Judy brought up an interesting ‘study’ from which we (evidently) learn which ‘science’ bloggers read which blogs. She thinks it might be fun to discuss, and I think so to. After all, we learn a number of eye-opening things. Like, for example, it would seem the blogger at “HotWhopper” may not be a regular reader of “WUWT”. See: There is no line connecting HotWhopper to WUWT.
(Data graph by Jarreau
Who’d a thunk? After all, if we examine “HotWhoppers” current front page, the posts showing are
- Wednesday, December 31, 2014 Duet on Ice: More denier silliness at WUWT
- Insects and microbes and OCO-2 conspiracy theories at WUWT
- Monday, December 29, 2014
Where has all the CO2 gone? WUWT fails arithmetic & science, so cries pHraud! - European temperature at WUWT – Finland, the UK, teleconnections and more
- Wednesday, December 24, 2014
Happy Holidays - Monday, December 22, 2014
Tim Ball FAILS Carbon Cycle 101 at WUWT - Sunday, December 21, 2014
A silly poster by Pat’n Chip at AGU14 provides a learning experience (The first sentence of that post begins ‘Anthony Watts has reported a poster ‘) - Saturday, December 20, 2014
Anthony Watts pokes fun at ATI - Friday, December 19, 2014
Wondering Willis Eschenbach looks for sunlight in the Arctic winter – yeah, really! (For those who don’t know, Willis posts at WUWT.) - Looking at Clouds with Ulrike Lohmann at AGU14
But, evidently, Sou may not read WUWT regularly. Or at least s/he may read other blogs more regularly. Or s/he didn’t actively participate in the study resulting in the apparent “isolation” of the “yellow cluster” of blogs which otherwise, would have been linked to the purple ones through “HotWhopper” (at least)
Guess what else? Evidently Victor Venema may not read WUWT regularly either. After all, there is no line connecting “variability” blog to WUWT. And yet, despite the ‘non-reading’ of WUWT, quite recently, Victor blogged about “The quality assurance system of WUWT”. Admittedly, Victor doesn’t blog about WUWT as often as HotWhopper does. But it appears his exposure to that blog is sufficient to motivate posts like My immature and neurotic fixation on WUWT or The conservative family values of Christian man Anthony Watts or even complain that Anthony Watts solicited donations for Joanne Nova which suggests that Victor is rather hyper-aware of Anthony’s doings. I’ll leave it to those who write scrapers to estimate the fraction of Victors posts that mention WUWT, its content or contributors in some way. But I’ll note that I don’t read WUWT frequently enough to have even been aware he helped out JoNova in that way.
Oh well…. maybe what the graph really means is that Stoat, Rabbet Run, Real Climate and etc regularly read “Hot Whopper” while Sou didn’t report which blogs s/he read.
Though based on the graph conventions, I think it appears Sou may have 3 incoming links and 3 outgoing links. If so, s/he did report which blogs s/he read and the lack of linkage between the “purple” and “yellow” blogs is due, in part, to his/her self-deception about how often s/he actually reads WUWT. (And if s/he lack this self awareness, possibly there are others who also lack self-awareness.)
Anyway, I think it might be fun to speculate
- Which of the blogs invited to participate bothered to answer.
- Of those blogs that participated, which correctly indicated the blogs they read
- Whether or not we believe these bloggers rarely read WUWT (especially those– who like Rabett Run — not only mention him in posts bug have given him a nick-name.)
Quite honestly, I think Sou at Hot Whopper reads WUWT at least daily. Just saying. 🙂
On a slight change of topics, has anybody else see this piece of garbage.
Gee wiz, if you leave out most of the blogs that criticize climate science, what you find is the ones you do include are “isolated”.
Who’d a thunk it?
“On a slight change of topics”
Well, it’s more colorful than Wegman.
Carrick,
Yeah. I saw that. It’s sort of funny. It seems to be this:
A blogger, who established a blog consortium, asked her friends what blogs they read. Then (I think) some of them asked the bloggers whose blogs they read which blogs they read.) Turns out that circle of friends reads (or admits to reading) a certain set of blogs.
Oddly, we are supposed to believe “Hot Whopper” does not regularly read WUWT. And yet, the title of the posts on it’s front page are:
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Duet on Ice: More denier silliness at WUWT
Insects and microbes and OCO-2 conspiracy theories at WUWT
Where has all the CO2 gone? WUWT fails arithmetic & science, so cries pHraud!
European temperature at WUWT – Finland, the UK, teleconnections and more
Tim Ball FAILS Carbon Cycle 101 at WUWT
A silly poster by Pat’n Chip at AGU14 provides a learning experience
Ok… That’s so bad, I need to post!
Carrick, I saw that piece of garbage at Judith’s and it is amusing but not very interesting. What’s interesting is that some bloggers highlighted it as some sort of statement about who was “connected to science” and who was “isolated from science.” That would be Victor Venema and Stoat in passing.
My subjective experience that many posts on sites such as Stoat, Rabett, Hot whopper, ATTP (not obviously on the diagram) simply take issue with stuff seen on Climate Etc, Bishop Hill, etc etc. to encourage a gathering of the climate faithful. It would take a lot to encourage me to place any faith in this piece of work. The prominence of Tamino is also odd given the inactivity of his site lately.
Whoops! Just noticed ATTP, the large font made it harder to see! This just goes to show the value (lack of) in this exercise. There seem to be very few real science blogs in the climate sphere – most of the ones that feature are ones that do little more than comment on contrarian views.
It might be interesting to see what a Venn diagram of the following two groups would look like:
1) People who write critically about WUWT/Anthony Watts but say they never visit WUWT
2) People who swear up and down that there was nothing to ClimateGate but smugly proclaim that they would never read “stolen” e-mails.
diogenes,
Tamino seems to be back to blogging. I see 4 posts since Nov. Before that it was July. So yes, it seems unlikely that he’s really #1 on any bloggers ‘regular reading list’ right now. But those answering probably did so honestly. “Mallemaroking” appears to be “iceymark” who probably reads few blogs at all. (http://mallemaroking.org/) He seems to have listed statistics blogs. If someone rarely reads blogs, the hiatus in Tamino’s blogging wouldn’t knock it off the list of “most read”.
It’s worth being aware that even if 600 blogs were ‘invited’ that doesn’t mean most answered– and even if they did, it doesn’t mean most of those bloggers did a terrific job thinking of which blogs they read “most”.
Also lots of people didn’t answer. I suspect skeptical science didn’t answer. I suspect (but don’t know) that Rabett Run didn’t answer. It has 3 links, and it’s size seems to be proportional to 3 ‘incoming’ so I infer Eli didn’t answer.
lucia, two quick notes about this study. First, as far as I know, nobody was directly contacted. The author simply tweeted a link to the survey and let people who happened to see it take it. That introduces all sorts of concerns about sampling bias as it relies upon people following her or someone who retweeted her just to have seen the link. It’s easy to speculate the “groups” which have limited presence do so because few of them even had the opportunity to participate.
Second, people were only allowed to list three blogs they read. It’s unlikely people like Sou would ever pick Watts Up With That? as one of their first three choices, even if they read it more than any other blog. Several people go out of their way to avoid even linking to sites they dislike in a way which would increase their presence in things like Google (and some even refuse to link to such sites at all). There’s no reason to think their responses would be remotely indicative of their overall reading patterns.
By the way, is there anyone who reads this blog other than me who does this sort of thing:
?
It turns out you can get more info. As I guessed, Eli did not answer:
https://155a2078255626663e33566e796f12caf0e22ee8.googledrive.com/host/0B5FtkJ8LVwqhTFNOQ0xwOTFxUHM/network/#RABETT%20RUN
These “dead ends” do matter to figuring out “what it all means”. It’s interesting– but one still does need to understand that a specific group was invited and there is a probability of a ‘dead end’ each time a blog is mentioned.
diogenese,
ATTP seems to me pretty much unconnected to science, and they are not at all interested in discussing science… of any kind. It is a political echo chamber run by and frequented by a bunch of green-left Malthusian extremists. When I read it (which is rarely) it is for the entertainment value of green nut-cakes trying to grapple with physical and political realities…. without letting those realities ever impact their preconceived notions. It’s entertaining in the same way as reading Paul Erlich or Club of Rome predictions from the 1970’s is entertaining… but with a bit of 1960’s carnival freak show added to the mix.
If there is a new RealClimate that is much more likely to be a good investment of my precious life time and I read a large part of them. But I have never denied reading WUWT occasionally.
More out of interest as blogger. Unfortunately, WUWT is not such a good resource for science, as many wonderful posts on this blog by Zeke Hausfather demonstrate. The serious sparing partner for scientists remains the scientific literature, that reports on the real problems and new understanding.
As I already wrote in my blog post, it is probably not a good idea to interpret single links and sizes of blogs. While HotWhopper certainly could have mentioned WUWT. (I am not sure anymore what the question was, maybe it indicated a positive view of the blogs.)
The quality level of WUWT is not exactly inspiring. Anthony Watts is naturally not able to command all fields of climate science and the number of posts is huge. That together with there being no quality control system, no people to help him in the selection of worthwhile posts can only lead to a low quality level, even with the best intentions.
You should probably not even interpret the size of the clusters due inherent problems with sampling and because blogs in the cluster of WUWT & Co might not have seen themselves as the target group.
It is interesting, however, that the only link between the WUWT & Co. cluster to the rest is Ed Hawkins stating to read WUWT. None of the sampled blogs in the yellow cluster have reported themselves to read blogs outside of their cluster. The “isolation” is, in this respect, self-selected.
If the sample were bigger, some links may have appeared. And there might be weaker links, had the question asked for a larger list of blogs, some links may have appeared.
The survey was about what motives science bloggers. This is just a side result that should not be over-interpreted.
Brandon,
http://www.scilogs.com/from_the_lab_bench/a-network-of-blogs-read-by-science-bloggers/
Turns out you are entirely correct. Sou wrote:
Of course Sou is not required to list WUWT for whatever reason Sou wishes to not list it. But the fact that Sou or others don’t or won’t list a blog that they clearly read constantly is something one needs to know before interpreting what the connections mean. Also, one has to ask: If WUWT is not about science, then how is HotWhopper ‘about science’? HotWhopper is about commenting on WUWT. If WUWT is not about science, it’s hard to see how HotWhopper is!
No Lucia, you missed Sou’s response.
Not only will Sou demolish your disinformation, she’ll install brand new fixtures at no additional charge.
/sarc_or_something_…_maybe_/stupid.
These people seem to have only the most tenuous grasp on the meaning of words. Replaces it with science?
Or maybe it’s a tenuous grasp on reality that’s really behind it.
It’s the “97% consensus” and “recursive fury” (AKA, the skeptics are all crazy) papers all over again. Absolutely no connection to reality.
SteveF,
I think the creator of the image (Paige) posted something and wanted to see what she got. It’s not a forma paper yet. She’s working on a degree in science communication and I think it was an interesting exercise.
She doesn’t seem to have gone any further than to note that the image reveals ‘structure’ (which it does) and that there are communities that talk to each other. This is also true.
It’s possible she will decide the general idea is promising but think a bit more about what is required to make this ‘science’ and to figure out what can and cannot be learned.
I think Victor Venema has tried to take this a bridge to far by trying to decree the ‘yellow’ blogs “isolated” and so on. After all, if the “yellow” blogs are isolated in the graph Victor drew, one might suggest the “black” blogs below are isolated:
Are they?
What about the green blogs below
I’m not so sure Victor would want to believe that “Graham Readfern” blog on “Sustainability, climate change, environment, coffee and stuff” is “isolated” from science. Yet there it is out on the end of a long tenuously connected trail of single links.
SteveF:
I don’t think this is a fair description. The study itself doesn’t seem “bad” or designed to reach preconceived conclusions. It just doesn’t seem capable of handling certain problems which arise.
The only part of the study I truly take issue with is the sampling methodology. I think anyone listed in the study should have been contacted directly to see if they wanted to participate. That would prevent certain groups from being excluded (unless they simply didn’t get listed by anybody).
Aside from that, I think it’s a fair study which just needs some caveats about how it is interpreted. I think if all respondents had responded openly and honestly, there’d have been no issue at all. I suspect in a lot of fields that happened, by far and large. I suspect most of the issues covered by blogs listed in this study aren’t as polarized as global warming is.
I think the author ought to offer some caveats to that confounding factor, and perhaps even put a little effort into studying its effects, but I don’t see that as indicating her results have “[a]bsolutely no connection to reality.”
Mark B,
“These people seem to have only the most tenuous grasp on the meaning of words. Replaces it with science?”
Yes, I think she does a good job of getting the science right re WUWT posts. Consider just the last two, here and here. Which do you think makes more sense? WUWT or HW?
Victor
You appear to blog about it at least once a month.
It is intersting Ed reads it. Among other things: it show’s he’s honest and willing ato admit he reads a blog lots of people like to discuss at their own blogs while pretending not to read it.
As other conclusions you seem to have drawn, you might want to dig a bit deeper before fossilizing your conclusion. If you read here:
https://155a2078255626663e33566e796f12caf0e22ee8.googledrive.com/host/0B5FtkJ8LVwqhTFNOQ0xwOTFxUHM/network/#
KLIMAZWIEBEL did not participate at all .
Climate Audit did not participate.
Climate Etc. did not participate.
Mark Linas did not participate.
Bishop Hill did not participate.
WUWT did respond.
So what you learn is that if the method hits a set of blogs who don’t participate, then those blogs will tend to appear isolated. While your comment makes it sound as if you think they all just read each other:
If you look in more detail, you’ll notice none other than WUWT participated at all. So, none reported reading anything in “their” cluster either. The branch hit a pocket of stuff that didn’t interlink. This may also explain why some ‘climate’ blogs end up in neither the yellow nor the purple cluster but off in some hinterland marked in black.
The “isolation” is an artifact of the study which is not robust to random die off of branches.
But beyond that: it’s pretty obvious that Sou’s decision to not admit to reading WUWT nearly constantly (which obviously Sou does) contributes to the appearance of “isolation”. It’s obvious Sou spend 80% of his/her posts on WUWT. That might be a pretty “interesting” thing for someone interpreting that graphic or reading your ‘interpretation’ to know. This ‘decision’ wasn’t made by any blogger shown in “yellow”. And contrary to what the graphic might suggest it is not a decision to not read the ‘yellow’ blogs. It is a decision to not admit to reading the yellow blogs.
Yet here you are over interpreting!
All I’m going is laughing at the fact that Sou’s response suggests s/he doesn’t read WUWT when clearly Hot Whopper is about almost nothing other than reacting to WUWT. And oddly, you– who post quite frequently– about WUWT seem to want to interpret the graphic to show some sort of “isolation” of WUWT. And yet you yourself blog about WUWT quite regularly! So you ought to know that people in the purple group (e.g. you and Sou) clearly read WUWT and do so frequently– no matter what you are willing to admit to Paige.
From Judith’s comments:
Venema’s attempt to describe the decoupled (or at best loosely-coupled) portions of the graph as “science” vs. “non-science” is just a silly attempt at re-branding.
Hi all,
I really glad to see this discussed. This discussion actually does a lot to provide context to my visualization.
A few notes. Lucia (Comment #133731) is absolutely correct. This survey question and the data that resulted from it are only a very small and rather exploratory part of my dissertation research. This question was never meant to provide a full map of the science blogosphere, or to show that some blogs are isolated or disconnected from others. Indeed, my entire survey is about looking at science blogging practices, especially SHARED practices / norms, and whether communities of bloggers share practices (like format, content decisions, degree of opinion expression, journalistic or non-journalistic standards, etc.) In this context, I’m still interested in the other blogs that any given blogger might read (or Admit to reading), as those other blogs that a given blogger reads, or respects, MIGHT ‘rub off” or lead the blogger to adopt some of those other blog’s content guidelines. Of course, this is a hypothesis that would need to be tested by seeing if there were ANY similar practices among communities of blogs that appear through this data. Also, shared practices among communities of bloggers don’t preclude the possibility that this network is actually much more interconnected and overlapping than this data makes it look. Indeed, what this graph can’t shown is the presence of overlap between communities, which is obviously present.
As far as my sampling procedure, I will say again that my survey was NOT only promoted by me via Twitter. It was shared via many different social networks, and even on other blogger’s pages, and via NASW and other scicomm listservs. Also there is no census of science blogs, but I did randomly sample and on contact bloggers listed on ScienceSeeker. So the sampling bias of this survey, while present as in any other convenience sample, should be low relative to other survey of science bloggers conducted in the past. I don’t know if any other survey of science bloggers with as high of a response rate / as large of a sample.
But again, I would still call this data exploratory, and I don’t think it should or can be interpreted on its own. At best, it could be used to guide interviews of bloggers in different communities, or used as a guide to analyzing the rest of my survey data on science blogging practices.
What is very interesting is that there does seem to be some division/controversy between blogs within the climate sphere, that my visualization has at least led to the discussion of.
Hollo Nick.
Well, in the case of the first link the WUWT article has a lot of detail, says more and thus has greater opportunity for error. HW on the other hand highlights this statement:
and shows a graph supporting the point that Greenland would have a lot of catching up to do.
Now I ask you Nick. In what way is noting that Greenland’s ice mass would have a lot of catching up to do demolishing the disinformation and replacing it with science? What disinformation has been demolished and replaced with science?
To be fair, I’m not going to contest the other example; I’ll give you that one. I think that one does highlight a particularly stinky specimen of junk posting at WUWT. It certainly does happen.
Nick Stokes
Probably neither makes more sense. But it would be hard to make less sense than HW. HW interlaces quotes, snide remarks and snippets in a manner that results in utter incoherence. I moused over the links but didn’t see a link to the WUWT article s/he is supposedly rebutting, so I can’t begin to guess whether it was equally incoherent.
Evidently someone predicts Greenland will begin to gain ice next year? I wouldn’t bet money on that, but Sou didn’t exactly say much to rebut it (other than making a snide remark about “Camille Parmesan” whatever that is supposed to mean.) And it’s possible the WUWT argument is horrible; that wouldn’t be unprecedented. Some arguments at WUWT are horrible. But it’s not as if Sou shows us what is or might be impossible about the prediction that Greenland will gain ice in 2015 or beyond.
In any case, we’ll know whether Greenland gains or looses ice in 2015 about 1 year from now. I tend to expect lose is more likely than gain– but I’ve been wrong before. And my guess isn’t swayed by anything Sou wrote as I found that post incoherent.
Victor, I agree with SteveF, this “survey” is rather useless but generates Amusement when some take it seriously enough to do a seemingly serious post on it. Your sarcastic remarks there are just not worthy of you. You can use my name when trying to communicate with me if you want to show any shred of the respect you expect of others.
Hot Whopper is childish in tone and content. It more a test of whether participants in this debate are really interested in science or In the childish aspects of the playground.
Paige,
Climate blogging is very contentious. One of the reasons for quick reactions is that many of us in the “yellow” camp (and we know where we are even if no one mentioned us in your study) are very aware of practices by some of the more oddballl bloggers in the “purple” camp. So, for example, you’ll find things like advising people to add “no follow” tags to links to blogs he doesn’t like (See http://variable-variability.blogspot.com/2013/09/nofollow-WUWT-unintentional-link-love.html and http://variable-variability.blogspot.com/2013/11/reactions-doubling-recent-temperature-trend-judith-curry-anthony-watts-lucia.html ). Evidently letting Google know which blog he’s commenting on presents a moral dilemma for Victor . Here’s his own words
Yes… this is the same Victor who wants to promote your study as showing that WUWT is somehow “isolated” from the discussion. Naturally, when I read Victor spinning someones study that way, I tend to be skeptical about Victor’s interpretation. 🙂
Paige, the history of the participants and their actions is of utmost importance. Victor is a relative newcomer, for instance, and gets into scraps with skeptic blogs and faces the classic conundrum of posting like an internet commenter and expecting to be treated like a scientist. These skirmishes, as internet skirmishes go, don’t turn out well for him, he’s angry and tries doggedly to get back at the ignorant, right-wing, American inferiors who mistreated him. I’ve seen this pattern repeat itself with several climate scientists. You really need a thick skin and the patience of a saint to be hanging around in blogs challenging concepts and educating people, and having fun doing it. Typically, scientists, as everyone else, tend to swing between attempting interaction and sticking among their own kind deriding the deniers.
lucia, Sou of HotWhopper has a funny post about you. Parts I enjoyed are:
And:
You dirty denier, you!
My favorite part is the link in the first sentence. Sou linked to your comment on an archived version of Paige Brown Jarreau’s site. She does it again later in the post.
Despite that, she links to the exact same page, telling people to look at it. Apparently Sou is so determined not to give those dirty deniers page clicks she won’t even link to their comments on sites she likes >.<
Brandon, Sou must be writing of Lucia’s evil antimatter twin, the one that hangs out with Brandon Schollenberger
Brandon,
I read that. She tweeted too. I wasn’t aware sent her “a strong message to lift [her] game”. I thought I’d said:
1) She blogged about WUWT a lot.
2) She obviously read WUWT a lot.
3) Her posts have not managed to “demolish” WUWT (which s/he has not. It’s operating quite regularly and getting plenty of traffic.)
I don’t particularly care if she “lifts her game” and didn’t think I’d sent her an message to do so. I would assume if her ambition is to demolish WUWT she might wish to do so now that she has learned WUWT is still up and running getting plenty of traffic– just as it did yesterday, the day before and so on. All despite Sou’s efforts to “demolish” it.
I did notice the tendency to use an archiving service. Don’t know what’s with that. But… there you go!
lucia, to be fair to Sou, I think she said she she demolishes the “science” of Watts Up With That?, not the blog itself. If so, you’re responses to her have missed the point. Whether or not the site continues to exist has little to do with whether or not someone has demolished arguments on that site. (I’d check my understanding but internet issues make any online activity difficult right now.)
j ferguson, I really hate that Schollenberger. I always knew he was stealing my glory, but I didn’t realize he was stealing my social status as well. Curse him!
Hi Brandon,
This isn’t the best time to be named Ferguson.
Brandon
Is she a she? (If yes, I can stop the s/he stuff.)
I don’t think she’s done that either. As far as I can see (looking at this months posts) her posts consist of either
(a) not describing the argument she seeks to rebut or (b) mischaracterizing it,
followed by
(c) snide remarks that don’t really inform us about anything but communicate that she thinks whatever argument was made was stupid or wrong and
(d) inserting a bunch of quotes which may or may not have anything to do with the point she thinks is actually wrong and so act as “stray factoids”
It’s a sort of tap-dance around something… but one is not quite sure what.
On twitter “stevebloom” assures me he thinks these are coherent. Well… ok.
Anyway, Sou appears to be complaining I don’t engage her in comments at her blog. I posted one– hadn’t appeared when I last checked. We’ll. See.
In anycase: it’s obvious s/he could comment here too. She appears to be asking me for advice– asking on twitter. Why she can’t come here to overcome the 140 char limit is beyond me. Obviously, I could go there… but I’m not the one who asked for advice. She did.
:>
Golly. We have no less impartial or objective a judgement than one by Steve Bloom.
Wait, Steve Bloom? The guy who thinks Anders of ATTP doesn’t moderate with a heavy enough hand(see here and here)? THAT Steve Bloom?
Well.
That settles it, doesn’t it.
[edit: bah, me and my rhetorical questions. I apologize Lucia, I constantly forget the rules. Please feel free to delete this comment if you prefer.]
In other news, the number of people who admitting to beating their spouse does not line up well with the number of people who reported to the emergency room that their spouse “fell down the steps”.
lucia:
Everyone on all sides refers to her as one, but I can only assume they’re right.
I don’t disagree. I’ve rarely visited her site, but I’ve never been impressed by anything there (including her willingness to edit posts to remove entire sections after the fact because they were wrong). I was just trying to clarify what the disagreement is about.
I wouldn’t trust her moderation in the slightest. I’m quite sure she’s happy to delete comments simply because she doesn’t like what they say (or who wrote them). I also wouldn’t expect her to comment anywhere she might have to give up such benefits. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her comment anywhere else, and I’m sure she would never be up for a frank and open discussion.
j ferguson, that might depend on the color of your skin. A black person with that name could have probably gotten publicity/air time just by taking advantage of it.
Lucia,
I believe this is the Sou from HotWhopper:
http://www.miriamobrienconsulting.com/
Yup, Lucia is another evil denier, just ask Sou. The hilarity is only surpassed by the utter stupidity… which seems limitless at many wild-eyed left/green blogs. Look at the traffic at the green/left blogs if you want to know how influential they are. Their relative anonymity is well deserved.
jan,
Why do you think that?
Hi SteveF:
Here is why.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/about-wuwt/my-blog-spawn/
Tom Scharf,
Spouse Janet fell down a ladder on the boat we lived in and wrenched her arm. Her shoulder became black and blue and she had some cuts.
Although it had never occurred to me, someone on the next dock said that we should be prepared to be examined closely at the hospital, a place sensitized to the sort of thing you refer to. They thought it was possible that I could be arrested despite anything Jan might have said in my defense. We ended up going to a doctor who knew us so don’t know if it might have gone badly for me otherwise.
WooHoo.
Sou.
prefix of souffle. n meaning to collapse when put under any pressure.
Stokes n meaning to fan the fires [a real scientist who likes to comment at ATTP and Sou], often compared to Billy Flynn for taking on non winnable arguments and “winning”them.
Paige Brown. a model girl and model scientist who has a doppelganger named Stephan Lewindowsky.
Shame to give them so much air?
No exposure to the light and blog cross pollination is the best way to go.
Is Sou Beta or VHS?
Lucia,
“As far as I can see (looking at this months posts) her posts consist of either”
No, there is a lot more than that. Take the one from early today. It’s mainly on, not Greenland, but Euan Mearns post going on about the spacing between ice age CO2 and temperature, with something on CH4 as well. To what effect I’m not sure. Anyway, as Sou points out, the ice stuff is entirely based on Petit’s 1999 paper, and there has been a lot of work published since, which she reviews and references. There’s mention of a 2005 benthic d18O result.
To be fair, unusually for WUWT Mearns himself gives some references. Anyway, you’ll know a lot more about the issue after reading HW.
Hi Nick,
Obviously I speak only for myself, but for my part I’ll say you’ve rebutted me. HW isn’t as devoid of scientific content as I first thought. It’s mixed in there, down in the dumpster along with the trash, so to speak.
To be honest, I didn’t look past the style and tone (Anthony Watts is scientifically illiterate…,…It’s just that he is a conspiracy theorist of the “climate science is a hoax” type, so much so that I’d not even rate his articles as pseudo-science…,…Now anyone who is taken in by this nonsense should go stand in the corner and put on a dunce cap. Then they ought to enrol in a remedial arithmetic class….etc.); my heuristics tell me such sites are more interested in propaganda than science. But, while my heuristics are good enough for my own decision making, I certainly do not expect others to accept my opinion that results from them as evidence.
Thanks for pointing out my error so I could correct it. 🙂
Regards sir.
Nick
Slight difficulty, what Sou claims is this:
She then — I guess– wants to rebut that claim. In contrast, you characterize Mears post this way
The difficulty is either Euan “goes on about…. to what effect…” or he does what Sou claims. I would say Mears did what you claim. He did not make the claim Sou puts in his mouth. This is not to say he doesn’t think it. But…well.. the claim she expends energy “rebutting” isn’t actually in the list of claims in Mears conclusions (which can be found under the hading “conclusions” in Mears.)
So it seems to me Sou “rebutts” something Mears did not claim. And that’s would correspond to step “(b) mischaracterizing it,” I noted above. It is certainly true she then cites some papers (which would correspond to my “(d)” above. But to what end? How do they connect to any point Mearns actually made? Sou doesn’t say– and neither do you.
Does the Sou post contain some factoids? Sure. Does she cite some literature? Sure. But do they engage what Mears actually claimed? Not as far as I can tell.
I further note: given your comment on Mears: “To what effect I’m not sure.”, you aren’t connecting the “rebuttal” in sue to any specific point Mearn’s made. I suspect that’s because you (like I ) can’t begin to guess what specific point Mears made. But even if you do know what point Mears made, Sou doesn’t tell us which one she rebutts. The one she ‘mentions’ is one that just happens not to be there. So one has to try to guess what point she “demolished”.
Well… yes. She saw Mears wrote about CO2 and methane and she posted some stuff about CO2 and methane. But there seems to be practically no connection between any point he actually advanced an anything she tried to rebut. (If the connection exists, I don’t know what it is.)
As for the “snide remark” tactic, it’s in “without mentioning Camille Parmesan once!”– which seems to be about a different article. But there it is.
That said: Unlike Mark I never claimed her posts are devoid of scientific content. Merely that she fails to rebut or demolish anything at WUWT. These are different claims. I think her posts are incoherent because she thinks she is rebutting something, but really she doesn’t dig down and figure out what point she is trying to address. So the posts end up just having a bunch of “factoids” sprinkled around. The one you linked is an example of that sort of thing– and that is true even if the “factoids” show some level of scientific understanding.
You see what Nick is doing here is the same as the Hot Whopper herself, i.e., reading the minds of those who they dislike for other reasons. People of a certain political frame of mind tend to do that. What Lucia is doing is actually looking at the evidence and its pretty ugly evidence.
Do you think Nick doesn’t like me?
hmm..
….
I thought Nick liked me…
…
Well, not everybody is going to, I guess.
…Anyways, but I think Nick is doing what Nick always does, which is arguing a different perspective. Sometimes he’s correct. Sometimes I don’t think he is. It’s all good though, I think. Nick is one of the people who helps make discussions interesting.
Lucia,
Actually, I thought the reference to Dr Parmesan was quite funny. Jim Steele has written post after post on the supposed (by Jim) misdeeds of this ecologist lady, who, yes, no-one else has heard of. Google list here.
“So it seems to me Sou “rebuts†something Mears did not claim.”
Possibly. But the confusion is that Mearns is in turn rebutting something that few if any claim:
“The only conclusion possible from Vostok is that variations in CO2 and CH4 are both caused by global temperature change and freeze thaw cycles at high latitudes. These natural geochemical cycles makes it inevitable that CO2 and CH4 will correlate with temperature. It is therefore totally invalid to use this relationship as evidence for CO2 forcing of climate, especially since during the onset of glaciations, there is no correlation at all.”
That does sound somewhat like what Sou is talking about. Who does use this relationship as evidence for CO2 forcing of climate? It’s true that people talk about it as a positive feedback. And Mearns says nothing to rebut that.
Lucia, Welcome to “deniersville.” There is another whopper post on your daring to give the whopper herself advice. And our friend Victor advises less snark. Another advises doing some “science posts” a tacit admission that what she usually does is something else. 🙂
Well, I have a history at hotwhopper. A short history. I recently saw a reference to a post knocking Steve McIntyre and praising PAGES2K. I posted a brief and gentle comment – the only one I ever posted there – pointing out that climateaudit had made a set of suggestions for corrections to PAGES2K, that half a dozen of the corrections were made, that climateaudit then pointed out that the hockey stick is now gone from the corrected PAGES and the MWP is back, something that PAGES did not note.
I included no links but mentioned that all these are very easy to find there. My post went into moderation and never appeared at all.
Unless someone could explain to me what was offensive about my post, I think I have to conclude that it was offensive to provide clear proof that hotwhopper’s post was wrong.
Nick
That Mears is rebutting something no one suggest doesn’t salvage the fact that Sou also does not rebut Mears. Had she just pointed out that Mears was rebutting something no one said and so Mears is confused…. well then she might have demolished what he wrote.
But she didn’t do that. Possibly she doesn’t recognize the problem. Or something. But in the end, hers is just as confused as Mears. That’s why I find the two posts a draw.
Mark Bofill,
“To be honest, I didn’t look past the style and tone”
I agree she sometimes lays the scorn on a bit thick. It’s mutual, though. I usually find it worth reading on.
Nick, I think the real question is whether you could easily find the same scientific content elsewhere. That’s an easy question it seems since there is little scientific content. So then why is it rewarding to look beyond the childish name calling? Is it perhaps more a statement about you and your distain for some?
Paige Brown Jarreau (Comment #133738)
What I think might be interesting is the thesis that politically charged topics have similar patterns. I wonder if other topics such as GMO or vaccinations exhibit similar clustering.
David Young
I’m only seeing the one post.
MikeR
It might be the spam filter at blogger. It seems to have eaten the one I posted at her blog today. Happens. Once it does one has to decide whether it’s worth spending time trying to get comments in past her filter.
Nick
I realize the google result can look dramatic. But it’s worth knowing that google will often list something as matching a particular search for odd reasons. One hint can be when the the ‘hits’ share exact same text. While it may be that this Jim Steele guy has blogged about Camille Parmesan many times, you might notice that the google results often link to posts that don’t disucuss her at all– not even in comments. Here’s why:
Sorry, The post I saw is the same one quoted by Bandon above.
Regarding Greenland’s warming, high altitudes are expected to gain mass due to an increase in precipitation whilst the lower altitudes are expected to lose mass due to a faster melting rate. Since there are competing processes, it actually isn’t implausible that in the future, we could enter a phase where there is a net increase in mass in Greenland.
I haven’t read Steele’s paper, nor Sou’s so-called rebuttal of it, but my impression of Sou is, like so many of the people on the so-called alarmist side, she seems incapable of separately the actual claims generated by climate scientists from the talking points generated by activists.
I should mention that satellite measurements like GRACE include model corrections that are larger than the changes they are claiming. Without better model validation processes, I think putting too much weight in the reported ice loses is unjustified. It’s my suspicion that such a large weight gets put on them because it matches up with people’s prejudices (and agendas), rather than because e.g. Sou has sat down and learned about gravimetry.
Nick+Stokes (Comment #133734) Mark B,
“Yes, I think she does a good job of getting the science right re WUWT posts. Consider just the last two, here and here. Which do you think makes more sense? WUWT or HW?
Mr Voisin put up an article on
the Three scenarios for the future of NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory.
He made a comment in the article, 1 sentence
“Insect and microbial emissions, each at 10X all anthropogenic emission, dominate in these lush forested areas while the historically mildly warming oceans are also net CO2 contributors”
It is in essence true. Biomass (ecology) From Wikipedia
“Apart from bacteria, the total live biomass on Earth is about 560 billion tonnes C, and the total annual primary production of biomass is just over 100 billion tonnes C/yr. However, the total live biomass of bacteria may exceed that of plants and animals.
Most of this biomass is found on land, with only 5 to 10 billion tonnes C found in the oceans.[1] On land, there is about 1,000 times more plant biomass (phytomass) than animal biomass (zoomass). About 18% of this plant biomass is eaten by the land animals. It has been estimated that about 1% of the global biomass is due to phytoplankton,. and a staggering 25% is due to fungi.”
You know that the source of most CO2 is from the biomass of the earth, some from the animal and fungal sources with respiration as they eat or compost vegetable matter, some from direct degradation from bush and forest fires.
His article, scientific, on the presence of CO2 distribution in the world by satellite was correct.
His views that it did not match current dogma on CO2 production seem to be correct, where could you disagree?
His views on what should and might happen with such information are speculation like the Hansen 1/2/3 scenario’s on future warming. You can agree or disagree with him.
“Consider the last one. Which do you think makes more sense? WUWT or HW?”
The mere fact that you can ask this question after looking at the careful, controlled and sensible WUWT article and the vitriol laden, taunting and off target article by Sou makes a grown man weep. Even as committed as you are to the cause, take a minute to sit back from your pitiful comparison and say to yourself ”If these are the people I have to associate with I’ll keep to myself in future”.
Lucia
Both your headline and the quoted part of your comment seem a bit confused or you are deliberately misleading people.
“Like, for example, it would seem the blogger at “HotWhopper†many not be a regular reader of “WUWTâ€.”
The study asked people to list 3 other science blogs they read, not all of them. And no one could seriously suggest WUWT is a science blog, and certainly Sou wouldn’t see it as a science blog.
Obviously, it is not suggesting anything like what you claim.
and this comment
‘Oddly, we are supposed to believe “Hot Whopper†does not regularly read WUWT. ”
is the same.
you are misrepresenting, deliberately, what the diagram was showing. The diagram does not purport to show all the blogs that people read.
Also, is this post ironic? seems to be just a bunch of snide comments about people with no substance…
Angech,
Voisin’s article started:
“A Cynical Engineer: There are three scenarios for the future of NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory:
…
3) The OCO instrument will suffer a premature and catastrophic failure.
When the first versions of the OCO were being launched I thought to myself: Great, let’s cut to the chase scene, grab the crucial data, and get this AGW malarkey over with quickly. But then scenario 3) happened…twice.”
So in Voisin’s bizarre world, NASA spends millions of dollars and years of trouble to design and launch the OCO, then because they anticipate the results “will quickly and stunningly turn CAGW upside down”, the launch fails.
As for the insects and microbes, each allegedly producing 10x human emissions, it’s well acknowledged that there is an annual cycle where plants remove CO2 from the air by photosynthesis and various organisms return it via respiration. Voisin’s figures are exaggerated, but the numbers are still large. But insects and microbes have no capacity to generate new carbon. They only return to the air what was previously reduced by plants.
Nick, perhaps you should restate your 3:09 comment. Perhaps the sun generates new carbon.
This is not to make fun. If you mean entering fossil carbon to the annual carbon cycle, well yes microbes do that. Microbes help in the re-cycling of ancient exposed sea beds. The cycle time for this carbon is geologic, but does have input to the annual cycle. both gains and losses.
Nick,
Meh. I don’t read that type of thing on WUWT either. But I appreciate your telling me this. Personally I like to hear rebuttals to whatever I’m reading. I doubt I’ll find it worth it to dumpster dive at Sou’s to get the counter arguments I seek, but it’s not an impossibility. It’s good to know it’s there.
Thanks Nick.
Nathan,
I think this is part of your error. Lots of people could seriously suggest WUWT is a science blog. You may not agree with those people, maybe such people are not tolerated in your particular tribe, but the fact is that WUWT has a larger following in general than any other climate science blog. WUWT won the 2011 bloggies for best science blog. I’m sure there are many, many people who would seriously tell you WUWT is a science blog.
So what, right? It doesn’t make them right. Sure. The 97% could be mistaken, they often are, we all know that. But the question isn’t whether WUWT really is a science blog, but whether or not anybody could seriously suggest it. I think it’s obvious that people could.
Meh. What is the matter with people? Who thinks that sneering and condescension is going to ever convince anyone but the convinced? I sometimes like to comment at ATTP, because the host is generally civil even if many of the commenters aren’t. But they just had a post where ATTP disagreed with Richard Tol. Tol showed up in the comments and they had a discussion. But Tol totally spoiled it IMHO by a nasty attitude and sneering. The commenters were doing the same, of course, but still – he lost a golden opportunity to show that he is doing serious work. If he is.
Robert Way gained a lot of respect (at least from me) when he came to climateaudit and judithcurry and patiently and seriously answered questions on his work. If any AGW climate scientists want to convince people, that’s an infinitely better way to do it than sneering at them from a distance. Surely that is obvious?
But it is so hard to find climate blogs that do not sneer. Sigh.
Mark Bofill
Lots of people can and do. Anyone who reads climate blogs and is aware of the history of WUWT and then claims “And no one could seriously suggest WUWT is a science blog, ” has failed “empiricism 101”. Or has trouble writing is thoughts clearly. They should either take an entry level science course or an entry level writing course. Possibly both.
Mark,
I think WUWT does publish a lot of silly stuff, and I don’t like its tone either, but…
The technical posts are always responded to technically and I think intelligently in the comments. I feel this is the great strength of the place. So I think it’s missing the mark to criticize Anthony for posting shaky science. It’s useful to have an idea expressed and then tossed around in comments with resolution left to reader. I think it valuable to read in the comments how a particular idea founders.
There are some warmist sites which entertain these sorts of dialogs, but does Sou’s?
Nick
Uhmmm so? Humans also have no (or very little) capacity to generate new carbon. We only return to the air what was previously reduced by plants, which rotted in special circumstances and turned into things like oil, coil etc.
I mean… I guess we could create a small amount of carbon through nuclear fission of fusion. But the carbon in fossil fuels was “previously reduced by plants” and burning it “return[s] it to the air”.
The main difficulty with Voisin’s ‘argument’ is that this ignores the fact that the 2% is a Δ and in things like “change” it’s the Δ ‘s that matter. Unless he has some evidence that insects and microbes have changed the amount of carbon released, his suggestion is just rampant speculation. In contrast, we do know we’ve been burning carbon and returning carbon previously reduced by plants to the air. (Note: Sou does mention this issue– but it’s buried in a mess of other confusing — and sometimes outright wrong– stuff.)
He hasn’t provided one snippet of evidence microbes are or even might be returning more carbon to the atmosphere.
On the other hand, Sou at HW’s ‘rebuttal’ contains claims that– taken litterally (which people will) are simply wrong. For example:
Now here’s the problem: the OCO-2 does not show pre-industrial atmopsheric CO2 at all. Satellite images were not around during the pre-industrial era. To support the claim that CO2 has risen you need a different graph showing data collected using a different method.
If her goal is to “demolish” arguments at WUWT, her arguments riddled with claims based on not knowing how to read graphs are destined to fail. I get that you– Nick– and some of her supporters might think, “Oh well… no matter. Her claim about what the graph shows is ok… because..well preindustrial was low. And that “matters” while Voisin’s claim about insects is stupid and anti-scientific because… well.. he should understand about Δ — but really, if you evaluate the two posts it’s a draw.
Of course HW can’t “convince” those who think Voisin is kinda-sorta right (or totally) right with her own writeups that contain similarly flawed errors.
In fact HW’s graph argument flawed in more obvious ways. A high-school sophomore can understand the graph doesn’t show what she says because it doesn’t contain the information required to show it. Students need to understand about equilibrium to understand the Δ issue. That comes after learning the concept of “graphs don’t show what they don’t show.”
I”m sure her audience isn’t going to give her useful tips. I doubt you will– because you are willing to overlook these things if you think the post is overall “on message”. But if she thinks she can ‘demolish’ a WUWT post in this way she is seriously mistaken.
There is no doubt WUWT is considered a science blog by many, many people. But WUWT does suffer from a terrible lack of quality control, and many of the posts are either fundamentally mistaken about basic science, or based on clear errors of fact. So lots of people (including me) ignore most of what is posted there, even while I do visit the site to see if anything interesting is posted; there is an occasional informative post. WUWT could easily do much better in terms of science, but aside from a few rather extreme cases (like getting rid of ‘Steven Goddard’) Anthony has not eliminated the really silly, really wrong stuff. I am not certain, but I think political considerations may be involved. How many more times will Anthony let people make rubbish arguments about whether putting CO2 into the air increases CO2 concentration? Once more will be too many.
Of course, many blogs which support immediate public action to reduce CO2 emissions are equally bad in terms of ‘the science’, and embrace as least plausible the crazy predictions of people like James ‘West Side Highway’ Hansen, and Stefan ‘2-meters’ Rahmstorf, no matter how clearly bizarre (and clearly wrong!) those predictions are. This also seems to me related to political considerations. I don’t usually waste much time on those blogs either, even though they are considered science blogs by lots of people (but again, with very poor poor quality control).
MikeR,
I suspect that at least some of the people who indulge in the sneering and condescension think it will be effective for reasons other than convincing people. Perhaps there are some for example who really don’t like to be mocked and are afraid of it who will avoid associating with [edit, identifying with] WUWT for fear of Sou’s snark, for example. Or perhaps Sou just thinks this. Or maybe she’s just the sort of person who takes joy in snark. ~shrug~ Whatever.
I’m with you though. If you leave the baggage and just give me the scientific pitch, and particularly as you say, engage without spite or defensiveness, odds are excellent you may win me over if your facts and arguments are in good order.
Lucia,
“I doubt you will– because you are willing to overlook these things if you think the post is overall “on messageâ€.”
.
I nearly snarfed my coffee! 😮
I don’t know if Nick is aware of his unwillingness to criticize obvious rubbish which is “on message” (it would be interesting to know), but in any case, that unwillingness reduces his credibility quite a lot. He acts like an advocate, which is too bad.
j ferguson,
Absolutely. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t have a problem with WUWT in general. I don’t care for some posts, and like SteveF I think some topics are pretty low quality. I actually think that this is inevitable given the popularity of the site; I think you can have high quality or you can have ‘over 11 billion served’, but you can’t have both. But I like WUWT well enough.
Other stoooopid HW claims: On Knappenberger and Michaels
No: They have not assumed the trend from individual runs matches trends for the earth.
No they have not mistaken climate models for weather models.
No they have not assumed trends for shorter periods will match between models and runs.
Why does Sou think they assumed this? Heaven knows. But they have not don’t say they assumed this and never have. They’ve done the same thing Easterling and Wehner did– and numerous other people, including Von Storch (I think.)
This is a nonsense claim– and merely shows that Sou hasn’t got clue one about what one can compare when ensembles are available.
And you can see in her later graphs, Sou persists in being entirely clueless about ensembles and the power of comparing a trend to an ensemble spread. While there are things one can say about comparing trends– her entire rebuttal is exhibits freaking cluelessness about comparing a sample to a distribution. I’d say it’s pretty clearly just and example of ignorance. She says what she wrote because she doesn’t know any better.
I’m sure Nick will give her a pass because he thinks Knappenberger and Michaels is flawed in ‘some way’ and so one must be kind when the hopelessly clueless say utterly stupid things when trying to ‘demolish’ it. But…well… really…
Nick,
Please,
“Allegedly Voisin’s figures (10 x) are exaggerated but the numbers are quite large.”
The numbers are quite large are they not. Most scientists would put them at around 10 x.
So drop the allegedly comment, it is not allegedly if it is correct and it is correct if it is in the ballpark, like 9x-11x, which it is.
“Insects and microbes have no capacity to produce new carbon, they only return to the air what is produced by plants”
Another Nick special from the Sou handbook, finish the sentence Nick.
If plant growth increases the microbes and insects will produce more CO2.
But, sigh I have fallen for the Sou misdirection.
Voisin’s gave 3 scenarios, the gist of his article.
One is science full ahead with the results , he feels, capable of turning the Agw debate on its head.
The third his worry that such a scenario could lead to people with a lot of their reputation in Climate science trying to sabotage such a result.
While this view is undoubtedly unlikely in your and my eyes, spare some sympathy for those people who believe in their views as strongly as you do in yours. Climate gate, turning the air conditioners off at the White house, the hockey stick code, zekes admission that all land temperature data sets are altered backwards in time and he may have some slight cause to feel concerned in his mind.
As a scientist why not discuss the scientific thrust of his article instead.
Satellite. CO2 data, does not agree with established scientific models.
Is this correct?
If so , why?.
Or will the data have to be changed so the observations fit the models and predictions.
“Sou science” and not for want of a better word as this is most apt.
Dang Lucia. You make me think I folded too quickly.
🙂
I don’t know why anyone reads Sou’s blog. I know Nick Stokes says:
I don’t know of any site which uses an attitude remotely close to hers that is worth reading with any regularity, but leaving that aside, what is the value in her posts? Whenever I read one of her posts, it has no insightful commentary or information. At best, it has answers I could get in the same amount of time with Google. At worst, it gives no, or even bad, information. And that’s ignoring the constant and blatant misrepresentations I see.
Nevermind the ridiculously biased moderation policy she uses where anything she dislikes gets censored while almost anything, no matter how abusive, is tolerated for anyone she dislikes.
SteveF,
Agreed. Or they go on and on about stuff that means… what? For example: I never know what to think about Tisdale’s stuff. It’s interesting in a horse race sort of way. He seems to be tracking where water moves over time. It’s long, it has pretty pictures. My impression is he doesn’t make over bold claims about what it all means. But I never ‘get’ the connection between the discussion of all those details and the main topic of the site: Climate Change.
Maybe sometimes he does some “corrections” stuff? I don’t know– I generally don’t understand what he’s driving at. I can’t criticize or endorse it, so after having read a few, I really don’t read them.
My criticism of Sou is she seems to read these things, decree they say “X” when in fact they don’t seem to do so, then tries to debunk “X” (which she sometimes does well and sometimes poorly). Normally I wouldn’t say anything about Sou at all. But the lack of “connection” between Sou’s blog and WUWT was hilariously funny. And her later claims about what she accomplishes with her blogging? Delusional.
Whatever she may think of WUWT, her blog is also riddled with obvious errors, some fundamental, and it appears she attempts to paper over her knowledge gaps with snark. Well… ok. She likes to do that. But her claim she “demolishes” WUWT? Or even that she demolishes the arguments posted at WUWT? Delusional.
And Victor Venema’s claim that WUWT is somehow “isolated” from the “purple” blogs? Equally delusional.
Heck, in the first comments at
http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2014/12/a-silly-poster-by-patn-chip-at-agu14.html
it appears ATTP and Victor Venema likely recognize that Pat and Chip are discussing ensembles– but they tap dance around presenting that tidbit to Sou. ATTP mentions someone else (who is not in the “wrong” camp) who does the same thing but merely says he doesn’t know why Chip and Pat are getting slightly different results. Victor alludes to a paper in Nature
So basically, they are pointing out that the Knappenberger and Michaels type comparison is done by “others”. Of course it is. It is a well respected method of comparing a sample to a distribution.
Another commenter writes
So… he’s pointing out here critcisms doesn’t hold.
Note: Nick appears. He doesn’t point out here fundamental error. He only complains that the charts are shown when the data do disagree. Well… uhhmmm yeah. We’ve discussed why predictions that are wrong initially ‘fail to reject”, then pop in and out of agreement for a while before ‘rejecting’. And we all know there is nothing to report during the periods of “fail to reject”– so yes, the presentations appear during the “reject” times– which are happening with greater and greater regularity as time since the projects were made increases. Nick likes to hug the existence of β error on this one.
We’ll see what happens over time.
But yeah.. if your thinking she posts generally useful stuff, you folded too quick. If you are merely backing off the extreme claim that her blog is devoid of science– well, it’s not devoid of science. It’s similar to WUWT– there is a mix of correct claims, incorrect claims, mystifying reasoning, lots of stuff that just makes you say “huh? And the point of that is… huh?”.
And obviously, she reads WUWT avidly. 🙂
Oh.. btw, in her post about ‘me’ she includes this bullet about Pat and Chi
Well…. given that her entire blog post is based on an utterly mistaken premise of what Pat and Chip presented– and her commenters even kinda sort of pointed it out without rubbing her nose it it… Well… no I don’t think she showed they didn’t do a good gob with their poster at AGU. What she showed is she is absolutely clueless about the entire concept of comparing a realization to an ensemble spread.
Lucia,
Sou seems to be a non-technical person pretending to be a technical person, with heavy dollops of snark, hysterical green politics, and lack of awareness of her own limited understanding, substituting for a critical analysis of the technical issues. (I have noted that these same dollops tend to be found at lots of green advocacy blogs).
.
WRT Tisdale, I never read his posts. Like you I find them to be long, pointless and meandering…. aside from the occasional nonsense claim that ENSO and related ocean patterns are responsible for ~100% of recent warming and that rising GHG’s contribute ~0% to recent warming. At least he avoids Sou’s snark.
Oh… and this criticism of Willis
http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2014/12/wondering-willis-eschenbach-looks-for.html
Evidently, she objects to his objection that someone only analyzed three months of solar data when they could have used the whole year. She seems to jump to the conclusion that this means Willis doesn’t know there is no sun during the dead of winter. But it’s quite obvious Willis is aware of that. In comments he points out something that is rather commonly known: There are more than three months that are not “sunless” in the arctic circle. Specifically:
So:(a) the artic region is more than the northpole and has ~9 mothns of some sun. Even the north pole has ~6 months of sun (and more if you include “twilight”.)
So… uhmmm… Really, even if willis’s post has problems, it’s hardly a problem for him to suggest that an analysis of reflected sunlight would be more complete if they used the full year.
Does willis include a sentences that sounds a bit dumb in context? (That you could pick any one of 12 3 month segmants?) Sure. Due to winter, the set that is fully in ‘night for all parts of the arctic isn’t a candidate. But Feb-March-April contains months with sunlight even at the North pole. And Aug-Sept-Oct does too. So, that leaves out 3 of the 12 candidates– if you are talking the pole itself, and fewer if you mean the entire arctic. And he engages that criticism pointing out that even that missing 50% of your data for no good reason is both unnecessary and increases uncertainty.
If Sou thinks she “demolished” willis’s criticism by pointing out there is no sun during some months of the year, Sou is having a “logic fail”.
Sou’s post on this is long. Most of it is a long quote which she requoted from Willis’s post. The reamining is a quote of willis, and then a quote of a comment by a detracto– omitting Willis’s eminently sensible response to that comment.
Is there anything “else” there? Not that I can tell. She showed nada. Bubpkiss. If she thinks she ‘demolished’ the willis’s discussion in that post, she is de. lu. sio. nal.
WUWT won the 2011, 2012 and 2013 “Best Science Blog” Bloggies awards, so clearly a lot of people think that WUWT is a science blog.
Obvious the pull down menus that contain current science data are clearly both science and valid science.
A decent number of the posts contain fundamentally valid science (e.g., posts that are primarily a press release), and the problems with scientific validity arise in the tired canards that are raised in criticism of these posts. Some posts, unfortunately, amount to pseudoscience.
But anyway, clearly WUWT is a science blog by any reasonable criterion, even if many of us wish the signal-to-noise ratio were higher.
This type of poll is a good example of not getting what you are actually looking for because the subject matter is so contentious.
People don’t answer this question in a vacuum. The very first thought they have is “What are they going to use this information for and what should the right answer be?”
There are many out there that are dead set against raising WUWT’s profile any further so they rationalize leaving it off the list because it isn’t “science”. Most of these people likely squirm heavily every time they hear web statistics on climate science sites. They want to correct this faux balance by any means necessary. I would suggest this entire exercise was to that end.
One has to engage in willful blindness to not see that WUWT has an agenda. To the extent that it pushes back against the excesses of climate science propaganda that is a good thing. Personally I use it as more as a People Magazine of climate science and scan the stories several times a week. It always covers the political and science dramas which is a guilty pleasure that I suspect many of us may have.
Everybody seems to think WUWT presents itself as an authoritative climate science information blog. It’s not; it remains essentially true to its 2006 roots as the “broad interest science blog.” Anthony Watts says he blogs “because it is interesting, mentally challenging, and it allows me to meet new and interesting people.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/about-wuwt/faqs/
Watts is fairly liberal with who he allows to guest post, meaning that the level of rigor in argument and evidence varies. Nothing, AFAIK, is edited to adhere to some “party line.” Willis Eschenbach’s stories are entertaining and his data explorations sometimes very preliminary. Tim Ball sometimes goes over the top with his rhetoric. Comments only get snipped for breaking the blog rules. Others trigger deeper investigations such as those by Leif Svalgaard’s on solar science. The idea that WUWT is pretentious and arrogant is merely hater propaganda.
As for Sou (aka Miriam O’Brien), she is WUWT “blog spawn” who “found no traction for her style of commenting at WUWT, which was really flypaper for her getting comments to reinterpret/repeat as nastiness on her Twitter feed, catching even the attention of our most tolerant and beloved late moderator, “REPâ€. Given her daily rants, she has now qualified for “Internet stalker†levels of infatuation and invective. Assigned to the permanent troll bin.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/about-wuwt/my-blog-spawn/
Gary:
Sorry, but this is not even close to true.
Brandon,
My guess is Anthony sometimes moderates/snips comments from people he finds very irritating. Nick Stokes comes to mind immediately, but I am sure there are others. I can’t say that is the best way, but it is his blog after all.
I suspect Brandon is referring to his own personal experience in being moderated at WUWT.
Which demonstrates the perils of gratuitous moderation IMO. I certainly remember the fact that I was moderated long after everyone else has completely forgotten what the conversation was even about. Worth it? Only if you want me to go away and not come back, which I’m sure is A-OK with the proprietors of most blogs where I’ve been moderated. 🙂
[Edit: it matters to me if I realize and agree that I’ve broken a moderation rule. I get past that. But capricious moderation is hard for me to forgive for some reason.]
SteveF:
I have no doubt that’s the case. I know he was quite irritated with me when he decided to censor me, and I suspect he remained irritated for some time after.
It’s obviously his choice as to why he deletes what comments he deletes. I think capricious moderation done for reasons of irritation or the like is all sorts of bad, but I don’t see a need to rehash the issue. I was just making it clear Gary’s depiction of moderation at WUWT is way off. I think it’s important for people to understand moderation at WUWT is not as even-handed as Gary depicts.
Mark Bofill:
I believe there are other examples I could use, but yeah, I’ll always prefer my personal experience because it’s the one I’m best acquainted with. I don’t have to worry about overlooked details, faulty memories or inaccurate descriptions messing with my understanding of it.
It could be worse. I had one “warmist” blogger, whose name escapes me at the moment, delete part of my comment while inserting Word of God responses in the middle of my comments. I don’t like the latter, but the former completely distorted the meaning of my comment in a way which painted me as a fool.
If I break a rule, I have no problem with getting moderated. If I participate in an unpleasant foodfight, I have no problem with that getting deleted simply because it’s a stupid diversion. I’ve had both happen, and I never complained. It didn’t affect my willingness to comment at the sites.
Capricious moderation is different. Capricious moderation makes it impossible to have any sort of honest discussion at the site as the blog owner is being disingenuous about what content he or she will allow. Even worse, such moderation is almost inevitably followed with dishonest explanations of the moderation. You’re (probably) not going to see a blogger say, “Yeah, I banned that guy just because I felt like it.”
Instead, you’ll get misleading, or even outright false responses. Those responses will be allowed to stand as the official record because you won’t be allowed to dispute them. The result is the blogger misleads his or her audience from then on in (since the record will remain). That’s exactly what happened to me with the people at Skeptical Science, Collin Maessen, Anders and Anthony Watts.
Put simply, capricious moderation is a dishonest attempt to sabotage discussions. That’s not the sort of thing people should just move on from. As long as bloggers feel free to behave that way, you have no reason to believe they’ll allow real conversations.
I wrote way more than I meant to in that last comment. Sorry about that. I just find it ridiculous so many sites refuse to allow open discussions. I had a similar issue arise with family recently where I got frustrated and said:
At which point I realized the premise of my statement might be flawed 😛
Brandon,
You were speaking my language there. I wholly agree. 🙂 It’s such a fundamental element of courtesy in my world that I get irritated all out of any reasonable proportion when it gets violated. That’s just me anyways.
So there are major logic fails with the initial post here Lucia.
“After all, we learn a number of eye-opening things. Like, for example, it would seem the blogger at “HotWhopper†may not be a regular reader of “WUWTâ€. See: There is no line connecting HotWhopper to WUWT.”
This is not implied by the diagram.
“Guess what else? Evidently Victor Venema may not read WUWT regularly either. After all, there is no line connecting “variability†blog to WUWT. ”
Not implied by the diagram.
It would seem your reading comprehension is poor.
Also, the endless snide remarks here, are enormously ironic and condescending. So I guess the arguments here can’t be considered ‘compelling’.
I am also interested to hear why the fact that same people claim WUWT to be a science blog, makes it a science blog… People claim all sorts of crazy things, but that doesn’t make it so.
So can I ask for examples of ACTUAL science from WUWT?
And when presented with opportunities to do ‘science’ Anthony Watts fails every time.
He labels working scientists and organisations as frauds, and then cowardly refuses to put his work out for scrutiny.
He won’t put up, is his problem.
Happy New Year Nathan. Hope you got some bubbly?
I encourage you to sign up for a “language comprehension course”. After several weeks of simple concepts approach your teacher and ask them to explain the meaning of “may” to you. After that, they can help you learn to understand the idea communicated in complete sentences containing the word “may” or “may not” and will be able to understand them even when you’ve had some bubbly.
The skill would benefit you!
Off to dinner and dancing soon. Jim and I are having the Salmon– served at 8. The band plays until 2 am.
🙂 Happy New Year Lucia & Blackboard!
Lucia
“After several weeks of simple concepts approach your teacher and ask them to explain the meaning of “may†to you.”
Wow…
So ignorance is your defence.
Of course, had you read what the author of the diagram said in regards to the construction of the diagram you would never have been able to add the word ‘may’. You would have known that there was no ‘may’ about it and that you couldn’t sensibly make the claim at all!
And MORE snide remarks from Lucia… Oh crikey, so it’s even LESS compelling now!
See the ‘science’?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/27/wuwt-publishing-suspended-major-announcement-coming/
Oh yeah!
Nathan, The blog survey is simply not of much value and Lucia’s merely saying that it leaves out some of the most important but unreported links. Those links were left out deceptively by people who wanted for political reasons to deny the truth that they read WUWT and actively respond to it.
What is important here is not WUWT, about which there are negative and positive comments on this thread. What is important is Hot Whopper and the hypocrisy it exposes among the committed 97%ers. Venema is the most glaring example, who seems to be insistent on civility for himself, but who seems to have no problem with the worst ad hominums and very disrespectful things when Hot says them. Hot is as disrespectful as its possible to be because there is little real scientific substance as Lucia has documented here very well. Venema also seems to adopt the arrogant tactic of simply not communicating with those whose posts he disagrees with. Apparently however, he respects Lucia.
Nathan,
Nathan,
Who said that because many many people would tell you WUWT is a science blog that it makes WUWT a science blog? That’s certainly not what I said.
To refresh your memory,
You complain of Lucia’s reading comprehension? That’s ironic.
David
“Nathan, The blog survey is simply not of much value and Lucia’s merely saying that it leaves out some of the most important but unreported links. Those links were left out deceptively by people who wanted for political reasons to deny the truth that they read WUWT and actively respond to it.”
say what? You obviously didn’t read what the author said.
She asked them to submit up to three science blogs they regularly read. It wasn’t a question of which ones they read the most; it was a very open question.
It’s entirely possible that WUWT is Sou’s 4th most read blog…
Lucia
“What I wrote is clear and correct.”
Only because you didn’t bother finding out how the diagram was created. Only because you rely on a lack of clarity and precision to give yourself wiggle room to turn tail when people show you that what you wrote was actually not correct.
Yes, wallow in your rhetoric, your shallow analysis. It’s what you do best.
Lucia,
”
Other stoooopid HW claims: On Knappenberger and Michaels
…
‘When you read their conclusions you’ll see that they’ve assumed that the trend of the models should always match the trend of observations, even over a period as short as ten years.’
…
Why does Sou think they assumed this? Heaven knows.”
For good reason. Their graph shows trends of models with CIs. It then shows trends of observations, with a change of colors when observations cross the model CI’s. The colors are spelt out in the caption. Last change is at about ten years. Why this change of color if it isn’t conveying an expectation that observation trends will lie within these CIs?
Mark
Lucia implied as much:
”
Mark Bofill
Lots of people could seriously suggest WUWT is a science blog.
Lots of people can and do. Anyone who reads climate blogs and is aware of the history of WUWT and then claims “And no one could seriously suggest WUWT is a science blog, †has failed “empiricism 101″. Or has trouble writing is thoughts clearly. They should either take an entry level science course or an entry level writing course. Possibly both.”
So is Lucia seriously suggesting that WUWT is a science blog? Unambiguously? I think it would be funny for Lucia to declare WUWT is a science blog… That would be great!
Carrick also seemed to as well
“But anyway, clearly WUWT is a science blog by any reasonable criterion, even if many of us wish the signal-to-noise ratio were higher.”
so I think my comprehension is fine…
How people can SERIOUSLY claim it is a science blog is beyond me… So much garbage over there…
Remember the NASA funded fraud? Wow, pure science.
Seriously?
Let me get this straight.
You start with:
which I refute.
You come back with:
and I point out that nobody said that the fact that some people claim something makes it so.
So what do you do? Revise the goalposts yet again.
Neither Carrick nor Lucia said that the fact that some people claim something makes it so, we’re going to just drop that part huh.
What are you, nine? Adult, but severely retarded? Whatever your problem is, you’ve clearly got no manners whatsoever.
Piss off buddy.
Mark
My comment wasn’t actually directed at you… Rather ‘some people’ (Lucia and Carrick) So you don’t need to assume that it was aimed at you (and I am not sure why you would).
“Neither Carrick nor Lucia said that the fact that some people claim something makes it so, we’re going to just drop that part huh.”
Fine. So that would then imply that both Carrick and Lucia, having considered WUWT are seriously suggesting it is a ‘science blog’
Are you also seriously suggesting that WUWT is a ‘science blog’?
Nathan:
I never claimed it was a science blog because people said it was. I said it is a science blog because it blogs about science.
So: It is a science blog. And most reasonable people accept it is a science blog. Many of us think it has serious quality control issues. But that doesn’t disqualify it from being a science blog.
This sort of trollish buffoonery you are exhibiting is why practically nobody takes you seriously.
Carrick
“It is a science blog. And most reasonable people accept it is a science blog.”
Ok, so you think it is. I find that kind of sad, given the garbage written there.
But I doubt most ‘reasonable’ people would agree. Especially not those involved in science. But hey, it’s your opinion.
Can you understand why Sou wouldn’t list it amongst her three choices for science blog? Remember this is why we are at this point, people indicating that the diagram should show a link between Sou and WUWT. An entirely bizarre idea, and one that should never have been made had the author of this post actually read how the diagram was created.
The whole point of this blog post is to poke fun at the author of the diagram and the author of HotWhopper. And considering that the main criticism of HotWhopper is that it pokes fun at WUWT makes this post enormously hypocritical and ironic.
“This sort of trollish buffoonery you are exhibiting is why practically nobody takes you seriously.”
well, this is the same kind of blanket statement I made above when I said no one seriously considers WUWT a serious science blog. So obviously you know it is wrong. 🙂
Trollish buffoonery… yep, that’s about right.
Nathan, it’s not my opinion that most people accept that it is a science blog. The fact it won the Bloggies Best Science Award three years in a row is evidence of that.
I think my opinion is a reasonable one because I have a difficult time coming up with a definition of a science blog that excludes WUWT—which does have valid scientific commentary nestled in amongst the dreck, and which does provide access to current climate data via pull down menus—while keeping many other blogs I would consider science blogs.
Well, I’m not a mindreader, and neither are you, in spite of your apparent beliefs to the contrary.
But I could understand reasons why she might, besides her accepting the ridiculous claim that WUWT isn’t a science blog. My speculation is her antagonism towards WUWT leads her to not be honest that it is one of her most read blogs.
That it becomes one of the most read blogs, for people who obviously monitor it at the level Sou does, almost automatically occurs due to the high rate of articles generated on WUWT compared to most of the other blogs that people read. That people who obviously read it and indeed closely monitor it (as Lucia clearly documented) but don’t admit it is one of their more read blogs, just makes them moral cowards, IMO.
Carrick
“The fact it won the Bloggies Best Science Award three years in a row is evidence of that.”
That’s just sad is what it is… Winning best Science Award, very sad. For someone who declared NASA as funding a giant fraud…
“ridiculous claim that WUWT isn’t a science blog. ”
wow, so my claim is ridiculous… Far out.
“My speculation is her antagonism towards WUWT leads her to not be honest that it is one of her most read blogs. ”
The question she was asked was not “what is your most read blog” – it was “list up to three science blogs you read regularly”.
“Well, I’m not a mindreader, and neither are you, in spite of your apparent beliefs to the contrary.”
Well, she said as much.
In other words, because people didn’t respond to a question they weren’t asked, you all got upset.
“That people who obviously read it (as Lucia clearly documented) but don’t admit it is one of their more read blogs, just makes them moral cowards, IMO.”
Again, they were asked to list up to three science blogs they read regularly.
What is clear is that you all lack the ability to understand simple questions. What if she just listed one blog? Just because you declare WUWT to be a science blog doesn’t mean others must consider it one, so your expectation that it would be listed by Sou and Victor is flawed. And your declaration that they are moral cowards is revolting; read the author’s question again… And especially her post above.
Nathan, The point here is clear. The survey didn’t tell us much about the true science blog map except that some people are so focused on their prejudices, they are not honest and direct but put their hypocrisy on display. Oh and that the climate issue is so politicized and over “communicated” that the science often takes a back seat to politics and gutter tactics except here and a few other places.
Nick writes “Who does use this relationship as evidence for CO2 forcing of climate?”
I wouldn’t call NASA’s “CO2: The Thermostat that Controls Earth’s Temperature” simply a description of a feedback.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/lacis_01/
So for example, that article suggests the analogy “The ordinary thermostat produces no heat of its own. Its role is to switch the furnace on and off, depending on whether the house temperature is lower or higher than the thermostat setting.”
And is effectively rebuffed by noting the thermostat setting happens after the heating has occurred…
Mark Bofill:
I’m glad to hear it! I know you’ve joked about being my sock puppet before, but your’s is an opinion I’ve valued, even when it didn’t agree with mine.
I don’t think there’s anything out of proportion about it. For my moderation policy, as long as people avoid foul language or inappropriate links, I’ll let them post anything. The most I’ll do is move their comments to a “moderation bin.” That will separate their comments from the rest people may post, but it will still let them participate in any conversations. Indeed, I’ll let people post comments which include nothing more than a link to their full remarks on a “moderation bin” remark so people can read what they have to say if they want to.
My moderation policy exists mostly to create a system where people have to “opt in” to discussions I don’t think they need to hear. I’ll set standards as to what I think is worthless contributions. People are free to disagree though. I won’t prevent them from reading what I think is worthless. I’m just going to use my moderation policies to show what I think should and should not be worth consideration.
I really can’t see any reason why anyone should censor commenters. There are so many better options. I think the idea of letting people have a place where they can speak freely, but other people can “opt in” to the discussion is perfect. It allows for open discussion while allowing the blogger to maintain whatever level of dialogue he or she prefers.
Of course, some basic rules as to decency should always be applied. I won’t allow pornography or cursing to be posted on my blog no matter the location. I think that’s reasonable. If you can’t refrain from cursing or posting pornography, screw you. I won’t flinch at deleting a comment which contains foul language,.
By the way guys, I knew I had that annoying Brandon Schollenberger to contend with. I didn’t realize I had a Bandon Shollenberger to deal with too though.
I’m on the verging of giving up. I think my recent eBook on the whole hockey stick debate is kind of great, but with all these people stealing my glory, I don’t know how I’ll ever get the proper recognition!
Nathan writes “Are you also seriously suggesting that WUWT is a ‘science blog’?”
LOL. Others have commented about your comprehension and I have no knowledge about that but I can see your vitriol when posting about WUWT.
So here it is…
WUWT is undoubtedly, undeniably and irrefutably a science blog.
Is it a peer reviewed science paper? No.
Does it always contain good science? No.
It is a blog. And all that goes along with that. But it IS a science blog and if you cant see that then perhaps you need to take a step back. Maybe a few steps.
David Young
“Nathan, The point here is clear. The survey didn’t tell us much about the true science blog map except that some people are so focused on their prejudices, they are not honest and direct but put their hypocrisy on display. Oh and that the climate issue is so politicized and over “communicated†that the science often takes a back seat to politics and gutter tactics except here and a few other places.”
Did you read what the author of the diagram wrote in this very post?
It is people on this blog that are jumping to conclusions about the meaning of the diagram, and making implications.
and I quote from Paige above:
“This survey question and the data that resulted from it are only a very small and rather exploratory part of my dissertation research. This question was never meant to provide a full map of the science blogosphere, or to show that some blogs are isolated or disconnected from others.”
so even when the author of the diagram advises you of the same, people here continue to whine and moan about how some bloggers didn’t say they read some blogs.
“If she thinks she ‘demolished’ the willis’s discussion in that post, she is de. lu. sio. nal.”
All you had to do was read the comments section of this post, whereby one of her regulars – PL – had to help set her straight.
But I definitely felt she demolished something.
Nick,
“Why this change of color if it isn’t conveying an expectation that observation trends will lie within these CIs?”.
This leaves me wondering if you know that “X matches Y ” does not mean “X lies within the confidence intervals for Y”.
Kan
Yes. Of course that reader was not Nick. 🙂
Nathan
You are very bad at reading minds. Who said I “expected it to be listed”?
Before seeing the images, I thought the probability Sou read WUWT daily or more exceeded 99%. After seeing the graph, I inferred that when listing the blogs she read, she did not list WUWT, so I though my previous guess was wrong and that she might not read it regularly. (That is: the fact that she did not list it among her regularly read blogs meant she might not read it regularly. This is– btw, what ““HotWhopper†may not be a regular reader of “WUWT†means. Literally. And the graph does imply that possibility because there is no outgoing trace.
Yes. Her words suggest that Victors theory of “isolation” was uhhmmm… rather… uhmmm hasty.
What conclusion about the meaning of the diagram do you think was jumped to? After you specify that, maybe we can sort you out on your difficulties with reading comprehension.
Happy New Years though.
Oh. I thought that was that Brandoon Shollenberger fellow.
Regarding moderation, it sounds like you’ve got a reasonable system. I think good moderation is an interesting and difficult problem in it’s own right. And I imagine it’s seductively easy to get it wrong and convince ones self that you’ve gotten it right. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Take Nick here. People occasionally take strong exception to Nick and wonder why he is tolerated at places like WUWT. Tempting, eh? Nick is inconvenient and embarrassing to have around when a member of one’s tribe makes a mistake, as I did earlier in this thread by overstating my case without proper fact checking. Nobody much enjoys being embarrassed. Let’s boot him! Uhhuh, next thing you know you’re sitting in an echo chamber where all of your readers are guaranteed to be dumber than you are. Besides, people enjoy watching good arguments. The good ones are like watching skilled duelists fight; it’s interesting and exciting. Part of what makes it interesting and exciting is that people take a risk; nobody is guaranteed victory or defeat. In my view, heavy handed moderation takes that away. But as a result, you want an exciting blog, you need to risk your hide in the arena from time to time. 🙂 That or you need blog participants to do so.
Now contrast Nick with Nathan here. Night and day, right! The point isn’t to go all ad hom on Nathan, but clinically speaking I think it’s obvious that there is no comparison. It’s tempting to get rid of Nathan just because it’s like having an unattractive boulder in the middle of your living room, distracting discussion, inconveniencing anybody trying to enjoy the room, and so on. But it’s just another road to ruin. Ban the Nathans and next thing you know you’ll ban the Bofills, since they aren’t as sharp as the remaining average of your Blackboard readers, and mostly you just get dumb jokes out of him. You’ll ban the Angechs, eventually you’ll work your way to the Brandoons, and then who’s left? Maybe Carrick is your last survivor. (Note, moving the boulder to another thread is a pretty decent solution to this specific problem)
No, 90-95% of the time the proper thing to do is nothing in my view. Even if a thread gets stunk up, well, so what. Life goes on. Better to tolerate that than to kill any possibility that the blog might recover and flourish at some point in the future.
Happy 2015 all!
Nathan
Wrong. That is not the point of this blog post. I certainly didn’t poke fun at the author of the diagram. I didn’t poke fun at HotWhopper. I said that when I saw the diagram, I learned my previous assumption that she must be an avid reader of WUWT might be incorrect.
Turns out my previous assumptoin was correct and in fact she is as an avid of WUWT. But taken as a “tidbit”, the graph– whose content does suggest she had 3 incoming links (which she did) and listed 3 outgoing links (which she did) did suggest she might not be an avid reader of WUWT because she didn’t list it.
Now: Before frothing at the mouth. Please look up the word “might” and learn the distinction between “possibility” and “conclusion” before continuing to froth at the mouth about “conclusions” and so on. Also: Stop assuming that suggesting that her not listing WUWT is a criticism or that I am making any value judgement of her actions. I simply not that not reading WUWT was one of a number of possibilities for why no link appeared– and I listed some.
As for the conclusions: I wanted to encourage discussion of what the appearance of “links” did or did not mean– given the possible range of behaviors of participants. Victor Venama had already posted his conclusions about what it meant. He said it meant the yellow blogs were “isolated”.
In contrast I did not conclude anything. I posted a number of possibilities and invited people to discuss the meaning further.
Wrong. I haven’t criticized HotWhopper for poking fun at WUWT. It’s not only not my “main criticism” of it– I don’t criticized anyone for poking fun at WUWT– nor any blog they wish to poke fun at.
I have — in commented here and elsewhere– stated that one of the problems with HotWhopper is that she believes she “demolishes” arguments at WUWT, in that she utterly fails. But that’s not the same as criticizing her for poking fun at them. There’s nothing wrong with poking fun at WUWT.
Now: I would like to repeat my invitation that you take a reading comprehension course. Or some sort of logic course. Or something. Because you really do make a hash out of meaning when you parse it.
Brandon
I banned Doug Cotton and his sock puppets. His ‘sins’ are mostly injecting utterly entirely self promotional OT material in what appear to be thread jacks.
I’ve banned someone else– mostly for sock-puppetry. I think he hit more than half a dozen ‘names’ sometimes supporting each other.
I limit the length of ‘willards’ comments to roughly a short paragraph and don’t let him post more than once every.. (what is it 10?) minutes. If he wants to write a long thing, he can provide a link to his blog where we can read it.
I had quite a go-around dealing with TCO initially.
The hard thing bits in fair moderation are:
1) Identifying bannable behavior before it happens, because any moderation rule created because of a single person tends to “look” personal. (But really… multiple sock puppets?)
2) Dealing with people who want to get around moderation. “Climate Researcher” recently submitted a comment. I’m pretty sure it’s Doug Cotton. It did not get approved. If I recall correctly, TCO worked hard a thwarting moderation. Other bloggers have had commenters use TOR to get around comment moderation.
3) Explaining why certain behavior is bannable or at least to be discouraged. I am comfortable with how I dealt with willard. But I know that ‘explaining’ the issue to those who like willard (most of whom are elsewhere) is not easy. But.. yeah… willard plugin. From my POV the method worked.
It’s easy to say “no lewd language” or some such. But bad behavior can have so many flavors.
For those wondering: Many “Doug Cottonisms” are in the ‘naughty word’ list. Obviously, you need to call him something like “he who must not be named”– because only I can get around the moderation filter and actually name him. But many other seemingly innocent words are in there based on high correlation with “Doug Cotton” and relatively low use by others who will be unmoderated if they hit a “Doug cotton word”.
Lucia,
Ah, Willard. 🙂 I used to wonder what you meant by being too Willard, and it being indescribable. LOL. I know what you mean now, but I’m not any better able to describe it than you. Except that Willard appears to be somebody who delights in never stating his point plainly if there’s any more obscure or ambiguous alternative way to put it. The trouble is, there almost always is.
I don’t know. Maybe the guy is an unappreciated genius in his own time and I’m just too thick to follow. Whatever. In my book, if you can’t make your point plain enough that somebody honestly trying to follow what you’re saying can, you don’t get credit for having a point.
If anybody ‘gets’ Willard and can explain the method to the madness I’m not getting, I’d welcome enlightenment. 🙂
Mark Bofill:
That’s still my favorite misspelling.
I actually don’t get any desire to ban people like either. The most I ever want to do is tell people to ignore the “boulders” if they’re inconvenient. As long as a person isn’t spamming or something like that, they can only be a trivial inconvenience unless people choose to make them something more.
I don’t see how getting rid of people who abide by the rules improves a situation, and I don’t have any desire to do it. If anything, I’d much rather have them present so any undesirable contributions can be publicly shunned.
lucia:
Definitely. It’s hard to get a good set of rules for people who intentionally behave in undesirable ways. You can cover a lot of it with some basic rules (like no spamming), but that can’t solve everything.
I think the best thing to do is to try to address issues socially. A lot of people don’t realize how effective it can be just to ask people to change their behavior. Most people will work with you to improve the discussion. Also, it shows the moderation actions you do take are done reluctantly. It’s hard to say someone is abusing their moderation powers if you believe the person didn’t want to use their moderation powers (the same is true with anyone in any place of authority).
I think anyone who does that will avoid most complaints about their moderation. You can institute any rules you feel you need if you genuinely try to work with people to help them abide by your rules. That’s something I’ve always liked about this site. Even when people do get moderated, it’s made abundantly clear how little they need to do differently to be allowed to comment.
And of course, it’s never, “Stop saying things we disagree with”!
happy new year, Lucia,
Climate Researcher sure did look like D**G. He posted the same words at a number of other blogs. I liked the idea of limiting persistent trolls to a single comment per day. The Bishop has one, ZBD, who isn’t particularly creative and seldom on point, beyond noting what idiots we must be. But… I thought limiting her to a single comment per day might be fun, maybe as an experiment. Apparently Andrew doesn’t see it this way.
I would exclude C. Researcher from even this limited access. I think most of us have grasped his point and don’t need any more reminders.
I really wish Judith’s moderation techniques were as effective as yours – entirely too much information-free contention by a few people. Only thing that seems to work for me is to search on a couple of names whose views i find interesting.
Judith Curry resolved to improve blog moderation in 2015:
I like her blog too, but for all my tough talk about how argument makes things interesting I’m not up for the daily food fight over there. 🙂 I just lurk.
Mark Bofill,
” Except that Willard appears to be somebody who delights in never stating his point plainly if there’s any more obscure or ambiguous alternative way to put it. ”
.
Seems a tendency shared by a certain silly rabbet; also makes comments so obscure that they are incomprehensible. I can’t imagine being an undergrad who has listen to him lecture on chemistry… YIKES!
Mark Bofill —
Arguments can indeed be interesting. But, as established by Cleese and Chapman (1972), an argument is a connected series of statements to establish a definite proposition; it is not the automatic gainsaying of everything the other person says [as often occurs].
j ferguson
Or he may see it that way, but doesn’t have access to easy tools to implement the policy. There are downsides to self hosting, but the upside is that I was able to write a plugin that moderates “willard”. The list did include other people– in fact some “banned” people are in there.
Perhaps I should switch Doug Cotton to “willard” treatment and see if that works? I think it won’t work though. Willard, to his credit, doesn’t do things like resorts to sock-puppetry, address changes and so on. He’s a pseudonym, but he isn’t going to return using a masked IP and newly created email addresses using various other names like “rattus” or “squirrel” or something that evokes the idea of “willard” while getting around a filter.
I predict she will fail because
(a) too many people do want to comment on her posts and (b) she is hosted on WordPress and so doesn’t have access to a wide range of functionality. If she wanted to automate moderation beyond ‘key words’, ‘throw away email addresses’ and so on, she probably can’t.
Given (a) and (b) there is probably not enough time in the day for her to moderate any better than she does. I suspect she will see that fairly quickly, and realize that the resolution was like many new years resolutions– great in principle, nearly impossible in practice.
Yep.
HaroldW,
Thanks so much, that was awesome. :> I certainly know the feeling; going into a room looking for an argument and mistakenly walking into the room where they’re giving ‘get hit over the head’ lessons!
Happy New Year!
Lucia,
I don’t understand why Judith doesn’t get a few volunteers to help with moderation. It would help the blog quality a lot if the usual suspects weren’t in constant food fights.
Judith does need better moderation, something I’ve suggested to her several times. I don’t know if there are any problems with using students for the job, but it might be something they might find interesting and challenging. I suspect its a job that will need to be shared by several people, given the number of comments.
Nathan, you seem to be quite invested in WUWT not being a science blog. Unfortunately (at least for you) your opinion of something doesn’t make it a fact. You also think it’s “very sad” that WUWT has won the Bloggies Best Science Award. I congratulate you on at least accepting that a Consensuses doesn’t make something a fact, but that leaves us with you holding a minority opinion. To answer this then requires us to define our terms precisely.
So the question really becomes “What is a Science Blog?” Obviously in your mind the primary criteria is that it never posts anything you disagree with. Apparently Sou and Victor agree with you. That definition doesn’t work well for me however, as it would immediately disallow 90% of the science blogs I read, including almost all the Scientific American Blog Network 😉
Carrick above gave a clear description of why WUWT should be considered a science blog. What is your reason for believing it is not? So far the only specific thing I can find about why you think WUWT shouldn’t be considered a science blog is some vague hints about WUWT saying NASA funded something that was a ‘Fraud’. Unfortunately I have no idea what your alluding to, so I have no idea if it even relates. Everything else you’ve written has been in this vain…
“And when presented with opportunities to do ‘science’ Anthony Watts fails every time.
He labels working scientists and organisations as frauds, and then cowardly refuses to put his work out for scrutiny.
He won’t put up, is his problem.”
That’s all just general fact free complaining. There isn’t even enough info to try to look something up. Frankly, it shouldn’t be hard to at least list some specific instants of WUWT screwing up. We’ve all seen it happen, though we might not all agree on each instance 🙂
Not that it would matter if you did, however. As I said before, I don’t expect a science blog to get everything right all the time. So do you have a specific reason for declaring WUWT as ‘not science’? Other then that they “Deny the Science” of CAGW?
j ferguson,
It took Andrew at Bishop Hill a very long time to ban ZDB – probably a year or two – despite the fact that she had never ever posted anything useful, helpful or relevant. In fact the very reverse; she seemed to take Andrew’s forbearance as a license to post ever-more rude and unpleasant tosh. Other of the Bishop’s commentators tried hard to reason with ZDB but – just as with Nathan here – she’s in permanent me-no-listen mode. Frustrating, but frankly even one comment per day would be one useless comment too many.
David Young
I think using students from her department without paying them could create a big problem both in appearance and possibly other employment issues.
While moderating might be something a student finds interesting and challenging, it is not a useful career move, moderating comments doesn’t help the do better research or anything. As a faculty member it is something she should avoid doing unless she advertises and finds someone unconnected to her department who she’s hired and pays a fee to do the job.
I do think the job would require multiple people– and be done around the clock to permit prompt discussion. Without good automated tools, the job at a large blog is very labor intensive.
With access to custom plugins many things could be attempted– but in some cases one would wish to implement them secretly. So for example, if I had the sort of traffic Judy has, I could create a “karma” index for various commenters, and make sure some never got moderated even if they used a word on the “Doug Cotton” list, I could create custom “pause” times based on karma and all sorts of things. I don’t have enough traffic to make this worth doing– but a large entity could do any number of things.
The difficulty is that once done, people who got wind of it would complain about how anyone decided what factors gave a commenter “good karma” and what factors gave them “bad karma” especially if any sort of manual override was involved. (And manual override would be required.)
Jerry Mead,
I agree with everything you wrote about ZDB’s contributions to BH.
The inevitable clutter of retorts to even one of her comments would probably be too much. And it would have been unjust to deny her the ability to re-retort. On the other hand, she would have been challenged to make her only shot do the job.
My thought was that no village should be without its idiot. She would have served well in that role.
SteveF
.
Seems a tendency shared by a certain silly rabbet; also makes comments so obscure that they are incomprehensible.
Mosher. OMG Steve Mosher. Sometimes I just want to slap him and say “This isn’t Twitter. You’re not Budda. If you’ve got a point, Spell it out already.”
Schitzree
Yes. But the rabbet is brief and appears only rarely. You would have had to read willard’s old comments to grok the difference.
Yes Lucia, it would seem moderating a blog is a full time job, and I agree you should pay any students involved. Some motivated retirees might be good as they typically have plenty of time and experience to know personality types.
One other thing is that I think Judith would attract more serious commenters if moderation were better. A lot of people who used to comment have disappeared and we know Pekka for example gave his reason. Judith is a credentialed climate scientist and that I think causes a lot of angst among the 97%ers and that easily turns to anger and personal attacks. That effect might also be diminished some if the blog was well moderated.
I do find a lot of the attacks on Judith to be rather baseless and just restating the obvious, viz., “you don’t agree with the 97%ers, therefore you must be wrong or sloppy, or paid by the evil fossil fuel lobby, etc.” On attribution, SOD has some recent posts that show based on the climate literature that natural variability is just not well understood and has century scale variation that simply cannot be accounted for in current attribution arguments. At least that’s my interpretation. 🙂 I find SOD perhaps the best science based climate blog. I believe there is no trace of an agenda there and the usual suspects seem to avoid it.
david,
Judith being an estabilished scientists attracts both the serious and loooooonatic commenter.
I’ve never found the comments threads attractive because I seriously dislike “threaded comments” at blog posts and think it does nothing good.
I know some people like them. But my view is they like them precisely because they enjoy the sorts of tangents that are especially fun at forum and email lists. But threading makes the distinction of OT nearly impossible and also prevents discussion from ever “ending” because threads move on to… other things.
“threaded comments”?
What CA uses?
Threaded comments without food fights and without too many comments can be workable. At Judith’s there are neither of those conditions, so threading doesn’t work very well there. Of course, if Judith just limited the most.. ahem… frequent commenters to half a dozen comments per thread, one of those problems would be resolved. Ban the politics-only commenters who are just there to criticize Judith (whatever she writes) like ‘Joshua’, and the food fights would stop.
Schitzree (Comment #133862)
“Carrick above gave a clear description of why WUWT should be considered a science blog. What is your reason for believing it is not?”
I’ll give some examples. Sure, it talks about science. Also about politics. And it has a lot of fans, many focussed on the politics. So it gets a lot of votes.
Take the latest fuss about acidification (3 posts). It’s full of allegations that Feely, or Sabine, or someone, misbehaved. One post was headed “pHraud…” It was based originally on a political journalist talking to a hydrologist who was making all these allegations.
One is that Sabine (or someone) replaced data with modelled results. I’ve asked, a few times, what does that refer to? No-one can say. The other is that some large amount of data was ignored.
But what Feely actually did, and I think this is what is referred to (though no-one on this “science” blog makes it clear) is to plot pH and CO2 data from a site (Aloha) in Hawaii. That starts in 1988. They aren’t ignoring the global data. They are doing something else. If a good trend can be got from global data, that needs to be shown. Lance Wallace claimed in the original post to have done so. His analysis was pathetic. Willis in the third post thought so too. Others tried. Says one commenter, expressing a general sentiment:
“I always love it when I see a supposed rate of change that has an error of +/- 1500-1800%. Meaningless.”
He’s directing that at the scientists. But it’s what you get from the “omitted” data (with bad analysis). Scientists analysed a consistent set and got a +-10% result.
Another example – a few months ago WUWT went on a tear against “zombie stations”. This was a reference to the USHCN dataset, where they average in absolute °F and so have to estimate the missing stations. This was seen as making up data, and much condemned. I tried to explain that in calculating a spatial average, every point in the space, other than the known data points, is estimated. Estimating the missing stations on a similar basis, and then interpolating from there, is just another, perfectly valid scheme. But no, the host of this science blog was having none of that:
“And no matter what you say Nick, making up data where there is none, especially from long dead weather stations using crappy data from surrounding compromised stations is still wrong. For the record, I don’t give a flying F how you rationalize it.”
The post was headed “The scientific method is at work on the USHCN temperature data set”
lucia – I tried editing (Comment #133866) , but it didn’t take. “Seems a tendency shared by a certain silly rabbet; also makes comments so obscure that they are incomprehensible.” was supposed to be quoted to SteveF
As for Mosher, don’t get me wrong, I think he is one of the top minds in the climate blogoshere. He is both very observant and able to connect disparate data. That’s WHY I find his obscure drive-by comments so infuriating.
SteveF – ‘A Conversation With Joshua’
Somebody: Water is Wet.
Joshua: What is your evidence for that?
Somebody: What? Everybody knows that.
Joshua: That’s just your opinion.
Somebody: Fine. Here’s an article on how wet water is.
Joshua: That’s from a Denier blog. I don’t accept that.
Somebody Else: Here’s a link to a peer reviewed study on the wetness of water.
Joshua: But this just describes one state of water. What about Ice? Ice isn’t wet.
Somebody:What? I wasn’t talking about Ice. I meant regular water. like in a lake. or from the tap.
Sombody Else: The definition of water is H2O in it’s liquid state. Liquid mean wet.
Somebody the 3rd: Ice can be wet. It has to be really cold ice to stay dry.
Joshua:(to somebody) You didn’t say anything about it being water between 0*C and 100*C. It could be at any temperature.
(conversation continues until everyone stops responding to joshua)
Nick, I don’t think the fact that mistakes are made on the science is a good argument to say WUWT isn’t a science blog. That’d be more of an argument against “drinking the koolaid”.
If you could show they primarily blogged on politics, that might be a legitimate point. But I don’t think there’s particularly any higher fraction of politics (or policy discussion, which is also not science) on WUWT than there is on most of the blogs that people seem to think are science blogs.
Indeed, based on this sort of criterion, I think Eli’s blog for example wouldn’t be a science blog, but an advocacy blog.
Schitzree, Joshua is partakes of a lot more sophism than your mock-up conversation demonstrates. He is also able to say in three long consecutive blog comments what it would take other people to say in a few short sentences, so there is that.
Nick,
Fair enough, WUWT and Anthony were mistaken about that. But how about Willis finding cool ocean buoy temperature data being “homogenized” into oblivion by warmer land stations ~100 KM away. Mosher disappeared without an explanation given. Are you ready to defend THAT as good practice? WUWT does have quality control problems. There are some absolute rubbish posts. The comment threads are sometimes as hostile (and obnoxious) as those at ATTP (and that is nothing to be proud of). But certainly not all posts are rubbish. It is a science blog by any reasonable definition, even if could be a lot better on accuracy.
As usual, I think SteveF is correct. Nick is performing a valuable service by raising the quality of the comments at WUWT. That statement has many implications. 🙂
My main criticism of the climate blogosphere is just that there are few forums to discuss the science that are not infested by the usual distractions, we all know who they are. Blooming idiots many of them. _;)
Meant 😉
Nick – If “occasionally makes statements about the other side being dishonest without adequate proof” makes you ‘non-science’ then that pretty much invalidates most of the blogs on both sides of the climate divide (and all Nature magazines).
The whole pHraud issue was silly. Both sides had some valid points. Nether had as many facts as the thought. All we can honestly say is that there isn’t really enough data to prove what ocean pH is doing, long term.
As for the ‘Zombie Stations’ issue, Believe it or not, some of us think that if you’re going to estimate data points in your dataset you should probably document them as so. Leaving them in as if they were actual measurements from stations that used to exist but don’t anymore comes across as somewhat… shady.
Carrick – I admit I wasn’t able to truly convey the level of sophistry and misdirection that Joshua can produce. My only defense was that I was pressed for time (and maybe I’m not as twisted, though I wouldn’t bet money on that).
Schitzree, I largely agree. If I ran a blog I think I would have have a hard time deciding how to moderate the likes of Joshua.
I sometimes wish Judith would enlist some volunteer moderators.
The flip side is that she gains extra credibility for tolerance, over and above her detractors who already make a more feeble case intellectually, IMO.
And if you want an online climate-argument, 24/7, then Judith’s is probably the best place to go.
Not to flood The Blackboard or anything, I know I’ve posted here alot today. But It looks like Judith was serious about Improving Moderation. At least, I’ve seen more ‘SNIP’s then I usually do today. Looks like most are going to Don Monfort, Possibly for feeding the trolls. It’s hard to tell what he said from the comments around him.
Carrick,
‘Joshua’ has absolutely nothing of substance to say and absolutely will not engage in substantive discussions; his objective is to sidetrack and frustrate with endless sophism. He (she? it?) is the quintessential blog troll. If I were Judith I would long ago have banned him (her? it?).
Schitzree
“Believe it or not, some of us think that if you’re going to estimate data points in your dataset you should probably document them as so.”
They are maked as missing in the raw file, and the estimates marked with an E in the final.
Carrick, (Comment #133875)
It’s not the fact that mistakes are made. It’s that they don’t care, as illustrated by AW’s reply to me above. Errors are rarely corrected.
Nick, I think it’s probably not fair to say “they don’t care”. I think you can find many examples where they’ve corrected the record when it was wrong. So I don’t accept this is the prevalent response to errors being discovered.
That particular thread, for reasons we can speculate on, Anthony refused to be rational.
But again that happens to other bloggers too. I can think of threads where Tamino wouldn’t be rational. One involving the 2LOT comes to mind.
To make it clear, I’m not making a tu quoque argument, it’s more of a call for consistency in how we judge blogs.
SteveF, can you provide a link to the WUWT thread where Willis looked at surface buoy temperature data getting smeared by land temperature 100-km away?
Were I Judith, I would certainly limit how many comments Joshua can make in one thread. It’s not just that he makes trollish comments, he makes so many of them that he swamps an entire thread with his rapid-fire content-free comments.
Carrick,
Yes, like when Tamino banned Lucia for asking perfectly reasonable questions about a Tamino ‘model’ of warming. You are right that errors sometimes do get corrected at WUWT (though maybe not often enough). Willis is usually pretty good about it if you can show where he is clearly wrong. Tamino admit he was mistaken? About anything? Not a chance. He will however be happy to ban anyone who questions him. So by Nick’s apparent criteria, Tamino doesn’t have a science blog. One of those rare times I agree with Nick! 😉
Carrick,
November 28 evening.
The Berkley Earth graphic of the buoy data shows a huge number of ‘quality control failures’ (mostly ‘too low’), for a buoy that sits by itself in the ocean north west of San Francisco, suggesting the ocean data is being compared to (warmer) land readings by the Berkley algorithm. I asked Steve Mosher if that was in fact the case, but he never answered. (see the comment thread)
SteveF (Comment #133856) January 1st, 2015â€
“Seems a tendency shared by a certain silly rabbet; also makes comments so obscure that they are incomprehensible”
63 going on 16 YO, is Eli older than me?
I would love to achieve his level of black belt obscurity and will continue working on it.
Mind you as this is a blog on Hot Whopper I wondered if anyone has the time or inclination to comment on sites names, appropriateness to their owners, without getting to personal as many are self descriptive.
Hot whopper [hint, Nick should take note of this]
WUWT inquiring , pun on owners name, funny,
Climate etc covers more than climate
Open Mind pure bliss.
SOD best of the names in my opinion laughs at itself self deprecating
Thanks SteveF. Given that context, I was able to find the thread:
Buoy Temperatures, First Cut.
This isn’t the first time that the issues with spatial smearing of BEST has cropped up. Brandon had a discussion on his blog.
I’ve commented on the spatial smearing on a number of other blogs but this discussion on Nick’s blog comes to mind. Nick had a trend calculator that you can use to look at the amount of smearing that BEST apparently is creating:
figure.
I’m not going to complain that Mosher didn’t stay to play. But it does seem odd that there doesn’t seem to be any concern with the BEST group that their algorithms need a tune-up.
Lucia
You seriously expect me to believe this blog post wasn’t a criticism of HotWhopper? Good grief.
This is why you cannot be taken seriously, as you simply play rhetorical games.
You need not have make this post at all, had you read how the author had prepared the diagram. It is simply meaningless.
For what it’s worth, I think threaded comments can be great. I think you need the option to minimize responses though. Or rather, responses to any top level comments should be hidden unless you click a button to reveal those of that particular fork. That lets people have their tangential conversations without disrupting anyone else’s conversations.
I’ve been meaning to follow up on that. I’ve still never figured out just what’s going on with BEST’s uncertainty calculations. There’s a step-change which significantly reduces them them followed by an abnormal inflation for a small period. My problem is the nature of this “quirk” has changed through various iterations of their results, and BEST doesn’t provide a code/data repository to allow people to compare the various versions.
To make matters worse, when I tried to get BEST to cooperate in comparing versions of their results, Mosher told me they don’t need to publish anything that’s not used in a peer-reviewed paper. BEST apparently feels it can launch PR campaigns based upon results but not show the work which goes into them. Combine all that with the difficulty of testing their MATLAB code when they refuse to cooperate in any way, and it’s just more work than I feel is worthwhile.
Especially when the entire BEST approach is based upon a fundamental assumption everyone knows is wrong. BEST’s methodology assumes the planet’s climate field has remained constant for over a century. At the same time, BEST members will openly state different parts of the planet are expected to warm at different rates. Despite knowing this fundamental assumption of theirs is wrong, they’ve done nothing to establish what the effect is. This means everyone knows (or should know) BEST’s uncertainty calculations are understated by an unknown amount.
Given that point was clearly established something like two years ago, I don’t know what BEST is doing. All I know is it shouldn’t impress anyone. Then again, these are the same people who publish activist documents as stupid as anything I’ve seen from groups like Greenpeace:
http://www.hi-izuru.org/wp_blog/2014/07/best-wants-you-to-be-stupid/
And nobody seems to mind. Heck, the co-founders of BEST even deny the rate of global warming has slowed down!
Lucia, from above:
”
Carrick,
Yeah. I saw that. It’s sort of funny. It seems to be this:
A blogger, who established a blog consortium, asked her friends what blogs they read. Then (I think) some of them asked the bloggers whose blogs they read which blogs they read.) Turns out that circle of friends reads (or admits to reading) a certain set of blogs.
Oddly, we are supposed to believe “Hot Whopper†does not regularly read WUWT. And yet, the title of the posts on it’s front page are:
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Duet on Ice: More denier silliness at WUWT
Insects and microbes and OCO-2 conspiracy theories at WUWT
Where has all the CO2 gone? WUWT fails arithmetic & science, so cries pHraud!
European temperature at WUWT – Finland, the UK, teleconnections and more
Tim Ball FAILS Carbon Cycle 101 at WUWT
A silly poster by Pat’n Chip at AGU14 provides a learning experience
Ok… That’s so bad, I need to post!”
Yeah, HotWhopper is ‘so bad’ you need to post, and somehow we are expected to believe this post is not a criticism of HotWhopper… And Carrick called the diagram a “Piece of Garbage”, and you called it ‘sort if funny’.
Such ‘moral cowardice’, as Carrick would say, to no admit the point of this post is to poke fun at both the diagram and at Hotwhopper (and Victor V).
Maybe its just as simple as seeing something that seems highly questionable and applying skepticism. What a concept.
Brandon:
I think this is a good point. In addition to temporarily invariance, they assume the kriging function is spatially invariant, and radially symmetric.
But if my memory serves me, I think some of the stuff we were looking at suggested that the homogenization process might be at play in the over-smoothing that people have noticed.
David Young:
Yep, you’ve nailed it. This is really not complicated.
But the very fact that Nathan seems to struggle so with such simple concepts is I think very telling.
Correction:
“temporarily invariance” should read “temporal invariance”
One other thing to bear in mind. Lucia allows you Nathan to contradict her on her blog. Hottie offers no such courtesy, assigning comments she doesn’t like to a special thread that is buried. The weasel does the same thing. It shows that Lucia is well above the low standard of the 97%ers.
“Maybe its just as simple as seeing something that seems highly questionable and applying skepticism. What a concept.”
That’s what is in such short supply at WUWT. Take for example today’s Tisdale post. It’s headed
“Has NOAA Once Again Tried to Adjust Data to Match Climate Models?”
with the usual overtones of phraud. But in fact what he shows at great length is that the new ERSSTv4 introduces a spike in the 1940’s that isn’t present in v3b, hadsst3 or models. It’s quite the opposite. And Bob concludes
“Then again, they can argue all they want, but the models still can’t explain that curious spike in the ERSST.v4 data.”
Well, maybe. But it in no way supports the headline accusation. Does anyone notice? There are plenty of piling on accusations of frαud. But no, no querying at all. Well, one from me. No interest.
Nick wrote at WUWT… “So ERSSTv4 has introduced a spike which isn’t in model results and isn’t in HADSST3 (or v3b). How is this adjusting data to match modes?”
Wasn’t Bob’s point that by undoing the adjustment that got rid of the spike in ERSST.3b and getting back to the spike in ERSST.v4 the trend changed to better match the models? But he also made the point that the spike itself was now a problem. Maybe I’ve misinterpreted him, though.
Carrick
“Yep, you’ve nailed it. This is really not complicated.
But the very fact that Nathan seems to struggle so with such simple concepts is I think very telling.”
So when you write
“…have you seen this garbage.”
It’s you being skeptical, and not mocking the diagram? How exactly is that skepticism? Looks likes dismissal by glancing at it and deciding you don’t like it. Then you send it to a friend so they can share in you dislike… You are absolutely mocking it.
Why not go and tell Paige what you really think.
https://experiment.com/projects/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-what-does-the-science-blogger-do
Where’s your moral courage?
David
“Lucia allows you Nathan to contradict her on her blog. ”
True, and I am most grateful 🙂
“Hottie offers no such courtesy, assigning comments she doesn’t like to a special thread that is buried. The weasel does the same thing. ”
Ummm no, she puts misogynistic and crazy posts in a separate place. As does ‘The Weasel’.
But both are often contradicted and will discuss the contradiction at length. Contradiction isn’t enough, it’s when people dispute the Greenhouse Effect and other stupid ideas that they bin them.
Nick Stokes (Comment #133901)
“Take for example today’s Tisdale post. It’s headed “Has NOAA Once Again Tried to Adjust Data to Match Climate Models?
with the usual overtones of phraud. So ERSSTv4 has introduced a spike which isn’t in model results and isn’t in HADSST3 (or v3b). How is this adjusting data to match modes?”
Easy,
Tisdale wrote.
“Based on a breakpoint analysis recently promoted by RealClimate, NOAA appears to have reduced the early 20th Century warming rate to agree with the climate models used by the IPCC.With the new ERSST.v4 data, the warming rate has been lowered almost to the modeled rate for the period of 1912 to 1940.”NOAA resurrected the spike in the late-1930s and early-1940s. NOAA appears to have suppressed the pre-1940 “Folland correction†in its ERSST.v4 data. the newer nighttime marine air temperature data and its use as a reference for the full term are the reasons for the delayed warming from the early 1910s to the late 1930s and the trailing sudden upsurge in the ERSST.v4 data in the late 1930s”.
Do you not understand Bob’s English?
It was a lot to wade through but you appear to ignore it, wave your hands and say look, Rabbet!
Nick,
I’m not sure what you’re arguing at this point. Sometimes skepticism is in short supply at WUWT, I think that could be demonstrated. So? Is your argument still the silliness about whether or not WUWT is a science blog, or is there some substance here?
Brandon:
Brandon, could you expand on this a bit? Climate field?
Nathan,
“Such ‘moral cowardice’, as Carrick would say, to no admit the point of this post is to poke fun at both the diagram and at Hotwhopper (and Victor V).”
.
Nathan,
It is a silly diagram, and Hotwhopper is a silly blog, so whether or not poking fun at them was the point of Lucia’s post, it would be a very reasonable point to make. As Lucia already explained, Hotwhopper makes it’s own glaring errors; the blog proprietor has not a clue what she is talking about much of the time. Poking fun and a few giggles are probably the best responses to someone that technically incompetent pretending to be otherwise.
Nathan
“That” was not referring to HotWhopper itself but to strong appearance irony. I blogged about the ironic state of things.
Nathan
Ahh… but that’s not what you accused me of doing before. You accused me of poking fun at the authors of the diagram and HotWhopper.
The diagram itself has elements that are interesting and elements that are amusing. I did laugh at the element of the diagram that’s amusing. This is not the same as poking fun at its author.
FWIW: I’ve been conversing with the author herself at her blog. She also commented here. She does not seem upset at my observation about the lack of linkage; rather she seems pleased to have learned something about communications and linkages, and pleased her graph fostered additional discussion. http://www.scilogs.com/from_the_lab_bench/a-network-of-blogs-read-by-science-bloggers/#comment-184065
Nathan,
BTW: I do admit this post pokes fun at Victor Venema; I even admit that’s one of the points. I never denied that. 🙂
That said: even poking fun at Victor Venema is not the “main” point.
Victor has been very silly in all this. Victor is the one who decreed this figured showed WUWT was “isolated from science” when he knows perfectly well that WUWT isn’t “isolated” from Victors own blog and Victor knows he did not report this ‘connection’ to Paige. So even if one thinks Victors not reporting he reads WUWT, Victor knew that meant the wording of the question was such that failing to report reading the WUWT didn’t imply WUWT is “isolated” from Victor’s blog.
Moreover, Victor, who reads HotWhopper regularly, perfectly well knew that HotWhopper blogs incessantly about WUWT, so when Victor wrote his post, he knew WUWT is not “isolated” from HotWhopper.
And now– even more hilariously– he’s posting all sorts of “updates” to try to explain … something, including and “update 3” that incorporates information I explained to him in comments here– and admitting “Had I thought of that before, I would have chosen a more careful title.” Oh. Well…. Although, I think extremely long “update 2” is the more hilarious of the two. It mentions my having written my post– I infer was written after I laughed at his over-interpreting the graph and which he ends with “This network is interesting, but “just” a side result that should not be over-interpreted.”
Well… no Victor. You should not have over-interpreted it.
And yes Nathan, I am poking fun at Victor.
Nick,
I said earlier,
And now I’m thinking, Oh. Were you .. just sayin’, as the popular expression goes?
LOL. If so, sorry. See, I’m over conditioned to look for meaning (to attack) in your lightest utterances. 🙂 My apology.
Nick, I agree that skepticism of “on message” points is often missing, especially in the comments, on WUWT. However, skepticism is also commonly missing for “on message” points at most blogs, science or otherwise. This is just human nature.
Like Mark Bofill, I don’t see how discussing the shortcomings of WUWT relates to the question of whether it qualifies as a science blog.
“I’m not going to complain that Mosher didn’t stay to play. But it does seem odd that there doesn’t seem to be any concern with the BEST group that their algorithms need a tune-up.”
Huh,
we identified this issue a long time ago.
1. In our comparision with Homogenization approaches.
2. In our study of 1/4 degree fields, looking at prism, which
has the opposite problem.
In short, the approach aims at minimizing the error over large areas. It will of necessity over smooth.
I don’t stick around because there isn’t a single one of you who makes a positive contribution to the issue.
A) should we even care about the smoothing? If one is interested in smaller spatial scales, my current thinking is that the answer will be a function of the particular use of the data and the particular area. For example, if you are interested in the Alps, there is additional data one would want to use and it happens to be available for that area.
B) How smooth is too smooth? What we can say is that depending on the product, depending on the area, there are areas where we are smoother than other products and areas where other products have laughable answers. For example, trends that change EXACTLY on lat lon lines, as if the climate knew the longitude and latitude by degrees.
In out of sample testing we minimize the global error. That was the goal. That’s the whole aim of the approach. NOT to get the local correct ( yes virginia fitted values from the regression differ from the data, as in duh)
As for no concern.
Whoever wrote this, has no effin clue the amount of research I’ve been doing while avoiding the likes of him and brandon. Attacking the smoothing issue is a huge undertaking. In one case, the data required, exceeded terabytes of data. Presently, I’m working in one small region of the world with another researcher to see if we can improve the estimate over a 30 year period. Download of the data itself takes over a month, and processing maybe 6 months. Even then, there is no assurance that the data will improve the estimate.
Generally, the only people who have a real scientific interesting in the smoothing question, are actually working on the problem. not blogging. They get my time. not bloggers.
“My problem is the nature of this “quirk†has changed through various iterations of their results, and BEST doesn’t provide a code/data repository to allow people to compare the various versions.”
First drop of the code contained the password to SVN. Of course you didnt find it because it was in the code where one set the system up. That is, you actually had to TRY to install the code to see the password. Those who did install it had no problems. Since you never tried, you didnt see it.
If you want to keep a history of changes its simple. just do it.
you dont want to keep a history. I judge your intentions by your behavior. Your behavior says you dont care. I judge your actions, not your words.
Nathan,
Is ClimateProgress a science blog in your opinion?
Mosher
Ahh…. long ago I recall people would periodically suggest I work on developing a new temperature series. Many of these people seemed to be under the impression that there was some ‘major’ issue with the existing series. My response was it would involve way too much time, and I didn’t think the results would change all that much.
I can see that it is taking as much time as I imagined! I also thought at the time– and think now– that it is difficult to do a competent job and also ‘blog’ about all the issues.
I applaud your efforts– and agree that no one should take not perpetually blogging reports on every question as an indication of “not caring” about an issue. Caring means looking at something– and also not reporting when a post would be little more than “blathering noise”.
so, after publishing we went to benchmark in a double blind fashion
our approach ( minimizing the error of the field) with approaches that did discrete homogenization.
http://static.berkeleyearth.org/posters/agu-2012-poster.png
What we found was that our approach tended to smooth the field more than others. This smoothing is not unexpected since we dont make discrete changes to individual time series. we dont adjust data, we look at the data and ask “what surface is the best fit”
after that we started to attack the smoothing at smaller scales from a variety of angles.
First cut was here
http://static.berkeleyearth.org/posters/agu-2013-poster-1.pdf
Now of course folks could not be bothered to read the discussion.
In terms of figuring out the smoothing issue. we see two extremes.
A. Unphysical, high frequency maps. See prism and NCDC and NARR, trend maps.
B. Overly smooth maps, like ours.
Now of course if you take the overall trend of these two extremes you see that they agree on the large scale but differ on the small scale. The question is what is the use of the map. Forestry guys like Prism. They like Prism because it is a really fine resolution and they need 1km or finer, plus it has precipitation fields.They accept the local quirkiness of 1km of land warming rapidily while the block next door cools.
They have work to do and they work with the tool that fits their task. Climate guys look at it and know its unphysical. When they look at source data they see why. Oh, that grid square cools because the station instrument changed and prism doesnt account for this.
Doing a product that gets a good global answer is easy. You can use GISS, CRU, NCDC, Nick Stokes, RomanM, BEST. Cowtan and Way. all of those will work to get you a good global answer. they might differ a bit, but the differences would be academic BUT FOR the global warming debate.
None of these products is designed to get state correct, or county correct. The artifacts will differ from maps where trends change discretely on gridlines, to artifacts where the local deviations are smoothed over.
Getting the local field correct to the highest resolution while also doing a global product is probably impossible over long periods of time. Nobody has much of a use for that product and the data required is either too huge ( where it exists ) or not available.
Steven Mosher:
1) Since when is error identification (a form of constructive criticism) not a positive contribution?
2) Arguing that over smoothing isn’t a problem is one of the poorest arguments I’ve ever seen you make. It’s a huge problem when you are having entire continents appear to warm and cool at the same rate. Given the interest in regional scale climate modeling, that just isn’t an acceptable result.
3) Arguing it is difficult to solve is risible because most groups don’t suffer from this over smoothing. So people aren’t generally working on it, because for them it’s already fixed: Most homogenization algorithms don’t suffer from over smoothing.
4) I think the lack of versioning in a way that preserves file timestamps is a problem (it’s part of why I don’t use subversion), and especially an issue since the “last modified” timestamp is not being stored in the individual files. Not documenting the changes in the files as updates are made is a problem too.
5) Again, I’m not asking for your time, though my tax dollars are helping to pay BEST participants salary, just bemused with the constant wave-offs and excuse making I’ve seen from you when obvious mistakes are noted.
You guys appear to have made a number of bad assumptions (like the assumed ubiquity of 1000-km correlation in temperature), and these bad assumptions have led to poor programing decisions that are producing erroneous results.
It is also not clear that you’ve minimized the global error either. Comparison with other products suggests there is a positive trend bias for the current period of globally increasing temperatures. It is very easy to see how over smoothing can yield such a net bias.
There are a lot of conceptual things you guys have done that I like. But it’s not good if you don’t end up with a better product.
Incidentally, it’s not very hard to modify products like HadCRUT so you don’t have the discontinuities on lat/long lines using a variation on the method of overlapping windows.
Lucia:
Agreed. That’s why I don’t try to develop a series too. Nick Stokes I think has one of the more promising approaches that I’ve seen with his TempLS series. A few things to note are the use of tessellation and LSF spherical harmonics expansion. Certainly this is much better than 5°x5° grids, which is actually a really silly way to grid (because of the cos(latitude) scaling of area). It’s also better than the time-invariant spatially-invariant azimuthally-invariant kriging function assumed by BEST (aka the “spherical cow” assumption). Interestingly, depending on how Nick handles the spatial weighting, he can produce a HadCRUT/GHCN or a GISTEMP like product.
(HadCRUT uses 5°x5° cells, and GISTEMP uses equal area cells.)
That aside, the distinction here is Richard Muller applied for and received funding to develop a new temperature series. So this is their job. If I understand it correctly, at least one of his crew is even being paid to interface with blogs such as this.
I agree developing series such as this can be hard work, but part of quality control should be an ongoing comparison against other, long standing and more tested approaches. Oddly, they don’t report on the results of these quality control tests if they are done and you can see how they respond to reports of quality control issues such as the over-smoothing that I discussed above.
I do expect transparency in science, and part of that transparency, should be the public reporting of errors when they are found, even if you currently lack the resources to fix them (which I think is itself risible, if reports on the amount of funding Muller is receiving is correct).
I don’t expect it either. But I am a bit surprised as what seem to be constant attempts to blow people off that I’m seeing here. That is hard to not interpret as other than “not caring” that their product is producing erroneous results.
Tom Scharf, I would label ClimateProgress, as the name suggests, a climate policy oriented blog. You necessarily have to discuss climate science when advocating for a particular policy outcomes (as Joe Romm clearly does), but that by itself doesn’t make it a climate blog IMO.
Incidentally, Victor argued on his blog that WUWT wasn’t a “true” climate blog because it failed to meet some unspecified set of quality standards. (I would argue that quality standards define whether it’s a “good” versus a “bad” source for climate science, which is a different thing that whether it makes the cut as a “climate science blog”.)
Anyway if I were to try and construct a set of criteria, I’d look at what the usual standards for scientific discourse are. One of those would be an open exchange of information. Because a great many number of “mainstream climate blogs”, including RealClimate, which has a hideously bad and capriciously implemented comment moderation policy, would not qualify as “science blogs”. Mind you, I’m not arguing against moderation (which can help discussion advance), just that the standards for moderation need to be well defined and meet with main-stream science standards for public discourse.
“I can see that it is taking as much time as I imagined! I also thought at the time– and think now– that it is difficult to do a competent job and also ‘blog’ about all the issues.”
To give you an idea.
As you know we estimate the climate of an area rather simply
C = f(alt,lat)
Now, we know that the climate of an area is also effected by
1. the presence/absence of geography that allows for seasonaly dependent cold air drainage
2. Distance from a large body of water.
3. terrain aspect, and slope
4. land cover.
etc etc.
So when you only regress on two variables some “climate” is left in the residuals and the residuals get krigged. ie smeared.
trend in that weather field is diagnosed as climate change.
So the question is can you add some of those variables to the regression. Let’s take terrain aspect. A north facing aspect versus a south facing aspect.
So you download SRTM say 30 meter data for a few places to test whether adding this to the regression will improve the fit.
Go calculate how much data that is for the US, much less the world. And when you finish a few months of work, you find that you explain a tiny amount of variance, but your processing time balloons from a month on a super computer to months. And then imagine distruting that to folks.
Or imagine you want to look at ground cover? maybe 1km data.
But you dont have one consistent dataset.. you have to stitch together multiple datasets.. so you test with a small area and again find small improvements..meh
Or attack the cold drainage issue by doing DEM processing to find valleys? Anyone have any clue how intensive that process is?
just getting the data.
Or looking at surface emissitivity values. again, terabytes of data, huge problems of getting the data from satillite formats into geostat formats. You might find one study doing this for one small area of the globe, but doing it for the whole globe is just unfeasible. and then you only have it back to the early 80s.
So, you try all these things and you continue to try a variety of means, methods ,approaches to solve a problem that is academic.
I have 2 terabytes of failures. are there improvements? ya. you add more data you get marginal improvements.
Are they publishable on a monthly basis as a global product? not close. not even close.
Do I want to take the time to write up all the failures or marginal successes? Nope. Do I want to spend time discussing this with people who fundamentally have no practical or genuine interest in the problem? Nope. I have no use for people who want to have academic debates. Zero interest. I left academia. Instead, I spend my time with another researcher who wants to know if we can do a specialty product for region Y, or state X. Or doing comparisons with products developed at the national level.
As far as the debate on climate goes. Ya, its warmer than the LIA.
” If I understand it correctly, at least one of his crew is even being paid to interface with blogs such as this.”
actually, not.
Brandon, I don’t recall what eventually ticked off Anthony enough to “ban” you from WUWT. You had a guest post as recently as June 24, 2014 (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/24/the-disagreement-of-what-defines-consensus-by-cook-et-al-is-revealed-in-raters-remarks-and-it-sure-isnt-97/). I will make the observation that your argumentativeness tends to be excessive and that you want the last word. Maybe that was the irritant. Moderation is an art, not a science and I’m sure nowhere near 97% would agree on how to do it. My assertion isn’t that moderation at WUWT is evenhanded (how can it be with multiple mods?); it’s that it adheres pretty closely to its stated rules.
I find it baffling how Steven Mosher just makes things up to paint me in a negative light.
This is basically a repeat of what he said over a year ago (discussed here):
Where he claims I was merely “pretending” to have read BEST’s code. The reality is there are a lot of files in BEST’s code, and it would be easy for someone to miss something in it. It’d even be easy for someone to read all of the code and not remember everything about it, especially if he or she were looking into different issues at different times when examining the code.
On top of this, the Readme file given for the code tells the user there is no SVN access, saying:
When you specifically tell the user you intend to allow SVN access in the future, you shouldn’t be surprised if the user fails to realize you’ve already allowed SVN access. And yes, I’ll admit I didn’t try running the code for the dedicated installer BEST indicated wasn’t functional.
I think that’s understandable. Mosher apparently doesn’t. He apparently thinks I’m dishonest, pretending to do things and blah, blah, blah. I wouldn’t really care much, except he uses this tactic to say things like:
Now, I think if you are going to release SVN so you don’t get people “bugging others,” you probably need to not give misleading information about the SVN in your code’s documentation. Even BEST’s web access to the SVN had problems where you couldn’t access the code directory just guessing its URL (which was only fixed after I figured out what was going on and brought it to BEST’s attention).
But the more obnoxious part is he refers to me when he says “like reporting bugs in r.matlab to me when you know Im not the maintainer.” Only, that’s not what I did. What I said was:
That’s not reporting a bug in the R.matlab package. That’s asking a person who is involved with BEST, who I know uses R a lot, if he has been able to get certain BEST files to open in R. That’s perfectly reasonable. It turns out there was a bug with the package, but I couldn’t know that at the time. There could have been something wrong with the files I was trying to open. Heck, I could have been doing something wrong. Is it shocking someone might ask Mosher for help with using R code when he repeatedly encourages people to use it and even gives advice about how to use it at times?
Of course not. Mosher just misrepresents what happened, pretending I knew there was a bug in the code and simply brought it to him instead of the guy maintaining the code. The reality is nobody knew there was a bug until weeks later when the bug was found (and fixed). But by misrepresenting what actually happened, Mosher is able to paint critics of BEST in a negative light, throw his hands in the air and say, “Woe is me.”
And this is just hilarious:
The primary problem I’ve expressed with the lack of change documentation is I don’t have access to the previous versions. How could I have possibly known I would need to keep copies of them? It’s not like BEST said, “We’re going to remove a bunch of stuff in 30 days, make a copy if you want.” I had no way to know things would simply vanish.
And even if I did, there are tens of thousands of result files which have been changed. Is Mosher suggesting I “dont care” about this issue because I failed to scrape every one of those files off the BEST website before I could have possibly known those files were subject to unexpected changes?
It certainly seems that’s how he’s portraying me as unreasonable.
Brandon,
You gotta realize it’s really difficult to code with nail-holes in your hands. Have some sympathy. 😉
Carrick:
Yup. The temporal invariance assumption is the one I’ve focused on the most because it arises before Kriging is even used. The climate field removed by BEST possesses a particular correlation structure. The effect is they’re calculating multi-dimensional baselines. That’s interesting to me because of how many times baselines have been an issue in the global warming discussion. There are a lot of interesting parallels.
Oh, definitely. I can’t say what parts are responsible for how much of any effects, but the homogenization process is definitely over-smoothing the data. I suspect the breakpoint calculations alone do so to a not insignificant extent. The “empirical breakpoints” BEST finds often have no connection to any apparent physical cause for a breakpoint. They basically amount to nothing more than a way to force the data to agree better.
Speaking of, I have to wonder how much computational overhead is introduced by the many false positives in their breakpoint calculation. I know one thing I hate about trying to work with BEST’s code is my computer isn’t that great. It lets me do most of what I want outside of higher-end gaming, but it can’t handle programs which can suck up three GB or more of RAM.
Nathan –
“Ummm no, she puts misogynistic and crazy posts in a separate place.”
Unfortunately Sou defines Misogynistic as ‘Someone who tells me I’m wrong.’ and Crazy as ‘Someone who proves it.’
Nick –
“They are marked as missing in the raw file, and the estimates marked with an E in the final.”
It was my understanding that up to a quarter of them weren’t missing in the raw files, and that at the time there were questions as to whether they where station that were no longer included because of bad placement or some other issue. I don’t remember if that ever got cleared up.
The main issue though was that even though they might have been marked with an ‘E’ in the final product, there was no notice that much of the data was being estimated. When Steve Goddard first brought up the issue, almost everyone, Including Anthony, thought he was crazy.
At the time, this thing was all over the Climate Blogosphere, I think even several post here at the Blackboard, with some of the big name Skeptics coming out on both side, flipping sides, flipping BACK, and all kinds of crazy. Made for great lurking. 😉
j ferguson:
I’d have more sympathy if those holes weren’t drawn on with permanent marker. 😉
Sure. BEST basically says there is a component to the planet’s surface temperature which is unchanging. The poles are colder than the equator. Temperatures at higher altitudes are lower than temperatures at lower altitudes. So forth and so on.
Based on that, BEST calculates “climate fields” for each month of the year. These climate fields tell us how temperatures in various locations relate to one another. Suppose the Chicago area has a value X for the month of June. Looking at these calculated temperature fields, we might find Phoenix has a value of X + 10.
It’s the same idea as calculating baselines in normal time series. If we want to look at how temperatures change in various locations, we’ll often look at anomalies, not absolute temperatures. We do so by calculating a baseline value for each series and subtracting it from that series. That’s what climate fields are. They’re just calculated for areas instead of individual series. (Because they’re calculated for areas, information like altitude and latitude can be regressed against to get a more informative baseline.)
The simplest way of thinking about it is BEST uses a multi-dimensional baseline calculation to align its data to make it directly comparable. The problem is it still suffers from the problems of any baseline calculation. For instance, the choice of what period to calculate your baselines over is fairly arbitrary. That is problematic because the choice of baseline perio9d can have significant effects on your results. We’ve often seen on this site (such as when comparing model projections to observed temperatures) how the choice of baseline period can be used to increase the apparent explanatory power of results.*
Some of the work I did examining the BEST data suggests this has a not-insigificant effect. My impression is BEST’s temperature patterns show significantly greater similarity in (and around) the period they used for their baseline calculations than they do as one moves further from the baseline period. This post may provide some insight:
http://www.hi-izuru.org/wp_blog/2014/07/cooling-is-not-impossible/
But I haven’t examined the issue as closely as I’d like, and I don’t think I will in the near future. I’m currently trying to focus on outlining my Part II eBook on the hockey stick debate. I’m finding it a lot harder to lay things out for it than I did for Part I. That’s a problem because I have a self-imposed deadline of January 31st for getting the final product published.
*It should be noted changing correlation structures is also a problem for any calculations done after this step which assume constant correlation structures.
Both the Hottie and the Weasel bury comments that are polite but disagree with the proprietor. This goes to Carrick’s point about openness. The weasel is particularly omniscient about everything and has a big burrow
Gary,
“I will make the observation that your argumentativeness tends to be excessive and that you want the last word. ”
Humm… Brandon may want to argue that point. 😉
Hi Brandon,
Thank you so much for your help with this. I’ll read and then may want to ask some more questions. it does appear that a climate field is an expression of geographic geometry and physical parameters. I sense that this is necessary to get at the sorts of insights desired but suspect that the choices or system for field identification and characterization could overwhelm the information sought.
I don’t know enough to have understood what Nick was doing at his site, but the meshing as you would for FEA, looked very interesting.
SteveF:
I have no particular desire to get “the last word.” What I have is a poor ability to ignore problems, even small ones most people wouldn’t care about. It leads to me discussing details nobody cares about and extending conversations beyond the point people want them to go. Sometimes that may seem like wanting to get “the last word” simply because I’m not satisfied things have been resolved.
That said, I wasn’t banned at WUWT. What happened is I said Anthony Watts was wrong (in the same topic Nick Stokes refers to above). He disagreed with me. He got tired of the discussion. Instead of just leaving it, he decided to shut it down. That’s inappropriate. If a person doesn’t want to participate in a discussion, they don’t have to. They can let people talk even if they don’t agree with what those people say. Watts wasn’t willing to do that. Instead, he got petulant and decided to take advantage of his ability to censor people:
After which I wasn’t allowed to comment again (even though at least one other person was allowed to respond to me). Then Watts went on to misrepresent what had happened to justify his censorship and tell people I’m just an obnoxious, horrible person. You can get details in my post (and comments) here:
http://www.hi-izuru.org/wp_blog/2014/07/i-suppose-it-was-bound-to-happen/
But I really don’t see any point discussing them on this page. If people want to discuss them, I’d suggest doing so in comments on that post.
j ferguson:
Feel free to ask any questions you may come up with. This is a topic I’ve felt deserves more attention than it gets for some time now.
That’s been my concern, and it’s something I’ve long found baffling. One of the simplest ways to examine results when it comes to regressions/baseline calculations is to see what would have happened if different periods were used. That’s not an exhaustive test, but it’s a useful first step. I don’t know whether or not BEST has done anything like that. All I know is BEST has never discussed anything like that.
Well, actually I know a bit more. BEST also published results where they claimed to demonstrate the explanatory power of carbon dioxide by regressing the CO2 record and a volcanic series. They also used a solar record but found it didn’t help explain anything. It’s similar to what Tamino did in his F&R paper, just way simpler. The thing is when I looked into BEST’s results, I found they were fairly sensitive to the choice of baseline period. If they weren’t aware of that with their really simple regression, it’s hard for me to have much faith they’ve done extensive sensitivity testing of the more complicated calculations.
He’s definitely done some interesting work there. I haven’t given it as much attention as I should. There’s so many different things I’m interested in. I don’t have time for it all!
When Nick was “banned”, apparently it was done in a way that affected his ability to post on other blogs too:
Apparently this happened by reporting Nick as a spammer to WordPress.
If that (or anything similar) is actually true, not only is this an example of moderation that far exceeds the authority of Watts to institute, it’s an abuse of WordPress too.
I view it as unethical behavior to boot.
Brandon,
We’re well aware you don’t agree with or appear to like Mosher. Give the rest of us a break and save the bandwidth.
I agree. It possibly borders on being actionable as well. Whoever did it must know that it wasn’t true.
Stopped by and found this thread prototypical. Lucia starts by commenting on the silly connections diagram Judith first commented on. Comments start out speculating on possible ‘quality’ problems possibly inherent in the methodology. Segueways to the Hot Whopper whoppers and Venema’s tribal take. When the author of the survey shows up to comment, ignored. The echo chamber has devolved into WUWT QC critique, and CE moderation critique. (Both interesting and wholly off topic). Ends with Mosher defending BEST against yet more problems with the regional expectations presumption, this Willis buoy off San Fransisco. Same issue as BEST station 166900. Same defensive result.
The overall debate would make more progress with less attention to debate style points and more attention to substance great and small.
As for Lucia’s original comment, it is self evident from reading many blogs and scanning comments that there are various tribes. And that they prefer to converse amongst their own except when conducting verbal blog raids on other tribes. I am more interested in running the science to ground, and find that although guest posts at Judiths are helpful, the time and research care it takes mainly mean long days and months crafting appropriately referenced, logically internally consistent essays. More Steve Mcish, but less learned and more eclectic than a deep dive on paleoproxies. HNY, all.
DeWitt:
Undoubtably you could make a similar call, mutatis mutandis, to Steven Mosher.
I would say the documentation errors in the Readme.txt file are of interest to anybody interested in installing the BEST code.
I was aware that you could use SVN (I can’t remember how I figured it out, but possibly Mosher told me).
I wasn’t aware that the install script worked (their documentation explicitly states that it does not).
I am touchy about using install scripts even when they claim they are error free. Being criticized for not running what we were told is a broken script is more like having a bottle of fluid which is either gasoline additive or maple syrup, then being berated for not pouring it in our gas tank to see what happens.
Rud Istvan:
Meh. More appropriate to comment on her thread.
The original topic wasn’t related to Paige in any case, but to the over-interpretation of it given by e.g. Victor and the spectacle of Sou seeming to claim she doesn’t read WUWT.
But why we might be under an obligation to respond to Paige on this thread requires a bit of mind-bending.
I would say the threads on this blog are more like cats being herded, poorly, so calling this an “echo chamber” is a bit gratuitous on your part
As for the rest of your summary, I suspect we can either read, or if we can’t, your summary didn’t help.
Mosher writes “A) should we even care about the smoothing? If one is interested in smaller spatial scales, my current thinking is that the answer will be a function of the particular use of the data and the particular area.”
When JAXA changed their algorithms to do slightly better edge detection on the ice, their total result changed by about 10%. I’d call that a pretty significant change when the result was “less smooth”
Rud
I’ve been commenting at her blog. I’ve assumed that’s more convenient for her.
Lucia
“Ahh… but that’s not what you accused me of doing before. You accused me of poking fun at the authors of the diagram and HotWhopper.
The diagram itself has elements that are interesting and elements that are amusing. I did laugh at the element of the diagram that’s amusing. This is not the same as poking fun at its author.
FWIW: I’ve been conversing with the author herself at her blog. She also commented here. She does not seem upset at my observation about the lack of linkage; rather she seems pleased to have learned something about communications and linkages, and pleased her graph fostered additional discussion. http://www.scilogs.com/from_th…..ent-184065″
Oh God… And now we’re back at the meaning of ‘maybe’.
So you were poking fun at the ‘irony’.
Now you’re simply being a ‘moral coward’ as Carrick put it.
Carrick
What is it you are skeptical of in the figure? For someone claiming to be skeptical it seems you haven’t really described what your skepticism is.
Lucia
Also, there would be no appearance irony (actually you may need to define this as I am sure you will declare you meant ‘the other one’ ) had you actually understood how the diagram was created in the first place.
Carrick:
What happened isn’t really “reporting Nick as a spammer to WordPress.” What happens is WordPress.com hosts a lot of blogs, and it uses software known as Askimet which uses information from across all of them to determine what is and is not spam. The result is actions taken by one blog’s adminstrators can affect how WordPress interprets comments at other blogs. In the extreme, being moderated at one blog can result in you being flagged as a spammer. Even blogs which self-host can be affected if they use the Askimet plugin.
There’s nothing inherently unethical about banning a person. There’s also no way a blogger should expect banning a person at their site to affect his ability to comment at other sites. As such, I don’t think there is anything unethical about this. It’s just an unfortunate effect of people giving over control to centralized services like Askimet.
A key difference is I don’t go around referencing things about Mosher as a person to dismiss arguments. Heck, even when other people were talking about Mosher in this thread, I didn’t. Prior to him painting me in a negative light in this thread, the only time I even mentioned him was when I referenced a statement he made as a representative of BEST discussing BEST’s position on issues.
Steven Mosher chose to discuss me as a person without even trying to address the points I made. I responded, pointing out what he said was misleading and using that as a springboard to discuss a few other issues with the BEST product. I find it weird which part of the exchange DeWitt Payne takes issue with.
This is my favorite metaphor of the year. At least, so far 😛
Mosher writes “So the question is can you add some of those variables to the regression. Let’s take terrain aspect. A north facing aspect versus a south facing aspect.
So you download SRTM say 30 meter data for a few places to test whether adding this to the regression will improve the fit.”
How exactly does simply adding more detailed terrain improve the climatology when you dont have the actual climate data to go along with that? What exactly isn’t improving the result? Assumptions based on terrain?
Oh good, Rud’s here to tell us what is and is not on topic. Now we can skip all that silly ‘Communicating’ nonsense.
lucia:
I’d figure the same. I would have commented there myself except I don’t have much of anything to say about the study. I’m glad she corrected me about how people were recruited for the survey, and perhaps I should have acknowledged that. Otherwise though, I’ve said all I have to say on the matter.
I do regret diverting this topic’s discussion though. I had meant to suggest moving the exchanges to the last open thread, but I forgot all about it.
Nathan,
I understood then and understand now. The irony existed then and continues to exist now.
Lucia, good for you for having done so (comment on the diagram survey authors blog). The best way to enhance real understanding.
My post was not meant as a criticism of you or this excellent blog, rather as a riff on yhr majority of the blogosphere generally.
And, hey, I have taken my share of deserved knocks, having begged Judith to issue a deserved Holocene SLR errata to an otherwise good guest post ‘By Land or By Sea’. Neither I nor she caught the gross ( in context) single mistake; her denizens did in about 10 minutes. Bravo to them for finding and correcting my bad.
People, You are getting lost in the weeds. The problem here is the survey didn’t really produce anything that was meaningful. Venema seemed to use it though as a confirmation of his rather harsh judgmentalism about people he disagrees with. Venema further seems to have no problem with The Hot One who is perhaps the worst I’ve seen at disrespect, lack of science, and just plain meanness. Playground stuff but fun to expose the hypocrisy. The public debate on climate will only get better if there is public shaming of the worst offenders. Lucia has a role to play here. Nathan you seem completely oblivious to it.
Brandon,
Of course you do. That’s the point.
You might try composing your comments and then editing them down to about 1/4 to 1/2 the original length before submitting. Then I might actually bother to read rather than skim them.
David Young –
I don’t know that I’d go that far. I thought that, overall, it did provide a basic idea of how the science blogosphere connects together, and the different ‘neighborhoods’ it is associated into. It just isn’t a complete picture, as it leaves out a lot of connection. Both as Lucia brought up about Hotwhopper and others not listing WUWT, and in general because each voter only got three picks.
If been considering that a fuller picture would probably be had if, instead of the pick three from those who read Paige’s Twitter or heard about it some other way, a similar thing was produced from the Blog Rolls of science blogs. It would be especially interesting if the connections could show the direction of each link. Of course, this still wouldn’t show a link between WUWT and Hotwhopper, as nether lists the other in their Blog Roll. 🙂 WUWT does list Realclimate though, where RC does NOT list WUWT. Directional connections needed, definitely.
Actually does anyone know what program Paige used, or one that can do something similar? I might like to try my hand at something like that.
What you’d probably need for a truly accurate view of how the blogosphere connects is a track of who links to who. Even then you’ll get false disconnects since, as was mentioned above, many on the Consensus side don’t actually link to the other side when discussing their articles. Sou’s latest rant about WUWT contained a full dozen links to Archived version of WUWT pages, but not one to WUWT itself. >_<
Personally, I'm still undecided as to whether this is because they don't want to send the other side traffic, are trying to limit Google link count in some way, or are just afraid their opponent will rewrite the article so it no longer has whatever thing they are ridiculing as they do with their own mistakes.
David Young,
I’ve been thinking about your comment since I read it. Pleasant as I think it’d be to improve the level of civility and general manners in the discussion, I’ve sadly got to report that I don’t believe this would work. I just imagine what the crew over at ATTP would make of the whole idea. Honestly, I think they’d laugh in your face. The likes of Steve Bloom or Hot Whopper Sou aren’t ashamed of doing these things, these are merely tactics to be used to accomplish objectives, manipulating and shaping opinions, and discouraging behavior they want discouraged. I think they explicitly believe this. If Eli hops on by I’d welcome his input on my perspective here, I can’t find the link but I seem to recall a comment of his over there boasting on how long he’s understood the value of ridicule online or some such related sentiment. Makes me think he’d understand well what I’m talking about.
Thanks for your comment. It was thought provoking. [edit, deleted smiley. I smiley too darn much.]
The link to the comment and discussion I mentioned.
Steve Bloom’s take.
Here is Rachel the moderator explaining the subtle distinctions in different tactics. Standard training for a Happiness Engineer? [edit, my answer, I doubt it.] What are they teaching kids these days…
OT, Break of Reality playing Lateralus. Gosh that’s gorgeous.
Helps keep me sane.
Mark Bofill – Ridicule can only be truly effective when you respect the opinion of the one ridiculing you. It might annoy people at WUWT when Sou writes one of her articles, but since most on the skeptic and lukewarmer side (and probably half the Consensus side, though they’ed never admit it) knows she usually doesn’t know what she’s talking about, it will never change anyone’s opinion.
Schitzree,
Sure. I don’t believe such games ultimately matter. My point was merely that nobody should kid themselves about shaming anybody into better behavior; people behave badly because they choose to, because they think it’s effective, regardless of whether or not it actually is effective.
Paige would probably be happy to give you additional details.
The archiving and posting links to the archive is peculiar. I did some googling and found that it’s being done by others in other contexts.
A guy at “motherboard” speculates about copyright issues surrounding the practice or archiving a post and then linking to the archive. He discussed the possibility the practice might not square with US copyright law. Although, it all might depend on motive for the archiving. In any case, I can’t imagine WUWT pursuing anyone. But the copyright aspects might be an interesting “angels dancing on heads of pins” issue. Also, if there is a copyright issue, WUWT might be able to DMCA to google/blogger and force her to stop doing that. Dunno really though.
My blog tends to repell attempts to archive because I block most ‘servers’– since generally, server based things aren’t people. Anyway, it appears someone at 58.96.68.97 tried to archive but the blog detected the IP of the server and blocked it. ( see https://archive.today/15g31#selection-41.49-41.60 for the block. Look at the ‘image’ to see the other IP.)
I also don’t know the motive. I’m also not sure what it accomplishes.
I wouldn’t be 100% sure how Google counts these links. Only people at Google really know. https://archive.today/robots.txt doesn’t block crawlers. So, presumably, the Google bot could wander over too https://archive.today/wattsupwiththat.com, find all the links and count them just as easily as if they appeared at HotWhopper. All in all, the Google link count could be a wash.
Also: WUWT inline ads show at archive.today, so the practice probably doesn’t affect ad-revenue. I guess it could affect the WUWT Alexa count– but views of WUWT from HotWhopper are probably a drop in the bucket compared to views over all. So… not sure the practice accomplishes anything. But. Oh. Well. If Sou wants to do it, it’s nothing to me! (Well… ok. I find someone doing something like that sort of amusing… but… the world is funny. Just one more thing to chuckle at! )
Mark Bofill,
Of course the part that makes Eli’s comment strategy work so unexpectedly (from Eli’s pov) is that his attempts at ridicule are so poor.
As to the links to the ATTP posts…..wow. Just wow: “dynamic thoughtless fossils” comes to mind. One would expect that little thought to be associated with non-animate objects.
Thanks for the amazing link. “Tool” is really impressive. What a great refreshing sound.
‘Tool’ did the original. ‘Break of Reality’ is a cello group that did a cover of it. I like the cello version much better, myself. 🙂
Thanks though.
Shaming or mocking people on blogs isn’t going to change their behavior or views. It’s rarely a very good way to do much of anything other than preach to a choir.
It’s true that I’m poking some fun at Victor Venema in this post– but that’s not the main point of this post. He’d floated around a notion that was wrong– which is that this graph somehow shows WUWT and some other blogs are “isolated” from “discussion”. The authors graph made no such claim– and seems to believe it can’t be used to show any such thing. But beyond that, it’s obvious methods of link counting or author interviews etc can’t detect linkages or communication if a group of people (e.g. Victors and Sous) go to great lengths to ‘conceal’ the degree to which they are influenced by another group of people (e.g. WUWT.)
“Link counting” won’t work unless the researcher knows to trace links at “archive.today” to the blog that was archived. Interviewing won’t work if the people interviewed want to think up reasons to not show connections.
FWIW: Based on what Paige says, the things she wants to study may turn out to be rather robust to these flaws– because she isn’t really trying to determine “linkages” for the purpose of discovering who is “connected to science” nor not, but rather detect norms that might be developing in communication patterns. Things like moderation practices, use of blog rolls, formatting choices and so on. What she already has may be fine for that.
Lucia, yeah I understood. I didn’t imagine you were thinking to change anybody’s behavior with your post. 🙂 I talk about things that strike me as silly or absurd too, mostly because they’re fun and interesting to talk about.
Night all.
Mark Bofill
No. I didn’t think you were accusing me of trying to do so.
That’s a perfectly good reason to discuss something.
Mark,
thanks for the gentle correction. In the context of this post, that is much appreciated, lol. I realized my mistake..after the editing option had run out. “Break of Reality” is a truly good sound. They have reinvented the cello rather nicely.
Here is a local band that somehow evokes something similar to “break”, at least as far as my ears hear it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzTUSTRAE2c
DeWitt Payne:
Of course. I might shorten my comments even further, packing them with nothing but snide remarks and insults which provide no detail or evidence people can verify, remaining eternally cryptic about everything save one single, vital detail, how much better I am than everyone else.
I might unashamedly jump into conversations with nothing to contribute but petulant remarks about people who are contributing to tell them how they ought to contribute while refusing to even say what I actually think.
I might adopt an anthropomorphic persona and refer to myself in the third person to disguise my poor reasoning skills with an appearance of insanity.
I might write all my comments in iambic pentameter punctuated only with emoticons.
I might be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.
But I think not. I think what I’ll do is what I’ve always done: Speak as plainly as I can the thoughts I have while trying to understand those who would do the same.
Schitzree:
I think that’s a good point. But it’s hard to respect people who don’t respect you, and ridicule is mainly used as a vehicle to convey a lack of respect.
Similarly, the other big tool used by the climate change activists—confrontation—mainly has a value in dividing and then subdividing people into progressively smaller groups.
Pesky rabbits not withstanding, we must have some hope that rational discussion is possible. Maybe not on blogs, but at least in science generally. I have had some success in this arena by being right. It makes a difference.
Mark, thanks for the link to the Break of Reality cover. Quite nice.
If you like Cello covers, a cello group I really like is the Finnish group Apocalyptica (originally a Metallica tribute band). Here’s one of my favorites among their covers:
Nothing Else Matters.
Just out of curiosity, and apropos of nothing, did anyone else look up the NOT EXACTLY ROCKET SCIENCE blog for the first time this week? 😉
I’d seen it before. Ed Yong tweets. His blog is very popular…. but I’m not that interested in the stuff he blogs about. I do like a number of non-climate change science blogs. For example, I like this guy: http://www.unz.com/author/razib-khan/ .
For what it’s worth, shaming is a useful tactic when you can use it to convince people to agree with you. It is almost always not about shaming the person themselves. It’s about making the person a target of shame by others so those others will move further from him or her (and generally closer to you). Shame is a powerful tool used to discourage behavior by causing that behavior to lead to undesirable results.
Shaming tactics are a fundamental part of human society, and people use them because they can work very well. The problem with them is they’re divisive and polarizing. They prevent bridge-building, and using them creates the risk of dividing people up in ways you won’t like.
Personally, I think shame is a good thing. I think people should express scorn or disdain for bad behavior to show they consider it shameful. I think that would improve things. I also think it generally won’t happen because a lot of people like that bad behavior is tolerated.
Carrick, if it’s the group I’m thinking of, I love Apocalyptica’s Hope.
Brandon Shollenburger – <_<
iambic pentameter? Is that what Fan’s doing? I don’t actually remember enough from English Lit to recognize iambic pentameter.
Carrick –
Hard, yes. But not Impossible. And any time you’re dealing with Celebrity (even the minor celebrity of a blog writer) you’ll find people who are respected more then they might respect back, if only because you know them better then they know you.
As an example, If Lucia respond to something I posted here with “Are you kidding? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard all day.” I would of course be devastated. 🙁
🙁 🙁 🙁 There may even be tears 🙁 🙁 🙁
Brandon,
In some circumstances, shaming might “work” in some sense.
But I think trying to “shame” people using blog discussions almost never causes the object of the shaming to change their behavior.
The mistake some people make is thinking “If I shame ‘joe’ then ‘joe’ will change’. This can work in special circumstances. But at blogs, discussion forums, list serves? Not so much.
Schitzree:
Nope. I just wanted to use the Hamlet reference for absurdity, and it needed a bridge. The previous lines each referenced a specific person. The last line referenced Hamlet. I thought a line mixing both types of references was appropriate.
On a different topic, shouldn’t that have been a ú?
lucia:
I largely agree in the limited sense of your second paragraph (that the person won’t start behaving better). I think there are a lot of other ways people’s behavior may change though. The most obvious example is a person might go away. There are other effects it can have though. Other people observing such shaming may wish to avoid receiving the same and thus behave differently. The person being shamed may become more prone to hostile or belligerent remarks rather than substantive comments. That will often reduce their ability to convey their ideas and diminish them in other people’s eyes.
A while back a guy in a bar I was at kept making a bunch of vile, racist remarks. People ignored him. He kept doing it. The comments only stopped when people started treating him with disdain. That’s when he shut up (and left not long after). I don’t think he stopped being racist. I do, however, think nobody else in the bar was going to make racist remarks.
That’s the sort of use for shaming I have in mind.
Brandon Shollenbúrger – I’m not sure how to type that. I can, however, Copy it. 😉
Carrick – Love Apocalyptica! thanks for the link.
As for the ridicule and shamming issue, I think it’s safe to say most of it’s done for the benefit of the peanut gallery.
And to expand on my own shamming, If Judith said what I’d written above, I’d probably crawl into a hole for a few days, internet wise. If Anthony said it, I’d be pissed and want to argue it. If Sou said it, I’d shake my head and ignore her ranting. If Joshua said it, I’d laugh and reply “well, you’re the expert on Stupidity.”
I disagree to some extent. i think responsible people sometimes change their behavior. I personally believe that this happened to Gavin Schmidt whose early activism and defense of Mann resulted in sufficient embarrassment that he changed his behavior and hews more closely to science. I suspect Venema is concerned about his blogging mistake concerning the blog map. You can see some backtracking. Will it result in a permanent change? Hard to tell. There is real change and sometimes people do really win arguments.
I agree the Blooming id***t contingent so well represented at ATTP will never change or admit anything. Some people are just fundamentally dishonest. The hope is they are a minority.
Lucia – Thanks for the link to The Unz Review. Lots of different topics. I’ll be reading them for a few days, I can tell.
Bandoon Scholanb̼rgger РFirst, the good news. The Easily Amused are also usually the first to lose interest. Just as well, the only thing I had left was Brandon Cheeseburger. Then it was just all downhill towards outhouse humor. Best to quit before Lucia is forced to make me cry.
Second, what threw me about the Fan/iambic pentameter thing was that he writes so oddly. There’s a strange rhythm and pacing to it, and I doubt I’d recognize iambic pentameter without the addition of Shakespearean English.
Actually, if someone DID write all their posts in iambic pentameter I’d probably be pretty impressed, even if they didn’t have anything more worth saying then Fan. But then, as I said. Easily. Amused.
Brandon, did you mean Hope Vol 2?
There’s also a “Hope” by Apocalyptica, but personally I like this one better.
What does cover mean in connection with music?
Steven Mosher (Comment #133923)
“As you know we estimate the climate of an area rather simply
C = f(alt,lat) Now, we know that the climate of an area is also effected by etc etc.
So the question is can you add some of those variables to the regression. Let’s take terrain aspect. A north facing aspect versus a south facing aspect.
And when you finish a few months of work, you find that you explain a tiny amount of variance, but your processing time balloons from a month on a super computer to months.
Or looking at surface emissivity values. again, terabytes of data, huge problems of getting the data from satellite formats into geostat formats. ”
2 comments to help Steven
You are describing the “Coastline Paradox” which has stumped minds as good as yours. [Lewis Richardson and Benoit Mandelbrot]
The better scale you use to estimate the climate the longer to infinity it takes to do so.
Knowing that you know this but to use it as an excuse to hide the accuracy of current measures of the climate makes your reply too cute.Basically you should pick a method of estimating the average climate that most people would be happy using, yell it from the rooftops when you use estimates rather than real data and tell everyone not as clever as you and Zeke and the readers here that it is an estimate and not the “real” exact data. Most of us are grown up enough to cope with this and if it leads to uncertainty, so be it. You have done your job, not been an advocate.
Mark Bofill,
You made a couple of interesting comments about ridicule. I have wondered about that subject from time to time, and recognize that I am myself guilty of ridiculing certain people.
But it seems to me that there are two distinct motivations for ridicule on climate blogs: there is ridicule for refusing to accept factuality reality (Tamino and ‘there is no pause’, skydragon slayers and radiative heat transfer, Stefan Rahmstorf and ‘2 meters rise by 2100’, and many more). The ridicule here usually comes after people have pointed out the factual error, but factual reality is simply not accepted. The other motivation is political, and blogs like ATTP are filled with ridicule which is mainly politically motivated. I note that ATTP commenters rarely if ever discuss the technical details, and all accept as received wisdom that alarm is absolutely justified, that personal wealth should be both limited and more evenly distributed, and that fossil fuel use must end ASAP. Politically motivated ridicule is just a mean to an end, a tool to advance a political philosophy; it is orthogonal to factual reality.
Steven Mosher (Comment #133919)
“Forestry guys like Prism because it is a really fine resolution and they need 1km or finer, plus it has precipitation fields.They accept the local quirkiness of 1km of land warming rapidly while the block next door cools”.
Quirkiness [1 km variety]
Um, It’s called rain.
Sometimes cloud.
Of course it could be called altitude, as in a hill or mountain
Climate guys look at it and know its unphysical.
sorry, they do, see above.
GISS, CRU, NCDC, Nick Stokes, RomanM, BEST. Cowtan and Way.
None of these products is designed to get state correct, or county correct.
sorry to see RomanM in there, your opinion is usually spot on. Good to see you say that all these wonder systems are not reliable. or rather, not correct.
Perhaps if they factored in rain clouds and altitude just a little bit more they would improve for all us forestry guys out here.
Steven Mosher (Comment #133915)
“I don’t stick around because there isn’t a single one of you who makes a positive contribution to the issue.”
We try, we may not succeed.
Prefer to have you around giving your usually positive contributions to the issue.
“Generally, the only people who have a real scientific interest in the smoothing question, are actually working on the problem. not blogging”.
Do not smooth away until there is nothing left, I for one am happy to have the raw unsmoothed estimates as well as well explained smoothing attempts.
Schitzree (#133972)- Yes, that was the first time I had looked at “Not Rocket Science.” I liked this article on eukaryotic origins. That’s the sort of overview article on a topic where I have little background, which attracted me to Scientific American back in high school. [Back in the days of clay tablets and Linear A.] I like having broad knowledge, even where it’s shallow…and sometimes it stimulates learning to a greater depth.
Lucia (#133973) – Thanks for the link to unz. Interesting columnists there. I liked this post.
Wow Carrick, thank you! I hadn’t run across them. Now I’ve gotta find something for you for Christmas next year. 🙂
J ferguson, it’s just a term for a group doing their own version of somebody else’s original work. cover version.
David, I think it depends to some extent what people are open to in the first place. I’ve started and rejected a couple of responses, so I guess that means I’m not done figuring out what I think about this yet. 🙂 Maybe it matters if somebody comes open to learn as opposed to coming to attempt to impose their view. Or maybe this misses the boat entirely, I’m not sure yet.
HaroldW,
I spent 35 years attempting architecture. An architect often is someone who knows next to nothing about almost everything.
My toe-stub on the road to Damascus was the realization that the sign of “next to nothing” wasn’t always positive. Blogs did that.
SteveF,
I like your distinction. I’ll chew on it some.
I don’t think I’d go so far as to suggest ridicule is always … what.. improper or something to be avoided or whatever, I don’t know what exactly. I mean, sometimes it’s a natural reaction. I myself ridiculed Nathan up here, and told him to piss off. In keeping with my original point, surprise surprise, it didn’t work, he didn’t go away. But I don’t think I was consciously exercising a device or tactic (I don’t really remember), I was just irritated and expressing it.
Thanks Steve.
Nathan,
This blog reports the graph shows no connection between WUWT and that Hotwhopper comments on WUWT all the time. I don’t consider that a “criticism” of HotWhopper. If consider reporting these to things together is a “criticism”, well… all rightie then.
Brandon
But “guy in a bar” is not “a blog”. The ‘meat’ world has an element of physical danger. Also, often people can’t be remotely anonymous. And so on.
It is true that people will leave bars and blog comments if they don’t get what they want out of them. But “shaming” isn’t unique in that. Merely not finding a ally who agrees will result in someone leaving. After leaving they may also “grumble” about treatment or the ‘denizens’ of the blog/bar the left– possibly grousing the ‘denizens’ had some ‘lack’ that prevented them from grasping the true genius of the guy who left (or his splendiferous arguments.) But this ‘not finding ally’ may have been just as –or even more– important than any “shaming” in the bar as it often is in blog comments. One really can’t tell.
Oh– Nathan, BTW: I did criticize Sou of HotWhoppers claim she “demolishes” WUWT, but I did that elsewhere. Specifically in comments at Paige Jarreau’s. Whatever Sou does, she does not succeed in demolishing WUWT itself and rarely makes even a dent in their arguments. The reason why she fails is discussed above in comments — not the post. So, no the purpose of the post was not to write that, just as it’s purpose was not to “lure” Nathan here so I could have a discussion with you which also happens in comments above.
j ferguson
I think in pop music, it means singing a song someone else wrote which was previously made popular by some other performer. But I might be mistaken.
Mark,
That never works for mythical creatures that live under bridges but somehow have internet access and post on blogs, not that I’m accusing Nathan specifically of living under a bridge. Any response only encourages them. Like the guy in the bar mentioned above, ignore them and they usually go away. The killfile in USENET was invented for just that purpose. If you don’t see the comment in the first place, you won’t be tempted to respond.
I see the plus sign in the Name field has gone away.
SteveF,
On ‘ridicule’ and ‘SkyDragons’, I think it’s important to distinguish criticism from ridicule. When I commented on who-zi-whats-it’s chapter int that Sky Dragon book for mistaking the conservation of momentum for the 2nd law of thermodynamics, that was criticism of his mistakes. On the other hand, people saying “oh… that’s just skydragonny’ are either resorting to borderline or full ridicule.
The other issue (more relevant to Nathan’s strange conflations of things with that which they are not) is that merely describing what someone did is not ‘criticism’. This “witnessing” or “testimony” doesn’t become ‘criticism’ even if the thing someone did is ridiculous. That people reading what the listeners might conclude the person who did these things is either wrong or ridiculous still doesn’t make the ‘witnessing’ or ‘testimony’ criticism.
So, with respect to my post: HotWhopper did certain things. I happened to report some things that happened. Some people think HotWhopper should have behaved differently. Others (like Nathan) don’t. Others don’t judge HotWhoppers as having done anything “right” or “wrong”; (I happen to be in that camp.)
So my post was not “criticism” or ridicule of “HotWhopper”. My position is merely that given what we know, the graphic cannot be interpreted to communicate the idea Victor suggested. And moreover, Victor should perfectly well have known it doesn’t communicate what he claimed it communicated in his blog. To the extent that I am saying Victor is not only making a mistake in interpretation and advising others to make the similar mistake but that he easily has access to knowledge that demonstrates his interpretation is nutso I am criticizing Victor. Because I do think that’s rather boneheaded on his part, and, moreover, he is, evidently, a scientist.
Hunter,
:> Must be nice to live in a place with decent local music! Thanks. I mysteriously find myself craving a good rum as I listen to it. 😉
Schitzree, I think any writing can be read as iambics, but how you’ll say the words will sound weird if it isn’t written well. Basically, you want to stress every other syllable when using iambics. The pentameter part can’t be forced into all writing as it fixes every “line” at (sort of) ten syllables. The parenthetical in that last sentence is because all the rules of iambic pentameter are flexible, and I don’t know just what variations are allowed. I just know it seems there are a never-ending series of exceptions.
Carrick, you’re probably right. I heard it in a video I saw, and I doubt I’d remember if it said v2. I’d check myself but my internet connection is being wonky and so I can’t look up music right now.
lucia, like most things in life, there are often many factors involved. In the example I mentioned, the guy was at the bar for several hours. People talked to him in-between his racist tirades about other things. I suspect if they hadn’t done that, he’d have left sooner. When I asked a couple why they did, they said they were trying to be “polite.” I don’t know that that was “polite” of them, but I do think they shouldn’t have done it. I think once a person starts behaving like he did, nobody should talk to them unless it’s to say something like, “We don’t want that kind of behavior here” or “Go away.”
DeWitt Payne, I’m all for ignoring people. I think one of the most effective ways of shaming people is to shun them, the primary factor of which can be ignoring them. I don’t think simply ignoring people is a catch-all solution as it can mean letting them do “whatever they want.”
On the topic of covers, I just listened to Paul Anka sing My Way, a song popularized by Frank Sinatra. My question is this: Does it count as a cover when Paul Anka is the one who wrote the song in the first place? He didn’t just write the lyrics. He also did the music (though it was derived from another song’s music).
Hi Lucia,
Cover was new to me, but the idea that another artist might do better with a song than the composer isn’t new. Hoagy Carmichel wrote Stardust with a fairly peppy meter. It didn’t fly that way. Someone tried it slower and it became the standard of standards.
Another example is American in Paris. there is a 1927 recording out there of Gershwin himself with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra which to my taste is terrible – too ricky-ticky. Much prefer Oscar Levant’s version.
What’ll I do? (gasp, a rhetorical question?) has been recorded many times. it was originally German, written in the twenties. you can find them on Jazz-On-Line.com for free – legal too. This was the background music in a recent Gatsby movie and is one of my favorite songs – Nat King Cole version (~1945) especially nice. If you download all of them and then cue them up in sequence it isn’t too hard to see which performance works the best.
In fact, something that i like to do with my fairly vast collection of Swing and pre-1960 MP3 jazz is to cue up all of the Rosettas, or Mood Indigos, Sweet Loraines, for examples, and listen to them while doing something else. a few are inspired but most not. Some bands could be great on one thing and another just a hack-job.
This can be done with classical, too, but easier on the web. There are a couple of Arias in Handel’s Julius Caesar which are stunning, especially if you like French Horns. Again, there are good ones and not so good ones out there, but in this case it isn’t always the quality of the performance, but more the depth of the recording. Same with Mozart’s Requiem – Tuba Miram – Bass Trombone, not Tuba by the way.
More recently, Wimboweh did much better by a “cover” group than it had done earlier – only mellow soprano sax track ever made.
And HaroldW, maybe my next to nothing in this area is positive, not negative.
Luica,
“On ‘ridicule’ and ‘SkyDragons’, I think it’s important to distinguish criticism from ridicule.”
.
Sure, and there is nothing wrong with criticism; criticism can be, and ideally is, constructive. Ridicule, not so much. Resorting to ridicule usually means that you have accepted it is not possible to resolve a disagreement via discussion, clarification, or compromise, and that the other person can’t possibly be convinced of the validity of your argument. Disagreements on issues which are partially or wholly non-factual (religion and politics immediately come to mind) very often lead to ridicule… or worse. It is mainly a political difference of opinion about priorities, goals, and values that makes a consensus on global warming and energy policy so difficult to reach… outside the voting booth that is.
Brandon,
Wikipedia writes this
That would suggest the composer recording after someone else is not a “cover”. The first recorded commercially released is not a “cover”. But someone other than the composer recording something previously released is making a “cover” version. I don’t think this implies better or worse, it’s just descriptive.
Generally really good songs do get covered eventually. Not everyone agrees on what is “good”, but I would suggest that any song that hits the top of the charts recorded by different artists has some element of “good”. Either it’s a good example of a genre, or the tune and lyrics are flexible and capable of spanning genres– which is even better. Remember Switched on Bach? “A Fifth of Beethoven”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh5Edqx7zx4
Some classics people loved these; some hated them. But the fact is: if something is good, it gets covered!
J. Ferguson — Interestingly, Mark Steyn had a great column on “Wimoweh/The Lion Sleeps Tonight” a while ago. The real original was “Mbube” by Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds…which I found on YouTube after reading the column….but even the Weavers’ version is, to my mind, no patch on the Tokens’.
Mrs. W. introduced me to the world of bossanova covers. My all time favorite: Astrud Gilberto’s take on “Light My Fire.” The worst: Someone actually tried a sleepy bossanova take on “Kung Fu Fighting.”
(What I’d love to hear is a bossanova cover of “Still Alive” from Portal, but that may never happen.)
SteveF, one thing I failed to do before is distinguish between is criticizing/ridiculing a person and criticizing/ridiculing their behavior. It’s a distinction I usually try to make. I generally don’t like talking about people. I almost always try to focus my comments on their behavior. After all, I don’t know how representative my experiences with a person are of them as a whole.
I agree if we’re limiting this claim to the use of ridicule alone. I disagree if you mean it in general. Ridicule can be appropriately used along with criticism. There is no reason a person shouldn’t be able to respond when you say, “This argument is stupid because of X, Y and Z” just because you called their argument stupid. We see that all the time here.
lucia, I wonder if the author of that statement said “artist or composer” to recognize people are called different things depending on style of music, or if it was because they were trying to say there could be both an artist and composer for one piece. The way you read it is how I would read it, but it could be read both ways, and I could see why one would hold to either standard.
I’m not sure there are actually fixed guidelines about what is and is not a cover. A lot of “covers” I’ve heard make changes to the lyrics. How much can you change the song before it stops being a “cover”? As an example, Hugo’s 99 Problems (great song) takes the two lines for its chorus from another song with the same name by Jay-Z, but otherwise, the two songs are very different. Hugo’s song is still listed as a cover of Jay-Z’s.
To make things more confusing, Jay-Z derived most of that chorus from a song by the same name by Ice-T. I’ve never seen Jay-Z’s version listed as a cover. I don’t know how people are drawing the line.
Just a couple more things on shaming.
1. Persistent argumentation did get Lew’s conspiracy ideation paper retracted. Some weren’t happy about it, but the record stands for future generations.
2. Lucia, I believe you have come close to criticizing HW. There is certainly a lot to criticize as it seems to me to be among the worst example of the politicization of science and is a great way to tell if people in this debate are worth listening to at all. If comment approvingly there, they are not worth your time.
David Young
I’m willing to agree with you. And I agree HotWhopper is worthy of that criticism. Certainly, it does little to clarify any scientific argument. It appears to spend a lot of time mis-stating other peoples arguments and then rebutting the mistatements and sometimes even failing to rebutt the mis-stated argument. The latter often happens when Sou just wallows in snark, which while fun is not a rebuttal. In my mind this sort of blogging is worthy of negative criticism. If HotWhopper or it’s fans think otherwise, so be it.
With respect to denying criticizing HotWhopper– I”m not claiming I’ve never criticized that blog, that I would not, nor have I suggested there would be anything wrong with criticizing it. I am simply observing that I did not advance criticism in the current blog post (though I do in comments and elsewhere.) Advancing that criticism was certainly not “the point” of this blog post.
I took the survey.
As a declared author of Watts Up With That
I wonder if my data was used
(I also, I think listed myself as unsettledclimate blog)
I also introduced myself to Paige on her blog, and pointed her to Amelia Sharman’s blog research and Dr Warren Pearce’s twitter research connections..
Guess my survey input not included?
I used to read Hotwhopper regularly, as it was providing specific counterpoints to many WUWT articles, and I like to hear both sides of an argument. That’s something you don’t get at many individual blogs. After I while though I realized that Sou was foundering on the same rocks that many on the Consensus side do, the idea that pointing out the Argument used by a skeptic disagreed with Consensus opinion was itself a Debunking. So if someone wrote a paper that figured the effect of a doubling of CO2 as an increase of 0.8C, She’d just point out that the IPCC says 1.5C to 4.5C with 3C as the best guess, so you’re wrong. No attempt at figuring out WHY the paper got that figure, or how it was wrong. It just was. “Read some Science”.
Of course, pointing that out to her never does any good. If you’re new, she just SNIP’s your comment and bans you, with at most a note that your comment was trolling or ‘misogynistic’. (which I’ve always found hilarious from someone who tries to hide who and what she is) But even her regulars usually just get ignored or are given a weak excuse.
So, am I ‘criticizing’ Sou, or ‘ridiculing’ her, or what?
I’m certainly critical of her style, and how she claims she’s demolished Skeptical arguments when she’s not even come close. And I have ridiculed her in this very thread, and I’ll even admit not for the ‘good’ reasons. It feels good to point out the failing of an ‘opponent’ or member of the other side among friends and peers. Feels like…Victory 😉
The thing is, I’ve already tried to engage her and correct her mistakes, or at least work out what she is trying to say. It seems Lucia has as well. But Sou won’t tolerate any correction of herself. Not even from her followers, much less someone she can declare is a ‘Denier’. And she can apparently declare almost anyone a Denier.
@ Schitzree (Comment #134047)
You said:
“After I while though I realized that Sou was foundering on the same rocks that many on the Consensus side do, the idea that pointing out the Argument used by a skeptic disagreed with Consensus opinion was itself a Debunking.”
That is a very good summary of the true believer’s fallacy.
At least daily? I’d guess Miriam obsesses over Anthony Watts at least every minute of the day.
I’m sure HotWhopper has plenty of Ghostwriters (Stokes is one of them) and most arent even her own words.
lol, Hoi, why do you think Nick ghostwrites for Sou?
Actually don’t answer that. This has really devolved into one of the silliest threads ever for this blog.
Only for 97% sure, Carrick ;). Still this thread is well elevated above most of Ms Whoppers own blog.
Seriously, I believe HW is mostly ghostwrited on the technical part, same as the Desmog and SS sites.
The hate part is entirly Ms Whoppers business.
OK, I admit I only made it about 24 hours… This addiction is probably worse than heroin. Just lurking 🙂
Daniel not Dennis.
sue,
Heh. Note above someone discusses ATTP’s announcements that he’s going to quit.
I suspect ATTP’s threats to quit blogging reflect frustration, because he is unable to understand how anyone could fundamentally disagree with his beliefs, values, judgement, etc. This inability is by no means uncommon across the political spectrum, but is virtually always found in people who hold rather extreme views, left or right (or green!). It is a blind spot common to the self-unaware and true believers of all stripes. This is no coincidence: true believers are generally self-unaware.
SteveF,
I thought that was mostly just drama. He puts on a good show for his people, keeps them interested and entertained. Oh, I’m sure he gets frustrated too, and was probably genuinely irritated at Don Monfort / Bishop Hill around that time.
ON a different note, speaking of Don Monfort, is it just me or does Judith Curry’s new moderation policy primarily consist of snipping everything Monfort posts? 🙂 Seems that way recently.
Since part of the discussion here has related to temperature data sets I was wondering whether anyone here has any recent information on the status of the major effort to benchmark (compare the results of various algorithms used for adjusting temperatures by applying the algorithms to a simulated and realistic climate world where the truth about non climate changes is known) these data sets. What I read initially about the effort was encouraging and appeared focused on many different aspects of measuring the skill of getting the local, regional and global temperature changes correct.
The one aspect that I thought was important of benchmarking would be to use at least one world where non climate temperature changes were introduced that could be realistic but known to be most difficult for algorithms to find and adjust.
@Lucia:
I’ve especially enjoyed bits of this thread where various denizens have posted up links to “OT other things of interest to me”. Perhaps you might consider opening a thread for people to post suggested reading/listening/chilling kind of things for the others here?
On the same subject but more generally: I was wondering if someone could suggest a sight that made suggestions about “other topics of interest” based upon browsing history. Something along the lines of Amazon’s “customers who bought this also looked at…” I know when I’m exploring the web I frequently fail to discover things of great interest (to me) that I simply didn’t know enough to ask about or search for properly and such an automated recommendation thingy would seem simple enough to implement with a graph database.
schnoerkelman
Well…. someone with access to google, facebook etc. data collected at a huge number of sites with google, facebook etc. data that had not been deanonymized could create such a thing. Then they would need to admit they obtained all this not-deanonymized data from those sources, created a tool, identified you and take all the flak from the privacy advocates.
Amazon can do it for things you look at because… well.. they use data you shared specifically with them. It’s not too much of a privacy invasion. But companies sharing across platform would result in a big stink. Few are going to risk the PR fall out!
MB I think Don Monford is probably writing continual snippable comments at the moment in anger at a fellow blogger/s comments. He will not relent on the snippableness so Judy has to keep snipping. Like Highlander there can only be one however.
WordPress updated. Presumably their programmers caused it then cured it.
Angech/MB,
One of the difficulties with moderation is that people often know someone was moderated, but they can’t see what he wrote. So it’s very difficult to determine whether moderation was or was not ‘fair’.
With respect to honest to goodness trolls (or people who are temporarily obsessed and acting like trolls) the problem isn’t one or two comments, but incessant repetitive comments, or long, argumentative comments ‘demanding’ answers or attention (including complaints if they are ignored.)
That’s why I mostly use my modified “time out” plugin which
(1) enforces a minimum time between comments with longer times for identified commenters and
(2) limits length of comment for identified commenters.
Willard inspired feature (2) and caused me to make feature (1) much more complicated. (Everyone has a short time out btw. Usually, the time has lapsed by the time a human actually writes a paragraph and clicks “submit”.)
Lucia: Amazon can do it for things you look at because… well.. they use data you shared specifically with them. It’s not too much of a privacy invasion.
What I’m thinking about would be a site that you permitted explicitly to use your browsing history for this purpose. It doesn’t need to use any private information, just the pages that were visited. The linkages would be based only upon web addresses and nothing else. Think of it like what Google does with its crawler but instead of chasing the links that are provided uses the browser history as the linkage information. I’m sure that I would have some number of things in common with others that read here and this would allow me to see what the others found interesting — naturally without knowing who found them interesting. If it were frequency based then bunny pics wouldn’t rank high but temperature data might.
I know more or less how to implement this but was thinking that there would likely be a solution out there that I’d not discovered.
bob
Lucia,
Which reminds me to thank for your indulgence of my temporary ATTP obsession, it was most gracious of you. I’ll move on [edit: I mean I’ll drop it] now. 🙂
I find all of this…amusing.
ATTP blog becoming sublime now, or is that sublimating.
Early on Anders suggests a cartoon is needed ( of skeptics).
Would be very amusing.
After the maths fiasco Josh puts a cartoon up but it is not appreciated.
Funny, that.
angech:
That’s just karma.
Things at ATTP become hilarious when Richard Tol enters the arena. All the ATTP lapdogs leap from their cages and try to tear poor Richard apart. Mr.ATTP himself then collapses into a spasm uttering “yes, but no, but yes” http://i.imgur.com/bIA7MJC.jpg
.
In the meantime Richard stays stoic making things only worse. Pure commedia della scienza fantasio.
“Why are they laughing? That thread at Lucia’s is, in places, venomous.” Found the quotes, 2 different articles at ATTP
ATTP January 12, 2015 at 5:26 pm Re cartoon
BBD, Yes, I had wondered if while Nic Lewis is happy to refer to others as “SkS activists†I should allow people here to refer to him as a “GWPF stoogeâ€. Maybe we could even get some kind of cartoon drawn.””
WebHubTelescope says:January 12, 2015 at 5:58 pm
“Why are they laughing?”
ATTP January 12, 2015 at 5:26 pm cartoons that simply mock others with whom you typically disagree is a little infantile.
Joshua says: January 12, 2015 at 6:23 pm
What’s juvenile about cartoons that simply mock others with whom you typically disagree?
WebHubTelescope says: January 12, 2015 at 6:56 pm
“It is only going to get worse:”
IN REFERENCE TO
“http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/12/monday-mirthness-more-sceptical-science-kids-scienz/”
BBD says: January 12, 2015 at 7:29 pm
” NL intended the term pejoratively. Second, since he is indubitably an activist himself, he is demonstrating a remarkable lack of self-awareness.”
BBD says: January 12, 2015 at 7:31 pm
“And you can stuff the tone-trolling. That thread at Lucia’s is, in places, venomous.”
Pekka Pirilä says: January 13, 2015 at 7:33 am
When you think that something that you read is wrong, you develop eagerly counterarguments and are even ready to publicize them using arguments that are actually very weak and do not show at all what they are claimed to show is common. Trying to make the arguments simple and strong makes them actually wrong.
russellseitz says:January 13, 2015 at 8:42 pm
“While the Tyneside coal baron’s court jester ,Josh, has drawn a literally juvenile cartoon celebrating this gaffe,”
BBD says: January 13, 2015 at 8:46 pm
“Here’s Nic Lewis commenting on the error at Lucia’s. Not sure where else this has got to, but doubtless there will be much premature and inappropriate noise.”
…and Then There’s Physics says:January 13, 2015 at 8:49 pm
“Yes, someone on Twitter pointed out that Josh can draw but doesn’t seem very bright.”
Victor Venema (@VariabilityBlog) January 13, 2015 at 9:03 pm
“Was is necessary to write a reply to a paper like Loehle et al. (2014)? It is not as if such a paper could trick a real scientist into thinking it was legit, ”
…and Then There’s Physics January 13, 2015 at 9:43 pm
” Picking on inconsequential mistakes and suggesting that they are important is indeed ClimateBall and is not the behavior one would expect from a scientist. Indeed.
Richard Tol (@RichardTol) January 13, 2015 at 10:02 pm
“Just because X made a silly mistake doesn’t invalidate the rest of their paper.â€
Angech
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2015/01/13/224-therefore-einstein-is-wrong/
Thanks for the breadcrumbs.
Of course not. I haven’t read the criticism everywhere, but I haven’t seen people here say the silly mistake invalidates the rest of the paper.
We discussed Cawley in comments here.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2015/yes-some-things-are-obvious/
There was quite a bit of about the oddities in Anders characterization of Energy Balance Models — and many speculated Anders is a bit at sea about what Energy Balance Models are,what they can do and so on. But that’s not a criticism of Cawley.
Nic arrived and pointed out the error Cawley here:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2015/yes-some-things-are-obvious/#comment-134430
He doesn’t say it “invalidates” the paper– he merely points out that if you don’t make the arithmetic error the results are for lower sensitivity. So if you “like” the method and think it’s useful, and Nic is correct, then you should conclude Cawley suggests sensitivity is lower than even Loehl suggested.
Meanwhile, people are chuckling at Anders because Anders at least seemed to “like” Cawley at least in part because of the numerical results rather than the “methodology”. Those “results” were it gave higher sensitivities. (Now, Anders may very well now say his love of Cawley always sprung fro the love of the methodology (i.e. better than energy balance models 😉 ) But the love being based on the numerical results was an impression he gave. Or at least I get that impression from this
and
Individually and together, the two statements give me the impression that one of the ‘metrics’ Anders used to deem Cawley an improvement on whatever it is Anders thought an energy balance model was that Cawwley’s numerical results were closer to AOGCMs.
Yes, he seemed to also “like” something about it not being an “energy balance model”– but the difficulty with that is Cawley is an energy balance model. So, presumbaly, if he doesn’t “like” energy balance models, he should have disliked Cawley in the first place. But.. oh. Well.
On this in Anders more recent post:
Well… I don’t know who these “people” are who he’s criticizing for focusing on the ‘wrong’ thing.
Here, discussion of Cawley has been limited to comments. So I’d hardly say one can impose “rules” on precisely which bits one should give priority to.
But in anycayse, in comments here “people” (I and a few others) discussed the type of model Cawley was (Energy Balance Model) what those can do and how it relates to Loehl and so on that in comments even before Nic arrived and discussed the error. And Nic discussed all these things. And yes– several people discussed reservations about Loehl. For example, wrt to Loehl I wrote
I’m hardly the only person who said they didn’t like this aspect of Loehl. I’m pretty sure Carrick did to. I don’t think there is any rule that every single person in comments is required to post “meeeee tooooooo”!
So I don’t know why he thinks “people” aren’t discussing the problem with Loehl. They are.
Obviously, since “people” have discussed the problem with Loehl, Anders’s speculation about the “reasons” people are not discussing those problems are… well… shall we say “de trop”? I for one don’t find it remotely inconvenient to discuss the fact that I’m not a fan of fitting cycles to data, subtracting them out, then feeding the ‘corrected’ data into an Energy Balance Model and so on.
But none of this takes away from the fact that:
(a) Cawley happens to have an algebraic error.
(b) When corrected, it appears the result of their methodology should result in lower estimates of climate sensitivity.
(c)People get to discuss this.
(d) Those who enjoy the irony that the paper was kinda-sorta pumped up for its result of “higher” ECS (more inline with climate models) are permitted to chuckle.
Anders continues to offer commentary I find fascinating. This time, he’s practically described the strategy used to defend the original hockey stick, while condemning it:
http://www.hi-izuru.org/wp_blog/2015/01/i-hope-im-dreaming/
Lucia:
Well it doesn’t take a lot detective work to figure out why they picked 60-years.
A 60-year cycle (the so-called AMO) appears in the various datasets (though I’m still on the fence a bit on whether it’s a real phenomenon): It’s certainly the case that it shows up in the limited surface temperature data. It also shows up in various long duration proxies. (Even Tamino gives his blessing to this work.)
Interestingly, it also shows up in a recent post at RealClimate in the sea level trend data:
Figure.
It’s also not surprising that if you have a 60-year oscillation (which peaks around circa 2000), that this reduces the global mean trend associated with anthropogenic forcing:
Figure.
… and hence reduces the ECS you get from data-based estimates.
The point is, if the 60-year AMO is a real cycle, then you have to model it, in temperature data and (importantly for Hay 2014) in the sea level data as well. And because it is (apparently) a large amplitude variation, it has significant effects on the outcome.
I am glad that Tobis’s planet 3 blog gets on the diagram. The traffic must be so low that the mighty Tobis goes trolling onto Blair’s site – chemist in Langley – to drum up traffic for his zombie blog. And gets reamed by Blair to boot. It is like getting all my wishes at Xmas. -&e
Carrick (Comment #134556)
Either the AMO is responsible for a 60 year cycle in global temperatures or it is a very good representation of whatever is actually driving a 60 year cycle in temperatures.
Noting that it is probably not always 60 years but some varying timeframe of a medium-term to long-term nature.
The AMO, however, is becoming less of a realiable source recently because something has happened to the seasonality such that mid-latitude northern hemisphere ocean SST anomalies always goes up in summer and always goes down in winter. It appears to be a data issue to me rather than a real effect.
Lucia: ” I never know what to think about Tisdale’s stuff.”
I’m generally of the same mind. As to WUWT’s quality control generally, I guess I’m more critical now that I’ve seen how Mr. Watts had never spiked any proposed post of mine until I submitted one that showed the central logical flaw in Robert Brown’s “Refutation of Stable Thermal Equilibrium Lapse Rates.” (However valid its conclusion, a fatally flawed proof should be called out.)
But, despite its length, I think this Tisdale post may be worth a read; it sets forth rather well Mr. Tisdale’s reason for considering the climate models hopeless: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/11/alarmists-bizarrely-claim-just-what-agw-predicts-about-the-record-high-global-sea-surface-temperatures-in-2014/.
Joe Born,
A well deserved spike if your post was anything like your comments at Science of Doom. The theoretical properties of a microcanonical ensemble (a classic thought experiment) don’t have much to do with the real world.
DeWitt Payne: “The theoretical properties of a microcanonical ensemble (a classic thought experiment) don’t have much to do with the real world.â€
This is the problem with scientists: they insist on parroting to us what they were told at Cal Tech (or wherever), independently of whether it’s relevant to the issue—or even if it really militates against what they thought they were arguing.
The issue was the validity of Dr. Brown’s silver-wire proof, which didn’t have much to do with the real world, either: the set of microstates of which its set-up admitted was indeed a microcanonical ensemble.
Dr. Payne based his argument on a side issue. Independently of whether a proof’s purported conclusion is correct, that proof is invalid if it’s based on a false or indeterminate assumption. To the extent that the silver-wire proof’s conclusion was correct, as Dr. Payne insisted, the assumption on which it was based was indeterminate. To the extent that, as I suggested, that conclusion was a little off, that assumption was downright wrong.
In either case, the silver-wire proof was invalid, independently of whether its conclusion was correct.
Oh, yes, the assumption, which I called “the B-E Law.” Dr. Brown expressed it thus:
“System A, in thermal equilibrium with a proposed vertical thermal lapse $latex \Delta T_A$ (in spite of the fact that it shorts itself out because it has a finite thermal conductivity). Thermal equilibrium is the state where no net heat spontaneously flows, because heat only flows within a system that is not in equilibrium. There is precisely one self-consistent temperature field in which no heat or matter will flow. Consequently, if you change the temperature difference from $latex \Delta T_A$ to something else, heat will flow until the temperature difference is once again $latex \Delta T_A$.
“System B, in thermal equilibrium with a different proposed vertical thermal lapse $latex \Delta T_A$. Again, if you place any other temperature difference across system B, heat will flow not to where it once again comes into thermal equilibrium with a new temperature difference — it will flow until the temperature difference $latex \Delta T_B$ is once again obtained. . . . If it is in equilibrium, then system B is not and heat is flowing within it. If system B is in equilibrium, system A is not and heat is flowing within it.
There is no state of ‘mutual’ thermal equilibrium in which no heat flows in both at some interpolatory temperature difference.”
Oh no, not another silly lapse rate argument!
.
Please tell me Joe Born that you don’t think the atmosphere must have a certain adiabatic lapse rate based only on the Earth’s gravity.
SteveF: “Please tell me Joe Born that you don’t think the atmosphere must have a certain adiabatic lapse rate based only on the Earth’s gravity.”
Okay, I don’t think that. More specifically, I don’t think that a thermally isolated ideal-gas column subject to gravity would exhibit any measurable lapse rate at equilibrium.
What I do think is that, in trying to demonstrate that result, Dr. Brown and other scientists contented themselves with parroting things they learned in school and leaving us laymen to assume that they had thereby proved what they purported to. Unfortunately, that’s what most readers did assume, and they gushed at Dr. Brown’s proof.
That’s why we lawyers sometimes think science is too important to be left to scientists: with scientists, there’s too much memorizing magic plugs and too little logic, but most people never detect it.
Incidentally, episodes such as these are why some people think the recent emphasis on STEM education is unhealthy: we need people who can think critically. I’m not of that opinion myself, but looking at Dr. Brown’s assumption certainly gives one pause.
If, as the silver-wire proof purports to establish, all equilibrium lapse rates are zero, how can scientists know what would happen if some were non-zero? How can scientists know that coupling the wire to the column in such a situation wouldn’t just change the two constituent systems’ equilibrium lapse rates to a common, composite-system equilibrium lapse rate—and thus avoid the perpetual heat flow on which the silver-wire proof depends?
Dr. Payne and other apologists never answer that question.
Hooray, just noticed the Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly in Niño 3.4 Region – 1999 to Present at WUWT show a fall below the 0.5 degrees anomaly.
This means no El Nino officially for 2014 and probably none for 2015.
El Nino being defined as 3 months of consecutive 3 monthly periods above 0.5 in Nino 3/4 region.
No comment yet from media or Bob Tisdale?
Still caused a very warm year but should be a lot cooler from here in.
Joe Born
No. Ordinarily science isn’t like this. It may be taught this way by high school science teachers. Some students might end up thinking this when doing certain individual ‘application’ type classes. But really, this is not how any scientist or engineer should see science at the end of a 4 year program of study in the field.
That non-scientists reading a proof might not be able to detect issues doesn’t really tell you much about how scientists evaluate problems. That said: poor scientists do exist. My impression is poor lawyers also exist.
I wonder if “Joe Born” is the latest nom de plume of a certain Australian?
dnftt
Joe Born
Does who-si-what’s it think the atmosphere has to at “equilibrium”? Why not just “steady state” . Lots of things engineers deal with are close to the latter without being the former. Mind you people slip up and say equilibrium sometimes. But the only “correction” those proofs usually require is, when a “mr. language person” jumps in and points out “equilibrium” involves no heat flow, the person who said “equilibrium” incorrectly just responds, “Oh. Yes. I’m sorry. I meant steady state, not equilibrium.” They you edit your post, paper etc to read “steady state”.
lucia: “That said: poor scientists do exist. My impression is poor lawyers also exist.”
You’re right, of course; I confess to being deliberately provocative. Education in the physical sciences routinely involves solving problems, and I see no reason for believing that the degree of critical thinking it requires isn’t at least as great as that required by other disciplines.
However, although it is no doubt my limitations that causes much of the difficulty I have with science presentations, I find that in a distressingly large fraction of those few occasions in which I do get to the bottom of things it was either poor logic or downright bad physics that caused the trouble.
lucia: “Does who-si-what’s it think the atmosphere has to at ‘equilibrium’? Why not just “steady state.'”
I think Dr. Brown (WUWT, “Refutation of Stable Thermal Equilibrium Lapse Rates”) actually did mean thermal equilibrium. His argument was a proof by contradiction, and its premise-refuting impossible result was undriven steady-state heat flow. (The thought experiment involved a thermally isolated ideal-gas column in a gravitational field that in the fullness of time had reached thermal equilibrium, and he then thermally coupled opposite ends of a silver wire to the column at different altitudes.)
No one was arguing that the atmosphere would ever actually reach thermal equilibrium in real life. And the conclusion Dr. Brown reached (equilibrium isothermality despite the gravitational field) is essentially correct. But the logic he used at the time was fallacious, and some time later he seemed to compound the error by employing bad physics. (He attempted to apply thermodynamics in a context to which it doesn’t apply.)
hunter: “I wonder if ‘Joe Born’ is the latest nom de plume of a certain Australian?”
It’s the nom this American has employed ever since he started using a plume.
Lucia,
Certainly by some high school science teachers, but not all. My dear wife (PhD, chemistry) who taught high school chemistry for a while, always focused on concepts. I remember reading some of her early exam questions and telling her “You’re going to kill them.” because the questions demanded grasping concepts quite foreign to most high school students. Memorization would not help. Of course, word soon spread, and many of the non-technically inclined avoided her classes if they could. What I think many non-scientists (apparently like Joe) do not understand is that real science is almost totally conceptual, with very little in the way of memorization. Technically competent people always look at problems conceptually, and indeed, most have an internally consistent “conceptual map” of how reality works. Maybe Joe would believe this if he talked to my oldest son, who has both a PhD in molecular biology and a law degree.
Joe Born,
“And the conclusion Dr. Brown reached (equilibrium isothermality despite the gravitational field) is essentially correct.”
.
There is no “despite” involved. Constant equilibrium temperature is not “essentially correct”, it is completely correct; no approximation involved. Unlike some, Brown knows what he is talking about.
Echoing Hunter, is JB another non de plume for our dear friend Doug C*tt*n?
About the same level of pointless discourse either way.
Carrick,
Same person or not, the pointlessness seems the same.
SteveF: “Constant equilibrium temperature is not “essentially correctâ€, it is completely correct; no approximation involved. Unlike some, Brown knows what he is talking about.”
Well, I’m not as sure of anything as you seem to think you are about this, but I’d say there’s more than one school of thought on the subject.
I’m told that according to classical physics a monatomic-ideal-gas molecule’s state can be completely defined by six scalar quantities, namely, its x, y, and z components of position and momentum. Therefore, the so-called microstate of an N-molecule gas column can be thought of as a point in a 6N-dimensional phase space. Furthermore, that microstate can be assigned an energy value equal to the sum of all molecules’ thereby-dictated potential and kinetic energies. A paper by Román et al. and another by Velasco et al. together considered a thermally isolated gas column’s microstates associated with the infinitesimal range of energies between E and E + dE. By doing so, they determined that the mean molecular kinetic energy of a gas in a thermally isolated column would decrease from a maximum at the bottom of the column to zero at the altitude E/mg, where m is molecular mass and g is the acceleration of gravity.
The molecular-kinetic-energy gradient that implies is mind-bogglingly small and requires some interpretation. But, to the extent that you use the kinetic definition of energy, i.e., mean molecular kinetic energy divided by three-halves Boltzmann’s constant for a monatomic ideal gas, you get a lapse rate that’s not quite zero. There are other definitions of temperature, of course, but they would be inconsistent with the premise of Dr. Brown’s proof.
Incidentally, note the manner of argument that SteveF and Carrick employ. They invoke PhDs and cast aspersions. When it comes to the rough and tumble of scientific reasoning, though, they prefer to hold Dr. Brown’s coat. They regurgitate results but betray no understanding of the manner in which those results were arrived at.
Unfortunately, that is not at all uncommon.
“joe” seems to have a different writing pattern than the Australian, but not that different. If Mosher were so inclined I bet he could crack this pretty quickly.
The internet is a great way to spend an unplanned sick day, lol.
Endless entertainment and no exposing anyone to pesky germs or virus.
But the entire “gradient” obsession is so boringly predictable: Never any actual maths or formula, only long winded assertions.
On second thought “Joe” is almost certainly Doug C dressed up and trying to write in a different voice.
Nick never writes anything like this:
Could be wrong, but can’t remember much of this from D.C. either.
Joe Born,
“A paper by Román et al. and another by Velasco et al. together considered a thermally isolated gas column’s microstates associated with the infinitesimal range of energies between E and E + dE. By doing so, they determined that the mean molecular kinetic energy of a gas in a thermally isolated column would decrease from a maximum at the bottom of the column to zero at the altitude E/mg, where m is molecular mass and g is the acceleration of gravity. ”
.
If those authors actually draw the conclusion you claim they do, then they are mistaken. The average kinetic energy of an ideal gas molecule is independent of pressure, it depends only on the temperature of the ensemble that gas molecule resides in. When there are more gas molecules in the same volume, then the pressure on the surface of a confining container rises in proportion to the number of molecules, because ‘pressure’ is just due to elastic impacts… more molecules, more impacts, more impacts, more pressure. That you can imagine it could be otherwise simply proves that you have not a clue what you are talking about… you don’t understand the basic concepts of an “ideal gas”. This has nothing to do with level of education; it has to do with how you think about the physical world. As I said before:
“Oh no, not another silly lapse rate argument.”
I will waste no more time on this rubbish. If you are in fact not D0ug C0tt0n, then you sure think in the same ways as he does. I hold nobody’s coat except my own. Adeus.
SteveF,
I think Joe is correct. I’d have to look up my statistical thermo book, but there is a very slight effect of temperature with elevation in an ideal gas. It’s so slight no one doing chemstry would every worry about it– nor do engineers. Heck, physicist don’t.
I don’t know where my stat thermo book is, but I think Joe is correct.
Anyway: what you are saying about ideal gas is true locally.
SteveF: “When there are more gas molecules in the same volume, then the pressure on the surface of a confining container rises in proportion to the number of molecules, because ‘pressure’ is just due to elastic impacts… more molecules, more impacts, more impacts, more pressure. That you can imagine it could be otherwise simply proves that you have not a clue what you are talking about”
Note the straw man. No one said that, everything else being equal, more molecules wouldn’t mean more pressure. Yet this fellow says I “imagine it could be otherwise.”
Again, such poor logic masquerading as science is too common. Unfortunately, most laymen see only the atmospherics and think the science guy has proved something because, after all, “it’s science.”
Lucia,
If that is true, then what is the magnitude of the effect? I don’t have any doubt about it for real (nearly ideal) gases, but ideal gas atoms are treated as extremely small points, so it is difficult to see how such an effect would arise.
The effect is very, very, very, very small on earth. I’d have to find the book to remember the details. But I seem to recall that problem being discussed when we did Maxwell relations.
lucia: “The effect is very, very, very, very small on earth.”
You’re exactly right. If I recall, even for only 1000 moles it could be on the order of a few picokelvins per parsec.
But keep in mind what the issue is. If the equilibrium lapse rate is exactly zero, then Dr. Brown’s above-quoted assumption is indeterminate: no one could know what would happen if it weren’t zero. If, on the other hand, there is a sense in which it could be said to be non-zero, then–for reasons I haven’t mentioned in this thread–I think his above-quoted assumption can be shown to be false.
Either way, the proof is invalid. So those folks’ arguments for absolute isothermality really constitute an own goal. They are effectively demonstrating that the assumption is indeterminate–which means Dr. Brown’s proof is invalid. To show that Dr. Brown’s proof is invalid under my view (which is that gravity makes isothermality off by a skosh), on the other hand, requires an extra step I haven’t taken on this thread.
Does this argument have anything to do with a real atmosphere? Even if a column of air could be isolated from adjacent columns, it would still not be a closed system.
Lucia,
The effect may be so very, very, very small that it does not exist at all. 😉
.
It appears that Joe Born simply misunderstands the second of those two papers, where the authors get the solution right. RomÌan F L, White J A and Velasco S, 1995 Eur. J. Phys. 16, 83–90, calculated a temperature effect. Those same three authors published a 1996 note on their own 1995 paper, where it appears they admit, in a very contorted sort of way, that they were mistaken about a temperature effect (S Velasco, FL RomÌan and J A White, Eur. J. Phys. 17 (1996) 43–44.). You can see the complete note here: http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/s-velasco.pdf
.
In that second publication they say a colleague pointed out to them a 1985 paper that makes their 1995 result paradoxical:
In the rest of the 1996 note, the authors go on to conclude that answer #2 is always wrong…. there is no equilibrium temperature effect with height. They conclude:
If you have any reference to work that shows a different result, I would sure like to see it.
HaroldW: “Does this argument have anything to do with a real atmosphere? Even if a column of air could be isolated from adjacent columns, it would still not be a closed system.”
I’m not sure what you intend by your second sentence, but the argument has to do with a proposition some have advanced: that gravity alone heats the atmosphere. Relevant to that proposition is what the atmosphere’s temperature profile would be if the atmosphere ever reached thermal equilibrium. Yes, the actual atmosphere is laterally endless, but disputants nonetheless argue by analogy to a gas column, and that doesn’t seem controversial.
Everyone here believes that such a column’s temperature would essentially be uniform. The issue is whether a popular proof of that result is valid. I say no. They say yes.
SteveF: “It appears that Joe Born simply misunderstands the second of those two papers”
That old chestnut.
Velasco et al. say clearly that there’s a molecular-kinetic-energy gradient. But they deny it’s a lapse rate. That’s not because they say the lapse rate is zero. It’s because under their definition temperature is not a local quantity. To have a lapse rate—even zero—you have to have a quantity that has local values, as temperature does under the kinetic definition. But their definition, which Román et al give in their Equation 40, is based on global quantities; it doesn’t have local values.
You can go by their definition—and thereby make the premise of Dr. Brown’s proof meaningless—or you can go by the kinetic definition.
Oh, you can also go by the thermodynamic definition. It does give you a lapse rate of zero. But it, too, is inconsistent with the premise of Dr. Brown’s proof.
The second sentence refers to the fact that a column of air in the atmosphere is open to space at the top. [Also to the ground at the bottom.] Solar radiation enters (part of each day), thermal radiation exits — it’s not a closed system energetically. Nor can it reach a static state of equilibrium.
Joe Born,
“To have a lapse rate—even zero—you have to have a quantity that has local values, as temperature does under the kinetic definition. But their definition, which Román et al give in their Equation 40, is based on global quantities; it doesn’t have local values. ”
.
A “lapse rate” that is zero is no lapse rate at all. So just define temperature any old way you want and the declare a ‘lapse rate’ exists based on that temperature. Such rubbish. Goodbye.
HaroldW: “Nor can it reach a static state of equilibrium.”
That’s right. The disputants discuss a (relatively) easily analyzed fictional system to constrain what they think is plausible about the real system.
Incidentally, although the fictional system of the two papers we mentioned above is thermally isolated, it’s “open” at the top in the sense that the top wall’s altitude is infinity.
HaroldW (Comment #134647),
Nobody is talking about a system with energy flows (eg sunlight in, heat lost to space). The issue is if there is a drop in temperature with height *at equilibrium*.
I was perhaps misleading in saying that Velasco et al. contended there was no lapse rate. Actually, they didn’t mention lapse rate at all.
Instead, even though they had explicitly stated that “for a finite adiabatically enclosed gas in a gravitational field the average molecular kinetic energy decreases with height,” they denied the statement that “temperature decreases with the height because . . . [t]emperature is proportional to the average molecular kinetic energy.” It was unfortunate that they did so, because that cryptic approach led more people astray than just SteveF.
Again, the reason they denied that statement is that they defined temperature as a function of phase volume (a global quantity of the column as a whole) and total molecular energy (another global quantity): it was not an altitude-specific quantity. As they defined temperature, therefore, talking about its decreasing with height would have been meaningless.
Because the premise of Dr. Brown’s proof by contradiction got involved in our choice of temperature-definition-choice discussion, I’ll state it explicitly. It’s that the “gas spontaneously equilibrates into a state where the temperature at the bottom of the column Tb is strictly greater than the temperature Tt at the top of the column. The magnitude of the difference, and the mechanism proposed for this separation are irrelevant.†That is, there is a non-zero temperature difference between altitudes in the state (“equilibratesâ€) in which no heat flows. Dr. Brown purported to refute this premise by showing that it leads to an impossible result, namely, undriven perpetual heat flow, if a silver wire is thermally coupled to the column.
I hope it is apparent that the only temperature definition that leaves this premise internally consistent is the kinetic definition.
SteveF,
I’m going by dim recollection. Now I’m going to have to find the stats’ thermo book!!
“I hope it is apparent that the only temperature definition that leaves this premise internally consistent is the kinetic definition.”
.
Yup, and that’s the defined ‘temperature’ that thermometers read. A difference in that ‘temperature’ is what dives heat along a thermal conductor. If a thermometer at the top would read something lower than a thermometer at the bottom, then you could have perpetual motion. You can’t. What utter rubbish.
Lucia,
I look forward to hearing what you find.
lucia: “I’m going by dim recollection. Now I’m going to have to find the stats’ thermo book!!”
I’ve had trouble posting links here, but here’s an attempt. The papers that lay this out are here and here. I don’t think you need more than about the first sixteen equations in the Roman et al. paper as well as its Equations 40 and 41, but the whole (much shorter) Velasco et al. paper is relevant. I’m happy to walk through it with you to the extent that’s helpful.
Joe–The discussion in my stats thermo book would predate any 2012 paper. 🙂
Lucia, a fascinating topic as always. I busted out laughing at the title, given how often the lady in the Batcave over at Hotwhopper writes about Watts Up With That (WUWT).
It did raise an interesting question, however—how could Ms. Jarreau’s results be so far from reality?
I say “far from reality” because by just about any measure, Watts Up With That is at the center of the climate blogosphere. Whether you look at total page views, “bounce rate”, page views per visitor, daily time on site, Alexa rating, you name the metric, WUWT comes out an order of magnitude ahead of any other climate blog.
Not only that, but it is read by people on both sides of the climate divide, as evidenced by the number of AGW-supporting individuals and sites who comment on the WUWT posts, both at their blogs, on Twitter, and to their co-workers. The AGW supporters may only read it to see what the opposition is up to … but they read it regularly.
So how did Ms. Jarreau get it so wrong? I’d say three things contribute to the skewed results, some of which have already been noted.
First, people don’t always tell the truth. Ms. HotWhopper is the obvious candidate. It’s obvious that she spends a whole lot of time reading WUWT … but she didn’t list it. I suspect that for some people, it’s a guilty pleasure, but that if asked, they’d say the equivalent of “I only read Playboy for the articles” …
The second reason for the skewed results is the way that news of the survey was passed around. It doesn’t appear that there was sufficient effort given to ensuring that the questionnaire was widely distributed. A much better method would have been to write up a description and invitation to the study, and to ask the various blogs to use it as a guest post.
Third, and in my opinion most important, there appears to have been no definition of terms, particularly what constitutes a “science site”. A number of people in this thread have said well, she didn’t list WUWT because it’s not a science site …
This, to me, reflects a profound misunderstanding of what makes a science site. The problem is that there are different kinds of “science sites”. I’ll use mostly climate science sites as examples, as I’m most familiar with them.
One kind is just a news aggregation site. The best example of this kind is Climate Depot. It just puts up links to stories about the climate.
Another kind of science site generally restricts itself to discussions of peer-reviewed science, but gives some commentary on each link. “It’s Not Rocket Science” or the Scientific American blog are examples of this category.
Another kind of climate science site mostly deals with the original work of an individual author. Climate Audit and Isaac Held’s blog are examples of this kind of site.
Then we have sites such as this one of our esteemed host, or Judith Curry’s site, which reflect the individual interests of the author but which range widely over a bunch of subjects.
Finally, we have WUWT. What makes WUWT unusual is that it is not a site that publicly discusses peer-reviewed science documents.
Instead, it is a site for the public peer-review of science documents, including original work done by guest authors such as myself. This is a very different animal. To start with, just as happens with the secret peer review which is usual for the journals, not all of the papers that are reviewed will pass muster. Of course the journals don’t publish anything that doesn’t pass peer-review, but for public peer review, everything is visible.
So when people complain that there is misguided science posted at WUWT … well, doh. That’s an unavoidable part of the public peer-review game.
Not only that, but it is an extremely important part of the game. Knowing not only which scientific claims are wrong, but exactly why they are wrong, is perhaps more important than knowing which scientific claims are right.
So yes, there is some very sketchy science that gets published and publicly peer-reviewed at WUWT … and almost invariably, it gets shot full of holes in very short order. This makes WUWT more of a scientific site, not less of one. You don’t see that kind of thing happening at say RealClimate for a simple reason—such comments are invisibly and ruthlessly censored … which is why the Jarreau claim that RC is at the center of anything scientific is a joke. Science doesn’t censor comments, and RC does. You do the math.
As a frequent guest author, to me this is one of the most important scientific aspects of WUWT—any mistake that I make will be identified in very short order. This has saved me immense amounts of wasted effort following blind trails … but some foolish folks think that publishing claims that eventually turn out to be erroneous reduces the scientific nature of WUWT. Nothing could be further from the truth. Identifying errors and falsifying claims is central to science, and the only way to do it is to first publish the claims that later turn out to be wrong.
As a result, Anthony has a delicate balancing act. He doesn’t want to publish things that are obviously pseudo-science, but then he doesn’t want to exclude things that might be right … plus sometimes he wants to publish things that he knows are wrong simply so that their errors can be publicly identified.
Does he make mistakes in the choices sometimes? Sure. It’s a tough job, and it is a job that no one individual could possibly be qualified to do, for a simple reason—nobody is as smart as the crowd. There’s no way to guess what errors someone might find in a piece that you or I might think is flawless. And there’s also no way to identify the odd scientific claim that in a few years might be “settled science”. So he has to pick and choose, and not every choice is right … so what?
Since the public falsification of bad science is essential to scientific progress, I find the idea that WUWT is not a science site because it sometimes posts shaky claims to be very parochial and short-sited. Private secret peer-review has obviously failed. In fact, much of the ridiculously bad “science” discussed at WUWT are peer-reviewed studies published in the most prestigious journals … but nobody can get that kind of nonsense past the kind of public peer review which is exemplified by WUWT. There are too many smart, insightful, capable people commenting on the posts for much to slip by …
So yes, WUWT does publish some obviously bad science. But what people fail to understand is, public falsification is the heart of science … and the only way to do that is to start by publishing and discussing that science, whether it is “good” or “bad”, and whether or not it’s already been peer reviewed.
In any case, those three reasons are why I think that the Jarreau results are so out of touch with reality.
My best to all, and Lucia, on my planet your posts are almost always fascinating, as are the comments that they engender. My thanks to you for your continued efforts to move the game forwards.
w.
SteveF: ” If a thermometer at the top would read something lower than a thermometer at the bottom, then you could have perpetual motion.”
That’s actually what Dr. Brown set out to show.
SteveF: “You can’t. What utter rubbish.”
Of course you can’t have perpetual motion. The question is whether any non-zero temperature difference at all between top and bottom would necessarily result in heat flow, as Fourier’s Law says. The proposition to be refuted is that gravity necessitates an adjustment to that Fourier’s Law result. The bald denial that it does is not as compelling a refutation as Dr. Brown and SteveF may have imagined.
hunter: “But the entire ‘gradient’ obsession is so boringly predictable: Never any actual maths or formula, only long winded assertions.”
The math is in those two papers. If you have a question about any particular equation, I’ll be happy to field it, with one caveat: I haven’t yet derived for myself the calculus identity set forth at Velasco et al.’s Equation 5. (The paper to which they appeal merely cites another identity I haven’t derived.)
lucia: “The discussion in my stats thermo book would predate any 2012 paper.”
Well, I hope you aren’t off on a wild-goose chase. This isn’t my field, so my guess doesn’t mean much, but Velasco et al.’s result identifies an effect so tiny that I’d be mildly surprised if a thermodynamics book treated it.
I’m told that the statistical justification of thermodynamics laws almost always relies on dealing with “macrostates”–i.e., sets of microstates–whose probabilities bear astronomical ratios to their complements’. But distinguishing between a gradient of zero and the gradient that Velasco et al. find requires, I think, a phase-space partitioning too fine to result in such high ratios. For example, I believe that the (mean) gradient they find is likely orders of magnitude smaller than the standard deviation of the gradient’s fluctuations.
Still, the Velasco et al. approach is actually a good way to demonstrate that thermal equilibrium is indeed essentially isothermal, so maybe I’m wrong and your book had something similar.
I’m not going to waste further bandwidth on reiterating this argument because I consider the issue settled and not in Joe Born’s favor. For those interested, see the comments at Science of Doom starting here:
http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/08/16/convection-venus-thought-experiments-and-tall-rooms-full-of-gas/#comment-81993
Joe,
Text books contain lots of problems often to just show solution techniques. Not all are “important” problems. I seem to remember one that had to do with maximum height a tree could draw water with capillary action and .. it was about there. These are all limiting cases stuff and were useful for knowing when commonly done assumptions didn’t work. So basically: techniques to easily figure out when things one might ordinarily overlook break down.
My recollection is “homework problem” not “important result”. That’s why I’m surprised that someone would suggest “research paper”. The thing is, I need to remember the issue so I can find it. And it may not be in the book– we were given handouts for homework problems. I found the stats thermo book.
I don’t think I need anyone to walk me through a paper. The issue is whether I will slate time to look at it.
I submitted a comment that seemed to vanish.
Here is a link to the discussion at Science of Doom mainly between Joe Born and Pekka Pirrila. Draw your own conclusions.
http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/08/16/convection-venus-thought-experiments-and-tall-rooms-full-of-gas/#comment-81993
Willis,
I think in terms of “gettng it wrong”, it depends what ‘it’ was trying to do. Given that the figure was publicized in a blog post identified as exploratory, I think she was making a first attempt to find a way to determine which blogs influenced each other. She is not trying to create a definitive guide– and the only ‘real’ problem was that Victor over interpreted what the graph means.
Lucia,
As I read the two papers, there is no claim of any sensible temperature differential top to bottom in any system with more than a handful if individual atoms. It might be more time efficient for you to read both the 1995 and 1996 papers (with the same three authors) rather than hunt for something. Tallbloke has them both posted.
SteveF,
The operative word is sensible. You can’t measure any property of a microcanonical ensemble and still have it be microcanonical. It must be completely isolated. As such, it’s a mathematical construct, not a real thing. It’s not even clear to me that having an interaction with a gravitational field doesn’t violate the isolation.
DeWitt,
Sorry. It suspect it’s related to the $ in spaces issue which confused WordPress. That glitch introduced itself, then fixed itself, but in the mean time, somehow, wordpress thinks people are “first time commenters”. If my theory is correct you’ll be fine from now on in.
(Or otherwise, you hit a “Doug Cotton” word.)
DeWitt,
Agreed. It is a silly argument to boot. If there were a 10^(-10) deviation, and even that I doubt, who would possibly care except for a troll or an idiot? IMO, no one else would. Sort of like calculating relativistic influences on the half life of a uranium round while in flight to its target at 3000 km/hr. The fact is: the adiabatic lapse rate is just a boundary criterion for atmospheric stability/instability, nothing more. All Skydragon arguments to the contrary are simply nuts. The fact that certain people insist on pounding this idiotic drum speaks only to how silly they are.
DeWitt,
Had I seen that thread, I would never have bothered to reply to Born’s provocations. He is just wasting people”s time with irrelevant rubbish. What an absolute troll.
Okay, now that SteveF and DeWitt Payne have agreed with themselves that they’ve satisfactorily dispatched an “absolute troll,” let’s review the issue. We’ll see that their arguments actually establish my point, which is that Dr. Brown’s proof is invalid, despite the fact that its conclusion is essentially correct.
Dr. Brown purported to show that if you assume a non-zero equilibrium lapse rate you’ll reach an impossible conclusion. Specifically, thermally coupling opposite ends of a silver wire at different altitudes to an erstwhile-isolated ideal-gas column would cause perpetual net heat flow. His reasoning was that, since the pre-coupling equilibrium lapse rate of the silver wire would not likely be the same as that of the gas column, the common lapse rate imposed by that coupling on the column and the wire would have to differ from the gas column’s and/or the silver wire’s equilibrium lapse rate: equilibrium could not be reached. This is obviously impossible; it implies that net heat would flow undriven in perpetuity. So he concluded that all equilibrium lapse rates even under the influence of gravity must have the same value. And no common value other than zero would be plausible.
But a careful reading of that silver-wire proof revealed that it was based on the following (at the time, unstated) assumption. If the gas column would indeed exhibit a certain non-zero equilibrium lapse rate while it’s isolated, then coupling it to the silver wire would not change what that non-zero equilibrium rate is. Heat would flow in response to any other lapse rate, and that’s true both when the gas column is isolated and when it’s coupled to the wire. And, as we saw in the quote upthread, Dr. Brown later made that assumption explicit.
And that assumption (which I’ve elsewhere dubbed the “B-E Lawâ€) raises the following question. If, as the proof purports to establish, all equilibrium lapse rates are zero, how can scientists know what would happen if some were non-zero? How can scientists know that coupling the wire to the column in such a situation wouldn’t just change the two constituent systems’ equilibrium lapse rates to a common, composite-system equilibrium lapse rate—and thus avoid the perpetual heat flow on which the silver-wire proof depends?
You will search this thread in vain for any answer to this question, which points up the fact that the assumption on which Dr. Brown’s proof depends is indeterminate. What do I mean by “indeterminate� If a turtle could fly, it would still be slow. If Mao Zedong had been a Republican, he would still have worn a Mao jacket. Those propositions are indeterminate: how could you know whether they’re true? And a proof based on an indeterminate proposition is invalid.
As I said as soon as Dr. Payne interrupted to opine that my piece had been properly spiked, Dr. Payne has instead contented himself with arguing something I’ve agreed with for years: that any deviation from absolute isothermality is too small to measure. But that fact goes only to whether the assumption on which Dr. Brown’s proof is based is indeterminate, on the one hand, or downright wrong, on the other. In either case, the silver-wire proof is invalid.
With tiresome consistency, Dr. Payne continues to prove my point; he just seems unable to recognize that fact.
Joe,
I have no dog in this race. I haven’t read Dr. Brown’s proof. I have a dim recollection of something, and I’m going to have to look. If my recollection is correct– whatever is known was known log before the paper you site and would not be stupendously complicated to show. But I need to sit down and push a few equations through.
Steve and Dewitt could be correct — as I said, I have a dim recollection of “something” that involved gravity and temperature gradients.
There may verywell be something wrong with the “silverwire” proof in term of logic– but I’m not going to dive into that.
lucia: “Steve and Dewitt could be correct.”
Dr. Payne is undoubtedly correct in saying, as you said–and as I’ve said–that any deviation from absolute isothermality is negligible for all practical purposes. He’s not correct if he thinks that fact establishes the validity of the silver-wire proof.
As to how long Velasco et al.’s result may have been known before they came up with it, I don’t know. But their heavy lifting is performed by the calculus identity given in Roman et al.’s Equation 5. Perhaps that identity isn’t “stupendously complicated,” but it was not self-evident to me.
lucia: “But I need to sit down and push a few equations through.”
Suppose you actually do that and find the (again, as everyone agrees, incredibly tiny) mean-molecular-kinetic energy gradient that Velasco et al. found for the isolated column.
The question you’ll want to ask yourself is what would happen if you coupled two such columns thermally at different altitudes. Let’s say that the two columns have different numbers of particles but the same average energy per molecule so that before they were coupled their mean-molecular-kinetic-energy gradients at equilibrium differed.
Even though they’re coupled only thermally–their molecules don’t mix–I say that coupling them will reduce both columns’ equilibrium gradients to a different, common value: they’ll be able to reach equilibrium. That may seem counterintuitive, but I think it’s true. Dr. Brown says instead that coupling would not change either column’s equilibrium value.
In fact, his whole proof rests on that proposition. Coupling forces the same gradient on both columns. But their equilibrium gradients, i.e., the only rates at which no net heat flows, were different before coupling, and he says they remain so after coupling. So the gradient imposed upon them by coupling differs in his view from the equilibrium value of at least one of the the columns: net heat flows perpetually.
You should find that he was wrong.
As my friends in Brazil might say: trollisimo!
Joe,
Don’t hold your breath waiting for a reply from me. I haven’t read your comments here, other than the first one about WUWT, and I don’t intend to read any future comments from you on this subject.
SteveF
FWIW: when I get around to it, the general issue that sits in my dim recollection would not vitiate the lapse rate. Basically, it would be one of those calculations that explains why one can utterly ignore the effect when doing other things– like calculating the lapse rate.
As you know: lots of these sorts of calculations exist– and subsequently, people feel comfortable not even mentioning the effect. Sort of like assuming Newton’s law of viscosity holds or ignoring relativistic effects. No one in science or engineering decrees anyone’s proof “wrong” just because it used Newton’s law. They might point it it applies only when relativistic effects don’t apply, but no one sane deems forgetting to mention that some sort of “logic error” etc.
There is likely to be a long delay in looking at this — because as I said– it a dim recollection. I haven’t looked at Brown’s proof at WUWT, but if the issue is that he treated something miniscule as ‘0’, I wouldn’t deem that an “error” in any real sense. If I did, I would need to decree the vast majority of work in the entire field of “mechanics” “illogical” or “wrong” or something. In fact: it is a field that nearly always focuses on behavior where relativisitic effects are negligible and everyone pretty much knows that’s an assumption — and no– people don’t go around repeating that at the beginning of every single “proof” .
SteveF,
Elements of the dim recollection are coming up out of the crevices of my brain. The issue rose when we were doing things like estimating diffision or viscosity based on simple models of ideal gases. Recall: one usually ignores gravity (and charge for that matter) when worrying about transport of ‘energy’ between adjacent boxes of material. The gases are treated like “tiny billiard balls” or some some such.
When doing that, the order of magnitude of the error in neglecting gravity can be estimated as follows:
1) The rms velocity as a function of temperature is $latex v_{rms} = \sqrt( 3 R T/M_m $ (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root-mean-square_speed )
Where
R= ideal gas constant = 8.3144621 #J/(Mole K)
$latex M_m$ is the molecular mass, which for air is 28.87 # kg/kmol http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/molecular-mass-air-d_679.html
We’ll use T= 290 K
So for air $latex v_rms = 2689.532 m/s.$
We can turn this into an equivalent change in height using
$latex h_e = \frac{v^2}{2g} = $ = 369060.3 m or 360 km.
But bear in mind, this is a scaling argument– given that all molecules don’t move in the same direction and so on… and that these simple models neglect charge, or even ‘billiard balls hitting each other”, what this means is things like the effect of considering gravity or elevation change this on estimates of transport of energy by molecular action will be about $10^{-6}$ the effect of velocity of individual molecules. It’s small.
Or put another way: The if seen as ‘billiard balls’ if the mean free path of the molecules is much less than 360 km, we can neglect this effect– especially relative to other things.
So: The purpose of the proof was to show that for all practical purposes, we can ignore this. Which is why we do. Often without saying so– and no one makes a “peep” about this being illogical or a bad proof or so on.
Oh– other application of the above. To figure out what one might worry about when ‘improving’ on the simple ‘billiard ball’ method of estimating transport quantities, we would estimate the relative importance of neglecting gravity to collisions by taking the ratio of the ‘h’ above to the mean free path.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_free_path
The mean free path for air molecules at STP is about 68 nm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_free_path
So, the order or magnitude estimate says if we were to improve our estimates of behavior of ideal gases using stat/thermo like concepts treating gases as non-colliding billiard balls, the correct of collisions is 5.427357e+12 more important than the correction for gravity.
I haven’t read the paper Born suggested I read, but if the molecular analysis considers gravity but does not include a detailed treatment of corrections due to collisions, it suggests lack of understanding of the order of magnitude of effects one needs to consider when moving from micro-to-macro scale.
lucia: “I haven’t looked at Brown’s proof at WUWT, but if the issue is that he treated something miniscule as ‘0’, I wouldn’t deem that an ‘error’ in any real sense.”
No, the issue isn’t that Dr. Brown treated something minuscule as zero, although you can be forgiven for inferring that from Dr. Payne’s and SteveF’s comments.
Instead, the issue is that after Dr. Brown adopted as a premise that the equilibrium lapse rate was NON-zero in an isolated system he made the unwarranted assumption that thermally coupling that erstwhile-isolated system to another would not change that system’s equilibrium lapse rate.
To the extent that in reality there are no non-zero equilibrium lapse rates, that no-change assumption is unwarranted because it’s indeterminate: how could anyone know the behavior of a non-zero equilibrium lapse rate if none ever occurs?
To the extent that in reality (as we know, minuscule) non-zero equilibrium lapse rates do occur, I believe that the no-change assumption is unwarranted because as I read the math the (again, minuscule) equilibrium lapse rate would, contrary to Dr. Brown’s contention, undergo a change in response to coupling. And I think the change would be such as to avoid the perpetual heat flow on which Dr. Brown’s conclusion is based.
lucia: “I haven’t read the paper Born suggested I read, but if the molecular analysis considers gravity but does not include a detailed treatment of corrections due to collisions, it suggests lack of understanding of the order of magnitude of effects one needs to consider when moving from micro-to-macro scale.”
If anything, those papers take collisions into account excessively. No, there is no explicit treatment of collisions, mean free paths, etc. Instead, the implicit ergodicity assumption reflects collisions’ effects.
This is among the reasons why I said at some point that those papers’ results require some interpretation; for extremely rarefied gases it’s relatively likely that a given phase-space trajectory’s statistics will differ significantly from those of the microstate ensemble as a whole, yet the papers’ results are ensemble statistics.
@ SteveF (Comment #134680)
“Trollisimo” seems to be an emerging bit of internet slang.
Very interesting.
http://www.topictimes.com/videos/autos/trollisimo-full-UFUG1O5bHjc.html
Joe,
Implicit ergodicity cannot entirely account for all the effects of collisions. Some effects need to be accounted for explicitly.
Joe
You are invited to do so too. Comments are Latex enabled and you can link to images and enter your questions. Or discuss any physical mechanism you like.
I’m not concerned about Dr. Brown right now. He’s not here in comments. I don’t even care what he showe. Right now I’m trying to focus on what you claim happens. You are here in comments and — presumably can give us a synopsis of the argument you think Velasco made and which you are telling is is somehow ‘right’. If you understand it, you can telling us the physical mechanisms involved as you understand them. I don’t mean saying “read equations blah, blah”. I mean you tell us what the balances are, and explain what it is you see as making gravity cause a temperature gradient.
Well… maybe you can explain — in words– what the balances are in the paper. It always the case that equations map into claimed physics, and so you should be able to say what they accounted for. I’m a bit puzzled about the idea that a paper could take collisions into account “excessively” and don’t know what you could possibly mean by that. (And note: you are the one saying it’s excessive– so perhaps you could explain what they do and why the degree they consider collsions is “excessive”.)
lucia: “I’m not concerned about Dr. Brown right now.”
Allow me to remind you that the discussion started when, in response to my commending a WUWT post despite Mr. Watts’ having spiked a piece of mine directed to Dr. Brown’s proof, Dr. Payne chimed in to I malign my view of that proof. So I definitely am concerned with that proof.
The Velasco et al. papers touch only tangentially on that proof’s validity; to the extent that there is no gradient of the type they find, Dr. Brown’s proof is based on an indeterminate assumption.
However, I’ll try to give you a Velasco et al. summary when I get back home tomorrow.
By the way Sou is up to her usual addled logic again.
Heat-addled brains and a competition: Judith Curry vs Phil Plait
Most of it is cringeworthy spittle flecking, but this little howler is worth noting:
[My emphasis]
No doubt about it?
Well here’s the top three temperatures for GISTEMP:
But of course these measurements have uncertainty associated with them.
This figure shows the GISTEMP estimate of annual uncertainty, which appears to be take from Global Surface Temperature Change, Hansen et al. 2010. Table 1 of that paper gives the uncertainty from 1960-2008 as ±0.05°C (2σ).
So looking at the difference in temperatures (for which the uncertainty is approximately $latex \sqrt{2} * 0.05^\circ \approx 0.07^\circ$), I get:
Range,DeltaT,p-value (1-sided)
2014-2010,0.02,0.29
2014-2005,0.03,0.20
2014-2007,0.06,0.04
So 2010 and 2005 are both statistically indistinguishable from 2014, based on the GISTEMP data and analysis products.
I judge the statement it was the warmest year. No almost about it. to itself be a HotWhopper.â„¢
Perhaps this is okay for a blog dedicated to serving up hot whoppers. 🙄
Lucia,
I suggest you look at the two papers. As DeWitt pointed out, they consider a ‘micro canonical ensemble’ which has only a handful of atoms and never comes in contact with anything. As I read it, they are saying that any condition where you could measure temperature is completely disconnected from their analysis. In the second paper they say explicitly that there can never be a sensible temperature difference with altitude; apparently one of their associates pointed out that certain people might read the first analysis and conclude there could be a measurable temperature difference. They are pretty careful to say there can never be a sensible temperature difference.
It turns out that I got a little time before I leave, so here’s an initial installment. Please pardon the typography; I have to leave shortly, so I may not get it quite right.
Velasco et al. is based on the conventional assumption that a the probability of finding system in any particular region, or “macrostate†of its phase space is proportional to that region’s volume. Let’s see where that takes us.
There is no reason to suppose that any molecule behaves differently on average from any other. So let’s pick one of them, Molecule~1, and call its position and momentum $latex \vec{q}_1$ and $latex \vec{p}_1$. And let’s require that the system’s total energy be $latex E$ and that $latex \vec{q}_1$ have some chosen value $latex \vec{q}$ whose altitude component is $latex q_z$.
Consider two macrostates defined by the Molecule-1 momentum $latex \vec{p}_1$’s having respective values $latex \vec{p}$ and $latex \vec{p’}=\vec{p}/\sqrt{2}$. That is, the two macrostates’ respective Molecule-1 kinetic energies $latex K_1$ and $latex K_1’$ are related by $latex K_1=2K_1’$, and their Molecule-1 total energies are given by $latex E_1=K_1+mgq_{z}$ and $latex E_1’=K_1’+mgq_{z}$, where $latex m$ is molecular mass and $latex g$ is the acceleration of gravity.
In the $latex 6N$-dimensional phase space, each macrostate covers a region whose projection into the 3-space representing Molecule~1’s momentum $latex \vec{p}_1$ is a single point. Their projections into the $latex (6N-6)$-space representing the other molecules are respective regions such that at every point the other molecules’ total energy $latex \sum\limits_{i=2}^{N}(mgq_{iz}+\vec{p}_i\cdot\vec{p}_i/2m)$ is $latex E-E_1$ for one macrostate and $latex E-E_1’$ for the other. And the probability density of the first molecule’s having momentum $latex \vec{p}$ at altitude $latex \vec{q}$ is in each case proportional to that region’s volume.
Computing that volume involves $latex (6N-6)$ nested integrations, so I’ll spare you the math. But think of that projection as the “surface” of a “hyperparaboloid.” (That is undoubtedly the wrong term for that hyperspace surface, but the mental picture I’m trying to paint is the three-dimensional surface $latex z=z_0-x^2-y^2 , z_0>0$.) For a given first-particle altitude, the hyperparaboloid’s “height” (the sum of the other molecules’ altitudes $latex q_{iz}$), and thus the relative probability density represented by the size of that surface, depend on the first molecule’s kinetic energy $latex K=\vec{p}_1\cdot\vec{p}_1/2m$.
In the extreme case in which $latex K=E-mgq_z$, i.e., in which Molecule~1 gets the entire system energy in the first macrostate but not in the second, the hyperparaboloid height is zero for the first macrostate but greater than zero for the second: the ratio of the first microstate’s probability density to the second’s is zero. For the same two kinetic energies, however, the probability-density ratio would have been non-zero if Molecule-1’s altitude $latex q_z$ had been lower: the kinetic-energy probability-density distribution differs for different altitudes. In particular, the mean kinetic energy is higher for lower altitudes.
The effect this has on lapse rate, of course, is unimaginably small in macroscopic gas columns, in which the number of molecules is upwards of, say, $latex 10^{22}$. In fact, perhaps the most impressive thing revealed by actually crunching the numbers is how small the effect is. But it’s not zero.
SteveF
I looked at the first after Joe suggested “If anything, those papers take collisions into account excessively.” I don’t know in what sense Joe thinks collisions might be taken into account “excessively”; looking at the paper, I am even more puzzled by that.
I haven’t looked at the second.
Joe
I know how it started. But this blog does not have any rule that says I am not allowed to comment on interesting bits. You will notice I only interjected on the portion of the discussion that touches on the possibility of a non-isothermal condition in an ideal gas under gravity. I am not now and was not then interested in the specific issue of “flaw in Brown’s proof”. I am interested in the claims about the ideal gas under gravity, what on might conclude based on micromechanics and so on.
I might develop an interest in Browns proof later.
Meanwhile, you and others are free to continue to discuss Brown’s proof with each other.
Carrick,
“It wasn’t an “almost warmest yearâ€, it was the warmest year. No almost about it.
[My emphasis]
No doubt about it?”
No she didn’t say no doubt about it. She said “no almost about it”.
The numbers have uncertainty. But Judith’s reference to “almost” a record year makes no sense there. No other year has a better claim. That’s what Sou was rightly reacting to.
Yes, Siou does tend to emotionally react.
Nick:
Sou says “it was the warmest year. No almost about it”. (my emphasis.)
The first statement is a definitive statement that 2014 is the warmest year (and it’s false that this is true without any doubt, which is what is implied when you say “it was the warmest year.”).
The second statement says there is no “almost” about it being “the warmest year”. This implies there is absolute certainty that it was the warmest year. That in turn implies the absence of doubt.
My comment “No doubt about it?†refers to what Sou says in toto, and she definitely was saying there was no doubt that 2014 was the warmest year.
Yep.
And Sou absolutely fails to address that the numbers have any uncertainty to them: She doesn’t even discuss that that the measurements have uncertainty.
Only if you insist on interpreting what Judith says in a hyper-literal fashion.
It made perfect sense to me as a colloquial expression:
It came close to setting a record in the statistical sense, so “almost a record”.
The only really criticism I can put on it was that it wasn’t even “almost” a new record (if the p-value were 0.1 instead of 0.3 for the closest year for example, that would be “almost a new record” to me), but I’d guess that wasn’t what you were trying to argue.
Yes it has a better claim, but the claim is weak. No sweat in saying the claim is weak. “Almost a record” imputes that for me.
I think a much better criticism can be made of Judith’s defense of Ted Cruz’s nonsense. Although unlike Sou’s categorically wrong statement, at least there’s a cherry picked way (use the probably wrong RSS data) to make what Cruz claims is true, true.
(I know, that’s a weak victory there for Judith’s white knights.)
Joe,
Interesting synopsis– it focuses on the gyrations and not the physics!
Anyway, the gist of it is it appears that he writes a Hamiltonian for the “billiard ball model”– which matches my description above. And the scaling argument I gave for the possible effect of ‘g’ (without doing all the math) is based on the billiard ball example– that’s the scaling law.
Though you seem to want to discuss things like hyperparaboloids, but that’s just ‘the arithmetic’ What I mostly wanted was the physical assumptions. (Everyone understands that you need to do gyrations after you make assumptions. )
Ok: I notice that your description does not mention “collisions”. Out of curiosity, why do you think if anything it accounts for “too many”?
Ok. But given what this means, the pdf for kinetic energy can differ because the distribution of height differs. The distribution of height differs only means density differs– which we know is true. Pressure and density are higher at the surface than aloft.
Which graph of equation do you interpret as telling us the temperaturevaries?
Thank you Mr. Racehorse, Esq.
What is it about an uncertainty of 0.05 degree that makes 0.68 different from 0.66, other than the way they look on the computer screen?
BTW: I can’t be sure which paper is the “2nd” velasco paper because the link reads like this <a>here</a> I need the uri.
If you just paste the uri, that will work fine. No html required.
To clarify Lucia’s comment, use this pattern:
<a href=”URL”>descriptive text</a>
Replace “URL” with your URL.
For example:
<a href=”http://lmgtfy.com”>Let Me Google That For You</a>
get converted to the hyperlink:
Let Me Google That For You
Or.. if he just pastes the uri…. I can read that. But right now, the link says “here” but points to nothing.
Lucia:
Not necessarily. The distribution could (hypothetically) be different (non-Maxwellian) due to the particles being in a gravity well.
Even then, once you’ve imposed the usual equilibrium conditions, it seems to me (without doing the math) you’ll still get that the mean molecular kinetic energy density is constant with height. This is of course just a micro-mechanical way of saying “the column of air is isothermal”.
The higher order moments wouldn’t constant with height if the particle velocity probability distribution isn’t invariant with height, but good luck finding experimental evidence for that.
Lucia,
My Comment #134642 shows the correct link to the second paper.
Carrick
I’m confused. Regardless of cause (like gravity well or other), doesn’t the pdf for the height of 1 particle in a 1-particle analysis give us the density (i.e. Num Particles*MassPartice/Volume) of the gas?
Or do you mean something else? Or do I not get something. (Any are possible.)
SteveF,
Thanks. BTW “1985” in the “(Coombes and
Laue 1985)” would explain why I would have a dim recollection of this being discussed. That’s about when I took stats’ thermo! The dim recolllection might merely be remembering someone discussing the issue.
Lucia,
I found the Coombes & Laue paper (also Tallbloke), but did not save the link. As I understand it, they conclude no difference in sensible temperature with height.
SteveF,
It is certainly the case that S Velasco, F L Rom´an and J A White don’t think their first paper suggests the existance of a temperature difference between the bottom and the top. It would be interesting to read why Joe Born thinks otherwise. Presumably, the explanation should involve mentioning “phase space” or “6 dimensional whatevers”, but rather pointing to specific results which supposedly ought to be interprested to mean temperature varies with elevation. If he does that we might be able to discover what he think they showed. After that, we can relate it to whatever it is he thinks might be wrong in Brown’s WUWT post.
Lucia,
I have no clue why the trollisimo can’t understand the plain words of the second paper (to paraphrase: ‘Of course we never meant to suggest a top to bottom temperature difference.’) But he has been performing pretty much the same drama for a while now on multiple blogs, and nobody has made any progress convincing him that what he believes is either wrong or completely irrelevant.
Carrick,
“Only if you insist on interpreting what Judith says in a hyper-literal fashion.”
What Judith said was:
“What does this mean for interpreting the ‘almost warmest year’?”
That has a clear meaning. “Almost warmest” means it wasn’t quite. Something else was warmer. And that is a screwed-up reference to uncertainty (presumably), which Sou rightly corrected. As she did:
“It wasn’t an “almost warmest year”, it was the warmest year. No almost about it.”
She’s right.
Nick:
Let’s see, T(2014) > T(2010) fails significance testing at roughly p=0.3, and you claim Sou is right that 2014 is the warmest year???
Sou is definitely full of it when she claims it was the warmest year, because factually we don’t know whether it was really the warmest year.
Why you choose to defend nonsense like this is beyond me.
Carrick,
“Let’s see, T(2014) > T(2010) fails significance testing at roughly p=0.3”
So 2010 was warmest? What do you think was the warmest year? Can there ever be one?
Candidates A and B. A polls 52%. Sampling error 3%. So A is almost ahead in the polls? Or is B?
lucia:
Lucia, the Maxwell Boltzmann distribution is for velocity (really speed) not for density. It’s true you can derive the density with height directly from this distribution, but I was referring to something different: Namely a hypothetical modification of Maxwell Boltzmann itself by the presence of the molecules in a gravitational well.
What I was suggesting was that, even were Maxwell Boltzmann modified (and I’m not saying it is), I believe that once you imposed equilibrium conditions that you’d end up with an isothermal atmosphere. (That is, if I am visually this correctly, which always a hazardous thing to do without putting anything on paper)
In terms of microscopic physics, saying a gas is isothermal is the same thing as saying the second moment of the velocity distribution is invariant throughout the fluid. My point is, isothermal doesn’t require the velocity distribution itself to be invariant, just the second moment. I think isothermal is something we’re stuck with unless we have an open system and dynamic effects get to impose their will on the system.
Nick Stokes:
What matters is what measurement science says, and if measurement science says two measurements aren’t sufficiently distinguishable within measurement uncertainty so that we can’t make a conclusion that one was larger than the other, then we can’t make a conclusion that one was larger than the other.
That’s how science works.
In any case, there really isn’t anything particularly exciting about an individual year being the warmest by itself, so I’m not going to break out in a sweat if we can’t say, within measurement error, that any particular year was the warmest.
It’s much more important to me whether this year is part of a pattern versus whether it’s a “one off”. Single datums do not a trend make.
But if you reduce your error (presumably by fixing the holes where there’s not data, like near the poles), your measurement error goes down. So yes, probably there will come a day when we can say ‘this year was the warmest’.
Incidentally, I like Gavin’s approach from the talk that Eli linked to on your blog:
These are the probabilities that a given year is the warmest:
2014 ~38%
2010 ~23%
2005 ~17%
1998 ~4%
Pretty nice job for somebody who is primarily a modeler.
Lucia, I hope you didn’t think I was being patronizing when I said “the Maxwell Boltzmann distribution is for velocity”. I know you know this, just clarifying what I was talking about (the classic single particle velocity distribution.)
By the way, strong gravitation fields (think neutron stars) may be one case where you can’t assume Maxwell-Boltzmann anymore. I’ve see a bit of “chatter” googling for Maxwell-Boltzmann and “strong gravity field” but only seen the comment made in passing.
I noticed another paper proposing tests for Maxwell-Boltzmann for our star (think helioseismometry), but no data comparisons.
So it’s on people’s radar, but mostly for extraterrestrial applications as far as I can tell.
Carrick,
I didn’t think you were patronizing. I took stat thermo and read papers involving ensembles of molecules, but most my work has always been using “continuum assumption”. So I know my being confused is not only possible but not unlikely.
Anyway, when I wrote my response to Joe, what I thought I meant was more along they lines of “But distribution of (YZ) varies with (x) doesn’t mean Z varies with (x) because we already know the distribution of Y varies with (x). So you could just be picking up a variation with (x). (There are of course other things that can happen to– but already one can’t conclude Z varies based on that evidence).
Nick
I think the points is “we can’t be certain of the answer to that question”. That was the notion Judy was probably trying to convey with “almost”. Possibly her wording wasn’t the clearest ever– but these are blogs.
This question comes up from time to time because– hypothetically– we could have a year that is so hot we are virtually certain it was hotter than the previous ‘hottest’ on. In those cases, pretty much everyone agrees we broke a real record.
I lean towards, “It’s a record in the sense that it is the largest value recorded.” We know what was recorded. The record corresponds imperfectly to reality, but we do know what was recorded.
That said: I don’t get remotely upset that people point out we don’t really know if 2014 was warmer than 2010. It’s true: we don’t.
lucia: “I have, btw, skimmed Dr. Brown’s proof. I read the comment where you describe what you think is a “flaw†and I don’t understand your argument — or I think there is some sort of missing link between what you say he wrote and what he seemed to claim when I read it.â€
Understandable. As is so often the case, the flaw lies in an assumption that’s made only implicitly. As we shall see, that assumption is that thermally coupling to another system would not change the equilibrium lapse rate exhibited by a first system whose equilibrium lapse rate in isolation is non-zero.
But let’s go step by step. Dr. Brown’s argument is a proof by contradiction. In a proof by contradiction, as we all know, the proposition to be refuted is taken as the premise. In this case, the premise was a non-zero equilibrium lapse rate in a thermally isolated vertical ideal-gas column. A proof by contradiction proceeds by demonstrating that the premise leads to a false conclusion. In this case, it was perpetual undriven net heat flow.
How did show that the premise led to that false conclusion? He started, at least implicitly, with the observation that in isolation the gas column’s (by assumption, non-zero) equilibrium lapse rate—i.e., the sole lapse rate at which no net heat would flow—differs from that of the silver wire. Fair enough. He also assumed that thermally coupling the silver wire to the column would impose a common lapse rate on the two systems. Also, fair enough.
But here’s the problematic (and, again, tacit) assumption. The sole lapse rate at which no heat flows in the gas column when it’s coupled to the silver wire is the same as the sole (by assumption, non-zero) lapse rate at which no heat flows in the gas column when it’s isolated, and the sole lapse rate at which no heat flows in the silver wire when it’s coupled to the gas column is the same as the sole lapse rate at which no heat flows in the silver wire when it’s isolated. As we will see presently, that assumption is unfounded. We’ll call that unfounded assumption the “B-E Law.â€
Based on the B-E Law, the conclusion is that the common lapse rate would necessarily differ from either (1) the sole lapse rate at which no heat flows in the gas column, (2) the sole lapse rate at which no heat flows in the silver wire, or (3) both. In short—and impossibly—net heat flows undriven perpetually. The non-zero-equilibrium-lapse-rate premise led to the impossible perpetual-undriven-net-heat-flow conclusion. So the premise is false. Q.E.D.
If the premise is false, then no non-zero equilibrium lapse rates exist in real life. And, if that’s true, how could Dr. Brown know that the B-E Law is valid? He couldn’t. The B-E Law is indeterminate. It’s like saying if turtles could fly they’d still be slow. How could you know?
The only relevance of Velasco et al. is that, to the extent that the gradient they found can be considered a lapse rate—and that a non-zero equilibrium lapse rate could be said actually to exist so that the B-E Law is not necessarily indeterminate—I think Velasco et al. imply that coupling to another system would, contrary to the B-E Law, change the erstwhile-isolated system’s equilibrium lapse rate. I say “I think†because that’s my interpretation of their math, but I tend to get lost in equations, so I could be wrong. But I’ve seen no convincing argument yet that I am.
So the silver-wire proof is based on an assumption that is either indeterminate or, in my view, wrong.
lucia: “I’m a bit puzzled about the idea that a paper could take collisions into account “excessively†and don’t know what you could possibly mean by thatâ€
Here I’ve been criticizing Dr. Brown for writing carelessly, and I’ve done it myself.
I’m sorry, I actually shouldn’t have said that; it’s an impression I formed without actually having worked it out, so I’m not certain it’s true. The reason I said it is that it’s always possible to imagine a (theoretically possible but highly unlikely) phase-space trajectory whose statistics differ greatly from the ensemble’s, and the trajectories of that sort that are easiest to imagine avoid collisions.
Again, though, I had not (and still haven’t) thought the implications through well enough to justify commenting, so I shouldn’t have said it.
lucia: “Implicit ergodicity cannot entirely account for all the effects of collisions. Some effects need to be accounted for explicitly.â€
Well, there’s probably some sense in which that is true. But I have a lot of responses to write here, so at least for now I’m not going to try to divine what that sense is.
Since you mentioned Coombes and Laue, though, it may advance the ball slightly to note that they arrived at their uniform-temperature conclusion without assuming any collisions.
lucia: “What I mostly wanted was the physical assumptions.â€
I gave you the physical assumption, which is that the probability of a system’s being in a region of its permitted phase space is proportional to that region’s phase-space volume. I don’t know any theoretical mechanics, but I take it that this is a conventional assumption in that discipline. Liouville’s theorem and all that.
If you want to know why they make that assumption, you’ll have to ask a theoretical-mechanics guy.
Actually, what I think you really want is an explanation that is more appealing intuitively. I do, too. When I’ve seen folks attempt that, though, it always deteriorated to hand-waving. Oh, they would regurgitate named laws they learned at M.I.T., but it still boiled down to hand-waving. So I’ve resorted to the math.
I don’t like it, either.
SteveF: “As I understand it, [Coombes & Laue] conclude no difference in sensible temperature with height.â€
For their purpose, Coombes & Laue provide an excellent discussion. And, yes, they do demonstrate how temperature uniformity can prevail despite gravity’s effect on molecular speed. Their initial assumption is that a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution prevails at one altitude. From that they reason that, at least in the absence of collisions, the same-temperature M-B distribution will prevail at all altitudes.
But you have to keep their assumptions in mind. They assumed, explicitly, an M-B distribution at one altitude. And implicitly they assumed, well, molecules all the way up. That is, they assumed an infinite number of molecules. In many contexts that assumption is harmless. But it’s not very instructive when the question is whether the molecular-kinetic-energy gradient might be slightly different from zero in a gas column that’s finite.
Joe
I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in saying this is not a physical assumption. It’s math. The physics would be the meaning of the terms in “equation 1” and the explanation of why the terms are in equation 1 and what they represent.
Math is used to explore the consequence of physical assumption. But that doesn’t turn the math into “physical assumptions”.
No. I wanted you to describe what physics you see in the paper. One of my motivations was that you claimed the paper included too much about collisions. That suggested that you skip right by anything involving “physics” and are — possibly– over impressed by “the math”.
My diagnosis is that you are going straight to math– and ignoring the physics. Or possibly, you think “the physics” is “handwaving” or something. Math is necessary. It can be impressive. Lots of people get lost in the math. But math isn’t science. The physics is the part that is science.
lucia: “But given what this means, the pdf for kinetic energy can differ because the distribution of height differs. The distribution of height differs only means densitydiffers– which we know is true. Pressure and density are higher at the surface than aloft.â€
Yes, density varies with height, but so does mean kinetic energy. That was demonstrated by the passage where I said the following. “In the extreme case in which $latex K=E-mgq_z$, i.e., in which Molecule 1 gets the entire system energy in the first macrostate but not in the second, the hyperparaboloid height is zero for the first macrostate but greater than zero for the second: the ratio of the first microstate’s probability density to the second’s is zero. For the same two kinetic energies, however, the probability-density ratio would have been non-zero if Molecule-1’s altitude $latex q_z$ had been lower: the kinetic-energy probability-density distribution differs for different altitudes. In particular, the mean kinetic energy is higher for lower altitudes.â€
I know this is conceptually difficult, so I’ll try an analogy. The analogy isn’t precise, but it’s easier to grasp, and it may help you see that density isn’t the only thing that varies with height. Or maybe it won’t
Consider a process that consists of three consecutive rolls of a fair die. Envision the $latex 6^3=216$ microstates as uniformly spaced points in a three-space (roughly analogous to phase space even though it’s oddly dimensioned) in which the different dimensions represent different rolls of the die, and in which equally spaced locations on each axis represent the different die faces. The 216 microstates thus occupy a cube in that three-space. All microstates are equally likely, and the probability of any defined macrostate is proportional to the number of microstates of which it consists. Absent any constraints, for example, the macrostate defined by the first roll’s coming up 5 is just as likely as the one defined by the first roll’s coming up 1 (or any other number): each consists of 36 microstates occupying a respective plane whose projection onto the first-roll axis is a single, first-roll-outcome-representing point.
But now suppose we impose a constraint analogous to the one that results from assuming that a certain amount of the total energy is taken up by Molecule 1. Let’s say we so screen results as to restrict consideration to those whose rolls’ sum is 8. Now instead of filling a cube the microstates all lie in a plane that diagonally slices the cube, and instead of filling a square the points that represent a macrostate of the type we just described are restricted to a line segment thereby associated with that macrostate. More important, the line segments representing different macrostates similarly defined by different sums have different lengths. The macrostate defined by the first roll’s coming up 5 is represented by only two points, so it is only one-third as likely as the one defined by its coming up 1: the latter is represented by six points, so its entropy is higher.
And here’s the effect whose analogy to the ideal-gas-column phase space we want to emphasize. If the constraint sum is 7 (read higher altitude), not only are the line segments shorter (read fewer molecules) than if the constraint sum were 8 (read lower altitude), but the probability distribution thereby implied has a different shape; the first-roll-is-5 (read higher–kinetic-energy) macrostate is now only one-fifth, not one-third, as likely as the first-roll-is-1 (lower-kinetic-energy) macrostate. That is, the tighter constraint (higher altitude) skews the (analogous-to-kinetic-energy) distribution downward.
lucia:
The old saying “you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip” comes to mind. If you can’t pull that information from the data, then you … just can’t.
This reminds me of David Rose running a story a couple of years ago when we had a one year bump up in ice
I would suspect that Nick would be perfectly happy to criticize this (appropriately) for conflating weather with climate. But we have the same thing happen with temperature, and the swing is in a direction that Nick “likes”, and here he and Sou are defending it as if it had any special meaning.
Sou didn’t say that, and neither did Nick, but anyway, it’s a record for now. Remember we’ve seen before 0.02 differences get erased in the reconstructions as more data comes in.
This isn’t like reading a single thermometer, it’s the output from a complex set of algorithms, whose value changes as we get more data, and whose value changes as the algorithm gets tweaked. So just because there’s a 0.02 difference right now, doesn’t mean the difference will stay positive.
Brandon put up something similar in the context of BEST.
lucia: “The physics would be the meaning of the terms in “equation 1″ and the explanation of why the terms are in equation 1 and what they represent.”
Well, I can do go through the equations, but we would still be at the level of theoretical mechanics. The theoretical-mechanics assumption is what I said it was, and the equations follow from that. Yes, it’s abstruse. Do I like it? No. Perhaps this phase-space stuff is over your head. That would be understandable; it sure gives me headaches. But that’s the nature of the problem. Science is hard. Or at least it is for me.
I can go through the equations if you want, but it’s not worth the trouble if you’re just going to claim it isn’t physics.
Joe,
I’ve read your explanation of what you perceive to be Dr. Brown’s argument and I’ve read Dr. Browns argument. I’ve concluded the reason you think his argument is flawed is you don’t understand his argument. Or at least, you leave out elements that are important to his argument when you analyze the logic and find it wanting.
I don’t think it’s worth discussing much further. I’d say more, but I don’t think it’s useful.
Carrick (#134749) —
Curry linked to a discussion of the hottest year announcement at the Capital Weather Gang. Kerry Emanuel’s take: “I think it is a mistake to focus on single years, whether they be cold or hot.”
Joe
I thought that’s what I invited you to do: discuss the assumptions and the physics. But you did something else: discuss the math. That you might perceive this as “the level of theoretical mechanics” is neither here nor there. You have discussed the math and not the physics. It may well be that you can discuss physics– in the sense that ‘you are able to do so’, but you have not done so.
LOL! I’m telling you that I an inviting you to discuss the phenomenology. For some reason you are not doing so. My reasons for inviting you to discuss the phenomenology is that it matters more than the math. It is not because I don’t understand the math!! That’s just hilarious.
I 100% believe that science is hard for you. Likely math is also hard for you. You might find science less difficult if you recognized the difference between the bits that are science and the bits that are math.
That said: it’s not my job to try to instill knowledge into your head. But I’ve pretty well become convinced that your criticism of Dr. Brown is misguided and based on your not understanding his argument. I’m not going to claim his argument is perfect– only that your criticism clearly falls short. Other than that, I’m dropping this because the shortcomings of Joe Born’s argument aren’t sufficiently important for me to worry further about them.
Joe, I came back and saw this again and realized that I was really being too kind.
The sense in which what I wrote is true is:
(a) ergodicity doesn’t account for the effects of collisions at all.
(b) you probably meant isotropy. (But who knows.) but
(c) if you did, assuming isotropy either implicitly or explicitly does not entirely account for the effect of collisions and in any case (in fact, it’s a stretch to suggest that it does so.)
(d) there is no particular evidence ‘isotropy’ was assumed overall since gravity works in the direction ‘z’ which which is thus, different from the other directions
(e) if you did not mean isotropy, but actually meant “ergodicity”, you need to hunt down a dictionary. Because the assumption that time averages and ensemble averages interchange has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not collisions are accounted for.
But do go ponder some more. Perhaps if you ponder a bit more you will arrive at realizing that there are things you don’t understand and that misusing term and concepts or intimating that you somehow do know by throwing around terms like “louville”, ‘ergodicity’ or ‘phase-space’ isn’t going to fool people into believing you have clue one about what you are talking about.
I went back through my old files pulled out all of the old annual series I had for GISTEMP.
I’ve placed the archive of files here.
Here’s a quick and dirty plot showing the amount of variation from year to year, in the reconstruction.
Note that I interpret this as an estimate of the uncertainty in the “recorded global temperature” (that is, it gives us an idea how the recorded temperature will vary), rather than a measurement uncertainty in the sense of difference between measured and actual temperature.
lucia: “But I’ve pretty well become convinced that your criticism of Dr. Brown is misguided and based on your not understanding his argument.”
Just for the benefit of any subsequent visitor who may have an interest in the subject, note that I had explained above why the perpetual-heat-flow conclusion was based on the B-E Law and why the B-E Law is unwarranted. Note also that Ms. Lijegren provided no reasoned argument for, e.g., that conclusion’s not depending on the B-E Law or the B-E Law’s being true. She betrayed no ability to do any better than the just-quoted conclusory statement. (And if you have been unable to identify the relevance in other comments, such as her claims that I mistook “ergodic†for “isotropic,†that’s because any relevance is extremely remote.)
Sadly, this is not atypical. I’ve had some experience with this issue since Dr. Brown published his proof, and so far almost all disputants avoided both relevant arguments, preferring inapposite tangents.
I recall only two exceptions. In one exception, a non-scientist commenter stated that Dr. Brown had not, as I contend, assumed the B-E Law. In the other exception, on the other hand, Dr. Brown himself propounded the B-E Law explicitly, thereby arguing its truth.
Since the latter exception was the high-water mark, I’ll report here Dr. Brown’s argument in favor of the B-E Law: thermal coupling does not mix the two systems’ molecules, so it could not affect their respective equilibrium lapse rates. I am of a different opinion: equilibrium lapse rate is a statistic of the allowed microstates, and thermal coupling so relaxes the erstwhile-isolated system’s constant-energy constraint as vastly to expand the microstate ensemble, thereby changing its statistics—including its equilibrium lapse rate.
For a short time yesterday I had some hope of actually discussing those issues with someone who might comprehend them. Ms. Liljegren’s hiding this morning behind the bizarre argument that a tenet of theoretical mechanics is mathematics, not physics, showed that my hope was forlorn.
Trollissimo!
You have not a clue what you are talking about. Sort of like a dead person doesn’t realize they are dead, but everyone else does. You can’t convince technically competent people your wacko POV is right because… well… because it is indeed a wacko POV. Your ‘understanding’ is comically wrong; there is zero evidence of a non-zero lapse rate at equilibrium. Maybe you should find something else to waste your time on.
Joe,
That would be Dr. Liljegren to you. 🙂
It is true that I am not going to waste more time responding to your post. Those who visit can decide for themselves what that means.
As for this:
I am hardly “hiding” nor was my statemtent “bizarre”.
In response to your goobledygook like this:
I will continue to tell you that statements about “probability” and “phase space” are mathematical statements, not physical. The physical parts of the problem are statements like “energy is conserved”, or “mass is conserved”, descriptions of the types of energy in the system (i.e. gravity, momentum, electrical etc.). Applying the chain rule, applying the theorem of Gauss, manipulating surface intergrals and volume integrals and so on is math.
lucia: “That would be Dr. Liljegren to you.”
Sorry for flubbing the honorific.
lucia: “I will continue to tell you that statements about ‘probability’ and ‘phase space’ are mathematical statements, not physical. The physical parts of the problem are statements like ‘energy is conserved’ . . . â€
I find semantic arguments pointless, but I suppose I should provide a comment here for the sake of those fortunate enough to have avoided the arcana of statistical mechanics.
Length, mass, charge, and time are all represented by scalars. Position and momentum are represented by vectors. The combination of all system molecules’ positions and momenta is referred to in statistical mechanics as a “microstate,†which is represented by a vector. The combination of all of a system’s possible microstates is referred to in statistical mechanics as a “phase space,†which is represented by a vector space.
I’ll leave to others to decide whether “physics†or “math†better characterizes discussions of those quantities—and whether anything turns on that characterization.
Joe,
It’s always amusing for someone to launch their own long winded and confused theories about semantics with “I find semantic arguments pointles…” Interesting you did so. Though I realize you likely consider a response to your longwinded theory pointless, here it goes:
Scalars are mathematical concepts. Mass is an instance of a scalar. Number of letters in an alphabet is an instance of a scalar. The former happens to be a physical property; the latter has nothing to do with physics. The fact that many instances of scalars have nothing to do with physics should demonstrate that ‘scalars’ are not “physics” themselves. Scalar is a mathematical concept that happens to be useful in physics as well as other applications (like accounting or linguistics.)
The fact that mathematical concepts are used in physics or can be used to describe physical quantities does not turn “math” into physics.
If you only discuss the mathematical aspects of a problem, you are discussing the math.
As for the honorific: If you are going to riddle your comments addressing people by their titles, you should use the correct one. Especially if it is your intention to cast aspersions on the people you discuss.
SteveF (Comment #134774) January 18th, 2015 at 4:01 pm
Troll definition “You have not a clue what you are talking about. Sort of like a dead person doesn’t realize they are dead, but everyone else does.”
Sort of a perfect description, right, technically wrong, but perfectly right.
Thanks for this gem.
I liked it.
Brief flicker of life from angech.
I may have erred when I wrote, “Also, fair enough†in the above comment about Dr. Brown’s assumption that, as I expressed it, “thermally coupling the silver wire to the column would impose a common lapse rate on the two systems.â€
In a proof by contradiction a premise is refuted by showing that it leads logically to a false conclusion. The proof is faulty if its reasoning is based on something inconsistent with the premise, or if the effective premise actually differs from that which is to be refuted.
My objection to Robert G. Brown’s silver-wire proof was that its actual premise differed from the one he attempted to refute. The one he attempted to refute was that at equilibrium an ideal-gas column disposed in a gravitational field would exhibit a non-zero lapse rate.
But his actual premise, I objected, was a combination of that proposition and the proposition that thermally coupling the gas column to another system would not affect the gas column’s equilibrium lapse rate. So, I implied, he actually proved only that a gas column’s equilibrium lapse rate couldn’t be non-zero IF it were unaffected by thermal coupling. However, I’m no longer sure he proved even that.
Dr. Brown assumed that thermal coupling would—as we infer from our observations of the zero-equilibrium-lapse-rate world—impose a common lapse rate on the coupled systems: that at equilibrium the two systems’ mean kinetic energies per molecule are required to be equal at each thermal-coupling point. Frankly, I assumed that, too. After I wrote, “Also, fair enough†above about that assumption, though, I realized that I wasn’t so sure that under the non-zero-equilibrium-lapse-rate premise—which must prevail throughout the proof—that assumption really is “fair enough.â€
To extrapolate to conditions that would prevail under the non-zero-equilibrium-lapse-rate premise of Dr. Brown’s proof, let’s drastically reduce the gas column’s number of molecules to two, and let’s give those two molecules different masses. Note that at any given altitude the mean kinetic energy of the more-massive molecule is less than that of the less-massive one; when they have equal kinetic energies and collide, the less-massive molecule always gains energy at the more-massive one’s expense. If we look at the two molecules as two thermally coupled systems, we see that at equilibrium such systems’ mean kinetic energies per molecule are not necessarily equal.
Yes, yes, I know. A single molecule is not a gas. What it’s undergoing is ballistic motion, not thermal motion. The effect I just pointed out is attenuated as the number of molecules increases. I’ve heard all those arguments. But they describe differences only in degree.
True, the effect is attenuated, but it is not extinguished entirely. So the fact remains that, to the extent that a non-zero equilibrium lapse rate does prevail—as it must according to the premise of Dr. Brown’s proof—thermal coupling may not necessarily imply equal mean kinetic energies per molecule. And Dr. Brown’s proof may therefore include another unfounded assumption, another difference between his proof’s ostensible premise and its actual premise.
Again, I don’t disagree with the essence of Dr. Brown’s overall equilibrium-isothermality conclusion; in fact, his conclusion was my reaction to Velasco et al. from the very start. But I remain convinced that proofs such as Dr. Brown’s based on finding perpetual undriven heat flow are invalid.
Another sign of trollishness is cross posting. The identical post above can also be found at Science of Doom.
I read what Joe wrote above and remain convinced that Joe is blowing hot air.
DeWitt Payne: “Another sign of trollishness is cross posting.”
I made an error. The error occurred in two places. So I admitted my error at both places; it’s possible that not everyone who reads this blog also one reads the other one.
What do you do when you discover that you’ve made an error?
lucia: “I read what Joe wrote above and remain convinced that Joe is blowing hot air.”
Well, our opinions are products of our respective experiences, and your comment is no doubt a product of yours. But my experience is different.
Specifically, you asked that I explain how the Román et al. and Velasco et al. papers arrive at their (again, minuscule) molecular-potential-energy gradient. I responded by saying that those papers were based on “the conventional assumption that the probability of finding system in any particular region, or ‘macrostate’ of its phase space is proportional to that region’s volume.†I observed that in a finite quantity of gas the molecular-kinetic-energy distribution inferred from that assumption has a hard limit, i.e., equals zero above that limit, and that because of higher altitudes’ greater molecular potential energy the hard limit on kinetic energy is lower at high altitudes than at low altitudes. I accordingly concluded that with altitude the mean-molecular-kinetic-energy distribution not only differs in amplitude but also so differs in shape that the mean kinetic energy per molecule, not just the density, is lower at higher altitudes than at lower ones.
Despite that explanation, you insisted that only density (or pressure) varied with altitude. Now, my experience extends to decades of dealings with extremely capable—and some not so capable—scientists and engineers in a wide variety of disciplines, and I know that everyone, no matter how bright, makes an obvious mistake such as that from time to time, so I didn’t criticize it.
Additionally, though, you simply dismissed my conclusion without explaining how you thought a lower hard limit at higher altitudes could possibly result in anything but a distribution whose shape differs with altitude. Instead, you preferred to quibble about whether my explanation was physics or math. You proceeded to tell me that I was wrong without explaining why.
As I say, your experience no doubt differs from mine. But my experience is that those who thus decline to engage substantively are more likely to be the ones blowing hot air than those who do provide substantive arguments.
Joe Born
My reaction to this is: You appear to have difficulty interpreting what people say.
Good luck trying to find someone to engage “substantively” with your theory. I’m content to let you continue to hold an opinion about the merit of your own argument that differs from mine.
Joe Born,
Well, at the risk of getting severely beaten up by other commenters, I agree with you that Dr Brown’s refutation is flawed. I agree with his conclusion, and disagree with Jelbring’s hypothesis, but Dr Brown’s refutation does not disprove Jelbring. Jelbring did not argue that temperature would always return to its same value (at some fixed reference elevation); he argued that the temperature gradient would always be the same. In fact, in his paper, he specifically states:
Dr Brown on the other hand assumes that if electrical or heat energy is removed from a closed system by his silver wire, and the wire is then disconnected, that the total energy content of Jelbring’s system is unaffected; i.e. that both the lapse rate and the temperature at some reference elevation would return to their original values. Hence, Dr Brown claims Jelbring is inventing a perpetuum mobile.
It is not a perpetuum mobile if the temperature profile of the entire column is decreased each time a packet of energy is removed. This limits the energy content to a finite value. (If I heat up a large block of iron and then encase it in perfect insulation, except for a small conducting connection, I can extract heat from the system very slowly for a very long time, but there is no breach of 2nd LOT.)
Even Maxwell himself did not present such an argument against Loschmidt’s assertion of a temperature gradient in a gravity field. Instead he argued that there was a breach of the LOTs by dint of the fact that you could set up a break-even heat engine with two columns, a far weaker argument.
In practice, you can derive Jelbring’s hypothesis very easily using the ideal gas law under the assumption of no heat conduction. If you introduce heat conduction, then the system becomes isothermal. If you introduce an external heat source (even a very small one), then the equilibrated system moves to the adiabatic lapse rate.
In practice the whole question is somewhat irrelevant to any real life physics. Any open system in practice will exhibit a lapse rate. The main problem that seems to be out there arises from an unsupported assumption that the lapse rate CAUSES the surface temperature to be elevated. In reality, if an optically transparent gas is added to a dry planet that previously had no atmosphere, the surface temperature should not change very much, but there would still be a temperature lapse rate apparent in the atmospheric column.
I hope you do not think that my comments are ex cathedra. they are not intended to be.
Test
Joe Born,
For what it’s worth, I agree with you that Dr Brown’s refutation of Jelbring was flawed. I also believe that his conclusion is essentially correct and that Jelbring’s hypothesis is incorrect.
Jelbring’s hypothesis related to the gradient of the temperature profile. Dr Brown assumed that both the gradient and a reference temperature would be unaffected by energy removal in order to argue that Jelbring had produced a perpetuum mobile. I can see nothing in Jelbring’s paper which would support that. If Dr Brown’s silver wire removed some energy and the entire temperature profile shifted down, then the total releasable energy is seen to be finite and there is no breach of 2nd LOT.
Even Maxwell did not argue this point when dealing with Loschmidt. His Gedanken involved two columns with differing gradients standing on a metal conducting plate. He argued that a connection at elevation would produce a break-even heat engine; he did not believe that it would produce a perpetuum mobile, but that, with waste heat flowing back into the system, it would permit 100% of the released energy to be converted to work.
You are probably aware that Jelbring’s hypothesis can be derived directly from the ideal gas law, assuming no conductivity. With conductivity, the column becomes essentially isothermal (ignoring hard vacuum behaviour at the top of the column). As soon as an external heat source is added, even a very small source, the equilibrated condition has a lapse rate.
In practice, this means that we should always find a lapse rate, since such closed systems do not exist outside of Gedanken experiments.
Joe Born,
For what it’s worth, I agree with you that Dr Brown’s refutation of Jelbring was flawed. I also believe that his conclusion is essentially correct and that Jelbring’s hypothesis is incorrect.
Jelbring’s hypothesis related to the gradient of the temperature profile. Dr Brown assumed that both the gradient and a reference temperature would be unaffected by energy removal in order to argue that Jelbring had produced a perpetuum mobile. I can see nothing in Jelbring’s paper which would support that. If Dr Brown’s silver wire removed some energy and the entire temperature profile shifted down, then the total releasable energy is seen to be finite and there is no breach of 2nd LOT.
Even Maxwell did not argue this point when dealing with Loschmidt. His Gedanken involved two columns with differing gradients standing on a metal conducting plate. He argued that a connection at elevation would produce a break-even heat engine; he did not believe that it would produce a perpetuum mobile, but that, with waste heat flowing back into the system, it would permit 100% of the released energy to be converted to work.
“… if two vertical columns of different substances stand on the same perfectly conducting horizontal plate, the temperature of the bottom of each column will be the same; and if each column is in thermal equilibrium of itself, the temperatures at all equal heights must be the same. In fact, if the temperatures of the tops of the two columns were different, we might drive an engine with this difference of temperature, and the refuse heat would pass down the colder column, through the conducting plate, and up the warmer column; and this would go on till all the heat was converted into work, contrary to the second law of thermodynamics. But we know that if one of the columns is gaseous, its temperature is uniform. Hence that of the other must be uniform, whatever its material.” Maxwell 1877
You are probably aware that Jelbring’s hypothesis can be derived directly from the ideal gas law, assuming no conductivity. With conductivity, the column becomes essentially isothermal (ignoring your hard vacuum behaviour at the top of the column). As soon as an external heat source is added to the base, even a very small source, the equilibrated condition defaults to a lapse rate.
In practice, this means that we should always find a lapse rate, since such closed systems do not exist outside of Gedanken experiments.
Hi Lucia,
I’ve tried twice to get a comment through. It was pretty mild and no URLs. Did they get diverted to moderation?
Paul K,
The “Doug Cotton” word is ‘Loschmidt’. That got the comment mixed up.
I note that the flaw you perceive in Brown’s argument has little to no overlap with the flaw Joe appears to be describing.
My problem with Joe Born is the things he surrounds his discussion with. There are too many things wrong in the ‘physics’ of what Joe himself says, and it’s not worth trying to dive into those. Worse yet, discussing with him would be an unending waste of time because he puts words in my mouth. Sorry, but it’s just not worth time debating with that sort of behavior.
Lucia, thanks.
I will avoid the L word.
I think the argument that I am presenting is genuinely buried in Joe’s comments, but it is very difficult to extract because of his own unintentional diversions.
I would also add that I have exchanged a few blog-comments with Joe on and off over the last few years, and it is decidedly unfair to call him a troll. He is struggling to find the truth like the rest of us, and he will accept a valid argument once he gets it. I think one of the problems, looking through the Science of Doom thread was that no-one actually addressed the key point that he was raising, probably because it was hidden behind two separate diversions – non-asymptotic kinetics and the assertion that the connected system would find a new equilibrium – under the Jelbring model (aka the “L” model), it will only do this if the external connection is broken, otherwise the behaviour is transient and then “semi steady-state” temperature loss. His key point – that Dr Brown’s refutation is not rigourous because he has not proved a perpetuum mobile was not addressed properly by anyone, as far as I can tell.
Anyway, I wait to be told by Joe that this wasn’t really his key point, and to be told by DeWitt that my argument is doo-doo anyway. (smiley)
Paul_K,
I haven’t called him a troll.
With respect to Joe, I tried to engage him on Joe’s own claims about the temperature gradient. See
lucia (Comment #134696)
I’d have to hunt down Brown’s article to discover what he claimed Jelbring claimed and read Jelbring to discover what Jelbring actually claimed and spend time to decide what I think of the validity of Brown’s “proof” that Jelbring is wrong. I’m not going to do that because I don’t find the exercise interesting.
But I was interested in Joe’s ownclaims about the thermal gradient– and I said as much.
I realize that some Joe (or you) might consider the Joe’s discussion of “non-asymptotic kinetics and the assertion that the connected system would find a new equilibrium ” to be a “separate diversion”. Maybe it is for Joe (in which case, he ought to learn the danger of going off on tangents that are irrelevant to his main point.)
But to think this is a “separate diversion” or that we here or those at Science of Doom are not allowed to focus on that “diversion”, it seems to me that one must assume that Joe gets to indulge in all these “diversions” and then dictate that people must somehow ignore claims he is making during his quite long and involved “diversions”, and merely focus on “the main point”.
But Joe doesn’t get to decide what “the” main point is. What Joe can decide is to limit himself to focusing on the point he wants to discuss. If instead, he lauches off on to discussing statistical dynamics and making claims, people are allowed to engage in these the elements of Joe’s discussion.
Heck, people are even allowed to tell him they are uninterested in his “main point” (or hobby horse) but are interested in his “side claims”. As I wrote before: I am interested in Joe’s own claims about what happens– not whether or not Brown’s proof is flawed. It is– of course– the case that Joe’s own claims can be utterly specious and Brown’s proof may be invalid. My diagnosis of “hot air” relates to all the junk in Joe’s “diversions”.
Paul_K,
I think you’re under the misapprehension that a perpetual motion device has to actually be able to run forever. A perpetual motion device of the second kind is one that extracts energy from a single heat reservoir. It violates the Second Law, but not the First and doesn’t run forever. The thermal connection at the bottom of the two columns means that there is only one reservoir. Therefore, with the columns at equilibrium, the possibility of any heat flow between the tops of the columns at all is equivalent to a device of the second kind because work could be extracted from the temperature difference.
Also, if having a lapse rate is the equilibrium state, then breaking the connection at the top would mean that a lapse rate would have to be established again. If not, then you have proved that being isothermal is, in fact, the equilibrium state. And, of course, it is.
DeWitt,
I wasn’t aware the terminology “perpetual motion of the 2nd kind” existed. That the term “perpetual” is used to describe something that operates for a finite period of time is an odd choice. Such is english!
I was aware that one need not show perpetual motion to violate the 2nd law.
Paul_K: Off topic, but I just wanted to say that among the things I hope to do before I shuffle off this mortal coil is to learn some statistics so that I can comprehend the analysis you did some years ago of whether a CO2 signature could be found in the temperature record. Unfortunately, I seem not to be making much headway on my to-do list.
As to Dr. Brown’s proof, it would be a triumph of hope over experience for me to expect that its discussion at this site will become any less unedifying that it has proved to be so far, so I’m going to leave you to it.
Joe,
Is this an indirect request asking Paul_K to endorse your notions pertaining to “Román et al. and Velasco” and what you think can really happen in a column? Not a rhetorical question.
It appears to me that he’s described that as “a diversion”. Of course, it was you yourself who embarked on that diversion and introduced all sorts of claims of your own. That you find negative criticism of claims unedifying is no ones fault but your own.
lucia,
I don’t think you can have a true perpetual motion device of the second kind without also violating the First Law. If you eat the cake, you can’t return it to the plate unchanged.
Paul_K: Sorry, I didn’t mean to brush you off in that last comment; I’ve been rushed, and I failed to read your comments about the Science of Doom discussion. Also, I’m about to hit the road for a few days, so I’ll give you the Cliff’s Notes version.
I agree with you about the failure of Dr. Brown’s apologists to address Dr. Brown’s logical fallacies. In my view the major fallacy is that he implicitly relied on an unfounded assumption I’ve since dubbed “the B-E Law.†Some years later, however, Dr. Brown made it explicit and addressed it himself, but his argument was not compelling; he failed to recognize, as, paradoxically, I believe at least one of his apologists did, that coupling to another system so expands the ensemble of microstates available to the gas column as to change the resultant gradient in mean kinetic energy per molecule.
Although I remain agnostic as to the precise result of the experiment Dr. Brown mentally performs, I think I may disagree with you about how it would play out, but I’m not sure. Basically, I think there’s no way anyone could know that—in the parallel universe in which the gas would exhibit a significant equilibrium lapse rate—the combined system would not reach a thermal-equilibrium state. I think so because (1) we don’t know that coupling would not change at least the gas column’s equilibrium lapse rate, and (2) I’ve begun to question whether, in that parallel universe, the temperature difference between the two points of coupling would even have to be the same in the two constituent systems. I don’t think this is what you’re saying, but for a few days I won’t have time to come up with my own exegesis of your position.
Anyway, let me just sign off by saying why I think Dr. Brown’s proof ties disputants up in knots. The premise of his proof by contradiction—i.e., of that proof’s proposition to be refuted—is contrary to thermodynamics. That’s okay, but it makes the proof invalid unless that premise carries all the way through to the proof’s intended impossible result, which in this case is perpetual undriven net heat flow. If we instead arrive at the intended impossible result by alternatively assuming both the ostensible premise and its negative—in this case, by sometimes inconsistently with the premise applying a thermodynamics law—then all we’ve shown is that a contradiction leads to an impossible result. We haven’t disproved the ostensible premise. While I can’t see inside their heads, I think that Dr. Brown’s apologists are unwittingly assuming both the premise and its negative.
More specifically, thermodynamics says that any temperature difference, no matter how small, will cause net heat flow in a thermally conductive material: zero is the only no-net-heat-flow temperature gradient. This is both Fourier’s Law and that discipline’s definition of temperature difference. The proposition to be refuted, on the other hand, is that gravity necessitates a correction to the net heat flow that Fourier’s Law dictates: at least for the ideal gas of Dr. Brown’s thought experiment, the equilibrium lapse rate that in isolation his isolated gas column exhibits—i.e., the sole gradient at which no net heat flows through it—is some non-zero value. (Since his premise is contrary to the thermodynamics temperature definition, it forces us to interpret “lapse rate,†for the purposes of the silver-wire proof, as the gradient in mean kinetic energy per molecule—divided, of course by the appropriate multiple of Boltzmann’s constant—rather than the gradient in temperature as thermodynamics defines it.) Therefore, applying, e.g., Fourier’s Law within the logic trail that leads to perpetual heat flow would render the proof invalid; it would be inconsistent with the proof’s ostensible premise.
It’s all well and good to regurgitate various physical laws and results. But, unless those laws and results establish the B-E Law, they do not demonstrate the silver-wire proof’s validity. That’s why I can’t see the apologists’ point. What point are they trying to make by observing that the Velasco et al. gradient is too small to measure or that it doesn’t result in what thermodynamics would call a temperature difference? Is it that, as the B-E Law says, a larger equilibrium gradient would not be affected by thermal coupling even though the Velasco et al. gradient is? If so, I don’t think the point is a good one.
Anyway, gotta go. Please forgive my recent logorrhea episodes; I’ve been trying to bang these comments out too fast. And sorry for not addressing you position more directly, but I’d have to wordsmith it to avoid our just talking past each other, and I’m out of time.
Paul_K: Sorry, I didn’t mean to brush you off in that last comment; I’ve been rushed, and I failed to read your comments about the Science of Doom discussion. Also, I’m about to hit the road for a few days, so I’ll give you the Cliff’s Notes version.
I agree with you about the failure of Dr. Brown’s apologists to address Dr. Brown’s logical fallacies. In my view the major fallacy is that he implicitly relied on an unfounded assumption I’ve since dubbed “the B-E Law.†Some years later, however, Dr. Brown made it explicit and addressed it himself, but his argument was not compelling; he failed to recognize, as, paradoxically, I believe at least one of his apologists did, that coupling to another system so expands the ensemble of microstates available to the gas column as to change the resultant gradient in mean kinetic energy per molecule.
Although I remain agnostic as to the precise result of the experiment Dr. Brown mentally performs, I think I may disagree with you about how it would play out, but I’m not sure. Basically, I think there’s no way anyone could know that—in the parallel universe in which the gas would exhibit a significant equilibrium lapse rate—the combined system would not reach a thermal-equilibrium state. I think so because (1) we don’t know that coupling would not change at least the gas column’s equilibrium lapse rate, and (2) I’ve begun to question whether, in that parallel universe, the temperature difference between the two points of coupling would even have to be the same in the two constituent systems. I don’t think this is what you’re saying, but for a few days I won’t have time to come up with my own exegesis of your position.
Paul_K: Sorry, I didn’t mean to brush you off in that last comment; I’ve been rushed, and I failed to read your comments about the Science of Doom discussion. Also, I’ve tried a couple of times to remedy that omission, and my comments were rejected.
Paul K: I agree with you about the failure of Dr. Brown’s apologists to address Dr. Brown’s logical fallacies. In my view the major fallacy is that he implicitly relied on an unfounded assumption I’ve since dubbed “the B-E Law.†Some years later, Dr. Brown made that assumption explicit and addressed it himself, but his argument was not compelling; he failed to recognize, as I believe at least one of his apologists paradoxically did, that coupling to another system so expands the gas column’s microstate ensemble as to change the resultant gradient in mean kinetic energy per molecule.
Although I remain agnostic as to the precise result of the experiment Dr. Brown mentally performs, I think I may disagree with you about how it would play out, but I’m not sure. Basically, I think there’s no way anyone could know that—in the parallel universe in which the gas would exhibit a significant equilibrium lapse rate—the combined system would not reach a thermal-equilibrium state. I think so because (1) we don’t know that coupling would not change at least the gas column’s equilibrium lapse rate, and (2) I’ve begun to question whether, in that parallel universe, the temperature difference between the two points of coupling would even have to be the same in the two constituent systems. I don’t think this is what you’re saying, but for a few days I won’t have time to come up with my own exegesis of your position.
Paul K: I agree with you about the failure of Dr. Brown’s apologists to address Dr. Brown’s logical fallacies. In my view the major fallacy is that he implicitly relied on an unfounded assumption I’ve since dubbed “the B-E Law.†Some years later, Dr. Brown made that assumption explicit and addressed it himself, but his argument was not compelling; he failed to recognize, as I believe at least one of his apologists paradoxically did, that coupling to another system so expands the gas column’s microstate ensemble as to change the resultant gradient in mean kinetic energy per molecule.
Paul_K,
” In reality, if an optically transparent gas is added to a dry planet that previously had no atmosphere, the surface temperature should not change very much, but there would still be a temperature lapse rate apparent in the atmospheric column.”
.
Why do you think this? I don’t think this is going to be correct if the gas is ‘optically transparent’ at all wavelengths… UV to deep IR.
SteveF,
I’ve had this disagreement with Pekka Pirilla. A spherical planet exposed to sunlight with the rotation axis approximately perpendicular to the plane of the orbit will have a temperature gradient from the equator to the poles. That temperature gradient will cause convection even in a perfectly transparent atmosphere. That convection in turn will cause turbulence. In the presence of turbulence, the conditions for an isothermal atmosphere, i.e. thermal conductivity dominated by diffusion only, will not exist. The turbulent mixing will maintain a lapse rate in the atmosphere. In an isothermal atmosphere, potential temperature increases with altitude. Turbulence causes heat to flow down a constant potential temperature gradient. An isothermal atmosphere is not stable in the presence of turbulence.
Nick Stokes made this argument some years ago. I initially disagreed, but came over to his point of view. The problem is scale. It’s difficult to maintain diffusion only conditions on the mm to cm scale in the laboratory. The idea that you could maintain diffusion only conditions over thousands of kilometers horizontally and vertically in a gas with a surface pressure of 1 bar and a surface temperature gradient is a non-starter, IMO.
Now Pekka insists that convection will only happen in a relatively thin layer close to the surface and that the rest of the atmosphere will eventually have a constant temperature because it will effectively be the stratosphere, i.e. stratified with no convection. IMO, that needs to be modified to a constant potential temperature, i.e. a lapse rate. No large scale convection does not mean no turbulence.
Even if you assume that large scale convection only occurs near the surface, the thickness of the convection layer will still be less at the poles than at the equator. That means there will still be a pressure force gradient in the stratosphere and there will be horizontal movement. Movement means turbulence.
Note that diffusion only conditions implies that a multi-component atmosphere will not be well mixed. The components will have separate scale heights based on molecular or atomic weight, as happens in the Earth’s atmosphere above the turbopause at about 100km altitude.
DeWitt,
Sitting the planet in bright sunshine does mean non-uniform heating. But nobody said anything about sunshine, or the rate of planetary rotation, or the angle of that rotation. I was thinking more along the line of a planet with a uniform internal heat source and no external heating.
SteveF,
It isn’t a planet if it’s not orbiting a star.
But if you did have a body in deep space with only an internal heat source and no external heat source such that the surface temperature was isothermal, then a transparent isothermal atmosphere is a possibility.
re SteveF (Comment #134996)
SteveF,
I would summarise DeWitt’s argument (which I fully support) by saying that still-air planets cannot exist.
Even if we consider a non-planetary body with an internal heat source, in order to postulate zero turbulence, you would require a perfectly spherical non-rotating body, far enough into deep space to have no differential momentum variation from external gravity and receiving zero radiative input from any source. My suspicion is that it would take sufficiently long to get these conditions that the uniform temperature would be very very cold!
Paul_K:
(Yet another attempt to post.) Your analysis will necessarily differ from mine because (1) I don’t assume the gas is non-conductive even though Dr. Brown says initially that he does and (2) I don’t assume anything about the equilibrium lapse rate in his proof’s premise other than that it’s non-zero even though Jelbring asserted other features that I could have included. I’d explain those choices if I thought a comment long enough to do so would post; my comments keep getting rejected.
Paul_K:
Here’s why I think Dr. Brown’s proof ties disputants up in knots. The premise of his proof by contradiction—i.e., of that proof’s proposition to be refuted—is contrary to thermodynamics. That’s okay, but it makes the proof invalid unless that premise carries all the way through to the proof’s intended impossible result, which in this case is perpetual undriven net heat flow. If we instead arrive at the intended impossible result by alternatively assuming both the ostensible premise and its negative—in this case, by sometimes inconsistently with the premise applying a thermodynamics law—then all we’ve shown is that a contradiction leads to an impossible result. We haven’t disproved the ostensible premise. While I can’t see inside their heads, I think that Dr. Brown’s apologists are unwittingly assuming both the premise and its negative.
Paul_K:
More specifically, thermodynamics says that any temperature difference, no matter how small, will cause net heat flow in a thermally conductive material: zero is the only no-net-heat-flow temperature gradient. This is both Fourier’s Law and that discipline’s definition of temperature difference. The proposition to be refuted, on the other hand, is that gravity necessitates a correction to the net heat flow that Fourier’s Law dictates: at least for the ideal gas of Dr. Brown’s thought experiment, the equilibrium lapse rate that in isolation his isolated gas column exhibits—i.e., the sole gradient at which no net heat flows through it—is some non-zero value. (Since his premise is contrary to the thermodynamics temperature definition, it forces us to interpret “lapse rate,†for the purposes of the silver-wire proof, as the gradient in mean kinetic energy per molecule—divided, of course by the appropriate multiple of Boltzmann’s constant—rather than the gradient in temperature as thermodynamics defines it.) Therefore, applying, e.g., Fourier’s Law within the logic trail that leads to perpetual heat flow would render the proof invalid; it would be inconsistent with the proof’s ostensible premise.
Paul K:
In my view Dr. Brown’s major fallacy is that he implicitly relied on an unfounded assumption I’ve since dubbed “the B-E Law.†Some years later, Dr. Brown made that assumption explicit and addressed it himself, but his argument was not compelling; he failed to recognize, as I believe at least one of his apologists paradoxically did, that coupling to another system so expands the gas column’s microstate ensemble as to change the resultant gradient in mean kinetic energy per molecule.
Paul K:
Maybe the reason my comments are getting rejected is I’ve attempted to provide a hyperlink, namely, a link to Dr. Brown’s years-later explicit statement and defense of what I’ve called “the B-E Law,†the major unfounded assumption in his proof.
Here’s another attempt at that hyperlink: the B-E Law.
Paul_K:
Yes, the attempt just to provide that link just failed again.
Well, here’s what I would have said about it if I had been able to link to it. It’s all well and good to regurgitate various physical laws and results. But, unless those laws and results establish the B-E Law, they do not demonstrate the silver-wire proof’s validity. That’s why I can’t see the apologists’ point. What point are they trying to make by observing that the Velasco et al. gradient is too small to measure or that it doesn’t result in what thermodynamics would call a temperature difference? Is it that, as the B-E Law says, a larger equilibrium gradient would not be affected by thermal coupling even though the Velasco et al. gradient is? If so, I don’t think the point is a good one.
Paul_K:
Here’s my analysis. To the extent that Dr. Brown’s premise is an equilibrium gradient that exceeds Velasco et al.’s, we can’t know what would happen in the parallel universe of Dr. Brown’s proof. But we have no reason to rule out the following behavior. (1) There is a heat quantity of the isolated silver wire that would result in no net heat flow when the wire is thermally coupled as Dr. Brown states. (2) Despite no net heat flow, zero-mean fluctuations in heat contents will result in the coupling’s causing a change in the gas column’s equilibrium gradient. (3) I used to think that the result would be equal gradients in the coupled gas column and the silver wire at equilibrium. (4) I know it sounds non-physical, but, for reasons I gave in connection with the two-molecule-gas example, I am now not sure that at equilibrium the two coupled systems could not have different lapse rates.
Maybe just the URL without the hyperlink will work: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/06/satellites-show-no-global-warming-for-17-years-5-months/#comment-1568845>argument
Paul_K.
If you go to the February 6, 2014, WUWT post by Christopher Monckton called “Satellites Show No Global Warming for 17 Years 5 Months†and search for the word “interpolatory,†you’ll find Dr. Brown’s explicit statement and defense of his proof’s unfounded assumption.
Joe,
I don’t know why your some of your comments went to spam. I’ve fished them out.
De Witt,
You wrote:-
“I think you’re under the misapprehension that a perpetual motion device has to actually be able to run forever. A perpetual motion device of the second kind is one that extracts energy from a single heat reservoir. It violates the Second Law, but not the First and doesn’t run forever. The thermal connection at the bottom of the two columns means that there is only one reservoir. Therefore, with the columns at equilibrium, the possibility of any heat flow between the tops of the columns at all is equivalent to a device of the second kind because work could be extracted from the temperature difference.”
The Gedanken model which you are referring to was proposed by Maxwell, not Brown, and he was indeed claiming a breach of second law, a perpetual motion machine of the second kind, in your terms, because he could operate a heat engine at 100% efficiency.
The model proposed by Robert Brown was a single isolated column connected from top to bottom with an isolated silver wire.
I realised when I was looking for quotes from his article to explain the difference that I had misread Dr Brown’s article. I thought that his claim was that he could extract work forever from the silver wire – a perpetual motion machine of the first kind. In fact, his claim was that he could circulate heat forever – a breach of the 2nd LOT.
This does make a lot of what I wrote about the system’s response into gobblydegook – my solution assumed extracted work.
The question put on the table was not whether the column should be isothermal, but whether Dr Brown’s refutation of Jelbring was valid in demonstrating this. I now find that I misrepresented Dr Brown’s argument, and that I believe that it was “sufficient unto the day” in terms of refuting Jelbring. It did not however answer one of the questions posed by Joe, but I will try to deal with that in a follow-up post, if he is still engaged.
Joe,
Please do read my note to DeWitt, because I had misread Dr Brown’s original argument.
Let me try to play back to you my understanding of your various issues:
1) A proof of reductio ad absurdum requires a reliance only on the assumptions underlying the postulate you are trying to disprove. (Agreed. This is canonical. However, you are allowed to include well-established facts, provided that they are not disputed by the postulate.)
2) You believe the B-E law to be ill-founded because it is indeterminate.
3) If Velasco et al is correct, then we can postulate the existence of an isolated gas column which has a non-zero gradient. On the face of it, Dr Brown’s refutation of Jelbring precludes the existence of such an animal. Therefore either Velasco et al is wrong or Dr Brown’s argument is flawed.
I hope I’ve got this right.
First of all, let me restrict my comments to Boltzmann gas. This effectively means limiting the vertical height of the column to avoid going into an altitude where Velasco et al would postulate a small temperature gradient in the rarefied gas. (Recall that Brown’s aim was to refute Jelbring, so it is sufficient to show that there is a paradox arising in the more restricted lower interval.)
Let me start with the B-E law. There are only four assumptions we can make with respect to gas conductivity. (a) conductive heat flux is proportional to the temperature difference (b) conductivity is equal to zero (gas doesn’t conduct heat) or (c) conductive heat flux is a function of a difference in temperature potential rather than in temperature (d) conductive heat flux is unrelated to temperature difference in any form.
Assumption (a) gives rise to an isothermal column in contradiction to Jelbring. It is not “indeterminate”. (b) and (d) are both refuted by a huge amount of data, and can be discarded.
This leaves only option (c) to deal with. Jelbring himself defined the temperature gradient at which the gas would not conduct heat; if it did then his column could not be in equilibrium. This allows temperature to be converted to temperature potential or vice versa. Any gradient (dT/dz) above Jelbring’s gradient should induce conductive heat flow downwards, and vice versa. This is indeterminate in quantity but not in qualitative terms. We can assume that the conductivity downwards is greater than upwards. In particular, note that this is true even under the assumption that the average kinetic energy of particles decreases with height. It makes no difference to the outcome, which is that you will always have a flux generated in either the silver wire or the gas column. There is no pair of values of temperature at top and bottom of the column which will resolve this into equilibration. Hence the only solution is permanent heat flow in contradiction of 2nd law. Since Brown was trying to refute Jelbring, I think that the argument is “sufficient unto the day”.
Let me now try to deal with your point (3), which is much more difficult, since I do not know the answer with any certainty. Let us say that we lengthen the column to an altitude where a small temperature gradient becomes apparent; (if it exists at all) it can only be in the rarefied gas of the upper reaches of the column. The Fourier law becomes inapplicable over that upper interval; moreover, making a thermal connection between the rarefied gas and the silver wire is not straightforward. In a free molecule regime, the coefficient of accommodation – a measure of the efficiency of energy exchange between a gas and a solid surface – becomes low, and this represents an additional flux restriction. In this instance, to impart an average molecular temperature T in the gas, the temperature of the solid surface would have to be slightly higher than T. The higher one goes, the larger the thermal resistance to conductive flow and the larger the temperature difference at the gas-solid interface would have to be. These two elements should exactly match the small temperature drop between the bottom and the top of the wire to ensure no net heat flux in this system. The possible existence of this particular gradient, because of its nature, does not therefore invalidate Brown’s refutation.
Paul_K: Thank you for being the first person to engage my argument, and for doing so in a logical manner.
I disagree with you on a few points, but let me choose the one most central to the B-E Law and get to the others as I can. (I’m in the midst of a several-day road trip and am trying to steal some down time to address this. So this particular comment will undoubtedly leave something for later completion.)
First, I believe I agree with you about “temperature potential†if you don’t mean “potential temperature,†which is based on raising and lowering a gas packet adiabatically. Note, though, that this “temperature potential†is just temperature in accordance with the thermodynamic definition: when it exhibits no gradient, no heat flows. We can distinguish this from kinetic temperature, which is proportional to mean translational kinetic energy per molecule.
But then you and I part company. You tacitly assume two (or maybe three) things when you state that “you will always have a flux generated in either the silver wire or the gas column. There is no pair of values of temperature at top and bottom of the column which will resolve this into equilibration.â€
First, you assume—as Dr. Brown does—that the kinetic-temperature profile for a uniform potential temperature is not affected by thermal coupling to another system. Less abstractly, you assume that, if the sole non-zero (kinetic-) temperature gradient at which no net heat flows is x when the gas column is thermally isolated, it must be x when the column is thermally coupled to the silver wire; coupling can’t change it to some other value y.
Now, frankly I don’t have a clue as to what would happen when the silver wire gets coupled to it. Or, more correctly, that’s all I do have: a clue. Specifically, if you adapt the Román et al. derivation to the situation in which two identical gas columns get coupled to one another, you see that their equilibrium mean-molecular-kinetic-energy gradient falls by 50%: contrary to the B-E Law, thermal coupling changes the equilibrium lapse rate.
This is so because lapse rate is a property that emerges from random-particle motion that is subject to a constant-total-energy constraint. When an erstwhile-isolated system is coupled to another, that constraint is relaxed. So, while you are correct when you say of proofs by contradiction that “you are allowed to include well-established facts, provided that they are not disputed by the postulate,†the B-E Law is not such a well-established fact.
I’ll try to continue this later. For now, though, let me make a more-general observation, which is that unless they resort to statistical mechanics the various disputants are attempting to use thermodynamics to prove thermodynamics. Independently of whatever shortcomings there may be in Jelbring’s argument (or Leonard Weinstein’s over at Science of Doom), they raise a reasonable question. Thermodynamics is an empirically based science. Isn’t it possible that the resolution of the measurements on which it was based was not fine enough to detect the small (but, as is happens, still way too large) departure from Fourier’s Law that those guys propose? It is no refutation to say—as Dr. Brown does when he ultimately assumes that the gas is conductive—that Fourier’s Law says otherwise.
Why discuss hypothetical States with impossible parameters?
Gravity certainly plays a part in producing heat, presumably in perfectly normal physical ways without contradicting any laws.
Examples abound in Gravity waves and the friction of ice layers moving over land layers to name but a few.
However it takes a massive gravity field to produce a relatively small amount of heat in a gas which probably wouldn’t be a gas in the instances debated here.
Columns of gas in a gravity field with a single temperature source to heat them cannot ever be isothermal.
There always has to be a difference in density with height (less dense) so lower temperature at height.
Prof Brown’s wire must be as hot at the bottom as it is as cold at the top.
The heat in the system is constant, input in equals input out.
Hence there is no creation of new extra energy, no perpetual motion.
The import of GHG is purely in retaining more of the heat in the lower denser gas (if it has any GHG)
GHG makes the gas hotter before it can emit the IR radiation.
Wether the gas at the bottom has any minuscule heat from gravity at all innores the fact that the heat loss is from IR radiation which is more intense from the dense part of the column and less from the thinned out gas at the top of the column. The top is cold because it is thin and does not absorb enough energy to to be called hot.
Joe,
Good.
“First, you assume—as Dr. Brown does—that the kinetic-temperature profile for a uniform potential temperature is not affected by thermal coupling to another system. Less abstractly, you assume that, if the sole non-zero (kinetic-) temperature gradient at which no net heat flows is x when the gas column is thermally isolated, it must be x when the column is thermally coupled to the silver wire; coupling can’t change it to some other value y.”
I don’t have to make such strong assumptions, Joe. The final contradiction still arises even if we postulate a definition for temperature potential which is affected in some (unknown) manner by the thermal coupling, such that the new equilibrated potential gradient is different from before. All that is required is the lesser assumption of continuity in the newly invented statistical mechanics of large numbers of molecules plus second law. Say we take an adiabatically isolated column and leave it to reach equilibrium at some assumed non-zero temperature gradient dT/dZ. Conducted heat flux is zero at that gradient definitionally. Do you agree that the gradient in potential temperature must rise monotonically as the gradient in real temperature rises? We may not know its “functional form” in terms of kinetic definition of temperature, but this should always be true, simply by dint of continuity and 2nd Law.
I think you will find that this is all that is required to give rise to the final contradiction of 2nd Law in Brown’s Gedanken. Once Brown’s silver wire is connected to his column, the temperature gradient in the gas must initially increase. It cannot remain exactly where it is, and it cannot decrease. The temperature potential gradient must therefore increase (by some indeterminate but positive) amount, and this will induce some level of conductive flow in the gas column. This is all that is required to ensure that the system now cannot reach thermal equilibrium. It reaches a steady-state of permanent heat flow.
The only alternative is to define a temperature potential in such a way that the equilibrium gradient is always equal to zero. This then allows the wire and the column to come into isothermal equilibrium, but this is the same as assuming that gas conductivity in the vertical direction is always zero, something we have already dismissed as unrealistic because of hard data.
Erratum, last para.
Should read: “The only alternative is to define a temperature potential in such a way that its gradient is always equal to zero.”
Hi Angech,
You pose a profound question.
“Why discuss hypothetical States with impossible parameters?”
Having given the matter some equally profound thought, I have concluded that it is because some of us are total nerds.
In this instance though, it has been proposed by several published authors, on the basis of probably bad physics, that a lapse rate causes warming at the surface, in effect providing its own greenhouse effect. (This is different from saying that the greenhouse effect cannot exist without a lapse rate, which is a true statement.) So I guess it is worth examining the assumptions underlying their physics.
Your own comments are bouncing a bit between heated open systems, and the closed system proposed by Dr Brown. As I said upthread, we expect to find a lapse rate on all planets – even a theoretical planet with an optically transparent atmosphere – because the atmosphere will be heated from below and convective heat movement will dominate conductive heat on all planets. This means that the surface temperature will be greater than the temperature at altitude. But it does not mean that the surface temperature is higher than it would have been without the optically transparent atmosphere – and that is the fundamental difference in viewpoint.
“Prof Brown’s wire must be as hot at the bottom as it is as cold at the top.
The heat in the system is constant, input in equals input out.
Hence there is no creation of new extra energy, no perpetual motion.”
You are talking about a breach of 1st Law of Thermo, or what DeWitt would call a Perpetual Motion Machine of the first kind. (This was the mistake I made when I originally misrepresented Dr Brown’s argument.) The only way to avoid a breach of 2nd LOT, via what DeWitt would call a “Perpetual Motion Machine of the second kind”, in this closed system is to have an isothermal column, same temperature at base and top. That is what the whole kerfuffle is about. The fact that the density of the column varies with height, is a requirement to yield gravity/convective equilibrium, and can be derived directly from the ideal gas law, but this does not and cannot on its own define the temperature of the column. This latter requires thermodynamics.
angech,
I’ll quote Pekka Pirilla in the discussion at Science of Doom:
DeWitt, Paul K, et al,
“In some sense this whole discussion is irrelevant”.
.
Not just in some sense, in most every sense. Whether or not you might find a few microkelvin deviation from thermal uniformity where the atmospheric pressure approaches zero is in every way irrelevant; nothing more than the number of Angels that fit on the head of a pin. For any real system, there is zero deviation from uniform temperature in a perfectly insulated column of gas at equilibrium. It is, IMO a waste of time to focus on bizarre circumstances where you are in fact discussing the “atmospheric pressure” at 200 Km altitude…. where satellites wiz by at 8 Km per second and hardly notice the “atmosphere” they pass through. Why is anyone interested in this subject? I, for one absolutely am not.
SteveF,
That’s essentially what I said after Joe Born’s first post in this thread, for all the good it did.
There’s no such thing as an optically transparent at all wavelengths gas either. At any reasonable pressure there will be collisional induced absorption even for a noble gas. That doesn’t mean it’s a complete waste of time to consider what might happen if it did exist. For that matter, no real gas is an ideal gas. I’m pretty sure that you can’t directly measure the kinetic energy distribution in a gas. You can only measure the bulk properties like temperature, pressure, density, volume and heat capacity.
SteveF,
I will defend to the death your right to be completely not interested in the subject. (smiley)
There is some irony here though Steve in your sentence “For any real system…”. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever succeeded in showing a real system with zero deviation from uniform temperature, even in the laboratory. The closed system with uniform temperature remains a theoretical construct.
I don’t have much interest in the still gas problem either. It seems to me there are three modes of heat transfer here:
1. Molecular conductivity – the attractor is isothermal
2. Turbulent conductivity – the attractor is zero potential temperature gradient – lapse rate. On any practical scale, as DeWitt says, this far exceeds molecular.
3. With GHGs, radiative transfer. Gas-gas radiative behaves much like diffusion, and its attractor is also isothermal. This again dominates molecular. So in practice, it’s a battle between radiative and molecular. The lapse rate settles to the balance between the capacity of the turbulence to pump heat down (which improves as lapse rate is below DALR), and radiative leakage. However, in the atmosphere, there is a nett upward flux, which would induce a gradient. It works out that this generally just reduces the pumping burden, allowing a closer lapse rate to DALR.
Paul_K:
I thought I understood what you meant by the concept of temperature potential, but now I’m not so sure. What I thought you meant was a quantity that by definition exhibits a gradient of zero when no heat flows (if the material is thermally conductive). I thought you meant that what determines whether heat flows in a thermally conductive material is whether the gradient in temperature potential is non-zero. A non-zero gradient in temperature potential says heat flows. That is, at thermal equilibrium the temperature potential is uniformly zero, although in accordance with the silver-wire proof’s premise the real (kinetic) temperature—i.e., for a monatomic gas, the mean kinetic energy per molecule divided by three-halves Boltzmann’s constant—is (uniformly, I believe) non-zero.
By changing the random molecular motion’s statistics, coupling changes the equilibrium real-temperature gradient but leaves the equilibrium temperature-potential gradient unchanged at zero. Therefore, my answer to your question “Do you agree that the gradient in potential temperature must rise monotonically as the gradient in real temperature rises?†is no, not necessarily. If the column remains isolated, then the answer is yes. But coupling a system initially at equilibrium to another system causes the real-temperature gradient, in the fullness of time, to fall from its previous level to a level at which the gradient in potential temperature is the same as it was before: zero. So I don’t see how you get that “Once Brown’s silver wire is connected to his column, the temperature gradient in the gas must initially increase. It cannot remain exactly where it is, and it cannot decrease.â€
I infer from the foregoing that by “potential temperature†you meant something different from what I understood; I just can’t figure out what it is. Until we get that sorted out, I’ll ignore the “temperature potential†concept and consider three possible assumptions of which at least some combination is necessary if the nonzero-equilibrium-lapse rate assumption is to lead logically to perpetual heat flow. As I will then explain, though, I do take your point that the B-E Law is not quite necessary in order to arrive at the perpetual-heat-flow conclusion, so I was not entirely accurate in saying that Dr. Brown implicitly assumed it in the original post. As I mentioned, though, he did explicitly assert it last February 15th.
The first possible assumption is, as I mentioned in my last comment, the B-E Law: if the equilibrium temperature gradient in the isolated system is some non-zero value, the equilibrium temperature gradient in that system after it’s thermally coupled to another system has to be that same non-zero value. When I said “indeterminate†in a previous comment, I was talking about the correctness of that proposition. If in fact no non-zero equilibrium temperature gradient exists, then that proposition’s correctness is indeterminate; it’s like the proposition that if turtles could fly, they’d still be slow. How could you know whether it’s true?
The second possible assumption is that the silver wire’s equilibrium lapse rate is always zero. To me it’s not a self-evident fact that the silver wire’s equilibrium lapse rate would necessarily be zero in the universe of the silver-wire proof’s premise, in which the equilibrium lapse rate in the gas column is not zero. We know from Velasco et al. that even in our real universe an isolated gas column would exhibit a very tiny but non-zero equilibrium gradient in mean kinetic energy per molecule despite conduction. Are we absolutely sure that in the silver wire that gradient would nonetheless be exactly zero? I’ve been saying we can’t be, but, frankly, as I’m writing this I can come up with some fairly persuasive—but not quite dispositive—plausibility arguments for thinking that, yes, we can. Perhaps I can return to them later.
The third possible assumption is one that I’m sure everyone is making and that until a few days ago I was, too. That assumption is that the lapse rate between the points of coupling has to be the same in the gas column as it is in the silver wire; since at each point of coupling the gas and silver atoms are randomly banging into each other, the mean kinetic energy per molecule in the gas at that point has to be the same as that in the wire, right? It seemed self-evident.
But forget about the wire for a moment and consider a thermally isolated gas consisting of equal numbers of molecules of two different masses $latex m_1$ and $latex m_2$. You can think of it as two systems thermally coupled (but also, in this case, intermixed). Despite their thermal coupling—indeed, despite their intimate mixing—I’m pretty sure those two systems exhibit different lapse rates. Now, I haven’t done the math to show this, but a plausibility argument follows.
For a single-molecular-mass gas, Velasco et al. say that the equilibrium gradient in kinetic energy per molecule is uniformly mg/E, where m is molecular mass, g is the acceleration of gravity, and E is the total kinetic plus potential energy of all the gas’s molecules: the gas’s density and mean molecular energy per molecule both reach zero at the altitude E/mg, which is as high as a single molecule could possibly reach, since its potential energy would otherwise exceed the total system energy E. In the two-molecular-mass gas, the highest altitudes that a single molecule can possibly reach are $latex E/m_1g$ for the one molecule type and $latex E/m_2g$ for the other. So I’m guessing that when I do the math I’ll see that the constituents have different gradients $latex m_1g/E$ and $latex m_2g/E$ even though the two constituents are in intimate thermal contact. At the microscopic level, a collision between two different-mass molecules of the same initial kinetic energy always transfers kinetic energy to the less-massive molecule at the more-massive molecule’s expense.
If those two constituent gas systems have different lapse rates despite such intimate physical contact, why should we expect the gas column to have the same lapse rate as the silver wire?
Reflection reveals that the perpetual-heat-flow conclusion depends on some combination of the third assumption with one or both of the others. For example, the first and third assumptions would together enable one to reach the perpetual-heat-flow conclusion.
I think it’s also fair to say that combining the second and third assumptions would, too. Even if we don’t make the first assumption (the B-E Law)—that is, even if we recognize that coupling to another system will change the equilibrium gradient—it would be a stretch to say that coupling could change an isolation-state non-zero equilibrium gradient to the exactly-zero coupled-state equilibrium gradient that the second assumption imposes on the wire, so the third assumption’s requirement of equal gradients would lead to perpetual heat flow.
But I don’t think that one can validly rule out the possibility that, for instance, coupling the wire to the gas column would not just (1) change the gas column’s equilibrium gradient but not enough to equal the wire’s yet (2) equilibrium is nonetheless reached because tiny mean-kinetic-energy discontinuities prevail at the coupling points due to a bias in the direction of kinetic-energy transfer similar to the one I mentioned above.
What makes this a hard problem is that we are inclined to apply thermodynamics to it even though there is theoretical territory where thermodynamics’ writ doesn’t run. Dr. Brown made that mistake last February when he said that Velasco et al.’s conclusion was almost certainly wrong. He failed to recognize that a partition of the phase space so fine-grained as to distinguish between gradients of mg/E and zero does not result in macrostates whose probabilities bear the astronomic ratios to their complements’ that thermodynamics’ applicability is based on.
Paul K,
The issue here is that every reasonable understanding is that the DALR represents a convective stability criterion for the atmosphere, nothing more. Heat from below and you exceed that criterion…. convective overturning is inevitable. Brown was (sensibly) trying only to show that all the nutty claims about the DALR being due to the mere presence of a gravitational field, rather than heating from below, are just that…. nutty. Nitpicking over microkelvins at effectively zero gas pressure only prolongs the nuttiness, especially at WUWT, where utter nonsense often rules, the blind lead the blind, and Tisdale does his best to write long tedious posts that show nothing. The only worse subject for the technically retarded is whether adding vast quantities of CO2 to the atmosphere increases the atmospheric concentration; the answer to which is similarly obvious to the question of whether or not the presence of a gravitational field induces a lapse rate at thermal equilibrium. The sooner people stop discussing these silly subjects, the sooner that ‘adult conversation’ you have often called for about energy policy can take place.
Joe,
One step at a time.
Re Definition of “temperature potential”.
In my comment on this (#135017), I originally included a detailed description of “temperature potential” (NB not potential temperature as applied to convective processes) as the driver of conductive heat flow in the vertical direction. (Most physicists would say this animal is identical to temperature and apply the Fourier law to gases, but under your rules we are clearly not allowed to assume that here.) However, I realised after I wrote the description that it was much too narrow, since it was based on common assumptions of flow theory in a potential field, which are not necessary here. I wanted you to see that even if you set up some odd rules which allowed the equilibration gradient to change, that it would make no difference to the final outcome, provided it did not always change to zero. So I scrubbed the detailed description and left a deliberately very broad one, but, from your response, I think you do understand essentially what the term is intended to describe. It is defined as the potential which drives conductive heat flow in the gas. The only assumptions that I need you to accept are that (a) if you increase or decrease the gradient in actual temperature from an equilibrium state (i.e. a state where the gradient in temperature potential equals zero) then the gradient in temperature potential must also increase or decrease accordingly. Allowing the gradient in potential to be always equal to zero is equivalent to assuming that the gas is not conductive at all.
But you were correct to highlight that one of my sentences was misleading – I got the sign on the gradient the wrong way round! The para should have read:-
“Once Brown’s silver wire is connected to his column, the temperature gradient in the gas must initially decrease. It cannot remain exactly where it is, and it cannot increase. The temperature potential gradient must therefore decrease from zero (by some indeterminate) amount, and this will induce some level of conductive flow downwards in the gas column. This is all that is required to ensure that the system now cannot reach thermal equilibrium. It reaches a steady-state of permanent heat flow.”
I will deal with the other problems you raise in a separate post.
Joe,
The silver wire’s equilibrium temperature gradient may be non-zero.
Ok. Allow that it is non-zero. Now calculate the temperature difference from top to bottom, when the wire is in a no flow condition. Translate that to a difference in temperature in the gas column. There is still a very large decrease in dT/dz relative to the original gradient. So there is conductive flow potential in the gas and we have a breach of 2nd Law. In practice allowing for some small non-zero temperature drop in the wire makes no difference to the argument. You could propose a new equilibrium temperature gradient in the gas at exactly that temperature gradient, of course, but then, since you could change out the silver wire for a different conductor or swap out the gas, it would be exactly equivalent to arguing that gases have no conductivity in the downwards direction – something we know to be silly.
Joe,
“The third possible assumption is one that I’m sure everyone is making and that until a few days ago I was, too. That assumption is that the lapse rate between the points of coupling has to be the same in the gas column as it is in the silver wire; since at each point of coupling the gas and silver atoms are randomly banging into each other, the mean kinetic energy per molecule in the gas at that point has to be the same as that in the wire, right? It seemed self-evident.”
You should do some reading on “coefficients of accommodation”. As long as we stick with Boltzmann gases, this assumption is provably correct. At high molecular density/short mean path length, the energy interaction between solid surfaces and gases presents little mystery. However, as you move into rarefied gases, this does act as a flux restriction. There are thousands of papers providing measurements – even for low molecular densities – because of the interest of industry in producing vacuum containers and double glazing. If you restrict the height of the column to stay within reasonable limits, this problem does not arise, and it still means that Brown’s refutation (of Jelbring) is valid.
Joe,
“But forget about the wire for a moment and consider a thermally isolated gas consisting of equal numbers of molecules of two different masses m_1 and m_2. You can think of it as two systems thermally coupled (but also, in this case, intermixed). Despite their thermal coupling—indeed, despite their intimate mixing—I’m pretty sure those two systems exhibit different lapse rates.”
These are not two systems, and most definitely do not have two lapse rates. They are a single system with a single set of bulk properties, which includes adiabatic lapse rate, dependent on the (single) specific heat of the mixture. You might also note that thermal conductivity of such mixtures in practice can turn out higher or lower than those of the constituent gases. Rules for combining properties can be found in Chapman & Cowling –
The Mathematical Theory of Non-Uniform Gases, but this does not deal with the effects of gravity on kinetic theory – which probably should not surprise you.
Joe,
Final piece related to your response. You wrote:
“But I don’t think that one can validly rule out the possibility that, for instance, coupling the wire to the gas column would not just (1) change the gas column’s equilibrium gradient but not enough to equal the wire’s yet (2) equilibrium is nonetheless reached because tiny mean-kinetic-energy discontinuities prevail at the coupling points due to a bias in the direction of kinetic-energy transfer similar to the one I mentioned above.”
I think you probably now recognise that w.r.t. (1), the gas can’t be a “little bit pregnant”. It is either in an equilbrium state or it is not. To be in equilibrium, there cannot be a residual difference in temperature potential which can drive conductive flux. W.r.t. (2) this may be a valid argument if the connection is made in what is called a “free molecule regime”, and as I said a while ago, it might therefore actually be a reasonable way to reconcile the appearance of a small temperature gradient at low molecular density with Brown’s argument. However, it is not applicable to a connection made in relatively high density gas lower down the column. Note that for Brown’s argument to have validity he only has to show that there exists one instance of a breach of 2nd LOT. Therefore he has a lot of freedom of choice with respect to the set-up of his Gedanken and can clearly limit its height without damaging the validity of his argument.
Anyway, have a further think about things, and see if there is anything else outstanding. For the record, I do not believe that Brown’s argument is, or was meant to be, all encompassing. I do think that it is “sufficient unto the day” to refute Jelbring.
Paul_K (Comment #135033) February 1st, 2015 at 9:51 am
“Joe,“But forget about the wire for a moment and consider a thermally isolated gas consisting of equal numbers of molecules of two different masses m_1 and m_2. You can think of it as two systems thermally coupled (but also, in this case, intermixed). Despite their thermal coupling—indeed, despite their intimate mixing—I’m pretty sure those two systems exhibit different lapse rates.†These are not two systems, and most definitely do not have two lapse rates.”
I think this summarizes the argument about perpetual motion loops and explains why they do not exist.
Either you have independent systems with these “silly” rules or you do not.
If you couple a system by use of a wire and a gas column or by admixing 2 gas columns you have a new system which must be in balance, ie have a zero potential for change.
If you stick one gas inside the other it develops an equilibrium as explained by Paul K. If you stick the silver wire inside the gas you would not expect to see the wire having a different temperature to the gas at all levels.
Joining the wire to the gas outside but insulated is no difference in practice.
Paul_K:
Please bear with my responses’ sluggishness. As I mentioned, I have been taking an extensive road trip. In particular, today I drove ten hours to Phoenix, Arizona, and then watched the American-football team that represents the town I practiced law in win the national championship, so I am not just now really equal to taking my side of the dialog. But let me make a couple of quick comments and follow up later.
Okay, I think I was originally correct in my understanding of what you meant by “temperature potential,†and I think you do, too.
And I do accept that “(a) if you increase or decrease the gradient in actual temperature from an equilibrium state (i.e. a state where the gradient in temperature potential equals zero) then the gradient in temperature potential must also increase or decrease accordingly.†Or, rather, I accept it so long as everything else is equal.
But not everything else remains equal when the silver wire is coupled to the erstwhile-isolated gas column. Specifically, the relationship between temperature potential and actual temperature changes: the real-temperature gradient that corresponds to a zero gradient in temperature potential is reduced from the value it had when the gas column was thermally isolated.
As to whether “Allowing the gradient in potential to be always equal to zero is equivalent to assuming that the gas is not conductive at all,†I take no position. What I do take a position on is this: the gradient in temperature potential is always zero at equilibrium. This follows from your definition of temperature potential as “the potential which drives conductive heat flow in the gas.â€
Now let’s consider what you said about coupling the wire to the gas column.
First, you said, “Once Brown’s silver wire is connected to his column, the temperature gradient in the gas must initially decrease. It cannot remain exactly where it is, and it cannot increase.â€
I agree. But the reason for the decrease is that coupling raises from zero the potential-temperature gradient that corresponds to the temperature gradient that then prevails. Consequently, the temperature-potential gradient changes from zero to a value greater than zero, thereby driving a heat flow—which reduces the temperature difference toward a value that corresponds to a temperature-potential gradient of zero and thereby avoids steady-state heat flow. Therefore it is not true that “This is all that is required to ensure that the system now cannot reach thermal equilibrium.â€
I’ll try to flesh this out more tomorrow.
Hi again Joe,
“But the reason for the decrease is that coupling raises from zero the potential-temperature gradient that corresponds to the temperature gradient that then prevails. Consequently, the temperature-potential gradient changes from zero to a value greater than zero, thereby driving a heat flow—which reduces the temperature difference toward a value that corresponds to a temperature-potential gradient of zero and thereby avoids steady-state heat flow. Therefore it is not true that “This is all that is required to ensure that the system now cannot reach thermal equilibrium.†”
We are either still talking at cross-purposes, or this is truly silly, Joe. You cannot have a heat flow in the system in order to change the equilibrium gradient for conductivity in order to avoid a heat flow in the system. It is either flowing or not flowing.
Still under the twin assumptions that (a) you have an isolated column which equilibrates at a non zero temperature gradient and (b) the (real) temperature gradient for zero conductive flow can change under some unknown and undefined circumstances, consider what happens if you keep re-running Brown’s model at different column heights. Do you reach an equilibrium state (i.e. no flow) in the gas column in each experiment. If yes, then it is exactly equivalent to saying that there is always zero vertical heat flux in the gas, when it is in a gravity field, at any arbitrary temperature difference applied across it. We know that this cannot be the case – and not only from kinetic theory and thermodynamics, but from measurements dating back to the late 19th century. On the other hand, if you do have vertical conductivity, then the system resolves into steady-state flow – and, hence, Brown’s breach of 2nd Law.
Paul_K: “You cannot have a heat flow in the system in order to change the equilibrium gradient for conductivity in order to avoid a heat flow in the system. It is either flowing or not flowing.â€
That comment suggests to me that I haven’t communicated as effectively as I had wished, so let me explain in a little more detail the behavior that I don’t think can be ruled out under Dr. Brown’s premise. Before I do, though, I’ll ask that we hold one question in abeyance, namely, whether in the parallel universe of Dr. Brown’s proof we can rule out the possibility of a temperature discontinuity at the points of coupling. Yes, I know this is a significant point, and I want to address it, but I think we understand each other’s position on that, whereas I’m not certain this is true of the rest of the discussion, to which I now turn.
First, the column is isolated and has reached thermal equilibrium. It exhibits a gravity-caused non-zero gradient in kinetic temperature. That gradient is uniform: it prevails at all altitudes. Since the column is at thermal equilibrium, the gradient in the temperature potential you’ve defined must uniformly be zero. Also, because the column is isolated, we know that the total molecular energy, kinetic plus potential, is constant.
Now let’s couple only one end of the wire to the column. That coupling may cause net heat to flow initially between the column and the wire. If so, that flow dies out, leaving the gas column warmer or cooler than it was initially. Since the other end of the wire has not been coupled to the column, I think we can agree that we again have equilibrium.
But this equilibrium is different. Even though the transients have died out, the gas column’s total molecular energy is no longer constant; random exchanges of energy—which over time net out to zero—still occur between the gas column and the wire. The hard limit on the height to which a gas molecule can climb has been raised. The statistics of the molecular motion have changed. And, at least if there was no initial heat flow, they have changed in such a way that the gradient in mean molecular kinetic energy is smaller. That gradient may not be much smaller, because the wire’s heat capacity may be low. If the wire’s heat capacity were infinite, on the other hand, the gradient would be probably be zero. (I say “probably†because I’m not sure the localized nature of the coupling wouldn’t make the results different from those of the canonical ensemble, where the system is immersed in an infinite-heat-capacity heat bath.) In either case, your temperature potential exhibits a uniform zero gradient.
After everything has thus settled to an equilibrium condition, let’s thermally couple the other end of the wire to the gas column, at an altitude higher than the first end’s. To avoid questions about rarefied gases, let’s make the higher altitude one where the density is still relatively high. Now, temperature falls linearly while density falls (nearly) exponentially, so the temperature at the high end won’t be much lower than at the low end. But it will be lower. And, although for the sake of this discussion we are permitting temperature discontinuities at the points of coupling, we still expect that some initial net heat flow from the wire into the gas will occur at that upper point of coupling. But that dies out, leaving the wire with slightly less total heat on average than it had before the second end of the wire was coupled to the gas column.
If we then decouple the wire’s first end and re-couple it to the gas column at an altitude higher than the second end’s, another equilibrium state is eventually reached, one in which the wire is still cooler and the gas column is still warmer.
Now let me try to map that behavior onto your above-quoted comment. “You cannot have a heat flow in the system in order to change the equilibrium gradient for conductivity.†This “heat flow†would be the random energy exchanges that occur even at equilibrium between the wire and the column; they so change the gas-molecule motion’s statistics as to result in a different equilibrium gradient. “In order to avoid a heat flow in the system.†This heat flow would be actual net heat flow at a point of coupling. “It is either flowing or not flowing.†Well, I don’t know whether you consider the random energy exchanges to be “flowing,†but they do occur. And net heat flow does occur at the points of coupling, but those are transient. Therefore, random energy exchanges occur, as do transient net heat flows, but no steady-state net heat flow occurs.
Again, I have not addressed the question of temperature discontinuity at the points of coupling, but I wanted to make sure that we’re clear about the rest of my scenario. If you still believe that your above-quoted comment applies to the scenario I’ve described, then something remains unclear.
Joe Born (#135037) –
Glad you were rooting for the correct team!
HaroldW: “Glad you were rooting for the correct team!”
Well, I was during that game, but I’m in a mixed marriage: it’s my wife who’s really the Pats fan. I’ve been a Colts fan since before the Pats came into existence. (And that’s not an easy thing to be in Boston, I can tell you.)
Paul_K: “You should do some reading on ‘coefficients of accommodation.’ ”
Thank you. As a long-time consumer of experts’ opinions, I keep being reminded that I don’t know what it is I don’t know.
Paul_K: “These are not two systems, and most definitely do not have two lapse rates.â€
Whether they are two systems is in the eye of the beholder, of course. But at equilibrium it must be true that whether the gas’s different-mass components have different lapse rates is a quantitative question, not a qualitative one. If you consider a two-molecule “gas,†there is a range $latex E/m_1 g < z < E/m_2 g $ of altitudes z at which the less-massive molecule’s mean kinetic energy is non-zero but the more-massive one’s isn't. Of course, as the number of molecules increases, the resultant gradient difference becomes very small indeed. But at what number of molecules does it actually reach zero? 10^10? 10^23? 10^40?
Paul_K: “As long as we stick with Boltzmann gases, [the proposition that at the point of coupling the gas and silver wire must have the same mean translational kinetic energy per molecule] is provably correct. At high molecular density/short mean path length, the energy interaction between solid surfaces and gases presents little mystery.â€
It seems to me that you’re again making a qualitative argument where a qualitative one is needed. So let’s step back and review.
I saw in Velasco et al. that a tiny non-zero gradient in mean kinetic energy per molecule prevails at equilibrium, even in the bottom two feet of the gas column. And it must be true that perpetual undriven net heat flow would not result if a silver wire were coupled to an ideal gas. Not even a little. So, even though the gradient Velasco et al. found is exceedingly small, an explanation is necessary for its not causing even a little perpetual net heat flow, even if the silver wire is only two feet long and located near the bottom of the column.
Groping for that explanation, I suggested that it may comprise one or both of two effects, namely, coupling-caused equilibrium-gradient change and temperature discontinuities at the points of coupling. No one has suggested any other explanation.
And those effects are like the equilibrium gradient in that they emerge from random molecular motion. According to Velasco et al., the gradient that emerges from that random motion is exceedingly small, so the equilibrium-gradient change and/or temperature discontinuities that must emerge from the random molecular motion in order to explain the lack of perpetual heat flow must be correspondingly small.
But the premise of the silver-wire proof is that the gradient that emerges from random molecular motion is much larger. Relying on Velasco et al., of course, I say it isn't that large. But Dr. Brown says one can arrive at that conclusion without making any such quantitative, statistical-mechanical argument. So the question is, If we assume a universe in which that random molecular motion results in the larger gradient, how can we rule out the possibility that the same molecular motion would result in correspondingly larger equilibrium-gradient changes and/or temperature discontinuities—and thereby avoid the perpetual heat flow that Dr. Brown claims?
In response, you state that the absence of a temperature discontinuity is provably correct for a Boltzmann gas. I’ll take your word for that, but whether the gas is a Boltzmann gas is a matter of degree; so long as the gas is finite, for example, its statistics differ from the Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics by a small amount. And maybe that amount leaves enough discontinuity to prevent perpetual heat flow?
angech: “If you couple a system by use of a wire and a gas column or by admixing 2 gas columns you have a new system which must be in balance, ie have a zero potential for change.”
Please see my last response to Paul_K with regard to why different gas constituents may exhibit a small but non-zero gradient difference.
Joe Born,
Have you ever heard metaphors about “angels dancing on the head of a pin” or “mountains out of molehills”?
In view of the discussion’s abstruse nature, a bird’s-eye view of the issue may be in order.
In this thread we have been discussing a cleaned-up version of Dr. Brown’s refutation of a cleaned-up version of the Jelbring hypothesis.
Of the Jelbring hypothesis I say “cleaned up†because we’re concentrating only on the proposition that at equilibrium a thermally isolated gas column would exhibit a gradient in mean kinetic energy per molecule whose magnitude is of the order implied by the adiabatic lapse rate. We don’t concern ourselves with Dr. Jelbring’s arguments for that rate. Basically, the justification is that, as Leonard Weinstein implied at Science of Doom, the correction to Fourier’s Law that gravity necessitates is small enough to have avoided detection in the experiments on which the empirically determined Fourier’s Law is based.
Of Dr. Brown’s refutation I say “cleaned up†because his actual premise included the assumption that the gas’s thermal conductivity is zero: “It is assumed that the only mechanism for achieving equilibrium is physical (adiabatic) mixing of the air, mixing that in some fundamental sense does not allow for the fact that even an ideal gas conducts heat.†When Dr. Brown took the gas’s thermal conductivity into account, he discarded the silver wire and essentially just stated that Fourier’s Law requires heat flow independently of gravity until no thermal gradient remains: “Any such system would quickly reach thermal equilibrium – one where the top and bottom of the gas are at an equal temperature. Nor does one require a silver wire to accomplish this. The gas is perfectly capable of conducting heat from the bottom of the container to the top all by itself!â€
In response to the hypothesis that gravity necessitates a correction to Fourier’s Law, in other words, Dr. Brown’s response was, essentially, oh, no, it doesn’t. He identified no experiments that validated Fourier’s Law in the presence of gravity to the precision that would have been required to detect the hypothesized equilibrium lapse rate if it existed. Obviously, the oh-no-it-doesn’t argument was not very interesting, so we ignored it and instead considered the silver-wire proof without the zero-thermal-conductivity assumption.
To me, a statistical-mechanics treatment such as that of Velasco et al., which quantified thermodynamics’ precision, was the correct way to refute the Jelbring hypothesis, and I criticized Dr. Brown’s proof for its lack of quantitative limitations. Velasco et al., I pointed out, did confirm that thermodynamics is exquisitely accurate, certainly accurate enough to rule out a gradient of Jelbring-hypothesis size for any macroscopic-sized gas. But for any finite gas Velasco et al. also show that gravity still would cause a tiny gradient, whereas the logic of Dr. Brown’s proof extended to any gradient at all: “The magnitude of the difference, and the mechanism proposed for this separation,†he said, “are irrelevant.â€
In contrast, I felt his proof was illusory unless some aspect permitted the gradient found by Velasco et al. But Dr. Brown rejected the Velasco et al. result: “Velasco et al is almost certainly wrong in their conclusion. It is all about Maxwell Demon models. Microdynamics that preferentially sorts faster molecules spatially in equilibrium violates detailed balance and inevitably permits second law violations. Note that the second law doesn’t care about how large the violation is — if it is macroscopically violated you can, in principle, work free-lunch magic.â€
None of Dr. Brown’s more-serious apologists joined him in disputing the gradient that Velasco et al. found. Instead, despite the categorical nature of Dr. Brown’s arguments, his apologists attempted to read his proof’s overall conclusion in such a manner as to avoid conflict with the Velasco et al. result.
But thus concentrating on the conclusion is not the same as establishing the validity of the logic by which Dr. Brown reached that conclusion; they didn’t show that the proof’s nonzero-equilibrium-lapse-rate premise leads logically to the premise-refuting perpetual-undriven-net-heat-flow result. And it was that logic, not the overall conclusion, that I criticized.
One apologist approach was to define away the issue. No matter what the difference in mean molecular translational kinetic energy may be between locations on a thermally conductive body when no heat is flowing, said this approach’s proponents, those locations’ temperature difference is still zero, by the thermodynamic definition of temperature. Such an approach does avoid conflict with Velasco et al., but it fails to refute the kinetic-energy gradient that Dr. Jelbring implied.
Another approach was to read something like “in the thermodynamic limit†into Dr. Brown’s proof. Well, it’s certainly true that the overall conclusion of equilibrium isothermality is correct in the thermodynamic limit, and that result is indeed inconsistent with Dr. Jelbring’s theory. Again, though, that approach addresses only the overall conclusion, not the logic behind it.
An approach that I once actually had some hope for was mentioned most recently at Science of Doom by Pekka Perillä: “In physics values that are not measurable even in principle are usually not considered worth any attention. Therefore the calculated very small difference in the average kinetic energy is not of physical significance. Thus it does not contradict anything Dr. Brown wrote.â€
But Dr. Perillä didn’t make that argument very ably. Most measurements to some degree affect the quantity measured, and some measurements are therefore more difficult than others. The mere fact that a measurement is difficult doesn’t mean the quantity to which the measurement is directed doesn’t exist. Physicists don’t ignore the neutrino, gravity waves, or the Higgs boson, for example.
But if someone actually could show that the Uncertainty Principle precludes the Velasco et al. gradient’s being detected even in principle, then maybe there is some way to graft a logic-saving limitation onto the reasoning by which Dr. Brown purported to reach the perpetual-undriven-heat-flow result. No one has done that so far, though.
Finally, the only person other than Dr. Brown himself who really addressed the proof’s logic rather than its overall conclusion has been Paul_K. By making me defend what my position really is, he has forced me to tighten up my thinking. As I indicated in my last response to him, though, I think he’s making qualitative remarks about quantitative issues. And I think that by doing so he effectively begs the question.
hunter “Have you ever heard metaphors about ‘angels dancing on the head of a pin’ or ‘mountains out of molehills’?”
In a sense this is indeed an angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin discussion; I’ve said that myself But Dr. Brown’s proof has been widely relied upon as a “lovely” proof of the fact that it is greenhouse gases that make the atmosphere warmer, and in some circles whether they do remains a significant issue in discussions of global warming. So it would be best if arguments in favor of the greenhouse effect were not made in a fallacious manner.
That said, I admit that I have been possessed by morbid fascination at so many people’s inability to recognize that proof’s logical fallacies.
hunter,
Physically abusing a deceased equine also comes to mind along with ‘a distinction without a difference’. More specifically, if the difference is so small that it can’t possibly be measured, then for all practical purposes, it doesn’t exist.
DeWitt,
Dead horses indeed… that have long since been stinking horribly. The stupidest thread I have ever seen at The Blackboard; quibbling over microkelvins… under bizarre conditions disconnected from any meaningful reality. What a waste of time.
Maybe Lucia could split out all the silly lapse rate discussion under a separate post titled ‘trollissimo’.
SteveF,
You could conceivably measure microkelvins. If it exists at all, and I seriously doubt it, it would be many, many orders of magnitude smaller than that. It’s probably on the order of the energy of one molecule, according to Pekka Pirilla anyway. One mole of gas, 22.4 liters at STP, contains 6E23 molecules. But the idea of a microcanonical ensemble of gas molecules is itself a mathematical construct, a thought experiment. To exist, it would have to be perfectly isolated from everything else.
That would require that its container would have to be a perfect reflector of everything, including collisions with the contained gas molecules, a perfect insulator. Of course no such thing exists. It’s not at all clear that the concept of temperature even applies to it, much less a temperature gradient. Add a silver wire to the system, and you no longer have a microcanonical ensemble.
Actually the same sort of thing applies to constructing a container for a column of gas to test if it would eventually become isothermal. Besides the fact that it would take an exceedingly long time, you would still need a perfect insulator as the container. If not, then the temperature of the container walls would determine the gas temperature. A gas at 1 atmosphere is a pretty good insulator itself in the absence of convection.
Which leads to yet more questions: What’s the temperature of a perfect insulator? Does it even have a temperature?
DeWitt,
OK, so orders of magnitude smaller than femptokelvins, and you can’t measure that. All very silly and irrelevant.
DeWitt Payne: “You could conceivably measure microkelvins. If it exists at all, and I seriously doubt it, it would be many, many orders of magnitude smaller than that.â€
Actually, the most impressive thing about Velasco et al.’s result is how exquisitely accurate it shows thermodynamics to be. That’s the one positive thing Dr. Payne contributed to the discussion: about three years ago he prompted me to look closely at the Velasco et al. effect’s magnitude.
If I remember correctly, the lapse rate of a thousand-mole gas column whose bottom is at room temperature would be on the order of picokelvins per parsec.
And even that value requires interpretation. If lapse-rate measurements could be made instantaneously with unlimited resolution (and that’s something that is indeed impossible even in principle), it’s my recollection that the magnitudes of almost all measurements would greatly exceed that of the Velasco et al. value: for macroscopic quantities at room temperature the Velasco et al. value is the mean of a distribution whose standard deviation is orders of magnitude greater than the absolute value of the mean.
That’s another way of saying that at equilibrium the gas is indeed isothermal by thermodynamics standards. Similarly, all those results that rely on the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution are indeed accurate beyond the range of experimental refutation even though that distribution is based on an infinite-heat-bath assumption. As Dr. Liljegren correctly observed above, failure to mention the ever-so-slight inaccuracy, which in almost every case we can utterly ignore, would rarely make a proof what we would consider wrong.
But it was by ignoring such an inaccuracy in one of those rare cases in which it cannot be ignored validly that Dr. Brown arrived at his perpetual-undriven-heat-flow result. And it is from that erroneous result that he reached his overall conclusion. The silver-wire proof’s overall conclusion is indeed essentially correct, but it was reached by way of an erroneous result. Even if the conclusion had been absolutely correct, the proof would still have been a bad one. A correct result does make a poorly reasoned proof valid.
However, it appears that the distinction between a proof and its conclusion is a little too subtle for many physical-science types. Perhaps it was such experiences that made Winston Churchill say of boffins that they should be on tap, not on top.
Joe Born,
You state how exquisitely thermodynamics works while you clutter up a thread with long, maths free rambles disputing exactly that.
Moses was at least eventually getting some of his folks through the wilderness to the Promised Land. And he had God guiding him. This trek through the wilderness is not being led by God, and is going no where. Unless there is a theophony in store to clear things up, why don’t you listen to some of the wise people here (not me, I am in peanut gallery, wishing for a return to the Blackboard I know and love) and move on. This journey of yours is not going to get anywhere, much less to a promised land of new physics.
The climate obsession fails because of physics as they are, not because of some yet-to-be discovered new rule of physics.
the discussion is still born.
@ Steve Mosher #135060,
lol +10
Steve Mosher,
Very funny :-0
SteveF
Hmmm…. I don’t think Joe is a troll so much as… well… he’s convinced himself of … something.
just want to thank Lucia for giving Joe a say on her blog 🙂
have seen Joe Born comment elsewhere on the climate blogs & he never came across as a troll to me either.
if his ideas are stupid (beyond me to comment) at least be civil.
so thanks again Lucia
hunter (Comment #135059) February 4th, 2015 at 7:36 am
” I am in peanut gallery, wishing for a return to the Blackboard I know and love) and move on”.
Well said.
Can we have an Arctic sea ice maximum for a quatloo or 2?
please.
I promise to be nice to Mosher for a month.
angech,
Thanks. Joe is a gifted analyst. He should perhaps consider a focus of his efforts on the non-technical aspects of the climate obsession. He might enjoy Ben Pile’s Climate Resistance blog or Tom Fuller’s The Lukewarmer’s Way blog as an introduction to some of the public square issues the climate obsessed are causing in policy and politics.
https://thelukewarmersway.wordpress.com/
http://www.climate-resistance.org/