Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[bit_pattern]

By doing this Watts demonstrates how alien he is to the academic world and its behavioural norms.

Dunno if this has been posted yet

Watts' New Paper - Analysis and Critique

And

BEST Results Consistent with Human-Caused Global Warming

 

[Dinwar]

There was a mountain of evidence available to Muller yet he seemingly choose to ignore that evidence (very UN-scientifically).

The highlighted word renders your entire argument invalid.

It's not up to you or me to decide what's sufficient evidence to convince someone. It's their obligation to decide that. It'll be different for each scientist--some will jump on a theory you or I may consider too poorly supported to agree with, while others may have standards we'd consider irrationally high. And again, that's a good thing--it's part of that constant outward motion. Some move faster than others, is all.

In the end he didn't change anything like Alvarez, he just confirmed what a large body of the scientific community already knew and along the way he just so happened to changed his own preconceived bias. That doesn't make him a good scientist, quite to the contrary in fact.

I completely disagree with you. This man did EXACTLY what Alvarez did--it's just that the outcome was different. And overcoming one's biases is the hallmark of a good scientist, even if it takes a while. What's the alternative? Obviously biases must be dealt with somehow, and the only suggestion even alluded to in this thread is "Follow the majority". Which won't work, because it's another bias in and of itself.

Should he have fact checked the work of others? Sure thing, but he should have kept his mouth shut until he examined the evidence.

He DID examine evidence, is the thing. The fact that he came to a different conclusion than you is not proof that he didn't examine evidence; it's merely proof that he disagrees.

He could have saved a lot of time and possibly a good bit of confusion if he had just followed the science.

Obviously by "science" you don't mean "a critical examination of the data available", because he did that all through this as I understand it. My only conclusion is that, despite your protestations to the contrary, "the science" to you means "the majority"--or worse, "the data I have available to me" (worse because this assumes you have the best dataset, while if you argue for following the majority there is at least the possibility of mitigating biases).

Again, it's not the conclusions that I'm interested in, but the process. I'd much rather be wrong for the right reasons than right for the wrong ones, because at least if I'm wrong for the right reasons I can correct myself.

 

[not_so_new]

The highlighted word renders your entire argument invalid.

Really? Well thanks.

He argued pretty heavily against the evidence that was presented by others. When he did finally decide to actually... you know.... look at the evidence he came up with the exact same result as everyone else did.

I don't see that as invalid, and I think that shows that he seemingly ignored all the other research that was done on the subject.

It's not up to you or me to decide what's sufficient evidence to convince someone. It's their obligation to decide that. It'll be different for each scientist--some will jump on a theory you or I may consider too poorly supported to agree with, while others may have standards we'd consider irrationally high. And again, that's a good thing--it's part of that constant outward motion. Some move faster than others, is all.

I don't disagree here and I don't know all the steps he took to validate the evidence in a manner that finally convinced him. The only thing I do notice is that his findings line up almost point for point with the existing body of evidence. He didn't have a higher bar other than he had to run the numbers for himself.

I guess that is okay, my problem is that he choose to speak out against the evidence before he made an attempt to follow where the evidence lead him. Had he followed the evidence he wouldn't have been a denier in the first place.

I completely disagree with you. This man did EXACTLY what Alvarez did--it's just that the outcome was different. And overcoming one's biases is the hallmark of a good scientist, even if it takes a while. What's the alternative? Obviously biases must be dealt with somehow, and the only suggestion even alluded to in this thread is "Follow the majority". Which won't work, because it's another bias in and of itself.

That is exactly my point. I agree, the hallmark of a good scientist is to overcome their bias and follow the evidence. Alverez looked at the evidence and brought something new to the table. Muller didn't.

Again, had he (Muller) looked at the evidence before he spoke out against the theory I wouldn't have a problem.

The chain of events.... the theory of man made global warming was presented, evidence was gathered to back up the theory, Muller vocally and very publicly, disagreed with that evidence, more evidence was brought to light, Muller publicly disagreed with that further evidence, Muller then looked at the evidence and came to the conclusion that it was accurate. He didn't bring a lot of new evidence to the table here, at least not that I can see. He just looked at it and finally decided that it was strong enough to change his mind.

He DID examine evidence, is the thing. The fact that he came to a different conclusion than you is not proof that he didn't examine evidence; it's merely proof that he disagrees.

Yet this very same evidence NOW is enough to change his mind? Again, I don't think he brought a lot of new evidence to the table here so he either didn't understand the original evidence (which means he shouldn't be holding a very public opinion on the matter, which he did) or he didn't review the available evidence (which means he shouldn't be holding a very public opinion on the matter, again which he did).

Obviously by "science" you don't mean "a critical examination of the data available", because he did that all through this as I understand it. My only conclusion is that, despite your protestations to the contrary, "the science" to you means "the majority"--or worse, "the data I have available to me" (worse because this assumes you have the best dataset, while if you argue for following the majority there is at least the possibility of mitigating biases).

Please don't make assumptions about my intentions.

I do in fact specifically mean "a critical examination of the data available" which he didn't do before he published his new research. He didn't bring anything new to the discussion here, he only examined the evidence that was already available and now he has "made a 180 degree turn" on the subject.

He made this seemingly remarkable change after he reviewed the evidence and came up with the exact same results as the rest of the body science.

Again, it's not the conclusions that I'm interested in, but the process. I'd much rather be wrong for the right reasons than right for the wrong ones, because at least if I'm wrong for the right reasons I can correct myself.

That is noble and I completely agree with this thought process. That however is not the case with Muller. He was only interested in his bias, he was very obviously NOT following the scientific process. The evidence for my statement rests in the fact that, when he DID finally follow the already available evidence he then changed his mind.

If you are as interested in the process as you appear to be then you will see why I have problems with the guy.

 

[DC]

Data checking is fine and well. But doing a pretty simple curve fit and then claim you went into much more detail than the IPCC is pure arrogance or ignorance.

 

[OMGturt1es]

I'll plagiarize myself from elsewhere:

Multiple, independent peer reviewed papers have already indicated that Earth is warming and that human-caused CO2 emissions are largely responsible. Muller's research would be a welcomed addition to this growing body of evidence if: 1. He waited until at least his research was in the process of being published in a peer reviewed journal before discussing his conclusions in such a public setting; 2. He attempted to honestly understand the existing body of evidence; 3. He stopped running his mouth.

It's quite annoying that Muller insists previous evidence is inadequate or flawed while demonstrating profound ignorance about basic climate science. From the beginning, Muller had every opportunity to simply crack open an introductory Earth systems text book to understand the basics of climate science. Muller had every opportunity to read through a bit of IPCC AR4 to review the extensive body of evidence that leaves essentially no room for doubt that Earth is warming. There are entire journals dedicated to climate change (e.g., Nature Climate Change). He could even consult Wikipedia to at least understand some of the basic evidence. Instead, Muller chose to accuse climatologists of anything from sloppy work to downright fraud and conspiracy. That's not the way science is done-- at least, not constructive science. Muller has a responsibility to at least fully understand expert consensus before critiquing it.

Moreover, while we can't actually scrutinize his work because it's not yet been peer reviewed, it really does appear that the attribution itself is based on simple curve fitting, which is something that climatologists are so far beyond it's not even funny. Climatologists have identified far stronger attribution evidence, such as the combination of tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling, the fact that nights and winters are warming faster than days and summers, or the changes in downward and outgoing infrared radiation spectra. And yet Muller runs his mouth, claiming that he's uncovered stronger evidence than anyone else. And that's just absurd.

And to make things worse, he continues to critique beyond his area of expertise. In his recent op-ed, Muller claims that Hurricane Katrina cannot be linked to global warming because the number of hurricanes hitting the US has been going down. This is really an incredible statement. It indicates complete ignorance of tropical cyclones and completely ignores Emanuel's work on Maximum Power Dissipation, a warming north Atlantic basin, and a cooling upper atmosphere. Muller claims that the heat wave in the US isn't linked to global warming because it's cooler elsewhere. Again, this is an incredible statement. It demonstrates amazing ignorance of basic climate science and it completely ignores Hansen's recent analysis that indicates temperatures three or more standard deviations higher than previous regional means are now nearly 40 times more common.

Muller needs to just stop. He needs to shut his mouth, and he needs to hit the books. He needs to reserve judgement until he actually understands the current body of evidence, and even then, he needs to consult with real experts before he thinks he has any reason to publicly criticize climate science.

 

[bit_pattern]

I'll plagiarize myself from elsewhere:

<polite snip>

Great post. I thoroughly approve. Muller is also promulgating (still) easily disproved myths about climate scientists. He's not doing the field any favours, all he did with his grandstanding and willingness to engage and humour the denialist fringe was to perpetuate the doubt already surrounding the temperature record. I wish he and Anthony Watts would just bioth get away.

I think it was Ben Burch or DC but whoever said it was spot on - I doubt either BEST or Watts's breathless rebuttal will ever see the light of peer review. This is just histrionics from a bunch of attention-seekers.

 

[bit_pattern]

He DID examine evidence, is the thing. The fact that he came to a different conclusion than you is not proof that he didn't examine evidence; it's merely proof that he disagrees.

My problem isn't with the work per se but the way that he has played a political game, pandering to the denialist CT fringe by promoting the idea that the so-called "climategate" somehow cast doubt over the veracity of mainstream climate science. There is some famous video footage of him repeating easily disproved allegations about "hide the decline" and "mike's nature trick" - he's still been going on about it since his supposed "conversion".


The guy isn't in it for the science, he's in it for the attention, in my humble opinion.

 

[aleCcowaN]

He was here once. Banned for not being able to be civil.

And unbanned in strange circumstances -I suppose on a promise of not posting here any more-, and not without firstly tainting these fora's resources for sceptics sub-forum with tons of denialist literature ...

About Muller's, Poptech seems to apply the age-old principle of "abjurers were never real believers in the first time".

 

[bit_pattern]

And unbanned in strange circumstances -I suppose on a promise of not posting here any more-, and not without firstly tainting these fora's resources for sceptics sub-forum with tons of denialist literature ...

About Muller's, Poptech seems to apply the age-old principle of "abjurers were never real believers in the first time".

Apparently Muller's scepticism is not pure enough, therefore his results can be dismissed out of hand. These deniers remind me of radical Marxists of old, where every idea had to be viewed through the prism of the correct form of Marxist ideology, anything that deviated had to be shouted down. It's the exact same psychological pathology driving it.

 

[Dancing David]

1784 was also the year without a summer, and not the first .

I'd expect to see an increase in the minimum for the year, which of course comes during boreal summer, but I doubt such precision is available that far back.

Ouch those volcanoes sure do effect the temperature sometimes.

 

[kblood]

Climate change study forces sceptical scientists to change minds

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/29/climate-change-sceptics-change-mind

The Earth's land has warmed by 1.5C over the past 250 years and "humans are almost entirely the cause", according to a scientific study set up to address climate change sceptics' concerns about whether human-induced global warming is occurring.

Prof Richard Muller, a physicist and climate change sceptic who founded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (Best) project, said he was surprised by the findings. "We were not expecting this, but as scientists, it is our duty to let the evidence change our minds." He added that he now considers himself a "converted sceptic" and his views had undergone a "total turnaround" in a short space of time.

Insightful stuff right there

 

[lomiller]

Well.... to play devil's advocate here.

The problem I think a lot of people have isn't that he was fact checking... it was that he was fact checking something that was already checked multiple times and his data came back almost exactly the same as the previous fact checking efforts.

It's sort of like someone saying "Hey, I don't believe Special Relativity is accurate" even though it has been tested and validated many many times. While one person is standing there saying "I don't believe Special Relativity is accurate" everyone else is moving on. Of course the rest of the scientific community is going to see this anti-Special Relativity guy as a Luddite.

And then, when this guy does all his calculations and then decides that "oh, well I guess that Eisenstein was on to something, I just proved his work is in fact valid" I think many people are going to see him as a glory hound or a hack... or both.

There comes a point when there is enough evidence that science needs to move on and accept that there is conclusive evidence for a given theory. If that were not the case we would still be discussing whether the Earth is flat.

Personally, I feel it's rather arrogant to fact check a large percentage of the scientific community on something they have already come to a consensus on.... then after that fact checking he comes back and says "now it's right because I checked it."

No one is saying scientists shouldn't double check their work. It's just that there is a time to do that and that time is well past in the climate change argument.

well said

 

[lomiller]

Than you're wrong.

I'm sorry, but there's no other way to interpret it. A scientist who relies on the opinions of others in areas they are expressing professional opinions on is not a scientist. The only thing that should matter to a scientist is the data--not what other people think of the data. Who knows? They may well all be wrong.

He’s right, you’re wrong. Think about it, if what you are suggesting were true no paper ever written would contain citations to anyone else’s work because everything you want to include would need to be personally confirmed and published.

There is no scientists anywhere who has personally validated and recreated every scrap of data scientific conclusions are based on. This is even true of specialists in a given field let alone people who only dabble. It simply isn’t humanly possible to personally replicate every scrap of science that even a very narrow field depends on, that ‘s why we have a system of citations.

 

[lomiller]

Take, for example, uniformitarianism. It dominated the scientific community for two centuries. It was so widely held that the term "consensus" doesn't really apply--no one thought to challenge it, there were no other options (once Catastraphism was shown to be deeply flawed, anyway). Yet along came the Alvarez team, and suddenly uniformitarianism needs to be re-thought from the ground up. One of the foundational theories of several schools of thought, which had been fact-checked by so many scientists that they no longer realized they were doing it, was shown to be flawed because someone had the courage to fight (and it WAS a fight) the majority of the scientific community.

Had the Alvarez team followed the advice given thus far in this thread, they'd have meekly concluded that the K/Pg event took millions of years, because that's what the consensus would have dictated. And they'd have been dead wrong.

Strawman. No one is saying accepted science can’t be overturned, just that if you want to say or insinuate the existing body of work is flawed it’s up to you to bring evidence to the table. Until you do people will keep accepting the existing science as provisionally true. The key point here is Alverez presented compelling evidence of his own, he didn’t simply repeat the same things others had done under the assumption they were lying/incompetent and expecting that if he repeated it he would get a different result.

What you are suggesting is actually the norm of crackpots and conspiracy theorists who insist that no matter how many studies papers or evidence has been presented on a subject we must reserve judgement because the next one could prove it all wrong. What you are suggesting is neither science nor scepticism.

 

[Trakar]

The daft thing is that the very industries funding the denialist movement are also some of the biggest providers for renewable research. It's really just a delaying tactic giving them time to develop the technologies to make money out of renewables...

^^^^This mostly. I would add "making as much profit from carbon fuels as possible for as long as possible," as a motivating factor.

 

[lomiller]

The highlighted word renders your entire argument invalid.

It's not up to you or me to decide what's sufficient evidence to convince someone. It's their obligation to decide that. It'll be different for each scientist--some will jump on a theory you or I may consider too poorly supported to agree with, while others may have standards we'd consider irrationally high. And again, that's a good thing--it's part of that constant outward motion. Some move faster than others, is all.

Ok, now apply that logic to those who still don’t believe there is enough evidence to say the world trade center collapse because a passenger jet crashed into it or that man has landed on the moon or that the world is more than 5000 years old.

Science never proves anything absolutely, so these people could be right. It’s very very very unlikely they are, but they could be. With scientific evidence it’s always possible to set a bar for evidence so high that it isn’t met by current research, this doesn’t mean it’s justifiable to do so.

 

[Trakar]

There was always going to be a point, as resources dwindle and the frequency of expensive natural disasters started to go up, where the voices of industries that stand to lose a lot when climate change was properly addressed start to get overpowered by those who stand to lose a lot more by not doing so.

And, y’know, if I was a clever, forward-thinking billionaire on the former side who was noticing this and starting to wonder if I could be held liable for anything when the tide turned and things started to get a bit real, I might start to lay the groundwork for a wee bit of an injury time reverse-ferret. Build myself a framing narrative of the good sceptical corporate citizen making sure we didn’t do anything rash, but nobly accepting they were wrong now that they’ve invested in looking properly at the data…

A reasonable consideration, IMO. I don't know how much it adds to the understanding of climate and climate change, but it seems in accord with social and behavioral psychology (as well as many business philosophies - which, btw, is why it is important to minimize corporatist influences and pure capitalism tendencies some sectors are always enthralled with, as they tend to weaken the checks and balances on such market distortions and corruptions).

 

[Trakar]

Yes but there s still the cause and effect- warmer oceans release more CO2 into the atmosphere, so not so simple as one graph shows.

So long as the oceans are a net sink, their emission contribution (due to warming) is offset.

 

[bit_pattern]

A good piece from Real Climate on the BEST/WUWT hoopla:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/08/let-the-games-begin/

The ‘best’ response to this circus is to sit back and see how pretzel-like the logical justifications can become. I particularly like the recent twist to the “No true scotsman” post-hoc rationalisation. Since the ‘converted skeptic’/prodigal scientist meme is a very powerful framing for the media, the obvious riposte for the ‘skeptics’ is to declare that Muller was not a true skeptic. But since these terms have become meaningless in terms of any specific position, this ends up as a semantic argument that convinces no-one but the faithful.

The actual trigger for all this hoopla is the deadline for papers that can be cited in the Second Order Draft of the new IPCC report. They needed to have been submitted to a journal by Tuesday (31 July) to qualify. Of course, they also need to be interesting, relevant and known to the IPCC lead authors. But there seems to be far too much emphasis being put on this deadline. The AR5 report is pretty much 90% written, and the broad outlines have been known for ages. Very few of the papers that have been submitted this week are anything other than minor steps forward and only a small number will be accorded anything other than a brief mention in AR5, and most not even that.

 

[a_unique_person]

I'll plagiarize myself from elsewhere:

Multiple, independent peer reviewed papers have already indicated that Earth is warming and that human-caused CO2 emissions are largely responsible. Muller's research would be a welcomed addition to this growing body of evidence if: 1. He waited until at least his research was in the process of being published in a peer reviewed journal before discussing his conclusions in such a public setting; 2. He attempted to honestly understand the existing body of evidence; 3. He stopped running his mouth.

It's quite annoying that Muller insists previous evidence is inadequate or flawed while demonstrating profound ignorance about basic climate science. From the beginning, Muller had every opportunity to simply crack open an introductory Earth systems text book to understand the basics of climate science. Muller had every opportunity to read through a bit of IPCC AR4 to review the extensive body of evidence that leaves essentially no room for doubt that Earth is warming. There are entire journals dedicated to climate change (e.g., Nature Climate Change). He could even consult Wikipedia to at least understand some of the basic evidence. Instead, Muller chose to accuse climatologists of anything from sloppy work to downright fraud and conspiracy. That's not the way science is done-- at least, not constructive science. Muller has a responsibility to at least fully understand expert consensus before critiquing it.

And all he had done is tell us what we already knew. It's good that he has independently replicated the existing science using new methods, but he hasn't added anything new either, for all his grandstanding and attacks on the existing science. You would think he would be more humble and say "Hey, we got the same answer you had already, maybe I should not have been so contemptuous of you after all".