to help introduce middle school level students with little or no understandings of math and science to some basic terminology and concepts. This handling of computer modelling, however, is disgraceful. I have written to University of California San Diego Dean of Outreach Courses in charge of preparing, overseeing and updating these earth guide courses which were originally produced primarily for elementary and middle school students. I will keep the board updated on responses and future communications in regard to this issue.

If you are prepared to discuss and deal with the actual issues I outlined from your actual words and not this out-of-date, out of context, snippet of word salad that should be an embarassment to even grade school educators and which you misrepresented as your own words, I am more than happy to engage in that discussion.

"If you are prepared to discuss and deal with the actual issues", I am more than happy to engage in the discussion. Please link a Climate Audit post that you consider to present "pseudoscience", as you called it.

The point that the UCSD quote makes, that errors compound, applies broadly. The basic point follows from basic arithmetic: any product of real numbers on the interval (0,1) must be less than any factor (like "confidence" in a parameter). .99ⁿ=>0 as n increases. The confidence in a model must be less than the confidence in a parameter used in that model (simplifying considerably, here). The only way a model can generate greater confidence is to compare its product to a previous product of an earlier model ("greater" than what?), and to increase the accuracy and precision of measures that determine the model's input data and parameters. Feedback.

Now, consider the entire apparatus of climate understanding, the entire enterprise from field researchers to journal editors to funding agencies as a climate-modeling device. By cherry-picking tree rings, "adjusting" thermometer measurements, and skewing the peer-review process, Mann, Jones, and their friends sabotaged the feedback process. McIntyre criticizes their enablers (university administrators, the NSF investigators) as much as he does Mann and Jones.

I recommend Axelrod, R. The Evolution of Cooperation. Pride, confirmation bias, money, in-group loyalty, and misplaced trust produced the hockey stick and sabotaged a neutral reassessment. If Mann, Jones, et. al., felt secure in their data and analysis, they would welcome critics and would not have responded in their characteristic strident ad hominem.

btw: "and which you misrepresented as your own words" will happen again. Count on it. That was fun!

 

[Reality Check]

Furcifer, please cite your evidence that Real Climate has an agenda, etc.

By omitting valid scientific papers that do not agree with their agenda while pushing political garbage.

Now I see what the problem is: You do not know what pseudoscience means!

1. Nothing to do with omitting papers from a web site that it reporting on science.
2. Nothing to do with politics.

Now we know that the anewer to Furcifer, please cite your evidence that Real Climate is a pseudoscience site is you do not know what pseudoscience means.

Now all you have to do is support the above assertion by

1. State their agenda and your evidence for it.
2. List the valid papers that they have omiited.
3. Show that these papers remain vaild, i.e. have not bee invalidated by later papers.

P.S. What is the political agenda of the Nature web site that prevents it from commenting on every climate science paper that has ever been published ?

I've already linked evidence of the pseudoscientific nonsense being purveyed there.

No you have not.
You have cited 1 article as far as I can see from Real Climate and that was just a report on a conference.

RealCrapClimate, SoCalledSkepticalScience and WattsUPWithThat, all are pseudoscience sites.

• Furcifer, please cite your evidence that Skeptical Science is a pseudoscience site.
• Furcifer, please cite your evidence that WattsUPWithThat is a pseudoscience site.

 

[aleCcowaN]

You're employing a double standard. On one hand you're complaining about verbosity and on the other you're complaining about simplifying the statistical method of approximation to "educated guesses". Your argument is disingenuous because your ideology is completely inconsistent.

Poppycock elevated to the umpteenth!

Nothing like that is in that paragraph. Could you be more specific? It looks you'd like it to be that way.

"The statistical method of approximation" .

 

[CapelDodger]

By cherry-picking tree rings, "adjusting" thermometer measurements, and skewing the peer-review process, Mann, Jones, and their friends sabotaged the feedback process.

You have no evidence of that. Evidence against is the BEST program, which gathered in all the raw data it could find. The power you assign to Mann and Jones to control all climate data gathered across the world is ludicrous, but does reflect the efforts of McIntyre to persuade people that it's all down to a few super-villains. They can skew peer-review in all science journals (they can't), they can make Arctic sea-ice retreat by altering data (they can't), they can force everybody to only use a few selected tree-ring sequences when doing climate research (they can't), and they do this all in the service of making money for themselves (they don't do it at all, because they can't).

McIntyre criticizes their enablers (university administrators, the NSF investigators) as much as he does Mann and Jones.

Of course McIntyre makes accusations of "whitewash" in all the investigations (there have been at least seven), but he has no evidence. It's the only answer he's got - a Grand Conspiracy (but he's not saying that, is he?).

I recommend Axelrod, R. The Evolution of Cooperation. Pride, confirmation bias, money, in-group loyalty, and misplaced trust produced the hockey stick and sabotaged a neutral reassessment. If Mann, Jones, et. al., felt secure in their data and analysis, they would welcome critics and would not have responded in their characteristic strident ad hominem.

Mann, Jones and scientists around the world collaborate to produce ever better science. They have many, many papers to their names produced with many other scientists (science is very much a group activity these days).

McIntyre has only one approach - slander climate scientists. And you accuse scientists of "ad hominems"? Are you referring to what was said about McIntyre in private? McIntyre is a slimeball, so there's nothing intrinsically wrong in saying so.

All the data is available. The analysis is all described and reproducible. Even the code is available. Nowhere does your grand conspiracy emerge - but then you're not saying there's a conspiracy, are you? Just confirmation bias, which is making Arctic sea-ice retreat (I kid, it's really not), and the lust for money.

Edited by Gaspode: 

Edited for moderated thread.

Meanwhile the climate changes. Nothing ever changes in the denier world, though.

 

[Furcifer]

Poppycock elevated to the umpteenth!

Nothing like that is in that paragraph. Could you be more specific? It looks you'd like it to be that way.

"The statistical method of approximation" .

No, there's no possible way to be more specific and it can't possibly simplified any further. You're complaining it's both too complicated and too simple in the same post, that's a double standard.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Now I see what the problem is: You do not know what pseudoscience means!

1. Nothing to do with omitting papers from a web site that it reporting on science.
2. Nothing to do with politics.

We disagree, here. Science is more about a process of investigation than about the answers we find. It's okay to make a miscalculation and assert something which later investigation finds inaccurate. It's not okay to sabotage the process of investigation. Lysenkoism was not bogus science because Lysenko was wrong about inheritability of acquired characteristics, Lysenkoism was bogus science because Lysenko misrepresented his methods and worked to suppress alternative views.

 

[Mikemcc]

"If you are prepared to discuss and deal with the actual issues", I am more than happy to engage in the discussion. Please link a Climate Audit post that you consider to present "pseudoscience", as you called it.

The point that the UCSD quote makes, that errors compound, applies broadly. The basic point follows from basic arithmetic: any product of real numbers on the interval (0,1) must be less than any factor (like "confidence" in a parameter). .99ⁿ=>0 as n increases. The confidence in a model must be less than the confidence in a parameter used in that model (simplifying considerably, here). The only way a model can generate greater confidence is to compare its product to a previous product of an earlier model ("greater" than what?), and to increase the accuracy and precision of measures that determine the model's input data and parameters. Feedback.

Now, consider the entire apparatus of climate understanding, the entire enterprise from field researchers to journal editors to funding agencies as a climate-modeling device. By cherry-picking tree rings, "adjusting" thermometer measurements, and skewing the peer-review process, Mann, Jones, and their friends sabotaged the feedback process. McIntyre criticizes their enablers (university administrators, the NSF investigators) as much as he does Mann and Jones.

I recommend Axelrod, R. The Evolution of Cooperation. Pride, confirmation bias, money, in-group loyalty, and misplaced trust produced the hockey stick and sabotaged a neutral reassessment. If Mann, Jones, et. al., felt secure in their data and analysis, they would welcome critics and would not have responded in their characteristic strident ad hominem.

btw: "and which you misrepresented as your own words" will happen again. Count on it. That was fun!

For instance McIntyre's attempts to effectively mount a science worlds version of a denial-of-service attack by swamping CRU with FOI requests. He posted up the form letter for his readers to swamp them with requests, each one asking for details about six countries, all different on each request, but amounting to the same information. Despite the release of all the data he has been strangely quiet about actually using it, whereas Tamino took about a week to work out his own model that used the data.

Or his crusade about UHI which turned into yet another bust...

Or his smearing of climate scientists, one particular classic was to equate the investigation into Michael Mann's e-mails with investigation into the activities of Jerry Sandusky.