The previous thread now has 999 comments. I’m starting a new one. Happy Spring, and open thread!
1,157 thoughts on “Happy Spring: New comment thread”
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The previous thread now has 999 comments. I’m starting a new one. Happy Spring, and open thread!
Comments are closed.
test
Yay Spring!
Neal,
I’m sorry, maybe I made a mistake along the way. When you asked for examples of smears, I was flabbergasted because I’d (for no particularly good reason I guess) assumed you’d understand that Moon Hoax Recursive Fury Papers (MHRFP) were conspicuous and hard to overlook examples. Maybe I’m mistaken in jumping to the conclusion now that you don’t consider these to be examples of smears. But if you do, then I don’t really understand why you asked me for examples before.
Kittens need yarn. I can get all tangled up in absolutely nothing but air, just let me speak for a few minutes. 🙂
In keeping with the Happy Spring theme of this thread, I choose to disclose that I dug an actual vegetable garden (goodbye veggies plants in pots) this winter in the back and have been starting seeds inside. 🙂
And in the interest of sarcasm, if some Warmers could tell me what to do to prepare and maintain my garden in the face of increased C02 levels and Global Warming and it going to be warmer than it would be otherwise, I would appreciate it.
Andrew
Hell, if you can remotely do the Antarctic, Midwest USA should be a piece of cake.
Andrew
I want to see whether people would agree with me here:
• It isn’t that hard to set up apache and other web servers so that you are required to enter a private password in order to use, on a per directory basis.
• It isn’t much harder to set up a file server so that people can download files, but it would require a private password to use.
• Even though these are relatively modest layers of protection, any attempt to circumvent them would fall under computer fraud and abuse laws.
That said, I also think:
• There’s nothing illegal about accessing or copying a file that is in plain view. This is to me little different than taking a photograph in a public space where there is no expectation of privacy.
• There’s nothing illegal about copying a file that has “confidential” written on it. The only exception to this is when the file contains information that is already protected from copying (health histories, sensitive federal data, others). Simply writing “confidential” doesn’t protect the file in any additional way.
• A person in an academic environment such as myself should be held to a higher level of standards. It would in general be inappropriate for me for example to access, copy or transmit files belong to a third party that contain personal research work without their approval. This would especially include documents like people’s thesis (where there’s a possibility that somebody else could “steal” their ideas, and force them to restart on a new Ph.D. topic).
• Media people should be held to a different set of standards than academics. A role of media (even ones like Brandon and other bloggers) is for them to act as external oversight. The media quite often publishes information where under other circumstances we’d expect our privacy to be respected. The line is possibly somewhere around private sex tapes (Hulk Hogan case), which is a hell of a lot more private than people’s emails containing non-personal information, comments on a semi-private forum or even somebody’s Ph.D. thesis.
With respect to “these are relatively modest layers of protection”, it’s exceedingly easy to set up Word files, zip & tar archives, etc. so that they are password protected.
I mention this because, if I have “for official use only” documents, you aren’t supposed to transmit these (and making them accessible via a web server in my understanding is an example of this) without individual file protection.
Using the level of protection afforded by Word and Zip are considered (in my understanding anyway) adequate for any sort of data that it’s legal to transmit over the normal (outside of federal control) internet.
It’s pretty routine for us to use a common password, even for documents we don’t think contain secure information. I personally. don’t consider any password, shared or other, to be truly secure unless it’s long enough to not be brute-force guessed by software. For comparison any 8 character alpha-numeric-special-char password can be broken in under six hours.
Even though that’s what the IT departments typically recommend or even enforce, simply choosing a short-but-hard-to-remember password helps you almost none against a serious hacker.
I’ll point out for people who’ve never been briefed that it’s completely possible to combine two or more pieces of already cleared information together in a way that results in something that you don’t have clearance to see under the deranged US classification system. I know examples of this.
Anyway, it’s always advisable when you are dealing with potentially sensitive information to at least apply a minimum, non-bone-headed layer of protection like a password to it. Don’t rely on where the file sits to protect it from prying eyes.
Carrick,
I agree with most of what you say in your first comment. I think the ‘confidential’ bit is funny
I have honestly wondered (and I’m still not sure frankly) if the main reason the government requires us to label our documents is so the security auditors can easily determine if we’ve put documents in the wrong receptacles. Because you’re right. Putting ‘classified’ on a document doesn’t make that document classified. If a document contains classified information, the lack of a banner doesn’t excuse anybody handling it. So on.
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I don’t know about different standards for different folk. I’m kicking that around. It sounds OK but something about it disturbs me. Or maybe I’ve just got indigestion, I’m not sure which yet.
Interesting link with the brute force cracking. I’d think that’s a highly parralelizable operation, so if can be done in 6 hours it can in essence be done momentarily if you’ve got the cash.
Of course, 6 hours is pretty close to ‘momentarily’ anyway. 🙂
The lawyers may correct me. But I’ll give my impression of the law or technology on these things.
It is trivially easy to set up a private password. My impression about legality is the consensus is even breaking a trivial password falls under computer fraud and abuse laws. (I know how to set up an .htaccess password and have done so. It is absolutely trivial.)
This seems to be the consensus. (This sort of thing is often discussed by Orin Kerr at Volokh conspiracy and there can be some disagreements about what happens with ‘really, really, really hard to guess urls’.)
If something is just plopped on a server in open view, and crawlable by robots it is not illegal to access or view the document.
It’s a bit like putting taking a piece of paper on the side of a tree in the park. Sure, maybe you think only your friends will find the note on the tree. But if someone else comes across the note on the tree there is nothing illegal in them reading it.
To my knowledge the highest court that has addressed this is the 3rd circut in the “Weev” case — and they side stepped it to some extent because his conviction was overturned on jurisdictional issues.
But they did go to the trouble to comment on the issue of password protection and they wrote:
http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/auernheimer-op-usca3.pdf
There can be a copyright issue involved in copying and displaying a file. That’s separate from computer fraud or abuse, and the discussion has to consider whether under the circumstances the copying and displaying is a violation of copyright. This means one must also identify who is violating copyright and in what way. And one must consider “fair use” (in the US) or “fair dealing” (in other countries) when gauging each hypothetical element of copyright violation.
Writing “confidential” on the document appears to be a legally meaningless statement. The Wall Street Journal could type “confidential” on the top of their paper if they wished. If they then print copies and distribute them, they are not confidential. I should think a similar thing happens if some idiot who wants to keep their material confidential goes ahead and publishes it on a crawlable server.
Sub-groups can, if they wish, set up standards that are more stringent than the law requires. I would think academics would frown on someone distributing a draft papers to others. (Yet, I know some academics do it during review.)
It’s not illegal, but I think those who academics who do this would tend to lose the respect of their peers.
Often, media people are held to nearly the opposite standard. If a document marked “confidential” is newsworthy and falls in a particular media outlets coverage area and it’s not illegal or tortious to disseminate the material, media are almost required to publish it.
The main issues for them is often how much to publish. In the past, the cost of paper and ink often meant they only published excerpts. Even now, sometimes only partial publication is done — to keep connections to sources functional.
The downside of Spring is that I had to mow the lawn today for the first time this year.
lucia:
If it were viewed as an ethical violation, it’s also possible there could be a punitive response from your department too. At that point it gets messy and well above my pay grade. It’s a case of better to avoid the appearance of evil…
Well that’s absolutely true. If you simply copyrighted it and put “no further distribution without the copyright ownership’s approval” you might be able to protect yourself from unauthorized redistribution.
However, I’m not a lawyer (obviously), but it seems to me your recourse is pretty limited in a case like this, where somebody decided to ignore your copyright warning. Isn’t it something you are entitled to a portion of the profits made from the unauthorized redistribution?
So maybe that doesn’t help much?
If for no other reason that media are generally for profit. If you don’t make the scoop and somebody else does, generally that’s not good business practice.
But perhaps you meant something more?
DeWitt:
Less than two weeks away for me before my first mowing. But I’m at the “gotta get the mower PM’d and ready to rock” phase of spring.
Carrick,
Even then you may not be able to prevent unauthorized redistribution. Some copying and display falls under “fair use”, and if it does, copyright can’t protect you. When it’s fair use, no authorization by the copyright owner is required. The copyright owner can’t over-ride fair use by writing “no further….” etc.
Provided the use does not fall under “fair use”, your damages are related to the amount people would pay. So if someone is actually selling your stuff the award a judge would grant is related to how much they sell it for.
But suppose you have something valuable and they give it away for free? You could still get damages– because your damages are how much you could have sold things for. That someone kills your market by giving your stuff away doesn’t mean you can’t win damages.
But if there is no market, you really can’t get more than statutory damages. That’s an important practical consideration– something might be a violation but the owner isn’t going to sue.
Mostly the economic.
But also, in some sense, the “news media” see bringing forward important stories as an ethical thing. It’s not always followed-but in principle, “the news” sees the goal of informing the public as a sort of public good and doing that has a moral/ethical element.
So if a very important story breaks, it is in a sense the “duty” of journalists to disseminate it, not squelch it. (Mind you, they might misjudge a story and think it’s not worth airing. But that’s different.)
I think this focus on what is technically legal or technically illegal is a red herring.
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B. knew, well before publishing certain documents, that the owner did not want them made public: two in-progress works. One is a doctoral thesis; the other is a multi-author which is getting embargoed, as usual. It does not take very much intelligence to figure out that the owner of these documents would not like seeing them made public by someone else, at a time prior to completion.
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Carrick, Lucia, DeWitt: I go back to the same question I asked Mark. I believe that you all have children. What would you think if you found that your children had obtained the in-progress work, poems, private photos, diary, etc. of a classmate and published it on the web? .
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Would you applaud their technical capability?
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Would you congratulate yourself on the quality of moral training you had inculcated?
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Just what would you think?
is Happy Spring the PC version of Happy Easter? Or Are you celebrating Nowruz?
Neal,
Brandon’s actions were more related to Daniel Ellsberg’s passing the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times than to your analogy. My children simply wouldn’t do the actions in your analogy as a matter of etiquette and politeness.
Hans,
It isn’t Easter yet. We have passed the vernal equinox, so it is Spring. Somehow I don’t think saying Happy Lent is exactly appropriate.
DeWitt:
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Ellsberg was providing information on the US governments activities in Vietnam, which would otherwise remain secret; and in particular unknown to the US citizenry. What he did qualitatively changed the information people had about the actions in Southeast Asia.
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B. released unfinished work scheduled for publication within a few weeks.
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Explain to me the similarity.
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With regard to your children: I’m glad they wouldn’t do the proposed analogous actions to their classmates. What if they simply did actually identical actions? Maybe with your private files, maybe with an acquaintance’s. Or if they are still too young, let’s set the clock a few years later, and ask the question then. How would you feel about that? Would you be satisfied with the results of the effort you had put into raising them?
IGNORE
Hans
Spring is what I’m seeing out my window right now.
Easter will arrive on Sunday. I would hardly think it appropriate to say “Happy Easter” on Good Friday– which commemorates the actual crucifixion and generally considered a ‘not so happy day’ on which (theologically speaking) Christ was suffering and dying on a cross. I don’t think it makes sense to say “Happy Easter” until Sunday– they day of the (theologically) happy event.
Neal
I think the verb “focus” is an odd choice. I think some discussion is appropriate and hardly a red herring. What is legal or illegal is important to evaluating the question of what might or might not be wrong with copying something someone doesn’t want copied.
On the legal front: There is no legal violation.
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First: Brandon didn’t publish the documents. He linked to document that were published (i.e. made public) by the authors themselves. Whether the authors “wanted” them published or not, the fact is the chose to make them public by publishing them on a publicly accessible server.
Second: That Brandon might have know the authors didn’t want lots of people to visit or “read” the page on which the authors decided to publish this stuff isn’t especially relevant to either the legal ethical issue I can see.
You are correct that both documents are things the authors probably shouldn’t have published because in some sense they didn’t “want” to publish them. But at least one of the authors who didn’t “want” to publish these things nevertheless decided to publish them.
In the case of the embargo, the author (likely Cook) decided to publish it despite a (likely) agreement with the journal that he, Cook, would not do so.
That Cook violated his agreement with the journal doesn’t compel Brandon to not link to the document when he happens along the published document.
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I don’t.
That would depend on specifics you aren’t including in your hypothetical. In some cases I would suggest they send them to the police. In other cases I would suggest they disseminate them widely. In other cases, I would advise keeping mum.
Maybe. Not sure why you are asking this.
Depends on the material in question. I would hope the would make the right choice. In some cases, the right choice would be “publicize the findings”. In others not.
You are being a bit repetitive. But the answer is still: “Depends.”
Lucia,
It occurred to me to wonder why Good Friday is called ‘good’. Apparently it’s only called good in America. Well, sorry, only called good in English.
In German it is ‘Mourning Friday’ apparently.
They should have called it Black Friday, and then we could have called that crazy shopping nite Good Friday. The world would make so much more sense!
Neal, I don’t agree with your claim that discussing the legal aspects is at all a red herring. Journalists, even bloggers, must follow the law or be willing to suffer consequences. Whether Brandon were my kid is more of a red herring.
In any case, Brandon is clearly a blogger, which is a type of journalist. I believe, as Lucia suggested, were he to encounter something that was of the public interest, he would have an obligation as a journalist to air that document, regardless of whether it said “confidential” or not.
Whether airing these particular documents serves the public interest–well I’ll let you and Brandon and others sort that out. (My predilection is to say “generally yes”). I’m simply addressing here the question of whether it is appropriate for a blogger, or any other journalist, to publish documents that are marked as confidential, when that blogger has judged that the contents of these documents are in the public interest.
Certainly he’s being more morally than many, because in spite of your protestations to the contrary, I believe he generally makes an effort to be as truthful as he can be.
As to technical prowess—well to be honest, John Cook is a dunderhead. In general. His leaving these documents where they could be discoverable was an act of complete dunderheadness. No slight to Brandon, but there was no particular high level of technical prowess required to unearth these documents. Possibly persistence, but that’s it.
Lucia: Separate topic
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A day or so ago, I gave an account of my view and understanding of how the “Nazi” Photoshops of John Cook were created and came to be gathered together. I understand that you had had a discussion with Rob Honeycutt on this question. For Mark, at least, this view seemed to some extent novel. Have I provided any information that Ron did not provide? (I guess it would be unfair to ask if Rob provided any information that I did not provide.)
Neal,
I’m not sure this is strictly true. It doesn’t seem to be centrally important to what you’re saying, so it’s OK with me that you say so / that this is your impression. Heck, it might even be true I guess I don’t know! The thing is, other than a certain degree of unseemly schadenfreude, I never really cared that much about the Nazi photoshop thing and honestly still don’t much care today.
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It’s all good though.
[Edit: not sure it’s strictly true, by which I literally mean: I’m not sure your account told me anything I hadn’t heard before. It’s possible that it did, but I couldn’t at this moment identify any element you mentioned that I can say with confidence I hadn’t heard before and lost track of over time.]
I haven’t had much to say about the SkS Nazi documents. They seem like a pretty strange thing to leave lying around, but that’s pretty much all I have offer on this topic
What, no spring haiku?
Cold winds cut no more
Golden rays lighten my steps
Tax refund blossoms
Mark:
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When this topic was broached a few days ago, you expressed the feeling that “shenanigans” were involved. I had the impression that you were inferring some sort of malicious intent, however unclear, on the part of SkS folks. Has your feeling on this point changed?
I don’t recall having conversations with Rob myself. Perhaps I did– dunno. But there are reports of Rob saying things.
Carrick
I think Brandon would agree: There was very little technical prowess involved in ‘unearthing’ these documents. (Not sure “unearth” is the right verb. That sounds a bit like the sort of verb one might pick if they were trying to get the audience to assume the documents were hidden, buried or difficult to find. “Locating” them seems both more neutral and more appropriate.) .
Many people who were merely curious could have done found the documents which were scattered around but in plain view for anyone who looked around a bit. I know and understand what Brandon did. I could have done it. I just didn’t happen to be sufficiently curious to bother.
Neal,
I understand why you’d say that. In fact my including the Nazi photoshop thing in the list of shenanigans I complained about would make more logical sense if this were so. But in fact that was not the case.
I don’t think (and didn’t think) malicious intent on the part of SkS folk was involved in that. My point was simpler. John appears to want gimmicks and quick fixes, sensational stuff. Real solutions to real problems are generally not accomplished so in my view.
Do yourself a favor; make serious contributions however small. Not splashy or sexy but [they] might actually have some real value to somebody eventually. Avoid the circus. Is it any wonder somebody who seems to spend half his life calling people denier ends up photoshopped as a Nazi, even if it was done by his own circle as a parody?
I’m sorry Neal, I think my reserves of diplomacy are running low for some reason. I hope there’s nothing offensive in here but I don’t quite have it in me right now to sanitize my comment. I hope I don’t offer offense; none is intended.
Carrick:
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That puzzled me, too, because my memory of the situation was that it was quickly agreed that this was not suitable to have around. I believe someone (possibly even me: I guess I’ll find out the next time SkS gets hacked) said, “This stuff is toxic waste! This stuff has to be gone,” and then it was all deleted.
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So the explanation I got just in the last couplel of days was, “When we deleted this material, it was deleted from the posting area; but it was not automatically deleted from the folder of uploaded graphics files.” Somebody should have known this, but it wasn’t me. And I suspect that virtually any system maintained by a couple of people has security holes they haven’t thought about.
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The giveaway that this was not a “secret cache of special documents” would be that, in addition to the controversial Photoshops, there should be a whole slew of very untitillating graphs, etc., mixed in.
Heck I don’t know if that was my original point Neal. I say a lot of stuff, sometimes I say stuff flippantly. It seems reasonable right now anyways. But it makes me grouchy when I read my own comments and doubt them.
Maybe I meant malicious shenanigans and I was wrong to include the photoshop incident in the shenanigan list. I don’t really know for sure at this point.
Neal
Saddly, given the clear security incompetence historically demonstrated by SkS, they could be hacked again. Lucky for them they’ve only been hacked once.
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Yes. But many of the “discoveries” aren’t due to anything one might call a “security hole”. Well… unless, don’t take a thumbtack and post your “super secret” documents on a public cork board in the local grocery store can be called a “security hole”. In some sense that sort of behavior stupidity is a ‘security hole’. The reason a person trying to “think” about that hole would overlook it is…well… uhmmm … the sord starts with ‘st….”.
Neal,
At times I’m thinking out loud in these comments. That’s what I think I was doing with the shenanigans remark. It occurred to me so I ran with it to see where it might lead and to see if anybody’s responses helped develop or squash the idea.
… I guess it probably doesn’t make that much difference and I don’t need to keep trying to chase this down. :/
Neal:
There’s a list of the files here.
It’s my impression there actually were a slew of untitillating graphs, etc. in addition to some pretty strange photoshopped images.
Neal,
If it’s not a “secret cache of special documentsâ€, it’s rather a pity some people accused Brandon of “hacking” and various sort of malfeasance for having found the non-secret documents and discussing them. The accusations of “hacking” eminating from some at SKS certainly give the impression that there was something “secret” about the documents.
lucia:
It’s clearly not. You can see that these files were all located in /images/user_uploaded .
At the time you could get a directory listing of the /images/user_uploaded directory on the sks server just by typing the full path to sks followed by /images/user_uploaded. [That’s some “hack”.]
Creating a listing of the directory used to be the default apache behavior by the way (that is, if there wasn’t an index.html file located in that directory).
Carrick,
I should have said “since it’s not” rather than “if it’s not”.
I agree the images were not secret. They were posted publicly by SkS people and left on the server were members of the public came across them. As such I think it’s rather odd that some want to accuse Brandon of “hacking” merely because he happened to be a person who found them and then discussed them publicly.
Obviously he didn’t find them by “hacking”. He merely came across a bunch of publicly posted images that were secret. Then he talked about them.
DeWitt:
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I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to download and look at the stuff I examined for the Miskolczi discussion. I found two errors (factors of R) that cancel out. It’s pretty hard to read.
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Carrick, DeWitt, julio:
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There seems to be a couple problems with my solution:
– The VT is not working out properly.
– The solutions for n(r), T(r), P(r) produce a 1-parameter family of curves. But I need a 2-parameter family: Otherwise when I fix the total number of molecules N = Integral {n} , I’ll fix T(r) and P(r) as well. Then how does additional energy show up? It can’t be in n(r), T(r), or P(r). And if you assume internal degrees of freedom, that doesn’t change anything either, because of equipartition of energy.
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However, I still think we’re stuck with negative Cv, because:
– total energy is 0, dT < 0.
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But maybe if I find the error, everuything will be fixed.
lucia, Carrick:
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I take exception to the term “posted”. “Post” has the connotation of having an intention to display or inform, and there was certainly no intention by anyone to do that.
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What there was was literally garbage that was not properly secured. I don’t’ know if you lock your garbage cans. I don’t. But that does not mean I’m in any sense posting my garbage when I put it into the can.
Neal, I didn’t use the word posted, but it’s beyond hilarity to get outraged that somebody looked at the files in the /images directory.
I mean seriously man..storing Nazi photoshopped images in the bloody /images directory!!!??
/images is not a garbage can.
/images is a “see what I have” directory. There is absolutely no credible argument that anybody could give that files stored in /images (or one of its descendants) were ever expected to remain private.
Carrick:
Let’s not forget when I obtained material for the 97% consensus paper, I didn’t just release it. I contacted John Cook to try to have a discussion about what was and was not confidential under any ethic approvals or the like. Cook refused. He didn’t even take the simple step of just asking me not to release anything, even if only for a period of time so he could figure out what was and was not confidential.
That’s the sort of thing which could get a person who works with sensitive information fired. And even after the University of Queensland sent it’s ridiculous letter threatening me (which contained multiple untruths), their refusal to specify what was confidential under any agreements they made is the sort of thing that would increase their liability in any lawsuit.
And oh, let’s not forget that in every case I found something Cook wouldn’t have wanted me to see, that only happened because he had specifically coded his servers to give out URLs informing people of the location of “hidden” things. Heck, in this latest case, I was given the location of the “hidden” material in the exact same way as the last one, meaning Cook was fully aware people could be given that information. And he just, accepted that.
It doesn’t take any special security knowledge to avoid problems like this. All it takes is to not post material you want kept confidential in public locations, or failing that, to not specifically program your servers to tell people where those secret locations are. And failing that, you can just have an honest discussion with people who find the material explaining to them why it needs to be kept confidential. So when you say:
There’s no slight against me. I’ve repeatedly mocked the idea it took any special skill for me to find any of this. I imagine if I wanted to use actual skill I could probably break into Skeptical Science servers for real, but I don’t have any desire to as there are way better things I could do if I were going to resort to criminal activity.
Well, actually I have a little bit of a desire to screw with Cook’s servers because people keep painting me as a script kiddie over what I’ve done. That annoys me a bit. Combine that with the fact I’ve discovered a number of security problems with Cook’s various servers without even trying to which could probably allow malicious activity (I’m referring to things I haven’t written about), and I feel a little provoked. It’s like, if you’re going to be this stupid about your security and say I’m incompetent, you’re kind of asking for it.
But if I were going to resort to criminal activity, I could think of ways that’d be a lot more profitable. Unless some shady oil company starts bankrolling me for invasive investigation, I just can’t see that the group is worth the effort or risk.
Neil, I had a look at your notes. As I said before thanks for posting them. I recognize these things are works in progress.
As I think I mentioned, I have a couple of reports then a big collaboration meeting in front of me. Maybe when I’m not at the meeting, I’ll get a chance to refine them.
lucia, carrick:
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People at SkS got upset because malicious conclusions were being made on the basis of what was stolen gargage.
Carrick:
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They were not “stored” in the directory, as one would “store” books in the attic. They were incompletely deleted, as was explained earlier: and obviously that’s a mistake. The intention was to delete, not to store.
Neal, who was coming to malicious conclusions?
The only one I can think of is Poptech who has posted some crazy theories about Cook being a Nazi.
I don’t think anybody believes that Cook is a Nazi.
Except Donald Drumpf. Pretty sure he thinks Cook is a Nazi.
Carrick:
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Somebody named Tom Fuller.
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One of our German folks runs into presentations which make some claim. Didn’t say where, however.
Neal, it sure sounds like somebody is feeding you a partial truth.
You just don’t put images in /images (or its descendants) to delete them. You don’t put images in /images like you would store books in an attic. /images is more like the “new books” section at Barnes & Nobles.
/images (and its descendants) is the primary repository for publicly viewable files. The primary one. A great place to store images so google will crawl there and get them all publicly indexed for you.
And that crap ended up in there.
Wut!?
As to deleting the files, it’s easy to get an index of all “jpg” files on a file partition these days. There’s no plausible excuse for not checking on Cook’s part, for missing that he hadn’t deleted all of the copies of those files.
Carrick:
<blockquote<As to deleting the files, it’s easy to get an index of all “jpg†files on a file partition these days. There’s no plausible excuse for not checking on Cook’s part, for missing that he hadn’t deleted all of the copies of those files.
I’m sure Cook didn’t even try to delete the images. If the comments/posts were deleted as Neal J. King says, I’m sure that’s as far as Cook went. Which I think is pretty strange. If somebody Photoshopped images to make a person appear to be dressed in Nazi regalia in a forum I ran, I would promptly close their topic, delete the images and warn them doing that is disgusting and inexcusable and they should never share images like that with anyone ever again.
Maybe other people would react differently. I don’t know. What I do know is there were a number of images made, including ones which showed a clear attempt at improving the quality of the work. That seems to indicate Photoshopping people into Nazi regalia doesn’t bother the Skeptical Science group anywhere near as much as it would bother me.
Thomas Fuller apparently wrote this post in which he seems to suggest whatever. I don’t think he says anything that makes it really seem like he believes those images were real, but he does suggest it. I think that was more for rhetorical purposes so he could smear people he dislikes than because of anything he genuinely believes, but I don’t know. I’ve seen Fuller say plenty of crazy things, and I don’t think he can be trusted to provide honest input for discussions, so I wouldn’t care to guess what he truly believes.
https://thelukewarmersway.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/john-cook-identity-thief/
Umm, I did a post about Cook that included the photo. When Andy Skuce told me the origin of the photo I updated with his explanation immediately. My post didn’t call him a Nazi or impute any beliefs to him. It was about his botching up of the 97% paper.
The dog that is not barking in all Neil’s comments about the photos: Scooter boy 🙂
These were Thomas Fuller’s exact words:
That definitely makes it sound like the image he shows is real, not a fake. So at least in that sense, it is understandable Neal J. King might think some people believed the images were real (at least for a time).
Since I’m commenting on it, I should also point out Fuller says this in the post:
Which isn’t true. Anyone reading that would come away with a very distorted picture of what had actually happened.
Neal,
Yes, I looked at the .pdf you linked. Yes, it’s hard to read. I see two equations that are said to be equal but don’t look equal to me. OTOH, my math skills are very rusty and tended towards brute forcing things rather than something more elegant.
That you’re getting a set of one parameter equations suggests that you’ve somehow set the internal energy to be a constant rather than a variable. My not very finely tuned physical intuition says that having a shell with a fixed radius underneath the gravitationally bound gas cloud (atmosphere) with a constant pressure at the surface will keep the gas from having a negative heat capacity. That might not be true for a shell with a small radius compared to the radius of the gas cloud, though. Because then the 1/r² behavior of the gravitational field will be important.
Carrick (Comment #144477)
“any 8 character alpha-numeric-special-char password can be broken in under six hours.”
To be clear I have enjoyed everything you have written this Spring, fantastic.
Re computer surveillance in a general sense.
Like that Tom Cruise movie where they break into a super fortress for a computer disc of secret information under impregnable guard.
If information was so important how could it ever be accessed or used?
240 million USA residents, 8 hours to break their codes, 30 million people working 8 hour days to review and use it all under top security. The mind boggles at the man hours involved in a simple team surveillance of 1 person, how much more so trying to spy on everyone.
Even if it took 6 seconds to hack most computers there’s no grist for anyone most of the time.
Bit like being a tourist at the moment.
At anyone time 99.999999% of tourists are quite safe, 0.000001% not. The odds are quite good really.
Carrick (Comment #144477)
“any 8 character alpha-numeric-special-char password can be broken in under six hours.â€
The worst bit is it can take me a lot longer than 6 hours to remember any of these %&*!#$$ passwords when I make a new one up. Lots of “forgotten your password ” resets are the plague of my life.
As I wrote then, “Update: Andy Skuce volunteers this: “John Cook is not “dressed as a Nazi†in that picture, it’s a Photoshop image. It was done as a joke, by one of the Skeptical Science regulars, in response to people calling us “SS†and Nazis. Of course, it is in very poor taste and should have been deleted, rather than left lying around on the server.â€
As Cook wrote then, ““John Cook: Sorry about the Lubos thing. Was posting some Lubos comments for the UWA experiment and forgot to log back in as John Cook.â€
On the topic of cracking passwords, what you guys are referring to is not as big a deal as it might sound. What you guys are referring to is when a password file has been stolen and can be transferred to another machine to run the password cracking on. That that part can done quickly is interesting and all, but… they have to steal the password file.
On top of that, the article Carrick linked to didn’t discuss salted passwords. Salting is a simple concept. You never store passwords in plaintext, but rather, you encrypt them with an algorithm that doesn’t allow decryption. This creates a thing called a “hash.” To verify passwords people enter, you run the password through the same algorithm and see if it gets you the get the same hash. If you do, they gave the right password.
The article Carrick links to explains how quickly you can guess a ton of passwords, by running billions of guesses through the same encryption algorithm and comparing the resulting hashes to the stolen password file. This ignores a major element, called salting.
When you are salting passwords, you do not run passwords through an encryption algorithm to create the hashes. Instead, you run each password plus another string through the algorithm. This means to correctly guess what a password when breaking it, you have to be able to guess both the “salt” and the password. Even if they know the salt for each password,* it still slows them down a great deal because when they crack one password, they won’t also crack all other copies of that password (without a salt, each password passed through the same algorithm will produce the same hash).
*A person who manages to steal a password file may also manage to steal the salting file as well. Or in the case of Skeptical Science, John Cook could just use the exact same salt for every password and render the entire process almost useless. That is one of the hilarious security problems Skeptical Science has, and they even published the fact they do it on their website. It’s hilarious.
Thomas Fuller:
This goes back to his whole narrative that John Cook engaged in identity theft, and that this identity theft was an “experiment being the research that led to Recursive Fury.” This is garbage. First off, this wasn’t “the research that led to Recursive Fury,” it was research tied to a different project all together.
It also wasn’t identity theft. Cook was designing research material for an experiment, and part of that experiment was intended to represent comments on a post/article. These comments were supposed represent comments from “skeptics,” so they were never meant to be taken as real within the Skeptical Science group making them.
In the process of making these fake comments everyone knew were fake, Cook used the name Lubos Motl on some fake comments. Having an account with that name to make fake comments everyone knew were fake led to Cook accidentally posting a real comment in another location under that name, a mistake he quickly corrected.
That is what Thomas Fuller claims was identity theft so he can make remarks like:
It’s nonsense. Cook used another person’s name when writing fake comments everyone knew were fake. The person’s name, along with the name of every other person in those comments, was sanitized before they were actually used in any research (none of which led to the Recursive Fury paper).
The only reason this became an issue is people looked at the stolen forum material and didn’t put any real effort into understanding what they saw before running off to cry, “Identity theft!” Everybody else, including the people in the Skeptical Science forum and people like me who had seen the same material before this became a thing, understood the comments were clearly fake so the fact they had the name Lubos Motl attached to them didn’t mean he wrote them.
See, the problem is, even if all participants know that it is a fake identity, in the future someone may not. And the comments which Cook might make acting as a skeptic using Motl’s name might reflect Cook’s opinion of Motl’s views and be decidedly negative. And some future unsuspecting archivist might take them as Motl’s actual views and impute them to him and draw inaccurate conclusions about them, which could have a negative impact on Mr. Motl.
What Cook did was wrong.
Worse yet, someone unscrupulous could scrape or take a screenshot of Cook’s comment under Motl’s name and disseminate it as Motl’s words.
Uh… no. That “some future unsuspecting archivist” might misunderstand what was communicated between people does not mean what those people say or do is wrong. People have no obligation to ensure their intents and meanings in private communication can be understood by people who never should have seen it. That people could misunderstand stolen private communication doesn’t make that communication wrong.
Nor does it mean that communication had anything to do with the Recursive Fury paper or that it should be suggested John Cook’s actions were criminal.
Oh, and lets not forget the threads John Cook posted in as Lubos Motl were titled things like, “BLOG EXPERIMENT CONDITION 2: warmist post, skeptic comments” and began with headers like:
This clearly identifies the thread as an experiment whose comments are created by members of the Skeptical Science group. There’s absolutely nothing about that to suggest the well-known Lubos Motl is actually posting there, but even if he were, the comments were clearly identified as being manufactured. There was no particular reason to expect them to reflect the views of the people writing them.
Sorry for the triple post, but sheesh:
Yes, somebody could intentionally deceive people by taking a screenshot of a comment and knowingly misrepresent it as something it is not. They could also just write a fake comment, take a screenshot and knowingly misrepresent that instead.
If a person is going to intentionally deceive people about what comments have been written by which people, they don’t need John Cook to do this. Anyone could make fake comments with no trouble at all and use those fake ones for the exact same purpose.
Typical tapdancing
Thomas Fuller:
I take this as an indication you are, like usual, going to make claims that are wrong and foolish then refuse to have anything resembling a discussion. As such, I’ll just make a very simple point.
If a person does something where people understand them and nobody is misled, the fact someone can come along four years later and fail to understand them after putting no effort into understanding what they said does not mean they were deceptive.
Umm, gee, what has been one of the major topics of discussion on this and the previous thread?
Brandon’s right,
Times were this was easy. Some utilities hit /etc/passwd and use it as a convenient list of users. In the old days it was thought to be perfectly fine [edit: for this file to be basically open for reading to anybody], since it was thought that DES was pretty secure.
It has become somewhat less easy in the modern age with the shadow password file; basically there is still an /etc/passwd that anybody can read, but the actually encrypted passwords are now usually stored in /etc/shadow which requires privilege.
~shrug~ Since the subject came up.
Tom
“As Cook wrote then, “John Cook: Sorry about the Lubos thing. Was posting some Lubos comments for the UWA experiment and forgot to log back in as John Cook.â€
Perhaps he thought he was Lubos and did not want to change back.
Neal,
I would like to remark on this though:
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It seems to me that you’d prefer to focus on the aspects of Skeptical Science that promote/facilitate the understanding of science. Fine, that’s part of what SkS is. But you [seem to] want to ignore that another big part of what SkS is is a platform for bashing views, not just environmental but also sometimes political, that you guys disagree with. And you (well, John at least) seems to like to wrap it in a nice ‘sciency’ wrapper, as if these partisan views are the objective scientific truth.
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Obviously you’re going to make enemies doing that. Obviously, there are people you will offend who will be all too glad for the opportunity to hit you back when an unfortunate event like this one takes place.
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So… Come on. You guys play the game. Don’t cry foul because you got tackled and it sucked; this is all part of the game you guys willingly choose to play.
[Edit: For the record, I haven’t decided how I’m going to vote. It’s not impossible that I might end up voting for Hillary (sorry Lucia). The SkS article didn’t offend me, it was relatively mild anyway. It’s just an example.]
I can’t tell if this is a rhetorical question:
But if not, I have no idea what answer one might be expected to give. Answers that come to mind are:
1) My book.
2) Mechanics of the greenhouse effect and various models arising from it.
3) Whether or not I actually “hacked” into anything, committed any crimes, am a liar, have a developmental handicap and various other things about me.
Mark Bofill:
Hey, I’d rather spend time discussing that sort of topic than anything else which has come up on this page so far. Not only do I find the topic interesting, it’d give me reason to point out more security problems John Cook codes into his server. Seriously, the things he does with them are mind-boggling.
Neal
Sorry, but this is a pretty lame attempt at word-smithing.
If you take a paper and thumbtack it to the interior door of the janitors closet, you have “posted” it on the interior door of a totally unlocked janitors closet which is accessible to anyone who has a sudden need to use the community broom, then you have put that material on display to anyone who can visit the janitors closet. If you put material on a publicly crawlable server, you have “posted” it because it displays to whoever visits including crawlers or people.
The material is ‘on display’ or ‘posted’ even if you think or hope the janitors closet is a low traffic site.
The fact that the person posting the material has an interior intention or hope that perhaps few people — or even no one– will happen to look at the interior door doesn’t make the act of “posting” “not-posting”. about whether anyone will happen to look at the display are not relevant.
And if you need this to be said more clearly using the verb “display” rather than “post”: If Cook didn’t want to “display” this material publicly, the he shouldn’t have displayed it publicly. But he chose to display it.
Cook himself displayed his Ph. D. thesis and the draft journal article; he displayed them by posting them to a publicly crawlable forum.
I doubt Cook considers his Ph. D. Thesis or the draft journal article “garbage”.
Neal
It’s morning… To address the images issue:
The person who intentionally put the images in the /images file clearly did intend to display them. You yourself told us they were discussed at the SkS forum– and so they were posted with the intent to display to others at the SkS forum.
It may well be that others thought they were garbage or you thought they were garbage. But it is quite clear that the person who did post them intended to display them. So they were posted. No one subsequently took down the postings and no one put them in the garbage.
So they remained posted and on display where people could find them. This is hardly dumpster diving. (But, fwiw, dumpster diving is legal in the US. And the police do it during investigations. )
B.S.: If a person does something where people understand them and nobody is misled, the fact someone can come along four years later and fail to understand them after putting no effort into understanding what they said does not mean they were deceptive.
B.S.: If a person is going to intentionally deceive people about what comments have been written by which people, they don’t need John Cook to do this. Anyone could make fake comments with no trouble at all and use those fake ones for the exact same purpose.
B.S.: Thomas Fuller apparently wrote this post in which he seems to suggest whatever. I don’t think he says anything that makes it really seem like he believes those images were real, but he does suggest it. I think that was more for rhetorical purposes so he could smear people he dislikes than because of anything he genuinely believes, but I don’t know. I’ve seen Fuller say plenty of crazy things, and I don’t think he can be trusted to provide honest input for discussions, so I wouldn’t care to guess what he truly believes.
B.S.: And oh, let’s not forget that in every case I found something Cook wouldn’t have wanted me to see, that only happened because he had specifically coded his servers to give out URLs informing people of the location of “hidden†things. Heck, in this latest case, I was given the location of the “hidden†material in the exact same way as the last one, meaning Cook was fully aware people could be given that information. And he just, accepted that.
Neal J. King: People at SkS got upset because malicious conclusions were being made on the basis of what was stolen gargage.
As an objective observer who has no interest is this particular issue (internet tomfoolery and anything else SkS might involved in) I can only say that Neal (God bless him on this Holy Thursday) seems as oblivious to information he doesn’t like in this thread as he did in the previous thread.
Andrew
Brandon
Actually…. that would be an interesting topic. 🙂
One of the problems Cook/SkS have seems to be that they “want” to keep things “private” while having 100% of the convenience of posting things in public. And meanwhile, their ‘private’ group is fairly large and that group very much wants to engage the public– disseminating their stuff to the public.
Their ‘go to’ choice of keeping things private seems to be “obscurity”– and sometimes they don’t even do that. (Posting things in the /image folder of the root, blog or forum isn’t even obscurity. And yes, a member of the SkS gang posted the Nazi images to that folder.)
The intrusion into the forum was a hack. Evidently not a stupendously difficult one if we are to believe SkS’s own report of what occurred — but still a hack.
But all the rest has just been “people seeing and discussing what the publicity oriented SkS as a group posted on a public server”.
Neal– Tom highlighted this.
posted by a member of the SkS forum. Even according to your story, it was posted and discussed at the forum.
You may not like the conclusions people who learned that SkS members posted this garbage on their public server. And you may consider those conclusions “malicious”. But the fact is: SkS members created this garbage, posted it on the SkS server, discussed the “garbage” and the ‘garbage’ remained on the server where it could continue to display publicly. It’s true most of us here aren’t privy to exactly what various people at SkS actually said– but there were a lot of images posted and quite a bit of time had to be invested in the making of and the subsequent posting of these images.
I’d say more but first question for Brandon: Were there time stamps on the Nazi images?
Okay, since it’s vogue or whatever to call Brandon by his initials. I’d like to request that I be addressed by mine. But let’s have a modicum of respect rom you slackers, address me using my last name first. Call me B.M.
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For even the very wisest amongst us must needs periodically pay attention to B.M.’s.
Thomas Fuller:
Should I just give up at this point? I mean, I have no idea what point Fuller might be trying to make with his latest comment (or the one before that), and that deserves some attention, but… seriously? I get Neal J. King has decided to start killing me “B” instead of “BS” after multiple people (more or less) told him he was being childish and pathetic, but now Fuller picks it right back up.
It seems like a hopeless battle. I don’t even know if Fuller did it on purpose, or if perhaps he just didn’t pay attention to any of the conversation leading up to him being mentioned. I just know I get tired of asking people not to label me that. It’s a stupid and offensive label I’d like to think most people would instinctively avoid, but…
I don’t know. With how many people (on this site!) have apparently thought it was cool to label me as having Asperger’s, I’m starting to think people just don’t understand how offensive they are. And before anyone tries to paint me as a hypocrite as I am quite willing to be mean, I’ll quote Oscar Wilde:
lucia:
Probably. I don’t know if I should talk about them though. After all, I might want to use those security problems in the future!
Not in the directory listing I was privy to. The files themselves may have had such information embedded in them, but I don’t have original copies of them anymore so I wouldn’t be able to tell. To be honest, I didn’t even bother to download all the images I found because I didn’t find the issue that interesting.
The most information I have right now is the Skeptical Science forum was leaked in March of 2012 (and it appears the images had not been made by that point) and I found the directory with those images in August of 2013. Other than that, I’ve got nothing.
I don’t know that it bugs me that it’s mean. It bugs me that it’s crude, does that sound snobbish? It’s dumb.
… It bugs me a little that it’s mean…
But I know you’re a big boy B.S. so you’ll deal with it OK.
:O
Not funny?
B.M.
Mark Bofill:
That’s somewhat similar to my thought process. I think if you’re going to insult somebody, you shouldn’t resort to such an obvious and lame method. The other part, however, is I can’t always tell if it is meant to be derogatory. Most people who call me by my initials are doing it to insult me, but there may be some people who do it as a convenient abbreviation. That bothers me.
Insult me all you want. But if you’re going to do it, own it. Don’t try to insult me in ways that let you say, “Well, I didn’t really insult you.” That’s just… lame.
Ironically, I am in agreement with ALMOST everything B. has been saying recently (since my previous post in this thread, re: B. vs.Tom Fuller].
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Garbage: All of the “salacious” photoshops found had been previously deleted from the actual postings. That they remained in the image foldler was due to inadequate understanding of how the image-posting system worked. I agree that somebody should have been enough on-the-ball to have caught that.Nobody was.
–
The thesis and paper were not deleted, so I wasn’t calling them garbage; but neither were they found in the image file. They actually had no business being left at the website at all, and John has received that feedback already in spades.
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SkS security is clearly inadequate. It is a hand-made system designed and implemented by one individual without much concern for security. It has since then received some update, but only a couple of people are really involved in the systems management aspects.
Neal,
This is actually a fascinating side topic to me although I expect it would bore the spit out of some. It’s relatively easy to write a system that’s powerful and flexible and convenient to use. It’s relatively easy to write a system that’s secure. Making a system all of these things; that’s the trick.
Mr. Schollenberger, while I don’t hold you in the highest regard, I used your initials to save time as I was cooking dinner. It didn’t mean anything else.
Thin skinned, much?
Say Tom,
So for all that I bragged that I don’t like name-calling because it’s stupid, I have been unable to muster the wit to decipher what the heck your point was here in comment 144548 which I’ve read about six times now, along with your other comments.
Help a poor mental midget like me out, would you? What was your point?
Neal J. King makes an interesting remark:
I won’t say anything much about this. I just want to point out I’ve had many experiences where a person who praised me as a person for things I’ve said later condemned me as a person for different things I’ve said because they had apparently forgotten their previous experience with me. It’s gone the other way too.
While I’m glad to hear King and I agree this material had no business being where John Cook posted it, I feel I should point out it was linked to in the Skeptical Science forum. Presumably, that was done so people could view and discuss the material. That raises the question of, if the material never should have been there in the first place, why did nobody point that out when they saw it was put there?
This is no excuse. In fact, it shows exactly why John Cook’s approach is so terrible. Basically every security issue I’ve come across with his servers has stemmed from the fact he hand-coded things in a poor fashion. In each case, he could have easily avoided the problems by simply using open source software instead of hand-coding solutions himself.
I could name a dozen different cases where Cook has created a security problem by writing his own code where he could have instead downloaded open source code, maybe made a few modifications, and saved himself time and trouble while creating a more secure system.
If a person doesn’t have time to do something well they should look at having someone else do it for them (or use work which has already been done). If they choose not to, then they deserve every criticism that comes their way. That Cook spends a ton of extra time hand-coding things that are less secure than readily available solutions is not a defense of him. It’s an example of why Cook is bad at this.
Tom, you used the well known abbreviation B.S. at the start of each paragraph. Can you provide another example where you used the person’s initials at the start of each paragraph?
I mean, seriously, if the point of this is not to issue 3rd grade level insults, when is this ever done?
Lucia, B.:
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Yes, there was considerable time and effort by one individual to create the Photoshops; and then he posted them internally.
And in the round of reaction, the overwhelming response was, “Get rid of it!”.
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There was never any time spent “celebrating” these images at SjS: the only time spent was by the Photoshopper. There was certainly no intent to make those images visible to anyone else in the world, either. Rather, the opposite.
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The files that had been placed by the upload/posting tool into the image file remained there, because most of of the people had no idea about it, and the couple of people who should have, didn’t have their eyes on the ball.
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Certainly, security on SkS should be much better. But it’s not within the interest range of most of the participants, and the people who do it have their own jobs and lives to deal with as well. The bottom line is that I always keep saying, “When we’re next hacked…”
.
Perhaps the basic root of the problem is that this is a hand-built system, and thus implements the strengths and weaknesses of the designer. I asked John why he just didn’t just get something “off the shelf”, and his answer was that there were features, needed in SkS, that he couldln’t buy OTS. In retrospect, certainly I would have pushed on the other side of that issue, on general principles.
Mark Bofill:
While I agree in general, there are also a lot of things that are easy to do well with no real problems. There are also a lot of things that would be incredibly unwise which you can do that wouldn’t make anything more convenient or flexible. Those are what I’d criticize John Cook for.
Thomas Fuller:
I specifically highlighted the possibility you may not have meant anything by using my initials. It’s hardly being thin-skinned to not be offended at all while still expressing confusion/uncertainty. Being thin-skinned would be something like, getting annoyed at people misspelling my name for the two dozenth time.
And it should go without saying, but that doesn’t actually offend me. I think it’s funny. Especially when Brandon Gates did it (whose post I highlighted in the last thread) since he couldn’t even do it consistently. I still chuckle a bit at the memory of him spelling my name so inconsistently he’d get it both right and wrong in the same sentence.
I’d almost consider going by my gamer handle instead, but somehow, I’ve seemed to pick one that gets misspelled as much as my real name. I don’t know how that happened.
Brandon,
dare I ask…
Carrick:
Would you like me to give a rough accounting regarding that question? I could probably provide you a thousand or more comments from him in an hour two. It wouldn’t be too difficult to see how often he refers to anybody by their initials, much less doing so multiple times like that.
I’ve known some people who refer to other users by their initials. All the ones I can think of did so fairly consistently. Fuller certainly doesn’t. Not only does he not usually refer to people by their initials, he has usually not referred to me by my initials. I can’t recall if he has ever done so before, but he has certainly referred to me by my name many times.
None of that proves anything. It could just be a coincidence. It’d certainly be a strange one though.
Neal J. King:
This demonstrates a rather fundamental lack of understanding on someone’s part. It is often true you can buy software which will not have all the features you want (fun factoid: I can demonstrate John Cook either did so or at least used a free copy of such software for a while thanks to him being incompetent at security). On the other hand, it is often trivially easy to find work other people have done for needs like yours which is open source. Because it is open source, you can take it and build upon it, adding the features you want to fill in any holes. Or alternatively, you can take parts of a project you find and add those to the system you already have.
Either way, you get the ability to use work which was done well to fulfill your requirements. it is far better than coding entire systems from scratch, especially if you’re not very good at doing so. That’s the entire reason we have code packages and repositories. Maybe Cook doesn’t understand that, or maybe there’s some translation issue because King doesn’t, but the only reason Skeptical Science is as unsecure as it is is because Cook uses an approach to designing systems that is terrible.
Even a script kiddie could do better 😀
Mark Bofill:
My gaming handle is hardly a secret. A little time on Google would let you find it, and I’ve posted it on my blog before (back when I was accused of using sockpuppets). It’s zz1000zz. I’ve also used the handle Docevus. I came up with that one when I needed a second account for something, and I liked how it sounds. Only then I found out people tend to pronounce it differently than me.
There may be some (I say it that way to hopefully forestall the necessity of me going forth and finding examples, yes) who claim that experience is the best teacher, and a good way to learn to build a secure system is to go get your clock cleaned a few times, figure out how it was done, and figure out how to guard against it.
.
But.
.
There’s also something to be said for learning from the mistakes of others. Get somebody to take a class, or recruit somebody with security expertise.
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Gosh, that’s what you guys should do Neal. Surely there is some sharp college kid somewhere with forward thinking political and environmental perspectives who would jump at the chance to help SkS out, right? Don’t knock college kids when it comes to computer work. What they lack in experience they more than make up for in determination to prove their competence, and a lot of the time they are pretty expert on open source. At least that’s been my experience. Best cheap/slave labor out there! 🙂
Yes, John Cook should likely have taken another approach towards building the system.
.
Anybody got anything new?
Neil,
“I used your initials to save time as I was cooking dinner.”
BS
You used it again and again (over several dinners) even after being asked not to do so
Mark Bofill:
I often approve of approaches like that, but when it comes to security, I can’t. You shouldn’t implement security practices on the hopes to learn from your failure. That might work for testing (throwing up a server and trying to break in), but when you actually create a service that should be secure…
I could provide a dozen names of people who’d volunteer. Heck, I’d volunteer. There are plenty of people who’d testify that when it comes to security, I’ll help pretty much anyone, even if I don’t like them. To me, everyone should be able to be secure.
Neal J. King:
It’s not new, but I do have something old. In the last thread, you claimed I practically lied about what I did to obtain the things I obtained. Since we’re talking about security anyway, would you care to elaborate on that accusation?
And this childish (3rd grade?) and lame excuse is again just … Pathetic
Sorry, Neil. Sloppy reading from my part. I see that it was Tim Fuller, not you giving the lame excuse
Brandon,
Of course that’s correct. I didn’t mean to imply I’d learn about security by providing a shoddy system to a client or employer and doing the forensics on it after it burned to the ground; that would be hideously unethical. Maybe I didn’t think my statement through. 🙂
Thanks Brandon.
Actually, I do have something new. I was goofing off earlier in light of Thomas Fuller defending his claim John Cook engaged in identity theft by using another person’s name even though it was done in private where everybody knew the comments were fake. That, combined with my happening to come across some old remarks I made about Skeptical Science’s 97 Hours of Consensus PR project (see here for the project’s final result), led me to whipping something silly up.
I want to stress the quotes you’ll see if you click on the avatars in this are not real. They were a few fake ones I generated to demonstrate how Fuller’s argument:
Is absurd. Anyone can attribute a false quote to another person (Cook himself has done this many times). They don’t need help from other people to do so. Here is proof:
http://www.hi-izuru.org/97/SkS/97%20Hours.html
Neal
I think the root of the problem is that the designer (John) is utterly inattentive to security. He persists in being inattentive to privacy and security despite having been hacked and despite repeatedly discovering that when he publishes files with no password restriction and hosts them on a public crawl-able server, these published files get viewed by people he would prefer not see them.
Lucia,
Yes. It boggles the mind that this keeps happening and is still an ongoing problem.
[Brandon: I don’t see how you can in good conscience have that up about Dr. Gleick without giving the man recognition for his service on the Task Force on Scientific Ethics. It’s like you’re not giving him his full due.]
Yeah, but giving these guys there full due would require writing a book so I could cover it all.
Oh wait…
Side note, because we’ve been talking about security and John Cook’s incompetence here, I’m tempted to actually do something cool with that page. It wouldn’t be very hard for me to take the account system I made on my site some time back and use that to create a profile system which could be displayed on that page. Then people could have avatars on the page which if clicked upon would show their profile information.
Add a timing feature to keep track of who hasn’t been logged in in a while and a small chat box, and you’ve got yourself a little lobby where people can hang out and chat. You could even link the accounts to a research project, a game or any number of other things if you wanted.
It’d only take a few hours to get that set up. It would take longer to make it look nice (much less make customized avatars if you wanted them), but you’re still talking about a tiny amount of effort compared to how much effort that has already been put into it. I’m honestly surprised Skeptical Science hasn’t done anything like it. When they first previewed the project, I thought they were going to do far more because there’s just so much you could do that’d take little effort.
Or if I wanted to just be really silly, I could takes the quotes from Mark Steyn’s book and create a parody version of their project where the quotes were all from people criticizing Michael Mann and things like that.
mark, do you know what Gleick has himself done on the Task Force? Not that it is unlikely to have been worthwhile, but ….
No. The irony is such though that I don’t think it should ever be forgotten.
DeWitt wrote: “Neal, Brandon’s actions were more related to Daniel Ellsberg’s passing the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times than to your analogy. My children simply wouldn’t do the actions in your analogy as a matter of etiquette and politeness.”
However, unlike Brandon, Ellsberg expected to go to prison for his actions. In fact, he brought his children along while copying top secret documents (and had them help), so they would later understand exactly what he had done. His account of the Vietnam era – “Secrets” – makes fascinating reading. Before the Pentagon Papers, he actually leaked secret documents as a warning to LBJ that secret plans further escalate the war would be immediately leaked as soon as he approved them. Quite the ego, especially since post-war scholarship has undermined his rational opposing the war.
Frank
Not sure where you are going here. Of course Brandon wouldn’t expect to go to prison because what Brandon did is absolutely, unequivocally legal. There no violation of either any letter or spirit of the law.
jferguson: “mark, do you know what Gleick has himself done on the Task Force? Not that it is unlikely to have been worthwhile,”
Gleick was one of Keith Kloor’s go to people on ethics before Gleick got caught with his computer shenanigans. I called out Keith on his use of Gleick (before Gleick was caught) and stated:
…
“This article is a classic of the pot calling the kettle black. Advocates for drastic cuts in CO2 live in a bubble of uninformed self-righteousness. Peter Gleick who called the book a “The Delinquent Teenager†“a stunning compilation of lies, misrepresentations, and falsehoods about the fundamental science of climate change†and failed to back up any of his claims is now worried about dogmatic ideological statements and the tone of the debate….Quoting Peter Gleick on this issue, who is one of the worst offenders in this arena, is perfectly illustrative of the lack of understanding and responsibility on the part of those seeking CO2 reductions.”
Here is the link to the post http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2012/01/must-the-climate-dialogue-be-reduced-to-a-street-fight/ Kloor’s blog was discontinued and the comments aren’t shown, but I retained my own comment because I thought Kloor’s use of Gleick on this subject was particularly egregious.
JD
Thanks JD.
Re: Neal J. King (Comment #144514)
Neal, as far as I am concerned the problem was solved already in Comment #144186 of the old thread, where I used your modified virial theorem and your expression for the pressure as a function of density to show that for a sufficiently thin atmosphere the average kinetic energy will increase if the atmosphere expands (that is, if the density increases at higher elevations).
If you then put energy in the system, either [K] or [U] or both must increase. If [U] increases, the atmosphere must expand (more molecules at higher altitude), and then we just saw that [K] will increase too. Conversely, if [K] increases, the atmosphere expands and [U] must increase also. So we have normal, Cv >0 behavior, for a sufficiently thin atmosphere for my power-series expansion to be valid.
That’s all that pure mechanics can give you. To go beyond that, and figure out just how all these quantities depend on (the local value of) T in a real atmosphere, you need thermodynamics, plus fluid mechanics, plus heat transfer equations, and who knows what else. That’s best left to the experts. 🙂
Hear, hear, JD.
JD, have you ever wondered what Gleick might have written about
Donna’s book had he actually read it?
FYI, Gleick will no longer be President of the Pacific Institute as of July 1st and take on the roll as Chief Scientist:
http://pacinst.org/news/the-pacific-institute-announces-leadership-transition/
Neal J. King (Comment #144563)
” Yes, there was considerable time and effort by one individual to create the Photoshops; and then he posted them internally.”
So much information,
yet so much left to the imagination.
Who could it be?
Photoshopping requires computer skills, not Peter Gliek style linguistic skills so our resident detective is unlikely to be able to help.
Also someone who dislikes Antony enough to dress him up in similar clothes.
The Skeptical Science Team candidates and followers include,
Dana
ATTP
Dikran marsupial
Cowtan
Cook himself
Rob Honeycutt,
Nobody in that lot with a gripe against Anthony though.
Lots of computer skills there, Brandon.
Posting them internally does not somehow make it “alright” Neal once it has been released.
The error was in putting it up where it could be publicly accessed now compounded by covering up and not apologizing.
Brandon and Tom, it might be payback , Brandon. Tom, enough with the low blows.
You are both gentlemen in the true Oscar Wilde Definition
“A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.â€
Anders is part of sks? I didn’t know that. Thanks angech.
angech:
I’m still not convinced what Neal J. King is accurate or even truthful. Leaving aside the factual errors he’s made on this issue, there were at least four different images of Dana Nuccitelli Photoshopped into such pictures. There were also at least three different images with him Photoshopped into Dr Who images which were considered flattering. The two may be unrelated though. Assuming they are, that’s still four images of him.
Combine that with two different versions of the most famous image of John Cook, in which there was effort made to improve the quality of the Photoshop, plus the image of a Nazi rally Photoshopped to paint it as a Skeptical Science rally. That’s, at a minimum, seven different pictures. And the rally one wasn’t just Photoshopped, but also had text crudely drawn into it. So while King has told us:
That claim is difficult to reconcile with what we know. There was not one image. There were at least seven. And they didn’t just involve John Cook. And at least one underwent refinement after having been posted so that a better version could be made. That does not seem to match the idea “Everybody else said, ‘This is stupid.'”
It’s difficult to construct a scenario in which one person would make seven different Photoshopped images, including two versions ones of the same one, and post them to the Skeptical Science forum while having received only negative feedback. What did he do, post all seven at once? Post a couple, have everybody tell him they were stupid and decide to just post some more? Did this person just spam the Skeptical Science forum with images everybody thought were stupid?
I don’t know. Maybe one of those scenarios happened. Maybe some other one did. I don’t know. I just know we don’t have anything resembling a complete story on this issue. All we have is a rather incredible claim from Neal J. King that he makes while consistently demonstrating a lack of awareness of the facts of the situation. That’s not what I’d consider compelling.
By the way, there are way more people with access to the Skeptical Science forums than you list.
Mark Bofill:
He wasn’t at the time. Even now, I’m not sure he’s part of the Skeptical Science team, though he has been invited to participate in their forum. And he’s apparently going to be co-authoring papers with the Skeptical Science team. So he’s at least somewhat related.
B.:
.
You’re losing the track: The folder of stuff you purloined held ALL the images uploaded to the site from the last time it was emptied until you snatched it. Over that period of time, there might well be Photoshops of Dana, as well as graphs and photos of all sorts of stuff. So? On some days people upload a lot; on some days very little. How do you draw an implication from that? Seems to me that your detail-mired focus is leading to some pretty fuzzy thinking. Maybe you need to step back from the magnifying glass, Sherlock, and smoke a pipe.
.
By the way, you have suggestd that my account is not “truthful” at various points; I don’t know if you used the “L” word that you apply so liberally to minor inconsistencies to which human memories are subject. However, here’s one for you: I said earlier that the Photoshops of the WUWTers featured them as the Spartans in “The 300.” You denied that, again claiming that this proved I couldn’t be telling the truth. Go back and look at the discussions at The Blackboard (Mark Bofill provided the link up above someplace): Those Photoshops are described as being based on the “The 300”.
.
I believe that, in your usual charitable way, you attributed what you perceived to be my major error of fact to some sort of malicious intent on my part. Now the record in the Blackboard shows that it was my casual memory that was correct, and your documentation-based historical “authority” that was wrong. To be consistent with your view of the world, I guess we must attribute such a gross error on your part to malicious intent. If you’re willing to lie about issues of such vividness as the basis material for the Photoshops of the WUWTers – which can be easily checked – what lies are you telling about things that cannot be checked?
SUMMARY:
– I said the WUWTers were Photoshopped into photos from “The 300”.
– You said I was lying, and should not be trusted.
– Blackboard records indicate that I was right.
– This means that B. was wrong; by B.’s customs of initerpretation, such gross error must be understood to be lying and must indicate general inaccuracy and probably intent to mislead.
Jferguson: “JD, have you ever wondered what Gleick might have written about Donna’s book had he actually read it?”
Good point. That really frosted me, and the fact that it had no consequences for him was really worse. How could have Kloor possibly used Gleick as an authority on ethics and keeping the tone in the debate civil? Thanks to Sue’s link, here is a funny passage from the Pacific Institute talking about Gleick:
“Gleick, an acclaimed climate and water scientist, researcher, author, MacArthur Fellow, and member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, co-founded the Pacific Institute in 1987 to conduct interdisciplinary research, policy analysis, and public outreach.”
Also, this reminded me that a reporter for the Wall Street Journal used Gleick as a source in an article in June of 2015. When I emailed her about his past, she politely said that she wasn’t aware of the incident and she said that none of her sources, including those that disagreed with Gleick had mentioned the incident. I think the reporter was being honest, but the fact that Gleick continued on as though he was a respected figure speaks poorly of the scientific community that he functioned in.
JD
Not too shabby Neal.
one problem I’ve got with that is that I sometimes think Brandon is too harsh in his interpretations. I don’t necessarily agree with him when he decides someone is lying. Thus I don’t feel like I’m being inconsistent when I decide that it’s a little harsh to conclude that Brandon is lying.
Nice effort though. 🙂
Neal,
and then Neal,
So, this stuff you tell use was ‘not a “secret cache of special documents”, you now call “purloined”?
Sorry: But finding publicly posted material doesn’t amount to “purloining” it. Viewing it isn’t “purloining it”. Even copying it is not “purloining” it. I think you are the one losing track.
(Comment #144591)”
Anders is part of sks? I didn’t know that”
Sorry if I misled
I meant that I thought Anders might be one of The Skeptical Science Team followers.
I cannot recall seeing a post of his there but maybe I do not visit enough.
There is a page devoted to the team which lists Neal.
He has more physics than I [rather obvious I know] and from his exchanges here he has been generally pleasant.
There seem to be two schools of warmists, the unpleasant Sou variety and others who are just passionate about their cause.
Kudos for engaging here, I will try to behave.
I still cannot beat your argument re surface radiation out which shut me up with embarrassment for 2 days.
Well done.
Forgot the Granuard link with Dana, Newspapers don’t photo shop, do they?
Well spotted Brandon.
Angech,
I find it better here than most blogs. Most of the regulars here aren’t your average run of the mill Bob and Janes. I mean they really aren’t, ask after their credentials sometime. So it doesn’t embarrass me at all that they’re better at math and science than me; it’s sort of a given.
So don’t be embarrassed I guess is what I’m getting at. 🙂
:>
Maybe I didn’t given John enough credit for his twitter bots. I mean, look at the troubles microsoft is having with theirs. It’s like teaching kids to say dirty words. You can’t trust anybody on the internet these days…
OMG! I missed my chance! I could’ve tried to turn it into a global warming denier!
NO!!! The missed opportunity, never to return…
Oh well. 🙂
Neal J. King, what are you going on about? You say:
Leaving aside the images were not “purloined” or “snatched,” I’ve explained the directory’s existence the exact same way you have. Multiple times. Claiming I’m “losing the track” because I’m unaware of something I myself have stated many times is…
I would suggest you try not claiming people have said things without either using quotes or links to what they said. Because you’re making things up. I rarely call anyone a liar, and when I do, it is only with specific and direct evidence. Moreover, I never suggested your account was not “truthful” until this latest comment of mine. A comment which is quite wrong, I’ll add. Before I get to that, I just want to re-emphasize this point though:
I have never said you’ve lied about anything. I do not know what causes you to make claims like this up, whether it be some incridible bias which makes you incapable of reading simple sentences or simply some strong emotions that distort your memories so bad you come up with wild-eyed fantasies about me. Whatever it is, what you say about me is consiwstently untrue. On the more interesting issue:
I didn’t say this error of yours was caused by malicious intent. But it was an error. That other people may have made the same error does not make it any less of an error. Before I get to that though, I’ll note you’ve conveniently ignored that there were multiple derogatory images created via Photoshop when you thought there was only one. This appears to be an error you do not dispute you made but also do acknowledge. Regardless, this is what I said about the image of the Spartans when I first discovered this directory:
It didn’t take long for a person to inform me the scene was not from 300:
But in fact a parody movie designed to mock 300. I don’t know what you think proves “that [I] was wrong” since you fail to provide any link or quotation to show I am, but it is quite easy to prove the scene used was not from 300. I myself suspected it was not from 300 the moment I saw the image because the visual style seemed all wrong, and once I had been given the title of the parody (which I hadn’t even heard of before), it was easy to find the scene that was actually used.
You can write three paragraphs and three bullet points on this one issue while consistently ignoring other, far more important issues, if you’d like. That you choose to argue only one point you think you have case for is silly, but it is something you can do. However, if you’re going to only respond on a single point, I suggest you actually put a little effort into making your argument decent.
And again, I did not attribute malicious intent to you for your error. I also didn’t label it a “major error.” Your entire comment here is unhinged.
lucia:
The incredible thing is I never downloaded any of the images from the directory.* I regret that now, and if I were to redo it I’d scrape the entire directory, but at the time I didn’t have a blog or any other website so I didn’t plan to republish any of them. Plus, I didn’t care that much. I thought some of the images I found were really weird, but I figured the issue would be explained and then go away within a couple weeks.
So Neal J. King is claiming I “purloined” things I never even copied. I didn’t even have the material he says I “snatched.” I’m not sure how that works.
*Technically, whenever you visit a site with images that load, you’ve downloaded the images as you have to have a copy of them on your machine to be able to see them. They usually go to a temporary directory on your computer where they may or may not get deleted in a timely manner. Hopefully that technicality can be ignored and the point of my statement is obvious.
Out of curiosity, I took a minute to do an internet search for Meet the Spartans. Recall, this is the Photoshopped image found in the Skeptical Science forum’s image directory. Compare that to this image. I’m sure someone could find the same image without the caption, but… I spent only 60 seconds or so.
So… yeah. I’m not saying Neal J. King is a liar. I don’t think he has intentionally posted untrue things in either this or the last post as I have no reason to. I think he is being incredibly biased though, and I think that causes him to write a lot of silly and untrue things.* For instance, writing ~200 words on how I’ve been proven wrong on where the original image for this Photoshop came from and blah, blah, blah, even though he provided nothing to show the image actually came from 300. And it clearly did not.
Of all the issues he could possibly choose to discuss, I find it bizarre he’d focus on such a minor one. I find it even more bizarre, however, that he chooses to focus on such a minor one when he had no evidence to indicate what he said about it was correct.
*I know I said I’m not convinced King’s account is accurate or even truthful. I stand by that. While I have nothing to indicate King has lied, the multitude of inaccurate statements he’s made does mean I am not convinced his accounts are fully truthful. Maybe they are as he understands them. Maybe not though. I don’t know. When a person is wrong that match, I try not to assume I know the reason. I would only assume someone is a liar if I had clear evidence they knew what they said was false or misleading. Which we have in abundance with the Skeptical Science consensus paper.
Sorry for the quadruple post guys, but it doesn’t seem like anyone else is in a rush to comment, and I’m hoping someone here might be able to help me solve a mystery. I happened to check my sales on Amazon today, and when I did, I discovered 48 copies of my latest little eBook have been sold (as well as 10 of previous ones) today. I have no idea how.
I haven’t been informed of any posts or articles about it, I haven’t been able to find any, and there’s no increase in traffic to my site so nobody is linking to it. I haven’t been able to find any apparent cause. There are obviously possibilities I wouldn’t be able to find evidence for (such as e-mail lists), but I can’t think of any that seem particularly likely.
Does anyone have any ideas? It seems weird enough part of me wonders if it isn’t just some glitch.
let me make it 49.
Talent rises to the top, my friend, what can I say.
jferguson, I hope you enjoy it.
Mark Bofill, I like the sound of that, but the mystery of this is intriguing. Not only is the sudden spike in sales unexpected, but it also has a strange trait. It’s normal enough when one book has sales other books by the same author might as well, and that happened with this one. There were some additional sales of my earlier books after the WUWT post promoting it. It was only a couple books each day though. Today, there’s been eight copies of my first one sold and two copies of my second one. That’s with only ~50 sales of the new book, meaning the ration is almost ten times what it was with the sales from the WUWT post.
I’d love to know what caused this. Did whatever that informed these people of the new book also link to the earlier one? Were the current set of people buying this one just wanting to do more research on what I’ve written, or perhaps even on me? Are they maybe just relatively new to the global warming debate and wanting more background information? I don’t know that the answers would really matter, but I’m intrigued.
B.:
.
From one of your’s:
NJK:
Second, as I recall the photoshops, they consisted of WUWT’ers faces on the warriors from the movie “The 300†– the story of how 300 Spartan soldiers held off the Persian army of 150,000 in the pass of Thermopylae for two days in 480 BC. As I recall it, they didn’t look ridiculous, they looked pretty damn good.
B.:
Maybe this is just me getting mired in the details again, but just like how I pointed out there wasn’t only one image of a Skeptical Science member Photoshopped into Nazi regalia like King claimed before, there also wasn’t just one Photoshopped image where people were mocked/insulted. And the image he refers to wasn’t from the movie 300, nor was it intended to reflect a flattering scene in any movie.
But, you know, details. I get mired in them.
=========================================================
You are perhaps correct that the movie wasn’t “The 300”; I don’t know, because I haven’t seen either that movie or the parody. I thought it was “The 300”, which was why I said: “Second, as I recall the photoshops, they consisted of WUWT’ers faces on the warriors from the movie “The 300″. Because that’s how they seemed.
.
The substantial point is that, in my response to my pointing outo that they did not ridiculous, you asserted that “nor was it intended to reflect a flattering scene in any movie“.
.
Well, apparently Anthony didn’t mind it at all:
“I haven’t looked this good since high school:”
.
So if some Photoshopper was making fun of Anthony, it was in a pretty gentle way. Even flattering, if you like the warrior look.
.
But for you, everything has to be seen as mean-spirited. That becomes self-fulfilling.
Neal,
I like a good blog dispute as well as any, maybe more than most, but that has got to be one of the wackiest arguments I’ve ever heard. Please don’t take that the wrong way; gods know I’ve laid down some strange arguments myself. In a way I sort of admire the audacity. Are you … seriously arguing that the photoshopper wanted to flatter Anthony or are you just screwing around here? I don’t think I mean this as a rhetorical question. As is generally true, also I do not mean this as an offensive question. But I gotta ask.
You’re screwing around aren’t you. I get gullible when I’m startled, that must be it. 🙂
angech:
.
I don’t intend to discuss names. From my point of view, it was a an activity in questionable taste. It was quickly put down. The problem was that there was a general lack of awareness of how the system arhitecture handles uploading. But once they were de-posted, nobody was looking at them.
Mark:
.
No, Mr. X was not trying to flatter Anthony.But he certainly didn’t givem horns and a tail; or a hung-over look; or have him falling out of a tree. Look at some of Josh’s cartoons, for contrast.
Neal J. King, I have no idea what meaning you intend to convey with the bolding you’ve done prior to saying:
You said “they looked pretty damn good.” I said, it was not “intended to reflect a flattering scene in any movie.” Meet the Spartans was a parody. That scene was not a flattering scene, so I said the Photoshop wasn’t intended to reflect a flattering scene. That’s hardly remarkable.
If you have some point to make, bolding these sentences isn’t making it.
An assertion which was completely correct and raised the meaningful point that when the image was created, it was likely created to mock people by portraying them in the roles of characters from a parody. The fact the image, when taken out of context, might fail to reflect the derogatory intent of the image does not change that it was most likely created to be rather derogatory.
You conveniently continue to cherry-pick one image. I get you may have only remembered that one image at the time you made the initial remark, but it has since been pointed out, multiples times, there were a number of these. For instance, this image was clearly not intended to be flattering:
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/monkeys.jpg
It was meant to be derogatory. The point you were responding to with your comment was that I said upon seeing images created to insult people, I decided I would let people know about the directory containing them. Had the directory not contained them, I would have simply e-mailed John Cook to inform him the directory was publicly accessible in case he was unaware.
If you want to say people being Photoshopped into a scene from a parody movie in which characters were made to look stupid wasn’t mean-spirited, well… okay. If you want to claim a person being Photoshopped into an image to be portrayed as the Wicked Witch of the West wasn’t mean-spirited, well… okay. But you also said:
Given your claims I falsely attribute malice are consistently made with other claims that are wrong, people may well suspect your claims I falsely attribute malice are also wrong. Which would be good because despite your claims, I’ve rarely attributed anything to malice, and when I have, it’s been because there was clear ill-intent.
Unless somebody is going to seriously say Photoshopping Anthony Watts into an image to portray him as the Wicked Witch of the West was not malicious.
julio:
.
I think there are some problems with your argument. The flat-earth system is Cv-positive because it seems that the U is positive; but if you reference U to infinity, total energy is only positive for gas mlecules that can escape the earth. If you have a lid on theh top of the gas, that has to be taken into account for the VT as well.
.
Anyway, I bellieve my previous equations were too simplistic. I now have equations that allow for non-zero density/temperature/pressure at infinity. Otherwise, there just isn’t enough ability to accommodate extra energy input, etc.:
T = T(R) {1+ [(GMm/kT(R)(h+1)] * [1/r – 1/R]}
dT/dr = -((GMm/k(h+1))/r^2
n(r) = n(R) * {1 + [GMm/kT(R)(h+1)](1/r – 1/R)}^h
P(r) = P(R) * {1 + [GMm/kT(R)(h+1)](1/r – 1/R)}^(h+1)
.
where
gamma = 1 + 1/h
.
In fact it may still not work. Unfortunately, all the relevant integrals are too hard.
Brandon, perhaps that is how the shady oil company is bankrolling you: by buying multiple copies of your book.
More seriously, does Amazon give you any details about where the purchasers come from?
The only information Amazon gives about where purchases came from (at least, if you don’t run an ad campaign) is just which Amazon page was used. They have different pages for different countries, and sales are kept track of separately for each. It actually can be irritating sometimes because you have to combine sales records from each marketplace if you want detailed information on royalties.
But other than that, I don’t think there’s any information available.
Oh, and if someone wanted to pay me money, I’d recommend they buy my $2.99 book instead of one of the $0.99 ones. I get ~66% of sales on the more expensive one but only 35% on the cheap ones.
Brandon,
Maybe your next publication should contain links that are designed to appeal to different sorts of people, or people with specific interests, and you can clock who goes where.
Heck, are your blog statistics up at all? Maybe you should just but (edit, PUT) something up inviting people to contact you and let you know where they heard about the book or what brought it to their attention. If it’s utterly unrelated to your blog it won’t help to do that, but it couldn’t hurt either.
Just a thought. Of course, nothing guarantees responses will be honest, but who would bother to lie / what for; why respond at all in that case.
By the way, 60 copies sold so far today. That’s about half as many sold the first day the WUWT post went up. It’s getting to me I have no idea why this is happening.
Mark Bofill, I probably should have at least included a link in it to my site at least. I honestly don’t know why I didn’t. Probably just my general suckiness at marketing.
But it’s good to know you have faith I’ll write another 😀
Neal,
I usually take it for granted that people don’t like geoengineering type solutions to AGW for the same reasons I don’t (which is they terrify me to the point where I’m in danger of wetting myself, worrying about unintended consequences). Are you opposed to geoengineering? What are your thoughts on it.
Brandon,
Yah, you can’t quit now! I want the box set!
Was it you I suggested to I could just write enough of these little eBooks to get enough material together to collect for a real book? I think it might have been.
It worries me that possibility isn’t completely out of the picture.
Well don’t worry. Be happy. 🙂
It’s hard to. Do you realize how much time I must have spent to actually know enough to fill a book (without even getting very detailed on anything? Even just on a financial level, it’s bad. I could have made more money collecting cans!
hmm.
http://www.zero1gaming.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Underpants-Gnomes.jpg
Just have faith in the model.
And if that doesn’t work, tune it until it looks like it did?
Brandon! What a nefarious imagination you’ve got. Nobody does stuff like that.
:p
Just as an update, 66 copies sold yesterday. I still have no idea why. I just see one link to my work did though. It couldn’t explain the spike in sales, both because of the timing it was posted and the number of people who visit the site it was on (as well as at least one other reason), but it is in an interesting read:
http://climateconsensarian.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-difference-beteween-fraud-and-farce.html
One of the critics of my book has reversed his position on the Cook et al. paper after having previously gone through some contortions to defend it (see my blog post discussing what he wrote if you’re interested). I’ve only had time to skim his new post so far as I just got home and it’s quite late, but I think it’s a good sign. His defense of the paper was… shall we say, very determined, but it appears he has accepted he was wrong in much of that. I respect that.
I suspect that author and I will continue to disagree about any number of points, and I know at least one of his recent posts is wrong in a number of ways (amusingly, I only read the post because it refers to our disagreement and includes the line, “Suck it Shollenberger”). Still, I respect that he was able to recognize he was wrong in an important way and acknowledge that. I wish more people could do as much.
Oh, since I mentioned those sales, I should point out that for the moment:
On our ABC a caller asked about satellites and joining 2 together whether the increase in mass would change the orbit.
From an intuitive point of view, since not up to Carrick’s math level either I thought of a chain of satellites in the same orbit and thought that if each is OK on its own then there would be no change if joined together.
Each satellite could have lighter or denser components but if weightless obviously mass density has no effect and I guess one has to be weightless when in orbit, almost a precondition.
Still hung up on the heat of different sized and different density bodies at the same distance from a heat source but working my way through it.
Comment #144611) Yes, I agree with you
Mark: Geoengineering
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I have two problems with geoengineering:
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1) Getting it to work: The world is the most complex thing in the world, and there are very likely to be both short and long term implications that you have not thought of; inclluding the posssibility of phenomena that counter whatever it is that you are trying to do.
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2) If it does work, you are still not addressing the main problem, you are counterbalancing it by another influence. Example: If you want to add some blocking agent to reduce solar input, MAYBE you could imagine putting just enough per year to balance out the impact of increasing CO2; although it is overwhelmingly likely that, even if there is such a perfect amount, that it would take you several shots at getting it out.
But suppose that “it works”. You then have a temperature stability that is maintained by two human activities.If you stop the blocking, you go back to the CO2 issue, with leftover blocking suff. if you stop the CO2, you have all this blocking stuff lying around. Either way, you would have been better off by just stoppiing the CO2 at the zeroth stage.
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At it’s best, geoengineerinng is like solvling your household budgetary problems by getting yet another credit card: It gives you some breathing room for a few months, but just builds up your debt further. In the long run, it doesn’t help.
(Unless your plan is to max out all your cards, disperse the money in ways that are irretreivable, and then declare bankruptcy. Then you will be technically free of your debt. But you will have other problems.)
angech:
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The mass of the satellites doesn’t matter, because they all accelerate the same: Since the acceleratioin is proportional to the gravitational force divided by mass, but the gravitational force is proportional to mass, the mass cancels out.
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So if two satellites were right next to each other and going in exactly the same directiion (in effect, already in the same orbit), then joining them together wouldn’t affect anything. But if satellite A were in circula orbit about the Sun, and then you “stopped” satellite B and then attached it to B, you would have slowed down the combination A+B. A+B would slightly fall in towards the Sun, with an elliptical orbit which would be closest (perihelion) on the opposite side and farthest (aphelion) at the point of joining.
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If the satellites are at a distance from each other, but connected by chains, You can get away with assuming that the trajectory of the center of mass of all the satellites will behave like a simple rock,with regard to orbiting the Sun. Over long periods of time, and in proximity to planets, so-called tidal effects will play some role. As Carrrick alluded to before, this has resulted in the Moon becoming more and more remote from the Earth; this is expected to stop when the Earth and the Moon are in a “face-to-face” locked-in orientation. This will shift the satellites with respect to each other.
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Keep thinking about the glass sphere.
Interesting Neal. Ty.
I don’t see why you say it’s like a credit card though. you eventually have to pay a credit catd, all the value you borrowed and then some. I don’t understand in what way a geoengineering solution is analogous. Why do we have to ‘pay’ at some future point for using it?
Maybe I need coffee. 🙂
My apprehensions about geo-engineering were that engineers would not be involved.
If the goal is to fool Mother Nature, you don’t hire anyone who thinks it’s not nice, but moreover knows it cannot be done.
I’m confused by a number of things, such as Neal J. King’s analogy seeming to be rather off, but the thing that sticks with me is the idea geoengineering would be inherently frightening. I remember reading the latest IPCC report talking about geoengineering. The options ot covered included things that are hardly troubling, things that simply remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. I can’t see how things like planting trees and would be frightening.
Is there something I’m misunderstanding, or are you guys perhaps only discussing a subset of geoengineering options?
Brandon, do you remember the scheme of salting the ocean with iron filings?
Brandon, I think I was the one talking about wetting myself. Yeah I do think it’s terrifying, although as always I could be wrong. I’ll explain in a bit.
If it were determined that at some future time that geoengineering would be beneficial in reducing GHGs, I would have more confidence in it working than government mitigation based on the current political environment and proposals. In agriculture bioengineering has increased output to levels that sustain a much larger population than would have been reasonably predicted years ago.Â
A free market incentive would be required to make geoengineering work as well as bioengineering has – i.e. keep the governments out of the picture as much as possible. Â Government selecting winners in geoengineering would be as disastrous as it will be in government mitigation of AGW.
“salting the ocean with iron filings”
And after they are done, I suspect the squiggly lines will change in some way based on the physics model they made of what is supposed to happen. Or maybe they won’t.
Fun With Climate Science.
You know you could just change the squiggly lines and not bother with iron fillings. Save some hassle. Take a vacation instead. Or better yet have a Climate Conference somewhere. No one would know the difference.
Andrew
Kenneth, It is the scale of geoengineering that I find threatening. In order to work, wouldn’t it need to be massive?
I suppose one could say our greenhouse gas output is already an exercise in geo-engineering, although unintended as such.
I cannot see that any method of selection of a massive scheme could protect us from error, not political, nor by scientific committee.
What do you think would work better?
Mark:
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Suppose you’re trying to mitigate the buildup of CO2 by adding stratospheric sulphate aerosols. Let’s say we’re adding X amount of CO2 each year. Over a 10-year duration, we have added 10*X of CO2, and the amount of heat F(X, 10) over the amount had X been 0.
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If instead, you mitigate by adding Y of sulphate aerosols to the stratosphere every year, the additional heat will be 0. But you will have still added 10*X of CO2; plus you’ll have the 10*Y of sulphates hanging around, contributing to acid rain, etc.
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So if you stop after the 10th year, your CO2 problem will be + 10*X greater (which is where you would’ve been anyway); consequently your 11th year GW heating will be just as bad as it would have been without the geoengineering; plus you have the issue of what to do about the 10*Y of sulphates you now have lying around.
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So if you think of industrial CO2 as similar to debt, geoengineering, like a credit card, doesn’t cut your debt; it gives you more time to buld up more debt. And it costs you interest in the form of the environmental burden of the sulphates.
Neal King,
” inclluding the posssibility of phenomena that counter whatever it is that you are trying to do.”
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Funny how it is always suggested a possibility of phenomena which would counteract your efforts to cool, but no such counteracting phenomena could possibly exist in Earth’s reaction to increasing GHG forcing.
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“Either way, you would have been better off by just stoppiing the CO2 at the zeroth stage.”
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Really? What about the very high cost of ‘stopping the CO2 at the zeroth stage’? Do we just ignore those astronomical costs and proceed as if the cost were zero? Do we not consider the added suffering of poor people who will continue to live in energy poverty? (Not rhetorical questions.)
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“At it’s best, geoengineerinng is like solvling your household budgetary problems by getting yet another credit card: It gives you some breathing room for a few months, but just builds up your debt further. In the long run, it doesn’t help.”
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I don’t see that there is anything similar between the two. Geoengineering is an adjustable technical response to a poorly defined technical problem…. a response that can be adjusted as system knowledge improves. The schemes for reducing the intensity of sunlight that I have seen (eg sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere) all involve relatively short lived influences, so you get to make adjustments if your first efforts are not exactly what you wanted. Dismissing technical solutions seems terribly close minded to me, especially since there is little evidence the “zeroth stage” CO2 reductions are going to take place in the foreseeable future. Technical solutions may be by far the most cost effective, and indeed, perhaps the only possible approach, both in terms of monetary cost and the average quality of human life.
Water-fountain engineering:
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I worked for a few years at a company called ROLM, that had a really nice campus in Silicon Valley. There was an artificial circular stream fed by a spring, running clear water; and in spring-time you could hear the toads.
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During a California drought period, the management decided to save water (and money) by recirculating the water, instead of running the stream from the Santa Clara water supply. So the water was no longer fresh, and after awhile you couldn’t hear any more toads.
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Then the water started to change: it became an unattractive shade of green. People complained, and the management decided that the problem was algae, and treated the water to prevent algae growth.
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Then the water turned white, like milk. After further conference, the management added further chemicals to treat the water.
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Then the water turned orange. Maybe like the colour of Thai iced tea? The plants at the side of the stream had been long dead. More management conferral.
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Then the water turned green again. This time, the management decided to leave it alone.
I agree with Neal. I suspect after dumping iron filings into the ocean, the Dead Fish Graph is going to look like a hockey stick.
Until they adjust it of course.
Andrew
Yup, having managers at an electronics hardware company trying to control water quality is probably a bad idea. A bit like having gardeners diagnosing cardiac problems… also a bad idea.
SteveF:
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Did you go off to Istanbul? How was it?
“having managers at an electronics hardware company trying to control water quality is probably a bad idea”
Gubbmint Agencies too. See Flint, MI.
Lose, lose, lose.
Andrew
Thanks Neal. I get the credit analog better now, and of course your example with the artificial stream is almost like a classic case of underestimating how hard it can be to modify or control complex natural systems.
I never did scrub my toilet or bathtub last week, and I’ve got yard work on top of that now. 🙁 I check back in later.
SteveF, I don’t doubt the possibility of a technical response (solution is too big a word for me to grasp) but I do doubt the ability of our political institutions to discover, recognize and implement it.
There would have to be near universal political agreement on the magnitude and mapping of the effects both of the problem and the cure. Suppose the Russians and Canadians liked longer growing seasons? Fry a Fijian to comfort a Canadian?
You may remember a bumper sticker seen in Texas in the late ’70s. ‘Drive 100, Freeze a Yankee’ which addressed the cost of Natural Gas within the state which was higher than the interstate cost. The connection of this cost with car speed was lost on me, but apparently the Texans understood it.
I actually think structuring a political system which could decide on a very large scale technical response would not only be very difficult, but could produce a concentration of authority that we both would hate.
Mark:
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Too much information.
Neal J. King (Comment #144644
Now if this were a government mitigation problem it would never admit failure. More funds would be called for fixing this mitigation caused problem and we would hear talk about how we are better off than without this mitigation.
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Yup, having managers at an electronics hardware company trying to control water quality is probably a bad idea. A bit like having gardeners diagnosing cardiac problems… also a bad idea.”
Something like government bureaucrats picking winners.
jferguson,
“I suppose one could say our greenhouse gas output is already an exercise in geo-engineering, although unintended as such.”
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Of course it is, though by no means is it the first such uncontrolled exercise. Vast land areas were deforested and converted to farm fields, rice farming fundamentally changed the surface of huge areas, and increased the flux of methane to boot. Caution is of course warranted if you are going to consider active technological solutions, but fear is rarely a constructive motivation when making decisions with potentially large long term consequences. Fear usually inhibits reasoned weighing of costs and benefits. Arguments about the ‘danger’ of geoengineering are at bottom the same argument as is raised against nuclear power…. how can we be sure radioactive waste would not ‘escape’ from Yucca Mountain in 50,00 years and ruin Nevada? (Answer: there can never be 100% certainty, but we can be 99.99% sure it won’t happen.) Fear often inhibits rational thinking, as the politics of nuclear power demonstrates. Fear usually demands the complete elimination of risk… and that can’t happen.
SteveF, I don’t doubt the possibility of an effective response, I continue to be nervous about the selection. Maybe it would be possible to create an international committee to reason through the thing, select a good method and cause its implementation.
I’m certainly not a Luddite, having made my living devising technological solutions to the problems of my clients, but I guess my scars from battling regulators must still be bothering me.
How to make it happen seems as big a part of the response as identifying something that would work
jfurguson,
“I actually think structuring a political system which could decide on a very large scale technical response would not only be very difficult, but could produce a concentration of authority that we both would hate.’
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I expect President Hillary will try very hard to move us toward that concentrated authority. 😉
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But I would suggest the enforcement of draconian CO2 emissions reductions would require a very similar level of concentrated authority. The Chinese and Indians (and Russians, Brazilians, and many more) are thumbing their noses at CO2 emissions reductions. I don’t see a path from today to international controls on emissions without a dangerous level of Orwellian control; in fact, I would go further: I predict no net reduction in global CO2 emissions (other than due to economic recession) over the next 20+ years; the cake is already baked. If climate sensitivity turns out to be higher than I think it is, then there are no simple solutions; I just won’t dismiss using technological fixes.
Neal,
:p
SteveF,
I’m fond of the idea of solving a problem when you know what it is, how big it is, and have some grasp of what will happen if it isn’t ‘solved.’
It may well be that temperature will be the driver that enables the establishment of an international governmental authority with teeth. Doubtless it will make more sense to locate its seat in Paducah rather than leave it in Brussels.
I also concede that you likely have a much better comprehension of the physical possibilities than I do. I worry more about the creation of a new broader governmental authority than I do about the increase in ‘global temperature’ because I doubt the likely effects will be that terrible as a result of what seems to me a reasonable estimate of the increase in say the next 100 years.
(My God, what a sentence, sorry.)
It wasn’t iron filings. They would rapidly sink to the bottom without dissolving. It was a soluble iron salt. Iron sulfate was used in one experiment. The point of adding iron was to create a phytoplankton bloom because iron isn’t very soluble in sea water and is a limiting nutrient for phytoplankton. The phytoplankton would consume CO2 and sink to the bottom when they died. See the Wikipedia article for more details.
Apparently it’s all right for a volcano to increase the iron content of ocean surface waters, the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo was estimated to have put 40,000 tons of iron dust into the world ocean, but it’s not acceptable for humans to do it. There is the point that maximum effect is only a fraction of the total anthropogenic forcing.
Ruddimann’s hypothesis is that this, the invention of agriculture some 8,000 years ago, is the reason we’re not well on our way to a new glacial period. I imagine that if there were the equivalent of modern greens back then, they would have been opposed to agriculture.
Interestingly, the advent of agriculture can be discovered by seeing a general drop in health, as determined by analysis of human remains, particularly teeth.
Ruddimann also has a hypothesis that the cooling period in Europe in the early 16th century was in part due to de-population of the Americas, as part of the Columbian exchange.
Neal,
Doesn’t that imply infinite mass? Have you compared the Jeans mass to the mass of your system as R → ∞? The density required to have a system unstable to gravitational collapse drops rapidly as the total mass increases.
Neal,
The Columbian exchange was indeed devastating, but there is evidence that all was not well in North America starting well before the Europeans arrived. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/29/science/don-t-blame-columbus-for-all-the-indians-ills.html?pagewanted=all
jeferguson:
Nope. I don’t think I’ve even heard of it.
DeWitt:
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I don’t think you have to go as far as r= infinity. Consider the integral of number densitY:
N = INT [r=R, Z] {n(r)} d3r
= 4(pi) n(R) INT[r = R, Z]
{[r^2 [1 + (GMm)/(kT(R)(h+1))*(1/r – 1/R)]^h } dr
where Z is the point at which the integrand vanishes:
Z/R = (GMm/R)/[(GMm/R – kT(R)*(h+1)]
n, T, and P all vanish at r = Z.
All the integrals converge, whatever the vaue of h = 1/(gamma-1)
Unfortunately, although all the integrals are similar, they’re not identical, and I haven’t yet thought of how to do them; it might be necessary to do it numerically.
Just for laughs, here’s what they look like (stripped down):
N = c1 * INT[r = R, Z] {r^2 * [1 + e(1/r – 1/R)]^h} dr
[P] = c2 * INT[r = R, Z] {r^2 * [1 + e(1/r – 1/R)]^(h+1)} dr
[U] = -c3 * INT[r = R, Z] {r * [1 + e(1/r – 1/R)]^h) dr
where e, c1, c2, c3 are constants.
While checking out my book’s page, I came across a link to a book by Tim Ball. I really want to read it because I want to see how crazy it is. I just don’t know that I want to spend money on something where I know it’ll help someone like him write disgusting and terrible things.
There were a few other books I wanted to check out as well. It’s remarkable how bad the literature on this topic is.
DeWitt:
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Science marches on.
DeWitt:
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Heck, I’ll see how far I get by integrating by parts!
Neal King,
“Did you go off to Istanbul? How was it?”
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Yes, I have finished work and will be here another 14 hours or so before I return. It was very much like the last time I was here: mostly terrible, incredible, horrible and intolerable traffic. A 6 mile drive can easily turn into 100+ minutes of wasted time, most any time of the day. Still also an odd mix of ~50% European oriented people and ~50% sharia oriented people, with little evidence of middle ground. I am honestly concerned about the future here.
SteveF,
Sure I’m scared, but I think there’s at least a couple more/better reasons to fear geoengineering than nuclear:
1) Scale. Screw up nuclear, you’ve screwed up a locality. What have you got if you screw up geoengineering to offset global warming of the planet? Odds are, nothing and it merely fails. But the potential is there for considerably more damage than that of a a nuclear screwup.
2) Feedback and comprehension. I don’t think our climate models are wrong primarily because the modelers may expect warming. I don’t think the climate models are wrong because the modelers are idiots. I think the climate models are wrong because it’s dang hard to model climate, and that we don’t really understand all of the factors. So — we go geoengineering. We are hindered by the same lack of thorough understanding. How’s El Nino going to change in response? What’s gonna happen to sea ice? We already only have a tenuous understanding of these things and sometimes little more than assorted unproven ideas about why these things don’t always behave as we expect.
Anyway. I’m just saying, I think the potential for something to go wrong there is a lot greater than it is for nuclear.
jferguson,
“I’m fond of the idea of solving a problem when you know what it is, how big it is, and have some grasp of what will happen if it isn’t ‘solved.’”
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Sure. But considering what is actually happening around the world, I suspect those things will become a lot more clear before there is any real need for (or even possibility of) choosing between restricting CO2 emissions, ‘geoengineering’ options, or doing nothing. I doubt either of us will be around by then to see it play out. 😮
Re: Neal J. King (Comment #144614)
Your comment made me realize that the math is actually a bit more subtle than I thought. I doubt if anybody would care, but here’s the deal:
I have been using rho(r) as a probability distribution function (PDF) over the variable r, but this is right only if I use the right measure, which is not dr, but r^2 dr. Main point, INT{R,Infinity} rho(r) dr is not necessarily a constant (independent of, say, the total energy), but INT{R,Infinity} rho(r) r^2 dr is a constant.
This has consequences, for instance, when calculating the average potential energy. It is proportional to
-INT{R,Infinity} rho(r) r dr
but in order to figure out how this behaves you need to bring out again the r^2 dr, and write
-INT{R,Infinity} (1/r) rho(r) r^2 dr
Now you can expand 1/r as 1/R – (r-R)/R^2, which explicitly shows that [U] grows when the atmosphere expands–meaning, the PDF rho(r) r^2 shifts towards higher average values of r.
(From this it follows that I was careless the other day and instead of expanding (r-R^3/r^2) I should have expanded (1/r-R^3/r^4). Fortunately, to lowest order it makes no difference!)
mark bofill,
Sure, there is risk in everything you might choose to do, and you do your best to accurately evaluate that risk and weight it against perceived costs and benefits. But if actually being considered, ‘geoengineering’ doesn’t have to be a crash program. Little steps. Learn. Define. Adjust. Progress. It’s just like most anything else. The Wright brothers didn’t build a 777. But I will walk onto one tomorrow morning.
Stevef,
Ok, that’s reasonable.
SteveF:
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Too bad, it was a great place to visit several years ago, before Erdogan went so retro.
Neal King,
I there are lots of nice things about Istanbul, in spite of Erdogan (which turns out to be a very common name… like “Jones”). The conflicts with surrounding political entities, Russia, Kurds, Iran, Greece (Cyprus) do appear to hurt the economy. The terrible traffic is independent of Erdogan.
SteveF, The problem could be resistant to incremental efforts, although i would concede that if Arrhenius effects are incremental maybe so could be the cure. But..
In the ’60s I was a research assistant (grunt) on a contract addressed to establishing a dosage vs performance alteration schedule for the use of an hallucinogenic on human and primate experimental subjects (never EVER volunteer for anything like this). There had been a year or two of heavy thought on this topic prior to contract and then two years for the contract. We never were able to show any gradation in performance. There was either no effect or the subject behavior was blown out.
I’m skeptical of tipping points being common in natural systems, but there seemed to be one there. We couldn’t even establish where it was. Same subjects, different days, totally different results. It wasn’t entirely random, but we couldn’t identify the controlling variables.
Our climate may be more stable, but among the risks of experimenting with it must surely lie the possibility that some heretofore unprovoked aspect of it will respond badly.
if, or when we do this, we need to be very careful, and have some good plan b’s and c’s.
If you have time, a boat trip up the Bosporus is very interesting. The Tall Cotton in Istanbul is really impressive, mansions built on the sides of the very steep banks. They do their boat traffic a lot like the car traffic though.
I had time to read Brandon Gates’s post in full today, and again, I think he deserves credit for his about-face on the Cook et all. paper. I wrote a post about it as I think it’s cool we were able to reach the point we agree on the key issues. But be warned, while I tried to be dispassionate and not gloat or be petty, I didn’t entirely succeed.
Brandon,
:> Did you think it was that your logical arguments were so clear, so irresistibly compelling that Brandon Gates simply couldn’t help himself and he had to change his mind? Heh. He changed his mind because he thought he was mistaken and it wasn’t unbearable painful to admit. So I don’t know what there is to gloat or be petty about, honestly Brandon.
Cause Game of Thrones is the sum of all human wisdom and despite what SkS might tell you, Winter is Coming…
:p
jferguson,
“If you have time, a boat trip up the Bosporus is very interesting.”
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I don’t have time, but on other trips to Istanbul I have seen the Bosporus from both sides, seen the houses built into the hillsides, and watched the (considerable) boat traffic… I even poked around a marina once. I’m not much of a tourist… I tend to focus almost entirely on work when I travel. I was surprised to read about the depth of the Bosporus and the salinity gradient with depth.
Mark Bofill:
I’d like to think the reason he came to believe he was mistaken is that I did make a compelling argument. But no, that’s not what I’d gloat about. What I’d gloat about is a person making strong comments about how wrong I am being wrong and having to live it down.
I can’t say I’ve ever read the books (I refuse to start them until the series is finished) or watched the show, but the part about a person bending their knees to you is that they submit and acknowledge you are their better (in that situation). You then grant them the right to stand back up, asserting your dominance and showing mercy at the same time.
A person simply changing their position isn’t going to their knees. A person who attacks you then decides to stop attacking you hasn’t submitted. That makes your analogy way off-base. If Gates had even just said a single word to me to the effect of, “Sorry I said wrong things about your book” you might be able to have a point. He didn’t though.
Brandon,
What?
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You haven’t read them?!?
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You’re dead to me, Shollenberger! I don’t know anyone named Brandon S., you hear! DEAD to me!
Okay not really. But the books are IMO awfully good, a heck of a lot better than season 1 was (only season I bothered watching). Unless you really like boobs, in which case I guess the show might have something to offer. At least that was the case around when I lost interest in the show. Not to say I’ve got anything against boobs…
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Was I saying something here at some point? I sorta … hmm..
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Wow, I didn’t expect that response. Awesome. I thought you’d probably scoff that the whole premise.
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Anyways. The yardwork is not yet done. Even though Neal thinks it is TMI, I bet I could come up with an argument that justifies a post on the status of my laundry on the basis of environmental and ecological concerns.
Serious ones…
Carrick, DeWitt, julio:
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After some staring and playing around with the integrals, I separated out all dimensional factors and have them reduced to purely numerical integrals, which can be a) Expressed in terms of the 2F1 hypergeometric function; and b) Evaluated by Wolfram’s website. The key parameter is: (GMm/R)/(kT(R), which is a measure of the degree to which the molecules are bound to the core.
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I won’t try to finish this tonight.
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I will note, however, that this approach is free of unreasonable restrictions on gamma, and should be able to accommodate changes in temperature, etc. It might be possible to draw out the analytical behavior in some neighborhood of parameter space, using Mathematica.
mark,
The show gets better. Also, the show will probably be finished before the books are. The fifth season already had scenes that occurred after the end of A Dance with Dragons. The sixth season, which starts in April, is almost entirely beyond anything that’s been published in written form. There’s a certain and growing amount of divergence between the books and the show. So skipping seasons 2-5 is not recommended. Conservation of characters is a large part of it. But the endgame will still be the same.
Thanks DeWitt. I’ll investigate the show sometime.
SteveF:
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When I visited Istanbul several years ago, it was very pleasant. In addition to the Hagia Sophia (which had been the Roman basilica in Constantinople before the Moslems took over), I also stopped in on very old church that had been converted into a Sufi mosque. I was invited for tea, and found that the gathering included a variety of Islamic sects, a Christian, and even an atheist. Afterwards, one of the participants invited me to a small but more orthodox mosque where he acted as the Muezzin, who issues the call for prayer.
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At the time, the stress that I saw in Istanabul included such events as the gatekeepers at the University refusing admission to a student who was wearing a simple scarf. It seemed a bit blown out of proportion to me, but some Turkish folks I knew from Germany insisted it was necessary: “As soon as they are allowed to wear scarfs in the University, they’ll gang up on the other girls and pressure them all to wear scarfs.”
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Anyway, the situation seems to have gone downhill from there. Erdogan has gotten increasingly abusive of the press.
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Mark:
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Sorry, Mark: I don’t have a TV. So sue me.
Oh god, someone save me from myself. I wound up buying that book by Tim Ball, and it is hilariously bad. It shows exactly why WUWT having Ball as a frequent, if not the most frequent, poster there is disgraceful and embarrassing. But more importantly, it just caused me to write an outline for another ePamphlet.*
I mean, how can I resist the hilarity of condemning Stephan Lewandowsky’s work painting global warming skeptics as conspiracy nuts when they keep promoting conspiracy nuts? It’s too great!
*A term I might actually try to use more regularly. 10k words is not a normal length for a book, but it is actually a normal enough length for pamphlets which used to see far more publication. Credit to Tonyb for drawing my attention to them.
If AGW were handled by torts as was the process used to deal with issues like AGW before the advent of the use of regulations, the problems caused by AGW would have to be proven in a court of law and remedies would derive from that process. If harm were proven, I could see a remedy involving geoengineering whereby those offenders found by the court would share the costs. The court would have to review the effectiveness and unintended consequences of the remedy and in such a process avoid the problems associated with governments never admitting a mistake.
Sequestering the GHGs at the source could provide a geoengineering remedy that would be less scary with regards to requiring a huge government oversight. If the prevailing politics of the intelligentsia where to allow free markets to determine the best solutions and avoid the known problems of heavy government involvement in these matters I think we could find a reasonable path to dealing with AGW. Unfortunately the intelligentsia is more interested in finding reasons (excuses) for greater government involvement in these matters.
Brandon Gates and mosher on the same wavelength re the Cooked survey. Very brave of both to say so.
Disagree on other viewpoints but this is one of the best acts of integrity I have seen recently.
I doubt I could have done it if I was him.
Brandon G might be about to find out the wrath of the conservative community, a bit like Robert Way at one stage.
Neal I think you could support Brandon G on this one but as a Skeptical Science figure you would be ostracised.
Much worse than dressing up in funny clothes.
angech, indeed. I’d like to think what Brandon Gates has done is the minimal standard of behavior, but sadly, it doesn’t appear to be. From my experience, not many people would do what he’s done. I think that’s sad. I also think it speaks well of Brandons.
And yes, that s is there on purpose. It can’t be a coincidence only another Brandon would live up to my standards!
Also, Happy Easter everybody!
Happy Easter!
angech: #144688
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There is zero probability of my doing that. I know what the SkS folks have done and have been doing for the Cook (2013) project, and I’m happy to be associated with it, although I didn’t do much work on it, nor was every detail done as I might have preferred. The vast majority of criticisms were answered before having been asked, in the paper itself. And there is a further document that provides direct answers, at http://www.skepticalscience.com/97-percent-consensus-robust.htm ; and I believe there is a supplementary document that studies some of Tol’s points to death. I don’t have any problem with their work.
Neal,
You don’t need a TV if you have 10Mbps internet or better. You can stream nearly everything to your computer. That gets you HD resolution. For lower resolution, you don’t need that much bandwidth. I don’t know if GoT is legally available anywhere but HBO. HBO NOW is $15 US/month and there are some hoops to jump through.
Alas angech, it seems only one person is going to be remotely sensible on this. Too bad. Brandon Gates’s attitude toward me wasn’t that much different than Neal J. King’s, so there was some hope King could follow in Gates’s footsteps.
Then again, Gates actually put effort into explaining the basis for his views and responding to what was said. King studiously avoids doing the same. I guess that makes all the difference.
Neal,
Back to what you were saying about geoengineering and CO2. It occurred to me to wonder if you view CO2 as an inherent problem. Please let me explain what I mean by that.
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Are there any conceivable circumstances under which you would consider increased atmospheric CO2 desirable? The Earth periodically enters ice ages, someday in the distant future doubtless it will again. Would increased atmospheric CO2 be OK in that scenario?
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By ‘inherent’ (and maybe that’s the wrong word) I mean [edit: the idea that ‘]increased CO2 in the atmosphere is negative’, period paragragh regardless of circumstances and all other considerations.
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There isn’t really a point to this; it doesn’t lead to some tricky argument that demonstrates something I want demonstrated as a contrarian. Again, just trying to understand you clearly.
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Thanks,
Brandon,
Well, you’ve got to make allowances. I mean, Neal’s name’s not Brandon.
😉
It’s not even Bradon or Brandoon.
Mark:
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Given enough time, the amount of CO2 concentration increase or decrease is not a problem: ecosystems can adapt & evolve around that. What concerns me is big changes on a human time-scale. If this CO2 change were imposed upon us, we would just have to deal with it. But this is, indeed, a geoengineering trial that we are running on ourselves, globally, with no back-up.
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Does that answer your question?
Kenneth Frisch:
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Isn’t what you’re talking about a carbon tax or fee, such has been suggested several times?
DeWitt:
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I haven’t wanted to expose myself to video media programming on a regular basis, for many decades. It’s more effective than gravity at eating up time.
Neal,
De gustibus, non est disputandum.
Or to put it another way: Whatever floats your boat.
Thank you Neal. In fact it doesn’t exactly answer my question, but maybe I need to think it through a little more thoroughly.
I’ve been thinking about what I meant with the shenanigans, or what I currently mean, and how to explain it Neal. Only if you’re still curious though. As it happens a fortuitous method of making clear at least part of my problem has dropped into my lap.
Tom Curtis posts on SkS:
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I pipe in, identifying myself as a contrarian yet voicing strong agreement with Tom’s sentiment.
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Finally, One Planet Only Forever comes to stand up for the progressive revolution.
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So what is it? Is Skeptical Science about opposing AGW/man made climate change, or is it about advancing progressive ideology? In your opinion.
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As always, thanks for your thoughts Neal.
For some reason I’m getting ads for Edward O. Wilson’s book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life on my Yahoo page. The capsule review is:
IMO, he’s preaching to the choir. I would guess that the vast majority of people on the planet, including most of those who are influential enough to actually get something done, do not believe our planet is fighting for its life. The title of this book will turn them off sufficiently so they’re unlikely to read it. If they do read it, the proposed solution, abandon half the planet, would be ludicrous.
mark,
Another way of making an egg shell stand up would be to put something heavy in the bottom.
:> why didn’t I think of that.
Mark:
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Well, the article is a re-post of one by Joshua Robertson published elsewhere. It states: “University of Queensland and Griffith University researchers have developed a ‘global energy tracker’ which predicts average world temperatures could climb 1.5C above pre-industrial levels by 2020.
That forecast, based on new modelling using long-term average projections on economic growth, population growth and energy use per person, points to a 2C rise by 2030.”
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There seem to be a few people (Tom Curtis, Glenn Tamblyn) who don’t wish progress on CO2 to be tied up in economic revolution, and some like OnePlanetOnlyForever who think it’s necessary.
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Tom has not been affiliated with SkS for some time, although he is sympathetic. Glenn is a regular contributor. OPOF is probably not a contributor; certainly I don’t recognize that handle.
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SkS has just posted the article. If you trust the conclusions of the article, the problems are much closer in than people have been thinking. I don’t think you can draw a conclusion about ideology here. I don’t see a consensus in the comments; and even if there were, the comments don’t represent “the position” of SkS.
DeWItt:
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It’s my impression that E.O. Wilson is kind of an expert on species loss, so if he says a lot of species are disappearing, I’m inclined to think that he’s probably right.
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That said, creating workable solutions is harder than identifying problems.
Thanks Neal.
Neal J. King:
This is a guy who says humans need to give up half of the planet to wildlife to avoid an extinction event on par with the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. I’d be skeptical of anything he says about species lost being a problem.
B.:
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Many physicists didn’t like the conclusion of the twin-paradox, but hey considered it seriously because it was a consequence of a strange but successful theory of electromagnetism.
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Others concluded, “This twin-paradox can’t be right; so that Einstein fellow doesn’t do good physics.”
An even better parallel would be to General Relativity. The only reason anybody paid any attention at all was because the theory was proposed by Einstein. It’s doubtful that anyone besides him understood it, with the possible exception of the mathematician Hilbert.
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Yet in the year 2016, we have the LIGO. And as early as 1919, expeditions were sent to Brazil and the west coast of Africa, to test it, when the theory was 3 years old.
“That said, creating workable solutions is harder than identifying problems.”
Neal,
Except for the case of Global Warming. In that case, ’tis the other way ’round.
We have solutions out the wazoo and spend uncountable amounts of money fixing…
…”its warmer than it would have been.”
Andrew
Likewise: Consider Le Verrier and Adams: Both predicted, on the basis of orbital discrepancies, the location and mass of a planet.
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But the Berlin Observatory took Le Verrier’s claims seriously, and found Neptune within an hour of search. The Cambridge Observatory did not take Adams’ claims seriously, and basically missed out.
The moral of the story is not: “Believe everything said by a famous expert.” But if such an expert expresses an extreme opinion, it’s silly to ding him for it just because it is extreme. He knows it’s extreme, and he’s putting his reputation on it. If the analysis is found to be unsound, his reputation will suffer for it.
“if such an expert expresses an extreme opinion”
Nullius in verba
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullius_in_verba
Andrew
Pardon Neal, I think I’m with Andrew on this one. I think it’s a matter of personal taste, what to believe when an expert tells you something strange. I guess if I’m wrong as a result of my heuristic, that’ll just be my problem then.
Andrew_KY: Irrelevant.
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Nobody is talking about “taking it for proven.” The point is to take a look at it, and see if it holds up under investigation.
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The approach you seem to be taking is “Keep shopping for different experts until you get the answer you like.”
“The approach you seem to be taking is “Keep shopping for different experts until you get the answer you like.â€
Neal,
You’d be wrong. My approach is don’t appeal to any expert opinion at all.
Again, you seem obtuse to the things I comment that are pretty straightforward. Maybe you can further explain.
Andrew
Again, pardon Neal, what you’re saying now isn’t what you said before.
isn’t the same as
Your initial explanation doesn’t explicitly offer advice what to do with the experts advice, but seemed to indicate to me anyway that I ought to accept it.
If this isn’t what you meant, that’s fine. I misunderstood you.
Leaving aside that Neal J. King is wrong on history (a point I’d detail save we all know he conveniently ignores anything that’s inconvenient to him), he’s just wrong. It is commonplace for “a famous expert” to say incredible and extreme things that aren’t remotely true. Many of them don’t have their reputation suffer for it, not even after it’s proven they were wrong. Heck, at least some of them have their reputation boosted despite it being proven they’re wrong. (Michael Mann being a perfect example.)
But more importantly, being famous doesn’t mean a thing. People who become famous in science rarely, if ever, are better or more knowledgeable about science than those who don’t. That’s because people rarely become famous for their scientific accomplishments. Edward Wilson certainly didn’t. Wilson only became famous because he tried to apply his work in a field he was an expert on (ants) to a field he had no real expertise in (humans and their society) in a haphazard way that had little to no real scientific credibility.
I don’t suggest “dinging” Wilson for making extreme claims. I suggest “dinging” him for making extreme claims that have no basis in any real science. That Wilson might be an expert on one topic doesn’t mean his extreme claims on other topics should be treated as credible. It’s not like he’s done any work to justify his claims. There’s no equations that can be checked, evidence that can be examined or predictions that can be verified.
Leaving aside that King and historical facts, or any other facts really, don’t get along, his comparisons are absurd. Einstein was listened to because he provided work that explained discrepancies which had existed for centuries. He provided working models and equations that could be verified. He showed how they were functional and useful, and he explained how they made predictions which turned out to be accurate. That was why people listened to him.
When a scientist does good science and draws conclusions from it, people should listen. When a scientist comes up with personal beliefs not rooted in any real science, people shouldn’t listen.
By the way, I would struggle to claim Edward Wilson is an expert on species extinction. That wasn’t a field of study he focused on during his career, and as far as I can see, it plays a small (if not non-existent) role in most of his scientific work. From what I saw when reviewing his published science, he pretty much came into the species extinction discussion because of his personal beliefs regarding ecology, not any real scientific work or expertise.
I don’t know what makes Neal J. King think Wilson is a famous expert on the subject aside from possibly the fact Wilson has gotten a significant amount of attention for making extreme claims regarding it. I certainly don’t know of anything that’d make me think he’s an expert people should trust and rely upon.
I haven’t read the book.But from what I’ve seen of the write-up, he ends up saying, “We have to exclude humanity from half the planet.” Now, that isn’t a conclusion from analysis, it’s a recommendation. So the unstated part of the recommendation has to be,”or else THIS will happen,” where THIS is something that he finds completely unacceptable, and believes that you do as well.
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In the full argument, he has to establish what the consequences would be of a range of responses to the biodiversity threat, from “do nothing” to “restrict humanity to 20% of the planet” or maybe even “get a new planet”. Then he has to explain the degree of acceptability of the different consequences. His analysis then has to be something like: “If you want the result to be in this range of acceptability, your actions must be in that range of effort.” This mapping, between the effort and the consequences, has to be convincingly explained in the analysis.
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To extract a recommendation from this, he has to establish that certain outcomes are unacceptable, not only to him but to you; and then he has to point out the minimal effort required to prevent all the unacceptable outcomes. At this point, he has a recommendation.
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But until we know what he regards as an unacceptable outcome, we don’t know how to evaluate the cost of the effort. And of course until we look at his analysis, we don’t know if he’s right in his mapping.
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Analogy: A different expert announces: “We can save the planet if we dedicate 50% of all economic activity for 10 years to preventing this problem; otherwise, we’re doomed.” Sounds ridiculous, right? But what if he is an expert on close-passing asteroids, and has just discovered that a Moon-sized object is scheduled for a direct hit on the Earth in 10 years? Does the cost sound too high now? I think the consequence we would be trying to avoid would, indeed, be the end of the planet as we know it, certainly the destruction of humanity. If he’s really respected as an expert (and not prone to practical jokes), we need to check his analysis: Is there a moon-sized object heading towards us, and when? What can we do to deflect it? How much effort would it take?
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He could be wrong on the size; he could be wrong on the trajectory; he could be wrong on the deflection technologies; he could be wrong on the economics. If any of these are wrong, his recommendation could be wrong. But if he has expertise that covers all these areas, then it deserves consideration. That doesn’t mean “Start a new Manhattan project overnight.” It means getting some other experts to check his work. If it all checks out …
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In the case of interest, we don’t know what E.O. Wilson is assuming to be unacceptable. If he is assuming that the loss of a single species is an unacceptable result that requires 50% reservation of the planet, then maybe his mapping is correct but his views on what is acceptable are too demanding. But until we know both the the unacceptable result and the cost, we can’t make a judgment on whether he knows what he’s talking about. All I can say about that is that he is generally considered an expert on species extinction and biodiversity issues.
Neal,
Wikipedia’ing him I seem to be getting that he is an ant expert and an award winning writer. He may be an expert on species extinction and biodiversity, but it didn’t seem obvious to me from the article on him. But maybe it’s just my jerky attitude, because (not being sarcastic) sometimes I have a jerky attitude towards some claims.
Anyways. I hope everyone had an awesome Easter!
“All I can say about that is that he is generally considered an expert on species extinction and biodiversity issues.”
Neal,
After that long winded and short facted comment, you just assert he’s an expert again.
Obtuse. Again.
Andrwe
Mark:
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I don’t know if it’s a well-mapped-out intellectual territory, like high-energy physics or general relativity. One would have to check with the community of people who work on these things and ask them what they think of him. What is clear is that he’s done a lot of rather high-profile writing on the topic, and I’ve never seen a professional biologist saying that he was full of crap.
Neal,
That’s fair and it makes a certain amount of sense to me. It’s what I think of as a reasonable heuristic. I think people use a lot more heuristics or rules of thumb about these issues than we usually realize. I’ve got no problem with that. Just understand, different folk have different heuristics. It’s OK; they aren’t laws of the universe or axioms or theorems or anything. Just rules of thumb based on experience.
And I guess this is like the shenanigans thing too. My reasoning there was a heuristic. Is there any clear cut reason I can explain that the 97% consensus study, the photoshop incident, the twitterbots, and the outrageous lewandowsky studies prevent SkS from having the unbiased truth whole truth and nothing but with respect to AGW? No. It just doesn’t seem like the things plausibly go together. It’s like supposing that there could be a college bookstore inside a Chucky Cheese kids pizza arcade. It could be. But.. not really.
~shrug~
Mark:
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Yes, navigating life is an heuristic process. To begin with, nobody knows enough to do anything. By trying things out in heuristic processes, you learn more and more, but there’s always the edge where you can’t be sure of what you know and what you don’t. Insisting that you can’t proceed without knowing everything is a guaranteed way to learn nothing.
I don’t insist that, do I?
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I certainly don’t mean to. Not aware of it anyway.
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No my point was literally just that different people have different rules of thumb. I’ve got rules of thumb that make me doubt the notion of giving up half the world to save the world. You’ve got rules of thumb that possibly cause you to view Wilson more charitably. Well, OK. Just different heuristics leading to our disagreement.
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What to do about it — well, I don’t propose we do nothing. But then again, I don’t propose we take Wilson at his word when what he proposes seems expensive and extreme. Surely there is some other way forward.
Mark:
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With regard to the shenanigans issue, these are things that can actually be understood. The starting point has to be, “What actually bothers you?” If you don’t know, then perhaps you ought to think about it harder.
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Since we’ve been over the Photoshop issue, the fact that you mention it again must mean that there is something still unclear in your mind. What is it?
With regard to EOW:
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There’s plenty that can be done:
– He’s definitely titled his book to catch attention and to challenge. See who responds: Are there any experts in relevant fields? What do they say? What weaknesses do they point out?
– Read it yourself: Maybe you can find logical holes even if the subject matter is not familiar to you.
– In other words: Use heuristics.
mm.
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I’ll think harder about the shenanigans issue and what bothers me, yes.
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Regarding the photoshop issue, I don’t understand why you think that. The fact that I mention it again does not mean there is something still unclear in my mind, as far as I can tell. Why would it?
There is something inconsistent in my view, of the idea that SkS is a place of sober and serious impartial and objective research on climate and many of these peripherals. This is why I refer to the peripherals, and the photoshop incident is one of them. Again, as best I can tell. I don’t see why something about the photoshop incident needs to be unclear to me to be inconsistent with the idea that SkS is a place of sober serious impartial and objective research regarding climate change. Or a sober serious impartial place regarding educating people on the basics, whatever, take your pick.
Walking dead blackout hour. Getting near the season finale. I’ll be back later.
Neal,
Abandoning half the planet is a complete non-starter. It’s not going to happen. His justification is unimportant since it’s primarily designed to support his conclusion.
SkS is an international grab-bag of people from a range of backgrounds and disciplines, and different senses of humor. People are quite serious; but they also exercise their humor. The mood very rarely gets as, well, grim as it seems here sometimes. For one thing, there isn’t an ongoing activity of one-up-manship at SkS. Even when people are critical, they are trying to help other people improve their output. I am probably the harshest critic there, when explaining why I think something is not a good idea.
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About the only time people are snide is when talking about cricket.
Neal,
As I said in a previous comment, the whole ‘sky is falling’ thing is actually counterproductive. Only the choir is going to pay attention to Wilson’s book.
DeWitt:
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I guess we’ll see.
Neal,
I think you misunderstand me. Probably a failure of my explanations and quick characterizations. You are probably more intelligent than I am and certainly better educated, yet you profess to have no problem with the 97% consensus paper. You appear to not be conversant with the moan hoax paper or the recursive fury paper. I meet you halfway as best I can Neal, but this doesn’t change the fact that you trigger some of my heuristic rules of thumb that suggest you are heavily biased, in the sense that you do not see things you do not wish to see when it comes to SkS.
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This isn’t consistent with SkS being a place I’d trust, which is part of what lead me into my lamentation about the shenanigans. If SkS didn’t have these warning flags; if you didn’t exhibit these warning flags, you’d be infinitely more persuasive and your argument more compelling.
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Now I’m sorry to say that, because to be perfectly frank I don’t want you to take your ball and go home. I don’t want to offend you or make any statement you find offensive enough to cause you to no longer engage in discussion with me. Still, I’m not about to start lying to you or dodging telling you what I think. There’s no point at all in that.
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Maybe, (it could even be probable) some set of the people at SkS do serious honest work. There is a disconnect between serious, honest, objective work and what John Cook and Stephen Lewandowski have perpetrated. Set aside the 97% consensus if you like, the moon hoax and recursive fury papers are utterly inexcusable and without the slightest shred of scientific redemption. They are obvious garbage that shouldn’t fool an intelligent objective college freshman. If that’s something you can gloss over, … what can I tell you. I can’t.
Perhaps it would be useful to discuss them one at a time and point by point. What you have heard about these papers is very different from what I have seen and heard from people working on them. I know what efforts went into the 97% paper, and what did not. I am less familiar with the other two, because they weren’t discussed as much; but some of the objections I did hear about seemed off the wall – like worrying about the ethics of quoting people who had already posted their named comments on a public website? Quelle horreure!
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I guess the point is that we can’t have a meaningful discussion or evaluation without talking about what each of us knows and thinks about the actual facts, for example, of what is in the paper(s). Otherwise we are just comparing reactions to two completely different experiences. If you say, “I hate cats,” thinking about lions, and I say, “I think cats are kind of cute,” thinking about house cats, we’re not talking about the same thing, even though we use the same word. Likewise, I would say that we have no common experience on these papers: the only way to discuss them is to create common experience by discussing objective facts, starting with the papers and what they actually say, rather than relying on associations generated from previous interactions.
A ringing endorsement (Comment #144693)
” There is zero probability of my doing that. I know what the SkS folks have done and have been doing for the Cook (2013) project, and I’m happy to be associated with it”
Similar to that from my favorite stage show of all time, Rocky Horror Picture Show.
The “I’m with you ” bit at the end by Riff Raff is a true snap moment.
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A number of SkS affiliated authors appear to have submitted a manuscript to a scientific journal with the title “Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warmingâ€.
the authors on the archived manuscript John Cook, Naomi Oreskes, Peter T. Doran, William R. L. Anderegg, Bart Verheggen, Ed W. Maibach, J. Stuart Carlton, Stephan Lewandowsky, Andrew G.Skuce, Sarah A. Green, Dana Nuccitelli, Peter Jacobs, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Ken Rice.
I notice ATTP is at the end.
So, Mark,
I reapologise
He is both a camp follower and in the camp!
Apart from the oxymoron of “A consensus on consensus”
the presence of Lewindowsky should surely make this one of the more memorable AGW papers of recent times.
I really love it when really bad papers are produced.
They have a Barbara Streisand effect for the ages.
The death of AGW will not be the cold death of a thousand true scientific slices but an explosion due to the hubris, greed and extravagance of the zealots.
Lucky you’re not on it Neal.
B.:
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Your argument about Einstein is historical nonsense.
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Nobody would have taken any interest in an incomprehensible theory that just gave the right result for the perihelion shift of Mercury, because there are other effects that are difficult to separate out (like the oblateness of the Sun), and because the number was already measured. Obviously, if the number is already measured, whoever writes up the theory is not going to publish it unless it matches the measured result; but when the theory is incomprehensible to anyone except its author, and entails other effects that have significant uncertainty, nobody can be sure if the theory honestly gives that answer, or if there has been some slight of hand, such as being slightly over-generous on the oblateness. If that was all he had, Einstein’s theory would have been ignored: too obscure, possibility of fudge factors, no real evidence.
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The next test of the GR considered is the gravitational red-shift. But measurements of this effect were not considered definitely positive until 1925; indeed, the earliest reports were negative. Therefore, these results could not possibly serve as support for the theory in 1915, when it was published in final form. The reason people kept looking was that they were interested in Einstein’s theory.
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The third test generally considered is the deflection of light around the Sun. But that was in 1919, in a difficult expedition that would only have been undertaken because of confidence in the theory.
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The reason that people undertook these difficult experiments was because they respected Einstein’s proven insight, as shown in his previous contributions to special relativity and quantum physics. Without that confidence in him as an expert, no one would have bothered to study the theory or to undertake the measurements. Even as it was, the study of GR has been considered a specialty even within theoretical physics; most physicists never study it.
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So this is indeed a case where an extreme theory was given consideration only because of respect for the expert proposing it. Thanks for your helpful example.
Ref:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity
angech:
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Yes, there are a handful of SkS folks on that paper.
But there are also the 6 authors of 6 previous studies of the consensus. They are not affiliated with SkS, because they did their work, for the most part, before SkS existed, and used differing methodologies. They teach at minor schools like Harvard and Stanford.
Neal J. King makes a remarkable comment above:
I get King may not have read the work of the person he promotes as an expert, but in what world does he think nobody else has? Here’s a hint, you don’t have to read a book to figure this out. Edward Wilson has given interviews in which he specifically lays out what he claims the “or else” will be. That’s why I didn’t even have to look up his prediction to know what it was. And remembeer, I Specficially said what it was:
My very first comment on this guy laid out what his “or else” is. I get King may not know the basic details of the claims the person he cites as a famous expert, but… I do. So does anyone who has spent even ten minutes looking at what his predictions are. So does anyone who read my comment.
Maybe King doesn’t know what the “famous expert” he promotes says. That doesn’t mean his ignorance is shared though. Some of us do a modicum of research before forming opinions on people.
Neal J. King, perhaps I need to clarify something:
Now, I could discuss how you’re wrong, but I feel like I may have given you a false impression. The fact I continue to point out your multitude of inaccurate claims may make you think you should keep making them because your participation here is contributive or… not horrible. It’s not meant to.
That you’ve repeatedly insulted me in the most juvenile ways imaginable is pathetic. That you’ve labeled me as mentally handicapped is beyond pathetic. That you’ve repeatedly made factual claims which were clearly wrong and refused to correct them is stupid, and that you’ve used many of these false claims to insult me is obscene. I struggle to think of a single reason I should talk to you, much less put time into explaining how you’re wrong, when I know you’ll just ignore all of your errors and then make some things up to insult me some more.
I especially struggle to think of a reason to respond to you after you called me a child molester. That sort of behavior is beyond words in how bad it is, and I clearly remember you doing it.
Owch Brandon.
I get your point, but. Couldn’t you have used a more rhetorically neutral example than child molester? Why not serial killer or nun rapist; something people wouldn’t spit on quite so readily.
Oh well. 🙂
Neal,
Yeah.
i’m sorry, I go back and forth in my mind on this. When I’ve got a tool (say a drill bit) that for whatever reason I really don’t want to break, I tend to be careful of engaging it in jobs that I don’t think it can handle. But what the heck right? Let’s risk it.
I’d prefer to talk about the moon hoax paper, because IMO the problems are more obvious and the smear is clearer to see; the whole situation is simpler in my view.
I’ll put together an introduction to my argument today for you.
Mark Bofill:
Hey, I could have said I remembered Neal J. King admitting he was a child molester to make the point. He painted me as some sort of voyeuristic stalker creeping on a female neighbor based like I was contemplating raping her based upon a ridiculous delusion he holds and double-downed on it when it was pointed out how crazy the claim was. It would have been appropriate to make my absurd claim about him involve him being a creepy guy who nobody should let live near them.
But I couldn’t be that distasteful. I figure I’d rather make the analogy stray a bit and have me still be the bad guy of the accusation than say something so disgusting, even if only to make a point.
Here’s a quick start:
1) The statistical methodology used by the paper is completely inappropriate as it is based on assumptions of (multivariate) normality that are nowhere near close to accurate for the data used, meaning the authors could literally draw conclusions about groups without any data for those groups.
2) The authors made no serious attempt to survey skeptics, (inadvertently?) helping ensure they’d receive no data which would actually allow them to do the analysis they were trying to do, then falsely claimed to have surveyed skeptics based upon unpublished and unverifiable work performed by John Cook regarding commenters at Skeptical Science despite the survey having never been linked to at Skeptical Science, then lied about it having been posted at Skeptical Science when questioned.
An aside, I think the exchange here at SkS was interesting and enlightening in at least a couple of ways. I’d remark over there but I’d hate to tar Tom Curtis by association. The last thing the guy needs is some dirty no good gosh darn denier supporting his point of view in that forum. Like getting an endorsement from the Klu Klux Klan I’d imagine. [Edit: well, tar him any further I guess]
Also, I think I may steal that second part of my comment there for a summary statement in my next eBook. I was thinking about writing one on the whole conspiracy issue, and it’s incredible how easy it is to condense the problems with the work done by Stephan Lewandowsky (with help by John Cook).
Neal King,
There has always been conflict between secular and religious people in Turkey. Ataturk’s insistence on a secular state (in the sense of separation of religion from politics) meant taking power away from the Mullas, and religious oriented Turks (eg those who think Sharia should be the basis of all law) have never been happy with this. The secular oriented did indeed ‘force their views’ on more religious people, at least in terms of government policy. Erdogan represents a shift in political views (not a large shift, but enough to change some election outcomes), and it looks like Erdogan and his supports want very much to incorporate conservative Muslim religious values in government; they want to ‘force there view’ on secular Turks. It is ‘normal’ politics for different opinions to compete, but in this case there are very large differences, not a lot of room for compromise, and some who are willing to use violence. As I said before, I am concerned.
Thanks Brandon. 🙂
Mark Bofill,
Thanks for that link; it was a perfect example of why voters need to keep green lunatics out of power. The comments themselves were also very funny.
Steve,
Yes, I think it’s interesting. In perfect seriousness the other day I bounced over to Brandon’s blog to ask Brandon Gates where these contrarians who deny radiative physics hang out. He told me deadpan seriously, at WUWT. I had to admit he was right; I just ignore the fools who argue that. I think it’s sort of similar here. Skeptics are conspiracy theorists for worrying about a one-world government plot by the UN. I ask you, what is OPOF talking about if not that? Maybe it’s easy for either side to ignore [edit: discount] their own crackpots and fools.
Steve,
It’s also funny in that it almost looks like OPOF used a direct word replacement algorithm to generate his doublespeak. 🙂 Anytime he wanted to say ‘capitalism’, he encoded it ”system of competition for maximum reward in an individual’s lifetime”, so on. I did think that was sort of funny, mostly because some of his sentences take some patience to untangle.
Mark Bofill,
.
The use of euphemisms, lack of clear phrasing, and avoidance of framing of a disagreement in terms people can easily understand is characteristic of totalitarians. In this case ‘OPOF’ argues that voters must only be allowed to select ‘the right’ kind of public policy, and be ‘overruled’, should they err in their policy choices, by an international Orwellian authority, no doubt run by people like ‘OPOF’, which would substitute their decisions for that of the voters. ‘OPOF’s’ proposal for control of government is very much like an election in Iran, where ‘unacceptable candidates’ are barred from running for office by the Mullahs.
.
The tendency to support (or at least condone) authoritarian ‘solutions’ is common among extremists of every stripe, whether religious or political, and shows just how dangerous people like ‘OPOF’ and his/her ilk really are. After all, if you are willing to take away people’s right to control public policy, then justifying political persecution and violence to achieve desired policy ends is the next logical step. Plastic bag suffocation of ‘undesirable people’ (a la Pot Pol), beheading of ‘infidels’ (a la ISIS), and extermination of whole regional groups (a la Stalin) often follows.
.
The underlying intellectual arrogance of such extremists… their absolute confidence in being 100% right…. would be comical, like a cartoon villain, save for the monstrous evils history shows they can and will do, if given a chance.
SteveF,
Yeah, there is that. The crackpots and fools on the totalitarian side of the equation do have an impressive body count…
mark,
You’re making a mistake if you think those responsible for the high body count are crackpots or fools. They are quite clever and use the crackpots and fools to achieve their own ends, mainly acquisition of power. Any authoritarian form of government is an open invitation. Instead of philosopher kings, you get Stalin or Mao. The crackpots and fools who put them in power are usually the first victims.
Hayek didn’t title his book: The Road to Serfdom at random.
How is it I don’t own a copy of that?
Thanks DeWitt. I’m going to see if I can’t get that today.
Mark:
.
I can’t imagine it would stain Tom Curtis’ bonafides if you were to pipe up in support. TC is who he is.
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
.
SteveF:
.
I have always thought that Atatürk went over-secular when he “modernized” Turkey:
– He mandated a change in clothing: from the fez and the turban to he fedora and the derby.
– He mandated a change in alphabet: Arabic to Latin
– He shut down the Sufis.
.
Perhaps Erdogan’s actions can be understood as a kind of backlash against too much change at once.
Neal,
Mebbe so, but I don’t think it’d help him persuade them. Best for me not to further irritate the restless natives. 😉
[Edit: Them? praps I should have said OPOF. I see no ‘them’ arguing with Tom over there.]
I have always thought that Atatürk went over-secular when he “modernized†Turkey:
– He mandated a change in clothing: from the fez and the turban to he fedora and the derby.
– He mandated a change in alphabet: Arabic to Latin
– He shut down the Sufis.
.
Perhaps Erdogan’s actions can be understood as a kind of backlash against too much change at once.
.
The same might have been said about The Shah in Iran – too much, too soon.
.
But the world certainly hasn’t stood still. Technological change and the information age are quite at odds with the irrationalities ans superstitions of the past. It’s been less than 100 years since the end of the caliphate. Sadly, it appears after the caliphate, European imperialism, and the Cold War, we’re gravitating back toward the ignorance of sectarian divide.
Mark:
.
OPOF is not a “them.” I have no idea of who he is, and he doesn’t sound like anyone I know.
.
Turbulent Eddie:
.
The Shah had other problems. A friend at that time gave me an example of the Shah’s modernization program: The Shah wanted everybody to have pasteurized milk. He mandated that all the milk be pasteurized before being sold. So he established a practice of sending milk trucks around the country to collect all the milk, take it to a modern pasteurization center, and then take it for sale. So he had pasteurization centers all over the country, and milk trucks running everywhere. But the milk trucks weren’t refrigerated; so all the milk became spoiled in the process.
Previously, the Iranians had dealt with the issue of pasteurization by heating milk in a pot before using it. But this wasn’t Western enough for the Shah.
.
Pushing too hard generates a back-reaction.
Mark:
.
In fact, the only regular that participated was Glenn – who supported Tom.
Neal, yes indeed.
Mark:
.
So I fail to see why you feel out of place.
mm.
.
Refining an accurate and precise answer seems tedious Neal. If you will accept a brief and somewhat sloppy set of generalizations, I agree with Tom and Glen on little. I initially commented because I thought Tom had realized something important, which is that by focusing solely on essentials of the problems of AGW as you guys perceive them to be and on solutions to those problems, you maximize your chances of reaching some sort of agreement someday that you can live with with guys like me.
On the other hand, if you want to hold out for your revolution complete with safe spaces for impressionable young gay-lesbian-bi-transgendered trees and forest animals, an end to microagressions everywhere and for all time, income equality, free healthcare, LSD and drum circles the second sunday of every month, social justice at the Academy Awards and so on and so forth, you will go nowhere. Hell will literally freeze over first; I will not roller skate with you to Alaska. However, I try to be a reasonable person, and if you can demonstrate to my satisfaction that there is profit in hedging my bets, building more resiliency, diversifying power generation to include more nuclear, – if you can make a reasonable case for driving to Alaska in the moving truck, it’s not beyond the realm of the possible that we can agree on that.
.
I don’t know that we’re covering new ground with any of that though. I promise you, I’ll get back to the moon hoax thing later today. 🙂
.
But that does beckon the question – is opposition to death for apostates pushing too hard?
.
Policy or not, modernity is pushing back against superstition.
.
“You can’t run a country by a book of religion,
Not by a heap or a lump or a smidgen,
Of foolish rules of ancient date,
Designed to make you all feel great,
While you fold, spindle, and mutilate
Those unbelievers from a neighboring state.”
Frank Zappa, we are Dumb All Over.
Neal,
Maybe I abstracted too much. Lemme tie in specifics:
Nope.
Heck no.
uhmNo.
Not with you there Tom.
uhhmmm. Okay, so. Tom’s position was the most reasonable from my point of view, which is a long way from saying I agree with it. [Edit: I agreed with Tom on the point that the best hope for progress is to stay strictly on the important points of the topic, in essence.]
.
In a way, this might segue nicely into the Moon Paper Hoax fallacy.
Do you think if I took a survey on my views on that thread, would it make much difference to the conclusions you could draw about people who thought like me if we mostly checked ‘disagree’ as opposed to ‘strongly disagree’? If I just ‘disagreed’, would that mean I agree in some sense?
.
Sounds like a weird question doesn’t it. Sound almost nonsensical?
Hold onto that thought.
My questions were not rhetorical, except possibly the ‘sound almost nonsensical?’ one. I think that one is borderline. I am somewhat curious to know if Neal thinks that, although it isn’t of critical importance to my argument. I’m sorry, it slipped out.
Neal,
I’ve got what I believe to be the data from the moon hoax paper here. Perhaps it is not in fact the data. If this is the case, my apologies. Maybe you know of a better place to obtain the data.
The questionnaire involved can be found here.
My impression is that the data I’ve got is only answers to questions 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 33, 34, 35 and 36.
If any of this is wrong, well, that’s possible. I admit that straight up right now. Maybe we should check.
Mark:
.
This isn’t a line of reasoning. Why don’t we start somewhere?
Neal,
Why I’d feel out of place at SkS was what I was trying to give you a feel for. I’ve segued into the moon hoax paper. Should I reset?
Yes.
Sorry. That’s a more comprehensive set of answers than the one I originally downloaded! 🙂 Lemme get my ducks in a row over here.
Okay, sorry. Let’s back up. You’ve got the floor.
mark,
My questions on a global carbon tax would be: how would you enforce it, who is the tax paid to and how would the money collected be spent? The UN is obviously too corrupt to even be considered for any of that.
This sort of thing is the grain of truth in the world government conspiracy theory. I don’t trust the US government to do anything useful with carbon tax revenues, much less any conceivable international organization.
DeWitt,
Oh. I didn’t mean I agreed we ought to have a global carbon tax. I meant I agreed that if we are ever to reach agreement / get anywhere, we need to focus on the minimum we’ve got to agree on to solve the problem.
Heck I don’t care that much about the carbon tax issue. It’s not like we don’t have a million other taxes. If it looks like sensitivity might be high, maybe that’s the thing to do. But if that’s the case, let’s focus on AGW, not economic, social, political revolution.
If sensitivity is low, we’re pissing money out the window and hurting ourselves to no purpose. So – it matters. But looking at the world from SkS perspective and trying to meet Neal halfway is my mindset right now.
mark,
I thought it was obvious that you didn’t think a carbon tax should be imposed immediately. I just wanted to go into some details as to why actually imposing a carbon tax raises a lot of questions.
In theory, a carbon tax would be the optimum way to raise the cost of carbon. However, as they say, the devil is in the details. But it seems like details are exactly what proponents of a carbon tax don’t want to talk about. Until there is a serious plan that addresses details, it’s nothing more than a fantasy. RP,Jr. refers to this sort of thing as magical thinking. There’s a lot of that going on.
DeWitt,
Thanks for reassuring me that that was obvious. For a minute there I had a very [edit: sick] feeling that I’d misrepresented my position very badly… 🙂
.
Good. On that note, yes. I don’t think I’ve ever given a lot of serious thought to how a global carbon tax would work.
.
It wouldn’t. People / nations will cheat, we’d have to know that going in. And yes, the money would probably be pissed away. The thing with that point is that it doesn’t strictly speaking matter. The revenue could be shredded and tax would still discourage fossil fuel use. It’d be nice if it went to some useful purpose, but.
I guess you try to figure a reasonable estimate of how badly everyone will cheat and build it into your calculations maybe?
..
Sounds dubious to me.
The EU has done CO2 cap & trade. Technically, I believe it functioned, but fell afoul of the weakness of cap & trade: Setting the price ahead of time. Concern over the economical impact led them to set the price too low; and that sort of mistake carries on into the future. Most economists think that a CO2 tax would not suffer from the historical inertia that plagues the C&T. As to what to do with the money: I don’t see anything wrong with offsetting other areas of taxation, whether to provide social security or whatever. As long as the taxes convey the message that there are cheaper alternatives available.
I still think if we had a global tax, it’d involve arm twisting to get it. Lip service. I don’t think India would get on-board. I don’t think Australia’d get on-board. It might be possible to bully them into it. They’d cheat.
~shrug~
Just my take. They’d have to voluntarily choose it for it to have a hope of being effective I think.
Neal so I’m confused now. I thought we were going to barbeque ‘ NASA faked the moon landing – therefore (climate) science is a hoax: An anatomy of the motivated rejection of science’ tonight. I’m not well prepared, but I’ve got my rudimentary pile of charcoal and matches, got the questionnaire and the data and my core arguments.
We don’t have to, I guess. Somehow I got the impression you wanted me to particularize / get to the details of my problem. I’ve got mixed feelings about it because I don’t want to piss you off and suspect I’m likely to.
Let me know what you’d prefer, no big deal either way. [Edit: I’m going to go eat dinner now]
Neal #144752)
“But there are also the 6 authors of 6 previous studies of the consensus.”
Slow down.
What consensus?.
John Cook, Naomi Oreskes, Peter T. Doran, William R. L. Anderegg, Bart Verheggen, Ed W. Maibach, J. Stuart Carlton, Stephan Lewandowsky, Andrew G.Skuce, Sarah A. Green, Dana Nuccitelli, Peter Jacobs, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Ken Rice.
Prominent studies.
2004 Naomi Oreskes study of the scientific literature on climate change. The essay concluded that there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. 928 articles published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and found that 75% supported the view.
So a 75% consensus?
based on a biased survey that examined only favorable articles? * [fact]
Bray and von Storch, 2008 2,059 climate scientists, 375 responses, response rate of 18%. climate change, natural/ anthropogenic occurring now?” 67.1% a result of agw causes?” 34.6%
67.1% consensus of 18%?
Doran and Kendall Zimmerman, 2009 3,146 of the 10,257 polled Earth scientists. 82% agreed that humans significantly influence the global temperature
So 82% consensus?
Cooks own stellar piece?
Nuccitelli, his own man, specifically said:
“The way I see the final paper is that we’ll conclude ‘There’s an x% consensus supporting the AGW theory, and y% explicitly put the human contribution at >50%’.
If we plug in the numbers from their study into Nuccitelli’s proposal for how to publish their conclusions, we get:
There’s a 97% consensus supporting the AGW theory, and 1.6% put the human contribution at >50%.”
So Neal,
What consensus are we specifically talking about.
How does Cook massage 1.6% [ consensus] to 97% [the message].
Mark:
.
Well, I’ve never seen the paper. So I expect that, since you have an opinion on the matter, that you would lead on the issue.
.
Until then, I’m just responding to remarks made by folks randomly passing through.
.
By the way, it’s now 1:50 am my time. So I won’t be up much longer.
The EU has done CO2 cap & trade. Technically, I believe it functioned, but fell afoul of the weakness of cap & trade: Setting the price ahead of time.
Well, that and the fact they were fleeced by fraudulent traders, trading accounts, etc. might mean that it was technically a train-wreck.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/30/climate-change-hack-carbon-credit-black-dragon/
But if “setting the price ahead of time” is a more comforting thought, by all means cling to it.
Mark:
.
Oh, I see that I have somehow missed several of your postings. I don’t know if something odd happened to the order of their appearance. In particular, I’ve just seen Comment #144780: March 28th, 2016 at 2:05 pm
.
“Data from the moon hoax paper”, “questionnaire”? The provenance of this information is rather doubtful. It doesn’t make sense to me to draw ANY conclusions from data of unknown provenance: It could be partial, substituted fake data, or in an early stage of preparation. I’m sure that the original paper was submitted with supplementary information: Where is that? Anything coming from a third party is not a valid substitute. Example: If I need to transfer a payment to Mr.X’s bank account, I want to get the account # from Mr.X or from his authorized agent, not from a news blog that mentions his name; and particularly not if they are attacking Mr.X in the article.
.
Can you find something more reliable?
Neal:
.
If you’d like to avoid discussing what a complete joke (unless you’re a taxpayer, then it’s not so funny) the EU cap and trade system was, that’s ok.
angech:
.
The paper will be probably be published fairly soon. It will be more sensible to discuss it then, when we can look at it.
The problems with carbon taxes are manyfold. Here are a few:
.
1) There is no way to define the future cost of rising CO2, so no way to judge if the tax rate is economically reasonable.
.
2) The elasticity in fossil fuel demand is very low (eg. low petroleum prices don’t lead to big increases in demand). Low elasticity means that the carbon tax would have to be very high before having a substantial influence on fossil fuel use.
.
3) When there are taxes, there are lobbyists working endlessly for preferential treatment for interest groups. More lobbying means more government action contrary to the common good. Lots of pigs will be at the “carbon tax” trough, looking for subsidies, transfers, support, etc. So ever greater opportunity for bad government.
.
4) Since energy is a substantial portion of the cost of all goods and services, the cost of living will rise. Unless of course you happen to be one of the lucky people who receive largess from the carbon tax pool. Most will be financially worse off, but the politically favored will do well.
.
There are other problems of course, but that short list is a reasonable starting point.
Neal,
Fair enough. We’ll see what we can do. However, note that Dr. Lewandowsky does not always support freely sharing data with critics, so it might be difficult to procure an official version that will satisfy you. It might be possible for you to obtain an official version. Might not.
Anyways, I’ll go investigate this. I don’t really know the story behind this data, maybe it is crap.
SteveF:
.
1) “tax rate economically reasonable”?
Inasmuch as the carbon tax rate can be adjusted, why is it necessary to define the future cost?
.
2) “low elasticity in FF demand means high tax rate”
The impact of that has to be evaluated in the context of, among other things, 4).
.
3) “More taxes mean more government”
This argument can always be used against any tax and any amount of government. Taken as a reason to cut taxes, you can ride it to the logical extreme of Flint, Michigan: Government cut to the point of non-functionality and lead in the water pipes.
.
4) “Most will be financially worse off”
If the carbon tax rebate is structured as a negative income tax, “most” people will not be worse off.
Neal J. King sounds rather… conspiracy-minded, when he says:
That post has been online for over three years, on a popular blog, and if the data linked to in it were remotely faulty it would be trivially easy to prove. And when he says:
It’s just funny as a ton of data for papers in the global warming debate has never been posted publicly by authors. Getting the data from people directly is a common thing, and if you then want to do work on that data, you should post it. The fact you had to e-mail the authors because they didn’t post it publicly shouldn’t mean the data you provide should be viewed as untrustworthy.
But because King is worried people might fake data in easily demonstrable ways, here’s a link to a page for Stephan Lewandowsky’s publications. People can find a link to the paper and the paper’s data on it.
Of course, that link won’t let you see the full data set as Stephan Lewandowsky has refused to publish it. For whatever reason, he excluded results for questions on his questionnaire, such as a question about people’s views on the Iraq war. It is possible to get the data for that as one of Lewandowsky’s co-authors e-mailed it to at least one person when they requested it, but since you’d have to get it from a third party source as the authors won’t actually publish the data, I guess King wouldn’t find that convincing.
Oh, and if you want the Supplementary Material for the paper, you can find it posted on the journal’s website. Strangely enough, it isn’t published on the page I linked to above. That may just be coincidence, but given the Supplementary Material includes “proof” many skeptics were surveyed with unpublished, unverifiable work by John Cook on Skeptical Science commenters even though the survey was never linked to at Skeptical Science, it may not be. I’m sure Lewandowsky regrets ever including that (again, unpublished and unverifiable) analysis as part of his paper’s Supplementary Material.
Brandon – perhaps Lew was just guilty of falling afoul of the weakness of politically motivated psych papers: setting the price ahead of time.
Mark:
.
To evaluate the paper fairly, we have to look at it, at some time, as the author presented it. Background information is fine; but if it hasn’t been prepared for presentation, can be misinformative. Just to pick a random example, when your tax information is provided to the IRS, is it reasonable that they give you a shot at putting together the picture the way it makes sense to you, before knocking on your door asking for all your files?
.
(In this article by Landowsky on transparency, I believe I heard it mentioned that somewhere he raises the point about the Climategate folk’s complaints about FOI requests from many many people for their data. How many of those requestors did anything with that data? How many of them even opened the package? Or was it just harassment?)
Neal J. King:
Because we clearly cannot look at it now, what with it having been posted online where anyone could access it.
Mark Bofill:
The data may be “crap,” but if so, that’s only because Stephan Lewandowsky did a “crap” job of carrying out his survey. The data linked to in that post is the data Lewandowsky gave out. It is readily verifiable, something one could even verify mathematically by looking at the results one gets with it and comparing them to those given in the paper. Or one could just download the data file given out by Lewandowsky, per the link I provided just above.
That said, I’d say it is fair to call a data file “crap” if the authors intentionally excluded data they collected from it without explaining why they did so. Or in this case, without even admitting they did. The fact Lewandowsky asked questions about potential conspiracies people might believe in then excluded certain conspiracies from his results is… well, perhaps enough to say his data should be viewed as “crap.”
Incidentally, after the full data set was obtained via direct communication with a co-author of Lewandowsky, it was discovered if one carries out the same analysis as performed by Lewandowsky (which would be wrong as his methodology is “crap”), they’d find for at least one excluded question, the one about the Iraq war, skeptics were less likely to believe in a conspiracy than non-skeptics. I suppose one could argue that’s a coincidence, but the authors excluded data from their analysis without even acknowledging its existence, much less explaining why they excluded it. That excluded data gives the opposite results of the data they didn’t exclude. That would be a strange coincidence.
Of course, the data proving this could all be fake. Maybe people even faked the copies of the questionnaire which show these questions were asked.
Neal King,
1) So please tell us what initial rate makes economic sense. (please include rational)
.
2) So do you agree that little elasticity means any such tax would have to be very high to substantially reduce demand?
.
3) Ya well, about this we will never agree. The Flint water fiasco was more due to stupidity (in the Flint case, technical stupidity) than anything else, which, I would argue, is something most governments have an almost unlimited supply of.
4) Idealized massive wealth transfer from (undeserving) rich people to (meritorious) poor people! It is a progressive’s fantasy. But it is not how politics usually works.
Neal,
I think your math skills are likely better than mine. This said, I think my math abilities are good enough that I can arrive at rudimentary conclusions about what can be deduced from a data set. I think in this case you’ll agree, if it turns out the data I’ve seen so far is correct.
It looks to me as if Geoff Chambers was the guy who somehow got his hands on this. I haven’t finished researching how. If I can’t figure this out with a reasonable amount of investigation I’ll just ask. 🙂 But nobody likes a slacker asking questions that they ought to be able to figure out for themselves.
Thanks Neal.
Neal J. King:
The “harassment” in question was that the CRU lied* about not being able to provide data based upon its confidentiality agreements saying data regarding its surface temperature record couldn’t be passed along to non-academics. The idea data could only be passed along to academics was so absurd people filed FOI requests for the confidentiality agreements. It turns out the few confidentiality agreements that existed didn’t say anything like what the CRU claimed they did.
So yes, many people filed FOI requests for these confidentiality agreements. The purpose was primarily to show support for Steve McIntyre so the CRU knew many people were interested. Also, because each person filed their request for confidentiality agreements with only a small number of countries, the CRU wouldn’t be able to say any individual request was too burdensome. That was relevant given the CRU had just lied about what the confidentiality agreements supposedly said.
In the end, I believe there were only four confidentiality agreements found by the CRU. None said what it had claimed they said, and it didn’t take them any real effort to find and post them. Nor did it take any real effort to create a form response they could send out to the group of people who filed the FOI requests. All told, this campaign of harassment would have only taken a few hours to resolve, and it was only necessary because the CRU lied to avoid properly dealing with an FOI request for data.
(Incidentally, nobody was sent a package of anything. It’s beyond me what Neal J. King might think people could have opened, much less what they could have done with the “data” when the “data” was a few brief confidentiality agreements. Does he think they should have run calculations on a bit of text?)
*I’m using the word “lied” as a bit of shorthand here. There was absolutely no basis for what the CRU said, and it was an absurd claim, but in theory perhaps someone could have managed to delude themselves into believing the absurd excuse. That is, unless you happen to read the Climategate e-mails and see people at CRU discussing how they could intentionally avoid dealing with FOI requests in an honest manner.
Thanks Brandon, that ought to simplify matters considerably!
Mark Bofill:
He e-mailed the authors and asked for it.
I’d still love to hear how Neal (or anyone else) can demonstrate that the EU C&T Exchange fell victim to premature price setting as opposed to outright trading fraud on a massive scale, and can give any evidence that it did something other than fleece EU taxpayers, but won’t hold my breath…
Brandon, I don’t appear to be able to get the data from that link. I end up here with this:
~shrug~
Neal,
Right maybe so. In my case I’d like to examine the data used to demonstrate that my endorsement of free market predicts my rejection of climate science and my endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories. I don’t feel like I’m the one doing the harassing here for some reason Neal, what’s your opinion on that?
TerryMN:
.
Suppose there was fraud. There is fraud all over the stockmarket as well: Do you advocate abandoning the capitalization of enerprises through stockmarkets?
Neal:
Fraud was endemic w/the EU CTE. Comparing it to “the stock market” and suggest its abandonment is a strawman.
SteveF:
.
1) Sensible initial rate:
Not my area. But since people do initiate taxes from time to time, I would guess there are methods. The fact that it would be adjustable would mean that you could correct for gross error – in a way that you cannot with cap & trade.
.
2) Low elasticity => need high tax to affect demand:
Yes.
.
3) The Flint government had been reduced to one (1) City Manager, essentially a dictator appointed by the governor of the state and answerable only to him. Between them, they decided to save $10 million (if memory serves; might have been LESS) by cancelling the water contract with Detroit and using river water. They “earned” an additional $10,000 by selling the water pipe, so they would be unable to revert in case of problems. They also saved a few $1000 by not running this brillliant idea past a water expert. I know hardly any chemistry, but even I would know that if you change the pipe from running resonably pure water to industrially polluted water that there could be some effect on the chemistry in the pipe (not to mention that people will be drinking the industrially polluted water). I probably wouldn’t have thought of lead right away – and that’s one reason I know I’m not a water expert.
Reducing the size of government isn’t always beneficial. There is a point at which you don’t have enough hands on deck, and you don’t have enough skills.
To see this as “technical stupidity” is to miss the big picture. It is a matter of managerial stupidity to think that one man can know enough to run an entire city without advice; and of arrogance and political stupidity to think he could get away with it. If it hadn’t been the water, it would have been something else: I bet there are probably a number of crisis-level problems in Flint, the water is just the biggest. I would not expect the smartest man in the world to succeed in running a city in the modern world without advice.
.
4) “not how politics usually works”
“not usually” /= “never”
Brandon,
Could the K R in your recent paper be Ken Rice?
Mark:
.
Why are you feeling harassed? Were you named in the article?
Neal,
So, no reason for you to be aware I guess. I endorse the free market, for the record. The paper draws conclusions about people like me that appear to be unjustifiable by any valid analysis of the data collected, and these invalid conclusions were used to smear people like me in popular articles such as the one I linked earlier.
I hope this clarifies Neal, I’m a little surprised you really found it necessary to ask me this.
I wonder that you seem to take it personally.
Taxes to “save the planet”… Let’s take NJ for an example. When the parkway was built, politicians said the tolls would go away after the debt was paid off. Gas tax increase would pay for maintenance in the future. Skeptics said BS, the tolls won’t go away & the gas tax won’t go towards maintenance. 50 (?)years later the tolls are still in place & have increased substantially. Lord only knows where the gas tax went… Color me skeptical about taxes “saving the planet” when NJ pols couldn’t even build a road & maintain it without increasing them every year. Taxes are not the answer to GW.
Neal, was Dana the photo shopper of the Nazi pictures found? Yes or No?
sue:
.
Certain questions, as I said at the beginning of this visit, I will not answer. This is one of them.
Mark Bofill:
Sorry about that. I had forgetten when Stephan Lewandowsky left the University of Queensland, he hid quite a bit of his data like that. Now you can only get a copy of it by filing a request where you have to meet certain requirements, and even if you do, there’s no guarantee you’ll get the data. It’s incredible since he had previously posted much of that data for everyone to see (and/or e-mailed it to anyone who asked for it).
I guess if Neal J. King wants to be certain the data isn’t faked, he can try filing a request for it and see if he can get a copy of it from Lewandowsky himself. Or, you know, he could just assume a data file used by many people, including people to whom Lewandowsky responded, is legit.
Here’s what I don’t get. If King is going to worry data files provided by Lewandowsky’s critics has been faked, why isn’t he expressing any concern the data file provided Lewandowsky himself has been faked? If one person can do it, so can another. The main difference is just that it’d be possible to verify if a critic of Lewandowsky faked the file (by checking the results it produces against the paper and/or having Lewandowsky provide the real data), but there’s no way to do so if Lewandowsky himself fudged the data.
jferguson:
I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Could you clarify?
Side note, it looks like John Cook has asked the Wayback Machine to remove the archived copies of these documents from their server (he must have done this directly as there’s nothing in his robots.txt file to do it). That means the copies are no longer available via the archived links I provided.
It also means I don’t have access to copies of them anymore. I actually didn’t download these files, having merely opened them in my browser. I get Neal J. King calls that “snatching” and “purloining” for some reason, but I’d say the fact I don’t have copies of anything is proof I didn’t steal anything. Maybe that’s just me though.
(I hope someone downloaded the files so they can’t be disappeared completely. It would be a shame if there was no record of what was written.)
Neal King,
Yes, governments do raise taxes. The process usually involves evaluating a perceived need, and estimating what attending to that perceived need would cost. The taxpayer’s ability (and willingness) to pay is also usually involved in the process. What is screwy about a carbon tax begins with the absence of a need…. the money is not raised to pay for something. Unless of course you perceive a need for more wealth transfer. More likely, the money would be used to pay subsidies to green energy companies like Solyndra, where the taxpayer baled out a bunch of rich investors in a green energy company.
.
I’m a bit disappointed you won’t even venture a SWAG on initial rate, especially since you so strongly support the need for carbon taxes. You can’t have a meaningful discussion of carbon taxes without considering the tax rate.
.
WRT Flint, the lead was always there (I suspect in old soldered copper pipes that used a tin/lead solder.) Lower the pH and you start to dissolve metals, which is why there was a lot of stupidity involved: acidic drinking water is a big no-no. It ruins (dissolves) copper piping. As to the claims of ‘industrial pollution’: I have seen no evidence of high pollutant levels. Lead in the water was the big issue, and it varied quite a lot around the city, probably reflecting the age of water piping in different houses and the overall flow in each area (and even in each house).
sue,
Of course he was. Poor judgement tends to show up in lots of ways.
Well, OK.
.
It’s all enlightening. I guess I’m sorry then Neal that I’m left with no easy means to develop and explain the shenanigans problem to you. I try my best to keep this a two way street communication-wise so you can learn about me as well, but. In this instance I’ve been foiled by the fact that Dr. Lewandowsky doesn’t share data with scum like us.
.
But it’s all good. 🙂
Neal,
.
.
I guess I can at least help you out with this. I don’t take it ‘personally’ in the sense that I believe it was uniquely intended for Mark Bofill. Obviously that’s not the case.
.
The paper connects people who endorse free markets, — can we agree to say conservatives there? It doesn’t matter, everybody understands what is meant.
.
The paper attempts to provide scientific legitimacy and cover to activists who struggle against conservatives. It gives them a tool to ridicule and dismiss an ideology they disagree with. Like so much (apparently) of what John Cook is about, it’s PR and an attempt to sway public opinion. Pinky and the Brain, episode 37’s plan to conquer the world. It’d be scary if people weren’t so darn fickle and forgetful in the first place, but as it is it’s about as effective as a Pinky and the Brain plot.
.
So that doesn’t much interest me these days (John’s schemes), but part of what I find fascinating is where people draw their lines. I’m a conservative, but I know liberals I have the utmost respect for. People who still believe that while they disagree with what I’m saying they’d be willing to die to defend my right to say it. Go back to the Tom Curtis thread for illustration of a similar concept. He might be that sort of man. Obviously a disagreeable SOB that I’d disagree with on virtually everything else, but that’s neither here nor there. Then there are others who draw different lines. Some who appear to draw no lines at all.
.
So, take it personally? Not a bit. It tells me what sort of man John Cook is, what sort of man Stephen Lewandowsky is. My original question to you is, what are you doing with those people. You don’t appear to be the same sort.
.
I could be mistaken.
SteveF,
It was more than just pH. The lead was indeed in the old pipes. Some of the pipes are made from lead. But those pipes were protected from corrosion by adding phosphate to the water. That acted both as a buffer and reacted with the lead surface to form a protective coating. When Flint decided that they could use water from the Flint river and treat it themselves rather than buy it from Detroit, they didn’t do their homework.
The cause of the problem was solely the responsibility of the government of Flint. Not Michigan or the US government and certainly not industry.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i7/Lead-Ended-Flints-Tap-Water.html
DeWitt:
.
Yes, the cause of the problem was the government of Flint. But who was the government of Flint? Basicly, the emergency city manager, who was appointed by and reports only to the governor of Michigan.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/meet-darnell-earley-man-behind-flint-water-crisis-article-1.2505074
Sue (Comment #144825)
Below the belt,
Neal is coming here to discuss Maths with a few of the brighter boys here and to let off some steam.
He has waved a few red flags around but stimulated conversation immensely.
Quite enjoyable, actually.
He has to defend the team, willingly I believe as he still believes strongly in the cause [Mark, take note].
Hence he cannot and should not speculate on individuals, particularly those who work for papers with a strong anti Nazi bias.
Does anyone have a site to the paper?
I was going to read it and just thought it would be there forever.
Mark:
.
I don’t know what you mean by “sort.” But there is another logical possibility: Maybe I am just like what I seem (whatever that seems to be to you), and they are just like me, and your take on them is not correct.
.
Have you ever directly dealt with either of them?
Neal: “But who was the government of Flint? Basicly, the emergency city manager, who was appointed by and reports only to the governor of Michigan.”
Yes and Cleveland which is run by a Democratic mayor has much higher levels of lead poisoning than Flint. Why no hysterical front page stories about Cleveland in the NYT? See http://www.wkyc.com/news/local/cleveland/clevelands-lead-problem-reaches-national-audience/72828727 14% of children in Cleveland are afflicted with lead poisoning as opposed to 6% in Flint.
See also “State health officials [Republican Administration] and a Plain Dealer analysis of city records both found the city was failing to follow up on all lead poisoning cases that require an investigation under state law.” http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2015/12/what_you_need_to_know_from_cle.html#incart_story_package
JD
Sue,
.
I don’t have an issue with people who really believe AGW is a problem. I disagree, but it’s a question of fact. One of my issues (there are probably several) are when people use AGW as a vehicle for their agendas. I haven’t worked out exactly where Neal falls on that spectrum yet.
.
Neal,
.
No, I don’t feel like I need to study John and Stephan up close and personal to understand them better. It’s always possible that I’m wrong. If I’m wrong, that’ll be my problem, same as most any other time I’m wrong. 🙂 But I don’t have an eternity to waste on third order questions, life’s short.
SteveF:
.
I don’t do SWAGs.
.
If I know how to calculate something, even approximately, I’ll calculate it.
.
If I can’t, I don’t know.
What I was suggesting before the carbon tax was brought into the conversation is that if harm from GHGs were handled as a tort and proven in a court and those causing the harm were required to remedy the harm by the court, there would a direct connection to holding those doing the harm responsible and compensating the victims. Given the political philosophy of the prevailing intelligentsia this approach will not be used any time soon. On the other hand, a carbon tax fits the prevailing big government philosophy very well. Taxes are not imposed by some enlightened attempt to determine an ability to pay but rather by expediency of the easiest path to obtain funds to finance the ever growing government. A carbon tax would soon find its way into the general fund just as Social Security and Medicare taxes have. A recent example of this mixing of direct taxes into the general fund was Obama wanting to mix airport taxes that were intended to pay for airport security into the general fund. The mixing of funds allows the connection to be lost and the intention shifted to maintaining and growing government.
“I haven’t worked out exactly where Neal falls on that spectrum yet.” #144838)
Ahh, judging by the emissions is a good scientific method. It depends a bit on the absorption bands as well I believe.
Still, while he is here in good company there may be a chance for a spectral shift, or not.
Angech,
:> Well spoken sir.
[Edit: Oh sorry. I addressed something to Sue that was actually a response to you. Oops.]
DeWitt,
Lead pipes? Yikes, they must be very old; I thought they went out with the Romans. 😉 Thanks, I was not aware of the phosphate issue.
.
From the article: ‘A General Motors plant stopped using the water in October because it was corroding steel parts.’
.
Hummm… Maybe that should have gotten someone’s attention.
SteveF,
I would have thought that a decent water quality program would entail some sampling at the end user’s tap as well as the water coming out of the treatment plant. But maybe not. As I said, the Flint water department didn’t do their homework before starting to do their own treatment of Flint River water. While the city manager is ultimately responsible, managing details like that seems to me beyond his job description.
Neak King,
“If I know how to calculate something, even approximately, I’ll calculate it.”
.
Well, you actually can estimate it. Here is my SWAG: if we compare consumer petroleum prices (going mostly to diesel, heating oil, and gasoline) in Western Europe and the States, and if (big if, see below) we assume all of the difference in consumption between the States and Western Europe is due to the difference in fuel cost, then we can estimate the long term elasticity of demand. US consumer price for petroleum is historically about half of the Western European consumer price, and Western European consumption per capita is close to 1/2 of USA consumption, so a reasonable order of magnitude SWAG is that consumption is approximately inversely proportional to price to the consumer. So, in the long term, doubling the cost ought to roughly half the consumption. 100% tax —–> 50% consumption.
.
Of course, that is only in the very long term, after a higher price has influenced all the decisions associated with fuel consumption (transportation choices, capital investments for improved efficiency, etc.). In the short term (<10 years), consumption is almost certainly much LESS responsive to price. The 'big if' when comparing Western Europe to the States is that there are other potential factors (like the relative sizes of the regions, distances covered by transport, climate differences, differences in housing preferences, etc) which cast doubt on the above. I would venture that these other factors are not insignificant, and would make the elasticity of demand even lower, so that a 100% tax would reduce consumption by significantly less than 50% in the long term.
.
BTW, my guess is that a 100% tax on petroleum is politically impossible in the States, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
SteveF,
Considering the recent large fluctuations in gasoline price, it should be possible to estimate the short term elasticity of demand.
Comparing with Europe is problematic given the generally shorter distances driven.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/ct-chicago-lead-pipes-water-testing-met-20160226-story.html
Chicago has gotten around its water purity problems through testing in the low risk areas.
SteveF:
.
I’m a little surprised at the results of your analysis. Much of urban Europe consists of places where one doesn’t need a car at all. I have been on the inside of a personal auto about 10 times in 10 years, in Germany. Where are they all going?
.
Isn’t the tax rate in western Europe about 100% for gasoline?
Kenneth,
Water tested in 50 homes every three years when there are lead pipes in the system in a city the size of Chicago? That is not sufficient. Note that this is the result of negotiations largely between government agencies at different levels. Imagine a private industry being allowed to test its waste water on the same time scale. It would never happen.
You need to test the water at a tap that’s as close as possible to the service line entering the house as well as at a tap as far from the service line as possible. But I’m betting that even with the Flint situation to raise awareness, not much will be done. It would cost too much and Illinois, for one, is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy because the state and local governments made pension promises to their employees they can’t keep.
I suspect the companies that sell lead removal water filters are going to start doing land office business.
Neal,
At least. In the UK, it’s 233%, ₤0.324/L pre-tax and ₤1.08/L at the pump. The rest of Europe is here.
– When the news was breaking about Flint, I also saw a short interview with Erin Brokovich. Not a terribly technical interview, but she said she had been in touch with dozens of communities about lead poisoning.
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– The issue I have about emergency city managers is that they have an extraordinary amount of power, and are specifically NOT answerable to the people they control. And there is no limitation to their terms.
DeWitt
I’d be more inclined to have my home tap water tested rather than rely on an in home lead removal kit.
I have no idea how well the various ones sold online work:
https://www.google.com/search?q=test+tap+water+for+lead&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=test+tap+water+for+lead&tbm=shop
Do you?
Kenneth:
.
Actually, I think the carbon tax mechanism has two possible functions:
.
One would be to mitigate CO2 in some way: buying and protecting rainforests, for example.
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The other would be simply to give industries a financial incentive to make decisions about processes and practices that minimize production of CO2. What actualy happens with the collected tax is a separate issue.
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I think the idea was developed to deal with the acid rain problem, and I recall it being controversial amongst some campaigners, who used the term “pollution rights”. However, it seemed to work fairly well in that case.
It seems Mark Bofill and Neal J. King aren’t going to discuss Stephan Lewandowsky’s work after all, since Lewandowsky stopped sharing his data and King won’t accept unofficial sources, but I want to comment on the topic of conspiracies.
Or rather, I want to draw attention to a post about them. You see, Brandon Gates, one of the people who harshly criticized my book also wrote a post about how Exxon supposedly lied about global warming. He’s since changed his mind on things he said about my book, but he sort of challenged me to respond to his post about Exxon creating a campaign to intentionally deceive people.
I think it’s bizarre anyone believes such a strange conspiracy theory without any evidence so I sat down and discussed the “proof” he offered. It makes for an interesting demonstration of how conspiracy theorists can contort even things which explicitly contradict their beliefs into “proof” of their beliefs.
http://www.hi-izuru.org/wp_blog/2016/03/nefariousness-unproven/
Oh, and an update on sales. I’ve now sold 457 copies of me new eBook. That’s way more than I ever anticipated, and I’m kind of overwhelmed by it.
Brandon,
.
Oh yes. This is the situation where everybody is spontaneously (cause it’d be weird to imagine this is coordinated, tee-hee) perpetuating the idea that Exxon knew about the dangers of CO2 and hid the dangers from the public all those years ago. The reason for this ‘spontaneous’ uncoordinated action (cause it’d be weird to imagine this is coordinated, tee-hee) is that somebody decided it’d be a good idea to go after Exxon using the same tactics that were used against tobacco companies.
.
So no, I don’t think Gates is doing a conspiracy theory. I think he’s pretending to go for a conspiracy theory to help with the program in a spontaneous, uncoordinated way (cause it’d be weird to imagine this is coordinated, tee-hee).
.
I wasn’t wearing my tin foil hat while I typed this… But I’ve got it nearby.
Aww. I didn’t need my tin-foil hat after all, look:
https://forcechange.com/148248/punish-exxonmobil-for-lying-about-climate-science/
The truth is out there Scully.
lucia,
I wouldn’t trust any of the test kits on the first page of your search. Your best bet is to find a local lab or find out if your water department has public test days.
The sampling protocol is critical at the ppb level. A local lab can probably better advise you on how to take a sample and preserve it for analysis as well as supply you with a clean plastic bottle for the sample with a little nitric acid to preserve it (<pH2).
An NSF/ANSI certified water filter for lead removal has been independently tested to reduce 0.150 mg/L (ppmv) Pb to 0.010 mg/L (ppmv, 10 ppbv). Since water has a density of close to 1kg/L, there's not much difference between ppm (mg/kg) and ppmv (mg/L).
I think the liberal media wanted an anecdotal case with Flint to rail against – in a Washington Post article – a supposedly non government entity causing the problem and still better who was appointed by a Republican. The point was do not blame the government(s) or at least Democrat run ones. Now that Pandora box has been opened I think the liberal media will want to forget about the entire problem.
Chicago is as blue a government as you could ever find with a mayor who was a pal of Obama’s and worked in his administration. The IL Supreme Court just ruled that Chicago like the state of IL has to make good on their pension promises and come up with the money that they spent on expenses other than a pension reserve. Shortly after that ruling the bond rating for Chicago went 1 level above junk and 1 level above that of Detroit when it went into bankruptcy.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the pension liabilities when the state of IL and Chicago default on their debt.
The fascinating thing is how global warming advocates can openly discuss their conspiracy theories, even creating public campaigns based on them, and nobody seems to dismiss them as conspiracy nuts. Dana Nuccitelli wrote a post describing a conspiracy to spread disinformation about global warming… on Stephan Lewandowsk’s blog. This sort of thing seems just as accepted with them as conspiracies about the temperature record do with skeptics.
By the way, I’m seriously considering writing another short eBook, this one on conspiracy beliefs and how they relate to the global warming debate. It didn’t seem worthwhile before, but now that I’m looking more at the “Exxon lied!” conspiracy stuff and reading Tim Ball’s book saying global warming is all a major conspiracy,* it seems worthwhile.
*Seriously, he says it’s all a hoax, that even the greenhouse effect is made up. How he hasn’t been laughed out of every group in the world is beyond me.
Unfortunately I think the people of Flint like many of those of other cities assume the government regulations and testing will insure they have pure water. If they were not so sure they might well drink filtered or bottled water and even do testing of their own. There is a lot of false security in regulations. I am not even sure that the Tribune expos’e will have any affect in Chicago. The Tribune usually does these investigations to sell papers and then goes back to sleep.
Kenneth,
I doubt there was ever enough money to properly fund the pension reserve funds, given the current low rate of return on investments. Pension reserves were funded, or not, based on unrealistic rates of returns on investments, ~8% or so, that weren’t realistic at the time and are now ludicrously high given ZIRP, much less NIRP. Even if the Chicago and Illinois pension funds had been fully funded based on assumptions of high returns, and they weren’t, they would be way underfunded now. I don’t think those court rulings will stand up if the state or city is forced to declare bankruptcy under federal law.
Brandon,
.
.
Well, they aren’t nuts. They are participating in a .. conspiracy of sorts. Just not a very secret one.
Personally, I like to think that the secret part is that if you complain about it (aaand if you endorse the free market), they will pretend that you are the conspiracy nut job.
.
It’s sort of neat.
Say Brandon, let’s start a secret organization and a conspiracy, want to? We can laugh about it on your blog. Then we can form the real secret organization with the joke as the cover. Then we can exchange emails laughing about it. Then we can really establish our super secret denier organization using some shoddy out of date encrypytion. We can exchange messages laughing about it.
…
you get the idea, right? 🙂
I’m sorry, last post until somebody else posts.
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Brandon,
.
The thing that bugs me about the Punish Exxon thing is, most people would have screamed absolute bloody murder if Exxon did absolutely anything besides keeping fossil fuel products as available and as cheap as possible. I would have been one of the ones screaming murder.
.
All of those poor victims, gleefully availing themselves of the fossil fuels, never suspecting the grim truth…
what. A. Crock.
Mark Bofill:
Well, yes… in a sense. But I’m talking about how they think Exxon engaged in a conspiracy, based on evidence which clearly contradicts them. I think that makes it reasonable to call them conspiracy nuts.
Oh. I see now. But Brandon that’s what makes it so magical! Don’t you see!
This is the model of the future Brandon. We need to embrace it. The only trouble is, we don’t actually have anything to conspire about. But other than that, I think we could pull off the same feat!
Or not. :p
DeWitt, the taxpayers in IL provide 80 percent of the funds for the pension obligations and the 8 percent return on investments is probably still used in order to avoid revealing the true unfunded obligations. The 8 percent was used long after it was well known that it was unrealistic.
Something I have not been able to get info on is that the judges in IL who rule on pension obligations also get their pensions from the state. Conflict of interest?
Brandon the problem is that you persist in thinking that they actually believe what they are saying. They don’t. Whether or not it’s true is besides the point. Whether or not it’s being said is the point. It’s got to be widely disseminated; it needs to be a meme. They can always handle anybody (like you, you dirty free market endorsing denier) who objects in a variety of ways, not least of which is to call you the conspiracy theorist. Or the Big Oil operative. Or whatever, the methods are legion. They can handle the Nays, so that leaves the Ayes; the Ayes have it.
It’s a green socialists’ wet dream. Strike a blow against capitalism and against global warming all at once!
Neal,
Yes, the tax on petroleum in Europe is about 100%. That is what I noted in my earlier comment.
DeWitt,
I agree. There are lots of differences between the States and Europe which are not accounted for in my SWAG. My guess is that the short term elasticity of fuel demand is extremely low, and that carbon taxes would have very little effect over less than a decade… unless they were so heavy they caused a general recession.
Mark:
.
I think the complaint about Exxon is that their scientists knew very well what the climate scientists were finding out, and substantially agreed with it. But at the same time, Exxon paid think tanks to generate articles questioning these same conclusions. (The payments are not conjectural, by the way: John Mashey has collected and published information about them, I believe from Exxon’s tax statements.) So you can call it a conspiracy or you can call it “clever PR”; but they were paying for people to write articles questioning things that you yourself no longer doubt – like the actuality of the greenhouse effect. It hasn’t been an open question for a long time.
Neal,
Bordering on conspiracy ideation. The petroleum companies are no more legally liable than I am for doubting the severity of future warming and its effects.
SteveF:
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Please indicate where I wrote anything about legal issues.
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Ideate much?
Neal,
The part that I find truly hilarious is that we are supposed to pretend that that has something to do with anything today.
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Fact is Neal, we use fossil fuels because it makes economic sense to use fossil fuels today. All of these delightful abstract games that these delightful progressive thinkers delight in, this story we are telling. It’s revisionist history in the sense that even if it were absolutely so it had not a damn thing to do with anything that happened.
Neal King,
“So you can call it a conspiracy”
.
legalities follow from this.
SteveF:
.
I’m just quoting you guys. I’ve never called it conspiracy.
Oh I know, I know. There are those out there among the progressives who could never quite grasp that the majority of Americans aren’t progressives and just don’t think the same way. It’s soothing to believe that what happened was that the diabolical plots of such holies of Unholies as the Heartland Institute was really behind the fact that nobody really gave a crap. It was the think tanks funded by the greedy fossil fuel interests!
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Yah. Keep telling yourself that. Nobody cared, nobody was paying attention, except when gas prices were high, and only then long enough to wish gas prices would drop. It wasn’t any sort of scheme. It’s America, then and now. People don’t care, never did, never will.
Mark:
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OK, I believe you. So why is everybody so defensive about it?
Neal J. King amuses me:
This is exactly what I wrote an entire post showing to be BS, based upon nothing more than flagrant misrepresentations of documents which actually show the exact opposite of what is claimed. King somehow manages to ignore all that, repeating claims that are easily debunked if anyone bothers to actually look at the evidence. Which he apparently chooses not to do.
Mashey is a conspiracy nut of the highest order who is also incompetent when it comes to research, making numerous errors in every document he writes.
Or we could call it wild-eyed fantasies of paranoid nutjobs who willfully delude themselves into believing insane things. That’s an option too.
Mark Bofill,
My experience is that ‘progressives’ are incapable of believing that anyone who is neither a moron nor horribly misinformed could possibly draw honest conclusions different from their own. Therefore progressives conclude anyone who says they draw a different conclusion must be duplicitous, involved in conspiracies, etc. I call this ‘the progressive blind spot’. Sort of like the optic nerve blind spot, but much larger, and not compensated for by a second eye that can actually see what is in the blind spot of the ‘progressive’ eye.
Neal,
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Well, fair question. I can’t speak for everyone on that. I’ll think about it. You’re right, it does irritate me, and I apologize if I snapped at you because I was irritated.
Brandon,
“Or we could call it wild-eyed fantasies of paranoid nutjobs who willfully delude themselves into believing insane things. ”
.
is that a reference to Al Gore, the SKS crew, or some other paranoid nutjobs?
Mark:
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The apology is appreciated but really not necessary.
.
But the irritation is interesting. If you come to any conclusions about that, I’d be interested in hearing them.
Neal,
Because folks tire of being accused of conspiracy ideation by people who truly do suffer from that affliction.
SteveF:
No. I believe the word you were looking for was “and.”
Neal,
.
Do you think that progressives generally are willing to go farther than liberals to accomplish their ends? Serious question, not irritation, not a foothold for the first position of an argument. I’d really like to know what you think about this.
It comes back to the lines I was talking about before.
.
Can we talk hypothetically about Exxon and climate change? I’m not interested necessarily in whether or not you really agree that the details I want to discuss are representative of reality, I just want to use it as an example to get at the points I care about. The things I try to understand that relate to why I got irritated, perhaps.
.
Would it be right in your view to scapegoat Exxon, under the right circumstances? Suppose these things are so – these are the things I don’t care if you really agree with. These are just the stage not the point. Suppose Exxon really wasn’t to blame. Suppose climate sensitivity is high. Suppose we believe that some actual benefit comes out of pretending that Exxon was to blame. Suppose that the thinking of the Climate Accountability Institute was correct, and by arousing public anger (right or wrong), noble objective X Y and Z can be accomplished.
Is it therefore the right thing to do?
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Some liberals I’ve known would say no. I think of them as ‘classic’ liberals, traditional democrats. They’ve got well defined lines that they don’t believe in crossing, period, paragraph. They’ve got principles that are more important to them than outcomes.
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Some ..radicals? progressives? I don’t always know. I’m not sure they call themselves by their right names. Some of these would say yes. Some wouldn’t admit to yes, but it’s obvious that the answer is yes.
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I can’t concisely explain why Neal, but I am not on the same side as these guys. I think they are harming us all; me too, the people I love and care about too. And it irritates me when I encounter their work. It scares me and it makes me angry.
.
~shrug~
Mark:
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I can’t think of a rationale for scapegoating the wrong people. What would be the point?
Neal,
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The argument would be the greater good would be accomplished. Say for the sake of argument that it was believed that if Exxon were blamed and the case brought against them, progress could be made on policy changes that would ultimately reduce the costs and impacts of climate change.
.
We can choose another example if you’d like. I know it’s strange, but I am asking you to assume with me for illustrative purposes that climate sensitivity is high, that impacts will be severe. So the hypothetical problem is, can I accomplish a greater good by way of a small evil. Let’s crucify Exxon right or wrong (and in this example, I’m asking that we assume that Exxon really isn’t to blame, regardless of what conclusion we’d come to about this in reality), so let’s crucify Exxon even though they aren’t really at fault, because we need to in order to rally people to fix policy.
.
The real question isn’t whether you think the ends justify the means. (If you do, there’s no need to tell me so right now. Spoil my evening it would.) The question I asked was – is this a progressive vrs liberal trait in your experience? Is this a radical vrs progressive trait?
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Anyways.
[Edit: in addition to the question I give you this by way of explanation. I said I’d try to explain why I was irritated, this is what I came up with.]
Actually, I can think of one reason to scapegoat the wrong person. Can you guess?
?? Cause his name is BRANDON SHOLLENBERGER?!?
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Did I get it in one? Tell me I got it in one!!
.
(Sorry. I’ve got a truly wretched sense of humor)
But Exxon wouldn’t be a usable example. I don’t see how stringin up Exxon executives would help anyone get anything done.
Mark:
.
Not even close.
Meh. So it was a poor example if you think that, not my point.
[Edit: I mean Exxon was a poor example. Not Brandon. I think anyone would have to concede it’s a good idea to scapegoat Brandoon… 😮 ]
.
Surely we could with enough trouble concoct an example where..
.
Look, how about Gleick. If Gleick had gotten away with it, would it have been the right thing to do. Some think so. [Edit: I think. I can’t actually substantiate this claim.]
.
Those who think so, would you characterize them as progressives or something else. Is the idea ‘the ends can justify the means’ a progressive idea, or am I slandering progressives in my mind by thinking this? Are these guys in fact radicals? Are they something else. ‘Unprincipled A-Holes’ comes to mind, but I don’t think it’s the formal term.
SteveF (Comment #144881)
” Sort of like the optic nerve blind spot, but much larger, and not compensated for by a second eye that can actually see what is in the blind spot of the ‘progressive’ eye”
Sorry if it can see it it compensates for it. Medically one eye is dominant and turns off the other eye but if it can “see”, i.e. the brain takes in and recognizes the image then any not seeing is psychological, not physical.
#144889) “The real question isn’t whether you think the ends justify the means.”
Like all the deaths and destruction in the US civil war and the Syrian conflict?
Practicality rather than principle for me.
In CAGW the means if it is true and not the means if it is false.
We will never know.
What time of year is it?
Neal,
Spring, just after Easter.
EasterScapegoats? Easter scape bunnies… No, it’s not helping me. I’m lousy at pictionary too.
almost tax time. If we could scapegoat the IRS?!? Ohh ohh can we please pleease can we pleeaaasssee?!?
I’m passing the normal bounds of silly and descending into ridiculousness. Think it’s about my bed time.
Night all, thanks for the conversation this evening.
wrt Gleick: I don’t think many people thought this was an appropriate tactic. If you become the story, there’s probably something wrong.
.
Of course, if you have an actual war, all rules are on-hold. But how would we expect to change current trends by having a war? Isn’t the task one of finding ways to cooperate?
What is Easter about?
Jesus
Neal, are you playing Pontius Pilate?
sue,
I would say he’s playing Socrates rather than Pontius Pilate.
DeWitt, perhaps, but he’s not clever enough.
I’m amused. So as I mentioned above, I wrote a blog post responding to the conspiracy theory that the company Exxon has engaged in a disinformation campaign to convince people of things about global warming it knew weren’t true. In it, I examined evidence which has been presented to support this claim, using a blog post by Brandon Gates as a springboard.
Gates how now shown up to respond with this impressive argument:
Seriously. It’s like saying, “What?! You criticize what I say? You fool! You are clearly wrong! Let me demonstrate this by repeating what I say!” Or as I put it:
But let’s be real. This is the only approach anyone who claims Exxon engaged in a disinformation campaign can take. After all, there isn’t the slightest shred of evidence to support their conspiracy theory.
angech,
There is no second political eye for ‘progressives’, their blind spot is not compensated for.
Well, this is an open thread, so I hope I can be forgiven for this comment. I just had to share a bit of material that made me laugh. I’ve been doing some background research on the whole conspiracy theory about there being a disinformation campaign as I thought it’d be interested to trace some of the history of hte claim. As part of that, I checked out the leaked Skeptical Science forum to see what they were saying years back. Some of the stuff was interesting, like one of the Skeptical Science team (John Hartz) saying:
Which is quite funny. And the thread’s subject matter is quite interesting for material on this conspiracy theory (the link is broken, but Google can find you the series of articles). Unfortunately, while looking into things like this, I happened to come across the Skeptical Science threads about the Heartland Institute documents, and they’re way too distracting. I’m not going to worry about the complete lack of skepticism they showed, but here are some funny bits. From their first thread about “Denialgate”, we have a user saying DeSmog Blog was running slow, so:
Another user:
Also, from users:
In another thread, discussing accusations Peter Gleick forged the one document:
John Cook himself chimed in:
And our esteemed visitor Neal J. King wondered:
And said:
Then a couple others come up with wild ideas:
But the best part is this speculation:
To which our wonderful King said:
There are plenty of other entertaining quotes, and I’m not trying to give a full or complete summary. I just wanted to highlight a bit of how conspiracy minded the Skeptical Science group is.
Brandon,
The only thing that matters to those who wrongly claim fossil fuel companies (and all ‘den!ers’ as well!) should be prosecuted is that fossil fuel use be eliminated. The exact path to that goal is not important, nor is honesty, truth, existing law, or public opinion. Eliminating fossil fuel use is the only acceptable outcome, by any means available. Like all zealots, they lack perspective, respect for other views, and any normal sense of personal decency. History shows that zealots bring about totalitarian nightmares.
Aw, my comment landed in moderation. I was worried it might due to the linking/quoting in it.
Neal,
.
Oh, I see now. Jesus, literally scapegoated ‘for our sins’.
.
Yeah I’ve never understood that. I don’t think a goat can pay for my sins. I don’t really get how anyone, (yep including the son of God) can pay for my sins. I don’t actually want anyone to pay for my sins, that hardly seems fair. I’ll cover it, thanks.
.
I live in Huntsville AL, and I am in fact a regular member of a church. I’m just not much of a believer, not a very devout one. But it’s a community thing. I’d be astonished if I was the only engineer around here who felt that way. 🙂
I believe the basic idea is that you don’t “pay” for your sins, but rather, you atone for them and that removes the sin and washes you clean. That would mean Jesus didn’t (theologically) die to pay for our sins, but rather, to wash us clean of them. By dying for our sins, he removed them so they are no longer part of us.
(And by “us,” I mean whichever people meet the necessary requirements for atonement. Different people have different beliefs as to just what is necessary. The most common view is that you need to believe in God and ask him for forgiveness, which kind of seems to contradict the idea sins are “paid” for, but…)
Brandon,
Yes. It confuses the heck out of me. I usually smile and nod, whatever details make sense to whoever regarding this, just so long as it doesn’t concern me. If it’s between you and God or whatever, that’s fine by me. 🙂
Neal Writes
You missed one and its highly pertinent to where I live. We had a carbon tax in Australia and that made hydro energy more valuable. So our island State went beserk generating hydro electricity and exporting it to the mainland to make a profit.
Then it stopped raining with El Nino. And our power cable to the mainland broke and so now we’re in dire straits energy wise as we’ve run down our water reserves in the name of profit.
So we’re bringing in hundreds of massive diesel generators and asking industry to lighten their electrical load and its bad for the State in so many ways. Did the carbon tax help? Nope, not in the slightest, it harmed.
Brandon,
That’s sort of mean. I’m absolutely certain I could find old posts of mine that we could have a good laugh about, things I’d find embarrassing. Now I sort of feel I ought to, to make Neal feel more comfortable.
.
I be back.
Brandon,
Sorry that got moderated. I don’t know what triggered that.
I have no idea who the SkSer who thinks I blocked him personally was. But Watts, Lucia and McIntyre do not happen to share IP addresses of people who challenge and annoy them.
Admittedly, I would share Doug Cotton’s IP addresses . . . But I happen to not have done so. It’s easier to just read his attempts to post and notice there are “Doug Cotton” type words that are required for him to describe his theory. Other people rarely want to discuss the “gravito-thermal effect” and if they do, they can wait a while for their comment to appear.
I do like the idea that the SkS conspiracy theorists tended to pick Mosher as the prime candidate for having ‘hacked’. Mind you, perhaps he could do so if he had a mind to.
Oh… sorry. I forgot. It can’t be the SkS crowd that suffers from conspiracy ideation. . .
OMG I’m not going to plod through WUWT threads years past looking for evidence of my public stupidity. Suffice it to say ( and I don’t think anyone around here will find it hard to believe 🙂 ) it’s out there.
Oh god, I can’t stop laughing and wanting to scream at a person for their stupidity. In a comment after my latest post, I wrote:
The point is obvious. I quoted a person then provided another quote which clearly contradicted the first. I then wrote a paragraph in an over-the-top, sarcastic manner highlighting the contradiction as though it were not one even though it made the literal words I wrote absurd. It’s a classic use of irony.
This is how Brandon Gates responded:
There were three pictures in there which I’m not including. In page length, this makes up about half of the entire post he wrote. All of that… to rebut the idea we don’t know the planet is warming. Because… I was totally serious when I wrote:
Totally. Serious.
Guys, I think I might be edying here. It’s hard to breathe because I can’t stop laughing.
marc,
I don’t think the issue is one of “public stupidity”. The issues with SkS and the Gleick incident is that many in the SkS crowd come up with numerous creative explanations for the facts, many of which involved assuming there was some sort of “conspiracy” going on.
That same crowd often accuses others of “conspiracy ideation”– without much evidence. (In fact so little, that Lewandowki’s papers are just laughable.)
In fact, there is quite a bit of conspiracy ideation amongst the “true AGW believer” crowd. (This is not necessarily the same actual climate scientists or even just ‘people who believe AGW is true’ as the “true believer” is something a bit different.)
One of their “theories” relates to the notion there is some vast organized “disinformation” campaign which evidently is operated by communication geniuses because (at least according to those who believe it exists), this disinformation campaign “works” and sways public opinion while all the “public education” campaigns (some government funded) somehow “don’t work”.
During the Gleick incident, quite a few at SkS seem to have been quick to jump on this explanation. And why not? The idea that ‘others’ conspire seems to be a fairly widely held internal believe or suspicion and people will often jump to their internal beliefs to try to put new bits of information into context.
In fact: The correct context for Gleick’s actions were that he did decide to steal Heartland info and so on. No one at Heartland was framing him. Mosher identified the “style” match between Gleick and stuff because… well… there was a style match. And so on….
Mark, Lucia:
.
It was an interesting episode, and since SkS folks were not involved, we didn’t know what was going on. So we speculated. It was hard for us to believe that Gleick would set out to do something that stupid, so other things had to be considered.
.
I remember being puzzled by the fact that Mosher picked on Gleick so early, but didn’t seem to provide much basis for it, from what I saw. I don’t recall seeing any further clarification of that question.
Lucia,
Yes. There’s a lot in what you say that is true, pertinent, and interesting; all of the above. Further, I ‘get’ your point that public stupidity really has nothing to do with it. I thought of public stupidity because:
1. It’s similar in that it can be embarrassing to have people repost past examples of posts that one might no longer agree with.
2. Empathy causes me to feel other people’s discomfort to a certain degree.
3. The best example I could come up with where I’d feel similar was posting something stupid. Probably posting something stupid forcefully too, as if I knew what the heck I was talking about. 🙂
.
Anyways. Whatever. Objection noted for the record, overruled, great let’s move on I guess. I’d rather talk about some of the points you raise than go on carping about my sense of manners or whatever, what I’m talking about isn’t very interesting to me.
Neal,
It was at that point that I started paying close attention to what Steven Mosher had to say. I figured it was evidence that the guy was smarter than he looked. (Sorry Steven, not saying you’re dumb looking.. You know what I mean.)
~shrug~
Lucia: “style match”
.
How is it that Mosher is so familiar with Gleick’s writing that he would notice a style match? Was he reading a lot of Gleick’s books or articles at the time? It seemed unlikely.
Lucia,
.
I agree. That was one of the other things I found educational and amusing over in the SkS thread I linked with Tom Curtis’s remarks. Tom repeatedly reminded OPOF that OPOF was in essence validating denier conspiracy theory. He gave it up eventually. Somebody else came along to discuss the great grand progressive agenda as well, and conceded that maybe it’d be best to work on the goals in parallel. It was all I could do not to post a final comment over there saying “Guys! Have you got $#*! in your ears?! Tom Curtis has told you to shut up with the ideation, deniers are reading this!” But other than amusing me for a few minutes that would have served no purpose…
Neal J. King is silly. He asks:
But there’s no reason Mosher would have needed to be familiar with Gleick’s writing. As Mosher said at the time:
Which is completely correct. The idea Peter Gleick would have been mentioned in such a strategy document, if it were real, is bizarre. That’s an obvious reason to look at him as a possibility. And as Mosher wrote:
None of that takes any particular familiarity. Remembering a few things about the guy, and then seeing his name included in a strange way would be enough to make him worth considering as a suspect. At that point, it would be easy to look up Peter Gleick’s writing style.
Or, you know, Heartland could have contracted Mosher out to leak Gleick’s name after it mailed Gleick a fake memo to try to get him to commit identity theft to steal other documents. I guess that’s a possibility too.
Neal
Yes. And your speculations involved postulating the existence of a conspiracy. This is evidence that you all harbor a tendency toward “conspiracy ideation”.
Yes. Because it was hard for you to believe what really happened, you guys came up with the idea that a conspiracy existed for the same reason or reasons other people come up with the idea a conspiracy existed. These are (a) they for some reason find it difficult to accept the correct theory and (b) they tend to believe conspiracies are likely.
People with lesser tendencies to conspiracy ideation might just say “Wow! I can’t really believe Gleick would do that! Let’s wait to hear more!”
BTW: It’s hardly impossible for people to hear a story and not suddenly engage in a conspiracy theory. People do this all the time with news stories. Right now, my attitude toward “#Cruzsexscandal” on twitter is “wait and see”. (Mind you– there are others who are engaging in conspiracy theories. But no one is required to do so and many don’t.)
Mosher gave his basis: The style matched. Which it did. Not sure what further “basis” you expected nor in what time frame you would expect any “basis”. The episode unwound rather quickly, so … no… no long peer review articles comparing “style” nor presenting the other evidence Mosher mentioned (like Gleick not being as present on Twitter as previously was his want.)
Given the short amount of time for the episode in its entirety, and the fact that no formal venue for ‘publishing’ the evidence of this sort existed, I’m not sure why you would be ‘puzzled’ by amount of evidence presented. I’d say under the circumstances, one could just as easily deem the amount of evidence “copious” rather than “skant”. (Going back to the #Cruzsexscandal, I’m neither “puzzled” nor “not puzzled” that further basis has not yet been revealed. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. )
But the fact is: short as the Glieck time scale of the episode was, the reaction at SkS was to posit the existence of a conspiracy– and some even suggested others take actions based on the probability the conspiracy existed was sufficiently high that you all engage in collective action to attempt to prove it. For example: your suggesting of “seeding” the web appears to have been based on the notion that the conspiracy likely existed and you wanted to gather evidence to prove it.
I realize your recollection may merely have been that you were “puzzled”. But in fact, you proposed activities to try to put pressure on the conspirators to “come clean”. Specifically
Lucia,
.
.
Yes. The virtue of using the conspiracy theory line of attack on people is that it’s a device that can be used on most anyone. Yet most people are reluctant to think of their speculations in these terms. They aren’t conspiracy theorists, they’re just speculating.
.
Virtue,if you want to call it that. Utility maybe.
Brandon
I don’t know about “silly”. It’s more that Neal likely didn’t want to read or recall the basis Mosher had given. Quite likely, he relied on the discussions among those at SkS– who themselves were either not reading or filtering the information actually given.
Those people either didn’t actually read what Mosher said about how he formulated and tested his hypothesis or didn’t want to consider the possibility that
(a) Mosher did initially get the idea to think Gleick might be involved because Gleick’s name was in the ‘leaked’ document.
(b) That it actually was weird to for Gleick to be mentioned in the Heartland document. Prior to the episode, Gleick was just an innocous nobody to most at skeptic sites. (Heck, I didn’t know who he was.)
(c) The styles did actually match.
(d) It might actually be true that Gleick did it.
In fact, (d) turned out to be correct. But a-b were clearly true before Gleick confessed; (c) could be debated. (Turned out Mosher’s diagnosis was correct.) But somehow in Neal’s mind, Mosher’s reasons for suspecting Gleick were just some sort of mystery. Even though Mosher told everyone the reasons. So, we can only speculate how Neal’s mind works. I put forwards: (a) cognitive dissonance and (b) some inclination to conspiracy ideation. The latter is often triggered by the former.
Lucia:
.
I make a lot of suggestions, often in context of a multi-threaded configuration of possibilities. Sometimes they’re concepts, sometimes they’re plans, sometimes they’re proposals, sometimes they’re probes, sometimes they’re jokes.
.
SkS internal discussions cover a wide range. People are generally not out to jump down each other’s throats. Differences in viewpoint are presented as such, and contradicting elements as well: There isn’t a whole lot of snide going around.
Neal,
Not following your point. I understand every sentence in your answer but I don’t understand how it logically connects to what Lucia is saying. Would you clarify.
Neal,
Uh huh…. So in that context: what do you think of “Recursive Fury” by Lewandowsky? Real question.
You have a group of people whose membership has been screened and approved by the admin. So it’s hardly surprising there isn’t much jumping down each other throats. The screening process ensures that most people are in general agreement on many issues.
No: there was no “snide” response to peoples suggestions the “other” side was involved in a conspiracy. Yes. The SkS forum was a “safe place” to engage in conspiracy ideation about the ‘other side’. That no one at SkS criticized the notions as “conspiracy theories” (snidely or otherwise) doesn’t magically transform the ideas into “not conspiracy theories”.
They were conspiracy theories that those at SkS felt comfortable advancing, discussing and which no one on the SkS made snide (or even negative) remarks about.
lucia:
Interestingly, I just realized that thread might have been the first time I heard of Edward Wilson. I’m not sure if I looked the guy up because of that discussion or if it’s just a coincidence.
Mark:
.
When I’m discussing things with folks at SkS, I just say what I’m thinking. I don’t spend a lot of time preparing a legal case. If someone has a different perspective s/he’s pushing, I’ll go back and do some digging if it seems appropriate. But I don’t go in “loaded for bear” just to make a comment. People discussing things there are interested in the topic, not in scoring points off each other.
.
So if I say something, and someone says “You’re missing something,” we can go back and forth and examine references and so forth. It’s kind of painless.
By the way, if I was just going for embarrassing things to quote from the forum, I would have picked other stuff. Heck, I didn’t even quote my favorite quote ever from John Cook:
Let’s leave aside the absurdity of Peter Gleick being identified because of his apparent authorship of the fake document yet having people like Cook believe Gleick did everything but author that document. The far more entertaining aspect is: “Shakespearean tragedy.”
It’s sort of like how one of the Skeptical Science team members decided there is such a conspiracy against them:
To this day, I’ve never said a word about that comment. I’ve never even quoted it. It’s just too bizarre/hilarious for me to figure out what to say.
Neal,
Oh, ok. Because Lucia said
??
.
Hey don’t take it personally, I’m sure it wasn’t intended that way. It’s interesting and sometimes valuable to examine how we reach initial conclusions, sometimes correct, sometimes incorrect. At least I think so.
Brandon,
Yeah I’m speechless too…
[Edit: Ok. Why does the skeptic side have to be the Effing Viet Cong:
I thought it was all the darn liberals, the Jane Fondas and the Robert Redfords who adored the Viet Cong and wanted to champion global warming (activism), how come we get stuck with that.]
I know. Not the point. Just an annoying detail.
I’m just puzzled: How is it that I see on the screen words that have never been said about a quote that has never been quoted?
Neal,
.
I understand that digging through the SkS forum might be offensive to you. I wouldn’t have gone there, but Brandon did. So, nothing to be done about that.
.
.(emphasis added)
.
See, I knew my instincts about you and Tom Curtis weren’t misplaced.
Not to mention the unquoted quote itself.
.
It must be my ideation going into over-drive.
.
Gotta get that checked.
Say Neal, you and Tom Curtis come out pretty well in that thread. I thought my instincts were in pretty good order. :p
Can anyone understand Neal J. King’s last two comments? I’m trying to figure out if there’s any point to them other than, “Hah, hah, he used an idiom wrong!” I get I should have said “until” instead of “to,” but that seems like an incredibly bizarre reason for King to respond when he’s chosen not to respond to tons of actual points in my comments.
I’d like to think King isn’t just sitting with bated breath, waiting for me to make a typo so he can jump on it as something he can finally say I’m wrong about, but… I’m just not seeing any other point to those comments.
Brandon,
Sure, I do. He’s trying to remain calm and graceful while you’re trying to be provocative, don’t you think?
[edit: not rhetorical. Do you think something else?]
Lucia:
.
I’ve never read Lewandowsky’s paper: I don’t take very much interest in psychological sociology.
.
Mark:
.
Odd that TC and I seemed to agree on so much in that exchange. I remember not liking his comment style very much.
I… don’t see how that answers my question. I was looking for a point to the comments. Are you saying the point of the comments was for Neal J. King to show that he’s trying to remain calm and graceful? If not, whether he is trying to be calm or graceful wouldn’t seem to tell us what the point of the comments was.
As for me trying to be provocative… I’m not sure what you mean. Yes, I write things that could be provocative. Criticisms tend to be that way. That’s not the point of the criticisms though. The point of them is to highlight how King does things that are bad because bad behavior shouldn’t be ignored, excused or even promoted.
But none of this seems to give any insight as to the point King is trying to convey with those comments.
Neal,
I think it’s worth noting that while I don’t know Tom Curtis at all I’ve got a suspicion from reading him that he and I would more or less despise each other on (edit: sight). I don’t think we’d be friends. This said, I can still recognize that the man has principles and seems to stick to them harder than most.
Fine, I don’t have to agree. But I think people do have to have some sort of integrity and some basic set of principles to function in the same society. I’m not saying that right exactly, you get the idea.
Brandon,
Eh.
What does Glen Tamblyn’s rambling screed got to do with Neal? Neal and Tom appeared to disagree with him on that thread.
Mark:
.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say I’m “trying to remain calm and graceful” regarding what you label as provocations. Most of the time, I’m completely oblivious to what B. writes. I don’t process it.
.
In this case, I noticed the last few words, which were self-contradictory. I was mildly amused, that’s all.
Alright, well. There you have it then. 🙂
.
It bugs me more than it bugs you I guess Neal. Maybe I’m like Hannibal Lecter. Perfectly OK to eat somebody’s liver but be rude to them? That won’t do.
~shrug~
Mark Bofill:
Why are you asking me such a strange question? I didn’t say a word about either of those people in that comment. You might as well ask me what that “rambling screed” has got to do with munster cheese. To summarize:
I had quoted a number of people from the Skeptical Science forum. You made a comment about how it can be embarrassing “to have people repost past examples” of comments. I gave an example of the sort of quote I would have posted if I were merely aiming to embarrass to highlight the difference between me quoting people because their remarks were relevant and me quoting them to cause embarrassment.
What that has to do with Neal J. King is beyond me.
Mark:
.
I’ll make a note not to have dinner at your house. I’m not fond of liver as a dish, anyway. I prefer my own uncooked.
Brandon,
Ok. I must have gotten confused. My impression as to why you posted Glen’s comment was mistaken.
Thanks Brandon.
Mark Bofill:
So yes, he did write comments solely to point out a minor mistake of having used the word “to” instead of “until.” He’s called me a liar and portrayed me as a voyeur creeping on my female neighbors without any evidence, flaunting the fact he won’t even attempt to justify what he says. He’s also repeatedly insulted me and suggested I have a developmental disorder. But you say:
I don’t have thin skin so his behavior doesn’t bother me much, but if you’re going to apply standards, would you please have some consistency? The things you complain about/remark upon from me aren’t remotely as rude or offensive as the things he’s done without you saying a word.
If King wants to constantly say things that aren’t true, repeatedly portray me in horrible and/or offensive ways without any evidence then refuse to offer any sort of response or justification when challenged, all while looking for any and every reason to criticize me, that’s his choice. I’m just not sure how anyone can consider that better than me pointing out when he does it.
I don’t care if people don’t like me, but sheesh. If I said things a fraction as bad as King does, I’d be crucified.
Brandon,
That was hilarious. I had to google to find the thread:
http://www.hi-izuru.org/forum/General%20Chat/2012-02-21-WOW!%20Peter%20Gleick%20was%20'Heartland%20Insider‘!!!.html
I
The first response was interesting…..
Still, a number of later responses fall into the category of “entirely sane”. So I think it’s best for people to read the whole thing to make up their mind about the collective reaction.
🙂
.
Well darn Brandon. Next you’ll be telling me you want equal rights for white men or something equally absurd.
.
No, I get your point. I’m sorry for selectively applying my outrage. FWIW, I would have preferred for Neal not to be rude either, but if I jumped on him for it he’d have walked away. So so much for my principles over outcomes, heh.
Mark Bofill:
Funny that. If I had as thin of skin as he does and was willing to behave as offensively as him, people might treat me better!
lucia:
Definitely. My point was just to show the sort of things one can find in the Skeptical Science forum if one is just looking to cause embarrassment. I wasn’t trying to do any sort of fair or balanced analysis. I was just saying, if a person wanted to quote crazy stuff from there, there is far worse things than what I had been quoting.
By the way, your link doesn’t work (WordPress doesn’t like the punctuation marks) so here’s one for people who might want to look.
Not sure if anything can be considered off-topic on this thread, but I found this interview interesting. For one, there’s a repetition of the prediction of an “ice-free” Arctic by 2020 “(possibly even the summer of 2016)”, with a 3-month “ice-free” state within a couple of years of that event. For another, we’re told that we should “treat this Arctic temperature amplification as an existential threat to humanity”.
HaroldW,
From the article:
“The level of certainty over these future effects is close to 100% if we continue to be stupid and do nothing.”
This always amuses me. “Close to 100%” must have been an actual calculated number somewhere before it transformed into poetry. Or maybe it wasn’t. If someone knows what it was, and/or if it was, please let me know.
Andrew
Harold,
Thanks. I’d never heard of Marine Cloud Brightening before. That’s interesting.
Mark –
There was something a few years ago about having ships cruise about, shooting large sprays of water in the air, as a means of increasing albedo locally. A quick Google suggests this, or some similar contemporaneous account, is what I’m failing to recall.
[Edit: Here is the paper which the newspaper article (naturally) fails to cite.]
I also found this reference from a few years earlier.
Harold,
I prefer geoengineering ideas [edit: like this] where we can have high confidence our ability to rapidly turn the system off if we don’t like what we’re observing. Doesn’t make it impossible to hang ourselves, but maybe makes it a hair less likely that we will end up doing so.
.
I’d still feel oh so much better about such things if we could model climate well. — Sometimes I wonder though if geoengineering experiments couldn’t help us refine models. Are there experiments we could do that would help resolve areas of doubt in our theoretical understanding? Without involving insane risks or insane amounts of resources to run the experiments?
I don’t know. I shoulda been a climate scientist. 😮
Mark Bofill,
” I shoulda been a climate scientist.”
.
Yikes! Then you would probably be a different person; there are not many conservative climate scientists you know. I think there is a wee bit of selection bias to only allow like-thinking people into the grad school programs. I expect it would be difficult for a true conservative to find an advisor in climate science who would not run him/her out of school on a rail. Same thing with sociology and other politically tilted fields, but (fortunately) those tilted fields have limited policy influence and limited potential for doing damage to society.
SteveF,
That’s true I guess. I hear things to that effect. I’ve been so long out of school. Even when I was in school (GSU), undergraduate studies were such that nobody really got to know me all that well. Lecture halls full of 30+ students; it didn’t come up. On such occasions in liberal arts classes that it mattered (English or whatever) I’m pretty sure the professors were delighted, as I’d do my level best to spark argument and discussion amidst the apathy of my peers. Never went anywhere, needless to say, didn’t matter.
.
I guess it’s different for graduate students. Maybe it’s different for undergrads in different fields, mine was computer science.
[edit: probably different at more competitive schools, now that I think about it. I went to a less competitive state college; basically sleepwalking through]
HaroldW,
Of course there were some record low Arctic sea ice extents during the winter. We’re in an El Niño, and a big one to boot. The AMO Index has also stayed high rather than dropping during the winter like the last couple of years. But the area loss from maximum to minimum is about 10Mm² and the current peak ice area is 12.9Mm² and rising. So the probability of an ice free Arctic Ocean in 2016 is, IMO, quite small. This is more Schneiderian exaggeration for scary headlines.
IIRC (maybe not), there is some evidence that the Arctic Ocean was ice free or very low ice extent for a time during the current interglacial (Holocene) some 5-8,000 years ago. It had to something to do with trees that fell into rivers draining into the Arctic Ocean that ended up far enough away from their origin that there couldn’t have been much ice.
SteveF:
.
It’s unclear to me how they would find out someone is conservative during graduate school application: How would it show up? With regards to entering a program, that would generally happen by taking classes in the subject and making useful contributions to the technical discussion. If your major themes seemed to be: “I don’t think this class or these problems are worthwhile,” then it is unlikely that a professor would seek you out; and if you went to talk to him, he would probably ask why you were interested in joining the program, if you found the endeavor useless. But in that case, whose was the bias?
.
With regards to general political attitudes, I can hardly think of a professor in the sciences I’ve met who would bring the topic up: What would it have to do with the research projects?
.
You might have trouble socializing with other students if you insist on harping on the uselessness of their work, or kept up an unending focus on conservative politics; but the same thing would happen if you kept an unending focus on any other politics either. Most science students don’t go to graduate school to talk about politics.
.
Under ordinary conditions, I can’t imagine how it would be an issue.
Brandon,
Reading the forum you linked to. Something caught my attention:
“Morano responds true to form – I’ve placed this screengrab in the SkS image stash.”
Neal,
I thought you said no one was aware about the separate image folder…
In this case my memory was not so bad although this paper was not the one I remembered.
The seals and polar bears seem to have survived this.
sue, the leaked forum was from an earlier time, when the Skeptical Science forum was hosted under the same domain as the main site as opposed to in its own (sksforum.org) where I found the image directory. I imagine the reason the image referred to in that quote is currently in the Skeptical Science /pics/ directory is before the forum move, users would upload images to the main site’s directory for images and link to them in the forum. After they changed domains, the process may have changed.
That said, this makes it difficult for me to understand how anyone could be unaware of how the system worked like Neal J. King claims they were. If users were used to having to upload images themselves then link to them, it seems like at least some of them should have understood the functionality would be the same on the new site, even if John Cook coded an automated system to handle it.
But hey, we probably won’t ever know. I mean, unless I hack into the backup server and steal all the contents!
Brandon, thanks for that explanation. Will await Neal’s response.. and Go for it, you hacker! 😉
Uh-oh. You’re encouraging me to break into servers? There’s clearly a conspiracy here!
No really, there should be one. Because then I could get paid.
Look if you want to have a conspiracy you need a secret organization with a secret clubhouse. That could be Brandon’s blog.
.
Then the best way to hide it is in plain view. Use an onion layer defense. At Brandon’s blog we reveal it’s a joke. One of the blog entries sets up an unsecured forum. At the unsecured forum we reveal it’s a joke. One of the entries there setups email membership. The only email that goes out reveals it’s a joke, but in the middle of the email is a link to a semi secure server. On the semi secure server there is a forum that reveals it’s a joke, with a link to a secure server with PGP. On the PGP server it’s revealed that it’s a joke.
…
Or is it…
…
Accuse me after that of running a secret organization you durned conspiracy theorists! How much evidence do you need that it was a joke for goodness sakes!
Why not just openly conspire? I could post things like, “I’m going to break into the Skeptical Science server now” and a few days later come back and say, “Success! Guys, you won’t believe what I found!” And then someone else can be all, “You succeeded? Awesome! Your check is in the mail!”
We can discuss all sorts of dastardly things we’re doing, making sure to never provide evidence so as to avoid legal trouble. Nobody will be able to tell what, if anything, we say is real. And they won’t be able to get us in trouble because if anyone tries, we can just go, “Oh, it was all a joke.” What are they going to do? As long as they don’t have evidence, we can confess to anything we want and there won’t be any proof they can use to get us in trouble.
Oh.
yeah.
.
.
But my way is way more convoluted and fun.
I mean, what’s the point in having a conspiracy if you’re not going to immerse yourself in layer upon layer of intrigue and madness?
.
.
Also, the pay part strictly kills it. If I could come up with a conspiracy to get paid, with or without the secret organization, I’d quit my day job. I guess…
Secrecy is less fun because the whole enjoyment of a secret is sharing it!
As for payment, the point of the open conspiracy is nobody will know if what you’re saying is true. Or if maybe some of it is and some of it isn’t. If you don’t like the payment part, that’s okay. Who said it was true in the first place?
sue:
.
I had prepared a long answer to your question. But if you’re going to be giving B. encouragement to hack SkS, I’m not going to give you any further response.
Mark:
.
I am really disappointed in the direction this discussion appears to be taking. If my visits to Lucia’s result in stimulating discussion of this nature, I cannot see any value in coming back.
Mark Bofill, I’m angry with you for deleting that comment before I got a chance to read it. Thanks to a strange quirk of timing, I know you wrote it and I know a few words that you wrote in it, and that makes the rest of the comment such a mystery >.<
Oh well. Neal J. King improved my mood:
!!
After the thing with Brandon Gates, I don’t think I have the energy to laugh anymore. I’ll try to keep it just to snickering. I mean, really? Is there anything in that exchange which suggests sue was serious? sue responded to my obvious joke with a joke, and…
I give up.
Yeah Mark, stop encouraging me to hack into their servers!
Sorry Neal,
I’m screwing around, just kidding and blowing off steam.
.
Look. We are not villains here, anymore than you guys are over at SkS. That’s the point. We can laugh about it, all of us, including you.
[Edit: I’d hoped by this time it would be obvious that I wasn’t laughing at you.]
Mark:
.
I’m not laughing.
.
Quite a few folks back where I come from were really not thrilled when information was publicized before they were ready to have it released. In fact, several of them warned me that this visit might stimulate further interest on B.’s part. I told them that I thought that Lucia, as the host, might find it in bad taste for one guest to rob another while visiting.
.
I’m losing confidence in the reliability of that assumption.
Alright. A couple final thoughts, then I go help put lawn furniture together or whatever the project is for the evening.
1. I’ve got an annoying, juvenile, crude, cruddy sense of humor. I’ve little doubt that it annoys the regulars as well from time to time.
2. Look at my record. When I thought you were attacking Brandon with the B.S. thing, I jumped in to mock myself with the B.M. thing. When I thought Brandon was digging into you above, I jumped in. so on. Please. How much evidence do you want that I’m not a mean spirited person? If you are interpreting my admittedly juvenile humor as an attack, you haven’t been paying attention to my posting style.
3. Anyway, I’m going to give it a rest tonight and allow a more sophisticated degree of conversation to occur here unmolested this evening. Mostly because I gotz to help my wife with some chores. 🙂
.
Again, I regret it if I offered offense. I’ve gone through what I consider to be a reasonable amount of effort to not to.
Oh cross post.
.
Look, Neal. Look at the comments in the [sks]forum. Hear the militant tone, the distrust. See how ready people are to justify betraying their ethics because ‘that’s the way the other side fights’.
.
We are all just people here. You want to think Brandon is your enemy, well, OK. I’ll go on thinking John Cook is the boogieman I guess? What’s the point, what does it serve? None of it is true. It’s just an excuse to imagine the worst about people you don’t know and run with it, to justify crazy behaviors.
.
The remedy is communication, civilized communication. Don’t pull the plug just because. That’s a waste.
[Edit: Wife’s home, times up for now.]
.
Sorry, but this is too funny. I get you are being apologetic Mark Bofill, but there’s no need for you to be. Neal J. King’s reactions are unhinged. This remark is especially hilarious:
But honestly, I’m done. I’m just done. This is from a guy whose first thought when asked by John Cook:
Was apparently to say:
He’s also commented here god knows how many times just to insult people, making vile accusations without any evidence. But you want to pretend there’s any credibility to him pretending we’re bad guys because sue and I made a joke about how he and his friends falsely accuse me of committing a felony?
I’m fine with not wanting him as an enemy, but his behavior is horrendous. On top of that, you’ve done nothing wrong (at least, not to him). Why would you apologize to him? That he constantly mistreats other people then whines when people behave in reasonable manners doesn’t mean you owe him an apologize.
Mark:
.
It’s not a question of thinking you’re a mean-spirited person. But you should recognize that the direction a conversation takes is influenced by what people respond to, and by what they tolerate.
.
I find jokes of this nature are about as funny to me as are jokes about rape to women who have been through that experience.
Neal,
I’m sorry… but are you suggesting someone here robbed you of something while you were visiting here? That’s what it sounds like. Could you clarify? Specifically:
(A) Who do you think was robbed.
(b) Who do you think did the robbing.
(c) Do you think said robbing happened here?
This seems a bit hypocritical, then:
Cold-bloodedly, SkS’s relationship is with the material: The information revealed by Gleick’s action, not with Gleick himself. We had nothing to do with his actions, and we are not responsible for them.
Now that the information is out there, our interest is in how this reflects on the climate debate/discussion at large: the way the science is understood or distorted. HL has been involved in this, and the informatiion casts light on their involvement. This is a legitimate topic of discussion on publicly available documents.
(Edit to move rhetorical). Neal, have you changed your mind about info in the public domain since the Gleick mail fraud incident, or do you just apply different standards to different sides?
Neal
Hyperbolic much? I should think jokes about raping women are rather less funny than jokes about Brandon hacking into a web site. Sorry, but there’s a rather large scale difference between being raped and having your server hacked.
I understand SkS was hacked once and members worry your site will be hacked again. But since you guys tend to call things like merely loading public facing web pages hacking or ‘purloining’ etc, jokes about the hyperbolic language will be made. Maybe you don’t like it– but the best way to make that sort of thing stop is to stop pretending people looking at stuff Cook posted in public is “hacking” or “purloining” or in anyway “stealing” etc.
For what it’s worth: people would also make “rape” jokes someone went around insisting that people accidentally brushing her while passing her on a crowded sidewalk was “rape” or “close to rape” and so on. While some rape victims might not like the jokes, it’s also likely they won’t appreciate someone calling something that is clearly not rape, “rape”. That someone would try to grab the sympathy due to an actual rape victim by claiming something rather trivial “is rape” or even close to it can only result in eyerolls, jokes or laughter. Seriously.
Suggesting that somehow your server being hacked is like rape… sorry…. no. It’s not. It’s also not like being murdered or battered so hard you end up losing the loss of your legs. There are lots of other bad things experience a server hack are not like. Trying to claim these things are just as bad as rape is, frankly, insulting to rape victims.
Neal,
I’m glad you told me. I didn’t know. Knowing that makes it much more likely that I will be able to avoid giving offense without intent in the future. The wonders of communication, right; I learned something that helps us get along. Maybe everybody ought to give it a try.
lucia:
.
In the context of the whole note, “robbing” is short for “publiciz[ing information] before [we] were ready to have it released”: I thought that was clear, or I would have added a parenthetical equation.
–
The concern was expressed at SkS that my visits “here” at the Blackboard site would inspire interest on B.’s part to further exploits of that nature. They even worried that you would egg him on.
.
I expressed my confidence that you would not find it acceptable to have someone plan such activities in discussion on your site, particularly as a representative of the “target” group was visiting at the time.
.
The fact that this discussion or “joking” has gone on quite awhile without any pushback from you or from anyone else leads me towards the conclusion that I had mis-estimated this group. Did I?
I would not have tolerated it myself Neal if I realized you found it offensive. Much less initiated it. I understand that offense is not always a matter of conscious thought, and it will take awhile to penetrate to the more primitive brain centers, but I hope that at some point this becomes clear.
Mark:
.
Your goodwill is not in question.
.
But at this point, I need to hear from the host.
FFS, Neal, didn’t you see the winky emoticon? Do you still believe Brandon “hacked”/”stole” stuff from SKS? Serious question…
After reading the SKS ‘hidden’ forum post, I realized that you believe you are in some kinda “war”. The number of times you & others talked about this “war” is amazing to me… I don’t think you or any of your friends would know what to do in an actual war. You all should stop using that analogy when it comes to what you guys do, which is basically making fools of yourselves under the leadership of John Cook.
Neal
So: it is wild hyperbole to distort what actually happened and to insinuate I might permit guests here at my blog to rob other guests here at my blog. Thanks for confirming that. (And by the way, find this use of hyperbole on your part rather laughable and think it tends to cause people to make jokes about the accusations. Just sayin’.)
Evidently they are worried I might… uhmmm…”egg him on” to visit your site and load public facing web pages.
First: Brandon tends to be interested in seeing what you guys have on public servers. You already know that. No “egging on” is required for him to be interested in that.
Second: If you guys continue to put stuff you don’t want views on public serving web pages members of the public will continue to see that stuff and — if it’s of general interest to some sub-set of the public– discuss this. And there is nothing wrong with members of the public doing that.
If you guys can’t get your head around that, the problem isn’t Brandon, me or the public. It’s you. And no amount of bizarred hyperbole is going to make the problem lie with Brandon, me or the public. The hyperbole just makes you look foolish and also makes those who use ridiculous hyperbole the butt of jokes (for the hyperbole.)
No one has been planning any hacking here in discussions at my site. I should note that you told us you sometimes make jokes in the SkS forum. If it’s true you sometimes make jokes, you should be aware other people also make jokes.
First, I don’t know why you put the scare quotes around joking. It’s recently come to my attention and it does look like honest to goodness joking. But beyond that as far as I can tell, what you describe as “quite a while” began at March 30th, 2016 at 2:08 pm when sue made a light joke which Brandon picked up. It is now about 5:30 pm.
I’m not sure what your standard for my monitoring “jokes” is, but rest assured that I don’t read every comment– and have not read every comment in the past 3 hours. I actually noticed the jokes when you complained about them directly. No earlier. So you would not see any “pushback” on that in any case.
But really– I don’t know why you would expect much pushback generally since I’m pretty well known to prefer light moderation. And beyond that: the joke is a ather innocuous one that pokes fun at the fact that the SkS crowd has been accusing Brandon of being a hacker and continues to do so. Those accusations are laughable and people are going to laugh at them.
I realize you might be sensitive to people making fun of the SkS crowds use of hyperbole. But well… people find it rather funny.
lucia, remember, Neal J. King gave me grief for not responding to a question he asked for 18 minutes. In his view, that’s too long a time for someone to do what he wants. It’s no wonder you taking a few hours was too much for him!
Another thing that has bothered me is that if Neal & his friends talked openly (in public) as they did in their forum, communication would be so much better. But apparently to them, any questioning in public is taboo & feeds the deniers or something. Of course, it’s just the opposite, but stick with that assumption guys 😉 Go back to your foxhole and conspire away…
Lucia, my last comment didn’t seem to go through…
Sue… I released 3 comments. Doug Cottons is still in moderation. 🙂
By the way, I said Neal J. King accused me of being a child molester before to prove a point, but now he’s coming awfully close to comparing me to a rapist. Maybe the idea of him calling me a child molester isn’t so far-fetched.
Lucia, thanks 🙂
BTW, I ate dinner(was starving) & in a much better mood than earlier…
Lucia:
.
The point is: B. found stuff that was not generally known and knew very quickly that it was not desired by its owner to be promoted: It was incomplete and scheduled for publication and promotion upon completion.
.
He nonetheless caused it to be publicized: Many more people knew about it after than before. You can play around with what you mean by “public”, but the fact is clear that if you plan to promote/publicize (= make known to lots of people) a document when it is complete, then you don’t want it to be publicized before it is complete. You want it publicized on your own schedule.
.
-You can argue about whether it was legal or not. As I said earlier, to me, the issue of legality is a red herring. In the information world, you don’t have to take an object to give it away: you can make a copy, you can give away the location, you can give a password: there are all sorts of ways of transferring information or causing it to be transferred. The fact remains that the legimate owner of the information was not ready to make this information known to lots of people. Without the action by B., it would NOT have beome known to them. Because of B.’s actions, it became so. B. had no right to do that.
.
You’ve lived on this planet for awhile. I am sure there are facts about you that are true, that are available in some circuitous way to the public, and that you would rather not everyone knew about. Perhaps these relate to your medical history; it really doesn’t matter, everybody’s got something they’d rather keep quiet about.
If someone were to find some of these facts out and proceed to inform all of your friends and associates about them, you would rightly be offended. What’s the difference? There is none: in both cases, information could be got at somehow: looking around the system logs, or sending a private detective to investigate. And then this is followed up by promoting this information to embarrass the targetted party. They are equally wrong.
.
So SkS security is no good? It’s what it is, and it’s better than it was. But there are a few steps in B’s story that haven’t been told. It isn’t like he accidentally stumbled across a wide-open door in all cases; the situation is more like his coming by every day and checking all the windows: waiting for you to forget one time.
.
But even suppose we take the view that SkS security is completely broken: Does this justify promoting information against the desire of the owner? Let me pose an analogous question: If you’re giving change to a bllnd man, are you justified in short-changing him because he can’t see? No, because the basic act is wrong; his blindness allows you to do that, but cannot make it right for you to do so. In the same way, the weakness of the security merely makes it possble for information to be wrongly promoted; it doesn’t make it right. (RQ – a)
Begs the question what he’s being “egged on” to say or not say here in what is probably a parallel thread in the SkS “secret” forum.
Neal, doesn’t it seem just a bit cult-like to you that other people you know only via a silly website are concerned when you post on the “wrong” site(s), and monitoring what you post there? I find that an order of magnitude more creepy than someone clicking a link.
I’m still interested if you’ve changed your mind on info in the public domain in the Gleick/HI case (you – good!) vs. this one (you – creepy/robbed/bad!) or if you just leave your standards at the door when it’s for the cause. The latter seems to be the case to me.
TerryMN:
.
Nobody is monitoring me.
.
In both cases, I said that the taking [edit: or “the making available to people who were not or were not yet intended to receive it”] was wrong. The information is out there now, in both cases.
s, I said that the taking was wrong. The information is out there now, in both cases.
Yes. And in the former, you were being cold-blooded and encouraging discussion of the docs (obtained in a clearly illegal manner for most, and most likely forged for another). In the latter you’re arguing it shouldn’t be discussed because it was “wrongly promoted.”
That is cognitive dissonance writ large, whether you can recognize it or not.
TerryMN:
.
I haven’t said the thesis and the paper SHOULDN’T be discussed; I believe I said that I’m not interested in discussing them because they are incomplete. The thesis will be revised, and the paper has already been changed. So why would I want to read that?
Whistle blowing bad Snowden, Assange, Climate Gate
Whistle blowing good Tobacco, Enron, Climate Gate
Whistle blowing ? Gleik
Fraud,
“in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name.”
and Duplicity
“I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to the original anonymous communication.”
Not mentioning that the document had his name in it and this was the reason Mosher was able to identify him as the author of the so called anonymous communication.
King, Cawley and Curtis can hold their heads high recognizing fraud for what it is with little support from their colleagues.
I get Neil’s point on information that one wants to keep private and agree.
In this case though the authors intend to give it to us anyway, they are going to publish it so it is not intended to be private.
I cannot see how it is robbing anyone if they were going to give it it to one anyway.
Skeptical Science is supposed to be an informative site to promote climate science ideas. It should be open to the public in it’s forums.
Committee notes should be kept private by the secretary and Science Papers should never be posted on a public web site until or unless ready to be distributed.
angech:
.
The paper has been scheduled for publication on a specific date; the involved universities will put out their notices, etc., for that date.
.
An early release of an imcomplete document will create some confusion with the correct version: I believe the focus was shifted for the final version, due to retraction of a paper to which they were commenting. (Or that might be yet a different paper. Anyway, for some specific reason, the final version is significantly different from the publicized one.)
B. had no right to do that.
Yeah. Baheela planted a bomb in 1949, killed six people. The brother of one of the six enlisted, and serving as a soldier shot nine people in 1957. The people killed had no relatives, but their neighbors remembered and taught their children well. Fully ten of these kids went on to fight in various ways, one of which used a suicide bomb to murder 241 soldiers in Lebannon in 1983.
.
And so on. And so on, and so on.
.
If you think you are the only side with a grievance you are sadly mistaken.
.
So. What shall we discuss now.
Terry,
“That is cognitive dissonance writ large, whether you can recognize it or not.”
.
Yup. The outrage is conditional; the ends justify the means. Gleick is OK, in spite of his criminal activity (with criminal intent), but Brandon is a miserable scoundrel for finding some information on a publicly accessible web page. I expect nothing more from a true CAGW believer, nor should you.
Neal J. King is funny. But not in a good way:
If people don’t want something publicized, they shouldn’t post it in public where everyone can see. That a person who happens to come across it and see it chooses to tell other people about it doesn’t mean he’s a horrible being, much less a criminal or a rapist. That’s true even if people don’t like the fact he told others about what he saw.
This is utterly absurd. Comparing finding a rough draft of a paper on a publicly accessible web page that discusses a subject of public interest and telling people about it to hiring a detective to find a person’s medical records to publicize them is absurd. It’s almost as bad as him saying:
Yhis is the exact thing King portrayed me as a liar over before. Just like before, he’s full of it. I have given every detail of how I obtained everything I’ve found. I have been completely open and honest about everything. In return, all King has done is make vague accusations he refuses to discuss, insult me, claim I’m a liar, portray me as a neighborhood pervert and compare me to a rapist.
Oh, and his entire discussion of Skeptical Science security is a red herring. How good or bad a site’s securityis is has nothing to do with anything. If you don’t want something publicized, don’t post it in a public location. If you do post it in a public location, understand anyone who sees it might point at it so other people see it too.
And that doesn’t make them a rapist.
Wow. Neal J. King just proved there was a legitimate reason for my to publicize this draft:
If significant changes are made to a paper, it is of interest to people what those changes may be as they let people learn more about the views, beliefs and work of those who authored the paper.
Incidentally, King’s claim I publicized these to embarrass people is nothing but bad mind-reading. While embarrassment might have happened, and while I certainly laughed at CONFIDENTIAL material being posted in a public directory of the Skeptical Science website, the actual purpose of publicizing this material was to allow people to examine and discuss it.
Though I suppose King might say I’m lying about what my motives were.
Want to stop global warming? Want to make a difference?
.
Any punk can divide and destroy. Go to Climate Etc, the place is infested with anonymous trolls trying to disrupt the conversation.
.
Show your worth. Unify. Bring people to your point of view. If the childlike squabbles between bloggers in the civilized world are more than can be managed then how on Earth can any of you hope to deal with the real issues and sacrifices and trade-offs facing people and nations all over the world? If this is too much, give it up and go home. You’re wasting your time.
Mark:
.
The point is that it doesn’t make sense for me to engage in activities that stimulate B. to do more of this non-desired information-spreading. If my visiting here provides the occasion for him to promote the glory of his exploits, and folks are going “rah-rah go! rah-rah go!”, that’s encouragement for him to continue with this. I don’t wish to be responsible for that.
SteveF:
.
I definitely did not say that Gleick was OK. Ask Mark.
Look Neal, I think it’s probable that no matter what we say now that this particular brief civilized visit is at an end, and that’s a shame. It was a pretty good run. I’ll be looking for the opportunity to talk again, not just with you; with any and all of the guys I disagree with. Cause nobody is going away. Because we are civilized men discussing global warming, not barbarians with the blood of our enemies brothers and fathers on our hands. The way forward is to talk and understand each other, obviously.
See ya around.
Mark Bofill:
Uh… yes, I did. I had every right to do it. It is perfectly okay to point at material prepared in the purpose of public dissemination on an issue claimed to be central for global warming which is portrayed as a wold-threatening problem when it is posted in a public location.
I didn’t reveal any personal or compromising information, unlike Skeptical Science who helped publicize documents with things like phone numbers and addresses in them. I wouldn’t. That’s because I understand what the basic standards used in civilized society are. Try asking any journalist if I had the right to do what I did, and I almost guarantee they’ll say yes. That’s because any decent journalist knows if you come across material that doesn’t compromise any personal information in a lawful manner, you have every right to use it.
Neal J. King:
Constantly spreading false claims about me is actually what encourages me to do further things. Heck, repeatedly portraying me as a liar, criminal and now rapist is probably the best encouragement you could possibly give me. If you’d try not making tons of false accusations, then there’d be no problem of encouragement.
Mark Bofill:
Uh… yes, I did. I had every right to do it. It is perfectly okay to point at material prepared in the purpose of public dissemination on an issue claimed to be central for global warming which is portrayed as a wold-threatening problem when it is posted in a public location.
I didn’t reveal any personal or compromising information, unlike Skeptical Science who helped publicize documents with things like phone numbers and addresses in them. I wouldn’t. That’s because I understand what the basic standards used in civilized society are. Try asking any journalist if I had the right to do what I did, and I almost guarantee they’ll say yes. That’s because any decent journalist knows if you come across material that doesn’t compromise any personal information in a lawful manner, you have every right to use it.
Neal J. King:
Constantly spreading false claims about me is actually what encourages me to do further things. Heck, repeatedly portraying me as a liar, criminal and now rapist is probably the best encouragement you could possibly give me. If you’d try not making tons of false accusations, then there’d be no problem of encouragement.
Neal,
OK, so do you agree that Gleick’s activities were criminal, and Brandon’s were clearly not? Come on man, step up.
Brandon,
Wait. Are you seriously suggesting you are NOT a liar, criminal, etc? Doesn’t matter, they can still get you with RICO.
Yet another fine example of The Humpty Dumpty Theory of Language.
SteveF:
.
As stated much earlier, I believe the question of legality is a red herring. What both of them did was unethical.
DeWitt:
.
Read the whole note. Read it like you’re trying to understand what it says, not like you’re trying trying to make it mean something else. When you read an equation, before you start looking for typos, you start by figuring out what the intent of it is. Do that.
Mark Bofill,
“Because we are civilized men discussing global warming, not barbarians with the blood of our enemies brothers and fathers on our hands. The way forward is to talk and understand each other, obviously.”
.
I think you are hopelessly optimistic. Arabs and Israelis are not going to suddenly have a Kumbaya moment, nor even agree to disagree. Having spent about 6 months in the Middle East over the last 15 years, I am quite confident that the Palestinians will never compromise.
.
The only people I have encountered less inclined to compromise are ‘progressive greens’; they are not ever going to compromise with other POV’s. It is ultimately going to be a question of who has the political power to restrict (or choose not to restrict) fossil fuel use, and nothing else. There is little point in engaging Neal: he will not budge from his policy preferences, and I suspect neither will you.
.
Make sure to vote in November.
SteveF,
🙂 I’ll vote. Regarding the other, trying to talk. I’ve nothing better to do. Who knows? It’d be neat. Sort of like flapping my arms and discovering I can fly.
You’re right, hopeless optimist. 🙂
Thanks Steve.
Neal,
“I believe the question of legality is a red herring.”.
.
I can’t say I am surprised by this answer. I can say you don’t have a shred of credibility.
Nah, I don’t accept that. Who all’s reading this? Who knows. We can generalize, but if I make any of them rethink their approach. If they give it a try even just one time. Maybe something was accomplished. And who knows? Maybe it’ll be more than that over time.
[Edit: night all]
Neal,
I’m quite sure you were aware of the semantic connotations of ‘purloining’ and ‘robbing’. Trying to say that doesn’t matter in context when you’re called on it is sophistry.
Neal,
Whatever happened to your Virial Theory atmosphere calculations? I was under the impression that we would see some results based on your last post on the matter. Or did I miss it somehow in the noise?
DeWitt:
.
This is what I wrote:
“Quite a few folks back where I come from were really not thrilled when information was publicized before they were ready to have it released. In fact, several of them warned me that this visit might stimulate further interest on B.’s part. I told them that I thought that Lucia, as the host, might find it in bad taste for one guest to rob another while visiting.”
.
This is what I thought of writing:
“Quite a few folks back where I come from were really not thrilled when information was publicized before they were ready to have it released. In fact, several of them warned me that this visit might stimulate further interest on B.’s part. I told them that I thought that Lucia, as the host, might find it in bad taste for one guest to rob [= publicize information belonging to and before the scheduled date set by] another while visiting.”
.
It was awkward, and I thought the meaning was clear enough without it.
.
How would you say the same thing?
Carrick, DeWitt, julio:
.
[cease-fire]For the direct calculation of the VT, it’s not going as well as I had hoped. I expect to get:
2 [T] + [U] = 4(pi) P(R) * R^3
.
What I’m getting at the moment is, for gamma = 5/3:
2 [T] + [U] = {(pi) P(R)*f^2.5 * Z^0.5}
………………………………* {(9/4)(pi) -(21/2)*ASIN(sqrt(a))
……………………………… + sqrt(a(1-a))*(-23/2 + 11a – 4a^2)}
where
f = GMm/[kT(R)(h+1)]
1/Z = 1/R – 1/f ; Z is the top of the atmosphere
a = R/Z
This may not be as bad as it looks: I’m trying to keep track of my equations in Word because my handwriting is so bad that I can’t recognize anything I’ve written after a minute or two, but this seems to be a very hard way to work with equations. The result is that I could very easily have arithmetic errors that are preventing terms from cancelling. The terms come from the free integration tool from Wolfram.
But there is an interesting result which does not depend on so much computation:
T(r) = [GMm/(k(h+1)] * (1/r – 1/Z)
The bigger Z is, the bigger is T(r) everywhere, because:
a) bigger Z implies smaller 1/Z
b) implies less negative -1/Z
c) implies bigger T(r), for all r
d) implies KE is also bigger
But since Z is the TOA, the bigger Z, the greater the U.
So, dU > 0 implies dZ > 0 implies dKE > 0 implies dE > 0
a) So julio was right: Cv is not negative; my objection about the zero-point of U in the flat-earth model was irrelevant.
b) DeWitt was also right: When you put a floor on the gas, the U cannot reach below a minimum value; after that, any reduction in E certainly has to come out of KE. So if dE < 0, dKE < 0.
c) The reason Cv can be negative in the coreless case is that there is an infinite supply of negative U in the gas self-gravitation: So if dE is negative, dU can be even more negative, so that dKE can be positive.
[/cease-fire]
Neal
The author published it on his public facing web server. You want to consider this “not published” because evidently you want to reserve that word for published in a more prestigeous venue than on his server. Brandon found it.
.
We all agree that after Brandon found material Cook had posted on his public facing web server (i.e. Cook had published), Brandon told people the material existed. We even agree that Cook would have preferred Brandon not tell people he found stuff.
I’m pretty sure we disagree on whether Brandon committed any sort of wrong in telling people. My position is he did not. The general situation when someone learns something or reads something on a public server is they are allowed to tell anyone they want. This general presumption can be overriden if the “finder” has some obligation to the person who wishes he wouldn’t blab. But Brandon owes no duty to Cook. He’s not Cook’s employee. He is not Cooks friend. He doesn’t owe Cook any favors. Brandon is not Cook’s chattle, slave, or anything else.
As far as I can tell: Brandon could do as he wished. If you or Cook are displeased, I get that. But that just means you and Cook are unhappy.
I’m using it in the normal way. Cook put the material on a public facing server which was crawlable by google, the way back and pretty much anyone who wanted to visit it. That is the absolutely normal definition of “public”.
We agree that Cook preferred that only a small number of people learned of the document. He made it public despite that wish. Why did he do so? Don’t know. But Cook did so.
Not sure what point you are trying to make. It was legal.
Yet, though you think it is a red herring, you bring it up. Let’s make something clear: it was legal for Brandon to point to a link where people could read the document.
And the fact is: Despite that the legitimate owner of the information chose to make the information public by putting it on a server.
Had Cook not put the material on a public server where it was accessible to the public, the material would NOT have become known to anyone.
There is no ethical rule saying “everyone must act to please John Cook and SkS”. And as far as I can tell, that’s pretty much the rule you are applying here. The rule doesn’t exist– Brandon did have a ‘right’ to tell people what he’d found.
The difference between my being offended and my claiming people have no right to discuss true facts they’ve learned? There’s a big difference.
Of course I can take offense. Of course I can decide to not be friends with people who blab things I might prefer others don’t know. I can shun them. I can go to my room and cry.
But if I claimed the blabbers literally have no right to tell other interested parties what they have learned, I would be mistaken. Seriously mistaken. If I claimed the blabbers were moral or unethical for telling people, the blabblers would be correct to tell me that I was mistaken about what ethics require.
I’m actually constantly amazed at the examples you pick which often simply show that my position is consistent. In both cases, the blabbers have done nothing unethical. They may have displeased the person blabbed about (which in your example would be me) and they might suffer consequences they prefer to avoid. But that doesn’t make theri act of blabbing unethical.
The sad thing is you are very confused here Neal. You were more correct when you thought it was ok for SkS to publish and/or tale about the material Gleick stole. It was correct for the to publish or talk about that– even if doing so displeased the Heartland Institute. Since none of the SkS guys are whether Heartland likes them, the consequences don’t matter to them. And the ethics are clear: it’s ok to discuss that stuff.
Neal
No. It’s more like him strolling through a public park every day and looking at the SkS displays and kiosks erected in the park. He’s allowed to come by every day and look. It’s a public park. It shouldn’t be that hard to remember not to post the document on the kiosk in the public park.
.
The two situations aren’t analogous. You can’t turn it into equivalent situations by just claiming it is. In case (a) you have a person sharing public information someone else doesn’t want shared. and in case (b) you have a person stealing money from someone merely because they can get away with. These are two totally different things.
Look: this issue wasn’t a “security” issue. It was Cook posting material in public– like on a kiosk in a park. You can’t turn people finding material posted in public and discussing it into something “wrong” merely because SkS also has crappy security at it’s site. Yes. Their security is crappy. That’s why the forum got hacked a long time ago. Brandon didn’t do that. The fact that SkS has crappy security doesn’t make it wrong for people to discuss documents Cook decides to post in public.
Dewitt
Well, especially since he also wants to insist that discussions of legality of Brandon’s behavior are “red herrings”.
It’s clear Brandon did nothing illegal. It’s also rather evident that Neal wants to keep using verbs that very heavily connote illegal behavior. And then, we are all supposed to somehow “understand” that Neal didn’t mean to use words like “rob” or “purloin” to mean …well “rob” or “purloin”. And then Neal wants to decree that emphasizing that Brandon did nothing illegal is a “red herring”. Oh? Sorry, but it’s not a red herring if Neal (or others) keep wanting to use verbs that connote illegal behavior to describe what he did.
Also, to be sure we don’t get another of the whole “red herring” claims: Brandon also did nothing immoral or unethical. There is nothing unethical about telling people about finding documents placed on a public facing web servers by their owners nor in telling others of the existence of documents which were make publicly available by the documents owners. Neal can complain all he wants about the fact that Cook didn’t “want” people to read the documents. But Cook make them public.
Lucia:
.
John Cook left them in a place that was accessible to the public, but did not intend to bring it to people’s attentions.
.
If you take that as “public,” it would be like saying that a woman who had left her purse on the bus had “published” her purse by leaving in a public place; and that therefore it was right and proper to take her social security number from that “public” purse and post it on the internet.
The difference is in knowing [intent].
Cook knew he had put up the post [intent] and it was accessible.
The woman did not know she had lost her purse [no intent], she did not mean it to be accessible in any way.
What if it was posted on the internet to track her down and return the purse?
Either way if she was going to give me the money from the purse anyway does it matter if I received it earlier?
Can anyone tell me if the paper as written came to a consensus or not? Where is it being published
The fact that all these people came together suggests very strongly that consensus was due [>97% certainty].
–
This despite the non consensus nature of the different papers.
Brandon Gates [thanks Brandon S] put up an excellent summary of what a consensus paper should actually do.
Perhaps Lucia could ask him if she could put up an abridged summary for discussion here with a heavily edited forward of praise from Brandon S. MB would be perfect as editor.
Lucia and Neal could then summarize the findings and send them to the Journal as guidelines in place of the actual paper.
Or they could just read them here online if they can get through Lucia’s famous security.
MB BS is a medical degree if I am not mistaken?
Angech, Lucia:
.
Intent: John Cook certainly did not intend the files to be public. In fact, I am informed that:
– There were no public links to the files.
.
– URLs had to be obtained from the database of redirect URLs.
.
– The database was password-protected: So it required actlve effort to obtain a username/password match and search the database to find target URLs before the files could be accessed. Once you have the URL, you can give it to anyone. But that’s true of a metal door-lock key as well: Once you have a key, you can make copies and give them to everyone. The block to the public was that decent people don’t try to hack username/password pairs on other people’s systems.
Brandon,
Neal states: “The block to the public was that decent people don’t try to hack username/password pairs on other people’s systems.”
.
Did you or did you not guess a username/password pair in order to find the information you found on the SKS website?
SteveF:
.
Thanks for following up on this point.
Neal J. King —
You present a deductive chain:
“There were no public links to the files[;] URLs had to be obtained from the database of redirect URLs.
The database was password-protected.”
Ergo, finding the files required hacking username/password pairs.
I find it difficult to accept absolute assertions such as the first premise above about security from one who sees to be of no more than average skill in the art, as seems to be admitted all around.
In addition to the doubtfulness of the premises, the conclusion doesn’t even follow from the premises. Holmes would be disappointed. Yet you are quite certain of your conclusion.
Neal,
Free suggestions.
Let’s return to Gleick for a moment, and the SkS forum. (link). A number of commenters appeared to subscribe to the opinion that Gleick was indeed a decent person, despite what he decided to do. There was an astonishing amount of empathy and charity involved in some of the responses.
.
Rather than coming at Brandon like a prosecutor seeking extradition of a criminal or something, why don’t you investigate the why behind Brandons actions. Treat him like Glieck. I might be wrong (often am, not a joke, I really often am), but it just might be possible that if you make an effort to understand why some of us appear to be hostile towards SkS, you will learn something productive that you can use to minimize the likelihood of events like these recurring.
I recommend you drop the ‘not decent, criminal’ hogwash. If you want to understand people, relate them to you. Figure out how they are like you. What would circumstances be like to cause you to behave as they did.
.
Perhaps none of this is easy or fun. Maybe we’d prefer to go back to demonizing people we disagree with from the comfort of our own ideologically homogenous blog spaces; nobody has to think or work, nobody is ever wrong. (oh, yeah, but nothing actually ever gets accomplished either).
.
A last free friendly suggestion, one I certainly still struggle with alot. There is a time to talk, and a time to think. Its particularly hard for me to close my mouth when I don’t actually have anything new or constructive or original to say. I love talking. Maybe instead of mindlessly battling the point it is time to think about the point. ~shrug~
.
As always, I don’t know anything about this. I know a little about programming computers and raising kids, and mostly I make the rest up as I go along. Caveat Emptor.
[Edit: And I can’t play today, I got to work.]
Uh… what? Seriously, what? Neal J. King says:
This is a complete and total fabrication. I have never attempted to log into the sksforum.org server.
SteveF:
No. Trying to guess people’s username/password pair for a website would be illegal. I did nothing of the sort.
B.:
.
So what did you do to get the URLs? Run an exhaustive search?
Mark:
.
For many types of people, what you are suggesting would be perfectly appropriate. In this case, I think not.
Neal,
Considering how rude you’ve been to Brandon, accusing him of illegality based on incredibly flimsy reasoning, I think it takes a lot of chutzpah to now demand answers from him.
Neal J. King:
I didn’t run any search to get the URLs, much less an exhaustive one. I already described exactly what I did, and you basically called me a liar over it. How is there any need to ask me questions about what I say I’ve done? I’ve openly described them multiple times.
Heck, what do you even think I would have done a search on?
HaroldW:
I’m kind of thinking that too.
There also seems to be an unusual amount of fuzzy thinking from somebody who otherwise is capable of clear thinking. For example in the conflation of “public URL” with “web crawl-able URL”.
Anytime you place a file in a directory that can be accessed with a URL without a password, that is a public URL. If you don’t want the URL to be public, the fix is so trivially easy, that you really have to be a complete moron to not use it, when you don’t want the URL publicly accessible.
The person who maintains the website has the responsibility to protect any information from public access that he doesn’t want publicly accessed.
That’s where the responsibility starts and ends.
On another note, Neal knows full well that no user names or passwords were required to assess these documents. That he chooses to insinuate this spite of knowing to the contrary does not reflect well on Neal.
Neal
Yes. John made them aaccessible to the public. That means “he made them public.” Period.
His mental state is irrelevant to diagnosing what he did: He made them public.
.
Concrete objects like purses, shoes and cars aren’t ordinarily said to be “published” because they have a function that goes well beyond being looked at. If she posted a photo of her purse,shoe or car in public, it would be “published”.
But to use your analogy: if a manufacturer reveals his new purse design by leaving it in a park, it is viewable by the public, who can bring a crowd around to look at it. There is nothing wrong with the public looking at the purse. So in the sense of being viewable, the purse would be “publishedâ€. So: yes, leaving your purse in public could be “publishing†it— in the only sense the word “publishing†might apply to a concrete physical object like a purse. Thanks for bringing this up so we could clarify it makes sense to say something left is public is “published†in yet another context.
No. It would be right and proper to look at the purse, take pictures of the purse, bring a crowd around to see the purse, let others view the purse and discuss the features of the purse. All those things would be the equivalent of what Brandon did.
I know you want to deem discussions of legality “red herrings”. You keep trying to attempt analogies– generally creating very strained ones that seem to try to inflate what Brandon did to something illegal. But you know, there are actual laws about the handling of lost, mislaid and abandoned properties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost,_mislaid,_and_abandoned_property . There are also laws about handling of actual honest to goodness private and/or embarrasing private information. Private here is a legal term of art— but is related to your notions of what really, truly is private. Social Security numbers fall in this catebory of “privateâ€; so do photos of sex acts. Drafts of journal article papers do not.
I know that you are upset that the non-private material that Cook published on his server was found and many people became aware of it. But you can’t magically transform this perfectly reasonable behavior on the part of members of the public into something unethical by just saying it’s “like†people mishandling other stuff that really is recognized as private— and so widely recognized as private that disseminating that information may be illegal or tortuous. (Disseminating SSN numbers may be illegal under many circumstances but courts have set that aside when forbidding it would trample on the 1st amendment. In the case you described, it’s quite likely publishing the SSN number would be illegal as you didn’t describe anything to suggest dissemination was newsworthy. So once again: you are trying to liken Brandon’s behavior which is entirely legal to something illegal. What Brandon did was legal— and so not like the probably illegal act you want to liken it to.)
Some stuff is widely recognized as private; other stuff is not private. If you don’t make the distinction you’ll come up with all sorts of strange notions about what can and cannot be shared both ethically and legally. You are coming up with those sorts of strange distinctions.
There is nothing wrong— either legally or ethically— with the dissemination material that is not inherently private and the stuff Cook put on his server was not inherently private.
By the way, I’m really curious where Neal J. King got this idea from. He says he’s been “informed” of these things that are true, but he doesn’t specify who informed him. Did John Cook lie to King and perhaps other people at the Skeptical Science forum? Did King perhaps just misunderstand something Cook said? Did someone other than Cook say whatever King is basing his beliefs on?
It sounds like somebody is saying things they know, or at least ought to know, are false in order to paint me as a hacker who committed a crime. That’s troubling. It’s also quite possibly libel (fun fact, libel doesn’t have to be public). I’m obviously not going to file a lawsuit over it, but… dang.
Brandon, Neal,
One of you has to be factually wrong. Neal wrote:
“– There were no public links to the files.
– URLs had to be obtained from the database of redirect URLs.
– The database was password-protected: So it required actlve effort to obtain a username/password match and search the database to find target URLs before the files could be accessed.”
and:
“…decent people don’t try to hack username/password pairs on other people’s systems.”
.
Brandon wrote:
” I have never attempted to log into the sksforum.org server….. Trying to guess people’s username/password pair for a website would be illegal. I did nothing of the sort.”
and:
“I didn’t run any search to get the URLs, much less an exhaustive one. I already described exactly what I did, and you basically called me a liar over it.”
.
This seems to me something which ought to be a clear matter of fact, not of opinion. Brandon, if you already told Neal how you found the URLs, then he didn’t understand you. Please restate (in as few words as you can) the exact process which led you to the URLs on the SKS website.
Neal
(a) Yes, there were public links to the files. Making a claim in bold doesn’t magically make it true. And
(b) Even if there weren’t any ‘public’ links, the files would still be public. By analogy: a file placed on the cork board of a kiosk would still be public even if there was no other file posted on another kiosk saying “to find posting A, go to kiosk B”.
Incorrect. The redirect urls existed, could be entered and were. That they might also have been in a database doesn’t mean they were “obtained from a database”. They were not.
Once again: making a claim in bold doesn’t make it true.
A password database containing these urls may well exist. But Brandon didn’t access it. The files weren’t accessed.
If you or anyone has evidence of Brandon accessing it, you should bring it to the authorities. But you don’t have it because Brandon didn’t do that. In fact, he found them by strolling down the urls without accessing the database. He’s describe this process. It is easy for someone with zero technical skills to do. It requires no brute force, no access to any database, no guessing and/or entering of password/user names.
Why you would not believe Bramdom did what he claims he did which is quick, easy, simple and requires few technical skills but instead did something arduous, time consuming and requiring heavy technical, I don’t know. Perhaps someone else at SkS told you Brandon did that. If so, your source does not know what he is talking about.
Putting aside the clear legality of republishing matters left on public servers, Neal K conflates Skeptical Science with a totally innocent person whose very private personal information is published. (Purse reference comment #145038) K’s analogy is very poor. SKS is not an innocent person without a public personna. SKS is a very public advocate for huge changes in economics that would take money out of my pocket. If SKS is going to have a public role and vigorously criticize others, it has to accept the rough and tumble that comes with its position.
..
Additionally, SKS partisans have no reluctance to demean those who disagree with their positions. See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/22/dana-nuccitellis-meany-mode-is-like-stinky-cheese/ for Dana Nuccitelli’s quick playing of the denier card. See also http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/11/on-skepticalscience-%E2%80%93-rewriting-history/ which documents John Cook adding fake comments.
..
Finally, I would add that you know that SKS’ purpose is obfuscation and not the pursuit of scientific truth by its use of a ridiculously misleading name. SKS supports consensus science not skeptical science. It gets around its false advertising by stating that it is skeptical of global warming skepticism — A very convoluted and misleading way of saying that it supports consensus science.
..
JD
B.:
.
Humor me: Where can I find your description?
Carrick:
I’d like to think he isn’t lying, but I struggle to see how anyone could come to genuinely believe what he claims. Perhaps somebody, like John Cook, has told him things that aren’t true (or said things that were misunderstood), but it would still require a significant amount of willful blindness to believe it given a counterclaim was clearly presented with proof being readily available, and he labeled it dishonest.
SteveF:
It is a clear matter of fact. All evidence shows what he said is false and what I said is accurate. Anyone who looks into the matter will find he is wrong.
As for restating it, I think I’d like to wait and let Neal J. King comment again. Perhaps he can talk to John Cook or whoever supposedly “informed” him of these things. IHaving explained it and provided means to provei it true multiple times already, I don’t see that things can move forward with him by doing it again.
Also, I’m kind of doing something right now so I want to wait a little while to do what you describe.
The other issue is Neal keeps talking about houses and keys.
Websites are not houses. Websites are publication vehicles. Comparing a house to a website is no more appropriate than comparing a house and key to a newspaper, magazine or book.
Placing a document on your website in a location where it can be accessed via a public (non-password protected) URL is an act of publishing that document.
Any person with a microscopic amount of common sense knows not to place confidential files in our publicly shared directories.
I don’t understand what is so difficult about understanding that you don’t allow a file on your web server to have a public URL when you don’t want to publicly share the file. And once you’ve allowed that document to have a public URL, you should assume anybody in the world can and may view it.
SteveF,
He didn’t.
In the past, Brandon found links of the form
http://www.sksforum.org/thread.php?t=594&p=X
where ‘X’ is a number in his referrer logs. Links would appear in referrer logs and so are revealed to the public– not on a web page but in your referrer logs. It happens that people sometimes publish their referrer logs– it was done more frequently in the past. But some still do.
If you clicked those, a script at SkS sent you to a web page of the scripts choice. You had no control where you went– just where SkS sent you. The page where you were sent might be of interest to you or not. That page might contain other links. So the script written by SkS creates is a path from “the public” to visit pages. Essentially, scripts of the form “http://www.sksforum.org/thread.php?t=594&p=X” became public links to files at other locations.
Brandon stepped through by incremeting “X”. This:
1) Uses publicly available URLs.
2) Involves no use of password/username combinations.
3) Causes people to arrive at pages that are public.
Currently, if I enter X=1 or X=2, I get a forbid message. However,
http://www.sksforum.org/thread.php?t=594&p=2000 sends me to “The economist”.
You can do it too. Anyone who is willing to undertake a very boring task can write an R, perl, language of your choice script to increment the value of “X”, try it, log the http response and and record other information that might be of interest to them.
(My software would likely block these romps, but that’s mostly because my system crashes when bots start strolling through and so I block lots of bot-like activity. It’s not so much a security measure as an “up time” one. If someone went slowly enough on a connection providing ISP like ATT Comcast etc, they could do it pretty easily though.)
It’s worth nothing: is a very, very, very simple process. It could be done manually if someone had a very high boredom threshold. It’s also entirely legal.
Why Neal dreamed up the notion Brandon did something that is bothmuch more difficult and illegal, I can’t imagine. (Oh. But I forgot. According the Neal, the issue of legality is a red herring. And evidently remains so even if Neal keeps likening what Brandon did to illegal acts or even claiming outright Brandon did something illegal. Hacking passwords is illegal. )
Neal
You could have tried this link.
But I described the method above. That should save you the 99 cents required to purchase Brandon’s book. Oh… he also describe this method at his blog. Oh… and it wasn’t a new method. He found “welloiledcatherd.org ” that way and described how way back when.
@Carrick,
–
Neal is an ideologue. If you start from his belief that he’s on the side of the righteous, and everyone who disagrees with his cause is unethical, evil, creepy, criminal, etc. then it’s pretty easy to see how he can continue to defend the indefensible and be willfully blind to trivial, easily demonstrated facts. He’s here to advance the cause of the righteous; no more, no less. We’re all (you included, Mark B; so much for being polite) stupid, evil, or both in his mind.
Neal J. King:
What?! You wrote:
And now you want me to tell you where you can find what you said are “basically just lies”? No. You labeled them (basically) lies and refused to do anything to justify that. You refused to even identify what were (basically) lies. I don’t think you have any standing to tell me to provide you the explanation you labeled (basically) a lie.
Especially not when all this stems from a post about my eBook which contains a detailed recounting of the events surrounding these issues.
“Websites are not houses. Websites are publication vehicles.”
I agree with Carrick. There is some kind of fetish with bad analogies going around. I guess I understand why you might use analogies if you think they are convincing, but if they aren’t, it just makes for tedious reading (if rehashing the events themselves again isn’t tedious enough). Just my 2 cents.
Andrew
lucia:
There’s no need to worry about saving money. I posted a link to a free PDF version of the eBook when I announced the new its publication. A link to it is provided about four paragraphs into the post:
http://www.hi-izuru.org/wp_blog/2016/03/a-new-secret-skeptical-science-paper-and-a-new-ebook/
I’ve actually made free PDF copies of each of my books available for the express purpose of ensuring there is no issue of a “paywall” for discussions of what I say.
By the way,
http://www.sksforum.org/thread.php?t=594&p=20000 sends me to a 2104 blog post at “the melt factor”.
Oh… I’m just now getting “forbidden”. Maybe someone at SkS got a clue and finally did something to prevent people from visiting their links.
Hmm…
http://www.sksforum.org/thread.php?t=594&p=20001
Note sure above my theory above.
http://www.sksforum.org/thread.php?t=594&p=20002
By the way, since lucia already provided an explanation and link proving what Neal J. King said isn’t remotely true, I should point out one reason I didn’t do so earlier is I had decided I wanted to create documentation proving what he said was false. Unfortunately, I’m not at a computer with the setup to allow me to keep track of my traffic logs (and am fact typing all this from a tablet). Because of that, I’ve gone with a simpler route. See this link:
http://archive.is/www.sksforum.org
It contains something like 50 URLs obtained in the same manner as before, using an archive service today. I instructed the archiving server to visit URLs like:
http://www.sksforum.org/thread.php?t=594&p=28565
And when it did, it was redirected to pages like:
http://www.hi-izuru.org/wp_blog/2016/03/a-new-secret-skeptical-science-paper-and-a-new-ebook/
Hey, would you look at that? Somebody in the Skeptical Science forum linked to my post announcing the book where I explained exactly how I got these URLs. And as proof there was no need to use any username or password, we have a redirection URL to that post anyone can use!
lucia, here’s the URL for 20000, which gave you the forbidden access:
http://www.sksforum.org/www.arl.noaa.gov/documents/JournalPDFs/ThorneEtAl.WIREs2010.pdf
The link is obviously malformed. The sksforum.org part is what’s causing the error. The same sort of thing crops up in WordPress if you don’t copy a link correctly.
Brandon,
I replicated here:
http://archive.is/RrcjW
Oh, and you’ll also get a Forbidden Access page if you enter a number that hasn’t been allotted yet. That’s not surprising. Trying to visit a PHP page with an invalid parameter often causes errors, and any well-designed system will have things to catch errors like that to prevent unintended/unexpected interactions.
Well.. I think that’s enough copying to show the SkS script does what Brandon says it does.
lucia, here’s a funny one I just archived for giggles:
http://archive.is/kWrHI
And yeah, I’m content this is enough documentation. I described exactly what I did in my eBook, providing URLs that would allow anyone to check my story. That should have been enough. But now we have documentation showing any machine could access these URLs without any username or password. If that’s not enough to convince someone, nothing could.
It’ll be interesting to see what, if anything, Neal J. King says now. Who knows, maybe he’ll tell us about how he was “informed” I hacked into the sksforum.org server to change their security settings to remove the login feature from this script. Or maybe he’ll admit I’ve told the truth the whole time and his beliefs were wrong.
I think both scenarios are equally likely.
Ok, so http://archive.is/lECaX shows Archive.is was forwarded by SkS to Brandon’s blog.
(I figured out why I’m getting lots of 403’s. I was cutting urls out of comments and wordpress had replaced & with htmls version sof &.
Brandon,
OK, it is now clear. I think Neal will still say that you were trying to do ‘naughty/evil’ things by poking around the accessible URLs. Which is to say, in Neal’s parallel green universe, doing something which is perfectly legal, but which Neal doesn’t like, is equivalent to Peter Gleick’s plainly criminal actions: stealing information from Heartland via deception (AKA, fraud), and forging and publishing a false a document he hoped would damage Heartland.
.
It’s always the ends that matter with wild eyed greens, not the means…. they’re saving the world you know, so they always think they hold the moral high ground, even when they are trying to throw innocent people in jail via specious application of RICO laws. And they wonder why people think the field of climate science is biased.
This is the better link to find the files Brandon had archived by Archive.is to show the SkS redirects do precisely what he claims
http://archive.is/http://www.sksforum.org/thread.php*
SteveF: +1 I couldn’t have said it better.
TerrMN,
Neal is among the blindest of the blind: those who steadfastly refuse to see what is in plain sight.
Brandon, it looks to me as if you read a billboard whose posters weren’t all up. It’s very hard for me to believe that the things you read were not effectively posted publicly, even if that might not have been the intent of the poster.
Had the paper itself been sensible, I doubt there’d have been the fuss.
I read your article.
I’d forgotten that the university copyrighted their letter to you and threatened you with some sort of action if you published it.
Absolutely amazing. Maybe Neal can enlighten us on how this was reasonable. It seemed pretty feral to me.
Interesting sks thread 4.5 years ago about how best to “take down McIntyre.” Multiple unethical and some illegal strategies posed. While Neal doesn’t cheer them on, there’s certainly no “that would be unethical” posts from him either…
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http://www.hi-izuru.org/forum/General%20Chat/2011-09-29-McIntyre's%20new%20target.html
–
Steve wrote a post at CA about it as well, titled “Behind the SKS Curtain.” Sheds a lot of light on Neal’s posts in these two threads – it isn’t how do we get the science right, it’s how do we win…
Terry/SteveF,
I’m just amazed at the analogies. Hey, I can do analogies too. How about this:
From time to time, the local school principle and his mistress decide to have sex behind the dunes at a public beach, being ‘careful’ to do it at 2am and looking around a bit to see if they are “private” before engaging in said act. Perhaps the principle even goes to the trouble to tatto his butt with the messages “Confidential goings on. Please don’t gossip.”
While engaged in sex behind the dunes on the beach, another man comes along and takes their photo showing they were in flagrante delicto on the public beach collecting enough evidence to make it apparent the venue was public, the deed was done and the people involved did include the principle and his partner.
The photographer then tells a few people and shows them the photo as proof.
So then a friend of “principle-in-flagrante-delicto” starts trying to tell us the photographer is unethical because obviously the principle didn’t want others to know he had sex on the beach with his mistress because everyone knows the principle wouldn’t want people to know he was having sex on the beach. Or, to buttress that, Friend-of-flagrante tells us: “The principal even tattoed his butt to make sure people know he didn’t want others to know he was having sex on the beach.”
Or to buttress that, “You can call the beach public all you want. But it was 2am at night, and very few people walk around the beach at 2am. So, it’s not really public sex.”
Or to buttress that we get, “The principle didn’t post a sign anywhere crowded telling people ‘visit the beach at 2am to watch me have sex with my mistress!’ “. So that makes it private.
And then we might get, “You know, that photographer. He wasn’t just taking a stroll. He was visiting the beach every night because he suspected the principal was having sex with his mistress on the beach. So the fact that the photographer was sort of looking for signs of funny business means the principals sex wasn’t really ‘public’. If the photographer hadn’t found him, taken pictures and told people, no one would have known. Not even the principle’s wife!”.
And then we get, “Well… you know, maybe in the past you did something you don’t want someone to know. If someone found that out and blabbed about it, well, you wouldn’t like that. So you see, their blabbing makes the blabbing unethical.” (Uhmm… no. nothing about the blabbing is unethical.)
And of course, eventually Friend-of-flagrante escalates to something that is more like “You know….the photographer didn’t just walk along the beach, see people having sex on the public beach, take a photo and disseminate it. What the evil photographer really did swim across a private moat, pick a lock on a door, wire tap their phones, listen until he learned of their assignation. Then knowing of the assignation, he managed to ‘find’ on the public beach having sex, took the picture and blabbed.”
Here Friend-of-flagrante has escalated to accusing the photographer of actual illegal activities. For which Friend-of-flagrante has no evidence. And no evidence exists because the photographer did not do things like swim the moat, pick a lock, wire tap a phone and so on.
But you know what’s even worse:
To make the analogy more like the Cook businness, its as if the principle-in-flagrante-delicto was photographed more than a year ago, and the story came out back then complete with details about how the beach is public and accessible and anyone who wants to walk along it may. And then, after the story broke once, “principle-in-flagrante-delicto” decided to do have sex on the public beach again. And get this: this time he used the exact same “privacy” scheme as before! That waiting until 2am, displaying the tatoo on his butt and expecting that waiting until 2am and displaying the tatoo on his butt transforms having sex on a public beach into a “private act in a private location”.
Sorry, but no. No one would buy this. No amount of trying to claim coming across the guy is “like” peaking in windows or “like” publishing people’s social security numbers.
OMG Lucia!
You have got to give us analogies more often!
I’m going to be laughing the rest of the afternoon.
Here are the quotes I saw that seemed relevant to the issue:
It’s nothing too serious, but it is more serious than anything Neal J. King complained about being said here. And while he participated in that thread, hedidn’t say a word to complain.
It’s a weird world when discussing the seriously possibility of people hacking into a person’s accounts is worse than people joking about it.
Now I’m going to have flagrante-delicto scrolling thru my head all day. 😀
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Beyond that, yep!
Terry – If you like, look up the song “First of May” by Jonathan Coulton (decidedly NSFW) on YouTube…the refrain has a rhyme you may appreciate.
(I take it the principal waited ’til 2 AM to avoid the midnight crowd?)
Joseph – thanks, ha! I’m surprised I never heard that before.
Joseph W.
Never heard that song. Always like to have my horizons broadened. . .
TerryMN,
I learned the term somewhere else. I suspect mysteries. It’s pretty widely used
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/in_flagrante_delicto
Brandon
Aside for the discussion of hacking going on, I can’t help but note the irony that people of people on a secret forum set up to facilitate back-channel communications ‘speculating’ about how “much” communication there might be between Roy and Steve:
Look guys. Roy has a blog. Steve has a blog. They read each other’s blogs. It’s a fair bet to suspect they may have sometimes emailed each other. How much? Depends.
But you know what? I’ve communicated with some blog visitors by email. In fact, I’ve communicated with Neal by email. And Richard what’s his face (who is still on “willard moderation”. And other people like SteveF, SteveMac and SteveM. I suspect that may cover the Steves, but other people to. Some to chat. Some to resolve connectivity issues. And so on.
Some … honestly… if you asked I couldn’t tell you if we’ve ever emailed. Based on memory I don’t know if I ever emailed Eli Rabbet so probably not. But if he said I did, I’d say, “Well… ok. Probably did!”
Go figure.
lucia, yup. That’s what made me decide to write the comment. I didn’t think there was much material in that thread regarding hacking or other questionable activities which was interesting, but when I saw that, I laughed.
On a completely different topic, I have a question for people. Would I be considered a (limited purpose) public figure for libel laws? I can’t imagine ever filing a libel lawsuit, but someone mentioned it as a potential remedy for being accused of being a criminal (not only by Neal J. King, but likely John Cook and others at Skeptical Science). It made me realize I don’t know just what the standard for being a (limited purpose) public figure is. I don’t have any real access to the media to be able to defend myself against accusations, but I have written blog posts and an eBook on the matter. And the ability to possibly get guest posts at blogs might count as media access?
I don’t know. I just figured it’d be something different to discuss than the absurdity of King’s claims.
Brandon,
The lawyers can weigh in, but WRT climate/AGW, yes, you probably are. You run a blog, you have had public run-ins with the SKS crowd, you have written ebooks on related subjects. I can’t see how you would not be a limited purpose public figure. If people want to say you are a foolish buffoon, or wouldn’t know the difference between radiative heat transfer and your own backside, that would probably be OK. They could even say you make misleading statements about AGW with no problem.
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Now if they start talking about why your first your first marriage ended (hypothetically!) or about how badly you treat your kids (again, hypothetically)… another story. False statements about these things would probably be actionable.
Lucia, I think I will have to question the aptness of your analogy. Surely you must agree that the principal took much more care than Cook in declaring his privacy. Have you ever attempted to write even a short message on your butt?
By the way, over a year ago another Skeptical Science team member, Collin Maessen, said this:
When I pointed out I had explained exactly howI found the material I obtained. This is reminiscent to Neal J. King’s claim:
They both allude to hidden information as proof I lied/misled people. Presumably, their source is John Cook or someone else from Skeptical Science. Given they seem to believe things that are clearly untrue, it raises questions about just what is being said about me in that group. And of particular interest, how is whoever the source may be coming up with such strange ideas?
Ok it was tatooed on, but my point remains.
I have no idea why that last comment double-posted.
SteveF, that’s what I would think. I don’t know though. I have no familiarity with case law regarding who is and is not a (limited purpose) public figure.
Brandon,
I think Collin might have been confused in that post. He links under the title “one of them explains how the forum data was obtained.” to here: http://skepticalscience.com/hack-2012-index.html — Did they think that one was you? I thought that was the German, or whatever.
Collin might have been confused, I know I’m confused. 🙂
Oddly…. perhaps the source is coming up with strange ideas because there has been another intrusion into their database by someone and they are assuming it’s you. If there has been another intrsion, that might explain why Neal is so hypersensitive to people joking about another hack. Also if so, maybe another shoe will drop. Or not.
Maybe Neal will let us know how he got the idea you guessed and entered usernames/passwords. More likely not. If “they” eventually decide to reveal that info it will likely be in the form of a 6 blog post long series suggesting the hacker is drinking red bull to stay awake while hammering away at his pc.
Oh, sorry. I skimmed past the “about a year ago”. Mark is probably right. Colin probably said that because he was confused.
Lucia –
“Maybe Neal will let us know how he got the idea you guessed and entered usernames/passwords. More likely not.”
Given the information which Neal presented, I think it’s a lack of imagination. That is, he started from premises which represent what the manager (presumably Cook) was *intending* to do — that is, password-protected access to a database of URLs, and those URLs were not to be made available publicly. Neal seems to have uncritically accepted those as factual.
.
Didn’t someone (on this thread or the previous one) mention something about reluctance to accept evidence contrary to one’s prejudices?
I don’t think there was any confusion on his part. That comment was made in response to a person asking if there was evidence the Skeptical Science forum had been hacked as that had been mention in the post. It wasn’t about anything I did.
(Unless you believe I’m the one who hacked the Skeptical Science forum!)
HaroldW, I doubt Neal J. King simply jumped to conclusions. He said he was informed of three things:
The natural interpretation is someone told him these three things or told him a narrative which he’s summarized (at least part of) in this way.
Mark Bofill,
You asked a very good question that I had meant to reply to: “Do you think that progressives generally are willing to go farther than liberals to accomplish their ends?”
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I think the line between ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’ is so thin that it is just about invisible; it may come down to how loudly they talk, and little more. Both will go ‘very far’ to accomplish their desired policy outcomes. And it is not hard to figure out why. Conservatives have an inclination to ‘conserve’ the existing political landscape; a perfect example is from the Declaration of Independence, where Jefferson writes:
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“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
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Liberals/progressives are not Jeffersonian. They are often unhappy with things ‘long established’, and are impatient to make…. err…. ‘progress’ by eliminating long established things. So you regularly see the chaffing of liberals/progressives against anything which slows movement toward their desired political outcomes. That can be Senate cloture rules , the plain words of the Constitution that limit the powers of government, the courts interpreting existing laws based on what those laws actually actually say (instead of what liberals/progressives wish they said!), etc. Heck, even the very existence of a legislative body like the Senate, where votes are not directly proportional to represented population, often frustrates and angers them!
.
All these things and more are viewed as impediments that only slow ‘progress’. Mr. Obama’s many dubious decisions and executive orders, some plainly in violation of long established law and/or the Constitution itself, as well as the long term ‘re-interpretation’ of the meaning of the Constitution by liberal jurists, to the point of Orwellian ‘doublespeak’, are the natural consequences of the conflict between ‘progressive’ goals and legal/political/historical reality. Yes, they will go very far indeed.
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If you have not already seen it, this presentation: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind?language=en is worth a listen. Haidt compares and contrasts the things that matter to liberals and conservatives, and notes that liberals (‘progressives’) are driven most strongly by a desire for “fairness” in outcome, while conservatives have a broader mix of motivating factors… Jeffersonian motivations, if you will.
Brandon: “I doubt Neal J. King simply jumped to conclusions.”
I agree; he stated what he was informed of. But he didn’t consider whether those statements were actually true; for example, what makes his informant sure that there were no public URLs. There are other, unstated, premises which he didn’t question.
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Instead of thinking, “What are some ways by which someone could obtain a URL without hacking”, he accepted the narrative of his informant that it was impossible to find those URLs without hacking. And thereby drew a false conclusion.
Equal odds that he’s reached the correct conclusion, but thinks admitting that does his cause no good so why admit it? Dude hangs out with people who honestly believe they’re in a war to save the planet, so anything goes (for them) – and anything from the “evil” side produces the wailing and gnashing of teeth we’ve witnessed several dozen times in these threads.
Re: “Brandon — Limited Public Figure”
..
Based on zero research but relying on reading I did about 18 months ago, I would speculate that you are a limited public figure. The interesting question, if you could prove a malicious falsehood, is where there would be jurisdiction. Cook is an Australian and statements made on the Internet are broadcast worldwide. Maybe there is no precised legal answer, but a practical one. Maybe you could sue wherever Cook or SKS had assets.
…
If I was trying to prove a lie that met the standard of legal malice, here is what I would do. I would go to Youtube and put up a video showing exactly what was done to access the information in a simple basic manner (such as showing you in front of the computer and showing how you accessed the urls with screenshots of the technique used.) Then when someone makes plainly incorrect statements about hacking, you can point them to the video, which should simply make the point clear. If after being pointed to the video, they still persist, you have a much stronger case for malice. I would make sure that the video distinguished your actions from any hacking that might have occurred to the SKS database.
…
In addition to clarifying the matter for those new to the issue, if it came to the point of where legal action was seriously contemplated, a good, clear Youtube video would be very helpful in making sure that any judge who would hear the case would understand the technical issues and understand the basic nature of the lies being spread. If sued, SKS would undoubtedly try to misdirect a court (most of which are not technologically sophisticated), and a good Youtube video would go a long way in preventing the misdirection.
…
JD
I agree with SteveF and JD Ohio – for a limited range of topics, you’re the kind who “voluntarily injects himself or is drawn into a particular public controversy.” (Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc.) As a blogger and frequent blog commenter you do exactly that. Some later cases tighten the standard for persons “drawn into” a controversy involuntarily…but that’s not you.
JD – I note that Brandon has in the past written up clear explanations of exactly what he did.
I’m getting conflicting information about what the system does and how it does it. I am going to take some time to verify actual behavior. This may take a little time, particularly in view of the season: everybody’s favorite day, the Ides of April.
If I understand JD, his advice about a YouTube video is to get you closer to Curtis v. Butts or Harte-Hanks v. Connaughton…where there was clear, uncontrovertible video or audio that would unambiguously show that the printed stories were untrue, but the defendants simply refused to look. That allowed the plaintiffs to meet the “actual malice” standard.
In your case it would be weaker because a “reconstruction” would still allow a hostile audience to distrust your reconstruction versus their own (badly grounded) beliefs about what you really did….unlike the contemporaneous recordings in those cases.
Joseph W. “I note that Brandon has in the past written up clear explanations of exactly what he did.”
…
In my experience with judges & juries, what Brandon has written is good, but it will still go over the heads of some judges, jurors or CAGW proponents. I would make it simple enough for a fifth grader to understand. As an example, I had a judge one time who didn’t understand what identical twins were. (One twin smoked heavily and worked at a dirty factory and developed lung disease. The other twin smoked heavily and didn’t work at the factory. This second twin didn’t get lung disease. The judge excluded the evidence pertaining to the identical twins.) I believe a good Youtube video is intrinsically clearer than virtually all written materials where any level of sophistication is required.
…
JD
begin-pedant-mode
The Ides of April is April 13
end-pedant-mode
😉
Joseph W “If I understand JD, his advice about a YouTube video is to get you closer to Curtis v. Butts or Harte-Hanks v. Connaughton…where there was clear, uncontrovertible video or audio that would unambiguously show that the printed stories were untrue, but the defendants simply refused to look.”
…
Partly true. The other reason is that demonstrative evidence has been shown to be much more persuasive. Here is a comment about Melvin Belli, a very prominent and effective lawyer, who is now gone. “Mel Belli was called the “Father of Demonstrative Evidence†for his pioneering work in illustrating in court the nature of his clients’ injuries. His early use of photographs, movies, scale models, human skeletons, animals, prostheses, and other devices was dramatic, riveting and highly effective.” See http://www.bellisociety.org/about-mel/
JD
SteveF,
Thanks. I had not seen that. It was interesting.
Also thanks for your answer.
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Lots to think about.
Neal,
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Bravo! Spoken like a true embedded software engineer.
JD Ohio:
Interestingly, I had almost this exact same idea the moment I saw Neal J. King’s comment that we’ve been focusing on. Sadly, I’ve not been in the situation where I could so far today. I’m hoping in a few hours I”ll be able to. The big thing is I want to get on the computer I used to write the program that collected the URLs, and that’s not going to be possible until this evening.
I just hope John Cook doesn’t change things before I get a chance. He might, but if he doesn’t, I can record a video of me replicating the process.
Joseph W.:
That was actually a different incident, where the method was different. You can find a post about the method I used for this incident,incident here instead. It’s from when I did the exact same thing over a year ago and told everyone exactly what I did.
If you’d prefer a collected overview of all the various details though, I highly recommend my new eBook. It lays everything out in a clear and simple manner.
JD Ohio:
Interestingly, I had almost this exact same idea the moment I saw Neal J. King’s comment that we’ve been focusing on. Sadly, I’ve not been in the situation where I could so far today. I’m hoping in a few hours I”ll be able to. The big thing is I want to get on the computer I used to write the program that collected the URLs, and that’s not going to be possible until this evening.
I just hope John Cook doesn’t change things before I get a chance. He might, but if he doesn’t, I can record a video of me replicating the process.
Joseph W.:
That was actually a different incident, where the method was different. You can find a post about the method I used for this incident,incident here instead. It’s from when I did the exact same thing over a year ago and told everyone exactly what I did.
If you’d prefer a collected overview of all the various details though, I highly recommend my new eBook. It lays everything out in a clear and simple manner.
Neal J. King:
Perhaps you should have done that before accusing me of being dishonest, but really, how much time does it take to read a couple pages and visit a few URLs? You could confirm I’m correct in under five minutes.
Just for the record, when I say:
I really mean, “Before accusing me of committing a felony.”
Yah I always like to verify actual system behavior before making any remarks whatsoever to management. It maximizes my reputation for accuracy and minimizes those awful meetings where I have to say ‘uhm, remember when I said, blah-blah. Turns out…’
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Mostly in practice that means I say ‘I’ll get back to you on that’ a lot.
Brandon,
Another minor detail I forgot in all of the hustle and bustle before. The comment I deleted? I deliberately posted something provocative sounding to further the joke and deleted it. Mentioning this just to wrap up that loose end. I forget exactly what it was. I wanted it to look like I blurted something I wasn’t supposed to out by mistake. I wasn’t sure you’d catch it. 🙂
Heh. It’s pure coincidence I saw any of it. The timing quirk I referred to arises from the fact different parts of web pages are often loaded separately. When I opened the web page and the body of it was loaded, your comment wasn’t there to be retrieved. However, after the body of the page loaded the Recent Comments section loaded. At that point, your comment was there to be loaded. But because the body of the page had already been loaded, the page displayed your comment in the Recent Comments section without it being displayed on the page you had posted it.
(Well that, or you deleted the comment before I loaded the page, and the Recent Comments section didn’t update as quickly as the body of the page did. I can’t rule that possibility out, though it seems less likely.)
mark bofill (#145121)
“Yah I always like to verify actual system behavior before making any remarks whatsoever to management.”
Exactly. Or to a customer. If I’m not 100% sure, I’ll say, “Let me look into that. I should have an answer by end of the day/week/whatever”. Like you, I hate to have to backtrack on something I’ve said. And (after a while) it gives people confidence that when I do give an immediate answer, I’m not just going by the seat of my pants.
Bought it already…now I just need to find time to read it. Thanks for the clarification!
(The other post…though I think I was remembering one from your own blog…stuck in my memory because of your explanations about “l33t mad haxor skillz” — such as chasing links and typing URL’s into a browser.)
JD – good advocacy tips. And I suppose if the judge didn’t understand Brandon’s explanation himself, he would have an easier time saying, “the defendants didn’t have to be convinced by it.”
Another Point About a Youtube Video:
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If you were at trial, and had a 3-5 minute video, you could ask the defendant what parts were inaccurate. Unless a defendant had a valid objection, the case would be 85% over at that point. CAGWers tend to try to get tricky with language to avoid taking responsibility for their mistakes. For instance, when their predictions go bad, they call them projections. The video would avoid the issue of playing hide and seek with language.
JD
HaroldW,
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I wish they would encourage this [edit: behavior in] my kids in school. Much of what I end up doing helping my older boy with math and science is getting him to be patient and careful and check. I’m under the impression partial credit is a good idea for some reason that eludes me right now, but there are times when I wish they would impress on my kids that a wrong answer is wrong as in, it’s not going to work in solving whatever you were actually trying to accomplish. Take the extra five minutes, be sure.
Lucia, what the heck was that guys name? Bob Lac…something.
Mark bofill,
Most of the kids I tutor are in high school. Some of my students teachers give 25 minutes multiple choice and 25 minutes free response. That means the first chunk– you have to get the right answer. (Sure, it’s multiple guess, but still…)
On the other hand, the other bit you need to show that you understand how to do problems. Ideally, the teacher picks somewhat different types of problems so that partial credit makes sense to give. The best multiple choice ones involve application of one or not very many principles. The best multiple choice require drawing a diagram, identifying several equations and so on. In the latter, kids should get some credit even if they lost a 1/2 when hitting the calculator. But kids who are careful about the actual number get an edge in the former.
Mind you, I don’t see the tests. So I have no idea whether the teachers actually pick the “correct type” for each section. But I have no reason to think they don’t.
Lucia,
You know I honestly don’t even know what their tests look like. Homework and practice problems (edit: are what i see). So for all I know their teachers may. Actually I just asked my boy and he assures me that his teachers do remind him all the time to be careful. Boys will be boys I guess, part of that is carelessness maybe.
SteveF,
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Huh, neat. Jose Duarte mentions Jon Haidt as well.
[Edit: Gotta love this.
] 🙂
mark,
I personally know one creationist who’s a very good organic chemist. Isn’t compartmentalization wonderful.
An exchange between the White Queen and Alice from Through the Looking Glass:
Then there’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text game from way back when. You couldn’t win the game unless Marvin the Paranoid Android considered you intelligent. The test was whether you could have two mutually exclusive things in your mind. In the case of the game it was having tea and having no tea at the same time.
SteveF,
When I think of a progressive’s idea of fairness the Kurt Vonnegut story Harrison Bergeron always comes to mind, or else Procrustes and his bed.
It’s oversimplification, but, IMO, progressives think fairness means equality of outcomes while conservatives or classical liberals think fairness means equality of opportunity. See, for example, the progressive idea that statistics alone, i.e. disparate impact, can prove that there is illegal discrimination.
Bleh. The video ran longer than it should have, and it’s pretty clear I wasn’t working off a script (and when I’m not, I get rambly). I’m sure the quality could be improved greatly. Oh well. It should still be enough to make it clear nothing I did was criminal.
I can make a better video later if there’s need (and they don’t change their server’s functionality), but for now, this will hopefully do. And really, there shouldn’t even been any need for a video like this.
(It’s still encoding, so it may be a short while before the video is available for viewing.)
mark bofill (Comment #144912)
March 30th, 2016 at 6:05 am
How do you propose to accomplish that, and to whom do you expect to deliver the payment?
Brandon, you’re link says the video is private and needs a password…
mark bofill,
He changed his mind because he thought he was mistaken and it wasn’t unbearable painful to admit.
It was a straw breaking the camel’s back scenario. There were two straws.
First one:
[Shollenberger]: Now mind you, they didn’t decide to collapse these categories until after they collected the data. They discussed the possibility, with Cook saying things like: “I’m not a big fan of complicating the endorsement categories unnecessarily but on the other hand, we can always collapse it down to a simpler final result and get the best of both worlds.”
[Me:] THAT doesn’t smell right.
Painful as it is to admit, Brandon S., you now have my full attention.
/quote
Second one:
[Mosher]: wow I thought arguing with skeptics that C02 is a GHG was tedious, but watching Gates twist and turn is hilarious.
/quote
Doing my own unguided tour through the private SkS forum dumps on Shollenberger’s (sp?) website tipped the balance further. I didn’t reference any of it in my about face article, which means I was limited to making arguments only on the basis of the text of the paper and its supplemental information. One of my persistent conflicts on the decision to not publish excerpts from those internal threads is that good portions of it also do the SkS team credit.
Re, Exxon:
So no, I don’t think Gates is doing a conspiracy theory. I think he’s pretending to go for a conspiracy theory to help with the program in a spontaneous, uncoordinated way (cause it’d be weird to imagine this is coordinated, tee-hee).
.
I wasn’t wearing my tin foil hat while I typed this… But I’ve got it nearby.
Mine appears to be sitting in its usual spot on the end table, but it could be that I’m actually wearing it and some TLA is up to a new form of trickery. It’s getting crazy out there.
Not directed at me, but I have a (serious) comment:
The thing that bugs me about the Punish Exxon thing is, most people would have screamed absolute bloody murder if Exxon did absolutely anything besides keeping fossil fuel products as available and as cheap as possible.
I can’t speak for others, but I would NOT have screamed bloody murder if Exxon (or major oil corp. for that matter) had put up more of their vast R&D budgets toward biofuels earlier, and in a bigger way than they’re presently doing. I think I understand why they didn’t: too much upfront capital risk with too long and uncertain payoff period. And just to be clear, that’s not a knock on Big Oil or even capitalism: it’s simply how h. economicus tends to work. I’ve previously put it a different way: one does not simply swim upstream against the market in perpetuity.
Here’s another shoulda woulda coulda. I would have been ecstatic if the US hadn’t collectively lost its mind after Three Mile Island. I would further dance a jig if Greennpeace broke this promise:
End the nuclear age
Greenpeace has always fought – and will continue to fight – vigorously against nuclear power because it is an unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity. The only solution is to halt the expansion of all nuclear power, and for the shutdown of existing plants.
I think that policy is loopy.
Oh, heh. Sorry about that. I apparently had it set to Public but failed to hit a Publish button somewhere so it was online, but unpublished. I never realized that could happen.
It should be fixed now.
DeWitt,
But statistical differences in outcome are used by both ‘classic’ liberals and ‘progessives’ to justify preferential treatment of groups that are ‘underrepresented’ relative to their population. I remember a guy from my high school who was half Italian (mom, I think) and half black (dad I think). He was a good kid, pretty quiet, had average grades and scored reasonably well (~70th percentile) on standardized tests. He played football and basketball, both mostly bench warming. When he applied to colleges (with guidance from my high school) he was offered a full ride to MIT and multiple Ivy’s. I don’t remember where he chose to attend. He was pretty poor, but so was I. I had high grades, >95th percentile on standardised tests, and had captained both cross country and track & field teams for two years. My main failing was insufficient melanin. MIT put me on their waiting list, and finally offered me a spot….. if I could come up with the 100% of the cost, which was, of course, impossible. I accepted an offer from a second tier school that gave me scholarship aid.
.
The point is: obvious preferential treatment has been practiced by ‘classic liberals’ for more than 45 years. There is no significant difference I can see between ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’ when you consider the policies they support. They want equality of outcome.
SteveF, DeWitt,
From very limited anecdotal experience I have this idea that is very probably wrong that goes like this – a lot of people I call ‘classic liberals’ believe strongly in honoring and adhering to a bunch of abstract concepts, like equal rights or freedom of speech – and I might be fooling myself but I believe that it was once a lot more common for somebody who called themself a liberal to actually care about the principle and not the outcome.
What I wonder might have happened is that a generation romanticized communist revolutions around the world. Maybe held up these revolutions as progress, as ideal. Maybe some looked at the ruthlessness, subterfuge, dedication / whatever it takes to be a successful revolutionary and realized that nuanced observation and debate on these obscure abstract principles was counter productive to revolutions.
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Let me be the first to admit that I am talking out of my butt, I don’t even have a hint of a shred of a scrap of evidence for my position. It’s all pure speculation and therefore B.S. more likely than not.
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But, since it relates sorta. I’ll put it up and let people tear it down I guess.
Brandon,
Was that Notepad plus in your video? Try Pycharm community edition! It’s nice!
Mark Bofill,
Jose Duarte sees the ‘progressive blind spot’ clearly. It’s good that he is willing to write about it. I don’t think it will have much effect on progressives…. they will continue to be selectively blind, as is their want.
Mark Bofill,
” I might be fooling myself but I believe that it was once a lot more common for somebody who called themself a liberal to actually care about the principle and not the outcome.”
.
Those are what we would today call conservative views. If there ever was a time those were ‘liberal’ views, it must have been before I was old enough to be aware of it… say before the mid 1960’s. But my guess is that the left has always focused on outcomes, not just opportunity. Sure, the left wants ‘equal opportunity’, just like conservatives do, but that is lip service; what they actually want is ‘more than equal’ opportunity to control economic outcomes.
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I think top marginal tax rates are a reasonable measure of the political inclinations of a country with an openly elected government. Remember that in the States the top marginal rate was >90% until the Kennedy tax cuts. Higher marginal rates are today supported by most ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’.
Brandon Gates (#145148) –
I agree that the opposition to nuclear in the ’70s, by factions such as the Union of Concerned Scientists and Greenpeace among others, caused a wrong turn in energy policy. It was mainly scaremongering (remember “China Syndrome”?), as the main technical concerns could have been dealt with. Even now the real concern — long-term waste disposal — has been ignored thanks to Sen. Reid and Pres. Obama. [I just ran across this WSJ article concerning a different side effect of the Yucca Mountain storage proposal rejection.]
“From very limited anecdotal experience I have this idea that is very probably wrong that goes like this – a lot of people I call ‘classic liberals’ believe strongly in honoring and adhering to a bunch of abstract concepts, like equal rights or freedom of speech – and I might be fooling myself but I believe that it was once a lot more common for somebody who called themself a liberal to actually care about the principle and not the outcome.”
Mark, in the distance past classical liberals were those who fought against government infringement of individual liberties much as libertarians do today. Modern day liberals tend to favor bigger government and for government to do their bidding. In my mind much of their advocacies for individual freedoms are rife with fundamental contradictions. They tend to be for freedom of speech but not when it comes to campaign financing or for public and taxpayer supported organizations where unions can demand dues from non union members and use those funds to support causes that the non union member is against. The second amendment regardless of how the justice system views it tells volumes about the modern day liberal viewpoint on individual rights versus government power where individuals are not trusted to provide fully for their own protection while a government monopoly on that function appears favorable to them.
There are contractions in the conservatives positions on freedom and individual rights, but we will save that for another day.
Brandon Gates,
Sorry your comment was moderated so long.
SteveF,
Classical liberalism, as exemplified by Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill morphed into social liberalism in the very early twentieth century. See here: https://mises.org/library/what-classical-liberalism
By the time you were trying to get into MIT, no one who followed the tenets of classical liberalism called himself a liberal. The label had been pre-empted. So instead of truly race neutral admission policies, you had affirmative action with all its unintended consequences.
My parents were able to send me to Caltech, but I couldn’t afford to send my daughter there. I enjoyed going to Caltech, but I’m not at all sure that for someone planning to go to graduate school, it makes all that much difference where you get your undergraduate degree. She got a full tuition scholarship to Furman, which has a very good undergraduate chemistry program, and was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. I seriously doubt that would have happened if she had attended Caltech.
DeWitt,
“Classical liberalism, as exemplified by Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill morphed into social liberalism in the very early twentieth century.”
.
Could well be. In any case, the beliefs you describe as classic liberalism are what ‘conservatives’ have actually believed over my lifetime. I kind of doubt most people who consider themselves liberals think much along the lines of Adam Smith.
Darn Brandon Gates, Interesting comment! As luck would have it I’m moVing a family member today. Boxes and furniture and all that. Don’t take my temporary absence to indicate lack of interest!
DeWitt,
“you had affirmative action with all its unintended consequences”
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Indeed. My college (which was fairly selective) set aside ~10% of the available freshman spots for disadvantaged applicants who might not normally qualify for acceptance based on academics. They got full scholarships, including room, board, and books (most were in fact poor). Each year, more than half had flunked out by the end of their fresham year, and their graduation rate was something like 10%. The 10% who graduated were almost always those who would have qualified academically without special consideration. The school was alarmed by the flunk-out rate, so they started paying other students to tutor failing ‘special admissions’ students. I did some of this; it was an exercise in futility. There was no way these kids could EVER pass introductory calculus…. they couldn’t have passed introductory algebra! So the program was a total FUBAR; it cost a fortune, accomplished little, and took admission spots away from far more qualified applicants. A nightmare that continues to this day.
Brandon—that was pretty good actually. I’m hardly an expert on production, but I thought your narration was excellent.
I think it’s worth revisiting this comment by Neal:
There is something really, really slimy about the way this is presented. It implies certain things about Brandon’s behavior that Neal almost certainly is aware did not actually happen.
Let’s see if I can summarize how this really goes:
• The URLs can be generated using a standard algorithm (they have a common string pattern followed by an integer, sequenced from “1” to the maximum legal value). There is no “guess” involved.
• Exemplars of this sequence of URLs are getting spread around the internet into people’s web server logs like so many rabbit droppings.
• Discovering these sksforum rabbit droppings URLs requires no special effort beyond knowing how to open the log file on your own computer.
• A “public URL” is one that you can assess the referred document without needing a password or username password combination.
• So these are all public URLs, and are ones that require no “guess work” to find.
• Web sites are not houses. They are publication vehicles. The analogy of the house & key is completely inadequate.
• From the Wikipedia:
• Thus, anything you place in public URLs is definitionally “published”.
The take home message is stop libeling people for catching your group’s stupid mistakes. If you don’t want the public to read them, don’t put them on a public link, or maybe jeez I don’t know, add a friggin’ password to the document?
Also—Neal, I respectfully request that you stop relating supposed stories about things Brandon has said in the past, without direct links to them.
It’s risky to even paraphrase things you’ve just read rather than just quote them.
Paraphrasing things that are years old often leads to complete works of fiction, which is what I believe has happened in some of your claims about things Brandon has said in the past.
Were I to make untrue (and possibly defamatory) remarks about another person, I would personally be very publicly apologetic about my comments. Just saying.
Carrick,
“Were I to make untrue (and possibly defamatory) remarks about another person, I would personally be very publicly apologetic about my comments. Just saying.”
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Sure. But you are a ‘classic liberal’. Neal is not. 😉
Carrick:
Thanks! Unfortunately I’ve spent time with people who are truly good at doing speeches/presentations I always wind up comparing what I do to what I know could be done.
I’m trying to not assume dishonesty here, but it is incredible how false the things he says are. Especially since he claimed things I said were (basically) lies, meaning he ought to be familiar with my claims… which are easily verifiable. I don’t know how to explain that. I can’t imagine someone would intentionally lie in his situation, but I also can’t see how anyone could convince themselves the things he says are true.
Imagine if you had unintentionally spread such a story amongst your friends and colleagues, without having said or posted them anywhere that person could be aware of them, much less respond to them. Whatever you might do about such a situation, I’m sure you’d feel terrible and would want to do something about it.
It seems apparent at least one person, most likely John Cook, has done this. Based on the Skeptical Science group’s reactions to other things, I don’t expect the person to feel terrible. I’m almost certain they won’t apologize.
SteveF,
Wrt affirmative action: IQ is a bête noire to progressives. The whole idea of affirmative action is that there are no fundamental differences between individuals that are not caused by how they were raised, nurture over nature as it were. The standard statement from college administrations is that they don’t admit anyone they think is unlikely to graduate. This in spite of a lot of evidence to the contrary.
SteveF, Yes indeed I am a classic liberal.
(That was a great link that DeWitt posted.)
These are exactly my views:
DeWitt Payne:
To be fair, IQ is pretty much total BS, at least as a measure of intelligence. And IQ scores are heavily dependent upon how people were raised/educated as opposed to reflecting intrinsic differences.
IQ is probably not a good example to use for your point.
DeWitt,
“IQ is a bête noire to progressives.”
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Painfully true. And by the same logic, Dutchmen are not really taller than average, chess grand masters are in fact not more likely to be Jewish, elite sprinters are not more likely to be descendant from west Africans, and the best marathon runners are not usually from east Africa.
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“The standard statement from college administrations is that they don’t admit anyone they think is unlikely to graduate.”
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We both know this claim a is pure manure. The statistics proving otherwise are overwhelming.
Brandon,
“And IQ scores are heavily dependent upon how people were raised/educated as opposed to reflecting intrinsic differences.”
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You don’t know what you are talking about. Read up on correlation of adult IQ for identical and fraternal twins raised separately.
Carrick,
“Yes indeed I am a classic liberal.”
.
Which is to say, you are a conservative.
SteveF
Classic liberals are generally fiscal conservative and more or less “small government”. They may or may not be social conservatives as currently defined. In current terms, the ‘social conservative’ often carries a sizable ‘religious conservative’ connotation.
Mind you, there is a range of social conservativism– including personal responsibility– that does align with classic liberal. But other features like “prayer in school”, or “anti-abortion” get lumped as “social conservative”, and classic liberals are sometimes seen as “social liberals” on many (though not all) “social” issues. I’d say it’s often hard to guess the position of classical liberals on a few of the “social” isssues particularly some of the more currently controversial one.
Brandon,
Correlation data from:
IQ Testing 101, Alan S. Kaufman, 2009, Springer Publishing Company, ISBN 978-0-8261-0629-2, pages 179-183
.
Same person (tested twice) .95
Identical twins—Reared together .86
Identical twins—Reared apart .76
Fraternal twins—Reared together .55
Fraternal twins—Reared apart .35
Biological siblings—Reared together .47
Biological siblings—Reared apart .24
Unrelated children—Reared together—Children .28
Unrelated children—Reared together—Adults .04
Cousins .15
Parent-child—Living together .42
Parent-child—Living apart .22
Adoptive parent–child—Living together .19
.
So environment does have an effect, but inherited ability is an important factor.
Lucia,
” I’d say it’s often hard to guess the position of classical liberals on a few of the “social†isssues particularly some of the more currently controversial one.”
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Agreed. My guess is the differentiating factor is their religious beliefs.
I agree with SteveF that Brandon was off the mark in his statement that “IQ scores are heavily dependent upon how people were raised/educated as opposed to reflecting intrinsic differences”.
This isn’t one of those reThat said [stands on soap box], here’s what they say in one study:
Nor I should add does it measure what you need in order to do well in a corporate job, nor in a collaborate research environment, nor in marketing, etc.. Also, there certainly are environmental effects on learned behavior, which do translate into the work place.
IQ isn’t a perfect measure of even “g”, because it includes tests like vocabulary word recognition. If you put one monozygotic twin on a desert island and the other in NYC attending Bronx High School of Science (famous for its eight Nobel Laureates), you aren’t going to find the two individuals will have identical vocabularies, .
Clearly IQ”s an imperfect instrument both in terms of not being really sure what we’re measuring with this hodgepodge of cognitive tests, let alone violated assumptions about measuring intrinsic factors only rather than also extrinsic cognitive factors.
SteveF:
It is unlikely any discussion began with a person stating their views being told they know nothing about the topic and should go do research will be useful or productive. As such, I’m just going to say I am quite familiar with the literature on this subject, and your response here doesn’t even begin to rebut what I said much less address the full body of available knowledge.
SteveF:
That’s a hard one to disentangle, because there is such an strong intertwinement between religious beliefs and culture.
I am certainly more socially liberal than modern conservatives. Fiscally conservative, possibly. But I’d guess I’d recognize a need for more regulatory government intervention in the marketplace than most conservatives would be willing to accept.
Carrick:
I’m not sure what your cut off sentence was meant to say, and I don’t really want to dwell on this topic, but I do want to make one really simple point because it deals with the basics of testing things: High heritability doesn’t even indicate genetics is the cause of observed variation between groups. That’s not just for IQ, it’s for all tihngs.
Brandon,
“High heritability doesn’t even indicate genetics is the cause of observed variation between groups.”
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That statement appears 100% contrary to logic. Actually it sounds a little bit like Lysenko.
Carrick,
“I’d recognize a need for more regulatory government intervention in the marketplace than most conservatives would be willing to accept.”
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An example or two would help clarify.
Carrick,
This, from your quotation:
“It’s the kind of intelligence you need to do well in school,†he says. “Not what you need to do well in life.â€
,
Seems to me contrary to data which shows financial success in life certainly correlates with how well people do in school. Of course, he is from Harvard, so he probably excludes “financial” from any measure of success in life.
let me think on it.
Boarding a plane now so it’ll be a while.
Brandon, it’s the doing well at school that influences your later life.
I don’t know of any examples where people were hired because of their high IQ score. If it happens, it’s pretty uncommon.
SteveF:
I suggest you try looking at it again. And again. And again. Until you understand why it is true. It may “appear[] 100% contrary to logic” to you, but it is actually a trivial truth anyone who looks at heritability scores should understand.
Carrick:
I assume that was meant for SteveF, not me, right?
Brandon,
More rubbish. Itellegence, how tall you grow will be, the composition of your muscles (fast or slow twitch), body proportions, and the color of your eyes, hair, and skin are all, along with many others, highly heritable traits. The data are clear and overwhelming. Gregor Mendel figured this out. Suggesting otherwise is just weird.
Carrick,
“I don’t know of any examples where people were hired because of their high IQ score. ”
.
Sure, but having a high IQ correlates strongly with how well you do in school, and that certainly makes a difference in hiring decisions, at least early in your career. I have known lots of very smart people who have not done well in school or after, for lots of reasons. But there is still a strong correlation between IQ when tested in childhood (or better, in adolescence) and lifetime success.
SteveF,
IIRC, IQ correlates well with degree level achieved. The median IQ for science Ph.D.’s is higher than for those with only B.S. degrees. That may be true for all Ph.D. and Batchelor degrees. I’m less sure about that.
The original work on IQ was because there were families where success in life carried over multiple generations. So a possibly heritable trait was, in fact, the inspiration for devising the idea of intelligence testing.
Cool April Fool joke: https://www.audible.com/mt/AF2016/?serial=&source_code=AUDOREM0325169GNU
SteveF:
That… is a strange response that doesn’t have anything to do with what I said. I can only assume this means you no idea what I’m saying, likely because you have no real understanding of the subject. What I said is a trivial truth which is derivved directly from definitions. Please read this again:
This statement is unquestionable to anyone who understands this subject at even a basic level. If you can’t figure it out, try asking anyone with any knowledge or experience on this sort of issue. Or anyone who understands how to interpret test results at all.
Or, you know, you could try asking me to explain it. That would be a normal enough way to approach a disagreement. Rather than just insist people who disagree with you don’t know anything, you could ask them to explain the reasoning for their views. I find it sometimes helps to actually exchange ideas rather than just make derisive remarks.
Against my better judgement.
Higher correlation between identical twins raised together and apart than for fraternal twins does imply genetics.
Brandon,
You started by saying you refuse to discuss the subject. Now you suggest I should request an explanation? Very strange indeed. If you want to explain what you think, explain. If not, that’s OK too. Suit yourself. Based on what you have so far offered, I really don’t think you have anything of substance to offer. Sort of like Richard Lewantin, but without the leftist credentials.
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This:
“High heritability doesn’t even indicate genetics is the cause of observed variation between groups. That’s not just for IQ, it’s for all tihngs.”
.
is utter rubbish. Dutchmen are taller (on average) than most people because their parents were also taller (on average). Guatemalans (living in the States, with good nutrition) are quite short on average because ther parents are quite short. To suggest otherwise is nuts. Stay in a snit if you want, but please don’t allude to some deep understanding of the subject and then refuse to talk about it. That is just a waste of everyone’s time, including your own. As I said before, I don’t believe you know what you are talking about. So far, each or your comments confirms that belief.
DeWitt,
Why ‘against your better judgement’? The data are clear.
SteveF,
Getting involved in a discussion with Brandon.
DeWitt,
Oh. You may be right. I too usually avoid that, but sometimes it is hard to let a totally rubbish comment stand unchallenged, no matter who makes it. OK, Doug Cotton is an exception.
SteveF:
You started the discussion off by responding to a very simple and obvious statement by doing nothing to address it beyond claiming I know nothing about this. My instinctive reaction to that is, well let’s be blunt, to troll you.
I don’t care about this discussion at all, but I am enjoying getting you to repeatedly claim a basic and fundamental truth of any discussion of heritability is rubbish.
This is a funny remark given I’ve repeatedly stated what I said is a very simple point. I don’t know how alluding to the fact I understand one of the most basic details of a topic would be alluding to a deep understanding of anything.
But seriously guys, what I said is trivially true. It’s something people who discuss heritability of things, including IQ, generally account for. I brought it up largely because it’s one of those things that can be good to throw out as a warning so people don’t make a very basic mistake. Even then, I only bothered to mention it because it has a lot of parallels to the mistake Stephan Lewandowsky made.
Brandon,
DeWitt was right. Any substantive discussion with you is a pointless waste of time. I also have doubt of your mental stability, but that is a different subject. You are now in my Doug Cotton class.
.
Como as pessoas dizem no Brasil…. a Deus. Talvez ele pode ajudar.
By the way, I’ll give a hint for uninvolved readers. This example from SteveF:
This:
“High heritability doesn’t even indicate genetics is the cause of observed variation between groups. That’s not just for IQ, it’s for all tihngs.â€
.
is utter rubbish. Dutchmen are taller (on average) than most people because their parents were also taller (on average). Guatemalans (living in the States, with good nutrition) are quite short on average because ther parents are quite short. To suggest otherwise is nuts.
Is actually a perfect way to see my point. Not only have I never suggested anything contrary to this, if you ask what the average height of these groups was 100 years ago, you can see exactly what my statement pointed out.
Er, sorry. I forgot the blockquote tags.
“High heritability doesn’t even indicate genetics is the cause of observed variation between groups”
“If you can’t figure it out, try asking anyone with any knowledge or experience on this sort of issue. Or anyone who understands how to interpret test results at all.”
Please explain Brandon.
lucia,
No worries. Part of the delay may have been due to me not immediately noticing the e-mail verification in my inbox.
markbofill,
Not at all, thus far I know you to be responsive as well as interesting and reasonable. I look forward to your comments as you have time. Regards.
Steve Mosher,
Why even ask?
Why ask?
I’m genuinely interested in what Brandon has to say.
And… programming Shiny is kicking my ass
Both Brandons actually
Mosh,
If you find programming Shiny frustrating….. then Brandon will really frustrate you.
Steven Mosher, it’s simple. I said:
Because a common mistake people make when discussing heritability is assuming a high heritability score on a trait automatically means any variation in that trait must have a genetic component. That’s a faulty assumption. Heritability scores are (at least supposed to be) calculated with all non-genetic factors excluded. Tying differences between groups to genetics requires accounting for that.
The issue of height is a good example. Height has a strong heritability score, and there are differences in average heights between various ethnic groups arising from genetics. At the same time, there are differences arising from things like dietary differences (even if it doesn’t rise to the level of malnutrition). A good example of this can be found by examining people from the same area/ethnic group in different time period. People in the past were often shorter on average than now without there being a genetic cause. That’s true even though height has a strong heritability score.
The point of my remark was just to draw attentionb to this simple point. Heritability scores are designed to explain intra-group.variance. That doesn’t mean they can inherently explain inter-group variance. Making such an extrapolation requires establishing there are no other, non-genetic, differences between the groups that affect the comparison.
I noticed two typos in my last comment and went to edit it only to find the Edit and Delete buttons weren’t there. That’s happened with a couple other comments as well. Has anyone else had any problems with those functions not appearing?
I figured that was what you were getting at.
still this puzzles me
““And IQ scores are heavily dependent upon how people were raised/educated as opposed to reflecting intrinsic differences.â€
Given that what would you predict for twin studies?
It seems as if you are arguing that “how people were raised”
will explain more of the difference in IQ than intrinsic
( I assume you meant genetic ) differences.
If that interpretation of your position is correct, what would
you predict for twin studies?
Mosher,
The obvious answer is to attack twin studies as ‘fatally flawed’. After all, monozygote twins aren’t really identical. They have different fingerprints for one thing. /sarc
That being said, some twin studies have indeed been carried to ridiculous extremes.
HaroldW,
.
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I deem UCS’s position on fission power more reasonable than Greenpeace’s. A sample:
.
.
I don’t consider their position as reasonable as I’d like. I somewhat share their position that the US nuclear lobby issues soothing bromides which warrant skepticism, OTOH the “it can’t happen here” soundbite comes across as a straw-mannish paraphrasing. I don’t have a problem with their call for better regulatory enforcement on principle. However, I also wonder how many of the NRC’s ills are also due to red-tape compounded by US plant designs being so non-standardized relative to, say, the French cookie-cutter design/implementation philosophy.
.
Then there’s NIMBY. If we’re to look for bi-partisanship on this topic, that would be a candidate, though not the only one. On the plus side, since Hansen has “come out of the closet” as it were in favor of expanding fission power, I’ve been encouraged to see other of my pro-CO2-mitigation comrades expressing cautious acceptance if not outright support.
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In sum, I would be most pleased if Lochbaum, their internal expert, backed off the whistle-blowing and used his ex-industry insight to propose ways to expand nuclear power in the safest and most economic way possible as a replacement for coal-powered electricity, which — kWh for kWh — is orders of magnitude more deadly in practice. (I once worked it out that coal power causes the premature deaths of 10-30 thousand US citizens per year. Assuming the worst-case projections for Fukushima/Chernobyl long-term fatalities, the risk accrual works out to about 100 per annum.)
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One of Lemmon’s finer performances. Good, thought-provoking entertainment which was disproportionately legitimized due to its release 12 days prior to the TMI incident. I can’t imagine a more unfortunate confluence of coincidental events.
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I’ll give my impressions from prior readings. Reid is being responsive to understandable NIMBY on the part of his constituents. Whether true or not, Nevadans’ perceptions are that the US downplayed the health effects on downwind residents of post-war bomb testing. I suspect Obama is hamstrung by divisions in his own party, not to mention that the default Republican answer to practically everything he proposes at this stage in the game is “no”. I don’t think he’s ignoring the issue of long-term waste disposal on the basis that he thinks it isn’t a real priority — more that he doesn’t have the political capital to shove through a reasonable alternative to Yucca Mountain — especially not this late in his final term. IOW, he’s more focused on battles he can either reasonably hope to win — or if he loses, gains a chit for the Dems in November (e.g. SCOTUS nomination, etc.).
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I think the above is mostly consistent with the lede paragraph of the WSJ article, which I cannot read in its entirety because it’s paywalled. I’d be happy for you to expand by posting some relevant quotes from the article.
Steven Mosher,
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I’m not fully up to speed here. Which question?
DeWitt,
“The obvious answer is to attack twin studies as ‘fatally flawed’”
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That is the standard response when an empirical study casts doubt on high climate sensitivity… come to think of it, it is the standard response on the left when any of their sacred cows are gored. So no surprise.
Brandon S: if you ask what the average height of these groups was 100 years ago, you can see exactly what my statement pointed out.
That’s an argument for evolution, and not against genetics though, don’t you agree? 100 years (5 to 6 generations in people?) has factors beyond genetics, but doesn’t ignore them. JMO, YMMV.
Brandon Gates,
I would say that was closer to true than not. I recently saw an article that Kodak had a film fogging problem in the 1950’s because packing material made from corn husks had been contaminated by fallout from American and Soviet atmospheric testing. Radioactive iodine, I-131, was the likely culprit. Searching now, the NYT published on this in 1997. The feds should have been handing out iodine tablets to prevent accumulation in the thyroid gland instead of secretly warning Kodak.
Dewitt, interesting article. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 30yrs ppl find out the govt warned some ppl of the dangers of the 911 air quality but not the FFs , police and volunteers helping with rescue efforts. They should have been handing out OSHA certified masks for small particles instead of declaring the air quality was fine…
I didnt ask what Brandon thought about twin studies.
I asked, given what he stated as a truth, namely upbringing
outweighs “intrinsic” factors, what would he Predict for twin studies.
That’s a different question. I’m not really interested in silly skeptical pet tricks– like oh those experiments are fatally flawed.
I’m asking what he would predict, given what he accepts as a truth.
Brandon S (#145212): “I deem UCS’s position on fission power more reasonable than Greenpeace’s.”
I’m not actually up to speed on what UCS has been saying recently. I was thinking of what they were saying in the ’70s. Sometimes the “need more safety regulation” card is code for “ask for an impossible level of assurance in order to delay forever”. Sometimes it’s reasonable. I probably don’t know enough to be able to tell the difference in this case. But given UCS’s takes on other issues, I’m not betting on the latter.
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Re: relative safety of generation technologies — That was one of the arguments in a small booklet I read back then (’70s) entitled something like “The health hazards of *not* going nuclear”. If I recall correctly — an unlikely premise to be sure — the primary factor is that lots of coal miners suffer health issues leading to premature death. Of course, most voters aren’t miners…and I doubt that any “greens” are.
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Re: WSJ article. Weird — when I click on my own link now, I get the paywall too. But when I get there via Google search, I can see the whole article. Try Googling “Harry Reid’s Nuclear Taxpayer Waste”.
Anyway, the article’s line is that because Yucca Mountain was not approved, “the feds have been in breach of agreements to accept spent nuclear fuel, and the lawsuits from utilities have rolled in. [Dept. of] Energy has paid more than $4 billion as a result of such suits over the past four years, and by some estimates total liability for these legal breaches could exceed $50 billion. ” The article is a year old, by the way.
“I’m not fully up to speed here. Which question?”
Any question, your choice.
Look people who comment across a broad range of sites are more intreresting than your average commenter.
plus, you changed your mind on something. that makes you inherently interesting.
Mosh: I’m not really interested in silly skeptical pet tricks– like oh those experiments are fatally flawed
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Nearly 2000 posts in, I’m pretty sure you’re the first person to bring up fatally flawed experiments – and yes, we all know you’re not a skeptic. Not sure if you’re trying to win your Onyx Consensus Badge, or just like to stir shit, or derail the thread, but honestly – you’re about as on topic as anything Oliver M has ever said with that comment, wrt this thread.
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Love ya Mosh, but quit refuting arguments that haven’t been made, k? I won’t speculate as to why you’ve done this (again), just noting that in this particular case that you have. [edit, also off topic, but] If you’ve uploaded any new R libraries I’d love to hear about them.
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Thanks!
DeWitt Payne,
I didn’t know that particular detail. It does conform to my general perception, thanks for the refs.
TerryMN,
Nope. That was me. I was looking up twin studies and ‘fatally flawed’ occurred in a lot of the hits. Since SteveF brought up the subject of twin studies and IQ, I made a clearly marked as sarcastic statement.
Not only has nobody said anything about “fatally flawed experiments”, we weren’t even discussing experiments, but rather the appropriateness of a given metric for explaining a certain class of observations.
@Dewitt,
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I also missed the “like” so I suppose it was just a simile – poor reading on my part, and I admit I’m (probably over-)sensitive to the broad brush characterizations I guess.
Carrick,
How was the flight?
Can you give an example or two where you favor more regulation than conservatives do? (#145185) Honest question.
TerryMN.
I will take your apology off the air. hehe,
The reason I asked Brandon for his prediction, given his prior statement, is so that we can avoid the kind of silly discussions
that happen when folks cite studies and then other folks use well worn skeptical retorts.
“If you’ve uploaded any new R libraries I’d love to hear about them.”
I stopped making packages, the ordeal of keeping up the maintence was not worth it.
I am looking at doing a end user dashboard for climate data using Shiny, but its pretty slow going. Have a look at Shiny and Shiny dashboard.
Most of my work now is a mix between R and SQL .. I officially hate SQL
Steve Mosher,
“I asked Brandon for his prediction”
Don’t hold your breath while waiting.
Mosh – you’re broad-brushing again and worrying about things that happen at WUWT, not here. We’re here. Stick to The Blackboard 🙂
HaroldW,
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I did some contract work for UCS, oh, 10 years ago (eek, 14 years ago) and most of my opinions of them are informed by that experience. It’s one thing to know an organization is political, quite another to see it in action, if only briefly.
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Not surprising to me that their stance on nukes has changed since the ’70s, nor that Greenpeace’s basically hasn’t.
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Exactly.
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I could argue it both ways. I definitely don’t know enough to convince myself of either.
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My understanding is that miners are better protected from respiratory ailments than they used to be. Epidemiology is tricky, and I’m fully aware that the estimates from various sources (WHO, NIH to name two) differ significantly. Still, I’m fairly confident that old- and current-gen coal plants are best phased out on the basis of present-day health hazards to general populations alone.
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One of my biases is that in my childhood I knew an ex-coal miner (old school deep rural Kentucky) who died of black lung disease. Good man, sad loss.
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Re: WSJ article. Weird — when I click on my own link now, I get the paywall too.
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Bugger.
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Added to the queue.
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Lawsuits are a fiscal challenge for new plant construction as well. NIMBY again. Then non-local, less informed activists get to claim that nukes aren’t economically viable. Derp-de-derp.
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Frustrating is about as mildly as I can put it.
Brandon Gates,
I always wondered not economically viable compared to what? The answer seems to be combined cycle natural gas fired generators, not wind, solar or biofuels. Admittedly, they emit less CO2 than coal fired plants. But if the world is coming to an end unless we stop atmospheric CO2 levels from rising, or in the case of 350.org, want to reduce them from present levels, then any CO2 emission is too much. Switching from coal to natural gas only delays the inevitable by a decade or so, IIRC.
Steven Mosher,
I thought I’d weigh in on IQ. So, tests are not comprehensive of “all” intelligence, e.g. as evidenced by individuals scoring differently on different tests. My recollection is that twin studies are inconclusive on nature vs. nurture, but suggestive that nurture is quite relevant. Testing is reliably predictive for level of education attainment and job performance.
I’m not sure which parts of those statements are contentious here. I’m getting most of this from Psych. 101, refreshed by the Wikipedia article I coincidentally browsed a few weeks ago.
I think so too. And yet, one board can be a full-time job …
By way of clarification, I should probably disclose that I more changed position than I changed my mind.
Thanks. Speaking of moral hazards, being … controversial … on C13 has been kind to my traffic stats.
Brandon Gates,
“My recollection is that twin studies are inconclusive on nature vs. nurture, but suggestive that nurture is quite relevant.”
Your recollection is mistaken. See the compiled correlation data (from multiple studies) at #145176. Nurture has an influence, but inheritance is stronger, especially in adulthood (as opposed to during childhood).
Brandon Gates,
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Long day. 🙂 I think I know what sore means but tomorrow morning I’ll realize I really had no idea.
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It’s a sad commentary on blog denizens that so few of them ever seem to publicly admit error or change their minds. Ironic that since so many pretend to be more or less infallible that what attracts people’s serious attention seems to be admitting otherwise. It seems particularly rare in the trenches between mainstreamers and contrarians. Skeptics? Contrarians? I don’t much care what terms we use anymore since I’ve long since gotten used to identifying as ‘denier’. I’m still in ‘SkS dialect’ I guess.
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So anyways. I’m glad you mentioned the Exxon thing. Do you mind if I ask, why were you writing on that? Do you recall what brought the idea to mind? As you probably noticed (tee-hee 😉 ) I suspect a coordinated agenda. Do you come to disabuse me of this particular conspiracy theory?
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Thanks Brandon!
Steven Mosher,
I’ve never learned R. I downloaded it and played with it for awhile. I think the fact that my understanding of all of the fun mathematical and statistical procedures R automates stinks is my problem. I didn’t delve all that far but it seemed complicated; R didn’t seem intuitive to me. But.
Don’t really have a point in saying this. 🙂 Never heard of Shiny till you mentioned it on this thread.
Lucia, SteveF, DeWitt, others?
I appreciate the discussion regarding classic liberals, progressive, and conservatives. Still catching up reading and thinking about that discussion.
… Ok. I think I’m more or less caught up now.
[TY Kenneth]
Brandon Gates,
BTW forgot to mention – It’s a rare treat to bump into someone who identifies with mainstream climate science and concern about it and who seems to embrace the idea of nuclear power. I don’t really understand why it seems so rare; I suspect if I really knew the answer to this I’d understand something useful.
DeWitt Payne,
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In my conversations, often not specified but wind/solar are implied — but that’s sans storage which doesn’t solve the intermittency problem. Yet, there are a number of voices on my side of AGW who get it, and either cautiously accept fission as a solution if not outright advocate for it like I do. So that’s encouraging. With Fukushima still reverberating, I’m not sure we’re making enough noise in the right places.
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We’re it not for AGW, I’d be fully on board. That said, I’m not against shale gas as the near-term coal replacement. I’d rather have nukes for electrical power, and LNG/CNG for vehicles as the interim solution while we’re figuring out how to make liquid fuels out of something other than corn.
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And practically zero particulates w/o scrubbers.
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CO2 < 350 ppmv is doubling down on the already near-impossible. I see little point even talking about it.
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I don’t know the estimates, but that sounds about right. To me it’s immaterial except for impact planning because I think NOT making that switch buys time on balance. Say “we” block shale fracking, path of least resistance economically might be coal. Plus, clamping down on the gas fields would cost goodwill that might have been better spent getting an R&D subsidy for … whatever, any … forward progress on something else.
I beg your pardon Brandon Gates, it does say on your blog large as life that the article on Exxon was prompted by something you saw on Rabet Run / Eli’s place. I knew that, just slipped my mind. As I said, long day. Maybe I’d better hush until I get some rest. 🙂
Night all.
SteveF,
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Done. That’s looking fairly bomb-proof, thanks.
Brandon Gates,
The CO2 emissions per KWH produced from natural gas (gas turbine with a steam bottoming cycle) is only about 35% as high as from coal (depends a little on grade of coal). So the reduction in CO2 is really quite significant if you switch form coal to natural gas. Nuclear may be a better option, but opposition to nuclear power is so entrenched that natural gas seems reasonable option. It is very low in air pollution as well (sulfates, ash, nitrates, etc.).
mark bofill,
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I see it IRL too. I recall that my first Usenet experiences were shocking for a number of behaviors that differ from face-to-face interactions.
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Deep Thought of the Day: In politics, the point is to NOT change one’s own mind, but others.
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I prefer to use contrarian unless someone is being particularly feisty. I refuse to cede skeptic.
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When a neighbor calls you an ass, strap a saddle on your back. ~Jewish Proverb
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I like ‘warmunist’ myself because of the pun. Call me an ‘alarmist’ though, and we’ll have words. 😉
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Right now I’m mostly having fun meeting folks, sounding and being sounded out — and having some actual discussions. It’s been nice.
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Not a problem. The followup post was decidedly more pointy, but in the original article, Exxon’s alleged past sins were ancillary to the main question, which was: should the AGU (and UCS) continue to accept financial support from Exxon?
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Legalese aside, I *do* think Exxon sinned, but that there is an opinion based on some suggestive evidence. “Proof” of conspiracy? There’s some due process that would need to happen first, and my blog scribblings won’t ever be able to cut it.
mark bofill,
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I think because it’s still a heterodox position. Hansen and friends’ open letter seems to have helped.
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I’ve noted that US conservatives are divided as well, but it doesn’t have the same identity politics working against it so far as I can tell.
“Mosh – you’re broad-brushing again and worrying about things that happen at WUWT, not here. We’re here. Stick to The Blackboard”
Fair enough. Point taken
“I thought I’d weigh in on IQ. So, tests are not comprehensive of “all†intelligence, e.g. as evidenced by individuals scoring differently on different tests. My recollection is that twin studies are inconclusive on nature vs. nurture, but suggestive that nurture is quite relevant. ”
Personally I haven’t looked at much work on this since maybe 1981.. Ya Pysch 101. haha. So, I don’t have what I would call a well formed belief on the subject. shrugs shoulders.. dunno
But, the thing that interests me is Brandon’s conviction that nuture outweighs nature. (Assuming of course that we have read his position clearly.) The structure of experiments to determine this, as he indicated, is interesting. Hence my question: Given his certainty that nuture dominates, what would his prediction be.
SteveF,
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Which makes liberal opposition to it really frustrating for me, even though I understand the argument. What initially surprised me is the amount of conservative opposition to phasing out coal in favor of shale gas until I remembered that just because I don’t live near coal country anymore doesn’t mean it stopped existing.
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Natural gas a path of least resistance that I’m not entirely unhappy about. I understand the inherent fears of nuclear power, but the political opposition still pisses me off because I don’t think it’s rational.
“I’ve never learned R. I downloaded it and played with it for awhile. I think the fact that my understanding of all of the fun mathematical and statistical procedures R automates stinks is my problem. I didn’t delve all that far but it seemed complicated; R didn’t seem intuitive to me. But.
#########################
It takes a couple months before your mind will start thinking
in R.
Don’t really have a point in saying this. 🙂 Never heard of Shiny till you mentioned it on this thread.
Here is an example.
basically you write R and html is spit out
http://shiny.rstudio.com/gallery/superzip-example.html
Long ago I did some UIs in R , but the shiny approach is way more cooler..
After reading this article by Mike Mann, http://ecowatch.com/2016/03/28/michael-mann-climate-denial/ all I can think of is, holy sh@t, It’s like Trump and his followers. Mike should be banned from science like Trump should be banned from politics, and their followers should be banned from voting… As a classic liberal/libertarian/fiscal conservative/social liberal I don’t condone that thought process that went through my head but, damn, I can’t stand either one…
Steven Mosher:
I just home, and it’s very late (or rather early, depending on how you want to view it). I’ll try to write a little answer, but be warned, I am writing this while quite groggy.
The view I expressed wouldn’t provide any clear or direct predictions regarding twin studies. There are all sorts of issues that come about with twin studies, and I think a number are inadequately addressed. I bring this up because accurately answering this question would require fully knowing the approach of the test. Twins raised in the same household would obviously have different environmental influences than ones raised in different households. This difference would likely grow if one twin was rased in another country or ethnic culture. Additionally, if one twin was raised apart from the other, it is likely adoption was involved. Families which adopt are not representative of families as a whole. Additionally, it is known correlations between test scores often vary with age, raising questions about any results unless the study creators examined the twins for a significant portion of their life.
There are more more concerns like those, but if you can overcome all them, I suspect what you’d find is IQ scores for identical twins would correlate better than for fraternal twins and even better than non-twin pairings. However, if you properly accounted for all the various factors influencing the test results, I believe you would find the genetic component is significantly smaller than the environmental one. It might turn out genetics explain 15-20% of the variation in IQ scores while things like family life, education, ethnic culture, technological exposure and and dozens of other things not tied to genetics explain 50+%.
Brandon, is your skepticism about genetics have anything to do with your family background? Just curious.
Brandon Gates,
“political opposition still pisses me off because I don’t think it’s rational.”
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Yes, it is not mainly a rational opposition to perceived dangers (there is some NIMBY opposition, but that is not the primary opposition), it is a philosophical rejection of the whole idea. That is, nuclear power it is not “natural and sustainable”, so is just not acceptable. There is as much opposition to developing “inherently safe” thorium salt reactors, which can’t go out of control, no matter what the operators do, and which produce only a tiny fraction of the waste volume, as there is to the present generation of reactors. It is very much like the adamant opposition to genetically modified organisms… again mostly philosophical.
Mosh I am looking at doing a end user dashboard for climate data using Shiny, but its pretty slow going. Have a look at Shiny and Shiny dashboard.
Most of my work now is a mix between R and SQL .. I officially hate SQL
I’ll take a look, thanks! I’ve been working on Hadoop for the last 4 years or so – the development languages on top of it can be Java, R, Python, Scala, and a few others (including SQL, which I also hate). Had a conv w/Steve Mc about this a few years ago, and I still say the best way forward for the modelers is to move their stuff to work on top of Hadoop instead of constantly asking for bigger computers.
Brandon
If I understand correctly: you mean variation of social, technological, nutritional, etc circumstances across the entire earth, not just in the US? The variation in the entire earth includes circumstances where people make it to adulthood in near starvation, vitamine A deprived and so on. This is pretty rare in the US.
I would expect if studies did expand environment to include a huge range of environmental factors, that the fraction of environment would increase. But assuming your answer to the above is “yes”, what’s your estimate if we just assume the variability in a large country like the US? I think that’s what’s of greater interest to most others in this conversation. Also, it permits us to compare heritability of intelligence relative to other things like height.
Anyone interested in current research on the heritability of cognitive function might want to see:
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Genetic contributions to variation in general cognitive function: a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies in the CHARGE consortium, Davies et al, Nature group, 2015. (open access)
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The 100 plus authors show: 1) cognitive function is heritable and depends on many, many genetic variations 2) the single nucleotide polymorphisms evaluated in the study (SNPs) set a lower bound for heritability of cognitive function at ~29%. The study doesn’t set an upper bound. 3) many SNPs associated with cognitive ability appear to also be associated with cognitive disorders like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
SteveF,
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You think it is philosophical. Interesting. It had occurred to me to wonder if it wasn’t coincidence in a sense..
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I wasn’t born yet so I don’t know, before my time. But my thought was that opposition to nuclear for military use was tied to opposition to nuclear development. I have an impression that the path our development of nuclear power plants took was influenced by considerations for refining plutonium for weapons. I have not verified this (in fact I’m not 100% sure I’m not 100% making this up at this second, posting before coffee is just a mistake I never learn from) so as always handle with caution.
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But yeah. The short of it is, the ‘activist tradition’ if you will; the people who fought against nuclear became the nucleus of the activists against global warming. And they’d already spent years fighting nuclear. Maybe.
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I should look at Greenpeace’s positions on this over the years as Brandon Gates has mentioned/alluded to.
Lucia,
Yes, what brought the subject up was DeWitt’s observation about ‘progressives’ reluctance to accept that different groups of people have different cognitive ability in part due to the genes they inherit from their parents. If identifiable groups have different average cognitive abilities due to genetic makeup, then the argument that all groups must be equally represented in all intellectual endeavors, in proportion to their population, becomes very dubious. It seems to me as silly an argument as suggesting the NBA should insist on a mix of players of different ethnic backgrounds in proportion to those ethnic populations in the USA, or if you prefer, in the whole world. My observation is that only progressives will advance such a silly argument and expect people to take it seriously.
Mark Bofill,
“The short of it is, the ‘activist tradition’ if you will; the people who fought against nuclear became the nucleus of the activists against global warming.”
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Yes. Many of the same people and same organizations, with the same objections to human impacts on the environment. If you get a chance, ask some of these folks their estimate of the maximum number of people on Earth which will allow the ‘preservation and protection of nature’. I think you will be surprised by their answers. The numbers I have seen kicked about range from a few % to 10% or 20% of the current population. The thinking is basically Malthusian, with a heavy overlay of green moral righteousness and global wealth redistribution.
So about Exxon. What exactly did they know, did they know CS? DI’d they have a better idea of CS than we commonly have today? The lost secrets!
SteveF,
Another consequence of affirmative action is that by favoring one group you, by definition, discriminate against others. In college admissions, it’s mainly Asians that are getting the dirty end of the stick.
Since sue brought up Trump: Anybody who thinks Trump is actually a good manager should read this.
SteveF:
Flight was good (just ABQ to MEM, with one layover in DFW).
It’d be easier to start by explaining a part of my political philosophy:
I guess I would describe myself as more closely aligned to fiscal pragmatism than fiscal conservatism. Fiscal conservatism advocates a minimum of government regulation (but it’s not clear where they draw the line). Fiscal pragmatists don’t draw a line in the sand and say smaller regulation is always good. We’re not rigid idealists and recognize that while government is bloated and the marketplace is over-regulated in many cases, you won’t always confer an advantage to the public interest by just randomly slashing regulation.
Some regulation is needed, and essential, for our public safety, our economic and personal freedom, and for a healthy economy. Other regulation is wasteful and ineffective, and serves only to protect the existence of the regulatory agencies.
I think regulation should serve one or more of the following functions: 1) protect the public safety, 2) prevent unfair market practice, 3) prevent exploitation of the vulnerable, 4) improve the efficiency of the marketplace, 5) protect our personal freedom, etc.
But I don’t support government regulation as a mechanism to effect social change (e.g., affirmative action laws or carbon tax). I think this is not only economically inefficient, it is an ineffective strategy for causing the “desired” social change. I’m not ideologically against any form of government intervention, but I think regulatory intervention doesn’t work in cases like this.
Examples of regulation that I think is “good” but isn’t supported by fiscal conservatives:
1) Improved federal oversight into real estate appraisals (e.g, the Dodd-Frank act). Conservative groups want to repeal this. This gives a rationale for why laws like this make sense (to me).
2) Improved standards for monitoring and disposal of waste water at fracking sites. This seems to be a no-brainer, but most conservative organizations seem to oppose it.
All intelligence is nature [genetics], nuture just ensures that it develops.
So genetics is the key.
Most humans are reasonably savvy and can be improved by education and training.
Poverty is crippling to its proper development as is cultural mindset.
Super intelligence is a freak development where all the right bits get lined up at once.
Affirmative action at College level suffers from having had the horse bolt a long time before.
Developing the skill of intelligence need active work put in at a very early age, before 5 YO, with continuation through to teenage level.
After that you would need Professor Higgins to make a great deal of difference. College is too late.
Trying to define it I would liken it to the ability to drive a car well, good drivers are probably more intelligent.
Sorry to all the bad drivers and men out there.
Dewitt, your link is a perfect example, IMO, of Carrick’s point, esp real estate appraisal.
And as I live in Joisey, I’ll allow myself some conspiracy ideation 😉 Our last 3 governors all fractured their femurs while in office. That’s a difficult bone to break… 1) Corzine was on his way back from a meeting in Atlantic City and his limo crashed on the GSP. His aide in the car was uninjured but so traumatized that she left her position w/ the governor. 2) McGreevey apparently broke his leg romping on the beach with his gay lover while his wife was home caring for their child. He later resigned as a ‘gay governor’ after questions arose of his hiring an Israeli “poet” for a position where he tried but could not get security clearance. 3) Whitman broke hers while skiing. She later became head of the EPA who stated the air quality after 9/11was fine, then later fired(?) for that faux pas. Either NJ governors are the most unlucky ppl or something else is going on here… Remember that look of Chris Christie looking like a deer in headlights… 😉 OK, I’m done ranting! Sorry.
Carrick,
Thanks for that explanation.
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My guess is that you would find more overlap on most regulatory issues with many conservatives than you think. I believe the common thread here is ‘pragmatic’. If there is clear evidence of a problem with contaminated water from fracked gas wells, then regulation to minimize that problem makes sense, and reasonable people of good will can surely reach a consensus on what that regulation should do.
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I think where conservatives tend to ‘draw a line in the sand’ (and with a lot more conviction than Mr Obama!) is regulation where the cost is astronomically higher than any potential benefit, and where the objective of the regulation is not to address what is, by consensus, a real problem, but instead to advance a policy agenda by any means possible.
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I mean, in today’s political environment, regulation is being used to implement policy changes which are contrary to both the spirit and the letter of the laws those regulations are based upon. It is the Trojan Horse (that is, deceptive) aspect of many Federal regulations which I think most conservatives object to, not reasonable and prudent regulation. When the objective of regulation on the treatment of water from gas well fracking is in fact to stop fracking and to force use of renewables instead, rather to actually address a problem with contaminated water, that is IMO nothing more than political fraud, and conservatives are going to (correctly) object to it.
SteveF,
Yes. I knew the initial context.
What’s not clear to me is whether there is any real diagreement under all the haze of apparent disagreement.
I suspect that everyone agrees environmental factors like vitamin A deficiency, lead/mercury exposure, being battered by parents, being raised by wolves (e.g. Romulus and Remus) or gorillas (aka Tarzana) or the post-apacoliptic conditions that exist in the world of MadMax would affect cognitive function and whatever is measured in “IQ”. So: if one is trying to explain differences in groups who have very strongly different environments, then ‘nurture’ is going to pop out as be a big factor. (When compared to kids raised in current US conditions, kids in raised in “Mad Max” conditions are going to have different results in measurements of intelligence, and likely different components of intelligence.)
But that issue isn’t strongly relevant to the argument between progressives and others in the US political sphere. In our political context, the question is whether the differences that in outcome are more due to relative lack of opportunity, prejudice and so on, or whether they are more due to heritable things like intelligence.
Teasing out the answer is harder for things like intelligence than say, becoming center on an NBA team where clearly, height makes a huge difference. And while nutrition affects height, it’s also pretty obvious heredity matter people people can just look at someone and determine if they are tall or short. Intelligence takes a bit longer to diagnose and often people can’t judge it well quickly.
SteveF:
Perhaps so, but it seems that the converse also happens, in that conservative groups sometimes use the Trojan Horse argument to oppose regulation that they oppose for other (probably selfish) reasons. I think that is the case with waste water from fracking.
Rather than propose an alternative bill that doesn’t contain Trojan Horse elements, they seem to prefer to dig their heals in the sand and prevent any attempt to address these issues.
For reasons that are probably clear to you, allowing polluted waste water to contaminate drinking water or otherwise harm the populace benefits absolutely nobody in the long run, including investors looking to earn money off of investing in fracking.
“Dutchmen are taller because of their genes”
Not until after WWII when their diet became a lot richer in protein and they distributed income more broadly
http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/23/why-the-dutch-are-so-tall/
Carrick,
Dodd-Frank is not just about real estate appraisal. It’s having a rather large effect on liquidity, particularly in the bond market. That’s not good and will be worse when, not if, there’s another financial crisis.
There is, of course, disagreement about this, but I’m seeing concern from multiple sources.
Eli,
So you’re implying that with the right diet any newborn could grow up to be as tall as Manute Bol? Oh, puhleeze. I don’t think anyone here disagrees with the idea that being deprived will growing up may keep people from reaching their full potential. But once they’re grown, it doesn’t matter if it was nature or nurture. Affirmative action won’t fix it in either case.
Lucia,
“Intelligence takes a bit longer to diagnose and often people can’t judge it well quickly.”
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But seeing as you are a tutor, my guess is that it doesn’t take you too long. 😉
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But in all seriousness, judging people’s intellectual capacity depends on the the context in which you interact and the subject matter. A blog exchange on statistical mechanics, cold fusion, or even radiative heat transfer, makes that determination a little easier and quicker. There is always the confounding factor of exposure to specific subject matter (or lack thereof) of course, but I don’t think it is terribly hard to access individual’s general ability to assimilate and consolidate new information.
DeWitt,
Eli Rabbet = Lysenko?
.
Just askin’.
sue:
Nope. It arises from having examined different IQ tests and different results for them. Particularly, seeing how various versions of the tests have been modified/refined over time as well as how resuklts have to be adjusted based on when they were taken.
Oh, and how IQ test results change with age. The way correlations in test scores change as a person grows older does a lot to suggest what they’re measuring isn’t just some genetic trait.
lucia:
My answer is I don’t know. I would have to give a lot of thought to various demographic issues due to how varied the United States is. I’d also have to consider the different IQ tests currently used, how they’ve been refined over the years, and how quickly changes in the patterns of their results would manifest. I can’t say I’m interested enough at the moment to do that.
That said, I know estimates on the variance in IQ scores explained by genetics have varied in the range of something 40-80% for adults depending on things like just which test is used. Peculiarly, the estimates are lower for younger people, with genetics ostensibly being more important for IQ as one grows older. While I take issue with that conclusion, I’d say 40-80% is the upper range I’d consider plausible for the population of any country. I’d then lower that based on how much non-genetic factors vary in the population being examined. How much I’d lower it for the specific case of the United States is something I don’t know.
But when making any such estimate, I’d feel obligated to emphasize I’m only talking about variance in IQ scores for the various tests being used. I would strongly recommend against assuming variance in IQ scores will match variance in “intelligence,” however you might choose to think of the concept. There is no objective definition of “intellgience,” and different people have different thoughts when they hear the word. As such, any discussion of the variance explained by genetics I might give would be limited to how much variation genetics might explain in IQ test results, not in actual intelligence. Any conflation of the two would be inappropriate.
SteveF
Actually, I can’t diagnose differences in intelligence between students all that fast. Differences in preparation, stress and other things can disguise it for a while. It’s easier to diagnose differences in “desire to think”, “perseverance” , “willingness to try additional exercises something others recommend as useful” and a few other things.
Bear in mind: I only tutor physics students. So any diagnosing involves a range of kids all of whom are at least fairly bright.
Carrick,
“Rather than propose an alternative bill that doesn’t contain Trojan Horse elements, they seem to prefer to dig their heals in the sand and prevent any attempt to address these issues.”
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I think there may be some confusion of cause and effect. With Mr Obama in office, I doubt he would ever allow a “non-Trojan Horse” alternative to become law. The issue is the President is himself sitting inside the regulatory Trojan Horse. Hell, he designed the horse! Maybe Hillary will be more inclined to compromise on these things. Maybe not.
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Of course, should the Republicans lose both Senate and House (courtesy Donald Trump), Hillary is not going to have to compromise on anything. In that case, plan on much higher taxes.
TerryMN:
Evolution doesn’t cause changes in average height of inches in the span of a handful of human generations. It simply cannot act that quickly. It’s quite possible a genetic shift could occur within a nation within that much time or less due to genetic information of humans from other areas spreading within the nation (such as due to migration), and that could affect the average height of people there, but if you account for factors like that, changes in average height are going to be tied to the environment of the people being examined, not evolution.
Bradon
Evidently, there is some disagreement on that score. See:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/did-natural-selection-make-dutch-tallest-people-planet
Lucia,
The conscious selection of mates based on specific desired characteristics (in this case, being tall; in other cases ‘men prefer blonds’, or women prefer ‘tall dark and handsome’, or most everyone prefers smarter) can exaggerate the pace of movement in the average of a population.
SteveF:
If he did so, the political risk would be on him.
It’s speculative on your part what would happen, had the appropriate legislation been proposed, voted on, and passed by House and Senate. But by sitting on their hands, the Republicans have properly turned themselves into piñatas for the general public to beat on.
That’s not in the best interest of the country, and bad politics to boot.
I happen to think they set themselves up for this, and for Donald Trump’s ascendancy, with their utter political incompetency and inability to accomplish anything of merit in the last four years.
Carrick,
“and passed by House and Senate’
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But that’s the issue. With cloture rules in the Senate, no law contrary to Mr Obama’s desired policies (eg blocking Trojan Horse regulations) is likely ever going to arrive on his desk.
SteveF.
Exactly. Harry Reid’s influence has been somewhat limited by not being the majority leader, but it’s still pretty strong, Yucca Mountain, for example. But this has managed to be ignored by those who insist that Republicans in Congress haven’t lived up to their campaign promises.
Of course, the Republicans in Congress could always shut down the government. I know someone who still thinks this should have been done and that the in the last shutdown, the Republicans caved when they were about to win. But then he seems to be a Trump supporter too and doesn’t believe the plain words of the 14th Amendment on birthright citizenship.
DeWitt,
“doesn’t believe the plain words of the 14th Amendment on birthright citizenship”
.
We may run out of aluminum foil fashioning our hats!
Even though it does not fit with topics being discussed here, I thought I might get some direction by posting some observations here on observed and CMIP5 climate model temperature series divergence of the Land SAT, Ocean SAT and Ocean SST series. For observed series I see a divergence around 1976 and for climate models it occurs around 1995. The divergence occurs at a near common time point for all 3 series, i.e. Land and Ocean SAT and Ocean SST. For the observed, the temperature series were HadNMat2 (Ocean SAT), HadISST (Ocean SST) and CRUTemp4 (Land SAT) while for the CMIP5 models I used the ensemble means for RCP 2.6, 4.5, 6.0 and 8.5. All RCP scenarios produced very much the same results.
In order to best see the divergence in all cases I offset the SAT and SST series to align prior to the divergence point. Prior to the divergence point all series align well without any evidence of divergence or convergence in the series. The divergence is such that the Land SAT has the greatest upward trend and with the Ocean SAT having next greatest trend and with the Ocean SST having the least trend. The order of these trends for the Ocean series are in line with what Cowtan et al (2015) found in their paper for a single CMIP5 climate model. I have been a bit leery of this near universal divergence point with the climate model series and thinking that I could be looking at some unexplained artifact. I have checked individual model runs and those runs have near the same the divergence points. I have looked high and low online for literature sources about this observation and only found a single reference that talks about the observed divergence of Land SAT and Ocean SST and that is from a blog post at Isaac Held’s site http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/blog/isaac-held/2012/11/25/32-modeling-land-warming-given-oceanic-warming/ where Steve Fitzpatrick introduces the observed divergence and asks for possible explanations. The divergence comes from this link: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/mean:24/from:1900/plot/crutem4vgl/mean:24/from:1900 . I am not at all sure that a good explanation was presented on that post.
I have been looking at the these temperature series as part of my discussion with Tom Karl and the authors of the Karl (2015) paper that some have claimed has busted the “pause”. I have claimed to the Karl authors that the New Karl global temperature series continues to show a statistically significant warming slowdown provided the trends are defined and analyzed using either Single Spectrum Analysis or Empirical Mode Decomposition and the proper time periods are compared. I think I was able to make a rather convincing case but unfortunately I have not received a recent reply after some rather lengthy exchanges back and forth with Tom Karl and the Karl authors. I have also proposed to the Karl authors that in light of the divergence of the Ocean SAT and SST series and the dependence in Karl 2015 on HadNMat2 (an Ocean SAT) to adjust – following the divergence date – what is listed as a SST Ocean temperature series, i.e the New Karl Ocean series, they should reconsider the adjustment or reference the New Karl Ocean series as something other than as it is listed and considered. In addition I showed the Karl authors that the CMIP5 climate models do not show a warming slow down from a 24 year period followed by a 15 year period anywhere near to the extent that the New Karl global series does.
Carrick,
“I happen to think they set themselves up for this, and for Donald Trump’s ascendancy, with their utter political incompetency and inability to accomplish anything of merit in the last four years.”
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I actually agree with this sentiment. I think the big issue is that the Republicans had their own ideological conflicts going on. Had they the good sense to offer substantive programs on issues like the (nutty!) capital gains treatment of short term investment income (and that same crazy treatment of hedge fund manager earnings), real training programs for workers displaced by free trade agreements, etc, they would be politically much better off today, and Mr Trump would have little attraction.
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Which is not to say Mr Obama would ever allows those things to become law, he clearly would not. But at least the Republicans would not be facing a buffoon like Mr Trump, and Mr Obama would have sacrificed considerably more political support to pursue his desired progressive policies.
SteveF,
You can thank Ted Cruz for Donald Trump. Cruz wanted to be the Donald Trump. Unfortunately, Trump plays Trump better than Cruz does.
DeWitt,
Cruz can’t hold a candle to Trumps’ megawatt laser.
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My wife has to leave the room if Trump is talking on the television. I prefer to just mute the TV, but for her, that is not enough. She can’t tolerate to even have his image on a screen in the same room.
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He is the ultimate offensive politician; five times worse than Clinton at his sexual assaulting/intern-abusing/lying best. The Republicans are toast if Trump is the nominee.
Eli Rabett (Comment #145271)
“Dutchmen are taller because of their genesâ€
Not until after WWII when their diet became a lot richer in protein and they distributed income more broadly”
Went to school in Darwin post WW11 with 3 lovely Dutch parentage kids. Mother dark hair 5 foot nothing, Dad blond 6 foot 3. 2 eldest took after their mother though the boy would have been 5 foot 7. The youngest was the image and height of his Dad.
Food certainly not a factor.
–
SteveF (Comment #145274)
“judging people’s intellectual capacity depends on the the context in which you interact and the subject matter. A blog exchange on statistical mechanics, cold fusion, or even radiative heat transfer, makes that determination a little easier and quicker.”
-Darn.
Have to learn how to do those faces on a keyboard.
Brandon:
“There are more more concerns like those, but if you can overcome all them, I suspect what you’d find is IQ scores for identical twins would correlate better than for fraternal twins and even better than non-twin pairings. However, if you properly accounted for all the various factors influencing the test results, I believe you would find the genetic component is significantly smaller than the environmental one. ”
So what is the list of things you have to account for?
be complete and explain why you think those things need to
be on the list ( for example, do you have to control for the
persons name)
“It might turn out genetics explain 15-20% of the variation in IQ scores while things like family life, education, ethnic culture, technological exposure and and dozens of other things not tied to genetics explain 50+%.”
50+20 leaves 30% unaccounted for?
Basically, since you seem to know a lot about this I am asking you for your prediction and how you would design the twin experiment
and then a rational for that design.. In other words what information leads you to believe that you have to control for various variables?
Steve Mosher,
Before going too far down that rabbit hole, you might just want to consider cutting through all the trash with Occam’s razor. The simple explanation, and that most consistent with the data, is that cognitive ability is highly heritable. Jeez!
Mosh:
Basically, since you seem to know a lot about this I am asking you for your prediction and how you would design the twin experiment
and then a rational for that design.. In other words what information leads you to believe that you have to control for various variables?
–
Good Q. That write-up could then be submitted to a journal too if good notes were kept.
–
[edit, forgot so say – Lucia, thanks for the quick un-ban!]
Given a lack of nutrition, Manute could be Muggsie. There is considerable evidence that bad nutrition has a retarding influence on intelligence.
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=151029&fileId=S0021932003002633
Eli,
“There is considerable evidence that bad nutrition has a retarding influence on intelligence.”
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Yup, and ever growing evidence that being a tenured professor has a similar retarding influence.
SteveF,
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At this point I should note that my argument for irrationality rests on data and analysis for which I must also maintain skepticism. I reiterate that epidemiology is not an “exact” science. Confounding factors are such that the results of any given study are surely subject to some degree of bias. What I normally look for are multiple studies from multiple disciplines arriving at similar conclusions.
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In this case, the coal to nuclear comparison shows several orders of magnitude difference, even when I use the low-end estimates for coal mortality rate and high-end estimates for nuclear. Most of my confidence rests on that observation.
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The TL;DR is this: I do allow some room for incidental ignorance or healthy doubts on the part of folks who have an ideological or fear-based opposition to nukes.
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Yes, I have frequently seen that kind of argument and consider it meaningless and dogmatic.
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Sure. I’m all for continued development along those lines, there are a number of other passively-safe designs on the drawing board which also show promise. My thing is that the current gen designs already in production have what I consider an acceptably safe track record.
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I have a favorite analogy. Fission is the energy industry equivalent of commercial air travel. Lots of people fear flying even though they’re more likely to die driving to work every day. Airliner disasters are always front-page news, yet the worldwide fatality rate is on the order of one person per day. Compare that to ~3,200 people per day killed worldwide in traffic accidents … 133 per hour, 2 per minute! Set a timer to beep once every 30 seconds and within the hour it becomes background noise and you’ll tune it out.
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That’s what we’ve done on our coal power habit. Yet the media still can’t stop yammering about Fukushima, so much so that they’ve apparently scared the Germans into backing away from nukes. The mind boggles.
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I see the parallels and agree they exist. It’s funny how some issues turn progressives into conservatives, eh? 🙂
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I’m personally split on GMO, mainly due to relative unfamiliarity particulars — which now that I think on it is somewhat odd because I have a far stronger historical background in biology than in any other science. You have perhaps just given me the motivation to make this the time to dig in.
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From what I’ve already gathered, I’ll lead with this: I’m not opposed to GMO on principle because, in theory, direct genetic manipulation *seems* to lend itself to finer and more responsive control and optimization than traditional selective breeding and hybridization techniques. In the scenario of increased food demand in the face of a changing climatic conditions, any advantage is paramount.
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My primary concern is that monkeying with genes directly also *seems* to have a greater potential to lead to unintended consequences. I’ll allow for the possibility that my concern is an irrational fear based on ignorance, not unlike so many people of any ideological stripe who fear the very real and potentially terrible hazards of splitting atoms.
Steven Mosher,
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Well then, I’m only a decade more current. Spitballing it is fun though.
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That was a view I came into this with as being plausible, but as SteveF points out at #145176, it might be an uphill climb to make it stick.
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Reading his answer, I think he makes a good point about controls. On the other hand, without lab-condition controls:
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Same person (tested twice) .95
Identical twins—Reared together .86
Identical twins—Reared apart .76
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That’s a very compelling argument for nature over nurture, especially considering:
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Fraternal twins—Reared together .55
Fraternal twins—Reared apart .35
Biological siblings—Reared together .47
Biological siblings—Reared apart .24
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I can think of an experimental design that might better quantify the percentage effect of nurture, but it would be rather elaborate and quite draconian. Think “The Truman Show” writ large.
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Something else to think about. How well do standardized test training courses actually work?
Brandon Schollenberger: ‘Evolution doesn’t cause changes in average height of inches in the span of a handful of human generations. It simply cannot act that quickly.’
Alistair Wilson, University of Exeter: ‘So the first challenge for scientists is to try and determine the relative contributions of genetic change (=evolution) and environmental change to what is happening.
For some simple Mendelian traits this is trivial because of an (almost) 1:1 mapping between a genotype we can determine and a trait. In such cases we can literally measures gene frequency changes from 1 generation to the next and see teh corresponding trait change. To robustly infer that these changes are adaptive evolution we strictly need to a) understand selection on the trait to make sure changes are in the expected direction and b) rule out genetic “drift” in the absence of selection as an alternative explanation for the change. Note change through drift IS most certainly evolution, but it is not “adaptive evolution” (i.e. response to natural selection) which is I think what Taylor is referring to specifically. Our ability to meet this criteria increases with the number of generations so while we may be able to see change over a single (or few) generations, we may not be able to rule out drift on statistical grounds until we have followed the genotype/trait frequency for longer (e.g. tens of generations).
For “complex” or polygenic traits – those like body weight or parental care behaviour which are likely to depend on many genes of small effect AND many environmental influences, “proving” adaptive evolution is real time is harder within a single population. This is beacuse we can’t simply track changing gene frequencies, and thus can never 100% exclude the possibility that some environmnetal variable we have not measured (and so can’t control for) is driving the trait change. We can – and do – use statistical predictions of something called “genetic merit” which is essentially the expected trait value of an individual given everything we know about its genes, and see average merit is changing across generations. Studies to date have mostly done this is 10-20 generations and found statistical evidence for genetic change underpinning trait changes that we can see (and detect easily).’
“I can think of an experimental design that might better quantify the percentage effect of nurture, but it would be rather elaborate and quite draconian. Think “The Truman Show†writ large.”
Yes. that makes his claim that nuture dominates all the more strange. That is, you can make all manner of objections about controls… but that just undercuts your ability to draw a conclusion.
Personally I always considered the genetic component to be small since all of my parents grandparents etc were barely high school graduates. but that is just an anecdote.
this was cool
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/10/genes-dont-just-influence-your-iq-they-determine-how-well-you-do-school
Point being this.. you could criticize this study and argue that 62% was ‘wrong” because of controls, but that counter argument doesnt get you to conclude that nuture outweighs nature.
this was cool
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1520-iq-is-inherited-suggests-twin-study/
I probably should have been more precise in my question to Brandon.
Given that you believe nuture explains over 50% of the variability in IQ, what would predict for IQ scores of twins raised apart?
That’s a fair question.
This was cool
http://www.livescience.com/47288-twin-study-importance-of-genetics.html
“Steve Mosher,
Before going too far down that rabbit hole, you might just want to consider cutting through all the trash with Occam’s razor. The simple explanation, and that most consistent with the data, is that cognitive ability is highly heritable. Jeez!”
I know. but brandon’s not stupid. Clearly he has some empirical evidence that shows nuture is over 50%.
He cant simply look at “faulty” twins separated study and pull a number out of his butt. So, he must have some positive data to back up his certainty that nuture is greater than 50%.
Steven Mosher,
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Agree. Something I’ve tried to get across at WUWT and elsewhere is that failing to reject a null hypothesis doesn’t mean the null is true, nor does it mean the experimental hypothesis is false. It just means that the results are not conclusive at the stated level of significance.
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Being rigorously agnostic apparently requires training. I certainly know of myself that suspending belief is difficult … and can be uncomfortable.
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Bonus: the study referenced in your first link is open access. This jumped out at me:
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It is important to emphasize that finding genetic influence is not a counsel of despair in terms of helping children who find learning difficult—heritability does not imply immutability. Heritability describes the extent to which phenotypic variance can be ascribed to DNA differences, on average, in a particular population at a particular time. In other words, heritability describes what is; it does not predict what could be. For example, despite high heritability, with sufficient educational effort, nearly all children could reach minimal levels of literacy and numeracy, which is an explicit goal of education in Finland (64). Success in achieving that goal would reduce phenotypic variance, which could change heritability. Another example is greater equality of opportunity in education would decrease environmental sources of variance and thus increase heritability, which has been demonstrated empirically (65).
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Emphasis added. I was good up to the second bit I bolded. Some of what comes after almost sounds like a description of Lamarckian inheritance, particularly, “Success in achieving that goal would reduce phenotypic variance, which could change heritability.” Um, what? How? Ref (65) is a 1985 Nature study, paywalled. The abstract isn’t much help.
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The other two articles you cited were interesting reads, thanks. Dare I say there could be a consensus on heritability of intelligence? Much depends on how we define intelligence, no? 😉
“‘Evolution doesn’t cause changes in average height of inches in the span of a handful of human generations.”
However evolution has given us genes which allow us to adapt to changing circumstances. In other words the reason nurture can work is because we have genes that program the nurture to work.
i.e. more food taller generations of children but the genes gave the capacity to respond to the food intake, not the other way round.
If this capacity was not there then the gene would only allow the one height/size/intelligence, not an increase. Obviously true starvation, injury, hypoxia etc would cause a lessening of potential.
mark bofill,
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They didn’t know CS, but they did estimate it in the 1982 primer. Paraphrasing starting on p. 33 of the .pdf (p. 26 as numbered in the document):
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– natural variability +/- 0.5 K
– at the time, pre-industrial CO2 level estimates fell into two groups based on literature at the time: 260-270 ppmv, or 290-300 ppmv.
– only a minority of climate scientists were claiming that a CO2 warming signal was detectable as of 1979, the majority opinion was that it would be detectable no later than 2000.
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Using the above as upper/lower bounds, they calculated a CS range of 1.3-3.1 K/2xCO2. Today’s IPCC estimate is 1.5-4.5 K/2xCO2, so Exxon’s estimate was both slightly lower, with a slightly smaller uncertainty range.
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I wouldn’t argue that Exxon’s was the better estimate. I’m more inclined to trust the present IPCC result for the simple fact that it’s based on ~35 additional years research performed by a much larger number of researchers using a lot more data, newer methods, better models, etc.
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Probably the best way to figure out whose estimate is better is empirically. The protocol is easy to describe: stabilize CO2 at some fixed level and wait 30 years. Actually running it is the hard part.
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At least some of them are looking found to me.
Brandon Gates,
Yeah. I haven’t gotten well organized regarding the Exxon thing yet. Now that I’ve thought about it a little more it the line of argument I was originally going to take probably doesn’t matter.
I was thinking along these lines:
1. I think if anything we know more about climate change today in 2016 than we did in 1980whatever.
2. Today we still don’t know that CS is high. As a result, we don’t know that climate change is even a net negative for humanity.
But perhaps this is irrelevant. I’m trying to get my head around the actual issues and they are slippery for various reasons:
1. It seems there are different theories under which we can decide Exxon might have done something wrong, is it about lying to the public or lying to investors?
2. I ‘get’ that RICO, intended for use against organized crime and mobsters was successfully used against Phillip Morris / big tobacco. That became legal precedent. I don’t care as much about what is legal as I do about what I think is right. Was that a correct precedent / was that decision right? I’m not sure.
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Strangely enough, I’ve got more free time during the week than I do on weekends. 🙂 I’m still running around like a crazy person today, so I’ll probably catch up with this early this coming week.
Brandon
This has to do with the way heritability is defined. It’s always defined conditioned on the sample. So the number depends on the sample in ways that are unusual.
The sample always has a range of variance in “nurture”. If the range in variance in the measured quantity in “nurture” was zero because everything was “nurtured” the same way, then all intelligence would appear “heritable”. If the range in variance in “nurture” was super-huge the “heritability” might appear small.
For an analogy: This corn in an irrigated, fertilized farmer’s field. In that field, the amount of variability due to water stress in the crop or lack of nutrients is eliminated– since the farmer works to do that. In contrast, the same corn strewn far and wide in any old field would show variability in outcome that depended on whether it got enough or too much water, enough or too much light, enough or too many nutrients and so on. Since ‘heritable’ as an outcome in an experiment is reported conditioned on the amount of variation in the sample, the % value number for “heritability” changes depending on the range of variability in “nurture” in the sample.
So universal education– especially done well– would affect how “heritability” looks on the low end of the IQ score ranges because there would be no one who had an upbringing that was the educational equivalent to Tarzan’s where he was educated by gorrillas. That doesnt necessarily mean that IQ wouldn’t still look heritable. If it is heritable, the high IQ kids might get even higher IQ scores– or not. It all depends on how education is done and what can be achieved through education.
For what it’s worth: I’m with the
Lucia (and others) –
Thanks for the background on “heritability”; I didn’t know that, and that’s one of the reasons reading here can be fun.
Lucia (#145305) – Your final thought – “I’m with the” — was left unfinished. A cliffhanger?
And in the domain of trivia, Wikipedia says that it wasn’t gorillas who raised Tarzan: “[Disney productions] portray the apes who raised Tarzan as gorillas, though in the books gorillas, called Bolgani by the Mangani, are explicitly stated to be a separate species.”
Brandon Gates,
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Part of what bugs me, was it inevitable that Exxon [edit: had to do] this research on climate? Would they have been better off if they didn’t? I’ve got a problem with any theory that punishes or obligates people or corporations for taking the trouble to find something out that they were never obligated to look into in the first place. It seems to me there’s something wrong with that.
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I suppose one could catgorize a group of individuals’ potential for success based on IQ, home environment, culture and race, but it never tell us much about a single individual in any of these categories. It would be a lazy tendency at best that would allow someone to judge an individual for admission or employment based on the categories that person might fall. On the other hand, it would be a lazy tendency at best for an individual to judge themselves limited by the category into which they may fall and not make the effort to improve or succeed or for those who might fall into what would be considered categories favorable for success and feel that they are entitled to succeed.
Success in life’s pursuits is necessarily based on the individual’s efforts and the individual not feeling limited by their falling into unfavorable categories. The individual orientation of this premise renders government action in these matters counter productive.
HaroldW,
I agree with the people who support good, broadly available education. Kids should not be excluded from getting a decent education.
The caveat is that I want to be sure that kids with higher abilities or more dedication do get access to what they need. And I do see a tension when between people who want to “use” the brighter or harder working kids as part of the resource to “help” the less bright even when that means depriving the brighter kids of access to higher levels of education or opportunity.
There is a tension there because anytime you track kids, kids can be tracked inappropriately and it happens. But you do need to track to some extent.
(By the way, in 2nd grade, we all knew reading was in “tracks”. There was the “top” reading group, the “middle” and the “bottom”. Though teachers didn’t say, we kids knew we were all tracked in other subjects by 6th grade. It wasn’t even a secret in 8th grade. For the most part, no one was surprised by which kids were in algebra and which kids were not.)
I would be very suspicious of a person’s understanding of first amendment rights or individual rights in general who suggests using RICO in the AGW debate. RICO laws that can be so easily abused probably makes those laws bad from the start.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/article/sen-whitehouse-d-ri-suggests-using-rico-laws-global-warming-skeptics/963007
More on how RICO laws are applied seemingly willy nilly in order to get convictions that would otherwise be difficult to get or should not have been prosecuted in the first place.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/04/william-l-anderson/the-atlanta-public-school-cheating-scandal/
lucia:
I’m not sure how true that is. I’m not going to worry about whether or not there is disagreement on the issue though. The authors of that study suggest preferential breeding might contribute to the average height of Dutchmen being so high. That’s somewhat plausible as selective breeding can influence physical traits in a genetic group.
But if you read that paper, you’ll find they don’t estimate the size of the effect they’re suggesting might exist. It’s a peculiar omission to me. To get an idea of the size of effect we’re talking about, the paper says men in the upper height bracket have 1.4% more children. Women who are taller than average actually have fewer children. That means the paper is looking at a 1.4% difference in birth rates for men only.
Even if we assumed height had a 100% heritability score and assumed this effect has been consistent for the entire period, this small an effect on birth rates couldn’t cause a change in average height of several inches in such a short period of time. Even with the most favorable assumptions possible, I doubt you could get an estimate for the size of the effect of even half an inch. If we really wanted to find out, there are equations designed to estimate this sort of thing.
Somebody else would have to do that though. I don’t care enough to do it myself. Just reading the study in question makes it clear if there is any disagreement on this issue, it isn’t well-founded. This is just one of those cases where if you use a large enough data set, you can find a statistically significant correlation between things even if that effect is so small it is not “significant” in the conventional sense.
Steven Mosher:
Um… no. The amount of effort it’d take to come up with a full list of factors to account for, with an explanation for each, is far more than I care to put into this right now. Coming up with an experiment design in blog comments for a discussion I don’t find very interesting is not going to happen.
Yes. There is almost always variance which cannot be attributed to anything. It’s usually called “random” variance, though technically “random” just means “no cause we can discern.”
That’s not true. Control issues don’t just cause neutral uncertainty. They often cause bias in particular ways. We can often predict with confidence what direction the bias would be in even if we cannot estimate the size of it.
Incidentally, if we have to implement a ton of controls to account for various factors that could influence comparisons of IQ scores, IQ scores must be rather dependent upon non-genetic influences. Even if one could theoretically control for these factors, the world we live in does not. That’s why I pointed out heritability scores are only valid for the group they’re estimated for. My concern isn’t that some studies are “fatally flawed”or anything like that. My concern is the results for studies are limited in their coverage, and there is no particular reason to assume they’d hold true if we applied them to the world’s society at large.
Which is a point authors of these studies themselves have made. Part of the reason for twin studies is to try to estimate the effect of societal influences.
Kenneth — The original purpose behind RICO laws was understandable. Since the Mob was investing the proceeds of their lucrative rackets in various legitimate enterprises, the idea was to make it a crime to invest the proceeds of crime in a legitimate enterprise. Thus, you could not only shut down the Mob’s drug ring, but make them disgorge all the moneymaking interests they’d acquired with the proceeds.
The abuse comes in a couple of ways. The first was including “mail and wire fraud” as types of racketeering activity. Under Schmuck v. United States, the connection between the “mail” and the “fraud” can be pretty tenuous. As interpreted in that case, the mail and wire fraud statutes give federal prosecutors a lot of “discretion” to make what would normally be a state case into a federal one. But if you have a “pattern” you can also turn it into a RICO case.
The second was deciding that governments and private parties could bring RICO lawsuits…and get triple damages plus attorneys fees. This encourages “creative” use of the mail and wire fraud statutes (and sometimes others). Thus people try to turn an ordinary corporate dispute — e.g., did the dominant party in a merger really pay the minority shareholders enough for their stock? — into a RICO case so as to chase those triple damages and attorney’s fees. (Back in the 80’s, Justice Rehnquist had an article titled “Get Civil RICO Out of My Courtroom,” making this point if I remember.) In Scheidler v. NOW, a pro-abortion group tried to claim that abortion protesters were committing “extortion” by protesting at clinics and sued under RICO…it took a decade or two, but the Supreme Court ultimately decided that no, that wasn’t extortion.
And of course since people in political disputes are always accusing the other side of bad faith, and everyone uses mail and the internet in political arguments these days…there’s that temptation to wrap mail/wire fraud together with RICO and shut them up.
So, I don’t think RICO is a bad law per se, but a few sections should be cut from it to curtail the abuse. Most importantly, the civil suits should be done away with.
Joseph W:
And the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I’ve always wondered what the road to Heaven is paved with.
lucia,
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Thank you for the detailed explanation. I’m still stumbling over how phenotypic variance can change, but everything else clicks. I probably just need to read the whole paper.
Brandon Gates:
Good outcomes, apparently.
…or good fences.
Brandon Gates,
“I’ve always wondered what the road to Heaven is paved with.”
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Accurate predictions.
It seems so strange to me, to apply these terms to fossil fuel use [edit: use? sale, I guess. The fossil fuel business.]
That doesn’t sound like fossil fuel to me. Nobody tells me to fill my tank or else los muchachitos will come break my legs.
What about fraud?
No, still doesn’t sound right to me. I never bought gas because I thought there couldn’t possibly be any environmental impact. I bought gas to drive engines and heat stuff.
It’s a strange world.
Pilgrim’s Progress defines the lining to heaven.
That good fences poem is really good when you get into it, thanks.
mark bofill,
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I would hope so.
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Indeed. The IPCC gives us a 3 degree range, with 3 K/2xCO2 being the semi-official central estimate as of AR5, about which it has been rattling around since forever.
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As I so often say, I don’t think waiting to find out empirically is the most brilliant of ideas. We know what the present and past look like, and that we have thrived under those conditions. This is one of those situations where this liberal becomes downright conservative — I think climate stasis is good. I consider it likely that owe our success as not just a species but a civilization to the fact that the Holocene has been ~10,000 years of relative stability.
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/stump speech
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The balance of your thoughtful post prompted me to write five longish paragraphs with possibility for even more — which seems excessive for a single comment. So I’m drafting a full article on my blog as a continuance of the Exxon series. Pending Lucia’s permission, I’d be happy to link to it here when it’s published.
Brandon Gates,
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I look forward to reading your article.
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My point wasn’t that we should wait to find out though. My point was, if we have significant uncertainties now, surely it was uncertain back in 1982. (And indeed it was, since posting this I’ve gone and read the Exxon climate crash course summary link thing).
So, they ‘knew burning CO2 caused climate change and lied about it’. Meh. They knew it might.
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I don’t really like this argument though. It seems like a cop out. Somehow my feeling is that Exxon shouldn’t get crucified even if they were certain sure that fossil fuel use would cause climate change and that the change would be significant. I haven’t come up with the explicits of this in my mind yet, but I’m working on it. 🙂 That and making lame fishing type comments like this to see if anyone jumps on them. :/ Not working out, either I have to make my comments even more lame or I need to give it up and try a different approach. I’m leaning towards giving it up and trying a more direct approach. 🙂
Brandon Gates,
BTW, I very much appreciate the fact that you are polite and considerate in you posts. You’re not yet a regular around here, so you ought to know up front that I’m mostly full of crap. 😉 The regulars all already know that.
Carrick,
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Good answer, albeit quite contentious depending on whom one asks.
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HaroldW,
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Especially when one can cajole the neighbor to build them. [wicked grin]
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SteveF
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Accurate predictions.
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The Devil is in the details. Fittingly, the word “accurate” is not in his dictionary.
I guess metaphorically speaking it is the road to hell that we would want to avoid and it is its paving that should be of interest.
Unlike Robert Frost I judge a good fence will make me less interested with what is or will be on the other side – something like the roads to hell and heaven
Brandon Gates,
” I consider it likely that owe our success as not just a species but a civilization to the fact that the Holocene has been ~10,000 years of relative stability.”.
Humm…
I absolutely agree that much of human progress over most of the past 10,000 years, perhaps most importantly the broad introduction of farming, has in fact benefited greatly from a relatively stable climate.
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However, I think there are qualitative differences between a race which is working to figure out reasonably productive farming practices, and how to record simple information (written language), and one that that produces high speed microprocessors, manipulates the genetic content of living organisms, and can travel outside Earth’s atmosphere….. along with thousands of other less well known intellectual and technological accomplishments, none of which could even have been imagined 500 years ago. Humanity’s welfare was always greatly influenced by the whims of climate in the past, but I doubt that influence remains nearly so large today. As A C Clark noted: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Seems to me magic beats a changing climate every time. 😉
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Of course, crazies of many stripes have both the desire and the potential to destroy, at worst, or delay, at best, the benefits which should come from the intellectual accomplishments of the last few hundred years. But that will happen only if we allow it to happen.
mark bofill,
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Funny, I was just writing the same about you. And you’re not the only one here I think that of thus far. I’m usually nice when others are nice, but not always. When the gloves come off, I can be a right bastard.
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Well then, we may get along yet. Cheers.
“No, still doesn’t sound right to me. I never bought gas because I thought there couldn’t possibly be any environmental impact. I bought gas to drive engines and heat stuff.
It’s a strange world.”
Mark, you have convinced me that you will never become a lawyer and if I read the above posts on heredity correctly your offspring will have much to overcome if they chose a career in law.
wag. Thanks Ken.
SteveF,
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Good.
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Agreed. Counterpoint: there are a lot more of us now, ever increasing, and ever increasingly consuming more resources per capita. I’m not a Malthusian catastrophist, but I do believe in the concepts of carrying capacity and economic shocks. My core position is based an awful lot on keeping the safety margins as wide as possible through being proactive, not reactive. Call it “pre-adaptation” if you will.
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Past Performance is Not Necessarily Indicative of Future Results
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That’s a pat answer I know, and it does cut both ways. Part of what settles it for me is that I believe a chaotic deterministic physical system is more predictable than the wiles of mass human behavior.
Famine, etc.
Eli
Imagine trying to get that past the IRB. But maybe it’s permitted in Australia.
Human population will not increase forever. Fertility rates are lower, in some cases much lower than replacement rates for nearly all the developed world and falling, though still high, in the undeveloped world. Lesson? Economic development improves sustainabilty.
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There is a good case to be made that we’re approaching peak human.
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Agricultural societies have lots of kids – more farm workers.
Transition to advanced economies means fewer kids.
The ‘Pill’ meant fewer still. Now we’re approaching the era where machine learning is replacing human labor. How will that effect birth rates? Difficult to imagine that it would in any way increase fecundity.
Turbulent Eddy,
Agreed, for the reasons you cite. I perhaps should have been clear on that point.
Economic development tends to increase resource demand. Which is all well and good so long as supply keeps pace.
Eli,
Eric Worrall cites incontrovertible evidence that Botany 101 has got us covered.
Lucia 145309 “I agree with the people who support good, broadly available education. Kids should not be excluded from getting a decent education.
The caveat is that I want to be sure that kids with higher abilities or more dedication do get access to what they need. And I do see a tension when between people who want to “use†the brighter or harder working kids as part of the resource to “help†the less bright even when that means depriving the brighter kids of access to higher levels of education or opportunity.”
…
An interesting experience regarding the need to address the requirements of high achievers has occurred with respect to my 10-year-old daughter. Until this year, she attended a middling inner suburban ring school district with many good teachers and many not well-prepared children. (As well as some very bright children) Last year my daughter complained that the boys talked too much and her teacher (not a great one) downplayed it stating that the boys were “chatty.” My daughter didn’t have much improvement in her NWEA Map scores and on occasion several Map scores went down during the course of the year.
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This year her Map score in reading improved from 213 to 233. Her Map score in Math improved from 210 to 228 — both of the increases were very large. Mean reading scores are supposed to increase by 7.8 and Mean math scores are supposed to increase by 11.6. So, clearly my daughter got a big bump by moving to a different school district where the children are better behaved. In fact, I wonder whether I am reading the chart correctly, but from what I can see my daughter’s reading score is higher than the average 11th grader. See 2015 MAP normative data download. https://www.nwea.org/resources/2015-normative-data/
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In the second grade, my daughter was paired with 3 other bright girls, and she did much better. Getting rid of the pairing with other bright children and [apparently] using my daughter to help other children who weren’t doing seemed to pull down my daughter.
JD
Eli,
War and Pestilence probably work too. The Fourth Horseman, Death, would end the experiment early.
Mark Bofill:
Just so you know, his comments here might be nice enough or whatever, but you shouldn’t count on that continuing. For instance, Brandon R. Gates’s response to my book wasn’t remotely polite or considerate.
And while he’s since acknowledged he was wrong on the Cook et al paper, his continued responses to me have not been polite or considerate. For instance, when he wrote a post about this narrative of Exxon engaging in a campaign of disinformation, he asked me to write a response (because I mentioned in passing the post was incredibly wrong). I did. He responded with a post which took an incredibly sarcastic remark as serious and used that to be incredibly derogatory. He’s now known my comment was sarcastic for something like four days, but for some reason, he’s refused to do anything about his post. Incredibly, he did edit his post to fix an HTML error I pointed out at the same time I pointed out much of the substance of his post was wrong.
Which… whatever. This whole thing is petty and stupid, and his decision to leave his insulting post he knows is wrong unaltered is blatantly dishonest. It’s probably due to him not liking me, as well as not liking that I keep pointing out huge errors in his views, but this is the sort of behavior you can expect from him if you do things he dislikes.
So… yeah. He may have been nice and considerate so far, but I wouldn’t expect that to continue beyond any point where you do something he dislikes. And that’s not just based on how he’s reacted to me. Before writing this, I reviewed his engagement with other people on other issues. It seems he follows a pretty clear pattern.
By the way, I will freely admit I made that last comment at least in part due to pettiness. I am a little annoyed Skeptical Science members appear to have willfully libeled me. The passive-aggressive approach they take is so childish and stupid. Take note of how Neal J. King has completely disappeared now that he knows his accusations are bogus.
And now we Brandon R. Gates writing a post painting me as being completely irrational, holding ridiculous beliefs based upon nothing more than an absurd misreading of a comment I wrote. Then, when he discovers the error, he chooses to not do anything about it, choosing to leave a post he knows is wrong unaltered despite knowing it paints a person in a derogatory way.
While these people may have believed the things they said at the time due to some sort of bias or whatever making them ignore obvious problems with their claims, at this point they are just being dishonest to spread lies about me. It’s a little annoying.
Brandon S:
Take note of how Neal J. King has completely disappeared now that he knows his accusations are bogus.
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Call me cynical, but I really believe after reading some of the threads in the sks “secret” forum that the group looks at everything (should I post, should I not, what should I post) through the lens of what and how it advances the cause first, and – well, nothing beyond that.
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You’re not dealing with someone wanting to engage in an honest discussion. You’re dealing with someone who is devoted to advancing the cause; no more, no less. And again back to so, so many posts there, you’re in their opinion a lesser being than they are in several dimensions.
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Since I’ve already said that at least twice, I’ll leave it at that, unless someone disagrees.
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[Preemptive note to Brandon Gates – this is directed to Neal J. King and all of the militant types at sks, not you].
Shouldn’t expect that to continue?
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I wasn’t, particularly. I didn’t have an expectation one way or the other. It keeps life interesting, not knowing.
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Regarding good faith on the other side, I’m not counting on anybody coming to the table in good faith. I actually care more about finding out how people in the blogosphere respond to these things than I do about the issues we are talking about. Having never articulated this specific idea to myself, thank you guys for helping me to realize it. 🙂 I hope it’s true, I’ll have to think about that too.
RE Neals absence – well maybe. Maybe he’s busy. Maybe he’s reconsidered his priorities. I honestly worry about that too a lot, how people will read it when I get too busy to talk from time to time.
Maybe he’s out to dinner. 😉
TerryMN:
Could be. I’m somewhat curious what they say about some of the things that have come up since the forum leak. For instance, I pointed out John Cook used a fabricated quote years back. I can prove they discussed that in their forum. I can also prove they discussed at least one follow-up post I wrote where I showed the same fabricated quote was used on their site, multiple times. I can even prove they discussed a post I wrote in which I showed the fabrication had been fixed for a publication, after which they kept using the fabricated one on their site. They still use the fabricated quote to this day.
I think it would be fascinating to see what they said in those discussions I can prove they had. If I had been wrong, there would have been a response. That they kept silent shows I was right. That means they discussed what I wrote, knew I was right but… kept using a fabricated quote anyway. Presumably they came up with some excuse or justification for this. I think it’d be fascinating to see what that was.
Given the public remarks of some of the Skeptical Science team, I’m sure it’d be interesting to know what they’ve said about me specifically. I think I had only been mentioned once or twice in the forum before the leak happened. I remember someone pointing out that there was no article about me on Sourcewatch or some other site. I thought that was amusing.
Ill add this though. Say Neal realizes he was mistaken. Good! Making people eat dirt when they are ready to admit a mistake is pretty darn counterproductive in my view. can’t see any reason I’d rush to do in their shoes.
Mark Bofill:
Whatever limits there may be to people’s good faith, I’d like to think people wouldn’t willfully post libelous material. While I’d imagine none of this is actionable due to there being no demonstrable harm,* it’s a crazy situation where people’s only defense for what they post is something like, “Not enough people fell for my dishonesty to warrant a lawsuit.”
Mind you, this isn’t just the Skeptical Science group. Anthony Watts knows fully well a $100,000 contest by Douglas Keenan he advertised was changed after-the-fact to make the contest harder in response people discussing how to win the contest, after people had already paid Keenan to enter the contest. That’s fraud, in a legal sense. It was illegal. And while Watts knows it happened, and he knows he helped advertise the contest, he won’t say a word about it.
If we were talking about 18, or even 28 minutes, which is as long as it took for King to make a fuss about me not responding, I’d agree. But it’s been days. It would have only taken a handful of minutes to verify what I claimed is true. He was happy to spend a ton of time on everything else. There’s no excuse for now going silent for days.
He’s clearly avoiding the issue. Now, maybe he’s doing so because he has “reconsidered his priorities.” That wouldn’t make it okay though. Suppose you repeatedly portray a person as a criminal, spend a significant amount of time engaging in discussions on and around your portrayal and then realize you were wrong. You even tell everyone you will investigate the error.
After that, the topic may suddenly not be a priority to you, but unless some crisis arose in your life, the reason for the change in priorities isn’t a good one.
Ill add this though. Say Neal realizes he was mistaken. Good! Making people eat dirt when they are ready to admit a mistake is pretty darn counterproductive in my view. can’t see any reason I’d rush to do in their shoes.
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To be fair, I wasn’t trying to make anyone “eat dirt” but the behavior has gone on for years. Go back and look at the “behind the SkS Curtain” post and the forum links, and nothing has changed. Not the people, not the “strategy” not the weird projections, paranoia, or conspiracy theories.
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Sometimes you just have to call a duck a duck.
Mark Bofill:
Eat dirt when they are ready to admit a mistake? What are you talking about. Not only has Neal J. King done a thing to suggest he is willing to admit any mistake, nobody is trying to make him eat dirt. The expectation is simply that he’d admit the falsity of what he said.
Look at the examples with Brandon R. Gates. I never once asked for an apology or any sort of contrition over his ridiculous portrayals of me. All I’ve expected is that he’d acknowledge and correct his errors. That same has been true with King. I would expect a reasonable person who said untrue things about another person to apologize because it’s the right thing to do, but all anyone has talked about is people admitting and correcting their errors.
I don’t get why you would suggest that is trying to make someone eat dirt. To be honest, I’m not even sure I know what you mean by that phrase. What I do know is expecting people to acknowledge mistakes, especially when those mistakes are things like “falsely accusing a person of a crime,” is perfectly reasonable.
Brandon Gates,
“there are a lot more of us now, ever increasing, and ever increasingly consuming more resources per capita. ”
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There are three parts to my response:
1) Until we start rocketing lots of valuable materials off into space, the quantity of materials on Earth is fixed.
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2) What limits the recovery and reuse of all raw material materials is the economic cost, not the physical availability… that economic cost is directly related to available energy and the cost of its production. The Beatles said ‘all you need is love’, but I think more accurate is ‘all you need is energy’; another argument for the importance of relatively inexpensive nuclear power. Condemning humanity to scarce and expensive energy simultaneously condemns humanity to ‘exhaustion’ or ‘depletion’ of the world’s raw materials.
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3) Wealthier people do consume more, but they also have far fewer kids. In the long term, it is unlikely that enriching the world’s very poor will lead to ever increasing population; I think the data say just the opposite. I believe also that we should not discount how technology will impact future raw material consumption. One simple example: well designed LED lamps now use about 1/10th the power of incandescent lamps and last 25 times longer; that is a big net reduction in both raw material use and energy use. If a TV has life-like resolution and lasts longer than a lifetime, then raw material use for TV’s will decline, not rise…. there are a hundred other examples. Finally, I think the need to travel (whether to “work”, for business, or for vacation) will gradually decline as technology makes travel less advantageous; you can already see a trend in this direction.
Oh god, the errors in that last comment are real. I wish I knew why the Edit option isn’t showing up (most of the time) for me anymore. It isn’t even consistently failing to appear. Sometimes it’s there and sometimes it isn’t. I do not get it.
Terry, Brandon, all of your points have merit, I know what you’re saying. Brandon, yes – in the sense that the issue is more than a garden variety blog splat, in particular to whatever extent legal or libel or whatever issues are involved, sure. More to it than normal, and I’m talking about normal situations. Terry yes. I read the Forum and it strikes me the same way I’m sure it does everybody else.
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FWIW, I am not trying to solve a problem. It’s not my thought that we’re going to talk and have a Kumbaya moment and resolve our difference for all time. Obviously. I’m not even looking to make progress, strictly speaking. In a way I’m trying to understand a personal character defect. I came into this discussion on the skeptic side, almost every bit as tribal and rabid and unreasonable as the SkS forum shows. It doesn’t make me evil. It makes me human. I like to understand myself and people like me, what makes otherwise similar people bitter enemies. That’s it really. I wouldn’t precisely call myself a one trick pony who is uninterested in any other subject., but when it comes to talking to wamists, this is usually the first thing I’m interested in.
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Thanks for your thoughts guys, interesting as always.
Sorry Brandon, missed this somehow:
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No reason I guess. A psychic premonition possibly. Maybe intestinal gas, I had beans the other day.
Re: SteveF
Historically, increase in energy efficiency has been linked with increased energy consumption i.e., the the Jevons paradox and increased demand for resources due to economic growth and the search for a higher quality of life. Anecdotally so for LED lighting as well.
I think Neal’s silence is a recognition that his argument on hacking has lost a lot of it’s legs.
I hope he returns on the other issues as he generates a lot of good conversation.
I do not feel he owes an apology, he obviously did not like the act of publishing the article link.
Brandon G, you have set out explicitly how the Cook paper should have been handled and future studies, thank you for that.
“He responded with a post which took an incredibly sarcastic remark as serious and used that to be incredibly derogatory. He’s now known my comment was sarcastic for something like four days,”
Perhaps a sarcastic remark would have been rewarded with a mere derogatory post?
If it had been marked as “sarcastic” in the first place it might even have earned a normal response.
What was that remark anyway?
angech, I quoted the whole comment upthread in comment #144920, but you can see it in its original context here. The key part is in response to Brandon R. Gates claiming Exxon knew, as early as 1980, that the global warming debate was settled and whatnot, I quoted the document he had discussed and responded.
Gates wrote a post in response to this whose content was largely built upon taking this paragraph as a serious statement of my views on global warming. Which is absurd. Obviously, if we don’t know global warming is even happening, we can’t believe the debate about global warming is settled.
Mind you, I had just written an entire post discussing how Gates was misrepresenting/misportraying the documents in question. I then wrote this, quoting one of the documents and saying it proves the documents show what Gates claimed they showed. That would be completely irrational if I was being serious. Especially since the quote clearly contradicts what Gates claimed the document showed.
There wasn’t a single thing to suggest I was talking about my personal views on global warming in that post. I was talking about what Exxon had and had not written in its internal documents. There was no reason to think I would suddenly bring up my views on global warming. And even if I were going to, it wouldn’t make any sense in the context of a comment clearly discussing what Exxon did and did not know.
I get sarcasm can not always go through in discussions. Sometimes though, it is so obvious it’s bizarre for anyone to get it. If somebody asks you a leading question and you respond, “Yeah, and I just stopped beating my wife last week,” it would be bizarre for anyone to take that as you confessing to criminal assault.
It would be beyond bizarre for them to write a post claiming it were proof of such then, once you pointed the sarcasm out to them, acknowledge they misunderstood the remark but refuse to change their post to warn people of the mistake.
RB,
If you mix the influence of energy saving LED’s with a bunch of other factors (size of new houses versus older houses, central air conditioning versus none, etc) obviously things become confused at best. And if you give very poor people LED lights, so that they are more productive (and can read and learn at night), they may well become richer, and so yes, their energy use may rise compared to living in the dark. But here is what I know for certain: when I have made the substitution, my electricity use has declined. Other people have told me the same thing. It is pretty clean data.
SteveF,
I’m disputing not the benefits from cheaper energy, but that energy efficiencies lead to an overall lowering of energy consumption. Jevons’ paradox implies that energy efficiencies that lower the cost of energy lead to a greater consumption of energy due to increased demand. Cloud computing is another example.
Folks:
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I have two priorities that come before commenting further here:
1) VERY late filing for my taxes for Germany: They are holding an amount of money of mine that you could not believe in “estimated taxes”, and if I don’t get my taxes filed in a few days, they will just keep it. Let’s just say that it is WILDLY in excess of any reasonable estimate.
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2) Checking out the methods described for getting the two files, fairly thoroughly. My SkS folks agreed that it worked that way the 1st time (for the Photoshops), but they claim it wouldn’t have worked that way the 2nd time, because they put a password system on it. Lucia did a demo, but then she reported a problem with it, so I’m not sure of the situation. It may be that what each side is saying is compatible with the other, but that’s not the way it looks. Maybe something is being de-emphasized in the story: either the effort required for some task, or the possibility of some work-around. I need some 1st-hand information.
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I’m not commenting further until I’m sure of what works and how. But item 1) has a distinctly higher priority right now.
Neal,
Certainly makes sense to me.
Just in passing:
I would like to suggest the possibility in advance that nobody is lying. It is common for newly implemented features to contain defects and not work right. Sometimes not work at all. It is not in human nature (in my experience anyway) for an inexperienced programmer to realize just how often and how easily this happens.
Good luck with your taxes.
RB:
That’s generally only true because of economic growth. Improved efficiency encourages economic growth, and that leads to the net effect being an increase in consumption. If there is going to be economic growth anyway though, then that effect is mostly irrelevant.
I’m sorry, but this is beyond ridiculous. Neal J. King says:
These two issues are completely unrelated. No investigation could possibly link them. A thorough one certainly wouldn’t have. The way I found the Photoshopped images is completely unrelated to how I found the other material. Neal J. King says:
Leaving aside that he somehow doesn’t address the video demonstration of the method I posted in which I demonstrated the methodology he says wouldn’t have worked still works to this day, there are live links on this very page showing there is no password protection. They still work right now. You can literally click on links like those in lucia’s comment above right this minute and see there is no password protection.
The idea it would take any amount of effort to click on a link and see it does what I said is ludicrous.
Just to repeat, here’s a link to the video I made proving what I did:
https://youtu.be/bFY3HZ8ikrc
I challenge anyone from Skeptical Science, or anyone else for that matter, to watch it and still claim I had to bypass any sort of password protection.
Neal:
1. If you don’t believe the redirects are being crapped about every time you guys link something from SkS, a sk anyone who has a blog that you guys have posted an internal link to to find the SkS URL in their referrer logs (like in the YouTube). If that’s not the issue, just grab a URL of the format from the example.
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2. If you think it’s a permission issue because every one of your devices are logged in to SkS all the time, go to a library, and type the URL from (1.) into a browser.
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3. Pick a few other random numbers close to the last number in the URL from (1.), substitute them in the address bar, and see what happens.
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4. If you’re too lazy to take 5 minutes to do the above, but are content relying on your SkS friend’s “who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes/browser” shtick, enjoy your Kool-Aid.
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[edit]
5. In the time it took you to read the thread updates and write your “I’m too busy” response, you could have already done the above.
[/edit]
TerryMN, thanks for making that comment. Interestingly, you say:
I can provide a screenshot of my server’s log showing two incoming hits from the Skeptical Science server which both direct the user to my post announcing my new book. If we really needed to, I bet we could find referrer links in other people’s logs as well. I know there were ones in lucia’s before (I don’t know how recently they linked to her site though), and they would have appeared in the logs of thousands of other servers.
I don’t know that it’d matter though. The evidence proving the accusations false has been readily available all along. A person would have to try pretty hard not to know the accusations are false at this point. I don’t know any amount of evidence would convince someone who does that.
TerryMN,
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Apprecated, with the caveat that I’m not sure I see myself as any less militant than the SkS crew. Mayyyybe more willing to accept an olive branch when it’s offered. Then again, my enemies list is quite a bit shorter than theirs, which I chalk up to having a lower profile and less relevance — as in statistically indistinguishable from zero.
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angech,
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Could have been handled is the better summary. I have strong opinions about some stuff, but also went out of my way to point out that I’m no expert on doing surveys. And frankly, I don’t see that my critiques were all that novel.
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That said, thank-you. I’m glad you appreciated the note.
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mark bofill,
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They make pills for that, you know.
SteveF,
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I agree. That’s exactly the scenario I hope to avoid.
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Again, I agree. My original statement didn’t make that clear.
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I don’t discount human ingenuity, particularly when our backs are against the wall. What I’d like you (and others here) to appreciate is that we don’t need to have our backs against the wall to be creative and ingenious. One of Gaia’s gifts to us is the ability to anticipate danger, assess risk, and hedge against it.
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And total end-user cost to boot. Yet there was a great hue and cry about being forced to abandon incandescent bulbs in favor of more expensive LED lamps. I don’t know the price history, but it’s a fair guess that the first generation LEDs really did have a greater lifetime operating cost because they were new tech, not quite as efficient, and being manufactured in very small production runs relative to now. As tech improved and market penetration increased, manufacturing economies of scale kicked in.
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It’s not a 100% valid comparison, but you see where I’m going with this.
Brandon,
Keep up the good work. You are only getting shot at, metaphorically, because you are on target. Showing up those clowns for what they are is something many are very appreciative of.
“Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”
Brandon R. Gates:
Interestingly, incadescent bulbs were not actually banned (at least, not anywhere that I know of). What happened is governments began setting minimum efficiency standards for light bulbs like they do with cars and mileage. In many cases incadescent bulbs couldn’t meet those standards so they were effectively banned, but much of the pushback against the idea stemmed from conflating the two ideas.
Actually mandating people use LEDs would be even worse. People generally don’t like the idea of government control so forcing them to buy a specific product would receive a ton of pushback. The confusion between these three different ideas has been a big deal.
This is particularly important because LEDs have been a terrible choice in many cases. In fact, I think LEDs still take something like 10-15 years to be wise on an economical level (for home use). That doesn’t even deal with the practical differences in LEDs, with many people simply not finding them pleasant to use. If people were required to use them rather than being allowed to use things like CFLs, things would be very different.
Brandon G:
Yet there was a great hue and cry about being forced to abandon incandescent bulbs in favor of more expensive LED lamps.
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I think most of the ban/replace legislation was from incandescent to compact fluorescent. It happened in I think the EU and maybe Canada; both before LEDs were being efficiently manufactured and sold at a reasonable price.
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Aside from the harsh CF light spectrum (which I think has been mitigated/improved) and inability to dim, the CF incompatibility with cold temps we see here half the year in MN definitely made me hue, if not cry, about any proposals for a mandated switch.
Brandon S.,
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You’ve gone and got me reading the US act itself. I didn’t even know it was passed on W.’s watch (Dec. 19, 2007). I’m going to cheat and use Wikpedia’s summary:
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B. Lighting Energy Efficiency
Requires roughly 25 percent greater efficiency for light bulbs, phased in from 2012 through 2014. This effectively bans the manufacturing and importing of most current incandescent light bulbs, though by 2013 at least one company had introduced a redesigned incandescent bulb for which it claimed 50 percent greater efficiency than conventional incandescents.[18]
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So, like you, I’m good with calling it an effective ban. The phase-in from 2012-2014 probably explains why so many people (incl. me) thought it was all Obama’s doing.
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Hence Bachmann’s short-lived Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act of 2011.
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Snark aside, the concept of government control over consumer choice interests me. I first became interested in it over the grousing about seat belt laws. It wasn’t immediately obvious what the State’s interest was in protecting the lives and heath of its citizens. One answer is, of course, its own self-interest. I can *definitely* see why that would bug the more libertarian/anarchist elements amongst us.
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That’s well-argued, and with the clarity of my own mini-review here, I agree.
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I like LEDs better. Less flicker, really bright.
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TerryMN,
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Ah, that makes sense. Whenever I’ve talked about it before, it was very US-centric and LEDs were already better than cost competitive.
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Yes, I can see how that may have colored your opinions. I haven’t lived in a house with dimmers for an age. For mood lighting I either use candles or X-mess lights.
Brandon R. Gates:
They’re good for directional lighting, but I think they’re terrible for atmospheric lighting. Even the bulbs they’ve added dispersal coverings to have terrible diffusion compared to CFLs (which in turn aren’t as good as incandescents). There are places in a house where I think they’re handy, but I wouldn’t be able to stand living in a house lit entirely by them.
Even today, I find it difficult to justify buying LEDs over CFLs on an economic level. It takes too long for them to be able to beat out CFLs for me to justify the up-front price, and it’s arguable they never actually come out ahead.
Both beat out incandescents pretty handily though.
Brandon Gates,
” One of Gaia’s gifts to us is the ability to anticipate danger, assess risk, and hedge against it.”
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Got to tell ya, I find that a very strange comment. What the heck is Gaia, and how does it give gifts to anyone?
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Our backs are far from against the wall. Humanity is more healthy, lives longer, is better educated, and suffers less violence (on average) than any time in history. On current trend, extreme poverty is likely to almost disappear within about 25-30 years. Backs were against walls during the Black Death plague, not now. Could we screw it up? Sure, some crazy could launch 1000 nuclear weapons, or we could make it very difficult for the very poorest (now mainly in Africa) to escape poverty. But I don’t think we are facing some ecological disaster; the evidence is simply lacking.
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“Yet there was a great hue and cry about being forced to abandon incandescent bulbs in favor of more expensive LED lamps.”
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That absolutely never happened, nowhere were LEDs mandated. Heck, there are still incandescent bulbs available (go to the store and look!). They are just halogen or designed with IR reflective surfaces to improve efficiency (a bit), rather than the old style incandescent. They don’t sell much because they are comparable in price to other alternatives, and much less efficient. The replacement of incandescents was mainly done with compact fluorescent bulbs over the last 15 years or so. It is only very recently that LED prices fell to the point that compact fluorescent bulbs were no longer the best (economic) choice. LEDs do offer a few other advantages: instant full light output and immunity to ambient temperature changes, but it was the economics that changed more than anything else. If you read news articles in the (technical) media from 5 or 6 years ago, it is obvious people were aware that only a substantial drop in cost would make LEDs viable…. and lots of companies were working on this.
Brandon
Links in comments are welcome. Sometimes wordpress holds them up, but I approve when I see them.
Neal King,
Maybe you could consider living someplace other than Germany. There are tax advantages to be had you know.
My CFs are dimmable. Must be my example.
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #145363)
“Just to repeat, here’s a link to the video I made proving what I did:”
Thanks.
16.21 minutes of my life gone, we only have 30,000 days you know, but worth watching.
Can I ask what the heck accent it is you have not being an American. Not GP or Boston or Texas. Is it a local east coast of some description. Do not have to answer, I just love learning where accents are from. British are the best.,
Oddly enough, I don’t know what my accent is. I’ve never had an ear for them. Someone with a better ear for them might be able to identify it.
The places I’ve lived in the longest are Ohio, Oklahoma and Illinois, if that helps.
By the way, I think it’s rather remarkable Brandon R. Gates responded to me above about the light bulb issue, yet he still hasn’t changed the post he knows is wrong in how it insults me. Leaving aside the rudeness of it, I think if you’re going to behave in such a dishonest manner, perhaps you shouldn’t talk to the people you are lying about while doing it in the same location they’re pointing it out.
Maybe it’s just me, but making it obvious you’re being dishonest seems unwise.
http://climateconsensarian.blogspot.com/2016/03/creatively-interpreting-exxon-dox.html
Brandon S.,
The post was wrong because it was wrong. I read your comment …
Because things are so settled about global warming we don’t even know if it’s happening!
… literally instead of its intended “sarcastic mockery”.
I’m deeply offended by said mockery, and therefore demand that you correct your own post.
angech,
How do you think his accent compare to this nasal midwesterner?
“Random notes on climate change from the perspective of one who trusts the scientific consensus.”
Brandon R. Gates,
May I inquire as to how the scientific consensus earned your trust?
I have my Mark Bofil hat on. I’m sure he doesn’t mind. He’s busy, anyway. 😉
Andrew
Andrew,
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Not my tinfoil one right? Oh, good, ok. Yeah, you can wear that one.
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So what were you saying?
I’m not convinced that’s my hat you’ve got there. Could be I guess… hmm.
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[Edit: I’ve never had lice. Just thought you ought to know that.]
mark bofil,
I think you have expressed an interest in learning how people of differing opinions on climate blogs arrive at conclusions(or something like that). That hat. But you may correct me if I’m wrong.
In this case I can see that Brandon R. Gates is inhabiting a quite a different perspective universe than I am, so I was politely curious.
Andrew
Lucia,
That’s not nasal! You claimed that before and I took you at your word; all this time I’d been imagining that you had an unpleasant voice.
I’m somewhat tone deaf regarding American accents. They’ve got to be really pronounced for me to notice. Maybe different for y’all. 😉
Andrew,
Sokay good ok yes.
SteveF,
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Gaia is the personification of Earth in Greek mythology. I was using it metaphorically to represent the natural process of human evolution, which has “gifted” us with the ability to anticipate danger, assess risk, and hedge against it.
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I’m talking about uncertain future events, not recent history.
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That’s one heck of a prediction. From whence does it derive?
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Perhaps you’re not looking hard enough. The best evidence of ecological disaster due to rapid climate change pre-dates the Holocene.
Brandon R. Gates:
And you are being dishonest because you are being dishonest. Tautologies!
And by “comment” I presume you mean “single sentence in a multi-paragraph comment which I now present out of context in a way which makes my misreading seem far less ridiculous than it actually was.”
I demand you make me a sandwich. But I also recognize demands rarely work, especially ones made online. That’s why I usually don’t make them. It’s why I do things like point out if a person chooses to not correct an insulting post he knows to be wrong he is being dishonest rather than demand he fix the post. After all, I have no reason to think a person behaving in a dishonest manner will do something because I tell him to. I don’t really have any reason to think anyone will do something because I tell them to.
Whenever anyone makes a demand online (hint to you Mosher), I think the best response would be, “You’re not my real dad!” Because unless you’re talking about blog administration or the like, expecting someone to acquiesce to a demand is foolish.
So yeah, I’m not demanding you do anything. I’m just pointing out it is incredibly dishonest and offensive to leave a derogatory post you know is wrong unaltered to allow people to be misled by it.
Lucia,
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I figured that was the case, but thought it best to make sure. Thanks. Now I just need to get up the gumption to finish that article.
I could make somebody a sandwich. If that would help. Just sayin…
Brandon Gates,
“I’m talking about uncertain future events, not recent history.”
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I am talking about both recent trends and scholarly projections.
Here is a link to a Wikipedia graphic with recent history and projections for extreme poverty. On current trend, it will be eliminated well before 2030, but more conservative projections place the date a little further away. In any case, the long term trend is sharply downward and that trend has become gradually steeper over the last 25 years. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/USAID_Projections.png/310px-USAID_Projections.png Reductions in global poverty are a huge success story, but with more still to do.
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“Perhaps you’re not looking hard enough.”
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I would suggest instead that perhaps you are looking far too hard to find future problems. I have absolutely no problem adopting rational policies to protect the environment (eg over fishing, industrial water pollution, air pollution, etc.). I just find the overall projection of future doom, when viewed in the context of what the world is like today and humankind’s ability to cope with problems, way, way over the top.
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BTW, I am going to think about the best ways to bring Greek and Roman gods into the discussion; surely they too are relevant.
Mark Bofill:
Too late. I just got done eating one.
Brandon S.,
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If I felt obliged to correct every post I ever wrote because it offended someone, it would probably just be easier to erase them all and never write another word on the Internet. I committed a reading comprehension error about your stance on whether or not the planet is warming, which I did cop to *immediately* on your blog when woke up the next morning. I hold myself duty bound to correct misinterpretations and/or factual errors, not to cater to people’s feelings.
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It was undeniably wrong of me to not correct my own post immediately. That part of it is fixed now, I hope to your satisfaction. You are free to comment on my blog if you have any further disputes, I would in fact prefer that so that readers have the sum total of my words for context.
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Now if you don’t mind me saying so, I’m getting rather deaf in one ear being lectured to about dishonesty by you, as this article of yours moves my goalposts for me. Whether or not my arguments are factually incorrect or not is immaterial to how you’ve reframed the issue and attacked my article for not conforming to how you think the point should be argued. That’s dishonest in my book. I suggest you take another look at what you did, and consider amending your comments.
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In the meantime, I’m working through your other salient points about *Exxon* — which is and should be the main focus here so far as I’m concerned — and will issue updates as my own time allows, according to my own list of priorities. Thank you for your concerns.
Lucia,
Soft upper-midwest accent, and not very noticeable. Your voice pitch is a little higher than I might have guessed before I heard you speak…. maybe because you can be so fierce (like a tiger’s growl) when a comment sets you off. 😉
I think Lucia has a nice voice too. And I’m not just Blog-Owner’s B*tt Kissing. lol I do mean it! 😉
Andrew
Andrew_KY,
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The facile answer is native trust in the scientific process in general. I realize that won’t fly here, and it’s also not entirely true. When I first heard of AGW c. 1990 I dismissed it out of hand as media-hyped environmentalist hand-wringing. [1] The short, more accurate answer is that it’s been a long process of personal research, with an emphasis on understanding the argument from first principles of physics, reading old and current literature, long hours of inexpert (but interesting, enjoyable and self-convincing) data analysis combined with a lack of any better alternative proposal from its critics.
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I should be more precise about my meaning in that last bit. Data show a warming trend outside the bounds of expected natural variability. The CMIP5 ensemble historical runs published in AR5 provide the best explanation I know of for observed GMST trends. No other model I know of which invokes *plausible* alternative mechanisms exhibits as much skill over the historical hindcast portion.
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In sum, to convince me that the current consensus science of AGW is “wrong” will at least require a model on the order of complexity and capability of state-of-the-art AOGCMs which reproduce the past with higher fidelity, with clearly minimal sensitivity to CO2.
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When John Christy testified recently in front of the US Senate and suggested 5-10% of the present US climate change budget for a “Red Team” review of the mainstream science, I balked at him asking for so much money for what he described as an “assessment report”. I would be happy to allocate funds out of my own tax monies for such a team to do actual science on two conditions:
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1) That one required output is a model such as I describe above.
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2) That policy based on current mainstream understanding is not put on hold pending any results.
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Not long after his testimony, in comments various places online, I proposed a deal: he gets his red team funding if I get matching funds for something on the “green” agenda. That could be R&D monies for liquid biofulels, say. Or it could be a carbon tax, part of which would be used to fund the red team.
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I got essentially zero support from either side of the aisle, which was a little frustrating. It’s almost like people are more interested in endlessly arguing about this crap than they are concerned about actually trying to find mutually acceptable solutions. Maybe I’ve just been reading the wrong blogs and news outlets. Or maybe I’ve been part of the “problem” the whole time and just not realized it.
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That’s a little more than you asked for, but most of that particular speech is never far under the surface.
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—————
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[1] At the time, I was dubious of claims that nuclear fission was as dangerous its detractors painted it out be. I’m even more dubious of such claims today.
SteveF,
Yeah….I sang 2nd soprano in choir. If I’d studied in school I think I’d be 1st soprano. Range is limited more by lack of skill than the instrument itself. I’m soprano not alto.
Oh– I put the link to the video up so you could compare Brandon’s accent to mine. We both live in Illinois. I’m “Northern Illinois Chicago Suburbs”. He’s in Southern Illinois, but evidently moved around. I’m not hearing much “Oklahoma” in his accent. I think he sound more or less like “from around here”, but his pitch varies more than usual.
BTW: I’m on pins and needles about Wisconsin. (Americans, you know what I mean.)
Brandon R. Gates:
I don’t know why you would say this. Nobody said anything about you changing a post because it was offensive. What was said is it is offensive for a person to intentionally leave an insulting post unaltered despite knowing it is wrong.
Not at all. While it is good you admit it was wrong to behave in the way I’ve labeled dishonest, you just changed the post to say (in part):
It hasn’t been four days since you “corrected this post.” You literally just updated the post to say you had corrected it four days prior to the update you were writing about.
If you don’t like being lectured on being dishonest, maybe you should try not intentionally lying for days on end. That you get tired of repeatedly being told you’re doing wrong when you know you’re doing wrong is not going to get you much sympathy.
Um… no. As the exchange with Carrick at my place shows, you’ve claimed not to have said things you clearly did say. That you may wish to rewrite the history of what you said doesn’t mean I’m dishonest.
Moreover, you wrote a post whose entire tone and rhetoric is based upon the horrendous misreading you’ve since admitted too. Even if there was some valid point buried in that nonsense, it would hardly be dishonest of me not to find it. Even if what I said were wrong, it would only be dishonest if I knew it were wrong. That you’d so quickly accuse me of dishonesty in order to draw parallel here is obscene.
I didn’t admit a mistake then refuse to correct the derogatory post it was contained within. You did. It is ridiculous you’d compare that to me reading your post in a way you don’t like.
Brandon R. Gates,
Thank you for the response. Admittedly, it’s longer and in some ways more detailed than I expected. I half expected you not to respond at all.
I pretty much experienced the same thing you did:
With the exception that I would describe my initial reaction as suspecting it was hype.
I guess where we part ways is what we are willing accept as evidence for and against AGW. I’ve seen, after my initial reaction, mostly unsupported claims and computer-generated drawings over the years. These are things I do not accept as evidence, and the high volume of them seems to indicate to me that they attempt to obscure what is a lack of evidence in climate science.
Anyway, if you see it a different way, you can respond at your leisure.
Andrew
Trying not to think about it. :/
Pardon, Brandon S,
I don’t believe Brandon G was saying he didn’t like being lectured to about dishonesty. I think you misunderstood him. I think he was saying he was sick of hearing you talk about it. If so, I’ve got a certain amount of sympathy for this point of view. Seeing that you appear to be guy who takes the trouble to nail down other people’s misstatements precisely, I thought this consideration might be of interest to you.
Oh, and for the crowd, here is an example of the sort of horrendous and dishonest misrepresentations I’ve supposedly made. I made this remark about what Brandon R. Gates had claimed in his post:
The next comment on the page was from Gates who claimed:
Even though he had filled the post I was responding to with remarks like:
So Gates wrote Exxon knew the global warming debate was settled “as early as 1980.” I criticized Gates for claiming Exxon knew much of anything with certainty in 1982. He claims I’ve moved the goal posts and claims “it’s not at all clear to” him Exxon knew anything with certainty in 1982. Or rather, that Exxon knew anything more than the general scientific community – which itself didn’t know anything with certainty in 1982.
Unless Gates is going to claim the scientific community at large knew the global warming debate was settled in 1982 (which would be completely wrong), this is a clear and direct contradiction to his earlier claim.
I’m not sure what goalposts I’ve supposedly moved, but when a person misreads things in incredible ways to claim I’m wrong then claims not to believe the things he had just said are true, I don’t find the claim compellings.
Mark Bofill:
I’m not sure how important this is, but I don’t think he was saying he doesn’t like being lectured about dishonesty. I think the same thing you think – that he was saying he’s sick of hearing me talk about it. But if he’s sick of hearing me talk about it, it seems likely he didn’t like being lectured about it so I thought I’d address that sentiment as well.
And because we’re talking about the specifics of how to read things, I should point out that I wasn’t sure he holds the sentiment I mentioned is why I said, “If you don’t like” rather than, “I get you don’t like…”
SteveF,
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You cited a graphic produced by USAID. Here’s what they have to say on their website:
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The Current and Future Development Context
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The eradication of extreme poverty within a generation is feasible—but it is far from guaranteed. Projections of economic growth are highly uncertain, but unless growth is both rapid and inclusive, extreme poverty is likely to persist in today’s poorest countries, many of which are in sub-Saharan Africa. A significant number of vulnerable people also remain in Asia, and pockets of extreme poverty continue to exist in all regions, even in countries that have grown into middle-income status. There are daunting challenges associated with conflict and fragility and with climate change, and the implications of urbanization may vary sharply across countries. Emerging opportunities lie in evolving sources and mechanisms of development finance, including greater attention to domestic resource mobilization; youth bulges that can provide a demographic dividend if supportive social and economic policies are in place; and the transformative potential of data and technology. These global trends will shape individual country trajectories; USAID’s task is to help push these trajectories toward their most promising possibilities.
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My emphasis added. They are speaking my language. Thus far it’s not clear to me that you understand their argument. Specifically, I’m getting that their projections are contingent on taking actions to address challenges so that the *potential* reductions in extreme poverty can be achieved. I could not have written the above paragraph to be any more representative of my own views, several of which I’ve already expressed in this thread.
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Quite possible. The sucky thing about the future is I can’t fast-forward to see if I’m wrong. What I do know is that a bunch of scholarly work based on hard physical sciences are telling me that continuing to raise CO2 levels will continue to cause ever more solar energy to accumulate in the system in a timeframe that represents a geological eyeblink. The far past geological record suggests that rapid changes of the projected future magnitudes are bad juju.
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I’d *dearly* love to tell you *exactly* how good OR bad the results will be on balance, but I can’t.
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I *can* tell you with a much higher degree of precision and accuracy what the planet was like between 280-400 ppmv, because that’s a matter of historical record, and one in which I can with absolute confidence state that we’ve enjoyed a thriving existence.
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TL;DR: I trust physical models over economic models.
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Good, neither do I. The sticking point between us here seems to be on what constitutes rational policy. I can easily tell you what I think rational policy is NOT: wrecking the present economy to save the future economy. I have a feeling that there may yet be some question about that on your part.
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I’m incredulous of arguments from incredulity. 😉
Brandon [edit: Shollenberger] my friend, this is why I’m so fond of you. I agree with everything you said in your response to me, and I think it was stated precisely and well.
I often worry (this is changing the subject somewhat) when I correspond with you that you will misconstrue my misstatements without grace. What the heck does that mean. I worry that if I phrase something poorly I will invite your wrath. That you will decide (understandably) to take me at my word and at the literal meaning of my word and conclude that I am … a liar, scum bucket, what have you, subject to the particulars of the error in phraseology.
I have no particular point I am reaching towards in making this statement to you at this moment. My recollection is that this thought has crossed my mind at least once or twice before, and I wanted to find the opportunity to mention this to you before I ‘tripped over my tongue’ and landed in conflict with you (so to speak), so I could refer back to it when and if that unfortunate moment should come.
Thanks for your patience in reading this long, probably convoluted comment. I honestly do appreciate your taking the trouble.
Oh lordy. I had been distracted from the discussion of things other than the absurd misreading Gates came up with so I hadn’t given that much thought to some of the other things he said afterward. Now I think I’ve figured out what he’s basing his accusations of dishonesty upon. I had pointed out his post misrepresented Exxon documents in multiple ways which portrayed Exxon as believing, as far back as 1982, things the documents clearly showed it didn’t believe. I then challenged him:
There are two separate options for what he could show here to meet the challenge:
1) Exxon acknowledged humans had caused some amount of warming.
2) Exxon acknowledged there would be dangerous warming in the future.
His accusation I’m dishonest seems to be that he never said point 2 is true. I, of course, never said he had. I offered the second option of how he could demonstrate Exxon has been engaging in a disinformation campaign about global warming because in theory, even if Exxon hadn’t accepted humans had caused the planet to warm back in 1982, it could still have “known” global warming was a serious threat because it believed there would be dangerous global warming in the future.
The point of the challenge was if in 1982 Exxon didn’t believe humans had already caused any global warming, and it didn’t believe there would be any dangerous warming in the future, then there was nothing for it to lie about. Its position back in 1982 wouldn’t have been stronger or more informative than its position in 1989 or later when Gates claims the disinformation campaign was underway.
Assuming I’ve understood him correctly, I made a general challenge offering two options to prove Exxon had engaged in a disinformation campaign. I didn’t quote anything Gates had said when doing so. I didn’t claim the two options were claims he had made. I said they were two options one could take to prove Exxon had lied.
I couldn’t think of any other options that would work to prove Exxon had lied, but if someone could have, they could have responded by saying something like, “Here’s a third option.” That would have been fine too. Challenges aren’t always fair or complete. If there was some error in mine, it would have been fine to say so. Alternatively, if Gates had just written, “I never claimed Exxon said that,” I would have responded, “Yes, but if you can show it did, it would prove your point.”
Instead, it appears Gates felt because one of the two options I gave wasn’t something he himself had said, I must have been misrepresenting him and claiming he said something he had not. Because of this, he made vague remarks about me moving the goalposts which I didn’t understand because he didn’t bother to write out what his point was. And because I didn’t understand these vague remarks, he decided I’m dishonest for not correctiny my post based upon them.
Assuming I’ve understood him correctly, and I admit that is a pretty big assumption (which we wouldn’t need to make if Gates had bothered to write out what his point was), it appears to be nothing more than Gates having misread what I wrote. Again. And just like with his ridiculous claim I don’t think we even know the planet is warming, rather than do anything to try to check or confirm his (mis)understanding of what I wrote, he just decided to go off and decide I’m an idiot/liar/crazy person/whatever.
Maybe I’m wrong though. Maybe Gates can point to some horrendous misrepresentation I’ve posted and refused to correct despite knowing it was wrong because I’m so dishonest.
mark bofill,
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More annoying that he continues on about it *after* I’ve admitted being wrong.
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Infuriating that he cannot properly restate my original argument on my 2nd Exxon post, refuses to do it even after I pointed out how he did it *twice* on his blog. In short, he’s holding me to a standard to which he does not hold himself. In *my* opinion of course. I could be wrong about that too. Maybe when he removes his jaws from my buttocks, he and I can have an intelligent conversation about it.
You guys sure nobody wants a sandwich?
…
[Edit : I gots to go feed my children now.]
Mark Bofill:
Glad to hear!
I won’t say this could never happen as we all make mistakes and let things cloud our minds at times, but I try to never assume a person is a liar or bad person if I can avoid it.* I might criticize people harshly, but I try to focus only on their actions, not them as people. I only start talking about people as persons when I’m very confident in the claims. For instance, in almost every case I’ve accused a person of dishonesty, it’s because they’ve admitted they know the truth of something, and that truth contradicts something else they’ve said. (It’s incredible people actually do this, but they do.)
It’s a shame you’ve felt this way. I could maybe see getting annoyed at you for misstating things (or just believing silly things!), but as long as you’re genuinely trying to engage in an honest manner, I can’t see ever coming to think you’re a liar/bad person.*
*Well, on a philosophical level I think humans as a whole are crazy, dishonest and, well, bad. But that’s a philosophical thing. I usually try to adjust my baseline for practical considerations, not philosophical ones. But hey! I can write a treatise on how humans are evil if we’d like a change of topic.
Brandon R. Gates makes me laugh:
“I intentionally lied about you for days on end to make you look bad. But now I’ve admitted I was wrong, so don’t you dare talk about it anymore!”
Sure. And hey, the guy who mugged me last week said it was wrong, so I shouldn’t talk to people about how he mugged me. I mean, who talks about a person’s wrongdoing after he acknowledges it? (Answer: normal people.) Who thinks a person mistreating or abusing other people and not apologizing or showing any signs of contrition is something that might merit discussio? (Answer: normal people.)
It’s not like you get to do whatever you want then say, “That was wrong of me” and everything is magically wiped clean. If I said, “It was wrong of me to access the Skeptical Science servers,” nobody from Skeptical Science would say, “Oh, okay. Things are cool now. We won’t say anything more about this ever again.”
I challenge anyone to read Gates’s remarks on this topic and figure out what I wrote that was wrong much less how it should have been written. I mean that seriously. I offered my guess at what Gates is complaining about above, but it’s just a guess. I have no idea how he expects people to be able to figure out what he means when most of his responses are things like:
Andrew_KY,
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Models are the only way to predict or project future events which have not happened. Whether done by sliderule on paper, or computer, there is no other way.
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Models constrained to observation help explain the past. Again, the “model” could be as simple as calculations written on paper and crunched with an abacus, or a full-blown 4D AOGCM.
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It’s models all the way down. In *any* field of empirical science. In climate science, there are a lot of empirical data. I don’t have exact figures, but a zeroth approximation is tens if not hundreds of terabytes.
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I understand that won’t convince you. I have told you what will convince me. It’s a tall order. On the other hand, it’s how the process of normal science works.
At dinner but actually think that’s fascinating. Humans crazy dishonest and evil? I think we are complicated but not necessarily all that. Will get back to you on this.
Brandon S.,
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I figured it was perfectly and clearly obvious what you’d done. Apparently I was wrong, so I explained it in more detail. How nice of you pretend I haven’t done so.
Brandon S.,
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Translation: the beatings will continue until I can change the past.
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Seriously, B, my having wrongfully not updated my article post-haste and you being robbed by a hypothetical mugger seems to stretch the moral equivalence a bit. Why I should feel contrition to the level you’re suggesting there, I’m failing to understand.
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But then I would struggle with that, because I’m a pathological liar who never tells the truth. Poor me, so misunderstood.
mark bofill,
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I’m beginning to wonder if he’s after my firstborn. Speaking of …
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Suggest you lay off the beans. Rumor has it they may be hallucinogenic.
Brandon Gates,
“Specifically, I’m getting that their projections are contingent on taking actions to address challenges so that the *potential* reductions in extreme poverty can be achieved.”
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I note that several of the projections agree on near complete eradication of extreme poverty within 20 years, even if USAID is more pessimistic. But that being said, yes there are potential problems with trying to reach near zero extreme poverty, especially in Africa, where the fraction of people who are extremely poor is higher than elsewhere, were poor/no infrastructure exists, where government is often corrupt and counter productive, where war and even genocide are a constant threat, and the overall level of education is appallingly low. In these places, eliminating extreme poverty will require more concerted effort, and is why my wife and I spend a couple thousand dollars per year helping to feed and educate very poor kids in Africa. I have seen no data suggesting climate change is a significant contributor to poverty in Africa (or anywhere else for that matter).
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“The far past geological record suggests that rapid changes of the projected future magnitudes are bad juju.”
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I’ve never encountered either good or bad juju. I think the “past geological record” is the least certain way to project what will happen due to a specified level of GHG forcing, and over what time frame. The conditions 125,000 years ago (or 6 million years ago, or 60 million years ago) were not the same as today, so any such projection is dubious. The second vast uncertainty is the “projected future magnitudes”. What I see is large warming projections from CGMs, most of which appear to be diverging from reality. This doesn’t inspire confidence in the projections. In any case, scenarios like RCP 8.5, which lead to the ‘worst case’ warming projections, are so far from plausible that we can safely ignore them, and concentrate on the more realistic emissions projections.
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What we are actually arguing about is 15-20 years versus 40 years. In 40 years, it is very likely that humanity will already have begun significant reductions in fossil fuel use, if only because at some point before 40 years from now, the cost of at least some recovery methods will rise above the cost of non-fossil energy. (And increasing nuclear power use will help make this happen sooner.) For internationally negotiated fossil fuel reductions to start having much effect on emissions, it will likely take 15-20 years. I am sanguine enough to wait to see happens over the next 15-20 years; if temperatures are rising more rapidly than at present (or if you prefer, rising at a rate which is inconsistent with the relatively low empirical sensitivity estimates) that will be the time to adjust policy.
SteveF,
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You mention lots of interesting things in your post to which I’d be happy to respond. But I’d like to focus on:
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Uncertain means “we do not know”. We *are* certain what 280-400 ppmv looks like, no forward-looking statements required.
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The commonality is that species adapt to present conditions. Evolution takes time. You are aware that there have been mass extinctions in the past? If not rapid (on the geology/evolutionary scale) changes to the environment, what’s your explanation for them?
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As they have done in the past — among many other things, “teh modulz” don’t predict the timing of internal variability.
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When we plug in external forcings from observation, CMIP5 does run about 10% hot over the hindcast portion as compared to HADCRUT4.
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Fine. Which RCP do you think is most realistic?
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And I am not. What will we be able to do 15-20 years from now that we’re not already able to do now? Furthermore, on a slick road at night in the fog approaching a blind curve, I generally think it’s prudent to ease off the gas pedal sooner than later. At the same time, it’s for sure not a good idea to stomp on the brake. The climate system has inerita. Go back to what I wrote to you upthread:
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My core position is based an awful lot on keeping the safety margins as wide as possible through being proactive, not reactive. Call it “pre-adaptation†if you will.
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If I weren’t in the car with you, I’d be perfectly content to let you keep the pedal down the whole way through that dark foggy icy curve and buy you a beer for having brass balls if you made it. That’s not the situation we’re in here.
Google is showing Cruz winning the 24 WI delegates. Or more importantly from my view: Trump not winning them. I’m not sure if this clinches or just nearly clinches a brokered convention. But I prefer that to Trump.
Say Brandon G,
Your conversation with SteveF is interesting enough that I’ll put away the magic beans for awhile.
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Do you believe we can take some effective action on climate – apparently. Who is ‘we’? The U.S. or the world? In my view we can first order approximate the world as the U.S., China, and India. Well, China is going to do what they are going to do, mostly it seems they guarantee nothing much out until 2030. The U.S., well, we still hate nukes. What can we do? India? They don’t seem to want to do much of anything right now.
Am I misrepresenting the situation in your view? I don’t see what realistic options are on the table.
Brandon R. Gates:
Bull. I said most of your responses were of a certain sort. By definition, that means some were not. And while you say you’ve “explained it in more detail,” that doesn’t mean I understand your supposedly more detailed explanations. Given how little effort you put into those explanations, I’m not sure how anyone could be sure what you meant. I certainly don’t, a point I’ve made abundantly clear.
You must be smoking crack. Seriously, there’s no sensible reason a person would take my remark the way you just did. Saying people don’t have to stop talking about the wrongs a person does one that person admits they’ve done them in no way implies people will keep talking about those wrongs indefinitely.
I didn’t say or suggest you should feel that level of contrition, whatever level of contrition that may be. I don’t even know what level of contrition you’re talking about as I’ve barely even suggested you should feel contrition at all. I certainly haven’t made a focus of it. I wouldn’t even care except I think it is mildly interesting how you feel free to abuse and mistreat people like this.
Seriously, on crack. I called you dishonest for one thing, something which was clearly dishonest. Acting as though that is portraying you as a pathological liar is pathetic.
Maybe next you are going to portray me as a voyeuristic creeper who breaks into people’s homes and watches them while they sleep. That’s about as reasonable a reaction as this. Expecting people to acknowledge when their derogatory posts are wrong is hardly remarkable. Neither is discussing how a person lied for days, even if that discusision does happen a few hours after the person walked back from their dishonesty.
lucia:
Wisconsin has 42 delegates, not 24. 18 delegates go to the winner of the stage overall, and the other 24 are split up with three going to the winner of each congressional district.
But yes, it does look like Cruz will win 24+ of them. For Trump to be on track to win the nomination without risk of a brokered convention, he needed to win something like 24, so that’s a problem for him. Even if he won 18 (which I doubt as I expect most to go to Cruz/Kasich), it puts him behind where he wanted to be. It’s not impossible for him to still get the 1,237 delegates he’d need, but it is unlikely. He either needs to do better in the remaining primaries than is likely, or he needs to secure a lot of the uncommitted delegates.
I wouldn’t rule the possibility of Trump winning the nomination without risk of a brokered convention out, but it definitely looks less likely with the projected results of the Wisconsin primary.
mark bofill,
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Hypocrite that I am, I had tacos and beans for dinner.
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I think it’s in the US’s best interest to lead. It’s an “if we build it, they will come” argument.
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I would include the EU in that, I think that gives us the top 4 absolute emitters.
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My understanding is that a lot of their initiative has to do with the fact that their coal habit and population density in urban areas is a serious issue for them in the present. I’m *guessing* the only reason they negotiated the “deal” with Obama is to see how much they could get for doing something they already intended to do anyway.
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Get the US to not hate nukes. I say that like it’s so easy. It will minimally require bipartisan efforts, something which is supremely lacking at the moment. Any other solutions I can think of — nukes don’t solve every problem — will likely require the same. I think folks need to start reaching across the aisle, which is what in my own small way I’m trying to do here.
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That’s my view too, and in a sense I don’t blame them. The rich industrialized nations got to use the cheap dirty stuff to make their fortunes. It wouldn’t seem “right” to me to bind them to an agreement that kept them from doing the same … at least not without some sort of “fair” outside compensation. All the more reason for me to argue that the US can and should lead, and let the rest of the world follow.
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On the whole, no.
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Not totally surprising. People tend to not look hard for solutions to things which they don’t think are serious problems. That’s not to say that I have any better answers. I do know that what’s been happening thus far isn’t working out as well as I’d like.
Brandon S.,
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Naw, you’d like that too much. Would give you even more things to whine about.
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #145405)
“Unless Gates is going to claim the scientific community at large knew the global warming debate was settled in 1982 (which would be completely wrong), this is a clear and direct contradiction to his earlier claim.”
The global warming debate is always “settled” according to the scientific community at large, 1982,1972 [no that was freezing was “settled”], 1942, 1642, 42 etc.
Amazing how a voice adds so much more personality to personality. So much more reality.
Cauliflower in white bechamel sauce tonight , Mark.
I even made half of it. Better than sandwiches.
Brandon Gates,
It is clear that we evaluate both the present and likely future scenarios very differently, and that there is nothing either of us will say to the other which will change that.
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My preference, when something is uncertain, is to reduce uncertainty and then act upon better information. You clearly think otherwise. It is for me a matter of prudence: there are a hundred ‘potential catastrophes’ people will always claim demand action NOW. My experience, which at this point is quite long, is that such potential catastrophes are always so exaggerated that they are implausible in the real world. The fact that a numbskull like Paul Ehrlich is awarded and celebrated for his ‘vision’ does not change the fact that in every case his ‘vision’ was (and is) grossly wrong, and worse, had people been foolish enough to have actually acted on his predictions, the world would be much worse off today. My prediction: So it will be with claims of climate catastrophe. ‘Truth on the ground’ in 20 years, in the form of measured temperatures and measured rates of sea level rise, will better tell people what actions are justified.
Cio.
Brandon,
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Ok. Well, I’m more or less with you on nuclear power, possibly for overlapping reasons. You’ve mentioned biofuels before I think. Is this another major part of what you propose?
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The ‘if you build it they will come’ thing. The trouble is, I’m not far off SteveF’s point of view that there are lots of potential problems out there. In fact, there are some I think are indeed more probable and more proximate. U.S. spending, debt, and the projected expanding cost of our so called ‘entitlement’ programs in particular — I think the probability of this situation turning into a problem that something must be done about is greater, and I don’t think it’s a trivial matter to solve. So… Is climate what I should be devoting my worry to?
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I’m personally willing to pay a few extra bucks each month for nuclear, to hedge my bets, that’s about the size of my commitment there. I’m happy to talk about it. …it’s not clear that I’m interested in doing more, or that I ought to be interested in doing more I guess. I don’t know. What do you think about all this.
Brandon G,
Additional elements:
1.In my particular local situation, it offends my sensibilities that the Tennessee Valley Authority has spent 7 billion over the decades building the Bellefonte nuclear plant that they now seem to want to get rid of / sell off. Seems nutty to me. But then again I have not estimated by how much Bellefonte would drive up my monthly electric bill, and maybe I ought to.
2.Something that would be of some value to me is to settle the issue of what to do about climate change in a manner I can accept. Like SteveF but maybe to a lesser degree, I don’t think climate change is going to be a major problem. However, it’s not beyond possible that some of the people proposing crazy actions in response might become a problem. Read OPOF here on this SkS thread. If reasonable people need to make an accommodation to keep the nut jobs like this under control, I’m onboard with that.
Brandon R. Gates:
I”m not the one whining here dude. As an example, I’m not the one accusing people of dishonesty then refusing to address anything they say regarding those accusations.
One difference between us is I express my criticisms in a clear and direct manner with little fluff. You express your criticisms in a vague, petulant manner with a ton of fluff. Only one of those leans toward the “whining” category.
SteveF,
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Which are we most certain of, CO2 levels and temperatures of the past, or the future? Are we not already acting to change CO2 levels?
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mark bofill,
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Yes, biofuels seem the better option to, say battery or hydrogen powered cars.
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That’s entirely up to you. No matter when climate change becomes a proximate issue (however you care to define that), all our other present pressing concerns will presumably still exist in one form or other.
Mark Bofill:
Personally, I’d find that topic more interesting than much of what else has been discussed. I’d rather be discussing philosophy than the meaning of statistical tests, what constitutes hacking or… whatever this nonsense with Brandon R. Gates is.
Then again, I’d even rather be discussing projections for the Republican primary. That’s at least a topic where one’s knowledge/understanding of the subject is readily demonstrable.
To be fair, at this point the reactor isn’t needed as the area has enough enough energy production already. Selling it off is probably the right idea. After decades, it’s pretty clear the place is never going to become operational.
It is pretty ridiculous things have reached that point though
Brandon S,
Yes, that’s the chief problem. It’s not needed.
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Still, it takes so darn long to build these things and costs so darn much. We’re not going to need one 20 years down the line are we pretty sure about that. Probably they are. ~sigh~.
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But are they sure about what the Feds are going to do? There’s a heck of a lot of coal burning to keep the lights on in Alabama if my recollections aren’t completely screwy. Might be in a couple of years they regret losing that insurance policy against the EPA.
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On that other note. I wonder if most people don’t understand what makes people (including themselves) tick very well and if that doesn’t explain much of the apparent insanity. For example, we are somewhat rational, but we aren’t really governed by reason (IMO) the way many of us might think. We’re animals, we’re primates, a lot of our behaviors tie into that; that’s a fairly trivial or …banal? yeah level of looking at it. More interesting to me, how our minds work. How we “reason” if “reason” is what we want to call it. We’re ‘intelligent’ but how do we really do it?
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I think a big part of our intelligence is our ability to make stuff up. I think we make stuff up constantly, without even being aware of it or how we do it. The very best of our stories make it into our awareness and we sometimes adopt these made up stories as fact. Maybe. That’s what I think anyway.
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[Edit: It’s a pretty good story at any rate, don’t you think? 😉 I just made it up.]
Brandon G
That’s not the only reason. Another reason is a block of people exist who believe it is a problem (or at least claim to) but who insist an existing proposed solution must be off the table. That solution is “nuclear”. We all know these people exist. It’s not all climate activists, but it is a quite vocal group.
And for a while, those in the “let’s do something about AGW” camp have not been willing to push back on the “yes. Do something. but NO NUKES” camp.
It looks like some in the “let’s do something about AGW” are starting to be vocal about the need to push back on those who refuse the nuclear option. This is promising because there are quite a few people who are skeptical about the need for AGW who would be willing to support more nuclear energy because it’s the step best suited to a high level of industrialization. And we know how to do it.
The fact is: as loudly as those who block nuclear want to scream that they are for reducing the risk of AGW, the fact that they block all nuclear means they prioritize other things over avoiding anthropogenic warming.
Brandon R. Gates (Comment #145432)
“My preference, when something is uncertain, is to reduce uncertainty and then act upon better information.”
Mine too.
In the surgical profession they talk about “fan it with a hat” meaning do nothing until the problem becomes clear, then take decisive surgical action…
AGW seems more like a bunch of junior physicians with a list of rare diseases ..
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“Which are we most certain of, CO2 levels and temperatures of the past, or the future?”
Probably the present.
Even then with CO2 there are only 2 or 3 reliable real sites the world over.
Temperatures of the past are constantly adjusted, the temp in 1998 for instance is different each year that passes according to Zeke, so past temps are definitely unreliable.
Future temps are much more reliable if you believe in models.
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“Are we not already acting to change CO2 levels?”
Queensland has just opened a massive open pit coal mine to India.
Was your question rhetorical or did you really believe we are reducing CO2 at the moment.
Nuclear has a waste fuel dilemma that imposes large after costs.
Dumping it in South Australia looks a really good option.
low population, other side of the world. Fits the NIMBY solution.
I’m in favor as long as they do not choose the adjacent Northern Territory which is MBY.
Mark Bofill:
Actually, the TVA’s estimate on when the plant might or might not be needed only runs out to 20 years. After 20 years, they don’t claim it would be unnecessary. I’d wager it would be good to have the plant running in 20 years.
Also, we should note it’s likely there would have been a useful role for the plant if plans for it had been followed through upon. However, as it became more clear the plant wasn’t going to become operational, other companies stepped up their investments in energy production for the area to help fill the void.
I would argue the whole “animal” part of our mentalities is overstated. People appear far more rational than given credit for if you accept that rationality leads to things most people don’t like to admit. For instance, people make a lot of rational decisions that are incredibly selfish. They then try to tell everybody, often including themselves, the decisions were for other reasons. Sometimes they even convince themselves of the things they say.
It’s a sort of willful self-delusion. People generally don’t notice they’re doing it, but that’s because they’ll actively avoid thinking about it whenever something causes it to come up.
Brandon, Lucia,
Yes. I wish this could be talked about without the cries of ‘Conspiracy Theorist!’. Can we not say it plain, if there are other agendas at play. Need that be a conspiracy. The politics and mudslinging seem to forever get in the way of getting to the bottom of what is going on.
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I think it strange that there is a mature, well understood technology that has zero CO2 emissions that has not been universally championed by global warming activists. I will openly state that this causes me to wonder if I understand what global warming activists are really trying to accomplish, and if minimizing atmospheric CO2 is really at the top of their agenda. Instead of doing the Cook-Lew-Shuffle, why not actually talk about this I guess. Not saying you do the Cook-Lewandowsky shuffle Brandon (dismissing your opponents as crazy conspiracy theorists), in fact I don’t think you do. I got carried away talking there.
BrandonS,
Google is now showing WI 36 delegates in Cruz bin and 6 in Trump. If the full number is 48, that leaves 6 floating around. We’ll see where they go eventually.
Mark Bofill:
My reason for not talking about it is I don’t care about global warming. The people advocating for strong action to combat global warming don’t behave in anything resembling the way people trying to prevent an existential threat should behave. The lack of professionalism, respect and, most importantly, humility, makes it clear to me this is not advocacy led by a responsible group basing their judgment on fair-minded analysis.
That doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy. It doesn’t even mean most scientists studying the problem are bad. It just means the advocacy for global warming isn’t trustworthy. To me, that’s enough. If people telling me there’s a problem I have to do things to combat can’t behave in a minimally reasonable way, I’m not going to care about the problem. If global warming is the threat advocates make it out to be, there are at least a hundred things they should have done differently.
lucia:
I think you must have misread my comment. Wisconsin doesn’t have have 48 delegates, it has 42. Reporting is at 100% now. The final tally is 36 Cruz, 6 Trump. That’s almost 20 less delegates than most people were saying Trump needed to be on track to avoid a brokered convention. There are still plenty of states where Trump could out-perform projections to get back on track, but this is definitely not a good sign for his chance (at avoiding a brokered convention).
lucia,
Trump got his usual 35% of the vote. But with only three people in the race, the rest of the vote wasn’t spread out and Trump couldn’t manage a plurality. Cruz nearly won a majority of the vote. It will be interesting to see how Trump spins this and who he blames. One thing is certain, he won’t blame himself.
More interesting to me is that Sanders stomped Clinton 56.5% to 43.2%. Perhaps the Dems are beginning to realize that the shine on Clinton is rot.
Trump is a very unattractive loser. This seems to be his campaign statement:
Other things I’ve read sound even worse.
I want to elaborate on something I said in that last comment. The reason I said the lack of humility is the most important indicator to me is if global warming is a serious threat to civilization, then it is obscene groups like Real Climtae and Skeptical Science are major players in the advocacy to combat it.
If I were a scientist truly worried about global warming, I wouldn’t create a website and say, “Listen to me!” I wouldn’t go on PR campaigns telling everybody about how those evil deniers mistreated me. I’d be doing everything in my power to get people and governments to organize groups to study the problem in a focused and controlled manner.
The idea there is some existential threat involving the planet’s climate which should be examined in a haphazard manner by disorganized scientists following their personal curiosities and whims for research is beyond laughable. The arrogance of thinking the normal scientific publication system could handle a threat to humanity asa whole is stupefying. That there can be any number of gaps in our knowledge or understanding of the subject simply because no scientists happen to have felt like devoting the time to work on it makes it clear not even the advocates are taking this threat very seriously.
If I were a scientist who believed global warming were a serious threat, my first thought would be: We need an organized approach which lays out the tens of thousands of issues we need to understand about global warming so we can clearly detail what we do and do not know then assign people to study the things where there are gaps in our knowledge.
Instead, we have the IPCC. That says all I need to know about global warming advocacy.
My last comment landed in moderation. I’m not sure why. Regardless, I had to laugh when you said this lucia:
As he’s a very unattractive winner too!
Brandon S. says: “The idea there is some existential threat …which should be examined in a haphazard manner by disorganized scientists following their personal curiosities and whims for research is beyond laughable. The arrogance of thinking the normal scientific publication system could handle a threat to humanity as a whole is stupefying.”
So, how should the might and main of the science community be organized to, say, prepare for or prevent a literal catastrophe such as some Near Earth Object (asteroid) colliding with our planet? How would astronomers, rocket-jockeys, radar-experts (whatever they’re called) etc be marshaled into effective order?
How are all the science cats involved in the study of Zika, Ebola, dengue, or malaria be herded into line?
I just am not sure any such problem is amenable to government or trans-national imposition of order.
Obviously Ronald Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican” has been discarded. But then it’s not at all clear that Trump is a Republican in spirit, but is just using the party for his own ends.
Pouncer:
Huh? It wouldn’t take “the might and main of the science community” to deal with an asteroid. Compared to global warming, that’s a simple issue.
I’m not talking about forcing scientists to stop their current work or having governments take control of academia. I’m talking about governmental, or even non-governmental, bodies creating projects with clear structure and plans to organize the examination of a topic. It’s done all the time with other things.
Compare what goes into building a major bridge with the sort of work done on global warming. The standards aren’t remotely comparable. That’s crazy. People being more rigorous and organized for something like building a dam than about saving the planet is ridiculous.
“So, how should the might and main of the science community be organized to, say, prepare for or prevent a literal catastrophe such as some Near Earth Object (asteroid) colliding with our planet?”
Pouncer,
Here we go with the bad comparisons again. Everyone knows what a big rock is and when should such a material thing impact, people would perceive it and secondary effects.
Global Warming is a misleadingly named statistical abstraction. If some crank Climate Scientists weren’t constantly yelling at you that it’s happening *right now*, no one would know the difference.
Andrew
Brandon S,
This is more or less where I’ve been too.
Footnote – You probably already know this, but when I said:
I was referring to Brandon G, not you. My original comment address was ambiguous, I’m not used to multiple Brandons here yet. 🙂
Brandon,
Oh, absolutely. I think you minimize the animal thing too much, but I certainly agree with you here. We rationalize, that’s what we do. We figure out how to make things fit together in our heads that really don’t fit at all. I believe it’s how we think; that’s part of the basis of our intelligence / how our brains work.
There’s probably a whole formal body of study of this stuff I ought to go read an intro to instead of speculating from my belly button. But. Gimme a second and I’ll rationalize why I shouldn’t…
Brandon S,
I find Trump an unattractive winner too. But I recognize that some people like winners who go “na na na na, na na na na, hey heyaaaa, good bye!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ7ZeHA1GHM&nohtml5=False
lucia,
I find Trump unattractive. Period.
The problem is that demagoguery works. Otherwise, the ancient Greeks wouldn’t have made up a name for it.
mark,
Hence the Through the Looking Glass quote above.
Mark Bofill:
I don’t agree, but that may just be because I’m a freak whose brain works differently than most.
lucia:
You know, if Trump were at least clever or witty about it, it’d be a lot easier to stomach his behavior.
Lucia,
“Trump is a very unattractive loser.”
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More than that, he is an unattractive winner. He is an unattractive speaker. He is an unattractive candidate. He is an unattractive person. Good grief!
Brandon,
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So trivial example first: Words on screen offend you. Adrenaline flows. Fight or flight. Animal reaction, affects thought process and response on blog. Shollenberger Smash Rrarrw!! Puny Bofill!
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Other examples are harder. Blogging in the first place, need for group interaction- this is a primate behavior, not exactly the same as a pure rational behavior. We like to talk.
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I think we establish precedence among ourselves in blogs, although I’m not sure of it, and I’m not sure I can demonstrate it. We establish a place in the hierarchy, even though the whole darn thing is virtual. Because we’re primates banging away on keyboards; no getting away from it.
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I’ll give some thought how to argue this and get back to you, wife just walked in.
How about an easier one, ganging up on outsiders. I grant you it’s more complicated in humans, and maybe it happens less here than some places, but don’t you think we see this on blogs? I think this is an animal / primate social behavior.
Mark Bofill:
I can’t say I’ve ever had that reaction before. Why would I have a fight or flight reaction when there is no incentive for “flight”?
A desire for interaction with other people isn’t “primate behavior.” That primates may interact in groups doesn’t mean interacting in groups is animalistic behavior. There are animals that aren’t social at all, there are animals that are mildly social and there are animals that are very social.*
I… don’t know what comparison you’re making here. I assume “precedence” wasn’t the word you meant to use, but I don’t know what word would fit there. As for any heirarchy existing, that’s again not a primate or animalistitc thing. Social structures all but necessitate heirarchies.
It seems like you may be listing traits necessary for any intelligent life to exist, saying primates share them and claiming that means we’re all “primates banging away on keyboards.”
*I don’t think comparing animal sociality to human sociality is very meaningful anyway. Anthropomorphism leads to all sorts of faulty conclusions.
angech,
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Ye olde Zebras.
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How small do the error bars need to be when the magnitude of the absolute change from pre-industrial is on the order of 40%?
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I’m afraid all I have for that one are standard responses. I’ll spare us all the boredom unless requested otherwise.
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Now that’s a novel argument in my experience. I’m getting the feeling that I should read it as dry snark.
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Rhetorical.
Brandon,
Then yes, I believe you are an unusual case, although I’m starting to wonder if maybe I’ve just got this wrong. My impression right now is that many people experience adrenaline reactions in situations where the reaction is completely inappropriate. Even counter-productive, in fact. Let me think how to substantiate this claim.
Brandon,
Yes. But primates are social. We are social, it’s a primate behavior. Octopuses are intelligent animals, they are not social. This is my point, it’s a primate behavior.
Brandon,
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Let me link this:
http://stress.about.com/od/stressmanagementglossary/g/What-Is-Psychosocial-Stress.htm
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And let me suggest that psychological studies support this without digging into it. If you disagree, we’ll figure out where that leaves us.
Mark Bofill:
Birds are intelligent. Birds are social. We exhibit bird behavior!
The point I’m making is the fact we can see something in a species of animals vaguely similar to something we see in humans doesn’t mean humans exhibit traits of that animal. That one type of animal is “social” doesn’t mean humans interacting with other humans are exhibiting a trait of that animal. The word “social” in this context is so vague it’s almost meaningless, and you could draw parallels between nearly any sort of behavior at that point.
By the way, there are social octopuses.
BUT WE ARE PRIMATES NOT BIRDS!! WE ARE!! YES I’M YELLING MY ADRENALINE IS FLOWING!! Arrrggghh!!!!
But there are social octopuses? I nidn’t know that.
lucia,
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It’s worse than we thought. Blocking nuclear power as a trade for coal generation is killing people now.
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I tossed out some stats above, but I’ll repeat them here: in the US the estimates are 10-30 thousand premature deaths per year due to coal. I believe that includes the supply chain. Forbes ran an article a few years back with some nicely summarized stats, which I attempted to mix with some light humor because it pisses me off so much.
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As you say, it’s not all “greens”, but they’re a noisy contingent which I worry has a tendency to drown out cautious nuke supporters who are otherwise vocally in favor of CO2 mitigation.
Well say. Will you look at that, social octopuses.
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Thanks Brandon.
Okay, I’m calm now.
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I didn’t mean to suggest that. But humans are a type of animal. I believe (this is a question of fact we can dispute) that humans exhibit some of the common behaviors that the overarching group of similar animals (primates) exhibit. I think that these common behaviors are due to the fact that we are [edit: all] primates. I didn’t think any of this was particularly controversial.
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Intelligence or rationality does not explain all of our behaviors. I thought your initial premise agreed with this. It seems strange, if you are arguing now that human behavior is entirely rational and therefore can’t possibly be explained in any part as irrational primate behavior.
Thanks Brandon.
Brandon R. Gates:
I clicked on that link and went to his post, and the numbers I found in it seemed off from what I remembered having seen the last time I saw this topic come up. I did a quick search thinking it was just a matter of different sources, but it turns out that’s not the problem. I have seen the Forbes article he cites before. He quotes it as giving a table which begins:
My search quickly pulled up a number of pages giving that as:
It turns out the Forbes article, as initially ran actually gave the table as:
It was edited to the second table I list pretty quickly, presumably because the 6 was a typo meant to be a 7. It was then edited again some time later to the first table, cutting the death rates by about a third. I don’t know just when that edit happened, but I do know it was at least two years after the original article was published. And of course, none of these changes were disclosed.
I could get on a soapbox here, but really, I just wanted to point it out because I found it fascinating. Plus, I think I deserve props for even noticing this. I’ve never researched this issue before, so the fact I happened to notice a discrepancy like this based on nothing more than a faint memory of a casual reading of random discussions on blogs is pretty cool.
Somebody should track down just what happened here and what the underlying sources actually say. I don’t think it’s going to be me though.
Mark Bofill:
There are some behaviors humans exhibit also exhibited by primates (technically, humans are primates). What I dispue is that the behaviors you cite are such. I don’t think people creating blogs is an example of a sort of social interaction we can say primates share.
I don’t think rationality has anything to do with most of these things. Being social or not isn’t a matter of rationality. It’s a matter of desire. What we want or don’t want is no more a matter of rationality than what flavor of ice cream we want. It may be that many of our desires arise from animalistic traits, but if so, the fact there are humans who don’t desire social interactions in groups demonstrates human sociality is not some simple reflection of primates being social.
Desires aren’t rational. They’re not irrational either. They’re just what we want. Our rationality or irrationality manifests in how we go about trying to fulfill our various desires.
Brandon R. Gates: “I tossed out some stats above, but I’ll repeat them here: in the US the estimates are 10-30 thousand premature deaths per year due to coal. I believe that includes the supply chain.”
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Having practiced plaintiff’s workers’ compensation law in Ohio for 17 years in the past, I am suspicious of this statistic. Southeastern Ohio has a good amount of coal and I didn’t run into that many cases. My suspicion (which can be proven wrong) is that a liberal or advocacy government agency extrapolated from a small sample with a high death rate to get a high (or very high) estimate.
JD
mark bofill,
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It’s not a perfect protocol, but I’m content to simply be Gates and Brandon S. can be Brandon.
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I’m not sure which comment of yours was the ambiguous one. But I’m going chime in on #145434, which you explicitly addressed to Brandon S. … er, Brandon.
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Yes. My basic understanding is that our brains don’t like gaps in a narrative, it’s unsettling. By example, our brains do it for visual input. Shapes in clouds, constellations in the sky, faces on Mars … Jesus on toast. Abstract modern art is just a desperate attempt to one-up the pointillists and other impressionists.
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Our brains are pattern-matching engines. They need to be since our senses are so limited, and brains so presently ill-equipped to handle the amount of input available. So we fill in the gaps, sometimes so automagically we’re not aware of doing it. Other times more consciously because we believe that we have no better choice.
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And now this: because “reality” is so often miserable, we invent stories to make it seem less awful. Or in fancier terms, we substitute normative for positive — what we think should be for what is. A raft of cognitive biases owe their mechanism to just such tendencies. Or so say the experts on Wikipedia.
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Not unlike my narrative above about artists, or everything else I wrote for that matter. Heck, for all I really “know”, you’re just a figment of my imagination which I invented because an isolated brain in a vat wants company.
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I like Philip K. Dick’s test for this: Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. Still it’s tricksy — second-guessers like myself will wonder if I’ve actually stopped believing in a putative illusion, or if I’ve just fooled myself into thinking I have. Halp!
Holy…
Sorry for the triple post, but I just tracked down the timing of the change in that Forbes article Brandon R. Gates used in his post, and it’s kind of incredible. As recently as March 3rd of this year the article gave the third table I described, not the first which Gates quotes. Sometime after that, but no later than March 9th, the article had been changed to show the table Gates quotes. Then on March 28th, Gates wrote his post quoting the secretly edited table.
That is pretty incredible timing. Maybe people quote that article all the time so it’s not surprising this might happen, but that the change would only be discovered because this particular person wrote this particular post at this particular time is… wow. It makes me wonder how many changes like this go unnoticed.
It also makes me wonder why this article was secretly changed nearly five years after it was written. That seems bizarre.
Brandon Gates,
Speaking of reality, have your read any Iain Banks novels set in his Culture Universe, particularly The Hydrogen Sonata? The starships are run by A.I.’s that are of an order like the First Ones in Babylon 5:
Except that G’Kar was wrong about them not being able to communicate with or notice us.
The Banks A.I.’s run detailed models or simulations, so detailed, in fact, that they worry that ending them might amount to genocide because the individuals in the simulation have become self aware. Those individuals are not aware they’re in a simulation, though, probably. The point being that the level of mental simulation one can run may be the best measure of intelligence.
Brandon G,
~shrug~ What effective difference does it make? It looks real, it seems real, it might as well be real. For all reasonable intents and purposes, it’s real. Yah it might be fake, you might be plugged into the Matrix. It’s not though. Anybody who thinks so can sit and try to ‘free their mind’, but “Descartes demon” so you’ll never know if you were successful anyway. Might just as well take take what we sense as valid and try to integrate it into some consistent sensible whole and run with that. At least that’s been my view for most of my life.
Brandon,
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I once chased down the sources myself, well hell, it’s not difficult for me to dig them up again.
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If you found others in your quick search which aren’t covered in that note, I’d be happy to add yours to the hopper.
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That’s disappointing. Nice catch.
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Rescanning the thread at Eli’s, I mention that I couldn’t find one of the referenced WHO studies, but the 30,000/yr upper bound figure I use comes from here:
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A Harvard study released in 2006 found that, on average, poisonous emissions from coal plants kill roughly 36,000 Americans due to cancer, respiratory illness and other health problems each year.
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The paper is open-access hosted on the NIH/pubmed website, but the 36 k figure doesn’t jump out at me, so it looks like someone somewhere in the chain did a calculation from the reported stats.
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I know at some point I did dig up a WHO study with more worldwide scope, I’ll see if I can find it again as time permits.
Brandon S,
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I don’t think I understood the implications of your position before. I still don’t, but at least I realize it now. I’ll think about it. Thanks.
Wow DeWitt, I like your response better..
How come you know about all the good books and I don’t. Another one I need to get. I still haven’t ordered ‘Road to Serfdom’.
I wrote a post documenting the changes to that Forbes article and providing links so people can see just when they were made. If you want to read it, it’s here:
http://www.hi-izuru.org/wp_blog/2016/04/a-peculiar-change/
JD Ohio, I share your doubts about the premature deaths attributed to coal. I did try to track down the source of the 2010 statistic, which appears to be from the Clean Air Task Force http://www.catf.us/resources/publications/files/The_Toll_from_Coal.pdf .
I’m trying to find the report commissioned by CATF and done by Abt Associates. I’m so far coming up blank. Nothing in the references in the 2010 report. So far I haven’t found anything at Abt either. Looking at one of the Abt reports that is available for Virgina, they sue a model built around a 2002 study of PM 2.5 mortality here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4037163/
JD Ohio,
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What’s your basis for comparison?
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I can attest from personal experience (but don’t have to) that cigarette smoking is also quite prevalent in Ohio. [1] Looks like top quartile to me. It’s a major confounding factor, so a good study would attempt to control for it.
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Thus far I’ve cited one study from Harvard, not exactly a bastion of liberalism. However, the fine print at the bottom includes:
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Supported by grants from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA; R827353) and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (ES00002).
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I’ll spot you the EPA, but the NIH?
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I’m not going to say that ideologically-motivated research doesn’t happen, or profit-motivated research for that matter. How would I be able to realistically “prove” otherwise in this case? In *any* case?
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—————
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[1] An amusing (to me) aside: unsurprisingly Utah has the lowest per capita rate of smokers, but near the highest rate of cigarettes smoked/day by those who do smoke.
mark,
Before being able to record multiple TV channels at once, much less streaming services that are producing original programming, and the internet, I used to read a lot. I subscribed to most of the science fiction and fantasy magazines. I belonged to the SF book club. When we still had a book store in the mall, I’d probably buy five or six books a week. I still have several thousand books, mostly paperback, in the house. And that doesn’t count all the magazines I have in boxes in the garage.
I probably still read more than most, but nowhere near as much. That’s partly because, since I’m not reading the magazines, I don’t see as many new authors that I want to add to my list of must reads.
Authors on my pretty much read everything they publish are:
P.C.Hodgell: Jame books starting with God Stalk (not very prolific but lots of fun)
George R.R.Martin: Game of Thrones but not Wild Cards.
Patricia Briggs: Mercy Thompson and related books set in the same milieu
Glen Cook: The Black Company (series now complete) and Garret: P.I.
Jim Butcher: Dresden Files and some others but not all
Iain M. Banks: Culture Universe novels (he writes other stuff under just Iain Banks.
Stephen King: well, I used to read everything, bu not so much now.
Michelle Sagara: The Chronicles of Elantra series
Terry Pratchett, if he were still with us: Discworld books
James S.A. Corey: The Expanse series
Neil Gaiman: Sandman (graphic novels), American Gods and lots of other stuff
Oh, and back in the day when they were still cheap, I used to collect Marvel comics.
DeWitt Payne,
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I have not, it sounds interesting. Haven’t dug into a good science/speculative fiction novel in a while, thanks for the tip.
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I counter with Kiln People by David Brin. Premise is cloning, with the hitch that clones only live for a day. At the end of the day, the “rig” (short for original) has the option to “upload” the clone’s experiences … assuming the clone makes it home alive. Or chooses to come back at all. It’s mostly an adventure/detective yarn, but lightly delves into some interesting ethical questions.
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Brilliant. The latest Star Wars movie ever-so-briefly touches on that when Rey saves BB-8’s life from a fellow, obviously less-than-ethical scavenger.
Thanks much DeWitt.
mark bofill,
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Exactly. But I think it’s a fun question to take out and play with from time to time. What if we’re all immortal gods, and this is all an elaborate game we designed for ourselves to stave off eternal boredom?
Brandon R. Gates (Comment #145481)
Here is a NIOSH doc (first doc found searching for pneumoconiosis in Bing) and it stated that there were 1766 deaths in the US in 1992, and I would expect that the number of deaths would have declined since that time in the year 2015.
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/96-134/pdfs/96-134d.pdf
JD
Brandon Gates:
Here is another summary: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5328a1.htm
The pertinent part states: “During 1968–2000, pneumoconiosis was recorded on 124,846 death certificates. Comparing 1968–1981 with 1982–2000, death rates among males declined 36% for CWP and approximately 70% for both silicosis and unspecified/other pneumoconiosis, but increased nearly 400% for asbestosis.”
….
The source for the statistics was: “The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) maintains a mortality surveillance system for respiratory diseases of occupational interest (2). The data are drawn from annual National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) multiple-cause-of-death mortality files, which include all deaths in the United States since 1968. For this report, pneumoconiosis deaths were identified during 1968–2000, the most recent year for which complete data are available, and include any death certificates for which an International Classification of Diseases (ICD) code* for CWP, silicosis, asbestosis, or unspecified/other pneumoconiosis was listed as either the underlying or contributing cause of death. Age-adjusted death rates (per million population per year) for periods of interest were calculated by using the mid-year population as a denominator. Age standardization was performed by using the 2000 U.S. Census population. ”
JD
Brandon Gates,
David Brin used to be on my short list. I’m not sure why I stopped paying attention to what he wrote. It’s possible it happened when I stopped going to the book store regularly
Richard K. Morgan wrote three books featuring not so much cloning as being able to store and transfer your consciousness between different bodies. Creating two copies, double sleeving in the parlance of the book, is highly illegal. Punishment for crimes was being put in storage for some period up to two hundred years. The books are: Altered Carbon (soon to be a streaming series on Netflix), Broken Angels and Woken Furies. I only read the last two recently. Altered Carbon is fundamentally a murder mystery. The protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, is hired by a resleeved victim, his mind was backed up to remote storage every 48 hours and he died just before his scheduled backup, to solve his murder, which the police have ruled a suicide.
In fact, I can probably date when I cut back on book purchases by the publication date of Broken Angels in 2003. Although somehow I found the first book of his new series in 2008, The Steel Remains, part 1 of A Land Fit for Heroes, not recommended if you’re offended by graphic gay sex. The other two are The Cold Commands and The Dark Defiles.
Unlike some other authors, these are actual trilogies with things fairly well wrapped up in the third book.
Brandon Gates,
For really good hard science fiction space opera, The Expanse series, James S.A. Corey (the pen name of a team of two writers) is hard to beat. The SyFy channel has done a fairly faithful version, at least for the first ten episodes, but the books are better. The narrator for the Audible version of the books is pretty good, although he didn’t do one of the books.
Gates (Comment #145460)
Temperatures of the past are constantly adjusted. “I’m afraid all I have for that one are standard responses.” dry snark?
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Even then with CO2 there are only 2 or 3 reliable real sites the world over. “How small do the error bars need to be when the magnitude of the absolute change from pre-industrial is on the order of 40%?”
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Yes?
Are you happy to take 2 or 3 sites only for the world’s CO2 levels.
Why should they be pristine when we do not use pristine temperature sites?
Would you be happy using just 3 temperature sites for the world temperature IF we were to specify them and keep them pristine?
Think about it?
All those savings if we were happy with 3 sites.
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DeWitt,
All that record Arctic air heat recently did it make any difference to the volume which I think you would say is dependent on the sub ice water temperature.
Any thoughts on where the ice will go this coming Summer? Is a quick melt in the offing?
JD Ohio,
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Yes, so-called black lung disease is the notorious killer of coal miners. I also would expect pneumoconiosis cases to reduce over time on account of the efforts of the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s efforts, the voluntary efforts of mining companies and/or union pressure.
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Try something cause-specific, but not disease-specific like “causes of death from particulate pollution”. Here’s <a href="http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/air-pollution-causes-more-3-million-premature-deaths-year-worldwide"one hit:
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The chief causes of deaths from particulate pollution exposure are stroke and heart disease. But it is also linked to deaths from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (374,000 deaths worldwide, according to the new research), acute lower respiratory infections in young children (230,000 deaths), and lung cancer (161,000 deaths).
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They cite two studies in that article, one from The Lancet (open access with free registration) and one from Nature (paywalled). The Lancet study estimates 3.54 million deaths/year from indoor air pollution. The Nature study estimates 3 million premature deaths/year from outdoor air pollution. Oh look, they use an atmospheric chemistry model to estimate air quality in regions of poor observational coverage.
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Oh well. 73 references in that one, 194 in the Lancet study.
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Heavy pollution days cause acute symptoms, phlegm, coughing/wheezing, shortness of breath, eye irritation, chest tightness/pain, fatigue … all things which are clues that breathing combustion products is not healthy. I’m inclined to trust the literature on this one more than not. Like I’ve said previously, I can’t prove that it’s not all politically-motivated claptrap, but given the sheer amount of literature pointing to broadly similar conclusions … I’m not buyin’ it either.
Brandon Gates: I believe this is the Lancet study you referred to: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4340604/
Some key statements: “In the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013 (GBD 2013) we ESTIMATED yearly deaths for 188 countries between 1990, and 2013. We used the results to assess whether there is epidemiological convergence across countries.” [All caps by JD]
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Also: “We used six different MODELLING strategies across the 240 causes; cause of death ensemble modelling (CODEm) was the dominant strategy for causes with sufficient information.” [all caps JD]
So, as I expected the authors are modelling deaths. When you look at the actual statistics, the deaths are much lower than the models. I would add that in my 17 years of workers comp practice, I didn’t have one pneumoconiosis death case which tracks with Niosh recording 74 deaths in Ohio in 1992. (Partly, just the way referrals worked. Did have a fair amount of silicosis and asthma cases. A particularly dangerous group of chemicals used by steel companies was Isocyanates.)
JD
To Brandon Gates: Pneumoconiosis in Great Britain
http://www.pneumoconiosis.org.uk/pneumoconiosis-statistics
“In 2008 there were 10 silicosis deaths and 129 other non-asbestos related pneumoconiosis deaths in Great Britain.
In 2008 there were 230 new assessed cases of coal worker’s pneumoconiosis.
In 2009 there were 80 cases of silicosis and 255 new assessed cases of coal worker’s pneumoconiosis under the Industrial Injuries and Disablement Benefit (IIDB) scheme.
Over the last 10 years the average number of pneumoconiosis cases recorded under the Health and Occupation Reporting (THOR) scheme in the UK on an annual basis was 200.”
angech,
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I suppose so. With a tinge of weariness. It’s probably unfair of me, this being a new forum for me and all.
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It’s not exactly like I have the option to go back in time and install more. I note you’ve dropped the “reliable” qualifier this round.
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Much depends on your definition of “pristine”. See again, we can only use the data we have from the past, not the data we want.
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No. Temperature is far more spatially and temporally variable than CO2.
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I have.
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Nobody typing on this keyboard has said anything about not wanting more and better data going forward. How much more data do you require, and how much better does it need to be before you can be reasonably certain that there is or is not a problem, and that we are our are not the main driver of it?
DeWitt,
Thanks for the recommendations. It used to be I’d go to the used bookstore and bring home grocery bags full of paperbacks. Then … life happened. I’ve missed it, and been thinking I’d do well to grab a sack of stuff I’ve never read and binge for a week.
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Oh. One of my favorite depressed/homicidal central computer stories is John Varley’s Steel Beach. And for world-building/fantastic creatures, his Gaia Trilogy is not to be missed.
Brandon Gates: Nature Study:
“Assessment of the global burden of disease is based on epidemiological cohort studies that connect premature mortality to a wide range of causes1, 2, 3, 4, 5, including the long-term health impacts of ozone and fine particulate matter with a diameter smaller than 2.5 micrometres (PM2.5)3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. It has proved difficult to quantify premature mortality related to air pollution, notably in regions where air quality is not monitored, and also because the toxicity of particles from various sources may vary10. Here we use a global atmospheric chemistry MODEL to investigate the link between premature mortality and seven emission source categories in urban and rural environments. In accord with the global burden of disease for 2010 (ref. 5), we calculate that outdoor air pollution, mostly by PM2.5, leads to 3.3 (95 per cent confidence interval 1.61–4.81) million premature deaths per year worldwide, predominantly in Asia. We primarily ASSUME that all particles are equally toxic…” [All Caps by JD] See http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v525/n7569/full/nature15371.html
Modeling again. Why am I not surprised.
JD
JD Ohio,
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Of course they used models. Can’t do statistical analysis without them. Here are two models used by the first reference you cited in post #145487:
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Age-adjusted death rates (per million population per year) for periods of interest were calculated by using the mid-year population as a denominator. Age standardization was performed by using the 2000 U.S. Census population.
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Which actual statistics? The ones they actually used in the study, or the ones you’ve been digging up on mortality due to lung disease? Some other data?
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You’ve just created a model based on your own anecdotal experience with one specific pathology, and implicitly extrapolated. That tells me a lot about why you believe what you do, but it’s nowhere remotely good enough to convince me that hundreds of peer-reviewed literature studies with far more comprehensive global coverage, and which include more than one pathology in the analysis are wrong.
” How much more data do you require, and how much better does it need to be before you can be reasonably certain that there is or is not a problem,”
Great question, seriously.
We have a wide spread of people who comment here who have reached their own individual tipping point.
Others who have not.
and a wide spread of opinions on what the data is and what the problem is.
In context one should be required to admit that the climate is always changing from factors beyond our control.
Assume a bland, slightly warming world for the next 10,000 years with potential Tsunamis, Droughts, deserts [these two can be man made without invoking CO2], massive cyclones naturally [You can have 1 in 10,000 year events scattered over so many individual potential events that we have one every second week somewhere in the world right now].
What are the chances that a particular man made event, increasing CO2 production, is likely to cause severe extra Climate change?
The only given being that a rise of CO2 in the atmosphere , on it’s own [ceteris paribus ], will cause a known rise in temperature of the surface layer of the earth that we live in.
The answer is that the data should show a rise in temperature consistent with the rise in CO2 and that that rise will reach a level that we cannot adapt to or tolerate on the earth in a space of time commensurate with humans continuing to pump out CO2 at the levels required to cause this in the next 3 generations [say 100 years, say 6 degrees Centigrade rise].
So,
-Fossil fuels run out or reduce in a hundred years, no problem.
-Nuclear fuels lead to a nuclear war, no problem [Climate change wise that is!]
-Temperature starts to go up rapidly in lock synch with the CO2
Problem, yes, if climate sensitivity is high enough to give the magic 6 degrees.
“How much better does the data have to be?”
Data is data.
” How much more data ”
We have buckets of data.
What we do not have is enough data over time.
30 years is too short for our rudimentary understanding of climate science to attach any meaningful significance to the data.
You know this, deep down in your heart you do, so does Carrick.
You are both well intentioned and take the preventative line.
That works some of the time.
I like to leave the house and drive my car and take known small risks with my life rather than stay coccooned inside.
I keep an eye on the rear vision mirror, look peripherally briefly as often as possible and concentrate on what is coming up ahead of and around me so I can take preventative action when needed.
Ask Lucia if she is happy with 30 year data sets, ask anybody scientific who is not a warmist and even some warmists.
We are all whistling Dixie in the dark and some jump at shadows even in the dark.
JD Ohio,
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It’s worse than I thought. Not only do you stop reading when you hit the instant disqualification words, you stop quoting too. Here’s the rest of the sentence you lopped off: “… but also include a sensitivity study that accounts for differential toxicity.”
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Valiant effort though.
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Because I pointed it out to you when I first cited it in post #145491?
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Oh look, they use an atmospheric chemistry model to estimate air quality in regions of poor observational coverage. Oh well.
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You’re getting predictable, counselor.
Brandon Gates: “Of course they used models. Can’t do statistical analysis without them. Here are two models used by the first reference you cited in post #145487:..”
Do you have any evidence that they checked their models against real world results. In the United States, why would you need models to determine deaths from coal, when you have death certificates?
…
From what I can tell all they are doing are making wild guesses based on the presumed health effects of certain substances. Please show me what verifies their models and their conclusions. (I personally would say guesses and not conclusions)
JD
Brandon Gates: As a follow-up to my previous post. Please show me the real world verification of the 10,000 to 30,000 death figure you quoted for the US. Coal dust is a highly studied subject and it should not be difficult to point to substantial real world support if there is any.
JD
angech,
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You’re the first person I’ve asked that of who’s said so. Thanks.
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I don’t doubt it. I know that I’ve made a conscious decision to believe what I do.
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Especially if they’ve ever read an IPCC report.
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The trick is estimating ahead of time what temperature level we won’t be able to adapt to. Two options are a model, or a crystal ball.
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There’s one way to know for sure what that threshold is: wait until we’ve reached it. To be *really* sure, wait a few decades after we’ve crossed the threshold.
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You know this how?
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Regardless of what we do about (C)AGW/CC (or not), that threat will not go away.
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It’s also a function of the rate of CO2 increase. In theory, we could have low CS with fast rate of emissions, or high/slow, or middling for both and still hit the threshold in the same year.
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I take that to mean that you think GMST should be calculated from the “raw” data? I’m setting you up here, think carefully about your answer.
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From that I infer that you aren’t a fan of “The Pause” arguments, but that you only consider satellite estimated bulk upper air temperatures reliable.
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I don’t know what Carrick has to do with this. But I agree, 30 years isn’t enough. That’s why I have gigabytes of data on this laptop, some of it going back millions of years.
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I like to leave the house and drive my car and take known small risks with my life rather than stay coccooned inside.
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All fine and dandy when the risks are known, and everyone in the car with you agrees with you that they’re small.
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You’re on a road you’ve never been on, straight and flat, going fast, good visiblity. Blind curve comes up, cliff on the outside of the curve, no guardrail, no posted sign indicating safe speed. Please tell me that you do something other than speed up to get around it and out of danger faster.
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Or that you have a spare car for me to drive on a different road.
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You just got done saying: “30 years is too short for our rudimentary understanding of climate science to attach any meaningful significance to the data”. Yet you’re convinced we warmists are just skittish about things that go bump in the night.
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You really don’t see the flaw in that chain of arguments?
JD Ohio,
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Think about what you are asking. If they had “real world results” to use, why bother with the “model”?
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Death certificates typically contain only primary and secondary causes of death. Epidemiology typically needs to account for numerous factors that would not be expected to be seen on a death certificate.
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Multivariate statistical studies require models.
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As soon as you do any calculation on a single statistic, you have created a model.
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From what you’ve told me, you’re not qualified to make that assessment.
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Since personal speculation is apparently allowable in this engagement, I counter with my own. You are not asking in good faith because you already have your answer. If peer-reviewed research done by trained experts published in prestige for-profit journals has not already convinced you, I doubt I as a layperson will be able to further substantiate my arguments to your satisfaction.
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I’ve shown you the source documents already, take them or leave them.
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The scope of my original argument was not limited to either coal dust or pneumoconiosis. We’re not even having the same argument because, for reasons unknown to me, you’ve chosen to reframe it and extrapolate from there that my arguments are dubious.
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If coal dust and pneumoconiosis are your only interests, I agree with you: they’re widely studied and should be easy for you to research on your own time as you see fit.
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Health issues from atmospheric particulates which are the byproducts of combustion are also widely studied. For whatever reason, such studies belong to an entirely different class of research you evidently don’t trust. I doubt I can help you resolve your dilemma.
JD — I’m sure someone else here knows a more contemporary source. But way back in the Twentieth Century I read this…its primary purpose was to compare deaths (per unit energy produced) caused by the different forms of energy production, and it went through the whole cycle.
If I remember, the largest number of premature deaths from coal were not deaths of miners from coal dust and mining accidents, though he included those too, but deaths among the general public caused by burning the stuff and breathing the results (though even in the 70’s, when it was written, this had been greatly mitigated). Estimates were based on things like the excess mortality during the London smog of 1952. He also included accidental deaths from the transportation of fuel (since coal requires many thousands of railcars versus a few truckloads for uranium – as is entertainingly illustrated here).
(The author’s purpose was not to attack coal, solar, hydropower, or any other source, let alone to suggest we should re-primitivize, but to determine which form of large-scale energy production was the safest for humans….and to combat the anti-nuclear hysteria which was then at its height. Alas, I still hear slogans from that hysteria — “no one’s figured out what to do with the waste!” — that were well answered back then.)
“Of course they used models. Can’t do statistical analysis without them.”
This is true. You can’t do a flawed or meaningless statistical analysis without one, either.
Andrew
” -Fossil fuels run out or reduce in a hundred years, no problem.
You know this how?”
The words oil reserves and run out of have been frequently used, true?
So some people admit it is a possibility.
” Data is data. I take that to mean that you think GMST should be calculated from the “raw†data?”
No, I mean we have tons of data. If we knew how to interpret it properly we could make much better informed choices.
GMST does not even have an adequate working description.
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“30 years is too short for our rudimentary understanding of climate science to attach any meaningful significance to the data.”
Hence the pause is a beautiful sock in the eye to warmist positions but does not mean much for precisely the same reason that warming in the 70’s and 80’s does not mean much. The time interval is too short.
For everyone clutching the straw of warming another can clutch that of the pause.
As Kipling said we should treat these two imposters just the same.
Otherwise we have to keep playing the Data Game
Warming? Pause.
Arctic loss? Antarctic gain.
Antarctic ice loss? Antarctic Ice gain.
Hot spot? No hot spot.
So you really do not realise that 30 years is too small, sad.
Joseph W. (#145504) —
I also recall that book, mentioned in #145219 above, though without a helpful link. It was one of the reasons why I favored nuclear power 40 years ago, irrespective of concern about CO2.
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Your second link didn’t come through. Try again?
Oh, it was just this: https://xkcd.com/1162/
Joseph W. —
Cute! I didn’t recall that, although I’m a dedicated xkcd fan.
angech,
PIOMAS volume is now flirting with record lows. The volume anomaly hardly changed in March, but other recent years had a significant recovery in March, so 2016’s rank dropped.
What’s going to happen this summer depends on the AMO and
how long the current El Nino hangs on. March RSS and UAH temps have dropped slightly from February’s high, which probably means we’ve seen the peak, but we won’t know for several months.
Antarctic ice seems to be recovering from the recently depressed levels.
On the topic of pollution deaths, it seems there is a ton of uncertainty in the calculations used to estimate deaths by pollution. Not to jump into the discussion of how the models are used, but Berkeley Earth published a paper recently claiming 1.6 million people die every year in China due to one type of it (particles 2.5 microns or less in size). Other estimates I see from respected groups are 400,000, 750,000 and 1.2 million.
I’m not opposed to using models to estimate things, but it seems to me the models being used for this issue have a ton of uncertainty that isn’t being presented in most of these discussions. That, or some of the people making these estimates are just horribly wrong, and there’s no clear way to tell which ones they are.
Gates is right in one respect in that there is nothing wrong in using statistical risk models to estimate impacts due to the use of coal-fired power plants. But it is foolish and naive to then take the output of this abstracted and extrapolated model and treat it as reality. One can do a multi-national multi-decadal analysis of non-accidental mortality regressed against calorie consumption and gin up a statistic that says McDonald’s causes 50,000 to 90,000 premature deaths a year. Cue the outrage and public outcry.
But what’s lacking is context for what the risk analysis really means. Without a comparison it’s a useless number, because it is so far removed from the reality that JD Ohio is looking at that it seems like a fantastic contrivance. I seriously doubt that there has been any actual ground truthing of these models to what can reasonably be detected or measured, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if the underlying key assumptions are based on decades old data and understanding.
Given all the assumptions, interpolations, extrapolations, and guesses involved in this methodology, it may comes as no surprise that there is a considerable amount of slop in the numbers. Total deaths in 2000 attributed to toxic agents (includes PM and S and N oxides) was 22,000. http://www.csdp.org/research/1238.pdf I leave it to the dilligent student to figure out how many of those are premature.
Thankfully, the premature deaths due to coal-fired power plant emissions means that vehicles, cement plants, wood stoves, forest fires, fugitive dust, occupational exposure, etc. all get a pass. I wonder how much of the 1.3 trillion kilowatt-hours of coal-fired electrical generation goes to hospitals, schools, fire stations, police departments, homeless shelters, et al. If one is going to pass judgement on a societal practice based on risk factors alone, it seems to me that one should at least do a basic analysis of costs versus benefits.
Over 32,000 people died in the US last year from motor vehicle related causes. I guess we should ban cars.
Coal fired power plants in the US emit far less particulates than they used to because they’ve been fitted with various types of filters. But the goal posts keep moving. If you can’t see visible emissions from power plant stacks, let’s blame particles too small to be easily visible, i.e. fine and ultrafine. These are emitted by gasoline and diesel powered vehicles as well as coal fired power plants.
OTOH, in the less developed world, you have dung fires and other inefficient biomass combustion, which probably reduce the local life span far more than coal fired power plants. To put it another way, if the number of interest is total premature deaths globally, then replacing coal fired power plants prematurely in the US and the rest of the developed world is probably not going to give you as much bang for the buck as reducing pollution in the less developed world.
OT: there used to be a guy here who said that the interest from Thomas Darden meant that the LENR operation was legitimate There seems to have been an update – in the legal arena.
RB,
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Yeah, here’s an article discussing it.
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Sad.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #145515)
PIOMAS volume is now flirting with record lows.
Thanks for comments.
I am going into hibernation mode on PIOMAS volume anomaly until /if it picks up this summer.
Fingers crossed.
Joseph W. (Comment #145504),
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Not addressed to me but I have a comment. The summary of the book says:
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[Dr. Beckman] makes clear that no technique for generating electricity is absolutely safe. Each has its risks. However some are much more dangerous to human safety and health than others. His energy book carefully makes comparisons and shows that our failure to use nuclear as the primary heat source for electrical power generation has sentenced many people to premature death. Nuclear power generation using U.S. technology is not only safer in some aspects, but in all significant aspects.
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That is one of the points made in the Forbes article I cited earlier, and in conjunction with the statistics presented, forms the basis for my position that nuclear is preferable to coal. Beckman may reach different conclusions, nevertheless, thanks for the reference because it at least seems to formulate the problem in the same way in which I too attempt to evaluate it.
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HaroldW (Comment #145510),
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Which I argue is an additional reason for more “greens” to consider supporting nuclear — it stands a good chance of enjoying political support from people who are less concerned about CO2, or not at all concerned about it. Perhaps not some who take the stance that more CO2 is better.
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #145516),
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I would say there’s no seems about it. It’s widely known and accepted that epidemiology is a difficult area of study. Complex, not at all fully understood organism in an arguably more complex and less-well understood environment. Large uncertainty is the expected and inevitable result.
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Perhaps many conversations do overplay the certainty. OTOH, whether uncertainty is played up or down is a slippery definition, subject to the personal biases of the participants.
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I share your sentiment that it’s difficult to tell which studies are horribly wrong vs. which ones are wrong but still useful. On the studies I’ve cited in this thread, I start with the heuristic that they were published in prestigious for-profit journals not known for publishing total crap on a regular basis. I then give the range: 10,000-36,000 deaths/yr in the US. That’s a lot of slop. Then I note that even using the worst-case fatality and projected premature deaths from Fukushima and Chernobyl and deriving a per kWh fatality rate, the risk of a 1-for-1 nuke for coal replacement yields an annual risk of 100 fatalities/yr in the US. Which is fully two orders of magnitude lower than the lowest annual fatality rate ascribed to coal.
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Two orders of magnitude leaves a lot of room for slop. The studies may very well be wrong, but I find it difficult to argue in this particular case that it’s not rational for me to make a case for nuclear in lieu of coal on the basis that, by the numbers, nuclear appears to be the least dangerous option — of all other candidates, not just coal. Especially since it’s the most suitable “drop-in” replacement to provide baseload power without the additional complication (and expense) of storage for intermittent technologies like solar and wind. That nuclear also would resolve my CO2 concerns is a rather thick and tasty icing on the cake. Two birds, one stone.
Andrew_KY (Comment #145505),
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Snappy retort, but vacuous. I respond in kind: You can use the above “logic” to disbelieve any result you don’t like solely on the basis that it derives in whole or part from statistical models.
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Earle (Comment #145517),
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Yes of course. It’s also foolish and naive to think that because one has raised the possibility that such a thing has been done implies that such a thing has been done. And from that, extrapolate a conclusion that the offending model must be wrong. It would be further folly to conclude that one’s own common sense on such things must then, by default, be correct.
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Not that anyone in this conversation has done such foolish things, or would even consider doing so, of course.
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Speculation with no substantiated evidence that it’s likely, or even demonstrably correct. You are in essence committing the exact same error that you personally suspect others of doing. You could be right, but I also have little reason to share your suspicions on the sole basis that there is historical precedent for sloppy, fraudulent or otherwise flawed scientific research in any/all disciplines.
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Presumes that one knows the cost/benefit factors with less uncertainty than the risks. Errors compound, so I’m not sure what doing a CBA adds to the overall certainty. Which is not to say that a CBA shouldn’t be done. Your comment also presumes that CBAs have not already been done, and/or wouldn’t be done.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #145518),
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You could choose to not drive. I could choose to go off grid, but everyone else still on it would still put me at putative risk.
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Let it not be said we’re wholly incapable of collective rational action.
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I mot sure I understand. What’s the argument?
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Ok sure. It’s arguable that the most optimal solution is to pool all available global resources and allocate them to regions where the putative problems are most acute. I’m not wholly opposed to such a scheme, but my inclination is more to take care of my own first, then help others as able — and as they’re willing to accept and use the assistance in the spirit of the intent with which it was given.
Brandon Gates,
Choosing to not drive is not a real option for a large fraction of people in the US.
DeWitt Payne,
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I get that. I also get it that some people really *do* want to ban cars. [1] I’m not one of them … I like my car. What I didn’t get was your comment that if we’re to ban coal, we should also ban cars. Perhaps you were jesting, and I should lighten up?
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For the record, I’m not a huge fan of banning, I’m a more a fan of replacement, e.g., nukes for coal. I’m pretty sure that banning coal without such a replacement would cause as many if not more deaths, if not for lack of heating alone, also for the hit that it would put on the economy.
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[1] I infer this because stickers which say DRIVING on them are a popular item in my town. They’re liberally applied to STOP signs.
angech (Comment #145506),
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So interpret the data “properly” and publish. That’s how “normal science” works. Until someone shows us a more “proper” interpretation by doing real science and getting it published in literature after peer review, I’m going to argue that our only option is to make decisions on the basis of what we presently have.
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I think we’re well-enough informed to at least conclude that stabilizing CO2 levels will eventually also end the long-term secular trend of surface temperature rise.
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I agree that focus on short-term trends is a dual-edged sword.
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Incorrect. I explicitly stated otherwise in the comment to which you’re replying: […] I agree, 30 years isn’t enough. That’s why I have gigabytes of data on this laptop, some of it going back millions of years.
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You did not answer my question about what you would do when driving a vehicle rapidly approaching a blind curve. Nor did you address my challenge that you claim we’re all whistling Dixie in the dark, but that some of us are apparently irrationally jumping at shadows. How is it, with all the uncertainties that you’ve gone out of your way to point out, that you know who is being inappropriately skittish, and who isn’t?
“You can use the above “logic†to disbelieve any result you don’t like solely on the basis that it derives in whole or part from statistical models.”
Brandon G.,
But I’m not using my above logic to disprove anything. I’m just saying that describing something as a statistical model doesn’t mean its a valid or accurate or even useful statistical model. It’s misleading to confer meaning onto a model that you don’t understand and even worse would be an attempt to scare people with it. That’s pathetic.
Andrew
Brandon R. Gates:
Sure. But if the individual studies being used don’t come close to capturing the actual uncertainty, then it is difficult to justify trusting any range one might come up with. To a lay reader who hasn’t studied the issue, seeing one study give a result of 400,000 +/- 50,000 and another study give a result of 1,600,000 +/- 100,000 doesn’t make me think the actual range should be considered 400,000 – 1,600,000 (or 350,000 – 1,700,000 if you prefer).
If a collection of studies don’t come remotely close to giving similar results, there’s no particular reason to think they’ve hit the high and low ends of the actual range. When you get very disparate results, it is quite possible the true value is lower (or higher) than any of them.
Certainly. I don’t think there’s any doubt nuclear electricity generation causes fewer deaths than the use of coal. I just don’t have any confidence in the numbers given for coal. The qualitative comparison seems safe to me, but any quantitative one seems quite shaky.
On the differences between human and animal behavior:
“Animals don’t behave like men,’ he said. ‘If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don’t sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures’ lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.â€
― Richard Adams, Watership Down
To expand on the deaths by pollution discussion, I should point out I just saw a post at Judith Curry’s blog that provides this link:
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/02/04/250000-could-die-early-from-breathing-in-chinas-cities-study-finds/
Saying a study which Greenpeace was involved with placed the estimate at 250,000. That is a fraction of Berkeley Earth’s estimate of 1,600,000. For the sake of demonstration, let’s take those two numbers as the uncertainty range with the midpoint being halfway between, That’d give us a “best guess” of 925,000 +/- 675,000.
If we applied the same uncertainty level to a best guess of 20,000 for US deaths (which wouldn’t be appropriate at all, but just making a point), that’d give us a range for the United States of ~5,400 to ~34,600. That calculation doesn’t mean much of anything, but it shows something of why I don’t put confidence in the idea we can use upper/lower estimates as the uncertainty range in mortality.
When there’s a lot of disagreement between estimates of an effect, I don’t think we can put much stock in the range of values given.
Andrew,
In fact it appears they do.
I liked Watership Down too. 🙂 Cute story.
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But thanks for reminding me of this. I withdraw my claim that we have ‘primate’ behaviors. I still suspect we do, but now that I’ve looked into it I don’t think we know as much about primates in general as I thought we did. What I thought was fact seems to be mostly speculation…
Oh well.
“Saying a study which Greenpeace was involved with placed the estimate at 250,000. That is a fraction of Berkeley Earth’s estimate of 1,600,000. For the sake of demonstration, let’s take those two numbers as the uncertainty range with the midpoint being halfway between, That’d give us a “best guess†of 925,000 +/- 675,000.”
1. The green peace numbers are limited to the 31 province capitals
2. We look at the entire population.
these two numbers are different.
“When there’s a lot of disagreement between estimates of an effect, I don’t think we can put much stock in the range of values given.”
You need to compare apples and apples.
or read more
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1701625/air-pollution-bigger-killer-mainland-china-smoking-says-new-greenpeace
Just to explain this is not rocket science.
1. You have estimates of “shortened life” from basically one
or two studies. the best study was a “perfect” natural
experiment. For 30 years chinese people in one province
were given free coal to burn. The province next door used no
coal. You basically get one number. Everybody uses this number.
so much life lost per microgram of exposure.
2. You have to measure the micrograms in the air. We did this
using thousands of stations hourly data. you get a field
of exposure.
3. Greenpeace looked at 31 cities.
next, you take your population ( we used the population of a huge area 97% of the population) and greenpeace used only the population of 31 cities.
Then you multiply.
There are basically 3 variables.
1. The concentration. We have a really good handle on that.
hourly data for a huge number of places. Correlates
well with satellite data.
2. the death rate per microgram: This is just a standard WHO number and approach. I am pretty sure everyone uses the same number. it is the source of most of the uncertainty.
3. The population.
basically 3 variables;
Greenpeace got 250K because they used the population of 31 cities.
We get 1.6 million because we use 97% of the entire population.
too funny
“In fact it appears they do.”
Mark Bofil,
I’m still dubious they ‘devise’.
A Wikipedia entry is not going to decide the case.
When I followed the links I went here:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140917131816.htm
It’s conclusion is that chimps are inherently violent, not that they ‘devise’.
Andrew
Mark – You might enjoy Frans de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics (happily available on Kindle) if you haven’t tried it before. Interesting creatures, our fellow primates.
🙂 I probably would enjoy that. Unfortunately (fortunately, actually) thanks to DeWitt I’ve got a backlog of books I want to get.
So wait Andrew. I never claimed it was sparked by human encroachment and interference, which is what your link appears to be about.
Mark Bofil,
The point is that neither your Wikipedia entry about Jane Goodall’s observations, nor the link I followed from it, scientifically determined that chimps ‘devise’ ways of spoiling and hurting other creatures.
In fact, my quote (*if read closely*) indicates that animals are violent.
Andrew
Alright.
“If we applied the same uncertainty level to a best guess of 20,000 for US deaths (which wouldn’t be appropriate at all, but just making a point), that’d give us a range for the United States of ~5,400 to ~34,600. That calculation doesn’t mean much of anything, but it shows something of why I don’t put confidence in the idea we can use upper/lower estimates as the uncertainty range in mortality.”
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1352231013004548
Lesson: if you start with the wrong comparison ( Greenpeace versus berkeley) to derive your range estimate. you will be wrong.
we estimate 1.6M deaths on a 1.3B population.
Greenpeace estimate 250K deaths on a smaller population.
you could get a smaller number by just considering the deaths in one city !! OMG the uncertainty that arises in apples to oranges comparisons.. genius!!!
we put the figure at around 50K deaths in the US. others put it
around 60-70K
this is actually a shortening of life, just to be precise and technical and all that.
Brandon Gates,
Sorry, I should have added a /sarc tag after my statement about banning cars. It was meant to be a reductio ad absurdum. It’s not if we ban coal we should ban cars, it’s we don’t and won’t ban cars, where the death rate and age at death is known with good precision, why ban coal when the estimate is far less certain.
As Mosher points out above, the really important number is decrease in lifespan. A lot of young people are killed in car accidents. I’m betting that the deaths from pollution are biased toward the old, ignoring any possible effect on infant mortality, which is a number I don’t trust.
Steven Mosher,
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Indeed. Yet the figures are so often reported as mortality rate per unit time, which raises eyebrows. Any insight you have would be appreciated.
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I have one observation in the meantime. The Forbes article puts coal at 160,000 deaths/yr (the “corrected” figure noted by Brandon S.) and rooftop solar at 400 deaths/yr. These are both global figures. My understanding is that the rooftop solar numbers are mainly driven by installation accidents, e.g. falls.
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My sense is that the mean age of death attributed to coal is higher than the solar installer dying from a fall. Hence, rooftop solar is probably more “deadly” than coal in terms of potential years of life lost.
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Just found this article which discusses this kind of technicality.
DeWitt Payne,
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No prob. Two missed sarc tags in as many weeks. This shall not stand. I will update my mental model to include you being a joker (in a good way) and bump up my overall impression of the quality of your arguments back to where it initially resided.
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I understand your argument about comparing an uncertain rate to a far more precisely known one. Interesting and good point.
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I’m completely with you that coal death rates are probably biased toward the old relative to car accidents, so the deaths/yr rates aren’t directly comparable.
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My sense is that the nuclear/coal comparison is a little more apples/apples, but with nukes probably being biased slightly young. There are some “immediate” deaths due to radiation sickness, esp. first responders to an accident. And the cancers from the patients who received lower radiation doses feel like faster killers cardiopulmonary diseases exacerbated by atmospheric particulates.
Steven Mosher:
That’s not actually true. The maps on the Berkeley Earth website make it clear you do not have data for the entire country. It may be that you extrapolate your results out for the large portions of the country you have no data for, but there’s no inherent reason the same could not have been done in the other study as well. You say:
But I can’t find anything showing this is true. I haven’t been able to find a link to any publication underlying this Greenpeace study, but the media statements indicate it says ~250,000 people died prematurely due to pollution at a rate of ~90/100,000. Multiply that by the population of China as a whole, and you’d get ~1.25 million premature deaths. That’s probably not accurate since the average probably isn’t population weighted, but… eh.
By the way, talking about “cities” in China is misleading as a “city” in China isn’t the same thing as most people think of. There are multiple levels of “city” in China, and one city can actually contain multiple other cities (I think Beijing includes three different cities?). I don’t know which cities were used for this, but for 31 cities in China, I’d wager you’d get 200+ million people, at a minimum.
So yeah, I’m not taking a position on any of this. You can laugh and scoff all you want, but all I’m doing is talking about the numbers that are being reported to the general population and how they’re reported. Maybe people could take the time to drill down into the discussion and find all the underlying calculations or whatever, but that’s not what’s been done in these discussions. In these discussions, people are pretty much just quoting news sources and however they interpret the underlying work.
Andrew_KY (Comment #145529),
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Appreciated. However, whenever someone in these sort of discussions raises issues without making some attempt to bed them down with substantive evidence, fair or not, I interpret it as an attempt to cast unwarranted doubt on certainly imperfect but not necessarily fatally-flawed research.
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Of course not. My default assumption is that the peer review process generally works, and that prestige journals like Nature and The Lancet are especially reliable about not letting complete garbage slip through the screen. I always allow for the real possibility that peer review has failed — there’s plenty of precedent (Retraction Watch, anyone?) — so being reminded of that which I already know seems redundant.
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To be fair, I’m new here, and you should not be expected to understand that about me. Let this comment serve as me letting you know where I stand: if someone suspects a particular study commits the error you describe, I’m only going to seriously consider it if they also provide some substantial evidence for me to consider.
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Similar response to above. I’ll add an additional general response: I don’t think it’s at all inappropriate to alert others to the presence of smoke in a crowded theater. I think it would be stupidly irresponsible of me, if not immoral, to wait to say something until I saw actual flame in such a circumstance. If someone thinks I’m only imagining smoke, I consider it up to them to tell me specifically why. Conversely, I do NOT consider it my duty to defend against a general observation or unsubstantiated charge of same.
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #145533),
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Fair enough. I have two questions for you:
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1) What would tighter estimates for coal allow us to do that we can’t get from the current estimates?
2) Based on the present state of the coal estimates, what course of action would you recommend?
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Agreed, especially if only two data points establish the range. In this case, the upper and lower bounds I cite differ by nearly a factor of four, so it’s tempting to see those as the “true” min/max. OTOH, that large a difference is cause to question reliability. Ideally we’d like to have multiple points clustering around some mean value, and use a PDF on the distribution to establish a CI for the range. Ye olde meta-analysis. (Cue the cautionary tales of publication bias, etc.)
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I’ve no idea if such a thing has been done for coal specific studies. More likely it’s been done for particulates from any source. Onus probably on me to scratch around for one since this topic is more or less my baby.
DeWitt Payne, PS;
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I wrote in my previous response to you: I understand your argument about comparing an uncertain rate to a far more precisely known one. Interesting and good point.
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I would also like to reiterate the same counterpoint I’ve made with Brandon S. In the context of a *transition* from coal to nukes (which effectively bans coal), I’m prevailing on the two orders of magnitude difference between the coal vs. nuclear mortality rates I’ve cited.
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I still appreciate your reductio ad absurdum with the caveat that I see it as somewhat a non sequitur wrt my comparison of coal to nukes.
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That is all. For now. I think.
Brandon G.
My default assumption is that peer review doesn’t necessarily work. And it doesn’t.
Again you feel the need to resort to a bad analogy. And again, I realize warmers have no evidence to present, so they present analogies. Great, but I have to let you know that presenting analogies doesn’t demonstrate anything scientifically.
I really have to ask you (If Lucia will allow me a couple clatifying questions) what you think the “crowded theater” in your analogy is supposed to represent. The entire earth? And what is the “smoke”? A hockey-stick shaped graph? Ice melting?
Happy Saturday Everyone!
Andrew
Or maybe “smoke” is closer to the truth than I thought, as in Smoke And Mirrors. 🙂
Weekend Fun Fun With Analogies!
Andrew
Brandon R. Gates:
I can’t let this slip by without remark. This is not a criticism of you in any way, but… Retraction Watch. Did you know that is a site which secretly edited its users’ comments? No joke. A site about integrity in science secretly edited comments by its users. In my case they actually contacted me and told me what they had done, without asking permission or approval, but I’ve found a number of examples where they didn’t even do that.
They only stopped doing it after I managed to get some media attention drawn to the practice after Ivan Oransky, one of the heads of it, helped spread a false story about Tim Hunt. I discovered the practice about the same time the Tim Hunt affair was receiving attention, and because of that, more people paid attention to it than they would have otherwise. That led to Retraction Watch swearing off it, but not admitting it was wrong in any way. They basically just painted themselves as innocent victims.
So… yeah. Mentioning Retraction Watch will always get a laugh out of me. I have copies of comments Oransky didn’t just secretly edit parts out of but secretly rewrote in their entirety. I assume they don’t do this anymore since they said they won’t, but I also don’t trust them enough to ever want to comment there again. As I said in my e-mail to him, which I think was calmer than the situation warranted:
Oh, and if you again act like any use of the word “fraud” must inherently be a claim that it is something which must be legally prosecuted, I’m just going to stop talking to you for good. That was ridiculous enough the first time around. I don’t care to deal with more intentional misreadings designed solely to let you insult people.
Brandon R. Gates:
I’d imagine it might allow people to actually quantify the externalities of coal. What one would do with that knowledge doesn’t interest me though. In case I haven’t made it clear enough already, this is not a subject I have any interest in.
I wouldn’t recommend anything. I don’t make recommendations on issues I have little knowledge of and even less interest in.
Publication bias is certainly a real issue, but a bigger point I’d stress is making sure the data points are actually comparable. I’ve seen a number of such meta-analyses that are completely inappropriate, with the worst by far being Richard Tol’s completely bogus work on the economic effects of global warming. Which to this day “skeptics” are happy to promote even though I’ve repeatedly shown them Tol’s work isn’t just completely wrong and nonsensical, but dishonest.*
If it has been done, I’ve never seen it.
*I really should follow up on Tol’s work as there’s a ton of material I’ve never covered, but it’s hard to find the motivation when I know people will just ignore it. “Skeptics” will ignore it because they like Tol and his conclusions. A lot of other people won’t listen because they don’t like me since I’m a dirty denier. It’s remarkable because this is a case which proves the IPCC lets its Lead Authors make secret, unreviewed changes to their reports, and “skeptics” don’t care.
Been very busy. Feel obligated to respond to some questions, since I started much of this.
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Brandon G “What would tighter estimates for coal allow us to do that we can’t get from the current estimates?”
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This is a very good question. My response is that it would allow us to much more clearly see the cost vs. benefits of reducing or elimination coal use. If there are for example, 2000, 10000 or 30000 deaths, the cost/benefit analysis changes greatly. When I have had the patience to hold my nose and read EPA justifications for onerous rules, the EPA typically cites that the rules will reduce deaths. My quick reading of the cited justifications and lack of confidence in the intelligence of EPA leadership makes me very suspicious of its justifications for rules based on “saved lives”
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Several things appear to be missing from the article you cited. 1. What are the benefits of the use of coal (cheap energy) that should be contrasted with its detriments. For example, energy prices in much of Europe are very high and in the UK actual fuel poverty deaths are calculated, and the most recent figure I saw was that there were 2,400 fuel poverty deaths in the UK. One example of the dramatic effects of fuel poverty was that “Deaths from hypothermia among UK pensioners almost doubled during the 5 years up to 2012, a time when several cold winters combined with largescale increases in energy prices.” See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_poverty_in_the_United_Kingdom
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Brandon G “It’s worse than we thought. Blocking nuclear power as a trade for coal generation is killing people now.”
This is the quote I have a lot of problems with. You are taking the Forbes article as fact, when, from everything seen so far, it is wild guesses based on projections. If not, I would ask you to see what justification there is for the death figures cited with real data based on actual reported deaths. If so inclined, you could start with US statistics as I requested earlier.
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Finally, I would add that the report refers to “premature” deaths. That gives the authors a lot of wiggle room to inflate the statistics. Is premature 6 months, 5 years, 10 years or what?
JD
JD Ohio:
My understanding is the formulas they use allow them to estimate those values. I’m not sure if they’re included in the underlying publications though. I’ve rarely seen them mentioned in the news stories.
It’d be interesting to hear how much of an influence coal supposedly has as opposed to other factors. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out the lost years could actually be attributed to more than one thing, and if you summed them all, a person who died at 80 might have died 50 years prematurely.
But I don’t actually know that’s the case. Maybe a better job has been done than I anticipate. If so, the publicity hasn’t indicated it.
Mosher talking about Best Study: “2. the death rate per microgram: This is just a standard WHO number and approach. I am pretty sure everyone uses the same number. it is the source of most of the uncertainty.”
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This is a very useful matter to know. The next question is what are the limitations of the WHO number, and is it based on something that could be most accurately construed as facts or guess-related projections, or something in between. If the WHO number is not really a fact-based number, do studies relying on it properly explain the limitations of the number and their own conclusions. When the EPA uses the number, does it properly explain the bases (and potential limitations of the number) of the number.
JD
Re: Comments on Coal Use in China
My children’s mother was Chinese, so I have visited Wuhan China many times. Wuhan has a climate that is roughly similar to Atlanta or Memphis. (also, very polluted) Hot summers with winters that include some very cold days. Until recently, the Chinese government did not allow the people in Wuhan to have heaters in their apartments (Regions the Chinese government considered to be warm were not permitted to have central heat). I have pictures of relatives wearing heavy coats in their own apartments during the winter.
If you consider the UK fuel poverty deaths as a starting point, it would be reasonable to assume that the number of cold induced deaths in China would be quite large. It would also be reasonable to assume that those places that were allowed to have heating would have comparably reduced cold-induced deaths. My point is that any study looking at the detrimental effects of aerosols and dust, to be anything remotely accurate for China, would have to contrast the detrimental effects of coal with its positive effects. I see little to none of this kind of research or balancing.
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Life expectancy has been rising in China as coal use has increased. It is reasonable to attribute part of that rise to the increased efficiencies that modern energy supplies. In any event, no case can be made that increased coal usage, looking from the broadest perspective, has overall, to this point in time reduced life expectancies in China. Obviously, there would be individual deaths caused by coal.
JD
“This is a very useful matter to know. The next question is what are the limitations of the WHO number, and is it based on something that could be most accurately construed as facts or guess-related projections, or something in between. If the WHO number is not really a fact-based number, do studies relying on it properly explain the limitations of the number and their own conclusions. When the EPA uses the number, does it properly explain the bases (and potential limitations of the number) of the number.
JD”
The references are here
http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/China-Air-Quality-Paper-July-2015.pdf
We spent a good portion of time looking at the literature on the health risk.
Understand. there are two questions:
A) what’s the exposure
B) whats the risk.
Our work concentrates on collecting new data for question 1.
so, one thing you’ll note is that critics miss the point.
1. They either screw up population comparisons ( easy to do on a blog when nobody is checking)
2. They attack the risk formula.
“Life expectancy has been rising in China as coal use has increased. It is reasonable to attribute part of that rise to the increased efficiencies that modern energy supplies. In any event, no case can be made that increased coal usage, looking from the broadest perspective, has overall, to this point in time reduced life expectancies in China. Obviously, there would be individual deaths caused by coal.”
That’ some powerful science right there! publish it.
When we talk about shortened life expectancy we are showing you the cost. in shortened lives. ( not death from coal)
IF, you want to argue for an offsetting benefit, then you need actual numbers. not just my mom told me, it seems reasonable… blah blah blah.
I have the perfect place for you to look for this balancing.
You need a controlled study. some people exposed to coal
( they will get the pros and cons ) other folks not exposed
Could you actually experiment like that on people?
yup
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/32/12936.full.pdf
Doh!
Mosher: “one thing you’ll note is that critics miss the point. ..2. They attack the risk formula.”
The risk formula is extraordinarily important. It should be subject to sustained and searching analysis.
JD
Mosher:
“IF, you want to argue for an offsetting benefit, then you need actual numbers. not just my mom told me, it seems reasonable… blah blah blah.”
We have the numbers. Life expectancy in China has increased greatly as coal usage has increased. In 1960 Life expectancy in China was 49 years. In 2015, it was 73 years. http://www.china-profile.com/data/fig_WPP2008_L0_1.htm As China has become more economically advanced, in substantial measure due to the use of coal, its life expectancy has dramatically increased. Why is that so hard to understand?
JD
Life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, economic development, GDP per capita, and just about every measure of human well being have all improved
as coal, fossil fuel, co2 emissions, and global average temperature have all increased.
It is silly to ignore the benefits that energy use has given humans.
And to imagine plausible but unobserved harms from CO2.
Jd wrong number.
You need to control for the coal variable.
You want a coal no coal case.
You don’t get that using all of China.
. Fundamental.
I used to think that when Nixon reduced highway speed limit to 55 he reduced available productive time. Then I realized i solved many of my thorniest problems while tooling along on some interstate. Maybe not the same as death by coal, though.
Mosher: “Jd wrong number.
You need to control for the coal variable.
You want a coal no coal case.
You don’t get that using all of China.
. Fundamental.”
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Exactly wrong. The authors of the study need to control for the death by cold variable and the benefits provided economic growth variable. The study you cited is a very good preliminary first step, but it by no means provides a comprehensive answer to the positive and negative effects of coal. If you are going to legislate or advocate against coal, you need to include both the positive ways that the electricity generated by coal decreases deaths and negative factors of coal usage.
JD
Mosher: Controlling Variables
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If the authors of the PNAS Study wanted to control for the economic growth variable (an obvious issue), there is a good amount of literature dealing with it. See, for instance, http://blog.euromonitor.com/2014/03/economic-growth-and-life-expectancy-do-wealthier-countries-live-longer.html
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It states: “The most obvious explanation behind the connection between life expectancy and income is the effect of food supply on mortality. Historically, there have been statistically convincing parallels between prices of food and mortality [2]. Higher income also implies better access to housing, education, health services and other items which tend to lead to improved health, lower rates of mortality and higher life expectancy. It is not surprising, therefore, that aggregate income has been a pretty good predictor of life expectancy historically.
If we look at the world today, however, the relationship between income and life expectancy begins to weaken once income reaches a certain level.”
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This seems to perfectly correlate with what has happened in China.
JD
Andrew_KY (Comment #145580),
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I wasn’t rebutting a scientific point, I was rebutting your unsupported insinuation: It’s misleading to confer meaning onto a model that you don’t understand and even worse would be an attempt to scare people with it. That’s pathetic.
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But of course, you weren’t trying to “prove” anything with the above statement either, you’re just sayin’. Amirite?
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So I answered in kind. See how that works?
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The crowded theater is the climate system as a whole. The smoke is the multiple lines of converging evidence which together make a stronger case for the system accumulating absorbed solar energy than any individual line of evidence could make on its own. The purported driving mechanism isn’t covered by the analogy because all analogies break at some point, else they wouldn’t be analogies — kind of like all models are always wrong, but some are useful.
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One supposes that UAHv6betawhatever is in your quiver of outliers to lob at me. Will you reject it out of hand if and whenever it passes peer review and gets published?
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One also wonders why things like rising Antarctic sea ice coverage are uncritically accepted? Why does peer review work for that, but suddenly breaks when the results don’t conform to what you have chosen to believe?
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See, I can Gish Gallop with the broad brush based on stereotype too, oh youbetcha. It’s not very scientific, but then you knew that already. I’ll be happy to knock it off when you start making the quality of arguments you’re rightfully holding my side to be providing … in lieu of spewing crap and asking for golden standards in return.
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Your move.
Brandon S.,
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I did not, thank you for the heads up. Added to my list of stuff to poke at when I have a spare minute.
Brandon R. Gates (Comment #145528)
“angech (Comment #145506),
No, I mean we have tons of data. If we knew how to interpret it properly we could make much better informed choices”.
“So interpret the data “properly†and publish.”
A typical Skeptical science response and beneath you I had hoped.
Asking someone on a blog to do scientific work and publish it is not an answer to a sensible comment.
It is an attempt to brush off details you are unhappy to discuss and uncomfortable about.
I do not really have 5 years to waste to “interpret and publish” so your remark is, I am afraid, duplicitous and inane.
Sorry.
We can all look at what is done with the data and how it has been interpreted to date and discuss this. IMO the use of the data we have has been used to push political points rather than rationally discussing where the evidence may lead.
You did not answer my question about what you would do when driving a vehicle rapidly approaching a blind curve.
A. I would not by choice or design be driving a vehicle rapidly approaching a blind curve.
There is also a difference between being a passenger and a driver.
And a difference between being a passenger willing or unwilling and a conscript in the car.
Such as I did not ask to be born in a world which allows CAGW, mugging, murder and stock market crashes.
Or events to occur which are completely out of my control, death and taxes.
Being as how I had no conscious choice in the matter it does not seem as if I have a great obligation to to change comets crashing, volcanoes or CAGW if it occurs.
I will merely go on living.
Of course I can take an interest in the world around me, if I want, and call out humbug when I think I see it.
Or not.
If put in a critical situation I would take the best evasive action I could.
The correct analogy for CO2 increase problems is a small pothole on the edge of a side road somewhere unimportant.
Perhaps I would notify the council if it got a lot bigger after the next rain.
They would not act anyway.
JD Ohio (Comment #145588),
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I agree. Now estimate the resources required to reduce uncertainty and balance that against the opportunity cost of either doing other research, or taking corrective action.
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You’ve as much said you don’t accept “my” estimates of the cost side of the ledger. The benefits of coal replacement will largely draw on the same sources of the cost estimates.
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Google, “air pollution deaths united kingdom”. 28,000, 40,000 and 60,000/yr.
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In the US — which is my present focus — where fuel is cheaper, my proposed replacement for coal is nuclear fission. If I were to limit myself to only replacing decommissioned coal plants and new construction to add capacity, according to the USEIA, total levelized costs for new construction going online in 2020 in units of $/MWh are:
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Conventional Coal: 95.1
Advanced Nuclear: 95.2
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Yes, NG plants are cheaper. I’m not wholly opposed to a gas for coal replacement as an interim solution.
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How many heat stress-related deaths over the same interval?
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It gets tedious to caveat every single thing I write with appropriate uncertainty. I’m already on record recognizing the high uncertainties in these estimates, while at the same time accepting them as the best evidence I’m aware of to rationally support my own arguments. Short of being promoted to God, that’s about all I’m ever going to be able to do.
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I’ve already responded to that question previously. Death certificates typically give a primary cause followed by any determined secondary causes. Here’s a hypothetical example.
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Estimating distal causes due to environmental factors requires *controlling* for those factors, ideally over representative populations. That requires models.
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This is getting tiresome. You can raise suspicions of improper statistical machinations and ideologically-motivate chicanery until the cows come home. It’s not my duty do defend against your speculations. Either RTFP and make a cogent argument for shonky statistics, abandon the argument and try something different and hopefully better evidenced, or simply accept that the authors have more expertise than you do and might in fact know more about this stuff than you give them credit for.
angech (Comment #145614),
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Neither would I. That is one of my foundational arguments about the Uncertainty Monster. It isn’t our friend.
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Don’t I know it.
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Garbled. I take that to mean you object to passengers taking the wheel in certain circumstances.
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Me either. As I see it, my options are to kill myself, be apathetic and let come what may, or try to improve my lot and that of those whom I care about.
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lol. Yes, we’d probably all like the conveniences of modern public infrastructure for free.
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And people complain that welfare recipients are freeloaders. Yeesh.
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Given all the uncertainties you keep pointing to, how is it you have formed such strong conclusions?
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The mind boggles.
Brandon Gates,
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I agree with you here. Infrastructure and then some. I’m reasonably well off as a member of American society, selling my highly specialized services to employers. The standard of living I would enjoy without this society protected by armed forces and police paid in part with my taxes would be significantly lower. I’d spend my time growing crops or something equally elementary and I’d be a much much poorer man, relatively speaking. Huge amounts of my time and effort would be wasted on things I can pay for with a single hours work [edit, the wages from a single hour of work] right now.
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I’ve got the resources to get the heck out, if I’d a mind to. I suppose I could go scratch out a living in the wilds someplace. No dice – not worth it not by a long shot.
[Edit: another thing, IMO you are correct about the uncertainties. CS could be high, climate change could be severe, no question. That’s just as possible as low CS.]
angech (Comment #145614),
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It’s how “normal science” works.
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I agree, which is why I cite literature. Too bad for you, there’s precious little of it to support your position. If that changes, I’d be amenable to updating my beliefs and changing my position. Until then, not so much.
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Wrong and ironic. Your statment which prompted my response above was: No, I mean we have tons of data. If we knew how to interpret it properly we could make much better informed choices.
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I take that to mean you believe that we don’t know how to properly interpret the tons of data we’ve gathered. It’s your duty to demonstrate that, not mine to defend against or disprove.
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Unsubstantiated assertions don’t make me uncomfortable, they simply don’t convince me. Nor should they.
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Yes, we could. If you want to do that, point to some data whose interpretation you question and make a cogent argument against it. Broad sweeping allegations that tons of data aren’t being properly interpreted don’t cut it, and are just as easy for me to sweep aside as they are for you to lob at me in the first place.
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You don’t want to read my slogans? Fine. Don’t hurl your own at me. Easy.
“It’s how “normal science†works.”
Data collection.
Data analysis.
Analysis based on an understanding of standard deviations, sample size sample length and probability.
Using that correctly.
Literature -the writing of stories and fables
So to misquote you
It’s how “normal science†works is why you cite literature instead of science. There’s precious little science in literature to support your position.
Given all the uncertainties you keep pointing to, how is it you have formed such strong conclusions?
You are conflating uncertainties with uncertainties.
I am certain of it.
In reply
“It’s how “normal science†works.”
Data collection.
Data analysis.
Analysis based on an understanding of standard deviations, sample size sample length and probability.
Using that correctly.
Literature -the writing of stories and fables
So to misquote you
It’s how “normal science†works is why you cite literature instead of science. There’s precious little science in literature to support your position.
Given all the uncertainties you keep pointing to, how is it you have formed such strong conclusions?
You are conflating uncertainties with uncertainties.
I am certain of it.
In jest how can you be so certain my strong conclusions are wrong with all that uncertainty about?
But the nub is that we think we know some things with great certainty based on experience and science.
Others we have to intuit.
Just because we want to find a cause to blame for the wrongs of the world we look for possibilities.
Possibilities are endless so if you look you will find.
Not science, not proof, just possibilities.
Stack enough of them together and you can say I am certain of the possibility of AGW.
Of course the argument works just as well the other way.
Let’s discuss the science we “know” then .As you said
“I agree, 30 years isn’t enough.”
So what time length do we need to get a handle on AGW rate?
and what data sets do we have?
The English one of several centuries seems the only one.
As I said 3 data sites could always be used to define the world.
My view is that we cannot “know” anything without a good data base of 100 years.
angech (Comment #145623),
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I agree with all that. Now if you’d care to point to a particular example of where climate science has fallen down on that and — here’s the important bit — explain in detail how to do it better and how that would change the conclusions, you may obtain my rapt attention. Otherwise, I will continue to sweep your broad-brush insinuations right under the rug where they belong …
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… and continue to trust what professional scientists have written over what random people on the Internet “suspect” is wrong with the sum total of their research.
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Not exactly a misquote, but a play on two senses of the word “literature”. Ever hear of “primary literature”? As in the results of doing science, writing a paper, having it peer-reviewed and published in a scientific journal?
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That’s what I mean by the shorthand, “literature”. I hope that clears up any further confusion and/or prevents any further silly word games.
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I agree that Grimm’s Fairy Tales are not the best place to search for reasonable approximations reality. Or did you mean “literature” in the sense I originally meant it?
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Yeah, that’s what I’m asking you. I’ve already made my position clear. We’re most certain of how the planet behaves with CO2 between 280-400 ppmv. So IF (notice the conditional) the rebuttal is, “bbbbut, uncertainty” my position is that making changes to the system might not be the brightest idea we’ve ever collectively conceived.
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IOW, the equivalent of lifting off the accelerator and applying some pressure to the brake pedal when approaching blind curve ahead.
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I said previously that I’ve got data going back nearly a million years on my laptop. That includes instrumental data going back to 1850, several millennial NH reconstructions which broadly agree with each other, and two NH reconstructions which cover the period from the last glacial ~20 kya to the early 20th century which more or less agree with ice core reconstructions from both poles. There’s a heck of a lot more data out there than that.
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How much more do *you* require?
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Good question. Maybe you should look into that one of these days.
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“Good” meaning what? How do *you* decide what’s “good” and what isn’t? 100 years beginning when? How is it you came by that number in the first place? Show your work, please?
-100 years beginning when?
whenever you can get a reliable data set for 100 years.
Best to date? Satellites
Age of records, 45 years
–
– How is it you came by that number in the first place? Show your work, please?
-From you “- I agree, 30 years isn’t enough.”
and discussions by warmists of how long the pause had to be to be significant, remember those?
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“That’s why I have gigabytes of data on this laptop, some of it going back millions of years.”
As said there is data and there is “data” and then there is the fellow in Star trek.
Data going back millions of years is poor quality data for what we are discussing, ie surface temperature. You could not tell me the temperature at any one place on earth accurately on the day 1 million years ago or the day before or after.
What does it tell you though?, as Reddington would say.
Answer in next dispatch if you cannot work it out
“Your move.”
Brandon R. Gates,
Thank you for your response. It’s plainly evident that you are merely a Warmer repeating what all other Warmers do. You’re a Warmer marketeer, just like all the rest.
I’m interested in engaging people in *discussion* on any topic. I’m not interested in enduring more Warmer Cold Calls, the same unsupported claims from Warmers I’ve been seeing for the past decade. It’s hardly worth reading, let alone responding to.
If I don’t accept usupported claims from original sources, I’m not going to accept them from flunkies, either.
If you have evidence of substance (and I mean that literally) to present, I’ll be more than happy to examine it with you. Canned Warmer Marketing doesn’t cut it.
Andrew
Andrew_KY (Comment #145632),
.
.
Still waiting for you to do your part, sweetheart. I’ve already lead with mine: #145397
.
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Shocker. I’m so glad you’re here to not only explain your obvious behavior, but to sweepingly declare by fiat what’s supported and what isn’t and make it the other guy’s duty to refute your own unsupported assertion.
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Bravo.
.
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Yah. From where exactly am I to obtain said evidence?
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Oh right, I forgot. That’s the point.
.
.
Whoop, another smoked irony meter. You could get expensive.
angech,
.
.
So you assert. Whither the basis for your claim?
.
.
I make it 36 years from 1980, but what’s 14 years among friends?
.
I’ll be dead by the time your proposed 64 year wait-and-see experiment has run its course, but I’m beginning to wonder if the actuarial tables might predict your existence. Very well, what will you do with those data when you have them in hand?
.
.
I remember a lot of contrarians repetitively paraphrasing certain statements without proper citations.
.
.
Why would I be talking about local weather on a particular date in a climate discussion even if I had allegedly reliable satellite data for it?
.
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That between the two of us, I might might actually have some semblance of a clue?
.
.
Which bit is that? The one wherein it’s probably a good idea to attempt understanding how the system works when left to its own devices sans human influence? Sort of like the experimental controls we use for dynamic physical systems which actually lend themselves to full-scale testing?
.
Crazy idea I know. Those ridiculously idiotic paleoclimatologists couldn’t possibly have passed 6th grade science had not some future engineer allowed them to copy their homework. What a riot!
“From where exactly am I to obtain said evidence?”
Brandon G,
Good question.
You profess to believe in AGW. You get to provide the evidence for AGW.
Your smart Climate Scientist friends should have some.
Andrew
Brandon G,
You’re wasting your breath. I wouldn’t bother.
Mark Bofil,
“You’re wasting your breath. I wouldn’t bother.”
That’s essentially what my comment of yesterday morning said.
You Warmers are so bent on propping up and expressing your own beliefs you don’t read what other people write. Not very scientific.
Andrew
Andrew,
.
Actually, since you indicate interest by remarking, I’ll go on to say that the reason I claim that Brandon is wasting his breath is that you do not in fact appear to be open to discussion. You seem to prefer to sneer rather than engage in substantive discussion. That ain’t going no place.
.
It’s a free country, and Lucia moderates lightly. Still, don’t expect me to pretend I think you’re saying anything about anything. Basically just a lot of trash talk is all I’m seeing.
Mark Bofil,
You: “you do not in fact appear to be open to discussion”
Me: “I’m interested in engaging people in *discussion* on any topic. I’m not interested in enduring more Warmer Cold Calls, the same unsupported claims from Warmers”
There is a difference between discussing and regurgitating tired, canned, decade-old, unsupported claims. I hope you realize there is a difference. Let me know if you don’t.
Andrew
Whoa, wait,
You warmers huh. This is the historic moment in which I became a dirty no good gosh darn warmer in addition to being a dirty no good gosh darn denier I guess.
Well. Wonders never cease.
Mark Bofil,
“You warmers huh.”
If I have described you incorrectly, please provide what your position is.
Andrew
No thanks Andrew. I’ll take my own advice. I’d sooner talk to my dog about it, frankly.
“No thanks Andrew. I’ll take my own advice. I’d sooner talk to my dog about it, frankly.”
Not open to discussion this morning, I see. 😉
Andrew
Andrew_KY,
If your method of discussing is to resort to ad hominems, those who prefer reason, logic and evidence are going to prefer to have philosophical discussions with their dogs than with you.
I don’t own a dog, but I do own a cat.
Lucia,
“If your method of discussing is to resort to ad hominems, those who prefer reason, logic and evidence…”
Yes I’m asking these same people for the physical evidence you mention. And they hesitate.
Andrew
Andrew_KY,
In Andrew_KY (Comment #145662) you pretty much called mark bofil and others ‘warmers’.
Quite honestly, I don’t see you as open to argument. That’s why I mostly ignore you.
Andrew,
Okay. Physical evidence.
.
Is sea level rising? [Edit: not rhetorical. This is my answer:] If you think it is, this is probably the evidence I find most persuasive that the planet is accumulating energy. This is because I can’t conceive of a plausible explanation covering why sea level should be rising to the extent that it appears to be that doesn’t involve either water expanding or ice melting, and either/both of these require energy.
.
Why do I think sea level is rising? [Rhetorical, here is my answer:] Well, I take scientists word for it. I hear that tidal gauges and satellites both show that sea level is rising, and that there isn’t any controversy or dispute about that except in how much sea level is rising. So – exact amount, OK, that’s subject to dispute, but as far as I’m concerned, the available evidence shows that sea levels are rising.
.
Maybe this is where we get stuck. What constitutes ‘evidence’ for you. I’ve asserted sea level is rising. I could link stuff. I could probably link data I think, if I worked at finding it. Would that do? Not rhetorical. If this won’t do, what will.
[Edit: sorry, added flags clarifying questions and messed them up first draft.]
Mark Bofil, thank you for jumping back in.
Thank you for the honesty. That’s the issue. Taking someone’s word for something and why you do, is at best a personal judgment call. I imagine you don’t believe everything every scientist has ever said. So, you don’t even apply your own rule to yourself all the time.
So I am back to looking at evidence to make determinations, rather than hearsay.
If you know of some evidence concerning SLR that you found convincing, I will certainly read it if you link it.
Andrew
Andrew,
The problem I have with that is applying that consistently. I would literally not have time to do all of the basic things I need to do in order to function and survive if I had to check everything.
.
Is that aspirin in that bottle you bought or something else. How do you know. Is there cyanide in that food. Is that really an antibiotic. Do antibiotics really work. Do immunizations work. Do I have an appendix. What evidence is there that ignoring my appendicitis (if there is such a thing) is dangerous. Do I have evidence about overeating, heart disease. Do I have evidence that this laptop in front of me is really running the software I think it is. How can I be confident that my car engine isn’t going to explode the next time I turn it on.
.
It’s too much. The list goes on forever. Without some specific reason to suspect a scientist or group of scientists are lying to me, I accept what they say.
.
Now I get that climategate happened. To me that’s pertinent. It causes me to look at what climate scientists say more closely. But I’ve still got to work within my limitations. I couldn’t even solve the simple induction problem Lucia put up on the other page; my math and science just isn’t good enough in general that I can realistically hope to follow and check everything even just in climate science.
.
This said, I am fortunate that there are a lot of well educated people out there who are skeptical of climate science. I do trust, or at least believe it probable, that if there is an area of climate science (theoretical or a body of evidence doesn’t matter) that rests on shaky ground, I’ll hear about it. That I don’t hear people much attacking sea level rise increases my confidence that yeah, sea level is probably rising.
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This is just me. I’ll go find and link data for you later.
.
Thanks.
.
Mark
“Is that aspirin in that bottle you bought or something else.”
Mark B,
Well, here’s the distinction: You can actually have the aspirin itself to scrutinize, if you choose. You are in a position to examine it, or cut it in half, or ingest it, or insist that it be in the shape of a little dinosaur, or refuse it, perhaps based on it appears to have been tampered with, or call your doctor with questions. Or take two instead of one. You can experience the effects if you take it.
In climate science, Warmer advocates won’t even post links to what they think is evidence, So we are several stages removed from comparing with aspirin.
Andrew
Okay Andrew,
Here’s CSIRO, here’s CSIRO sea level data, for starters.
[Edit: Here’s a link to tidal gauge data. It looks extensive. It looks like it would take us all day, maybe several days to go through it. As I explained earlier, I’m not going through it, I don’t have time. But where does this leave you. It is absolutely your privilege to do whatever and believe whatever you want. But if you insist on data, I link it, and you don’t want to go through it all yourself, then is there any conceivable way for you to be persuaded of this point? Not rhetorical.]
Thanks Mark.
I will look though your links.
Andrew
Andrew,
What I’m getting at is this. It’s fine to demand the data. I think though that once you do, you incur an obligation to yourself to actually look at the data. If you demand data that you know you’ve got no intention of going through and trying to understand, then what you’re really doing is stonewalling the person you are talking to and wasting their time. That’s what I think anyway.
.
You don’t need to do this in my view. We are all free, you are free to say – I don’t believe this and I’m not going to look into it. Period. And that’s fine.
.
Further, you are even free to be dishonest about this if you like. However, if we are not going to try to be honest then I think at some point people start to lose respect for our position and lose interest in conversing about it.
.
Just food for thought.
.
[Edit: sorry about the cross post.]
Mark B,
I am going to continue to look through the info in these links, but before I go any further, I did notice that primo dude on the About page is an Warming Alarmist (or tries to be):
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5985/1453.full?ijkey=juCXkrL2vilUg&keytype=ref&siteid=sci
Funding Crisis Too:
Andrew
Andrew,
.
I don’t actually have to like these guys to look at their [edit: believe their] data [is ok]. I don’t have to agree with their political views, or their policy conclusions, or their taste in women, or anything else. It’s possible (I think) for people to have different beliefs than I do about all sorts of stuff and still be able to reliably collect data and compute well understood math properties of that data like means, linear trends, standard deviations, variance, stuff like that.
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I say that because I don’t understand what [edit: else] the relevance was supposed to be, in your observation that the head guy seems to be alarmist.
“I say that because I don’t understand what [edit: else] the relevance was supposed to be, in your observation that the head guy seems to be alarmist.”
Mark B,
If dude is a Warming Alarmist, he may be inclined to produce only information that supports his Alarmism, rather than information that undermines it. It’s the old Conflict Of Interest bugaboo. He’s got funding on the line.
Andrew
Andrew,
.
Well, the same could be said about deniers like us. In fact I think I could demonstrate that there are people out there who try to discredit skeptics on the same basis.
.
At the root maybe it’s a different sort of question. How to trust somebody we don’t know, who appears to hold different convictions and draw conclusions that we disagree with. How to trust that that person still has integrity and did their work honestly.
.
This is an important point in my view that I never seem to be able to make clear to people. This is why scientists shouldn’t be activists. I trust scientists, I trust the guys who make it their business to figure out the truth and tell it without regard to the societal implications (or any other implications). I prefer the idea of the ivory tower scientist who’s slightly out of touch with the rest of the world to be honest with ya. I don’t want scientists paying too much attention to anything besides their science.
.
So yes. Unfortunately, all of the activism IMO muddies the waters. Still, what are we to do? At the end of the day I still can’t just dismiss out of hand findings I don’t like just because the objectivity of some scientists might be failing due to activism. I can look out for specific cases, but it seems dangerous to me to dismiss the whole thing lock stock and barrel. That’s way too easy to be right, in my world.
Say Lucia, I think one of my comments fell into the bit bucket on the floor. I’ll try reposting:
Andrew,
.
Well, the same could be said about deniers like us. In fact I think I could demonstrate that there are people out there who try to discredit skeptics on the same basis.
.
At the root maybe it’s a different sort of question. How to trust somebody we don’t know, who appears to hold different convictions and draw conclusions that we disagree with. How to trust that that person still has integrity and did their work honestly.
.
This is an important point in my view that I never seem to be able to make clear to people. This is why scientists shouldn’t be activists. I trust scientists, I trust the guys who make it their business to figure out the truth and tell it without regard to the societal implications (or any other implications). I prefer the idea of the ivory tower scientist who’s slightly out of touch with the rest of the world to be honest with ya. I don’t want scientists paying too much attention to anything besides their science.
.
So yes. Unfortunately, all of the activism IMO muddies the waters. Still, what are we to do? At the end of the day I still can’t just dismiss out of hand findings I don’t like just because the objectivity of some scientists might be failing due to activism. I can look out for specific cases, but it seems dangerous to me to dismiss the whole thing lock stock and barrel. That’s way too easy to be right, in my world.
.
But. Just my heuristic I guess.
Side Story:
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/feb/04/csiro-confirms-300-job-cuts-with-climate-research-bearing-the-brunt
Considering that variation is part of the definition of climate, I wonder what it is they proved.
http://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Climate
Andrew
Mark Bofill:
You’re late to the club. Andrew_KY labeled me a warmer what feels like ages ago.
Well Brandon, I think it’s only understandable and natural that Andrew would mistake you for a dirty nogood goshdarn Warmer, but mistaking me for one… That’s an entirely different matter…
:p
.
Actually I guess I really am a lukewarmer at this point. Didn’t used to be. But I think I can still call myself a denier too.
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[Edit: maybe I shouldn’t say dirty no good gosh darn warmer, since I don’t think I am a warmer. It’s different when I call myself a denier, cause I am a skeptic. It’s sort of like ethnic groups making fun of themselves, that’s allowed and PC-kosher isn’t it? [rhet, think so]]
.
[[well, if it’s not, I guess I’ll just deal with the outcry and public condemnation.]]
Quick update on my newest eBook. Assuming I added things up correctly, I’ve now sold 592 copies. That’s far more than I could have ever anticipated selling.
Gratz! 🙂 That’s awesome.
.
That might be a substantial percentage of the people who read climate science blogs at all, actually.
[Edit: or not. If WUWT gets around a million unique visits a month… not so much no. My bad. Still, that’s pretty cool.]
I think a healthy amount of sales actually came from people who don’t normally read climate blogs. I could be wrong, but I would think the day-to-day sales are more from people just seeing the book somewhere (recommendations, searches, whatever) and deciding to check it out. People who follow climate blogs would be more likely to buy it when it gets promoted on a blog, causing spikes in sales.
Also, I think Watts Up With That overstates its traffic.
mark bofill (Comment #145686),
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On the off chance you overlooked the conditional, I should like to point out the glaring IF at the beginning Andrew’s lead sentence.
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Note also the implicit circularity.
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I know you could. They discredit themselves, not least for ceding the word skeptic to contrarians.
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Your argument on the case for SLR as an indicator of warming was as about as concise and elegant as I’ve ever seen. I’d be tempted to filch it, but imagine the hell I’d catch for quoting a self-described d****r. 🙂
Brandon G,
What circularity specifically?
.
🙂 I’m starting to like the sound of ‘contrarian’. It’s got a nice ring to it. Denier sounds so mid 2000’s to me now, it just won’t do anymore.
.
Feel free to steal the SLR argument. I think I first heard it from somebody over at Climate Etc and found it persuasive. It might have been Steven Mosher now that I think of it. I don’t know if them’s good or bad credentials from your perspective, but. ‘Open Source’ type people like me adhere to the ‘steal with pride’ school of thought when it comes to these things.
Brandon G,
SLR is evidence warming is occurring. It doesn’t put the A in AGW though, FWIW. It’s always seemed to me that sea level rise started a trifle early for CO2 increase to be the original cause.
mark,
For SLR to put the A in AGW, one would need to see acceleration in the rate of increase. So far, AFAIK, that hasn’t happened. In fact, one would need to see a significant acceleration in the current rate to see even a 0.5m increase in sea level by 2100, much less 1m or more. And that pales into insignificance compared to the 13.5m in 300 year increase in sea level from Meltwater Pulse 1A at the beginning of the Younger Dryas period some 13,000 ya.
Younger Dryas is an interesting period if you want to look at the effects of rapid cooling and fairly rapid warming. Hint: rapid cooling is worse, just get in your time machine and ask the Clovis people in North America.
DeWitt,
.
I’ve always wondered about that actually. It seemed to me that SLR would have to accelerate, but I’ve never been quite sure.
.
Regarding Younger Dryas, it is an absolutely fascinating interval, I agree.
Thanks.
(Comment #145702)”I think Watts Up With That overstates its traffic”
A valuable insight.
I think WUWT is a wonderful site, they have helped immensely promoting Brandon’s book and deserve kudos for that.
Without it the Skeptical world as we know it would be [almost] non existent.
Anthony has done more single handed than humanly possible.
If he upsets some I am all for it personally.
Other blogs like Sou and ATTP, “spinoffs” from WUWT in turn do their “part” in promoting discussion.
Lucia and Curry in the middle, perfect foils.
mark bofill (Comment #145708),
.
.
I should quote him directly: If dude is a Warming Alarmist, he may be inclined to produce only information that supports his Alarmism, rather than information that undermines it. It’s the old Conflict Of Interest bugaboo. He’s got funding on the line.
.
Strip out the conditional and uncertainty clause, what’s left is that Warming Alarmists are wrong by definition.
.
As written, he’s essentially issuing a challenge to others to disprove the conditional. The only way to satisfy that is to “prove” that “dude” doesn’t believe the planet is warming due to human influence, but does research supporting an AGW position without being paid to do so.
.
.
It’s far less loaded than the d-word, and in some contexts can even be considered complimentary.
.
.
The part of it I liked best was: So – exact amount, OK, that’s subject to dispute, but as far as I’m concerned, the available evidence shows that sea levels are rising.
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I often use that form in other arguments [looks up], but in an arena where uncertainty itself is cause for rejection of the whole kit and kaboodle ….
.
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I tend to agree with his *arguments* more often than not. His creds get a boost from his association with BEST and all the rest.
.
.
Ah, finally an AGW issue which might fall reasonably within the scope of a blog discussion. It might help if you specified which SLR reconstruction(s) yer speakin’ of.
.
The only way I know of to tease out main drivers is to use some sort of model.
mark bofill (Comment #145674)
“Is sea level rising? ”
Increasing energy you said.
What about continual erosion?
you know, as the mountains erode and plains drain sediment into the sea and coastlines wear down.
This would be one of a number of causes of rising sea level unrelated to increasing energy.
Isostatic rebound is an energy in free cause of decreasing sea level.
So if the goalposts can be changed what does rising sea level mean [get benchmarked by] anyway?
P.S. could walk to Tasmania and England 30,000 years ago so I am sure the sea has been rising for a long time despite my quibbles.
Brandon G,
.
Good question. I don’t know what reconstruction I was talking about. 🙂
.
How about this one?
.
Look, I don’t have issues with models generally speaking. I’m not sure I can unzip my fly to urinate without using a at least a simple model, so that’s OK with me. I like models.
angech:
I’ve never been big into the world of examining internet traffic, but even given the somewhat limited experience and knowledge I have, that statistic seems bogus. If you count unique visitors per day, then sum each day for a month, that might make sense. Otherwise, a million different people visiting the site each month? Not likely. Heck, I’d wager even if they were counting people multiple times per month, a million unique visitors a month is an exaggeration. There are plenty of sites with that kind of traffic, and WUWT doesn’t have the appearance of one.
While I am glad for the publicity my book got there, and would be glad for similar publicity basically anywhere, I cannot say I agree WUWT is a wonderful site. It certainly isn’t helping the skeptic cause. When a site happily endorses and promotes dragon slayers, allowing them to spread any and all accusations they may want to make, no matter how absurd, the site is going to do more harm than good.
Heck, half the posts I see at WUWT show fundamental misunderstandings or lack of knowledge on the subjects they’re about. Just this week there was a post there talking about how the IPCC’s RCP8.5 scenario couldn’t possibly happen because there wasn’t enough fossil fuels in the ground. In writing the post, the author claimed all of the forcing in that scenario would have to come from CO2 when anyone and everyone knows there are other greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide.
On top of that, the author based his claims of the scenario being impossible on the amount of fossil fuel reserves, seemingly unaware those reserve estimations are based on what is economically feasible, not what is actually in the ground. This made him look foolish as if the 8.5 scenario were followed, demand would increase and cause more recovery of fossil fuels to be economically feasible.
I can’t see anything WUWT is contributing at this point which is useful or worthwhile, but it is contributing a lot of things that are wrong and harmful.
Angech,
.
Well OK. Two things,
1. Just off the top of my head, wouldn’t it take a helluva lot of erosion to cause sea level to rise a millimeter or two a year?
2. Why would this suddenly pick up just before 1800?
.
Also, I don’t assume scientists are morons. So perhaps I spoke poorly before, in saying that I couldn’t think of another explanation. I actually couldn’t at that time. Even so, I’m pretty sure this possibility must’ve occurred to the guys studying sea level rise. I’m willing to assume they’ve investigated the possibility and have good reason for rejecting it. But I’m open to listening to the case if you care to make it, that this is being overlooked.
.
Thanks Angech.
Brandon S.,
.
I don’t agree with you about WUWT, but I don’t think it’d be worthwhile to argue it with you. I just want to say this to note my disagreement for the record.
Brrandon R. Gates:
I wouldn’t find anyone’s association with BEST to be good for their credibility given BEST has deceived people on many occasions, to the point of actively lying about its work. And BEST responses to criticisms online, often given through Mosher, have been horribly wrong on many occasions (even leaving aside how he does things like explicltly compare BEST’s critics to Holocaust deniers). Plus, their work is arguably worse than that of any group which came before it.
On the topic of dishonesty, the best example is how Richard Muller (the head of BEST) told the media BEST had rerun its calculations without the adjustment (homogenization) process to see what would happen, found no regions had their results substantially altered and that the resultswere published on the BEST website for anyone to see. It turns out BEST had not, and still does not, publish those unadjusted results, and if you do get a copy of them, you’ll find the adjustments actually do significantly alter trends for entire continents.
You can find something of an overview here. It’s a post I wrote about two months ago, and it shows how the falsity of Muller’s claims has been proven for close to a year now. I’ve even contacted BEST, and their responses prove beyond any doubt they know the results Muller says had been published on the BEST website way back when have in fact never been published for anyone to examine. I even had to not share a link to the resullts when I was given it, because it was to a location BEST didn’t want publicized.
There are plenty of other issues with BEST, including ones that directly impact their results, but… they’re not trustworthy. At all. They’ve made errors in their work then secretly covered them up; they’ve made changes to their methodology and never said a word about them, and they tell the media things about their results that aren’t true while hiding the results which prove what was said is false. They do all this while repeatedly claiming to work in a complately open and transparent manner.
The sad thing is I’d much rather discuss the BEST methodology and some glaring flaws within it. Such a discussion could actually improve their results. It’s just not feasible. After the 20th time you have what you say completely misrepresented in a nonsensical way while being insulted, you start to question if there is any chance of an actual dialogue. When you then repeatedly get accused of being a liar for saying things that are obviously true by someone who refuses to even look at what you link to, you stop questioning.
(Interestingly, the Skeptical Science group said many things about Richard Muller in their forum I happen to agree with. I believe the short version is something like, “He’s a showboating glory-hound who is just playing to the media.” I bet if Skeptical Science didn’t like BEST’s results, it and I would have a lot of points we’d agree on. They just won’t examine BEST critically since they like what it claims to find.)
mark bofill,
.
Yup, I know Jevrejeva et al, 2008 and think I understand the issue you take here … the trend looks to start going up around 1780, is wiggly until about 1850, and basically linear from that point on. That about right?
.
I figured you weren’t a strictly no-models kind of guy, but I wanted to make sure.
Brandon G,
Sure.
[Edit: about to call it a night. I’ll have to wait for morning for the punchline.]
DeWitt Payne (Comment #145711),
.
.
For sake of argument let’s assume for a moment there isn’t. We know from basic physics two plausible mechanism for SLR, thermal expansion and landed ice discharge from glaciers and ice sheets. KNMI Climate Explorer serves up data for both. What I find there is accelerating ice mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica from 2003-2013 (GRACE) which are the two main ice masses of concern, and accelerating OHC and vertically averaged ocean temps down to 2 km from 1955-present (NODC).
.
I think we can rule out evaporation as a significant offset.
.
That leaves us 2-1 against the hypothesis of non-accelerating SLR at least between 2003-2013. 4-1 if we consider that CO2 has been rising since 1950 at a much more rapid rate than previously, and surface temperatures have risen since then as predicted.
.
Claims of accelerating SLR are relatively weak on their own. By consilience with other multiple independent lines of evidence, that claim becomes stronger.
Mark Bofill:
That’s fine, but please remember one of the most prolific authors at WUWT is a dragon slayer who denies the greenhouse effect.* The site promotes a book Anthony Watts co-authored, Climate Change: The Facts, which says things like we cannot even know the planet has warmed in the past.
As you can imagine, I have plenty more to say about the issue, but the point is the site doesn’t engage in skepticism. It engages in “skepticism.” Having biases is one thing, but mindlessly accepting any talking point no matter how outlandish or wrong is an entirely different thing.
Though the bias alone would be troubling. My favorite example is Anthony Watts defended a guest author for calling people “deniers” to insult them after spending years talking about how horrendous doing that is. Because it’s apparently only horrendous when the other guys do it.
*Please attach whatever nuance is appropriate for the actual dragon slayer position. Those guys are crazy enough I don’t care to try to remember the exact details of what they reject/accept.
mark bofill,
.
.
Gives me that much more time to make it a good one. Rest well.
You could not tell me the temperature at any one place on earth accurately on the day 1 million years ago or the day before or after.
What does it tell you though?, as Reddington would say.
Brandon R. Gates (Comment #145641)
Why would I be talking about local weather on a particular date in a climate discussion even if I had allegedly reliable satellite data for it?
It is called data, you said you had data going back millions of years yet you cannot tell what the temperature was like anywhere on earth millions of years ago at any site at any time.
You can only guess. That is not data.
What does it tell you though?, as Reddington would say.
The paleontology says the earth has maintained a stable climate under many fluctuations and is quite resistant to perturbations over 2 billion years.
.
That between the two of us, I might might actually have some sem
Brandon G,
Please don’t feel like you’ve got to put a presentation together for me or anything like that. It’s fine if you just want to summarize or even just link whatever argument you want. Unless you are having fun preparing your argument, in which case go for it. 🙂
“Warming Alarmists are wrong by definition”
Brandon G,
If a Warming Alarmist is someone who tends to only emphasize climate related material they think will scare people, then you are correct. A real scientific minded person would consider the climate related information that wouldn’t scare people, too. They would include all the relevant information to form their perspective.
Andrew
Brandon G.
Remember that the sea floor is sinking and will continue to sink.
Also, while you might eyeball this figure and say the rate of increase of heat content is accelerating, I doubt that it’s statistically significant, given the serial autocorrelation of the data. And to get to 1m SLR by 2100, that rate would probably have to double or triple long before 2100.
#145718) “I can’t see anything WUWT is contributing at this point which is useful or worthwhile, but it is contributing a lot of things that are wrong and harmful.”
I see your problem then.
–
On the other hand, apart from Ric peddling Cold fusion, I see no problem with all sorts of ideas being put up as the discerning readers like yourself will sort them out anyway.
Site stats
268,830,947 views
Well you, I, Sou and ATTP check it at least 30 times a day each so that must be 200,000,000 of the views unless my maths is wrong.
mark bofill
“1. Just off the top of my head, wouldn’t it take a helluva lot of erosion to cause sea level to rise a millimeter or two a year?”
True.
On the other hand plain old water runoff [after a few months of heavy rainfall] can apparently raise the level of the seas by a millimeter or two and in less than a year.
So now we have from basic physics five plausible mechanisms for SLR.
Thermal expansion [not that simple as hotter water does put more water into the air and only up to 100 C. Also from -2 to 4 degrees C water shrinks as it gets warmer]
Landed ice discharge from glaciers and ice sheets.
plain old water runoff
continual erosion
Isostatic compression. [I apologize for this last one as not happening at the moment but Glacier formation actually causes a slight sea level rise due to pressure forcing the crust in. Because the forcing agent [ice accumulation] causes a bigger sea level fall the positive effect is missed by most paleontologists. Similar to the heat emitted by a colder object to a hotter object not being noticed by some due to the seeming one way preponderance of the major cause]
Angech,
So water runoff is going to be driven in part (I think in large part, but we can verify this) by rain, which is in large part water that has evaporated from the ocean in the first place. Now I understand that this is not universally true. I get that there are such things as aquifiers. But same argument as before; why would sea level suddenly start to change around 1800 due to aquifiers? I don’t think erosion and aquifier contribution have all that much to do with it, and again, I’m pretty confident the guys who study this stuff weren’t fools who’ve never considered it.
.
So again, and please don’t ignore this in your response if you choose to respond, – if you’ve got some specific reason to think there’s been a mistake made and that these factors are more important to recent SLR than we realize, make your case with specifics. If not, I’m just not all that interested.
.
Thanks Angech.
mark bofil,
In continuing to explore the CSIRO website, I came across a couple of things that may not get enough attention:
https://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_drives_budget.html
Andrew
I also thought this was particularly interesting:
I wonder if they have calculated how much a few mm of higher sea level will penetrate.
https://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_impacts_climate.html
Andrew
Thanks Andrew.
“Storm surges occurring on higher mean sea levels”
And I don’t think this makes much sense. Storm surges would be local. It seems to me that a local higher sea level might contribute more to the storm surge (which raises the local sea level), but not a distant/remote sea level (both local and remote would be used to create the average).
Someone please correct me if I’m mistaken.
Andrew
mark bofill,
.
No full presentations. Spent most of my brainpower last night reading, Kopp et al. (2016) kept me particularly busy.
.
I have not time to discuss, have errands to run, back later this afternoon.
angech,
That’s not true for sea water. The salt content makes the density increase all the way to the freezing point. I have a link to calculator that shows how things change with pressure, salinity and temperature somewhere. If you want, I can probably find it. What it amounts to, though, is that the thermal expansion coefficient below the thermocline is relatively constant all the way to the sea floor.
Arctic sea ice area and extent have been extremely noisy lately. That 13.12Mm² area dropped back to 12.5 the next day. NOAA near real time has been worse:
2016, 04, 06, 14.016
2016, 04, 07, 15.065
2016, 04, 08, 14.318
2016, 04, 09, 14.274
2016, 04, 10, 15.033
2016, 04, 11, 14.477
JAXA and MASIE have been more stable, but JAXA for one uses a several day moving average, IIRC.
mark bofill,
.
So it turns out I do have a small presentation on SLR vs. CO2. More I dig into it, more interesting it gets, but I thought I’d share what I’ve got now before adding more.
Another update, this time, not about sales. Remember that CONFIDENTIAL draft version of a paper I found? The final version has now been published. It’s incredible in how blatantly dishonest it is. I won’t bother you guys with details here, but if you’re curious, check out the post I just wrote:
http://www.hi-izuru.org/wp_blog/2016/03/a-new-secret-skeptical-science-paper-and-a-new-ebook/
I imagine there will be plenty more to say about this paper in the coming days/weeks.
Thanks Brandon G!
DeWitt Payne
re ” Also from -2 to 4 degrees C water shrinks as it gets warmer”
–
That’s not true for sea water. The salt content makes the density increase all the way to the freezing point [which is below zero]
–
Thanks , interesting that salts change water’s freezing characteristics. Will not be able to use that argument in that form again.
A great paper Brandon.
Seems Richard has niggled them more than you.
“Tol’s erroneous conclusions stem from conflating the opinions of non-experts with experts and assuming that lack of affirmation equals dissent.”
ie silence is consent
or to be utterly misogynist [sorry everyone]
“She did not say no”
I think a few people will be able to call Cook in on criminal trials now as an expert.
angech:
If they’re smart and/or clever, they should actually be ecstatic about Richard Tol. He’s their greatest ally imaginable. He keeps making all sorts of arguments that have no bearing on the central problem of the Cook et al paper (that they conflate any acknowledgement of the greenhouse effect with the idea humans are the main cause of global warming), allowing them to respond to his arguments and pretend doing so addresses all the criticisms of their paper.
If Tol didn’t exist, and if people like Christopher Monckton didn’t comment on this matter either, the Skeptical Science group might actually have to deal with the real problems of their paper.
No. Not at all. Not only is this wrong, but the comparison is gross. The Skeptical Science group’s position is “no position” means “no position.” People like Tol and Monckton and their fans claim the ~8,000 papers rated as “no position” proves the consensus is <33%. That's garbage. That a paper might not take a position (in its abstract) does nothing to suggest it contradicts the consensus.
Bad arguments like these are why Cook et al can get away with the gross misrepresentations of their results like in this video Cook recently made:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEb49cZYnsE
The clips included at the beginning of the video misrepresent Cook et al's results. Cook includes them in his video but doesn't correct them or warn viewers of the misrepresentation. That sort of dishonesty is the problem with his work and his actions. It's also something nobody pays much attention to now because of bad arguments coming from people like Richard Tol.
It's good Tol got the Skeptical Science group to admit to some false claims in their (in)famous paper, but overall, he's probably done more to help them than anyone else.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #145734),
.
.
I don’t recall where I read it — Levitus (2012) seems likely — but yes, the I think the word is that the ARGO-era OHC data aren’t yet statistically significant. For that matter, I don’t think the radio altimetry SLR data are either due not only to the shortness of the record, but also the flattish trend in the 1990s attributed to the Pinatubo eruption.
.
However, over century scale SLR estimates, Church and White (2011) say:
.
There is considerable variability in the rate of rise during the twentieth century but there has been a statistically significant acceleration since 1880 and 1900 of 0.009 ± 0.003 mm year-2 and 0.009 ± 0.004 mm year-2, respectively. Since the start of the altimeter record in 1993, global average sea level rose at a rate near the upper end of the sea level projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Third and Fourth Assessment Reports. However, the reconstruction indicates there was little net change in sea level from 1990 to 1993, most likely as a result of the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991.
.
So, sometimes having many years of data can make up for greater uncertainty of individual measurements. That seems to be the basis for C&W’s argument here.
.
.
Which is the very most worst case rise based on RCP8.5. The low end is 28 cm (from the 1986-2005 mean) based on RCP2.6.
Andrew_KY (Comment #145731),
.
.
Generally, the “official” task of a scientist is to figure out how things work, and present results in literature. Period.
angech (Comment #145728),
.
.
You just got done telling me I didn’t have data because I can’t tell you what the temperature was at a given site on a given day some millions of years ago.
.
Now you’re telling me that climate has been “stable” for the past two billion years because … “paleontology”.
.
Make up your mind please?
mark bofill (Comment #145674)
” Physical evidence. Is sea level rising?
this is probably the evidence I find most persuasive that the planet is accumulating energy.
This is because I can’t conceive of a plausible explanation covering why sea level should be rising to the extent that it appears to be that doesn’t involve either water expanding or ice melting, and either/both of these require energy.”
–
Yes, everyone agrees with you that the sea level has been rising, not that this has to have anything to do with AGW or proves the planet is “accumulating” energy over time.
This has to do with coming out of the ice age and could do with being closer to the sun in some shape or form [Milenkovitch cycles, etc you know] or solar heat production variation, both not exactly “accumulating” though and not due to CO2 in that time frame.
Water expanding [thermal] and ice on land [specifically] melting [ though I know you know and mean this] are the most likely causes.
You said you can’t conceive of other plausible explanations, yet I have been able to propose 2 and their may be more.
” make your case with specifics.”
Re rainfall for instance Australia and one other Continent had a big soaking a few years ago and papers were put out [by scientists I believe] saying the sea level had stalled or dropped , albeit temporarily due to the vast amount of water trapped inland.
Sea level is obviously dependent on the degree of rainfall and years, decades or centuries with higher rainfall will obviously have lower sea levels than those without.
What have those fluctuations been like?
Erosion is a permanent factor that needs to be thought about over thousands of years of natural sea level rise
–
“Why do I think sea level is rising? I take scientists word for it.”
–
Not a pretty argument, really.
Needs a lot of rephrasing to accurately mean what you really meant to say
–
” I hear that tidal gauges show that sea level is rising,”
Some do, some don’t, lot’s of arguments here.
For instance the extremely complicated method of estimating tide levels around the world has been in place for well over a century. Have they changed the way they calculate the tides?
If not, why not?
and are the calculations showing an increase overall in predicted tide levels?
No-one done the research?
Such a shame
–
-“and satellites show that sea level is rising”
yep
They also show it falls at times, the Earth must really glow each time that accumulated sea energy rushes back out into space [my pathetic attempt at humor, sorry]
“there isn’t any controversy or dispute about that”
except in how much sea level is rising.
Maybe this is where we get stuck.
I’ve asserted sea level is rising.
I could link stuff.
I could probably link data If this won’t do, what will.”
–
I’m not good at linking but I would direct your attention to the latest assessment of Antarctic ice which points out that ice has been accumulating on land [importantly as we both know] for the last 10,000 years and more importantly the last 30 years.
I would point out that this was not known by scientists working on sea level rise and all the “scientific” papers you could care to quote are therefore out in their calculations of how much energy has accumulated in the sea.
They are all “wrong”.
Permanently.
because they worked on factors including a known Antarctic ice melt which is just not plain true.
No one can explain the Antarctic ice increase on land and at sea so energy is not necessarily accumulating the way that scientists want it to?
Science is assumptions proven by facts.
AGW is an assumption not borne out by the facts.
Would you care to assert “Sea level rise is increasing faster than natural factors and natural variation in proven linkage with CO2 rises “
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #145757)
April 12th, 2016 at 9:05 pm
“If they’re smart and/or clever, they should actually be ecstatic about Richard Tol. He’s their greatest ally imaginable”
Like Lew for warmists?
No, their paper is poison.
Keep on hitting it Brandon and make them visible.
angech:
In a manner. People like Stephan Lewandowsky, Michael Mann and Richard Tol all do a good job of getting certain groups to agree with them/promote their work and views despite their work being basically garbage. The result is creating a ton of opportunities for their opponents to not only make those three look bad, but also to make everyone who has supported them look bad.
The best thing the climate science community could have done back in the early 2000s is to back away from Michael Mann. Cutting him and his work out of the global warming narrative would have made the global warming cause far more effective. Instead, the community embraced the poison of his work and has been severely hurt by it.
Richard Tol is the same thing for skeptics. His work on the economics of global warming contains such obvious dreck anyone promoting it looks terrible to any fairminded reader. Similarly, the obviously false and/or nonsensical arguments he makes about the Cook et al paper make all critics of the Cook et al paper look bad.
Then we have Lewandowsky on the warmist side again, and the people promoting the paranoid fantasies of some massive disinformation campaign from fossil fuel companies causing the public not to agree with them. All of these things just result in the people supporting/promoting them looking bad and their “side” being viewed as less trustworthy. Getting rid of these rotten apples and the poison pills they create is how the sides could make themselves seem more trustworthy.
Definitely. I suspect at some point the Skeptical Science group’s approach will collapse. Either people will start recognizing the dishonesty the group has relied upon, or the consensus messaging approach will simply peter out because it turns out people don’t actually find it convincing. In either case, I expect the people behind this approach to get more and more shrill as they try to find new excuses for why they are failing to get people to implement action to combat global warming.
The question is how much damage they will do before their approach collapses. The answer to that depends in part on if skeptics can get their act together and create narratives that aren’t incredibly easy to see through. I don’t expect them to. I expect we’ll continue having both sides make terrible arguments for years and years, with the public’s general apathy never changing because of it.
Well that, or people like Bernie Sanders will manage to get enough power and influence to take drastic and unnecessary action to combat global warming. I find that outcome unlikely (as the public’s apathy is a very powerful thing), but a move toward liberal totalitarianism isn’t completely impossible.
Okay, this new paper has what may be the worst chart I have ever seen:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/11/4/048002/downloadHRFigure/figure/erlaa1c48f1
The x-axis is given as “Expertise.” If you look at the Supplementary material, you’ll find it says:
The part about coloring/confidence intervals should be ignored for now (though there are things to be said about it). What matters is… that’s all it says about this chart. Each “consensus estimate was assigned” a level of expertise from 1 to 5, without any rubric or guideline presented to show what those numbers might mean. As strange as that is, it gets worse when you actually look at the chart’s x-axis. Notice the scale it gives?
That’s right, there is none. If there are only five categories for “expertise,” then there should only be five columns in the x-axis. Instead, there are 16. Each column is assigned to one “consensus estimate,” and they are all plotted one-by-one. if you add up the values in the table, we see the categories have this many entries:
1 – 2
2 – 2
3 – 3
4 – 0
5 – 9
So the chart shows two estimates for category one side-by-side. The next two points are for category two. The next three points are for category three. The next five points are for category five. That means half the chart’s x-axis is devoted to one category, and another category isn’t even shown on the chart. The scaling on the chart is completely nonsensical.
If you look at the video I linked to above, you’ll see John Cook presenting a chart based on this with an animation showing a smooth curve of how the degree of consensus rises with expertise. I challenge you guys to try to visualize what that chart would look like if it were properly scaled. Enjoy your headache.
Oh, and don’t forget, these “expertise” ratings were completely arbitrary and created without any sort of rubric being present.
I promise this is my last comment for a while, but I wanted to give a quick visual demonstration of (part of) why this chart in the new paper is terrible. To do this, I’ve added lines to the chart and numbers to delineate the categories:
http://www.hi-izuru.org/wp_blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/4_13_scaling_example.png
I like how the category for the highest level of expertise not only covers the entire half of the “Higher” expertise range, but also extends into the lower half. Apparently their highest expertise category is both “Higher” and “Lower.”
Angech,
.
Is it OK for me to say that to be coming out of an ice age means we are warming? Not rhetorical. If that’s not what coming out of an ice age means, I’m at a loss to understand what we’re talking about. It’s not OK to say that to warm is to accumulate energy now.
.
This is doublespeak Angech. I don’t get why we can’t talk straight here.
Woah, lucia, you might want to resize that image. It’s huuge.
Oh, and I wrote a post about that strange chart so I could have all my thoughts in one place. For those who are curious about what makes it so strange:
http://www.hi-izuru.org/wp_blog/2016/04/strangest-chart-ever-created/
“Generally, the “official†task of a scientist is to figure out how things work, and present results in literature. Period.”
Brandon G.
I take it you’d agree then, that information concocted to scare people shouldn’t be the work of a scientist.
Andrew
Okay, I guess my question was rhetorical. I think it’s OK to say that coming out of an ice age means we are warming. I think it’s OK to say that to warm is to accumulate energy.
Sorry for the unanswered rhetorical question. I have a hard time distinguishing those for some reason.
mark bofill (Comment #145766)
coincidentally my birthday Mark
I love your style, have no problems with you in general or particular.
You were having a discussion with Andrew KY who asked for people to put up the facts re AGW.
“Andrew_KY (Comment #145658) You profess to believe in AGW. You get to provide the evidence for AGW.”
Your reply [to Brandon G]
“mark bofill (Comment #145659) “You’re wasting your breath. I wouldn’t bother.”
After a bit of tit for tat
‘Andrew_KY (Comment #145671)Yes I’m asking these same people for the physical evidence you mention.”
“mark bofill (Comment #145674) Okay. Physical evidence.
Is sea level rising?”
–
Presumably this comment refers to proof of AGW.
But sea levels rise naturally from little ice ages without AGW.
To paraphrase,”This is doublespeak mb. I don’t get why we can’t talk straight here.”
–
You said
“Is it OK for me to say that to be coming out of an ice age means we are warming? Not rhetorical.”
Sorry, but if we are coming out of an ice age then to say we are warming is rhetorical.We don’t need to ask the umpire on that surely?
–
” If that’s not what coming out of an ice age means, I’m at a loss to understand what we’re talking about”.
We are talking about AGW, which is not what coming out of an ice age implies, ever.
–
“It’s not OK to say that to warm is to accumulate energy now”
Of course it is OK to say that to warm is to accumulate energy.
If you are discussing Greenhouse effects it is quite common to say that to warm is to accumulate energy.
It demands that the GHG are holding [accumulating ] extra energy in.
You are right.
However if we are talking about the sun heating the earth, and the sun gets closer or the sun gets hotter the earth gets hotter.
It is not exactly holding onto [accumulating] extra heat, it is merely being exposed to more heat.
The term”accumulating” has two meanings as Lucia could elaborate.
If you assume accumulate to mean merely the act of getting hotter you are right for everything including coming out of the ice age.
If you take the AGW view , accumulating means gathering in more energy due to an increase in GHG holding more heat in then this is an incorrect view of warming from the ice age.-
–
To answer Andrew-KY with
“Physical evidence.Is sea level rising?” Yes.
I am merely pointing out that your answer, while eminently self true, in no way answers his question and never will.
Sorry to upset you.
Andrew_KY (Comment #145769),
.
.
Scientitsts shouldn’t “concoct” anything for *any* reason.
.
Gee, I wonder where this is going …
Brandon G,
That sounds like a pretty definitive position.
Anyway, in that case, there must a way you can tell when a scientist “concocts” something (if they do) vs when a scientist does good science.
If you have a mind to, you can explain how you detect a concoction so that you could point it out to someone. In other words, give us a real world example of a scientist setting off your BS meter, so we know you even have one. If none ever has, you can say that, too.
Andrew
Andrew_KY (Comment #145783),
.
.
The most reliable way would to be a domain expert oneself, which I most certainly am not. So I personally use heuristics, the main one being looking for what most experts agree on in published literature. I then look for consistency in the arguments they agree upon. Do the arguments make sense? Are they coherent and consistent? I don’t need a lot of technical prowess to do those kinds of evaluations, sometimes it’s just a matter of looking up definitions for some of the jargon.
.
Then I look to what they don’t agree on. Much harder to sort through that as a layperson. In climate science there’s a lot of it … or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I’m more aware of the disagreements because I pay more attention to climatology.
.
.
More or less the opposite of the above; inconsistency or contradictions in core principles. Claims that widely accepted fundamental principles which have been shown to be useful across multiple disciplines allegedly fail in one particular application, thus the whole thing needs to be re-evaluated and/or rewritten.
.
.
Rossi’s E-Cat is a good one. Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity predictions are another (albeit quite seductive). Satoshi Kanazawa’s paper on liberal atheists being more intelligent than conservative theists (another seductive one). Any attempt to link “race” with intelligence or single behavioral attributes (not at all seductive for me).
.
Typically the “softer” the science, the more I’m inclined to throw a red flag by default. In harder sciences, I’m watchful for fist-study or single-study syndrome, especially ones which make very strong claims.
.
You have little reason to believe any of the above. I might go so far to say that you shouldn’t.
Brandon Gates, my evil twin. 🙂
Or am I the evil one?
Lol that sounded a heck of a lot like me anyway.
markbofill,
.
I see no logical reason why we couldn’t both be evil. And if you have a tendency to play Devil’s Advocate as I do, it may be an arguable point.
.
On that note, interested parties may wish to monitor the discussions on Cook et al. (2016) at ATTP’s and/or Sou’s.
Brandon G,
.
Both evil.
.
:> We really do think alike. It’s sort of weird.
.
Say, this thread is over 1000 comments long. It’s been struck by an iceberg in the North Atlantic and is sinking. Join us on the Banning Bing thread.
mark bofill,
.
Worse things could happen. I’ll trip over to the Bing thread and see wassup.
Thanks, Brandon G, for the detailed response.
Just one follow up: Is there anything a climate scientist has presented that you think may be concocted/BS?
Andrew
Andrew,
.
Since the convo has moved to the Bing thread, my response to your last may be found over there.
Doing my taxes didn’t get a chance to respond to Brandon Gates on several issues:
…
JD”One example of the dramatic effects of fuel poverty was that “Deaths from hypothermia among UK pensioners almost doubled during the 5 years up to 2012, a time when several cold winters combined with largescale increases in energy prices.â€
…Gates response: “How many heat stress-related deaths over the same interval?
…
JD current response. First, if heat is the problem causing death, fuel poverty plays an important role because air conditioning would stop the heat deaths. However, beyond that cold causes many more deaths than heat as explained by a Lancet article. See link to Lancet article in this posting. For example, in the US, 144,000 people die from cold and only 9,000 die from heat. There is a chart from the UK showing that many more people die from cold than heat. Don’t have time to figure out. See https://sunshinehours.net/2016/04/07/usa-heat-kills-9000-and-cold-kills-144000/
JD
…
Gates defending estimates as something close to scientific truth:
…
“This is getting tiresome. You can raise suspicions of improper statistical machinations and ideologically-motivate chicanery until the cows come home. It’s not my duty do defend against your speculations. Either RTFP and make a cogent argument for shonky statistics, abandon the argument and try something different and hopefully better evidenced, or simply accept that the authors have more expertise than you do and might in fact know more about this stuff than you give them credit for.”
…
JD Response: Those who study scientific journals know how shoddy they can be. You seem to be according a high degree of accuracy and competence to peer-reviewed journals. In fact, those who have studied scientific research have found it to be greatly flawed. For instance:
“Last summer, the Open Science Collaboration announced that it had tried to replicate one hundred published psychology experiments sampled from three of the most prestigious journals in the field. Scientific claims rest on the idea that experiments repeated under nearly identical conditions ought to yield approximately the same results, but until very recently, very few had bothered to check in a systematic way whether this was actually the case. The OSC was the biggest attempt yet to check a field’s results, and the most shocking. In many cases, they had used original experimental materials, and sometimes even performed the experiments under the guidance of the original researchers. Of the studies that had originally reported positive results, an astonishing 65 percent failed to show statistical significance on replication, and many of the remainder showed greatly reduced effect sizes.
Their findings made the news, and quickly became a club with which to bash the social sciences. But the problem isn’t just with psychology. There’s an Âunspoken rule in the pharmaceutical industry that half of all academic biomedical research will ultimately prove false, and in 2011 a group of researchers at Bayer decided to test it. Looking at sixty-seven recent drug discovery projects based on preclinical cancer biology research, they found that in more than 75 percent of cases the published data did not match up with their in-house attempts to replicate.”
See http://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/05/scientific-regress
See also the work of John Ioannidis, which shows how bad biomedical research is and the negative effects of bias. (A truly horrendous problem in Hansenite climate “science.” ) He states: ““The studies were biased,†he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.†Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. ” See http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/
JD