In a discussion of climate communication over at Collide-a-scope, NewYorkJ, wrote this.
Lastly, while I’m not confident improved communication from scientists to the public will have a great effect, efforts like these are a move in the right direction.
Certainly, it can help to more quickly combat media misinformation in close to real-time.
I thought The Climate Rapid Response Team was an interesting idea when I first read about it and wondered how it was going to work. It seems the group set up a web site that permits users to send them questions. One of “matchmakers” (i.e. John Abraham, Scott Mandia or or Ray Weymann) forwards the question to an appropriate climate scientists, then an answer is supplied to the person who asked. Sample questions and answers are posted on this page.
Scanning the page, I thought of two minor sounding things they ought to consider doing to improve visibility of their communications:
- Climate Rapid Response Team responses posted on their web site sometimes contain hyperlinks, but the team’s web page doesn’t turn those into clickable links. This makes it unnecessarily cumbersome for people reading responses at the web to visit the site. (Note: My blog turns all links entered into comments into clickable links. It’s done using a plugin to WordPress which contains a small bit of php code; so it’s trivial to add this functionality to their page which is also generated using php.)
- The climate rapid response team hasn’t set up their system to hold the inquiries/responses in a database and show all inquiries/responses as individual pages. Using appropriate (free!) blog software like WordPress, and using a suitable template theme would let them create pages of each inquiries/response, give that page a permalinks and create an RSS feed. Once set up in a more ‘bloglike’ manner, the following advantages would accrue:
- web search engines would crawl those pages which might make the answers posted more visible to someone in the general public who might be asking any question submitted as an inquiry,
- let people at blogs and forums a topic could link to the discussion at the climate rapid response site.
- interested people could subscribe to the feed and discover which questions have been answered at the site.
(For those wondering, using blog software doesn’t require one to support comments. The theme used to display the entries doesn’t have to look “blog like”.)
It seems to me these would be very low effort changes that could improve the impact of what they are already doing. I’m sure if I thought a little longer, I could think of a few more suggestions. But, instead of waiting, I thought I’d ask readers: If your goal was to rapidly disseminate The Climate Rapid Response Team” answers to climate questions to a broad public, what changes might you make to that site?
Update
I thought I’d add questions I’m thinking of asking– in the form of an “interview”. Here are my current questions:
1. When did the The Climate Rapid Response web site go online.
2. Roughly many inquiries a month are submitted?
a) fraction from main stream media (i.e. newspapers, magazines, television, radio outlets.)
b) fraction from bloggers.
c) fraction from individuals.
d) fraction from spam.
3. Do you respond to inquiries regardless of organization type?
4. Have stories appeared quoting the scientist you linked to the person making an inquiry? If so, about how many and where have the stories appeared? (Links to specific stories would be of interest.)
5. Who funds your program and what is your annual budget?
6. Overall, do you think you are making progress toward achieving your main goals?
Do any of you have additional questions you’d like me to ask?
Lucia,
I am going to explain something to you, just like you explain (on occasion) 🙂 🙂
The rapid thingie is for journalists to have a hotline to ‘top climate scientists’ direct.
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They do not intend to use their website as a platform, in and of itself, for any form of direct public communication.
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Say you are a journalist who is writing an article on Climategate and you don’t know who the expert is. You ask the rapid team your questions, who pass it on to the Climategate expert Gavin Schmidt.
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You have a question about the hockeystick? The rapid team puts you in touch with hockeystick expert Michael Mann. That kind of stuff.
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And anyway, why do you want to know what questions are being answered by whom, with what answers? Just go back to your seat and read the newspaper or watch the TV. All will be revealed in its due place and time.
Despite Shub’s cynicism, I think he’s actually quite correct. This is a media steering machine, not an information repository. The purpose of the rapid response team is to ensure that “consensus” interpretations of the science are the most accessible, thus ensuring that journalists can continue to lazily copy-type the information provided to them by the establishment.
The hope is that, having climate scientists on tap using the matching method, with the absolute minimum of delay to allow doubt to creep in, there will no longer be any desire on the part of journalists to tap the sceptics for their interpretations of the science. Of course, when you’re in control of the matchmaking, you’re in very precise control over the message.
The enquiry form is available on every page of the site, because the site is a funnel and nothing more than that. There is absolutely no intention on the part of the matchmakers to share broadly the responses being provided. Knowledgeable dissenters can’t dissent from responses that aren’t exposed on the site. Once the tinted interpretation of the science has been transferred from “expert” to print, there’s no real mechanism to correct falsehoods or expose advocacy.
Lucia: The goal is to NOT disseminate to the public (as mentioned previous), nor to present a balanced view.
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This is from the Resources page at that site:
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Other Useful Documents
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* The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism is a 16 page booklet that looks at both the evidence that human activity is causing global warming and the ways that climate ‘skeptic’ arguments can mislead by presenting only small pieces of the puzzle rather than the full picture. The science is explained in plain language intended for the layperson. More detailed treatments of the science are available at Skeptical Science.
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For web resources, only warmist sites are mentioned. Oddly, you did not make the cut (yes, sarc). RC and SS are right at the top though.
One is the medium, one is the message. See M. McLuhan for operating instructions.
If I were a member of the CRR team and I wanted to get my message out I would:
1. Create an additional blog type forum so that they can be sure that they are really answering the questions being ask. I find that one of the ways that this sort of communication fails is that often there is confustion concerning what is actually being ask.
2. Proactively engage and correct dissenting viewpoints elsewhere. Do so in a calm and rational manner linking back to the home blog to drive traffic to the target web site and provide a collection of material. Then when engaged on a question, existing stores of information may be accessed easily.
Oh course, all of this assumes they are really capable of honestly debating the subject. If that is true, the above steps work beautifully. If that assumption is false, they just create more skeptics by dodging the questions.
Shub
I assume it is the goal of the rapid response team to get the information to the public. In that regard, my question is: If this was your goal, what would you do?
Simon Hopkinson
Maybe. But if so, would you suggest improvements? I’d suggest that their inquiry page add information describing which media contacted them, which scientists they were steered to and then provide a link to the story (if it’s on line). If it’s not online, just cite where the story appeared.
Les—
I agree they have a point of view. Presumably, they want to rapidly disseminate their POV. You may not like their POV, but assuming you had created a “Les Johnsons Rapid Response Team” site, and provided answers to questions, what might you tweak to make it work better?
Artifex—
I assume they reason they aren’t actually blogging or being proactive in hunting down quesitons is that they don’t want to deal with the time sink of comments nor spend the time finding what people really are saying. They are assuming that if the set up a site, questions will come to them.
But, I too would make that “inquiry” page fold in a blog element — at least in the sense of using some sort of content management system to show the questions that have been asked and show any answers.
Simon
To elaborate– if their goal is media outreach, I would “bloggify” their
testimonial page:
http://www.climaterapidresponse.org/testimonials.php
Each testimonial end up as a dated stand alone page. It would include a link to the journalists online presence, and ideally to the article that Monbiot felt was helped by the CRRT.
For example, the testimonial from Monbiot reads
At a minimum,this should include a link to Monbiot’s author page at The Guardian. Ideally, it would link to the specific Monbiot article wrote using information gleaned from his CRRT contact.
The CRRT could supply people they helped with an entry form permitting them to enter their testimonial and prompting for the link.
“Certainly, it can help to more quickly combat media misinformation in close to real-time.”
Here’s my question:
If your site was responsible for spreading misinformation, would you disclose information concerning this responsibility publically?
Andrew
This will be another failed effort to control the message and defend climate hysteria.
Perhaps its backers already realize this and are wandering off looking for other ways to keep the cliamte hype alive.
Having Monbiot write an endorsement of the CRRT is not really a good thing, by the way.
Lucia: your
“Les Johnsons Rapid Response Team†site, and provided answers to questions, what might you tweak to make it work better?
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I would do a lot….
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1. search-able database
2. list of potential contributors
3. list of published articles, and links
4. site references (“don’t trust me…look it up elsewhere and verify”)
5. graphics. its god awful plain.
6. list of actual contributors
7. FAQ section, because its probably already been asked
8. Multiple answers. Because there is rarely just 1 right answer.
9. News section (using a web crawler)
10. as you said, clickable links.
11. topics and key words sections, as you suggest, so that people can link.
12. social network it.
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And I would try to make it balanced, no matter my viewpoint. Because I don’t have the only view in the world. Nor is mine likely entirely correct.
> Do any of you have additional questions you’d like me to ask?
There are a number of controversies within Climate Science, where the “Consensus” position is not the only reasonable one. In other words, in these cases, a range of views are consistent with current understanding, such that “Consensus”-type positions have not discredited “skeptical”-type positions on scientific grounds.
How do you decide who is to respond to inquiries on such controversial subjects?
Lucia, if I’m to juxtapose my preferred approach with their chosen approach then there are one or two caveats – fundamentally I believe my site’s raison d’etre would differ from theirs. I would be endeavouring to maximise the amount of information that could be accessed, in as rapid and useful a way as possible. What I would not be trying to do is control the content or the message that could be derived there-from. These are the principle differences that distinguish me from the RRT. So let’s ignore those differences, and pretend that our purposes equate.
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I agree with you. But it appears that, despite the site being written in PHP, it is not – as far as I can tell – exploiting PHP beyond server-side includes (page components like header, footer, inquiry form, menu) simply for site consistency. It’s otherwise a static HTML site with an uninspired (I’d argue non-existent) theme. It’s been “designed” by PIRC’s Richard Hawkins, who “[..] coordinates PIRC’s climate workstream, bridging between the research community and campaigning NGOs.”
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And the mainstream media, now, apparently. Our Richard’s going up in the world.
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In my version, inquiries would be fed directly into a simple SQL database table and given an ID (auto-incremental). Also collected would be the asker, their website, contact information and other information (as also collected by RRT on their inquiry form). The final print or online location can be added later, but space provided for this detail.
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A matchmade response would be collected and entered into a separate table with its own ID, linked to the inquiry by ID. Multiple responses could be collected and linked to the original inquiry using the initial inquiry’s ID – “many-to-one”.
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I’d also have an additional table of relationships for supplementary information. This would contain Inquiry IDs and the IDs of indirect but relevant, previously issued Response IDs. It would also have a precis of the reason for the link – eg. “More details regarding isotopic CO2 fingerprinting”. Databased hyperlinking, if you will.
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Exposing the whole lot (excluding reserved contact detail, obviously) is a given. Assuming the text of both the inquiry and the response is properly indexed, the MySQL is very simply “WHERE MATCH (field1,field2,..) AGAINST (‘searchterm..’)”.
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By “bloggifying”, I’m unsure if you literally mean integrating WP or Blogger etc. In Apache, URL rewriting is easy, even without resorting to blog software. I tend to write on the Microsoft IIS platform, where URL rewriting is a dead loss. What was prohibitive to net searches at one time was carrying querystrings (“?name=value” pairs, or even “address.org/?value”). These problems are historical and though the URLs can be ugly (“/page/?rid=1843&resp=this%20and%that&damn=this%20is%20an%20ugly%address”) they don’t need to be. A bit of sensible indexing can ease the eyestrain ( eg: “/page/?these_are_not_the_droids_you_re_looking_for”) and they make perfectly good permalinks as well.
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As a footnote, I expect that some RRT inquirers likely wouldn’t choose to link to the article where the response was being utilised. Monbiot, for example, who is the honorary president of the astroturfing CACC, firmly believes that all contrarian contributions to his blog comments are from co-ordinated deniarrr sources. RRT, written properly, would of course be a primary launch-pad for such attacks. That would never do. 😉
Certainly, it can help to more quickly combat media misinformation in close to real-time.
Sorry Lucia, that’s like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.
In any case, they are targeting the wrong argument as Judith Curry observes.
Ms Curry breaks down the ‘debate’ into 4 tiers. For simplicity I’ll break it down into 3 tiers.
In our toy society we have theoretical scientists, applied scientists and production.
Theoretical scientists spend all their time identifying problems theoretical solutions.
The applied scientists refine the problems and solutions into something that can be built by production.
If it turns out that the theoretical solution can’t be refined to the point that it can be built by production then the problem ceases to exist as a problem, it gets consigned to ‘that’s life’ or ‘gods will’.
If climate change is a problem then our only currently available solutions are
1)windmills and solar panels which will return society to a pre-industrial period when human activity was governed by the whims of weather.
2) nuclear power which carries with it a waste problem and some small probability of catastrophic accident.
There are a bunch of other theoretical solutions, but the applied science people haven’t figured out how to implement them yet.
The communications problem is between the theoreticians and the applied people. The applied people can’t build the Utopian energy paradise that the theoreticians are demanding.
Simon
Obviously, the point of their site is to gain some control over the message. From their view, they– the CRRT want disseminate that which they consider “correct information” rapidly in order to counter the dissemination of that which they consider to be “misinformation” being set forward by others. Obviously, they are going to filter the output to consist of whatever they consider to be “correct information”; from their view, they are not “neutral” relative to all possible views and interpretations of everything. (I don’t expect them to suggesting people read Oliver K. Manuels stuff on the Iron Sun as a possible legitimate theory.)
I think that if they don’t want to sit down and think through a unique system, they could just use something like WordPress, adding an appropriate entry form for people to submit inquiries. (That form could be a lot like my “contact lucia” page.)
As for their site as a whole:
Each of their existing “pages” could be a “page” in WordPress terminology.
Each response to an inquiry on their current “inquiries” page could be a “post” in the category “responses”. The current “inquiries” page would just display the most recent responses. If the RCC turn off comments and write an appropriate theme, that top page could look exactly as it currently does, but the earlier responses would “live forever” on the web.
As for permalinks: WordPress already has functionality to give nice permalinks to each posts, so the people creating the site don’t have to think much.
This is precisely what a “blog” software does and what I mean by “blogify”
To organize somewhat, they could could use ‘tags’ or subcategories– these are already available in WP.
Their “submit inquiry form” could be added to the side bar of every page and post (as currently), or they could just create a stand alone page– sort of like my “contact lucia” page.
The one thing they need to do that I don’t do is use a plugin to click-i-fy the hyperlink their current authors don’t turn into links. That’s trivial. (I use one in comments.)
So, basically, if they just loaded up WordPress, and used that to display their site, they’d already have web site that expands as the create content, is more crawlable and can be expanded for improved functionality fairly easily. That’s what I mean by “blog-i-fy”.
I’m sure hiring someone to come up with a “more perfect” CMS could result in a “more perfect” system, but the difficulty would be that the group would have to update their CMS from time to time. So, I really was thinking: They should use WordPress.
Lucia,
Why would anyone wish to suggest improvements to what is clearly a propaganda instrument?
Combat “Media misinformation, no less? Reality is that to the folks involved in this, “misinformation” is anything and everything that does not strictly conform to AGW orthodox dogma.
They may need help with the dogma, but not with the propagation of it. The MSM are doing a pretty good ‘useful idot| job in that regard already.
I agree with Tetris. It is a blatant activist propaganda site (Abraham and Mandia). Just look at the recommended sites and books:
Realclimate
Six Degrees
Storms of My Grandchildren (Hansen)
Dire Predictions (Mann)
Other books by Gavin, Oreskes, Foster (Tamino) and even Joe Romm!
I am surprised that Lucia is taking this seriously.
Other questions? Well you could start with
“Why is your site so biased?”
“Who do you think you are fooling”?
“Why don’t you link to Judith Curry, Lucia, Spencer or Roger Pielke?”
“Don’t you realise that this sort of propaganda and scaremongering usually backfires?”
tetris, PaulM: It’s kinda a fun exercise to explore how someone else might approach the challenge. I’ve no doubt that any improvements I suggest would be like salt to a slug, to the CRRT guys. Openness and transparency are delicious ideas to me. To them, not so much.
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Lucia:
Briefly looking over Hawkins’ other site builds, he does know how to integrate WordPress. I don’t see any evidence in his portfolio of him venturing outside of WordPress towards custom dynamic content, though.
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I’m willing to bet that, after all the coaxing, nudging, tweaking and beating into submission that you’ve in all likelihood had to do in order to keep your WordPress site functioning and your plug-ins plugged in, you could easily have spent less time learning a bit of PHP/MySQL and created your own CMS.
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A custom CMS shouldn’t be a particularly daunting challenge to any experienced WordPress user. At the heart of every CMS is simply receiving data, storing that data in a structured way, and serving specific data when called upon to do so. Rudimentary understanding of the MySQL commands “INSERT INTO”, “SELECT * FROM”, “UPDATE” and “DELETE FROM” are all that is really needed. A bit of forethought in designing your database and you’re good to go. Keep a cheat-sheet near to hand and you’re laughing.
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My brain is addled after 10 minutes of trying to figure out what’s going on in the WordPress source files (NB: I never programmed in PHP, I’m old-school “VB/classic ASP”). WP is complex because it has to be all things to all kinds of people, and navigating that provision makes what should be a simple thing into an absurdly complex pastime. A custom CMS, by comparison, is a model of simplicity.
“I thought The Climate Rapid Response Team was an interesting idea when I first read about it and wondered how it was going to work.”
I would think that any group with a name including rapid response is going to give the partisan and advocacy position no matter which “side” they are on. These are aimed at people who are either incapable or too lazy to decide for themselves by digging into the issues on their own initiative.
In partisan US politics we have had a recent growth in rapid response teams who in my estimation do a good job of finding the other side’s gross misinformation, but unfortunately answer it, all too often, with misinformation of their own.
I think these teams are in response to the ideas of Joseph Goebbels, who was minister of Nazi propaganda, and believed that telling a lie sufficiently often would lead to its being taken as truth.
But here you have a direct quote from this despicable bastard:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.â€
Re: Kenneth Fritsch (Mar 7 13:47),
This is getting really offensive. These people believe what they are saying. So do I. They have been saying it for ages. And now they are trying to say it more effectively. This doesn’t make them followers of Goebbels. Like any number of people in free countries, they are just trying to put their case.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment#71297) March 7th, 2011 at 1:47 pm
Talk about being offensive bud… Lower it down a notch. Just because you disagree with a group doesn’t make them the same as Nazi propagandists
Uhmm…. I know some php/MySQL. If I didn’t we wouldn’t have betting. Do you think WordPress has functionality to let you guys bet built in? I wrote a plugin that I could use to insert a form into the wordpress post, and let you add data to the database, etc.
2) You are wrong. I could not write my own CMS in less time doing whatever you think I’m doing “beating” the blog into submission. I certainly couldn’t write one that does what I want it to do efficiently. (Do you think I want to write my own code to let you guys edit comments? Or write my own spam-filters? Or provide an RSS feed? All from scratch? The downtime we periodically experience has to do with *hosting* and how much memory or cpu the dynamic site uses with lots of comments uses to serve tons of dynamically generated pages. None of it has to do with tweaking wordpress into submission. WordPress even self-updates, alerts me to revised plugins etc.
Kenneth–
First: avoid Nazi allusions here, and I’d advise everywhere. Not only are they offensive, but quite often, you end up making a very bad case. In this particular case, it appears the climate rapid response team is just trying to create a resource that encourages people (possibly only journalists) who do have questions about a climate related topic to get in touch with specialists who work in that area.
So, if you ask a question about NH ice, following their stated program, the put you in touch with a glaciologist rather than, say, a guy who works on forecasting hurricanes. I recognize that they may, somehow, have a tendency to recruit experts from among the most “alarmist” range in science–but– they may not be doing that. Or maybe if a group of people from North of Nowhere Wisconsin are hosting a debate on “x” climate related topic, they could ask the CRRT to suggest scientists who might debate. That would be a useful service. (Do you remember the kerfuffle over the debate in Northern Wisconsin?)
Anyway, I think even if the group has POV, they should be welcomed to the public debate. I, for one, would actually like to read some of their enquiries/responses.
Lucia,
I looked the site over. It is a bit like RealClimate Lite, but targeted at journalists. Not a hint of balance, not a hint of areas of legitimate uncertainty. So long as these folks choose to focus only on straw-man arguments, their case is automatically weak. Lemme guess…. if someone asks a real question, it won’t ever be answered by a real climate scientist. (eg. ‘All climate models use different assumed historical aerosol forcings, and different assumed future aerosol forcings. How can the models be considered to produce credible estimates of future warming if they profoundly disagree with each other about aerosols and net past forcing?’) I have seldom seen real climate scientists addressing real questions. I can think of lots of good questions which would most likely not be addressed.
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The whole idea seems to be focused on only the most superficial and irrelevant “dis-information” arguments (‘back radiation violates the second law’, ‘it has to be the sun’, etc.). IMO, the site simply avoids the real issue: there is huge uncertainty due only to the currently poor understanding of how Earth’s climate actually works. That wide uncertainty is endlessly used to justify draconian policy action now, but has little to do with unpredictability of Earth’s climate, it has mainly to do poor understanding and weak science.
I agree with Nick on this. One rule of science blogging should be one shouldn’t assume the motives of a party you disagree with.
Anyway, I don’t think that’s even a quote by Göbbels, though it’s widely attributed to be, but if so I’d be interested in an actual reference to where he wrote or uttered it. (Somebody claiming he said it doesn’t count.)
I think their goal is to answer queries. So, presumably, if someone asks a question, they answer that question. I guess this could become strawmen if people wrote questions requesting the scientist engage an argument never posed by anyone anywhere.
I’m not really sure how the group can control the questions though.
Sorry, but I think you people missed my point and it was rather simple and I suspect it says more about where you are coming from than I. The idea of attempting to keep lies or even half truths from becoming accepted as truths is a very good one, but when partisans groups do this I think they are sometimes much better at showing what the other party has wrong than getting it necessarily right itself.
The implication of my quote from Goebbels was that, yes, we need to be ever vigilant to what the truth is and that is probably best done by individuals taking the effort to determine what that truth is. If we point at someone and say he/she has the truth we still have to pass judgment on that someone and their arguments. When it is only the state making that official judgment is where the real problem comes.
For Stokes and Way to make the implication that I was using Goebbels quote against a group attempting to prevent what Goebbels did, or at least a lesser level, does not make any sense except that they jumped to a conclusion not there. I also think the groups that are attempting to do what the one under discussion here in this thread is doing do it in a sincere manner and thus my Goebbels reference. My point is that they should not set themselves up as an arbiter of the truth.
Nick, Lucia, and Carrick,
No, Göbbels shouldn’t be brought into this. Serves no purpose. The folks who put up this site almost certainly believe what they say, and are simply advocating their POV. That doesn’t automatically give the site relevance (or irrelevance); you have to look at what they write. So far, I am not impressed.
Carrick, the quote:
http://thinkexist.com/quotation/-if_you_tell_a_lie_big_enough_and_keep_repeating/345877.html
Lucia,
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I expect the same way that RealClimate does. Of course, I hope they will prove me wrong.
I think this would be a good time to start a “lukewarmer rapid response site”. 😉
“I think these teams are in response to the ideas of Joseph Goebbels, who was minister of Nazi propaganda, and believed that telling a lie sufficiently often would lead to its being taken as truth.”
I think I see where the confusion was in my statement above. By response I meant in opposition to the ideas of Goebbels. I thought that was obvious since the Response Teams are supposedly responding to lies or at least half truths.
Kenneth–
Whatever one means to communicate using a Nazi analogy, it is generally best to avoid the Nazi analogy. Using Nazi’s generally tends to dilute whatever point you are making.
Well, they couldn’t even if they tried, could they? They can’t in the sense of imposing dogma because they aren’t the state. But in an open society with freedom of speech etc. they can form a group to get whatever message out.
It’s pretty rare for any group that actually forms and becomes active to be totally neutral toward all points of views. But it seems to me their stated POV is fine– connect people who make queries to people who have expertise on that query. Let those with questions ask questions from those who have answers.
Obviously, the group is not going to be neutral toward all possible types of “experts”. The CRRT will have some metrics to decide who is an “expert”. But I don’t think people asking questions are going to be utterly unaware of this.
But all that is a bit orthogonal to diagnosing whether the steps the CRRT is taking might not be tweaked to better achieve goals like:
Getting more questions.
Getting good questions.
Getting their answers read and circulated.
etc.
The Gobbels reference is absolutely appropriate.
RQ: How could you get a group of people to acquiesce to behaviors they would normally oppose?
RA: Lie to them.
RQ2: How could you get a group of people to acquiesce to really bad behaviors they would normally oppose?
RA2: Lie Real Big (Like Gobbely/Globally Big)
Andrew
Re: Kenneth Fritsch (Mar 7 16:49),
The anti-quote.
It sure sounds like a made-up quote to me. But like he says, the answer is a proper source.
Goebbels has merely become the reference synomym for carefully crafted and executed propaganda. The reference has no other value than that.
The Soviets, Chinese and Vietnamese Communists had a way longer time to perfect their skills than the Nazis, and their various propaganda machines represent the ultimate in the art of manipulating carefully chosen and crafted blends of falsehoods and half truths into “facts”. The Lysenko catastrophy during the Stalin era is probably one of the best examples of concocting from scientific falsehoods an all-encompassing propaganda message to further the socialist/communist political cause.
And as Lenin shrewdly observed, there are always plenty of “useful idiots” – people sympathetic to the cause – willing to help spread the propaganda “facts”. In our case the “Climateresponseteam.org” site. Not much more to it.
Kenneth, as Nick points out, that’s an unreferenced source. I believe it is not a real quote of him, but something somebody made up for (believe it or not, shock and awe) … propaganda purposes.
This site is known by its founders to be misleading. They say it is about getting accurate science, but that’s not true and they know it. It is a political propaganda site which is deliberately mislabeled. That is dishonest. Understandable, perhaps, but still not straightforward in terms of integrity.
Now it may well be that the vast majority of political propagandists engage in misleading tactics. Defending them as being engaged in an activity which is simply par for the course for propaganda, however, doesn’t refute the point.
From a science perspective, this isn’t a site which promotes integrity.
Carrick,
Maybe, but does it matter? Those folks set out to purge Europe of ethnic minorities, and in the final analysis, they pretty much accomplished exactly what they set out to do. Mis-quotations of Göbbels don’t matter all that much, IMHO.
Stan,
Please explain how you know that the founders of the site know it is misleading. I suspect they believe every word.
SteveF:
Scholarship and academic honesty don’t matter? It’s hard for me to believe you would say that.
Carrick,
Sure they matter. They just don’t matter all that much in the context of this thread. Bringing Göbbels into this thread was (IMO) completely inappropriate, along with all Göbbels related quotes. The rapid climate response folks are not remotely similar to Göbbels. Are they honestly mistaken about a lot of things? Yes, I think so. Göbbels? Nah.
SteveF, one should certainly not taint one’s argument with a factual error about what somebody else said, if the purpose of ones argument is to rebuke the errors on the part of others.
So yes, it does matter, if one cares about their credibility.
The link below is better referenced with regards to Goebbels propaganda and I think does give some insight into why some amongst us will continue to want decide for ourselves what the truth might be.
Certainly Rapid Response teams have in (the back of) their minds the problems of propaganda and what the horrible effects can be when taken to extremes. I wholeheartedly agree with that position. On the other hand, I get a bit uneasy when these groups talk about public relations and the need to put their arguments forward in the best light – as in convincing others somehow beyond just presenting the facts of the matter. That approach as you scientists here well know is not very scientific.
Now if the Rapid Response teams are only interested in presenting straight facts and talking about the uncertainties involved and without editorial comment, I say that is a step forward. I have found that in reading papers concerning climate science topics that if these papers are carefully read – and interpreted – they say something very different than what I might hear from RC or like blogs. I think some of the latter progeny of the MBH proxy series are increasingly coming to terms with the amount of uncertainty in the results of these studies. It is the selling of AGW and the needs for mitigation that I have bigger problems with and it is that that, in a quick read, I thought the Rapid Response team under discussion here was concerned with .
http://www.psywarrior.com/Goebbels.html
Lucia, I think we are talking past each other. I perceive WordPress as a difficult-to-manipulate, cumbersome and inefficient system (which you don’t), and you perceive a content management system to be a prohibitively difficult and/or complex thing to achieve (which I don’t). Doubtless we’re both entirely correct about the things we do know, and have formed opinions in the absence of expert knowledge about the things we don’t.
“Sure they matter. They just don’t matter all that much in the context of this thread. Bringing Göbbels into this thread was (IMO) completely inappropriate, along with all Göbbels related quotes. The rapid climate response folks are not remotely similar to Göbbels. Are they honestly mistaken about a lot of things? Yes, I think so. Göbbels? Nah.”
SteveF, I am rather discouraged that you continue to say that bringing Goebbels up was to imply that the Rapid Resonse Teams were similar to Goebbels. That was not my intent at all as I have explained. The teams are formed in response to what they see as propaganda. I would ask you to carefully go back and read what I have said.
While you do not use my name directly, I am the only poster who brought up the propaganda issue and Goebbels. It may have been my mistake to bring a Nazi into the discussion, but I did not imply what you and others have stated here.
Lucia
For good or bad, the Nazi era is a part of human history. We should boldly look at it in the eye, and move on. Shying away from it won’t help.
.
When we were growing up, my dad alluded to Goebbelsian propaganda – illustratively – on occasion. The specific avoidance of all Nazi allusions is a peculiar form of historical political correctness that wont do us any good.
.
Turning back to the ‘rapid’ dudes:
Why do you want to ‘improve’ their efforts?
.
For any platform to project *authority*, the machinations that go on behind-the-scenes must remain veiled. This is precisely why the rapid dudes want to hide their exchanges, but present only the product (thereby improving the power-profile of climate science).
.
I have seen John Abrahams’ powerpoint thingy against Monckton. Whatever he may be, Abrahams is not at heart, a scientist.
Lucia,
What I saw in the replies were a series of extended ‘explanations’ which did basically address straw-man arguments. Certainly the the answers also did address the questions (more of less), but each questions seemed to me treated as an opportunity to answer all kinds of questions which were not directly raised.
I guess what most stuck in my craw was the “there is no important doubt” tone of every answer. They no doubt believe that is true. But it is a bit like Cromwell’s plea of “think it possible you may be mistaken”…they clearly don’t. It devalues their answers, and their site.
Steve F,
Look at this page http://www.climaterapidresponse.org/resources.php
These are not the resources of anyone interested in an honest presentation of the science. E.g. Krugman’s book has nothing to do with science at all. This is straight propaganda, understood to be propaganda, intended to be propaganda.
I give them enough credit to assume that they know what they are doing. To think that they could compile that list of resources without realizing that it was pure propaganda is to assume that they are brain dead stupid. I don’t think they are that stupid.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment#71338),
Sorry if I misinterpreted your references to Nazis, their propaganda efforts, and how these relate to current climate science blogs. May I gently suggest that perhaps it would be simpler to not make these kinds of references? As Lucia immediately noted “Using Nazi’s generally tends to dilute whatever point you are making.”
.
It also tends to cause food fights.
stan (Comment#71341),
It is an advocacy site for public control of CO2 emissions, pure and simple. Their source materials list comes right from Real Climate. What they believe to be an “honest presentation” of the science may differ quite a lot from what you or I might think is an honest presentation. That does not make them dishonest if they believe that is correct… they are just true believers.
This somehow seems pertinent to the above discussion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn_PSJsl0LQ
Carrick and Nick Stokes are correct. There is no primary source for the Goebbels statement I quoted – even though it appears in many books and articles.
I find it disheartening that Nazism cannot yet be discussed in rational manner and from lessons learned and that my post was so misinterpreted and re-misinterpreted with little effort to determine what I was attempting to say.
Kenneth Fritsch,
You might try saying much the same thing without the Nazi baggage. With regard to discussion of Nazism, I suspect that a thread on Nazism would be a suitable venu, and you would not be disheartened at all.
Kenneth Fritsch Don’t worry, it was bound to happen. If you hadn’t heard of Godwin’s Law before, now you have. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
On a message board I frequent, the general rule is that the first person to “Godwinise” a thread loses by default. Threads that are actually about the Nazis excepted.
Shub
Sure. But nevertheless, when you are trying to explain something, it’s best to tread carefully on alluding to Pol Pot, Nazis, Stalin etc. These are sufficiently politically and emotionally charged that they can be distracting. If you can think of a way to convey an idea without mentioning Nazi’s, it’s usually worth using the non-Nazi based discussion. As SteveF noted later: mentioning Nazis tends to cause food fights.
SteveF
I saw some of that too. I’d suggest they do need better answers. But that’s much more difficult to fix than making each answer into a stand alone post that can be linked and crawled by google.
The GLORY launch failed. Haven’t seen this on any other blogs yet. Dammit. http://news.cnet.com/8301-19514_3-20039222-239.html?tag=mncol;posts
Seen it matt…it’s very depressing news.
I think this new climate communications site will have little net effect. It exists exist to pre-digest the narrative that most journalists in the rapidly shrinking MSM would like to present if only they were not too lazy and innumerate to actually read the stuff already available on Real Climate.
A question or two the new flacks should answer to test their commitment to truth and balance might be:
Question (1): Last year, the head of the IPCC defended an indisputably erroneous reference to the imminent disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. That particular error is obviously not dispositive of any larger climate issues. However, what is noteworthy is the manner in which Dr. Pauchuri framed his response: (a) that there was a scientific consensus on the issue; (b) it was based on substantive research and (c) the motives, methods and qualifications of those who disputed the claim in question are suspect at best. This is a common, almost uniform mode response to criticism or questions about any claim presented in support of AGW. This raises two questions:
(a) Given that that exact same form of defense is offered in defense of the erroneous (eg. the 30-year imminent Himalayan glacier death), the highly debatable (e.g., Mann’s paleo-climate hockey stick, Steig’s model of Antarctic warming) and the highly substantive (the radiative physics of GHG), doesn’t that rhetorical habit of “circling the wagons” to defend even unworthy assertions diminish confidence in the science overall?
** Bonus question: What is the meaning and evidentiary status of a “consensus”? If 90% of a scientists in a particular discipline are 60% sure about a particular predicted outcome is that a stronger or weaker consensus than 80% being 70% sure? If 100% of scientists think there is a 51% chance of that outcome, is it more than 51% certain?**
(b) To address the fundamental problem identified in part (a) above, what is your policy with respect to conveying degrees of uncertainty so that journalists get a clear picture of what scientists do or do not know? Will you go after instances of “circling the wagons” to help restore the credibility of climate science?
Question (2): In a demonstration of balance and mastery of core materials, review the summary materials in any IPCC report and identify the worst two or three instances of (a) overstatement of the liklihood and/or amount of warming from CO2, OR (b) overstatement of the likelihood and/or scope of particular predicted adverse effects (e.g., flooding, hurricanes, malaria, etc.).
The best way to implement a site such as this is to use a more broadly focused CMS than wordpress (which I would put in the category of blog software, not CMS). There are several good options available under open source licenses, such as Joomla and Drupal. Other commenters have suggested “rolling their own” custom CMS, however I think that in the vast majority of cases this is a very poor choice. There is so much prebuilt and bug-tested functionality already available in popular CMSes that re-inventing the wheel like this would be a waste of time, and when it comes time to make updates, you are stuck writing code (good programmers write less code, not more). Drupal especially is extremely flexible — it’s designed to be completely modular and there are thousands of well supported modules available. Personally, I would use Drupal with a few key modules such as:
CCK – lets you define arbitrary content types. In this case “question” and “response”, where question would have various fields for the title, full question, originator, reference to responses, tags/category, rating, date etc. and the “response” type would have something like title, text of response, responding scientist name, tags/category, rating, date, etc.
Views – a very powerful module that lets you define various views of your site’s content. In our example, you could define a view for a list of questions sorted by topic area/rating/date posted/scientist, etc. with links to answers for each question. You could also easily do views say by responding scientist or subject area.
Advanced CMS like Drupal will give you things like RSS feeds, users/login, comments, file uploads, and much more for free and the great variety of available modules means that pretty much anything you want to do has been done before and coded up into a nice module.
So yeah.. my $0.02 is use a proper CMS like http://drupal.org and everything else is easy.
PS I don’t agree with the mission of this site at all! Just pointing out how it could be done better from a technical perspective.
I was at a physics blog site the other day. They had a poll on various physics topics that required a response as to how likely each hypothesis would stand up over time. It was interesting to see the low probabilities assigned to many things that are considered the consensus view like inflation.
Biology has had it much worse than climatology over the years, given the conflicts between religious traditions and evolutionary theory (as it has
evolveddeveloped). In AGW debates, people commonly stake out a high ground, we’re like the evolutionists, whereas you are like the creationists. Pro-AGW-Consensus advocates are particularly prone to seeing the debate in these terms.Yet most high-profile disputes in biology aren’t made any clearer by application of the evolution/creationsim template. Example: one exciting development in 2007 was the discovery of a genetic variant (SNP) in the KIF6 gene. In the aftermath of a heart attack, the best therapy for a patient would depend on which KIF6 alleles they carried (2008 article). Celera moved rapidly to commercialize a KIF6 test, and over 150,000 have been performed. Alas, more recent large clinical trials and careful re-analysis of earlier findings seem to show that the KIF6/statin connection is ephemeral (The KIF6 Collapse, 2010).
While this dispute continues, to my knowledge, no side is painting their adversaries as anti-Science (“Your search – kif6 snp +creationism – did not match any documents,” sez Google).
Per George Tobin (#71354), climatology has the challenge of realizing that many dissents from orthodoxy should be viewed as part of the process of a field’s normal development. The Rapid Reaction Team seems less wild-eyed than their more doctrinaire bretheren (or than the same people in more doctrinaire roles). But they seem invested in the same fallacy (e.g. see their site’s recommended reading list).
I have a question for them
define climate scientist
@AMac
If you read a lot of the anti-agw arguments, they are usually dishonest and/or anti-science and/or entirely inconsistent with each other and/or catastrophist and exaggerating the errors/uncertainties in the science. I have said from the start, the only real debate is the climate sensitivity, and, to a large extent, I would guess the ‘regulars’ here would agree. But many years and endless hours of time that could be spent on more fruitful debate is wasted on such useless dead ends as ‘is there even a greenhouse effect’. Which is a complete waste of time, since if you can’t convince a person of that, then you aren’t going to be able to convince them of anything.
I will attempt, one more time, to make my point – which I consider important given our current political situation. Groups doing fast responses to misinformation have the moral high ground and the obvious reason is that misinformation has been used in the past by totalitarian and not so totalitarian governments to enact policies that would not have been enacted if the full truth were known. I judge that fast response groups are motivated by this past history.
What I see today in US politics with blogging, cable TV and talk radio is that we have become rather good at digging into the other parties misinformation in a timely fashion and that is a good thing. The unfortunate thing about this approach is that it tends most times to be partisan and too often the criticism of the opposition is used to imply that the other side must be, by default, the way of the truth.
We should have a disinterested media to handle issues that show misinformation on both sides of the aisle, but a less than casual observer knows this is not the case in many important instances. Often time the partisanship shows through by what a group chooses to investigate and what they do not and thus the biases are often times ones of omission. Another unfortunate way of discrediting the other side is to imply representation of the other side by some of the more yahoo partisans.
All the above actions with which I disapprove strongly would appear to me to be more a matter of putting one side in good light than in finding the truth and letting the chips fall where they may. Now if a fast response team comes along and lets the chips fall where they may they have my vote. On the other hand, if their approach points to something like those I have given above, do not expect me to naively give my approval.
Re: bugs (Mar 8 06:51),
I agree with three of your four sentences — 3.5 actually, since there’s some merit to “the only real debate is the climate sensitivity.” And yet, I think you miss the point.
Part of that is expressed by Kenneth Fritsch, immediately after you. “Another unfortunate way of discrediting the other side is to imply representation of the other side by some of the more yahoo partisans.”
It’s likely that some yahoo partisan would gladly frame the KIF6 prognostic test controversy (described in #71361) such that his or her side is Defending Science From Creationists. But the debate can only be settled by understanding and then carefully evaluating the competing claims, under the usual rules. Without emotive appeals to the memory of Darwin, or to other sacred secular or religious icons.
This concept isn’t hard to understand. But in some cases, it has proven very difficult to implement.
People like bugs who do the little “Ms Superiority” dance need to remember to look in a mirror occasionally.
Bugs – Re: honestly framing arguments – “the only real debate is the climate sensitivity,” presumably you realise the implicit ‘established’ hypothesis and the breadth of issues this deceptively simple claim encompasses?
Totally O/Y, but:
HAPPY WOMEN DAY LUCÃA!!!!!
It’s woman day?!
Re: lucia (Mar 8 10:36),
Yup. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Women%27s_Day
looks like this whole AGW thing Mr Mann and everybody else has been exposed as a fraud and are now finished for good… caught in the act! LOL
http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/08/wahl-transcript-excerpt/
Stephan… I haven’t read the article yet. But… somehow…I suspect “Mr Mann and everyone else” are not fishished for good!
The problem, as evidenced by Stehpan’s timely post, is that the vast, vast majority of AGW skepticism is of the Yahoo partisan variety. The popular face of climate skepticism isn’t even Christopher Monckton–it’s Rush Limbaugh who tells his millions of listeners that climate science is a hoax blah blah something about God.
It’s rare that a climate topic reaches the newspapers that is any kind of actual argument. Mostly it’s surface-stations or the fact that it snowed this January.
Lucia, summarising,
Wahl’s testimony to the IG contradicts the Penn State enquiry Finding #2, Penn State is now highly vulnerable as they have used their finding as a defence against FOIA requests.
Either the Penn State panel were naive or complicit, either way Mann knew that the relevant finding was false, his failure to correct the error and his (and his colleagues) use of the finding to defend his reputation leave serious questions regarding his integrity.
“I suspect “Mr Mann and everyone else†are not fishished for good!”
Rah Team.
Andrew
Well AGW warming is hahahah
http://processtrends.com/images/RClimate_UAH_Ch5_latest.png
currently -0.257C just joking.
I think he is it will be hard to wriggle out of this one though me thinks
BTW
It seems the team does not realize that we are not after them in particular. No one wants to see them go to jail. For gods sakes they are just scientists really.The point is that the work they have produced is costing billions for nothing (acka there is no AGW. or it hasn’t been proved). It has to be stopped! This is why legal action/inquiries etc are is now taking place
I was a strong advocate of AGW until about 3 years ago when I saw the hadcrut temps averaged/now “adjusted”graph. I was always interested in climate because my dad wrote 3 papers in nature re evapotranspiration and was an eminent meteorologist (WMO). When I saw Svensmarks paper in 2009, I though my dad would be rolling in his grave if he had to deal with the absolute crap that’s been spewed out by the team. cheers
Gras Albert-
I agree with your summary. But I don’t think this means that “Mr Mann and …. are now finished for good”. I think things are going to drag on, just as they have been.
This is the killer
Q. And what were the actions that you took?
A. Well, to the best of my recollection, I did delete the emails.
@Stephan.
It’s been three years, and warming hasn’t stopped. Svensmark is also arguing at cross purposes. He discards any influence from CO2, and focusses only on the sun. His ‘cosmic rays’ proposition has since been demonstrated to be irrelevant. The CRU temperature record has since been demonstrated to be on track with the others. There is nothing fraudulent about it. If anything it is lower than the other surface records.
Lucia,
It sure is the international day of women: http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dia_Internacional_da_Mulher.
Parabems…
Re: Gras Albert (Mar 8 14:34),
Interesting, I had not thought of some of that.
and more is coming.
Stephan,
Yes, but unless the US Congress gets involved, everyone, including Mann is never going to answer the obvious questions. In the long run it doesn’t matter; the sensitivity is what it is. The politically motivated struggle will (unfortunately) go on for longer than it otherwise would have, due to the loss of the Glory mission. Ugh!
Re: bugs (Mar 8 06:51),
Bugs we agree.
Boris [71396]
You forget: until Climategate and the 2009 Copenhagen IPCC confab meltdown, ALL but ALL mainstream media AGW coverage was of the Hockey Stick/ice-free Arctic/Maldives are drowing/we-are-all-going-to-fry IPCC endorsed computer models/”Nobel Prize”/science-is-settled variety. Talk about Yahoo…
And the “popular face” of Man[n]-Made-Global-Warming hysteria during its best years was another loud mouth Yahoo populist: none other than Puff the Magic Dragon Al Gore. Haven’t [may the gods be praise] seen or heard much from him lately. Ever wonder why?
Yahoo arguments backfiring, perhaps?
Ah, yes, Climategate. The game changer that invalidated…….zero papers.
Doesn’t it embarrass you, tetris, that your one argument in this scientific debate has had zero impact on the actual scientific literature? McIntyre isn’t even trying to do science any more. This should tell you, more than anything else, how solid the science actually is.
If emails invalidated papers or showed fraud, this should be easily provable and fraudulent papers should be retracted. NO ONE IS EVEN TRYING TO GET PAPERS RETRACTED. Stop listening to the noise and watch the actions–they tell you everything.
“If emails invalidated papers or showed fraud, this should be easily provable and fraudulent papers should be retracted.”
Boris,
This assumes people care that much about The Papers. There are an awful lot of people who didn’t care about The Papers to begin with, and they still don’t care about them. They don’t care enough to read them or even know they exist, so who cares about retracting them. Retracting them from what anyway? Irrelevancy?
Obviously The Papers mean a lot to you. Maybe you could get them autographed someday.
Andrew
Boris,
You are whistling past a graveyard.
Andrew,
When you see the reference to ‘the papers’, think of the movie The Paper Chase and Bell’s outline. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGPahA5WSCw
Listen, Andrew, Tetris
I don’t know how much news you watch but the new excuse people like Boris are making is that people who don’t believe in the hoax are intellectually inferior to liberals. Show somebody that isn’t familiar with global warming some of the emails between Mann and company and see what they think. Real quick, let me go ahead and burn down Boris. Boris, your so full of crap this page and several others are now permanently brown. The Mann graph was the blockbuster visual for global warming advocacy. That graph was Al Gore’s long lost baby. The fake Mann graph was used in an attempt to erase the Medieval Warm Period. Thereby allowing for the claim of “unprecedented temperatures”. The best thing we can do with people like Boris is simply not accept his premise. Nobody is trying to get papers retracted? Excuse me Boris but what the hell do you think the AG in Virginia is doing? What do you think is the goal of his investigation? Do you think once he finds out Mann cheated he’s going to give him a pat on the shoulder and let him go?
Furthermore, I’m pretty much expecting a smart alec response but I’m going to ask for it anyway. I think Lucia owes me an apology for supporting the Michael Mann graph. This isn’t an eye told you so in your face kind of thing, it is just me asking you to acknowledge that you underestimated the slipperiness and dubiousness of Michael Mann and his cohorts. I don’t know how you expect to have your message on this site resonate outside of the online world if you do not address the political issues. The lipstick your wearing right now has petroleum derivatives in it. Oil prices are flying up and one side of the aisle plans to do zero about it. Recall that Bush ultimately was able to lower the price of oil by lifting the oil moratorium that president Obama has reinstated. Plus, oil prices were 9% lower when Bush left office than when he first came in.
Boris
You are sucking and blowing at the same time [not good for your throat].
We have for quite some time now been dealing not with AGW “science” but with AGW politics. Pretending otherwise is delusional. A political fight the alarmist camp has conclusively lost. Everywhere. No ifs, buts and whats and across the board. The AGW/ACC storyline and with it its political handmaidens cap-and-trade and carbon taxes are politically stone dead [as the last hold out – Australia’s socialist Prime Minister Julia Gillard- is in the process of finding out].
Yahoo reporting never was the “problem”. Scientific fraud was.
Have a look at the latest we know as of today about Jones/Mann’s Climategate “delete the emails” correspondence and its consequences. If you somehow can still convince yourself that is OK, you should have a look at an ethics refresher course. It’s not OK Boris. Its called scientific fraud. And maybe, just maybe, Mike the Mann will see the inside of the big house because of it.
Lucia,
I notice for the second time today that “tetris” has been relegated to the moderation queue. What gives? That bad?
bugs:
I agree with bugs on this part, though it is rather unfortunate that they deleted their original data sets. That isn’t standard practice in most fields.
Question 2 from the PSU inquiry:
Finding from the PSU inquiry:
Is McIntyre claiming that Mann faked these emails?
toto, read question 2 again, and then read Wahl’s testimony again.
When he was asked:
the truthful answer should have been “Yes, I forwarded Phil Jones’ request to Eugene Wahl.
“This assumes people care that much about The Papers.”
No, I know some people don’t care about the science at all. It’s all political for them. I appreciate your honest on that, BTW.
tetris
You aren’t moderated by me. Sometimes… it’s just the spamfilter.
I only found 1 in the moderation queue. I don’t know which spam filter decided to put it there or why. Was the 2nd ‘moderation’ the “whoa?” message? That’s just a time out filter– but if it sees a very recent comment in moderation, it will make you wait. It actually helps people who are moderated from accidentally having one of the filters think they are spam because they are just bombarding the site with comments complaining about being moderated!
If you are moderated, the best thing to do is use the “contact lucia” form, not post a comment mentioning you are moderated. The “contact lucia” comments are filtered by my home email to make them stand out from individual comments. (I get an email for *every* comment on a post authored by ‘lucia’. But… when there are lots, I don’t necessarily read them all. So, ‘contact lucia’ will work.)
Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd. (Comment#71428) (aka. Dr. Shooshmoon, phd.)
You are currently on “time out” moderation which lets you comment, but forces you to wait between commments. Please do not try to work around the “time out” moderation by using a fresh email address. If you do, I may just add 4 lines to the code to detect ‘names’ and/or IP addresses.
Or, I might not even do that. If I want to do less work (which I think is fair to me), I’ll just mark your comments spam and let Akismet deal with you. If I do that, you may have trouble commenting not only at my blog but at others that also use Akismet. That’s a large number of blogs using WordPress including Anthony’s. I am sometimes willing to do work to moderate you here without impacting your ability to comment on other blogs. But you are pushing it.
You are really, really, really pushing it.
Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd. (Comment#71428) (Dr. Shoosh),
Some weeks back you said that you would no longer comment on this blog (I guessed that you figured Lucia did not deserve to receive your comments). I am very surprised, and more than a little disappointed, that you have resumed commenting. Your original decision was the right one; there is no good reason for you to waste your valuable time (and everyone else’s) commenting here.
agree totally with Cadbury. If in fact Lucia is supporting Mann’s hiockey stick im outa here real fast bye. She would lose my support as a scientist is she is one.
I judge that Boris provides some insight into what might motivate groups such as the Rapid Response and other advocacies groups for immediate AGW mitigation (IAGWM). I believe these IAGWM advocates sincerely believe that much of what stands in the way of getting mitigation going is the general publics’ reaction (favorable) to the more yahooed dissenters from mitigation. And thus we see these people and groups pointing to and correcting statements like a Rush Limbaugh might make about all of AGW being a hoax and those who might imply or outright state that the HadCRU temperatures are fraudulent. These approaches, as others here have noted, appears to be constructing a straw man by not addressing the more serious issues that often include the uncertainty of the findings and evidence related to AGW and its potential detrimental effects. For example, it is a legitimate observation to note that while the instrumental record gives a warming trend we can argue about how well the uncertainties of that trend can be or have been quantified.
In my mind, I think that even if every yahoo dissenter’s misinformation was completely destroyed by the IAGWM advocates that the general public would not be swayed to agreeing to IAGWM and certainly that action would continue to leave the legitimate dissenters questions without answers. And while I must admit I continue to have disagreements with Judith Curry, I think perhaps her epiphany on IAGWM mitigation and legitimate dissent may have arisen from seeing the problem with the straw man approach.
Is this professional advice? 🙂
But seriously, you admit that it’s all political for you. That’s fine and great. But the reality of the science actually exists. You can claim fraud all you want, but unless you can point to specific problems with the long, long chain of empirical evidence, you’ve got nothing. Proxy arguments won’t do in science, sorry.
I know. I said proxy. Fish for the barrel.
The goal is to find dirt or fraud. If the AG already had proof of fraud from Climategate, he would prosecute. So, once again, there is no evidence of scientific fraud, just a right wing scavenger hunt up the ivory tower.
Boris,
I agree that empirical evidence is the most important issue WRT evaluating AGW. But I hope you recognize that some of the unseemly/inappropriate content of the UEA emails, the doubtful quality of the several ‘investigations’ that followed, and now the apparent misstatements (or misleading statements) by Michael Mann to the Penn State investigating committee, all do real damage to the credibility of climate scientists and climate science. These well known climate scientists acted in ways that raise legitimate questions about whether their advocacy compromises their objectivity.
.
I will grant you that there is no justification for ignoring solid evidence of warming. I hope you will grant that the kind of blatant, win-at-all-costs advocacy by climate scientists that has been so well documented over the past 16 months provides plenty of reason to doubt how rationally they interpret that evidence. Climate science simply needs to clean house. Climate scientists should take Roger Pielke Jr.’s advice and act as honest brokers, not advocates. It has not happened so far, and I have seen no inclination in that direction among climate scientists. Too bad.
Stephan
1) I have never suported Mann’s hockey stick. I don’t discuss paleo much one way or another. I simply don’t have time to become a subject matter expert in paleo, don’t have any interest in it, and I suspect there is a large element of fairy-dust in most paleo-temperature reconstructions.
2)If I did have a defensible technical opinion on Mann’s hockey stick, and I advanced it I would absolutely not think I had any need to apologize to Shoosh/Cadbury for any opinion I held based on facts and analysis.
3) Shoosh/Cadbury is frequently demanding “apologies” to him for things that a) I did not do, say or think and which b) even if I thought said or did would not justify his demanding an apology of any sort much less to him.
I am no more going to apologize to Shoosh for supporting the hockey stick than I am going to apologize to SteveF for eating lobster last Sunday. Unlike Shoosh, SteveF has the good sense not to arrive in comments and post thoughts similar to this:
“I think Lucia owes me an apology for eating Lobster last Sunday”.
(For those wondering: I never eat Lobster. I am allergic to crustaceans. Eating them makes me very ill.)
Ok apologies accepted.. Just joking. Im back to stir the pot
lucia (Comment#71459),
You have said before that you never eat lobster (or crab)…. but now I am not sure, did you in fact eat lobster last Sunday?!? (I knew you are/were allergic.)
I did not eat Lobster on Sunday.
That’s one of the features that makes someone demanding the apology similar to what Shoosh/Cadbury is doing. Shoos/Cadbury is being obnoxious on many levels.
Lucia,
Speaking of Lobster, I was walking through Boston/Logan airport yesterday, where they sell live ‘lobsters to go’; I was tempted, but the ~100% premium over the same lobster at a local seafood market persuaded me not to buy. (sorry, off topic.)
SteveF–
Well.. I brought up Lobster. Plus, the next riveting post is now up and we got derailed into discussing the moderating of shoosh. So, going OT is no longer as important.
Shoosh’s IP is in the “time out” box now. I did the coding.
Boris
Care to provide empirical verifiable proof for the A in AGW? No proxies. No hypotheses. No extrapolitions. No Al Gore “science”. There is no empirical verifiable proof, which is the problem for those supporting the AGW/ACC meme. So “evidence” is concocted: e.g Hockey Stick, upside down splicings, deleting emails “that might be used aginst you” [Mike Mann quoted today on his advice to Wahl, from his vacation in Hawaii] and purported warming in Antarctica.
That’s not science. That’s all part of manipulating data in support of a political message. Science as politics. Like Lysenko.
I would have to guess that Boris does not necessarily see it this way but attacking the straw men of the yahoo dissenters is not much different than what is done by the disssenters, and not necessarily all yahoos, who use the climategate like misdeeds of some climate scientists to discredit all or a lot of what climate science has to say.
Climategate merely showed, in my mind, that advocacy can get in the way of science, but the derived science does not change by that showing. As a practical matter for me it might mean that I would tend to read a paper authored by an advocate/scientist more times then I would other scientists – looking for lack of “robustness” and sensitivty testing or improper sensitivity testing.
Also a very important point in my view is getting a feel for what it would take for climate scientists to voice a concern or point to errors by other scientists in the field. If one judges there is hesitancy to criticize others in the field then one must make a larger effort to look for these potential errors on their own.
How appropriate that Lucia is giving a timeout to that very youngish acting Drphd. I often remind my grandkids in MN that I do not give MN timeouts of a few minutes and that an IL timeout could last an hour.
SteveF (Comment#71344)
No matter how much of a true believer any of them may be, there are limits to honest advocacy. A lawyer may truly believe in his client’s case, but he is ethically bound to avoid making arguments about the law or the evidence that are unsupportable. Perhaps this is just an argument about the Trenberth/Gore position that scientists have to deal in untruth to be effective in PR. My position is that the resources listed push the Trenberth/Gore attitude to new lows. Regardless of the strength or their faith, integrity can’t go that far.
If you look at the climate world before and after Climategate, nobody can deny that there’s a huge shift (or can I say an earthquake?) in the perception of AGW and climate science in general.
Anyone denying that is still living in a greenhouse bubble which sooner or later will blow up in their faces. The genie is out of the bottle comrade Boris, whether you like it or not.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment#71487) March 9th, 2011 at 3:26 pm
Well sure. The problem is that we don’t have UEA emails for all the other climate scientists to look at; maybe most are as pure as the driven snow. We only have very limited data, and what data we have does not paint a flattering picture of climate science.
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As I argued last year at Bart’s site (he hated it) IMO the problem is that most climate scientists become climate scientists because they are unusually ‘green-conscious’ and concerned about how humanity is damaging Earth’s various ecosystems. They are a self-selecting population with strong personal values/political positions going into the field. I doubt that a random selection of graduate level electrical engineers (only as an example) would hold such strong ‘green’ convictions. A uniform philosophical POV like that has at least the potential (and I think more than that) to tilt the field towards an interpretation of data that is perhaps less than balanced and reasoned. The continued outspoken advocacy of many well known climate scientists for immediate reductions in CO2 emissions does not (IMO) help, and in fact diminishes, the overall scientific credibility of the field.
RE: SteveF (Comment#71495) March 9th, 2011 at 4:06 pm
“As I argued last year at Bart’s site (he hated it) IMO the problem is that most climate scientists become climate scientists because they are unusually ‘green-conscious’ and concerned about how humanity is damaging Earth’s various ecosystems. They are a self-selecting population with strong personal values/political positions going into the field. I doubt that a random selection of graduate level electrical engineers (only as an example) would hold such strong ‘green’ convictions. A uniform philosophical POV like that has at least the potential (and I think more than that) to tilt the field towards an interpretation of data that is perhaps less than balanced and reasoned. The continued outspoken advocacy of many well known climate scientists for immediate reductions in CO2 emissions does not (IMO) help, and in fact diminishes, the overall scientific credibility of the field.”
Ding Ding Ding!
Very little observed objectivity in this field. Most of the clisci that speak out do so with a singular purpose that is far more policy than science.
Can’t you just see the terrorist’s lawyer at an atrocity trial employing the Mann defence
q. Did your client forward an email instructing the defendant to carry out the attack?
a. Yes, but he didn’t add any comment to the email so he wasn’t part of the conspiracy
SteveF, I agree with what you say in your most recent post here. My problem is with dissenters who would go a bridge or several too far with their claims of what the climategate emails show about climate science findings. Some, I think, when finding an error in judgment or science by a climate scientist think that is sufficient to through out the whole case that has been presented by climate science.
It is like the Rapid Response teams that respond to a yahoo dissenter argument and then imply that those are the only legitimate arguments that need to be refuted.
Also the “true believer” on any side of these issues are rather easy to distinguish when they see the yahoos on the other side only.
Re: Boris (Mar 9 11:17),
> I know. I said proxy. Fish for the barrel.
Heh. No worries. Now, if you’d said “data series“…
Kenneth Fritsch
I generally appreciate your comments. That said, your take on Climategate and its lack of implications for AGW/ACC science [@ 71487] is boderline naive.
Because, if you apply your reasoning to, say, Enron it is tantamount to saying “well yes we have evidence of a few guys actively corrupting both accounting data and the process, but overall the numbers are still credible”.
As a former CEO I can tell you that just doesn’t fly. And the various procecutors at the time saw it that way too. Proof of which is that several former Enron exectutives are looking at the world from behind bars for anywhere from 30-40 years.
From where I’m sitting, it would be mere justice if when all the song and dance is over, something similar should befall Jones and Mann and Co. Its called fraud. Financial or scientific, its the same thing. Fraud.
A lot of the comments here illustrate my point quite well. I mean, SteveF talks about emails as if they are “data.” Honestly, who cares if a scientist is an advocate if their work is sound? If their advocacy interferes with their scientific output, then that should be evident in the output itself.
A lot of skeptics want to argue by implication. That’s fine in the world of politics, but it comes up short when the actual science is discussed. (Also, you guys hate it when someone says we shouldn’t listen to Lindzen or Pat Michaels because they have taken oil money. But that’s the same argument.)
The fact that very few skeptics are actually digging for new data or new ideas rather than new emails illustrates how empty, scientifically, the skeptic movement is. It’s just a matter of time when you have no substance.
boris
The emails are “data” for something.
No one.
But what if their advocacy does either:
a) interfere with their own scientific output or
b) interferes with publications of scientific output whose soundness is equal to thing that get published but which the science/advocate believes would negatively impact the political position the science/advocate supports.
How does one figure this out? Most especially, how does one figure out if a set of emails suggesting some scientists are inclined to do (b) appears?
Look, you are being a bit silly by trying to suggest that people shouldn’t discuss climategate because no papers or “science” has been overturned or retracted. Of course neither would happen as a result of emails that may suggests some scientists did (b). It wouldn’t happen even if it is the case that the scientists tend to look favorably on results they “like” and disfavorably on results the “dislike” and this affects both their behavior when doing their own work or when reviewing that of others.
Climategate isn’t about whether or not findings in climate science are “overturned” but about how much trust voters will place in advice and findings reported climate scientists.
This is not a trivial thing, and it is not less important than whatever some call “the science” (a very odd expression btw.)
No matter what “the science” currently is or says, voters have to make up their mind how to judge how much they trust what AGW advocates, AGW skeptics, and everyone in between commenting claims “the science” says.
Ordinarily, the public will give great deference to funded scientists communicating scientific finding in their own field. The public generally has good reason to give this deference.
But the majority of individual members of public never, ever, ever decides how much deference to give to funded scientists by doing their own science. They look to other markers. You want to say this is scientifically empty? Fine. That’s trivially true. The majority of people who accept evolution do it without doing their own science, so their acceptance of evolution is “scientifically empty”, in precisely the same way that any individual member of the public’s view about the reliability of climate science is “scientifically empty”.
So, how does the public assess the reliability of any science: By markers– things other than assessing science itself. Things that count are obvious success, truthfulness, candor etc.
They climategate email fall in the realm of markers the individual members public uses to assess whether climate scientists opinions, communications and advice should be given the same level of deference that individual member of the public would give to the Surgeon General, a geneticist, an agronomist or pretty much anyone.
With regard to individual members of the public deciding how much to trust climate scientists and/or climate science, the climategate emails are “data”. Now, I admit it’s true that some people at all extremes of the AGW believe spectrum wildly misinterpret this data. But your pointing to the fact that no individual papers are overturned making climategate and suggesting that it somehow is not worth talking about for that reason is just silly.
Climategate is worth talking about. It is data one should be aware of in assessing the truthfulness, and candor of science, whether one thinks advocacy is affecting the balance of scientific findings published and whether one thinks that scientists are spinning science when presenting it to the public (and even, to some extent to each other.)
Lucia (#71555),
Glad you said all that. It was a lot better than what I was writing, and you saved me a lot of time. 😉
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Boris (#71549),
Here is what I have observed over the past 35 years: many scientists (in fact, I guess almost all) really like their own work, and really hate any work that refutes their own. The poorer ones seldom get past this. The better ones usually do, although often after some considerable struggle with themselves, the data, and/or others. And this is in honest, well intentioned, and smart people who have no overriding policy/political POV which is relevant to “the science”. If you think that personal motives/inclinations do not frequently tilt the technical analysis of scientists, even when they are not aware of it, then I believe you are simply mistaken. In a field like climate science, where those involved are self-selecting and where that self selection leads to a large majority holding strong “green/environmental” personal views, the potential for consistent tilting of the entire field is considerable. Why is it that the relatively few climate scientists who do not share that same POV (Lindzen, Spencer, Christy, and a few others) consistently come to different conclusions, even when looking at the same data? IMO, it is mostly because they do not have the same tendency to tilt the analysis toward the same ‘desired’ outcome (which is not to say they don’t perhaps have an opposite tendency to tilt the analysis!).
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In a field with enormous political implications, and where there is clear evidence that most of the practitioners in the field share similar political/philosophical views, it is naive to believe that people outside the field do not need to look closely at the behavior of those involved, and use that behavior in evaluating the confidence “the science” merits. The vocal advocacy of many well known climate scientists damages the credibility of the entire field. The unscrupulous behind-the-scenes actions so evident in the UEA emails damages the credibility of the entire field. I remain astounded that anyone could think otherwise.
Kenneth Fritsch,
Yup. There is a reason Lucia is not welcomed to comment at Tamino’s blog. It is always easier to address non-sense arguments than reasoned ones; Tamino understands this. It is also why so many very reasonable comments don’t pass moderation at at many CAGW advocacy blogs.
“Because, if you apply your reasoning to, say, Enron it is tantamount to saying “well yes we have evidence of a few guys actively corrupting both accounting data and the process, but overall the numbers are still credibleâ€.
I do not see the Enron analogy fitting here. The numbers were shown to be bad by the best test of all: Enron went bankrupt as the market place prevailed.
I like what Lucia states about the importance of the revelation and discussion of the climategate emails. My point has been that when either side wants to make a very general statements about the validity of the counter argument based on what a yahoo or even a credible representative of the other side did or said is counterproductive, and in fact makes those doing the generalizing easy targets for the other side. The discussion needs to stay focused on the specific issues and published papers and details and not throwing out general statements of fraud or of influences by a cabal of fossil fuel executives.
DeWitt Payne has made the statement on these blogs several times to the effect that there is much to discuss and be skeptical about in the AGW debate in the details of the evidence and arguments without attempting to deny already established science and evidence.
To be clear, the climategate emails surprised me only by the fact that some climate scientists did not even attempt to hide the fact that advocacy could interfere with the science process. That we had scientists/advocates (and the potential consequences) was rather clear before the email revelations by any reasonably close observations of peer reviewed papers and comments on those papers.
“But your pointing to the fact that no individual papers are overturned making climategate and suggesting that it somehow is not worth talking about for that reason is just silly.”
I don’t really disagree with what you are saying, Lucia, but you don’t take it far enough. You see, if the Climategate emails reveal fraud, then that fraud has to be undone somehow. If Climategate is the game changing moment, then something has to change. When nothing changes–and I am speaking here about projections, ideas, empirical evidence–then the “marker” that is Climategate begins to lose its appeal.
Let’s say someone reads about Climategate and is convinced that much of climate science is corrupt and there is no AGW at all. They expect that scientific bodies and the scientific community as a whole will clean house and fix the problem. When this doesn’t occur, these people have a couple choices: they can either think that all scientists everywhere are corrupt or they can think that maybe the whole Climategate thing was overblown. While conspiracy theories are popular among the extremes on both sides, they don’t usually play well to the middle, so it’s pretty clear to me which way the majority is going to swing on that one.
So the fact that no papers have been invalidated by the Climategate emails is an important marker in itself.
If you look at polls of Americans that show a lowered belief in AGW, you should also note that the respondents all think that scientific opinion on global warming has lowered recently. When they figure out that scientific opinion has not changed, those numbers will rise again. That and a heat wave/strong hurricane season could undo a lot of the polling damage from Climategate rather rapidly.
“Why is it that the relatively few climate scientists who do not share that same POV (Lindzen, Spencer, Christy, and a few others) consistently come to different conclusions, even when looking at the same data? IMO, it is mostly because they do not have the same tendency to tilt the analysis toward the same ‘desired’ outcome ”
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Either that, or the other way round. Did you consider the possibility that a small, acrimonious minority with conspirationist tendencies might actually be wrong?
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The unscrupulous behind-the-scenes actions so evident in the UEA emails
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The worst thing that came out of the emails was Phil Jones acting dickish (though after persistent ribbing).
Boris–
If I’m not mistaken, the “marker” never had any appeal to you. All you seem to be saying now is that it doesn’t affect the things you consider important, and so you think “now” has no appeal. But the fact is, it affects other things, which other people think are important. So you can keep saying “I think only A is important, climategate didn’t affect A, so you should stop worrying about it”. And people can keep replying “It affected ‘B’, and I think ‘B’ is important, so I’m going to keep discussing climate gate.”
Unless you can either show 1) climategate didn’t affect ‘B’, or 2)’B’ is unimportant, then you aren’t going to persuade the person who thinks ‘B’ is important that climate gate is not important.
Actually, they can think many other things. They can think that the scientific community “as a whole” rarely cleans up house and “fixes” problems in a sub community. They would have good reason to think this because, the fact is, the scientific community “as a whole” has practically no policying agency and doesn’t like to do whatever “cleaning up house” might mean. So, they can think your claim that one should expect the house will be cleaned up is unrealistic and also conclude the fact that no clea up occurs to simply confirm the fact that the scientific community almost never does this sort of “clean up” activity. (Which they don’t BTW.)
For some questions, but not others.
Yes. If the earth temperature pick up soon, that will encourage more people to have confidence in past predictions that the earth is warming. Success in prediction is a marker people use to gain confidence in science. But the predictions have to be predictions.
toto (Comment#71570),
Odd, that is not at all what I found to be the worst thing. Lots of people act ‘dickishly’. For me the worst thing was the coordinated effort by several climate scientists to interfere with peer review (threatening editors/publishers, trying to find the identity of reviewers that allowed “undesirable” papers to be published, etc.). The efforts to avoid legitimate FOI requests were not good, and I found the overall tone (arrogant, hostile, and aggressive) both offensive and troubling. The message for me was clear: these are not people that I can trust to collect and interpret data objectively.
Lucia,
Seems almost unfair that you insist on setting such high standards for climate science. Do you require the same of predictions in other fields?
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Fear not, the next round of model projections in a year or two will replace the last set, and all past model failings will become irrelevant. The goal posts can be moved as needed.
They would certainly withdraw consensus statements and their support for climate science (Think NAS, Royal Society). People will begin to wonder when nothing changes. Again, the poll numbers are important to this point: people already think scientific opinion has changed.
SteveF–
Well, whether a group of scientists like it or not, the public will give them credit for making good predictions to the extent that the public thinks they can predict things before those things happen.
Mind you, the public can sometimes be fooled by Astrologers who reveal “all” their predictions that came true last year. The Astrologer achieves this by making a blizzard of somewhat ambiguous predictions (some mutually exclusive) and then at the end of the year, they remind people they predicted “x” and then “x” happened. But to some extent, people are on to this trick. So, it means that if individual developes the impression scientists do this, that will lower their confidence in science.
So, to get credit, scientists: predictions have to be
* predictions must be about something specific. (e.g. global temperature.)
* communicated as “the” predictions of a specific thing ‘x’, before ‘x’ is observed.
* the set of predictions must be fairly clear. So, one has to know that they predict “x” will fall between “a” and “b”.
* the set of predictions cannot contain mutually incompatible predictions. So, for example, saying the amount of snowfall in Canada might increase or decrease or even stay the same, is not really a “prediction”.
* A list of predictions can’t be mutually incompatible. That is don’t ‘predict’ both more snowfall in arkansas paper A and less snowfall in arkansas paper B and then just fish out the appropriate prediction after it either does or does not snow in arkansas.
There is a limit to precisely how much people will check, so this prediction business is rather dangerous. If you predict and are right you gain credibility. If you predict an you are wrong you lose some. But the worst possible thing is to seem to try to rig the system so that it looks like you are claiming you can predict, but really you are resorting to the tricks of astrologers.
Boris,
Would they? I think it relatively unlikely they would withdraw much.
And anyway, are the consensus statements for the upstanding nature of climate science and climate scientists? Or do the statements say that the NAS or Royal Society has decreed climate scientists singularly unblemished and uterlly totally unbiased relative to any and all scientific disciplines that ever existed on earth? Or even that at any given time, the “typical” paper in climate science couldn’t possibly be biased (either in the ‘more alarming’ or ‘less alarming’ direction?)
The answer to those is no. That’s not what those consensus statements say. So, nothing those groups have failed to do argues against climategate being important in the sense I said it was important.
There is no need for those groups to withdraw consensus statement as a result of climate gate because those statements are not “support for climate science”. They are support for the notion that the theory of AGW is sound. And that’s a different thing.
Boris,
Sure poll numbers can be important. Like the fact that a majority in the USA supports CO2 emissions reductions if it only costs them US$80 per year, but will not support CO2 reductions that cost them several hundred. An honest estimate of the economic cost makes support for CO2 emissions controls almost completely disappear.
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Scientific opinion has changed somewhat. Estimated sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 has gradually dropped from ~4C per doubling to ~3C per doubling. If it falls to near 2C per doubling (as I suspect it will), then global warming loses most of it’s political import; too many will just say “Who cares?”
Boris,
Mann08 (PNAS) is a paper authored by a prominent climate scientist and published by a prominent journal. It is not some linchpin of AGW or some crucial keystone, without which Consensus views fall. The Usual Skeptics identified some big problems with Mann08 within days of its publication. IMO, many of the skeptics’ claims as to invalidity of many of Mann08’s main conclusions turn out to be correct. Whether the paper should be “withdrawn” is a question that might be answered affirmatively or negatively. But in either case, the flaws and shortcomings of the paper should be clear to readers who come across it.
This is not the case, at present. Only readers of certain skeptical blogs will understand why most of the reconstructions in this paper are actually “not skillful”.
This is because of the tenacious defense of bad science by the pro-AGW Consensus Establishment, IMO.
The hacked Climategate emails aren’t determinative to this conclusion (though one or two modestly supports it.). But they do illuminate the general “ambiance” of climate science in which this small drama played out, as described supra by SteveF.
Lucia,
It is actually even worse than this. When there is an unusual weather event, papers are soon in print explaining how the unusual even is consistent with global warming… maybe we could call this process ‘global warming post-dicting’. The northern winter is unusually cold? Count on a new paper to show how that is consistent with global warming. Too much snow? Not enough snow? Suitable papers are soon published. Really hot? Really rainy? Same story. Lots (or few) Atlantic (or Pacific) hurricanes? You know papers are on the way. Let’s face it, no matter what happens, it is going to be found (in the peer reviewed literature, no less) to be consistent with global warming.
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I wonder if climate scientists can begin to understand how stupid these ‘global warming post-dicting’ papers are? The breathless press releases that go along with the papers are even worse.
SteveF–There is one important prediction that is clearly not a “post diction”. That is Hansen’s prediction, to Congress. He predicted it would continue to warm and it did. At quite a brisk rate.
Mind you, I think he over predicted the rate–but he did predict it would continue to warm. So, even though he predicted high,this is a big one.
Some of the other stuff relating to weird weather? Some (not all) come off as sounding like self-promoting astrologers sometimes.
RE: AMac (Comment#71588) March 10th, 2011 at 1:35 pm
Yes. Most of the close followers of climate science had already concluded that Mann 98 and Mann 08 were “bottom of the bird cage quality”. Climategate emails simply exposed and confirmed the motivations behind the work.
Kenneth Fritsch
The Enron analogy does hold. Sure, Enron went bankrupt, but that’s not the point. During the period before that happened, several senior executives were involved in cooking the books. For which a number of them are doing serious time [as they should]. Cooking the books was not the cause of the company going belly up.
Key is: the books were cooked, cratering the credibility of the accounting data and methods and of those involved in the scam. The Climategate emails show beyond any doubt that the Jones/Mann/Briffa/Wahl/Amman/et.al “science” and their “methods” were singularly corrupted, cratering the credibility of everyone involved in the scam. Would you really trust anything Jones, Mann, Briffa or Wahl and Amman publish in future, against the backdrop of the body of evidence we have of their repeated duplicity with both the data and the methods? I wouldn’t. Where I come from, their credibility is shot beyond repair.
The analogy goes further: In the Enron case investors and employess were swindled, loosing billions. In the Climategate debacle, it is by extension the taxpayers in the developed economies who are being swindled out of billions because governments are implimenting far reaching policies on the basis of highly questionable science. And those responsible for the corruption have yet to account for it. But, always the optimist, I’m comforted by the fact that things appear to be shifting rapidly at Mann’s former home base.
“The answer to those is no. That’s not what those consensus statements say. So, nothing those groups have failed to do argues against climategate being important in the sense I said it was important.”
You don’t think that if the vast majority of climate science were shown to be a fraud that the NAS would alter its statement?
Look, the main point is that if scientific opinion doesn’t change, the long term impact of climategate is minimal.
“This is not the case, at present. Only readers of certain skeptical blogs will understand why most of the reconstructions in this paper are actually “not skillfulâ€.”
Obv, I disagree with you that Mann 08 should be withdrawn. Even if you are 100% correct, the only issue is with the non-dendro recon. But let’s say you are right.
Whose fault is it? If people want the literature to be changed, this must be done through the literature. You can’t just post on a blog that a paper is invalidated. The work needs to be done. Maybe you are wrong and there are more questions about lake varves than you know about.
Boris–
I think the NAS would alter it’s statement on AGW if they specifically believed that AGW was not supported by evidence.
Otherwise, they remain silent on the issue of the relative levels of fraud in any scientific field. Because they are silent on that point and have made no proclamation on the level of fraud or absense of that in climate science as a whole there is no need to change their non statement. They can just continue to have no formal statement on any such issue.
So, my answer to your question is: No.
As for Mann being withdrawn: Papers are very rarely withdrawn and oddly enough, papers can be utterly wrong and not withdrawn. People demanding that Mann be withdrawn do not understand this point.
Re: AMac (Mar 10 13:35),
“Mann08 (PNAS) is a paper authored by a prominent climate scientist and published by a prominent journal. It is not some linchpin of AGW or some crucial keystone, without which Consensus views fall. The Usual Skeptics identified some big problems with Mann08 within days of its publication. IMO, many of the skeptics’ claims as to invalidity of many of Mann08′s main conclusions turn out to be correct. Whether the paper should be “withdrawn†is a question that might be answered affirmatively or negatively. But in either case, the flaws and shortcomings of the paper should be clear to readers who come across it.”
The piltdown man was recognized very early by experts in the feild as having severe problems. One reaction was to deny access to the actual bones to people making inquiries. Another reaction was people claimed it was a fluke. So, the hoaxers indicated that had a piltdown II, an independent verification.
In the end the hoax stayed in the literature for decades. It was even referred to AFTER flouride tests sealed its doom. That essay appeared in Nature.
Note. I’m not suggesting mann was a hoax. I’m pointing out how journals do a poor job of representing what “scientific” “truth” is.
Boris (Comment#71658) —
> Even if you are 100% correct [wrt lake varves], the only issue is with the non-dendro recon.
According to its abstract, the paper’s important findings concerned… non-dendro recons.
> Maybe you are wrong and there are more questions about lake varves than you know about.
Yeah, maybe. Actually, that’s what I thought for some time — that the snark and poor manners of the paper’s supporters bespoke some well-grounded confidence in its data and analysis.
But the ‘Case Against’ is simple. Most scientifically-literate people can walk through the relevant material and figure it out for themselves, in short order. On the other side, the smartest guys in the room have yet to come up with a coherent rebuttal. Sophistry like “bizarre” and “I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter” ought to be embarrassing. Serious people don’t argue serious points in such a way.
I won’t repeat SteveF’s remarks to you upthread, though many apply here, I think. I’ll quote his #71579 response to toto, out of context —
Lucia
Your point about papers being utterly wrong and not being withdrawn is correct. From a scientific point of view, the fundamental problem with that situation remains that the paper in question will continue to be cited in the litterature by those who for whatever reason support its conclusions. Be it about the Piltdown Man, Lysenko’s “science” [until well after his “demise”] or Mann08.
“Would you really trust anything Jones, Mann, Briffa or Wahl and Amman publish in future, against the backdrop of the body of evidence we have of their repeated duplicity with both the data and the methods? I wouldn’t. Where I come from, their credibility is shot beyond repair.”
In a nutshell: What I see as evidence about mixing advocacy and science goes to heart of my wariness of papers published by those I suspect, but that in and of itself does mean I can out of hand reject anything that these people publish. In fact I also suspect those who would reject their works and others out of hand.
My political heads up to you would be that in our current political climate business people are very easy to demonize whether they are deserving or not. That is not so true of scientists and even some politicians – think Spitzer and his new career. Mann and others can play the victim role to the hilt and with good effects for them. No one is indicting Mann or I think have the grounds to do it. The worst political outcome for warmist advocates is for bloggers to keep pointing to the deficiencies in some climate science papers, showing the systematic hypocrisies and incompetency in FOIA and other institutions like the IPCC. Look at the poor frustrated liberals who no longer have Bush to blame all our problems on – not that he was not blameworthy.
“On the other side, the smartest guys in the room have yet to come up with a coherent rebuttal.”
A rebuttal to what? There is nothing but ephemeral blog posts to rebut. And, in case you haven’t noticed, those same people are currently getting harassed by attorneys general. Your quotation of bizarre refers, I assume, to McIntyre’s PNAS submission. That is McIntyre’s fault for not being clear on the issue and for throwing in absolute BS about recons creating “hockey sticks.”
Speaking of bizarre, it seems bizarre to demand a rebuttal when no clear case has been put forth, and more so when whatever unclear case has been put forth is intermixed with yards of yawning prose about who said what in emails. Given the reticence for anyone on the skeptic side to come up with the goods of an actual paper on Tiljander and Mann08, I tend to think that there’s just not much there there.
This quote also applies to Steve McIntyre.
My this discussion has wandered. a couple of points come to my attention though. It appears to me that Mann 08 is the hockey stick with one of the larger MWP’s, why do not the contrarians at least embrace this part of the shtick? I like the idea of rapid reponse, we need to answer questions about crazed sex poodles. My theory is that they are french and that the Fuhrer himself was very fond of one called Mitzi. Which make the Natzi connection to AWG even more relevant.
Couple of points — Muller, the Berkeley physicist working on the new database, said that Climategate e-mails gave him a list of people whose work he will no longer bother to read. Apparently that position may be more widespread than some commenters here want to face.
And the “withdrawal” argument re Mann’s flawed work. One of the biggest problems that alarmists have in “communicating” the science is that science process is woefully ill-equipped for the purpose that alarmists are using it for. The public asks obvious questions — why aren’t badly flawed papers withdrawn? Why are studies never checked/audited/replicated? Why are the thermometers still sited so poorly? Why don’t these people get help from stats experts and software experts? Why do they keep screwing up?
Scientists have but one response — that’s just how we do things. What the scientists don’t get is that the general public isn’t willing to have their lives upended on the basis of such shoddy process. It may be how science is done. But it isn’t sufficient in terms of quality to justify the policy.
So the real issue isn’t whether Mann’s papers should be ‘withdrawn’. The real issue is why scientists do not understand that the policy they push on the public demands far more quality than they may regard as normal.
I think once you understand the futility of applying certain methods to proxies, there really is no point in doing reconstructions with any linear methods.
For me it was JeffId demonstration with synthethic signals that ended my interest in the notion that a better selection of proxies or better methods would
yeild ANYTHING. So, I think Mac is right. There no point to made with existing proxies and methods.
However At AGU I did see some cool baysian stuff with GCM and forward modelling and psuedo proxies. gave me some hope.
Would you really trust anything Jones, Mann, Briffa or Wahl and Amman publish in future, against the backdrop of the body of evidence we have of their repeated duplicity with both the data and the methods?
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The good thing about imaginary “evidence” is that you can use it to support any position. 🙂
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For me it was JeffId demonstration with synthethic signals that ended my interest in the notion that a better selection of proxies or better methods would
yeild ANYTHING.
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The ones where he “shows” that simple averaging restitutes the original signal much better than “Mannian” selection – if only proxies are so nicely behaved as to all have the exact same amount of noise?
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Or the ones where he shows that you can fit any late pattern with some of the proxies – which is precisely why you would want to use a “Mannian” algorithm in the first place?
toto, I think what was demonstrated was the problem with using correlation as the primary method for selection of proxies. It doesn’t mean that proxies can’t be used, just that the method that Mann and others are using to “calibrate” the proxies is inherently flawed.
Junk method + good data = junk results.
The method used by Mann even managed to flip the sign of relationship between proxy and temperature in a couple of the proxies…. and in spite of the fact there is a physical relationship stating that the real relationship has the opposite sign, neither Mann nor his supporters have been willing to admit that this is a serious problem.
(Performing the analysis without Tiljander doesn’t remove the problem with flipping the sign of the physical relationship between proxy and temperature when you do include it in the analysis, since it speaks to a problem with the method not that particular proxy, neither does the argument over how much including or removing that proxy modifies the signal, because that fails to address the problem with the method, and assumes blindly it is limited to only that particular proxy.)
toto, I can also run a series of red noise curves through and get the same verification statistics and a nice “hockey shape”, which is to say a slope tracking the temperature during the calibration period + a random walk during the “measurement” period. (I’m not using “verification statistics” in the highly interpretative sense used by Mann.)
It’s been my experience that defenders of Mann either a) don’t really understand his method or the statistic issues with it, or b) would rather concentrate on ad hominems directed at people who criticize the methods rather than address the criticisms.
For people, who haven’t seen it, Here is Jeff ID’s criticism of CPS that Steven Mosher was commenting on.
Short take home (from my perspective), selection of proxy by correlation during the training/calibration period doesn’t work, at least as currently implemented in the literature.
Carrick, I believe you do modeling for a living and I agree with your recent post that temperature reconstructions as currently performed are problematic. That would leave most of the heavy lifting in predicting future climate to the models. Do you have a short one post explanation of the current state of climate modeling and what the future for modeling improvements might be and what such developments would allow the models to predict. I would be interested in localized effects and particularly those dealing with climate extremes.
Boris (Comment#71678) March 11th, 2011 at 10:02 pm
You certainly might find that to be the case. For sure, Steve McIntyre is more confrontational with ‘the team’ than I would try to be. But this is a false equivalency: Steve McIntyre is not advocating costly public policy based on his research results. Extraordinary conclusions, with extraordinary policy implications, invite extraordinary scrutiny. The content of the UEA emails most certainly hurt the credibility of those involved… inviting even more scrutiny.
When some of the leading lights of climate science behave in petty and unscrupulous ways, it does real damage to the credibility of the entire field. I am far from alone in drawing that conclusion. You can of course discount my observations, and I fully expect that you will, but you hurt the policy goals you profess if you choose to ignore so obvious a problem. Climate science needs to clean house, nothing less.
Carrick,
The weird thing is that McShane and Wyner pretty well laid out the problem, and the ‘denial’ continues. I just don’t understand. It is pretty widely understood that these methods tend to underestimate variance in the pre-calibration period. McShane and Wyner showed that the uncertainty is also rather grossly underestimated. The multi-proxy reconstruction field rests (at best) on a very doubtful foundation. The conclusions are doubtful.
Kenneth Fritsch:
In the spirt of not “overly” hijacking this thread, I’m going to restrict myself to this.
As I see i,t localized effects and climate extremes both almost certainly have to do with how climate change impacts short-period climate fluctuations and severe weather events (e.g., hurricanes, strong thunderstorms, etc). IMO, these require a much higher spatial resolution and improved treatment of physics such as the atmospheric boundary layer and cloud formation, than is available in any of the existing models (though some are closing in on being able to accurately model ENSO and other short-period climate).
IMO, if you understood the underlying equations, had all of the data necessarily and did everything right, no slop, I don’t think the computational resources are there to solve the problem accurately.
I don’t think the GCMs do a very good job on ENSO, their treatment of clouds is borderline atrocious, and even large scale circulations (e.g., Hadley Cells) isn’t in step with more detailed studies. [On that note, I’ll point out that Isaac Held, one of the premier researchers in that area, has his own blog now. h/t Nick Stokes.]
SteveF, not only does the denial continue, Craig Loehle (who IMO is the only one who uses a defendable methodology for selection of proxies) continues to be the recipient of unnecessary ad hominem attacks and vitriolic rhetoric. In addition it is claimed that M&W actually “confirm” Mann’s finding.
If we compare correlation to Ljunddqvist, Loehle has the highly correlation and, strangely at odds with the rhetoric, Mann CPS… the worst.
SteveF (Comment#71722) March 13th, 2011 at 2:05 pm
He is doing exactly that. By creating the false impression that all the climate science is wrong, because that is all he does, he never finds anything right about it, he is feeding the current conservative and libertarian backlash against doing anything about AGW. My experience of a real audit is that it tells you what is right, not just what is wrong. (Not that I accept most of what he says anyway.) McIntyre is nothing like a real auditor, he has petty and personal animosities that he has become obsessed with.
Kenneth Fritsch [re: 71675]
As the saying goes: it takes years to establish credibility and less than 30 seconds to destroy it. I think that the Team’s members -indivudually and collectively- have done plenty of the latter. And once destroyed, the credibility is gone forever.
I think that Stan’s comment [@71702] to the effect that: ” Muller, the Berkeley physicist working on the new database, said that Climategate e-mails gave him a list of people whose work he will no longer bother to read. Apparently that position may be more widespread than some commenters here want to face”, nicely captures my earlier argument. And I don’t understand your point to the effect that people who like me [and Muller] will no longer read whatever the Team’s members care to produce are somehow suspect for no longer bothering. Maybe you can explain that one more time.
Meanwhile, as I pointed out to Lucia, the scientific damage continues because -while shown to be utterly wrong with conclusions based on concocted data- the Briffa, Wahl, Amman, Jones and Mann papers have not been retracted, and continue to be quoted in the litterature by those whose purposes they serve.
bugs (Comment#71728)
March 13th, 2011 at 3:15 pm
🙂
I agree that in the business world it takes years to develop a good reputation and not very long to lose it. That is damn near the opposite in government and, in some instances science, and you must well be aware of that.
Do not confuse scientific damage and with that to the public persona of an advocate/scientist. Getting your underwear in knot about retracting climate science papers is a major waste of time. Those who are in position to do that are those in the climate science community. What we should be looking at is the reaction from that community and not people like you and me who are more or less convinced that AGW mitigation, given the current political situation, will create more problems than it will solve and even if the unknown consequences of AGW are detrimental.
Do not forget that most climate scientists/advocates are very much more in tune with the prevailing intelligentsia than are their critics and unless you admit to that and recognize it for what it is you are only fooling yourself about any short term developments.
“If we compare correlation to Ljunddqvist, Loehle has the highly correlation and, strangely at odds with the rhetoric, Mann CPS… the worst.”
My take on all this is that I can select a group of proxies that can show a wide range of past to present temperature anomalies, but that does not say anything about the methodologies other than we might just be looking at the result of an arbitrary selection of proxies that have lots of white and red noise.
Out-of-sample results is what I will instruct the grandkids to look for.
Bugs,
Actually, I think he has quite a lot of experience related to auditing the validity of claims of mineral wealth. I can’t accurately comment about his personal feelings or animosities WRT ‘the team’. I do suspect if you asked him about this, he would answer. Based on the UEA emails, it is clear the animosity goes both ways.
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But in any case, independent of Steve McIntyre, the UEA emails paint a sorry picture of the climate scientists involved. It is unfortunate for you that you can’t see that.
Re: Kenneth Fritsch (Comment#71736) —
I think proxy-based climate reconstructions might well be performed in a way that yields reasonably accurate results with known uncertainties. But such studies would require (among other things) a robust method of selecting data series to use as (representative) proxies. I don’t see that any have been developed. Worse, my impression of the paleo community is that they don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about this problem, on the basis that it’s already been solved.
As a thought experiment, consider what method of selection would have been developed, if these stages of paleo work were being undertaken in the aftermath of a ~150-year decline in global temperature anomaly. What hindcasts would such proxies have produced? Similarly, what if global temperature had been relatively stable in the recent past?
An extension of that idea might provide the basis for a screen, at least of regional proxies. If a long-term episode of cooling is known (eg the onset of the Little Ice Age), perhaps that could form the basis for a validation step.
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And then there are the uncertainties… they seem far too narrow. The very nature of the “spaghetti graph” makes that point.
My entire point is that sites like Climate Audit and WUWT have totally overblown the “petty and unscrupulous” behavior, whilst simultaneously ignoring their own petty and unscrupulous behavior.
The best example is “Mann was trying to undermine the peer review processs at Climate Research by trying to boycott the journal!!!!!!!!!!” How does it get lost that:
1. Chris De Freitas bypassed normal peer review to get that paper published.
2. Hans Van Storch, no fan of Mann, criticized the paper and resigned form the board, along with a few others, over the issue.
3. The publisher later agreed the paper should have never been published.
4. The paper was an utter piece of crap that should never have been published.
Chris De Freitas? Soon? Baliunas? No criticism at all for shitting on the scientific process. Mann is a mean man and should never be trusted for trying to do something about it. The dishonesty of the skeptics on this issue is mind blowing.
My entire point is that sites like Climate Audit and WUWT have totally overblown the “petty and unscrupulous†behavior, whilst simultaneously ignoring their own petty and unscrupulous behavior.
Just shows how wrong you can be. I suggest you look at Prof Muller Berkeley’s presentation where he says tha he will no longer read papers published by certain journals and scientist such as Hansen/Mann. He actually names one of them. See if you find out which one. Incidently, he condemned them in no uncertain terms saying that what they did was not science and unacceptable. Allez voir.
Boris, Mann’s snitty behavior in response to well-founded criticisms of his work long proceeded the existence of ClimateAudit and WattsUpWithThat or of any activity on the part of SteveM, so from my perspective at least, this tu quoque defense of their behavior falls a little flat.
And bugs…the practice of using correlation to select proxies during the training/calibration period is undeniably wrong. I can’t think of any examples in other fields where this practice would be condoned let alone be so extensively practiced.
What does climategate have to do with Richard A Muller? He’s been criticizing Mann for years. Oh, and he also liked the crappy article by Soon and Baliunas.
http://web.archive.org/web/20041021080002/davidappell.com/archives/00000427.htm
“Short take home (from my perspective), selection of proxy by correlation during the training/calibration period doesn’t work, at least as currently implemented in the literature.”
The nice thing about this is that anyone even Boris and bugs can see that this is in THE MATH. forget Mcintyre’s personality which you find offensive. Forget Mann’s personality which we find offensive. I dont know anyone in the field who denies that these methods reduce variance. In fact, several have objected to MC by arguing that he is pointing out the obvious. ‘we know it reduces variance, why doesnt MC come up with a way that doesnt” And Oh, heres the latest version confirming other flawed approaches. You see they cannot just say “we dont know.” because skeptics would have a “field day.”
This issue is not a scientific issue. At some point they decided that the whole
“unprecedented” line of argument was essential to the story. its not. As gavin once said, the HS is scientifically uninteresting. Its uninteresting because it doesnt constrain the estimates of sensitivity which is one of the most interesting questions.
Climategate is sociological issue.
Heh, I just watched Muller’s presentation. He apparently thinks that people were dodging FOI requests about the data on tree ring divergence. Come on, he’s not even educated on the basic facts of the controversy he’s talking about. This is so typical of climate “skeptics.”
Re: Boris (Mar 14 13:34),
What’s even Funnier is that one of the investigations thought that Jones request to delete mails had nothing to do with FOIA requests.
Right Boris.
See, I have no issue saying that Muller can get the exact details wrong. The FIOA request being denied was Hollands. Hollands request was about Ar4 ch06. Two of the issues at play (on CA) were briffa’s treatment of mcIntyre and Briffa’s chart ( a hide the decline variation).
But can you say that the inquiry got it wrong when they held that the request to delete mails had nothing to do with FOIA? why not?
Re: Boris (Mar 14 12:49),
Boris, he “liked” the article?
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/13423/?a=f
strange I dont read it that way at all.
Maybe you should have read it.
Mosher
Climategate is not just sociological. It was from the outset about the use of “science” for political ends. And it remains highly political. Have a look at ClimateAudit today: Jones’ Climategate request to delete emails was made while he was being funded by a US government agency -to researchers being funded with US taxpayers’ funds- and the whole issue is therefore subject to US FOI rules. If it hasn’t happend yet, someone somewhere is bound to put his nose to that scent trail soon.
Boris
It is so simple, I can’t fathom why you don’t understand: When you do crooked “science” on the government’s payroll, you are really first and foremost screwing the taxpayer. That’s what Mann did: concocted “upside down” “spliced” crooked “science”, with taxpayers’ money.
Now he has a high powered posse -deputized by the taxpayers- out after him. And his buddies at the old academic “Hole in the Wall” have been so badly shown up in covering for him, that they too have the bloodhounds on their tail. You can run and run, but you can’t hide. Just ask Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
And not just skeptics should be able to understand this tale. You too.
Maybe “liked” is a strong term. He certainly doesn’t appear to understand the major problems with S&B2003.
I have no problem saying the investigation got details wrong. This happens all the time. However, I’m also not suggesting that people discount reams of scientific evidence based on perceived meanness.
I await the correction of this crooked science in the appropriate venues. Until then, it’s just a talking point that edges close to a conspiracy theory.
That post by JeffID is actually what I had in mind. “I can fit any signal I like by choosing SOME proxies, ergo choosing proxies based on how they match real temperatures cannot possibly increase the signal ratio”.
The obvious non-sequitur is then wrapped into enough inflammatory language to elicit a classic “with me or against me” response from the reader.
toto (Comment#71796)
“choosing proxies based on how they match real temperatures cannot possibly increase the signal ratioâ€.
“Cannot possibly” is extreme language, but aside from that quibble, I think that states the problem with proxy-based reconstructions nicely.
When you choose proxies based on matching
realimputed temperatures, you run the risk of ending up with Tiljander.This doesn’t mean that methods can’t be developed that could produce multi-century temperature reconstructions that are robust and are constrained appropriately with realistic uncertainties. Heck, it seems to have been done for longer intervals, with lower time-resolution, back hundreds of thousands of years.
Just that it hasn’t been done at the multi-century scale, yet. But M&W and others have stirred things up recently, so maybe new blood and new perspectives will get the ball rolling.
The defense of wrongly-used and uncalibratable data series brings up images of a bar patron insisting that he will settle his tab with Confederate scrip. Beyond a point, there’s not much to say. It isn’t legal tender, and no amount of clever wordsmithing will make it so.
Toto, you seem like a smart person so I find your arm waved justification for trashing Jeff surprising. What is so “obvious” an non sequitur about finding that correlation selection picks up noise and assumes it as signal?
Boris
Is the upside down Tiljander splice now conspiracy theory? And the bogus China data Jones used in his UHI paper as well? In any setting where there is a modicum of accountability, that would be seen as “crooked” and be sanctioned. And Mann and Co’s work has been corrected in appropriate venues, and shown up to be “crooked”. Pretending that has not happened is lik pushing on a string. Muller’s reaction is one form of sanction, and methinks Mann is in line for some other sanctioning as well.
toto:
You can engage in the inflammatory language yourself, if you like (it can be a group activity), but the pictures tell the story: The method is flawed. End of story.
Boris (Comment#71764),
Wow, it is clear that you and I understand very different things when we read the same documents. Best to simply agree to disagree I think. I believe you are mistaken, and that your take on this (one widely held among people who are very concerned about global warming) inhibits the kinds of changes climate science needs. But I recognize that there is nothing I can say to convince you of this.
One of the first things I noticed wrong with Jeff Id’s post is that he claims that except for the Luterbacher proxies, no proxies have a proven relationship with temperature. This is obviously untrue. there are well documented physical reasons that tree rings at treeline are temperature sensitive. This was covered in the 2006 NAS report that skeptics like to claim vindicated McIntyre.
Boris:
That is just an argument that is made, or maybe even just a rationalization. It’s almost certainly false over periods of 1000 years that “temperature limited growth” (near treelines for example) remains “temperature limited”… if for no other reason that, over those periods, the treelines themselves shift.
Re: Carrick (Comment#71815)
Smart, knowledgeable people, passionately engaged in proclaiming the robustness of obviously weak positions.
??
Off topic, here is a 1 MB, 25-page PDF by a Tokyo Electric Power Company engineer from 2010, describing a study they conducted in the aftermath of the giant Chilean earthquake. It has the tragic title, “Tsunami Assessment for Nuclear Power Plants in Japan.”
Off Topic: Relevant to the relationship of the Fukushima nuclear crisis to climate change, Prof. Barry Brooks has been running a technology-oriented blog and discussing issues from such a standpoint.
He has posted a 10-minute YouTube clip where he’s interviewed on the Aussie news program “One Plus One,” where he offers a succinct defense of his pro-nuclear views. He draws the connection with climate change at the 5:12 mark. The clip is embedded in this BraveNewClimate entry.
Interesting that a number of the “regulars” on climate blogs, pro and con, have found their way to BNC’s comment threads.