DeNihilist raised the subject of temperature reconstructions at Keith’s blog, suggesting the fact that blogs like mine are doing a service of investigating a contention issue that is highly visible to the public. Bart responded suggesting that scientific and public discussions differ, writing,
Yet they also show in which way the scientific and public discussion differ: I suspect that many scientist didn’t actively distrust the temp reconstructions out there in the same fashion as a portion of the lay public do (partly based on innuendo following the released CRU emails). So redoing yet another temp reconstruction was not on many scientists’ radarscreen, since it wouldn’t have created new insights really. Most scientists are not surprised that thorough reconstructions by and large agree. Those that are engaged in communciation of science are opf course releaved that indeed it turned out like this, as it indeed, as you clearly say, helps to increase the trust in existing temp reconstruction and hopefully trust in science a bit, which is highly needed.
I agree that scientific and public conversations differ; I am also not surprised that most temperature reconstructions largely agree. However, the totality of Bart’s comments motivates me to discuss issues surrounding the appearance of temperature reconstructions at blogs, and to use this example to place my views about the function of climate blogs into the context of the public discussions.
Reconstructions at Blogs
The discussions of Anthony Watt’s surface stations projects has always come up in comments at my blog. It’s always been my position that Anthony’s project identifying potential problem was a useful contribution but, for many reasons, those problems might not result in a warming bias in the determination of the overall trend. The problems Anthony highlights do need to be considered when developing an algorithm to create a reconstruction; as far as I can see, researchers at agencies like NOAA, GISS and CRU make a good faith effort to account for these issues. However, this does not mean that people are forbidden to ask questions.
Questions do come up. In response to the sorts of questions that actually come up, I’d written a number of posts using “toy” data to explain why certain criticisms of the anomaly method (1, 2) or rounding observed temperatures at blogs like Chiefios did not constitute a problem for creating a reconstruction. The point of these posts was to explain that certain types of “errors” that were getting wide airing in comments at some skeptic blogs were simply not errors.
Of course, ‘toy’ problems explaining that some analytical choices are sound are insufficient to prove that the reconstructions based on dirty data must be trustworthy. Having dispensed with the simpler questions people were asking, people in comments began to ask more nuanced questions many of which cannot be answered using toy question, and which are difficult to answer even after looking at data.
Zeke asked if he could post articles on actual reconstructions — and the actual posts DeNihilist links are his. (You can find all Zeke posts under Zeke.) Zeke is doing a very careful job, lots of people are asking specific questions about analytical choices that concern them. Meanwhile, there are numerous blogs doing work in parallel. Most were not motivated in anyway by my blog — the notion that reconstructions needed to be investigated was in the air at blogs.
So, what happens at blogs? The public has questions about reconstructions. In the end, questions the public actually has are being addressed at various blogs including The Air Vent (JeffId), The Whiteboard (Ron), StatPad (RomanM), clear climate code, Forest for the Trees (Chad), Open Mind (Tamino), Moyhu(Nick) and Roy Spencer .
Anthony Watts has also put a team together to perform some analysis of surface station data; preliminary results were presented at Heartland. Since the blogs listed above are oriented toward questioning, I predict that all will give Anthony’s results the same level of scrutiny they give NOAA, GISS or CRU results. Anthony knows this will happen and my impression is he thinks it perfectly fair for his work to be examined on equal footing as that of NOAA, GISS or CRU.
Here we see lots of interest and discussion on the part of bloggers. Yet, as Bart observed, public discussion and scientific discussion can differ. Fair enough.
What should evidence of public interest mean to scientists?
Now, returning to one of Bart’s points — that scientists are not surprised reconstructions agree but might be relieved that members of the public are resolving the question in the direction they anticipated. Though I do not want to put words in Bart’s mouth’s, I get the impression he thinks this means that a new reconstruction is not required.
I’d make this observation: Even though the reconstructions are largely agreeing, I think it’s a mistake to believe there is no need for a new reconstruction. Siting issues, TOBS adjustments and UHI remain contentious issues and it’s not clear the questions about the effect of siting issues or UHI can be resolved to the satisfaction of doubters by comparing reconstructions based on the data from the surface sites alone. (See UHI in the U.S.A.).
Whether or not scientists are worried about the quality of these data sets, the validity of TOBS or the effect of UHI on fundamental conclusions, enough of the public is worried to make the uncertainty in temperature reconstructions an issue when we turn to the political side — as we must if we are to collectively decide on responses to threats posed by AGW.
A reconstruction based on a truly independent data set would help resolve this issue. If Spencer’s method of measuring ground temperatures using satellite data looks promising, work to create a reconstruction using that method should be funded. That sort of independent check could help resolve some contentious issues about siting, TOBS and UHI effects on the temperature reconstructions. The mere fact that work is funded, particularly if done by a group that is independent of those creating the existing reconstructions of surface temperatures, might itself allay suspicions of those who have little confidence in any particular agency.
Politics
Now, I’d like to move to focus on a political issue associated with the need for a new reconstruction.
Some readers may also have noticed I highlighted the word public above. The reason I did this is that the issue of the reconstruction has become an issue that is very public, and scientists need to recognize that work on this issue must address questions the more technically oriented members of the public are actually asking. Many of these questions are being asked by people with advanced degrees in sciences, engineering, math and related fields. The questions are rather detailed.
I realize that some scientists, particularly those working at agencies, will point to Q&A type pages appearing at public agencies. I think many are doing a disservice by only selecting questions that don’t do a very good job reflect specific concerns discussed by the public at blogs (For example, the answer to “Q. What are some of the temperature discrepancies you found in the climate record and how have you compensated for them?” at NOAA is not useful if placed in context of details actually discussed at blogs.) Meanwhile, peer reviewed papers tend not to answer the questions the public is asking.
Why aren’t the questions the public actually has being answered by scientists or agencies? I can only speculate.
Being imaginative, I could think of many possible reasons. My preferred theory is that no one is funded to discover the questions that are actually being asked and to provide answer to these specific questions. Scientists may not see things this way, but to a large extent, they receive funding to talk to each other; those who wish to advance focus on communicating to other scientists, not the public.
The result is effective time management often involves spending very little time discovering which questions really concern the public and instead focusing on questions that other scientists would consider worthy of publication in peer reviewed articles. Questions like “Explain in elaborate detail what one might know about UHI”, is often not seen as a proper subject for a peer reviewed article. The explanation is often subsumed in an article discussing the full reconstruction and communicated in two or three sentences that might say, “We also explored the effect of considering ‘X, Y and Z’ and found they had little impact on the overall results.”
If the peer reviewers are satisfied with this, the paper may be published. If they are not, the authors may need to elaborate.
So, I think Bart’s observation that public discussion and scientific discussion differ is correct. I think they often differ quite a bit.
But what happens if discussions diverge to the extent that the peer reviewers are either unaware of or don’t really care which questions bedevil the public?
The answer is: Peer review papers will almost address these questions. Members of the public will read peer reviewed papers, discover their questions have been given short-shrift and are left wondering why peer reviewers do not insist that claims that the effects of “X, Y and Z” have little impact be presented somewhere. Even if these detailed discussions do not belong in brief journal articles, they could still be published as an agency report and made available at various reports servers like NASA Technical Reports Servers, or DOE’s OSTI.
Peer reviewed papers are certainly permitted to cite these voluminous reports, which are generally available to the public for free. Doing so is standard in many fields particularly those where public buy-in is required to move forward on public projects. However, publications of these sorts of extremely detailed reports seems not so in climate science where agency reports are often seem little more than the first draft of the paper submitted to a journal. I attribute this to a culture where scientists have been accustomed to only communicating with scientists.
Of course my favorite theory may be wrong. What I do know is that questions the public actually asks are not being answered in a manner that permits a curious individual member of the public to access what members of the public often consider a full explanation.
The other things I know is that on blogs, some pro-AGW activists sometimes suggest the reason questions posed by bloggers are not answered is that answers to those questions “are not science”, the topic is “boring”, the question is somehow “the wrong question” or it’s “a question asked only by denialists”. These sorts of responses are evidence of some truth in Bart’s observation that scientific discussions differ from public discussions.
But does this mean that scientists’ discussions are the only useful, correct or interesting discussions? Or that the topics the public chooses to discuss is boring and not quite worthy of discussions?
I think the answer to those both questions is, “No!”. My view is responses that suggest that scientists discussion are different from public discussions — and that public ones might be boring is, “So what if the public discussions bore scientists? The fact that the answer to a question is ‘not science’, the topic is “boring”, or it’s a question asked only by ‘denialists’ is no reason not to answer a question that is asked repeatedly by many members of the public.”
I suspect that quite a few members of the public share my view. I also suspect their sharing my view is one of the reasons climate blogs have become popular. These blogs will remain popular even if scientists think the questions discussed at blog are unimportant, even if William Connolley of Stoat finds the discussions at these blogs boring (see WC’s second comment on Keith’s post) , and even if some dislike the ‘tone’ associated with questions on matters scientists believe have been resolved to their satisfaction.
Empirical evidence suggests that water tends to flow down hill. It also suggests that if scientists do not engage the public in forums the public prefers or if they do not engage the more difficult questions the public presents, the public will continue asking questions they want answered and if scientists will not engage these questions, the some members of the public will work to find their own answers. Blogging has become a method where members of the public do this collaboratively.
If those scientists who present a visible public face at blogs respond with little more than the blog equivalent of visible eye-rolls or by answering questions the scientists think the public should be asking, there will never be a bridge to span the gap between more skeptical blogs and more pro-AGW blogs. No blogger I know of is writing these posts to entertain William Connelly, none are concerned about visible eye-rolls or snark aimed at them; we are all writing our blogs and discussing issues in blog comments to discover answers questions to we find interesting.
The questions that are being answered, I suspect, are those that suggest the science is BASICALLY wrong, i.e. the ice is NOT retreating, the temperatures are NOT going up, CO2 has NO influence on air temperatures. The true problem with AGW projections, as I see it, is that each of the propositions is ALMOST completely right, but that the alarmism or crisis, which is the heart of the AGW debate and cap-and-trade type proposals requires each component to be EXACTLY as projected to occur. What we have, instead, is a series of propositions that are 10 – 30% pessimistic (based on the precautionary principle) that when brought together create a 200% projected result.
What is the “real” temperature rise over the last 100 years? The warming bias is obvious. Raw data at individual stations (and countries) do not show the pre-1990 1.7*C/century (or more) rise in temperature. “Corrections” have added perhaps 0.4*C/century to what is actually going on. The UHIE, dismissed by the IPCC, has been shown by several researchers to be far greater than postulated. Eliminating this warming error reduces the actual rise further, especially significant when the great reduction in global temperature data collection sites favours the retention of urban sites. The expansion of smoothing to 1200 km, to make Peru and the Arctic hotspots is a model problem that further exaggerates warming trends. Why does the GISS and the NOAA data continue to diverge: mapping functions in low data areas, as more low data areas have increased with the reduction in station reports.
The rise is CO2 seems straightforward, but what of the component that is fossil fuel derived? Somewhat exaggerated, perhaps? And negative, buffering activity by water vapour, ignored by the IPCC – is it somewhat effective? Probably.
Each AGW component, from what I’ve seen, suffers from an excess of enthusiasm/noble alarm. Backing each off leads us into a “normal” or slightly warmer trend than pre-1975 (or pre-1940). Natural solar or oceanic processes are then of the magnitude to be responsible for the majority of the warming. Our fossil fuel contribution is then essentially irrelevant or unimportant. To say that within recorded history we are in the hottest of times is to deny the MWP, the Roman Warm Period, the times of the Minoans existed. Fooolishness.
The IPCC has created a house of cards with the AGW scare. Exaggeration or “precautionary” selection of heat-contributing parameters creates the very thing we fear. Warmists like to say the “deniers” – a psychologically interesting term, refute the essence of AGW, thereby dismissing them as fools. Skeptics, in their passion, like to claim warmists as dupes of the environmental/anti-capitalist movement, and therefore deserve dismissal. In fact, it is the tweaking up of data and influence towards warming, and the tweaking down of data and influence for cooling that need addressing. Models showing the other side need to be run.
In the resource business, about seven factors lead to a projection of how much oil, gas or metal will come out of a well or mine. Resource concentration in the rock, thickness of deposit, area of deposit, efficiency of extraction, cost of extraction (economics limits the concentration of resource to be tapped) are all estimated by excited, involved individuals whose careers, prestige and self-worth are on the line. A 10 – 15% optimism is impossible to refute. A negative fudge-factor may be inserted by wise managers at the top to account for this, but often it is not in their interests (or the markets’) to do do. The same I see with the IPCC. Nowhere is there the Doubting Thomas to throw in some disbelief to counter the swelling and internally supporting excitement of the Warmist community. If reservations were present at each step of the way, a different, and non-alarming scenario would be reached. Simply look at the IPCC projections. Today is fine, tomorrow the disaster starts, whether it is 1988 or 2008. That reflects input data and algorithms selected and primed for a “worse” case scenario.
As a professional and as an investor and as a citizen of the world, I have been fooled by ratcheted evidence of one sort of another. Prospects become double what they should be, the market will rise rapidly and one country after another will domino-down into communism. All from exaggerations of one parameter being fed into the calculations of another, exaggerated parameter.
Let us see, and soon, a model projection based on subdued temp rises, fossil-fuel contributions and buffer effects. This is NOT the base case of the IPCC, as that model still has bad historical data and lacks buffering. We need our own projections, not just refutations of specific parameters. We’ve done that. Now we need to see what, brought together, they provide as a model for future changes.
Re: Doug Proctor (Jun 16 10:45),
I’m not sure how you can think this.
from Craig L.
Esper’s new paper claims to fix the divergence problem.
JAN ESPER*w, DAVID FRANK*, ULF BU¨ NTGEN*, ANNE VERSTEGE*, RASHIT M.
HANTEMIROV z and ALEXANDER V. KIRDYANOV. 2010. Trends and uncertainties in Siberian indicators of 20th century warming. Global Change Biology (2010) 16, 386–398, doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2486.2009.01913.x
Abstract
Estimates of past climate and future forest biomass dynamics are constrained by
uncertainties in the relationships between growth and climatic variability and uncertainties
in the instrumental data themselves. Of particular interest in this regard is the borealforest
zone, where radial growth has historically been closely connected with temperature
variability, but various lines of evidence have indicated a decoupling since about the
1960s. We here address this growth-vs.-temperature divergence by analyzing tree-ring
width and density data fromacross Siberia, and comparing 20th century proxy trends with
those derived from instrumental stations. We test the influence of approaches considered
in the recent literature on the divergence phenomenon (DP), including effects of tree-ring
standardization and calibration period, and explore instrumental uncertainties by employing
both adjusted and nonadjusted temperature data to assess growth-climate
agreement. Results indicate that common methodological and data usage decisions alter
20th century growth and temperature trends in a way that can easily explain the post-1960
DP. We show that (i) Siberian station temperature adjustments were up to 1.3 1C for
decadal means before 1940, (ii) tree-ring detrending effects in the order of 0.6–0.8 1C, and
(iii) calibration uncertainties up to about 0.4 1C over the past 110 years. Despite these large
uncertainties, instrumental and tree growth estimates for the entire 20th century warming
interval match each other, to a degree previously not recognized, when care is taken to
preserve long-term trends in the tree-ring data. We further show that careful examination
of early temperature data and calibration of proxy timeseries over the full period of
overlap with instrumental data are both necessary to properly estimate 20th century longterm
changes and to avoid erroneous detection of post-1960 divergence.
I would agree that climate science has become public whether scientists want to accept that or not. They do have a public responsibility, but the academic incentives haven’t really acknowledged this fact and to a large extent, neither have they (I just hear Evelyn Fox Keller give a good talk on the subject – I’ll see if I can find a recording).
We’re also entering an era where contributions from non-scientists are having a greater impact, though I see no prospect of blogger analyses making it into AR5.
Lucia, this post is really, really good. If you haven’t yet, I hope you ask Bart and Keith to repost there, as well.
One of the problems is the very political nature of the science and the fact that it appears to many of us the simple ‘truths’ of temperature reconstructions and atmospheric CO2 have been used to justify very dramatic models that in fact are gross exagerations of what even scientists actually expect to happen.
Prior to Copenhagen this was evident on the BBC website with stories suggesting 2 then 5 then 7 degrees by the end of the century. The current observations and trends simply do not support that( the end result of climate change is not difficult to understand). A lingering doubt remains about weather stations and how many ‘evolved’ on airports with are all heat islands so the trends are all important
This is very political science and policy makers and the media have demanded ever more exciting scenarios and some scientists have delivered almost a la carte the kind of spin(peer reviewed of course) required. Its happening right now as scientists meet to work out how to ‘shift public attitudes’. When was this a scientists job?
This is the corruption of science quite plainly and the IPCC played the same game. Predicting future events in complex systems has a wide margin of error.
What you are dealing with is the problem of explaining a flat line for 20 years might be within those margins and after that who knows.
lucia (Comment#45977):
Suggest you read Doug’s comment again, in particular the clause before the part you quoted and the sentence after.
I think his assessment of “a series of propositions that are 10 – 30% pessimistic” is (in addition to being fairly gross hand-waving) going in the wrong direction. At least with regard to IPCC consensus documents, projections tend to be conservative rather than pessimistic.
As I noted at Keith’s, critiques of this sort that are political in nature are fine. I think that if you want to make the point that the science is wrong, though, you have to do science.
Lucia: Siting issues, TOBS adjustments and UHI remain contentious issues and it’s not clear the questions about the effect of siting issues or UHI can be resolved to the satisfaction of doubters by comparing reconstructions based on the data from the surface sites alone. (See UHI in the U.S.A.).
Whether or not scientists are worried about the quality of these data sets, the validity of TOBS or the effect of UHI on fundamental conclusions, enough of the public is worried to make the uncertainty in temperature reconstructions an issue when we turn to the political side — as we must if we are to collectively decide on responses to threats posed by AGW.
.
No technical response will be sufficient to resolve the doubts of those who are not primarily motivated by science.
lucia (Comment#45977):
Who has said these things and in response to which specific questions? Since this assertion (“I know”) lies pretty close to the heart of your thesis, it would have been stronger if you could actually quote people in context.
That being said, allow me to make a similarly broad, general statement. One other response that I have heard is that the targets of these inquiries believe they are not being made in good faith; i.e. that they are being badgered by adverse questioning, and would be drawn into online debates where their interlocutors can say what they wish. I think your point is somewhat diminished by leaving this reason out of your list.
Re: PDA #45988 (Jun 16 13:19),
Michael Tobis’ comment at Collide-a-scape may be relevant to items on Lucia’s “some pro-AGW activists sometimes suggest” list (though not “boring”).
Ron Broberg (Comment#45987) June 16th, 2010 at 1:09 pm
Lucia: Siting issues, TOBS adjustments and UHI remain contentious issues and it’s not clear the questions about the effect of siting issues or UHI can be resolved to the satisfaction of doubters by comparing reconstructions based on the data from the surface sites alone. (See UHI in the U.S.A.).
Whether or not scientists are worried about the quality of these data sets, the validity of TOBS or the effect of UHI on fundamental conclusions, enough of the public is worried to make the uncertainty in temperature reconstructions an issue when we turn to the political side — as we must if we are to collectively decide on responses to threats posed by AGW.
.
No technical response will be sufficient to resolve the doubts of those who are not primarily motivated by science.”
As I have said many times. There are roughly speaking three audiences.
1. The audience that believes the record is fine. they see the work as dull, boring, meaningless, settled science. They are wrong.
2. The audience who will never be convinced. They are entertaining. have fun with them.
3. The audience that is unsure but can be convinced.
You should note the article I linked to by Esper. When writing about the divergence problem several of us noted ( yes its in my book) that Briffa NEVER questioned the temperature record. Those of us who have looked at siberian records believe that his faith in CRU WRT this region IS WORTHY OF INVESTIGATION.
Notably, Rob Wilson, in his own studies of tree rings in Canada has REJECTED the temperature series produced by Jones. It would seem reasonable to at least LOOK at the record in this region. Esper has. I suppose we could reject his paper out of hand… but I’d rather read it. I think Audience #1 is demonstrably wrong in their assessment that there is no benefit in looking at the reconstructions. Wrong. demonstrably so. Audience #2 amuses me. Audience # 3.. Ron YOUR WORK will help convince them. people like Amac.
Watts and McIntyre don’t ask questions, they make accusations.
bugs,
“Watts and McIntyre don’t ask questions, they make accusations.”
You obviously have no idea how many questions Steve Mc has asked of climate scientists. Perhaps you should read his blog in a bit more detail.
I think Lucia herself has some skewed idea of what questions the public actually has, perhaps filtering out large volumes of inanity and insanity. So to add some flesh to that thesis, I’d suggest she actually list some concrete and specific examples of what questions are not being addressed.
As for scientists who do interact with the public, they do get emails, blog comments, questions at lectures, which will give them their sense of what’s being wondered about out there. Why should that be any less valid a sense that Lucia’s sense of what’s out there?
FAQ pages, blogs, and blog comments serve their purpose, but at the end of the day, there is no obligation on the part of any scientist to take each and every individual person by the hand and personally answer all their questions. At some point, if the person wants to go beyond some of the basics, he’s got to buck up and spend a couple months reading the literature, and working out toy problems for himself if appropriate. He’ll be better for it, and then can ask more focused questions.
“Members of the public will read peer reviewed papers”
And this is where you go off in the weeds, I think. They don’t. To a large extent, paywalls are an issue here. Now if somebody cared so much that they spend a lot of time commenting on blogs, they should also have the time to go to the library and get some photocopies made. But there is inertia there; I don’t like doing that myself – I want the PDF now. But even without the paywalls – a lot of people aren’t going to read. For example, a lot of EM Smith’s confusion could be addressed by just reading Hansen/Lebedeff, which, along with most GISS papers, is free access.
Anyway, I agree with bugs. It isn’t a matter of Watts and Co being forbidden to ask questions.. asking good faith questions is fine, but there we have something else entirely. We’ll also see how much he actually enjoys scrutiny. He seems quite defensive to me, which is in line with the cyberstalking of critical commenters, bizarre and totally out-of-place one-liners questioning the patriotism of others, and so on. He gets upset he’s getting ‘bashed’, but doesn’t seem to ever get around to putting out a substantive response.
Re: PDA (Jun 16 13:19),
Sure it would have been stronger. And yet I am not going to google to quote-mine. I do know this to be true.
Re: carrot eater (Jun 16 14:52),
My impression based on Bart’s response is that many scientists do not see the need for a new temperature reconstruction and for this reason, have not been proposing to address it. On this issue, the scientists and public are discussing different things.
People at CA are reading peer reviewed papers. So, are those members of the public doing reconstructions. Peer reviewed papers are discussed with some frequency at blogs, including mine. I should think this makes the statement ““Members of the public will read peer reviewed papers†quite obviously true. Some of these people even spend money to get on the other side of paywalls, but often they’ve figured out how to get the papers in other ways.
bugs (Comment#45992) June 16th, 2010 at 2:07 pm
“Watts and McIntyre don’t ask questions, they make accusations.”
False bifurcation. They do both. Steve, to be accurate, use innuendo
They almost always are. That isn’t a novel statement.
In terms of scientists addressing people’s concerns about the exiting temperature records, they just point to the work that’s already done, and hope you read a paper or two. But it turns out, some people just a priori don’t like it if it says “Hansen” or “Jones” on it. Therein the value of a dozen other unaffiliated people taking v2.mean and playing with it.
There are reasons why Zeke is better at communicating with the masses than say Gavin. This is true. And yes, a person like Zeke has his ear closer to the ground, in that he’s more willing to take the time to do a fresh mini-project to rebut/explore something, whereas the actual scientists would just roll their eyes and continue working on whatever they’re interested in. I think Zeke, Ron, Nick Stokes, etc fill a void as a sort of rapid-response – people who read WUWT and blog comments and quickly pick up on what’s being discussed there, and have the tools to put out a substantive answer in a couple days or even hours. For example, when Watts/d’Aleo published through SPPI a pamphlet full of absolute temperatures simply averaged together, I think the response of Gavin was pretty much just “you’re an idiot, we’ve already explained to you that anomalies aren’t absolutes simply averaged together”, and he went on with his day job. Zeke, Tamino and others, on the other hand, put some time into a quantitative response. Different people will have different levels of interest in engaging in different ways.
I think we need to better define who we all mean by the ‘public here. You maybe mean Zeke, Ron and McIntyre. I mean the vast hordes of laymen who go onto websites and leave comments about CO2 only being 0.00038 of the atmosphere, how can it possibly do anything.
When I saw reconstructions in the headline I nearly didn’t read this article as I have little interest in the hockey stick wars. However I have a great interest in the accuracy of our temperature record and the fact that various people are ‘reconstructing’ the work of GISS etc.
Carrot–
I never said all members of the public will read articles. Zeke, Ron, McIntyre, JeffId and I are all “members of the public”. Different people will read different papers and find various levels of detail. Depending on background, they will have different reactions to the tendency for articles in climate science to be very brief, and to not cite some rather voluminous agency reports documenting the results of investigations to check the effects of various assumptions in rather mind-numbing detail.
Yes.
Also, I’m simply agreeing with Bart that often, scientists and the public wish to discuss different topics. It appears you agree that they do wish to discuss different topics, and that Gavin in particular would rather get on with his day job than discuss this. Of course Gavin and every other scientists has a perfect right to do this. Equally “of course”, the consequence is the public and scientists will continue to have different discussions.
I think that a 19 year old college student counts as a “member of the public” under any reasonable definition, and I read peer reviewed papers all the time. I’m one of the people that goes out of their way to try and get around pay walls. Google Scholar really is awesome in this respect, as you can find many papers (although hardly all that you’d like) available as PDF’s online. Arxiv.org is also good for finding work that hasn’t been published, but few climate people use it, even those who have extreme difficulty getting through the gatekeepers.
You made it sound like it was commonplace, when it’s probably exceedingly rare.
When I’m using terms like the general public, I don’t think you, me, Zeke, or McIntyre are at all representative of that. I mean Joe the Plumber – casual observers who don’t have doctorates. On the other hand, your language seems (to me) to extrapolate from your own experience and thoughts to cover the wider layman population, which I feel just isn’t appropriate.
That will always be true, so I don’t think it’s a consequence of scientists refusing to quit their day jobs and playing whack-a-mole all day long on the internet instead. The guy going around website comment sections and ranting about how a trace gas can’t have any effect is simply not going to be going to academic conferences and attending talks on the latest research.
Andrew,
I’m surprised a college student doesn’t have free access to most everything you might want.. ?
carrot eater (Comment#46006)-Interesting you should mention that. The other day, while on campus I could access a PNAS article from the computers there. But most of the time I’m using my home computer, and that same article, for example, I can no longer access.
But beyond that, I’ve been following climate discussions for about three years now, and I read peer reviewed articles in High School, too.
Come to think of it, next time I’m at the FAU library, I’ll see if I can access BAMS or something. It hadn’t occurred to me before that I could do that. Like a lot of bloggers, I suspect, I can be oblivious to things in real life.
Andrew,
In case you are being generally oblivious, check if you can’t VPN from your home. Otherwise, it’s no bad thing for a 19 year old to spend some time in the library.
BAMS you can read for free anyway. You need not be in anybody’s library.
Carrot–
Can you define how you use the word “VPN”? I use Argonnes VPN from home. I use it when on Argonne business, and it is possible to surf the web while connected. Isn’t this “VPNing”? And “from home”?
Carrot
I havent’ suggested scientists quite they day jobs and play whack-a-mole all day long. The public is not going to discuss what interests scientists, simply because it interests the scientists (who happen to be the smaller groups. So if the scientists elect to not discuss what the public discusses, then the discussions of the two groups will differ.
Are you suggesting that what I am observing is not a fact?
That’s exactly what I mean, Lucia. A college student ought to be able to connect through VPN, and then use whatever online resources that school offers, including the library.
I’m saying it’s not an interesting fact. It’s just the natural order of things, and will be true in any field, regardless of how the experts choose to communicate to the general public. The people actively at the forefront of that field will be thinking about and discussing things that are different from the various ideas which might be occupying the laymen with a casual or passing interest.
That said, I just came across this. So far as comments sections go, it has an awfully high density of people who actually are actively engaged in relevant research. to the extent that the “public” are mixing in with it, I guess in this one rather isolated and limited instance, they’re talking about the same things, however vaguely… (probably nobody participating there counts as representative of the general public by my yardstick, but they do by your yardstick)
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/06/atlantic-tropical-cyclone-records-trends-and-ephemerality/
I don’t really mean this as an example of anything; I just found it a highly unusual comment section.
Carrot
In which case, it must have been and equally uninteresting fact when Bart brought up the issue.
But if as a consequence of finding the fact uninteresting, we don’t recognize it, how can we explain why blogs addressing issues scientists find uninteresting attract so much traffic? And even if that question is not interesting, how do we respond to some scientists complaints that those bloggers who address issues of interest to the public come to be trusted by some members of the public and even get some attention from the media?
In the end, I should note that what interest you might not interest me and vice versa. You could point out this is trivially true, in which case I might point out that you should already know that your expressing your disinterest in a topic is, itself, a rather uninteresting observation on your part. If you grant yourself permission to be boring, I suppose I can grant myself the same liberty.
Holy crap I had thought for so long that AMS didn’t let you access articles for free. I just tried a whole bunch, no problems. How long has this been the case?
I became convinced that I couldn’t get them when I tried a while back and couldn’t. It took me a while just now, but I couldn’t get a fairly recent article in Journal of Climate. It’s not that journal though, as another article in that journal which was much older, again no problem.
Jeez, I thought I was good at this.
Ah, seems that AMS has changed the rules recently:
“For a number of years, all AMS journal volumes older than five years have been available online free of charge. Effective January 2010, however, users will need to pay for access to just the current year and previous two years worth of content. In other words, any journal volume older than two years will be freely available.”
There’s a lot of discussion and considerable movement towards making university publications open-access (at least here in Canada). There’s still financial hurdles to work out with publishers, but I heard a lot of talk at a recent conference about the importance of making publicly-funded research publicly available. Plenty of universities are setting up open-access repositories with funds available for authors to compensate publishers for copyright.
Many of these are still fledgling efforts, but they will be growing.
Check out this list of open-access repositories:
http://www.opendoar.org/
Paying off the publishers is one option.
I wonder how long the academic publishers can continue to get away with charging exorbitant fees. Now and again a university library will drop a subscription to protest.
because something is uninteresting because it’s well, normal, we end up not recognising it?
I might, at the dinner table, discuss the world of finance. the sorts of things I might talk about are necessarily and obviously different than what’s talked about at Goldman. Anybody with any self-awareness would know this implicitly.
Maybe it’s only worth mentioning in climate because some people might somehow lack that awareness – they may have no idea what researchers are actually working on these days.
You’re rather sanitising the issue here. A blogger who addresses issues of interest is just fine. Take the Science of Doom guy. When I look over there, much of what he says was already known by the late 70s. So his discussion is far removed from the current thrust of research. But nobody is going to complain about him, because he’s actually educating. As opposed to the d’Aleos of the world making calls of fraud based on complete and total misunderstandings of the process of the GHCN and the basic methodology of GISTEMP – I don’t know what that is, but it isn’t education, or responsible discussion.
The alternate route is the establishment of open-access journals, or the transition of existing journals from a fee-based to open-access form of publishing (although very few journals have done this). I wonder if this is happening at all in climate science, cause I’ve seen it start in sociology and biology. There is still the problem of covering operating costs, but these can be minimal under certain academic “business models”. Established publishers can resist, but if they fail to adapt they may soon be irrelevant.
I guess the publishers are all watching the PlOS experiment. I have no real opinion on whether that operation model will take over the world, or not, or will be a niche, or what.
Carrot
I think this is untrue. Many common place things we all recognize as true can be said to be uninteresting to some. Nevertheless, if something is uninteresting, it can be the have consequences that that interest us. To understand these consequences, we must sometimes recognize the “uninteresting” fact; to explain it, we must mention it.
If we insist on ignoring or never speaking of the “uninteresting” point, we will find it difficult to understand why consequences of that uninteresting things happen. So, to explain the consequence of a fact Bart brought up and you find uninteresting, I am mentioning noting noting it’s true, and pointing out the fact this uninteresting thing is true has consequences.
If I am not mistaken, your disagreement with D’Aleo is not that he says is uninteresting.
You are now are making it sound like you think people are permitted to discuss “uninteresting” things endlessly as long as you approve of the message; in this case, “uninteresting” observations are downright valuable. On the other hand, if you don’t like the message, “uninteresting” becomes something to complain about.
Possibly you don’t mean this.
However, for the time being, given the totality of what you say, I can report that I find your observations of what is, or is not, interesting both uninteresting and valueless. Your observations of what is “interesting” communicate nearly nothing of any value, so why should I care about this diagnosis?
Re: PDA (Jun 16 13:19),
As I said, I’m not going to go hunting for quote to mine to give evidence that I know what sorts of things pro-AGW people often say about the public, people at forums, and arguments and questions posed by “those with whom they disagree”. However, on Keith Kloor’s thread MT writes
I admit that I didn’t find a quote where he says that we ask the wrong questions, but he is saying we pay attention to the wrong things. There is not much difference here.
While you may not be aware of this sort of discussion at various pro-AGW blogs, it is common enough for pro-AGW bloggers to say this sort of hing.
(BTW I also will note that generally, those conveying the notion that the issues “naysayers” attend to are wrong fail to explain why or how any specific issues I and the “naysayers” attend to are “wrong” and they will resist explaining this even if asked. )
carrot,
I think in some ways scientists have misunderstood what is expected in an internet discussion. To be sure the public has also failed to treat scientists in a way they are accustomed to. I know I’m guilty of that. For example, I have no issue whatsoever in you calling me an idiot on the internet. Heck even in real life I have no issue with that. It’s not something I expect scientists are used to.
Lucia,
At bit OT perhaps:
I took a look over at Kieth’s blog and noted that he had put up a comment from Gavin complaining about endless demands on climate blogs that climate scientists denounce other climate scientists who are claimed (by the unknowing) to have erred in one way or another. I think you made a few comments on this as well. The thread unfortunately descended into Tiljander purgatory after Gavin posted a comment referencing Mann’s 08 reconstruction as an example of the unknowing masses making these demands. (Neither Mann, Gavin, nor any other climate scientist will likely publicly address the real issue raised by Willis and SteveMc… all the proxies that actually contributed to the sharp upturn in Manns 08 reconstruction are extremely doubtful as temperature proxies, and if removed, as would appear to be a reasonable “sensitivity test”, the upturn is greatly reduced. But I don’t want to provoke yet another Tiljander tempest, so everybody reading this please immediately forget I used the word ‘Tiljander’!)
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What was more interesting to me was that Gavin’s comment appeared to be responding to a recent (very long) tread at Climate Audit, which started as being about Lonnie Tompson’s not archiving glacial ice core data, but ended up being about why climate scientists who claim to support data archiving refuse to “call out” other climate scientists who refuse to do so without explanation. Willis got particularly wound up. I wonder if Gavin was in fact responding to the long CA thread, and if so, what about that particular thread prompted him to do so. My guess: Judith Curry and Michael Tobis both participated quite a lot in the CA thread. Maybe if just a few more climate scientists were willing to ‘engage’ the skeptics, then many others would be willing to do the same. Or maybe I’m just being too optimistic. FWIW, the tone at the end of the long CA thread seemed a whole lot more civil than at the beginning, which I think is a good thing.
Zajko: The alternate route is the establishment of open-access journals, or the transition of existing journals from a fee-based to open-access form of publishing (although very few journals have done this). I wonder if this is happening at all in climate science, cause I’ve seen it start in sociology and biology.
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http://www.geoscientific-model-development.net/
http://www.egu.eu/publications/list-of-publications.html
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Hat tip to Dr Annan via Rabett Run
I’m not saying it shouldn’t be discussed; I’m just saying I think it’s self-evident, and not profound. Or at least, it should be, for people who have self-awareness. What is discussed amongst the lay people, what is discussed on the populist climate blogs, is not generally well in step with the latest research. Dealing with people who don’t understand how anomalies are calculated, who don’t know how a baseline is calculated, who can’t figure out phase equilibria, who think Venus is hot because it’s at high pressure – these have nothing to do with the current state of the research; it’s just remedial education.
I’d be happier if RC did less of the remedial mole whacking, and more of a journal club format. Saying, here are a couple new papers in field x, this is what they say, this is how they fit in context with previous work, here are the strengths and weaknesses and unresolved issues. It’d be boring as heck for the people here for the bloodsport, but illuminating for the people actually curious about the state of the art. They already have some balance between these types of posts, and they need to have some balance.
? What would make you think that was my disagreement with him? My disagreement with him is the widely publicized call of fraud on the back of absolutely nothing. I find that to be the act of a clown, and I will not mince my words in saying so.
That has nothing to do with whether something is interesting or not. What’s that to me? I don’t care. If I think your blog post is uninteresting, I’ll read it, forget it, and move on with my life. If I think something is uninteresting but is given improper context to make it appear more important than it actually is, then maybe I might say something.
I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that climate blogs generally focus on stuff that “scientists” have “moved on” from. In point of fact, many climate blogs have discussions about issues that are very much related to current areas of research. Even the blogs that often discuss things that are “uninteresting” a great percentage of the time, still at least occasionally feature discussions very relevant to the “modern” research questions scientists are looking at.
Spencer’s blog for example is very focused on feedbacks, which is a major area of ongoing research. For my part, I’ve often looked at the “impacts” issues, which is a never-ending-arguably parasitic-field which will continue to be of “interest” so long as the this AGW “issue” is.
Speaking of political, public and scientific discussions, Monckton has a pleasant, non-bombastic posting concerning Margaret Thatcher on WUWT.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/16/margaret-thatcher-the-world%e2%80%99s-first-climate-realist/#more-20670
Monckton is a Lukewarmer!
Re: carrot eater (Jun 16 21:44),
First, I have never claimed Barts observation was not self-evident or profound. I was agreeign with it and discussing consequences. One is: Because scientists don’t discuss what is of interest to the public, the public will still discuss without scientists involvement. They will go right ahead and find their answers possibly in ways scientists do not like, roll their eyes at etc. But the public is still going to do it. Moreover, I think the every single member of the public is right to try to discover answers to question that interest them.
But yes: the observation that scientists aren’t interested in what the public is interested is not profound. I never claimed it was profound. Your jumping in to say it is not profound is, ahem, not interesting.
Also: I didn’t say you said it shouldn’t be discussed. I’m observing that you are jumping in to an uninteresting, not profound observation.
I never thought your disagreement with D’Aleo was that he was uninteresting. However, you introduced him into a “compare and contrast” discussion of bloggers, criticizing one and saying the other was ok.
What I’m saying is that it appears based on your other example that you don’t even mind people being uninteresting. In fact, can find examples of uninteresting discussions you find valuable. When you bring up examples of things you disagree with it’s not because they are uninteresting.
While you might jump in to tell me that Bart’s observation which I discussed was simply not interesting and not profound, the fact is, your comment itself is uninteresting. Moreover, it is valueless because the fact that an individual fact might be uninteresting isn’t much of a flaw to an overall discussion. And it’s clear you think discussions containing uninteresting facts can be valuable.
Lucia, let me clarify my initial objection here, as we’re talking past each other, as usual.
What I’m objecting to is the idea that this state of affairs is somehow caused by how scientists in this set of fields choose to communicate. It isn’t. It’s just the natural state when there is some topic that is interesting to members of the general public for whatever reason – political, economic, religious, what have you. Non-specialists will be having different sorts of conversations from specialists. These differences are amplified when the non-specialists are interested in the topic for reasons that go beyond inherent curiosity, but due to real or perceived implications of the topic.
What has ‘interesting’ got to do with it? We’re discussing whether some topics are directly relevant to current research, or not. Of course I don’t mind people discussing things not on the cutting edge of research. It’s called basic education, and it’s important. From a standing start of no relevant technical background, it would be rather hard to pick up a journal article and make much sense of it. I could pick up the Lancet or JAMA, read a few articles, and have wasted my time because I don’t really have the background.
This is the point of my compare/contrast. When there are idiots running around saying the greenhouse effect violates the laws of thermodynamics, it’s appropriate for somebody in the blogosphere to explain things to the confused. Is that discussion relevant to the latest things discussed at a conference? Of course not; some of this stuff is a century old. But that’s fine – it’s education, and you have to master the basics first before you can move on.
What I frown upon is the opposite of education – the clowns running around saying there’s fraud, based on their misunderstanding of how the GHCN was set up, and how anomalies are used.
Private and public
Temp recons are on the way.
So says she: Judith.
============
AndrewFL:
Most any blog will have some discussion of recent papers. Sometime more or less informed, sometimes more or less heated, sometimes even involving people who’ve actually read the entire paper, along with other relevant works.
Even WUWT has a constant stream of press releases related to recent publications of various sorts. Though that can’t be called a discussion; it’s just the copy/paste of the press release, with a single sentence added by Watts on top.
Carrot–
?Caused?
Of course it is the natural inclination for scientists to discuss what interests them, and for the public to discuss what interests them. No one said otherwise. So, I don’t know why you are yammering on about this point.
My “uninteresting” (but you admit true” fact in my post is brought up to point out the consequences of people following the natural course. We know the larger group– the public– is not suddenly going to decide to lose interest in their own interests. They have no inclination to do so, and anyway, why should they decide the topics they are interested in are uninteresting? Those topics are interesting to them.
So the consequence is:
I am observing that this will happen as a consequence of the “uninteresting” thing we both agree is true.
As far as I can tell, your gripe is over the notion that the consequence is caused by the scientists. Well…if they follow their their natural inclinations, this will be a consequence. Does that mean they are “caused” it? I’m not sure. I didn’t use the word “caused”. The two words are related. However, “consequence” has the nuance of “B follows A” while caused has the more specific nuance of “B was caused by A”. So, if your are quibbling about whether or not I should say “caused”, I didn’t. I said “consequence”; I picked this because, for one thing, there are multiple causes– including the fact that trying to get the public to lose interest in questions they care about is a practical impossibility.
So, if we can get past your uninteresting observation that Barts observing different people are interested in different things is uninteresting because it is soooo obviously true, what do you think happens if the public talks about what they want to talk about while scientists talk about what they talk about?
What might happen if scientists decided to overcome their natural inclinations and and joined the public in their discussions of what they want to talk about? (Mind you, scientists aren’t required to do this. But what happens if they do?)
Re: Don B (Jun 17 04:25),
No ad homs, and only one foreign phrase!
carrot eater: I’d be happier if RC did less of the remedial mole whacking, and more of a journal club format. Saying, here are a couple new papers in field x, this is what they say, this is how they fit in context with previous work, here are the strengths and weaknesses and unresolved issues.
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me too. For example, I’ve just finished reading Ruddiman’ early AGW paper. Very cited paper, attacked and defended. How is it currently regarded in the field? What are the current weaknesses? Where has it held up well? I can read it and several related papers -but I can’t really understand its “ranking” in the paleo-climate-model world because I (a lay-reader) lack access to that mode of discussion which helps determine that perceived ranking, to the hallways of universities and conferences, the emails of researchers.
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Lucia has a point about scientists not quite addressing the questions being asked by the ‘doubters.’ But I think the point is a bit exaggerated by her disregard for RC. RC’s role got distorted by the pro-Mann/anti-Mann and also got sucked into belly-button gazing over the last 9 months. Thankfully they seem to have moved on. Nevertheless RCs topics are right on target. The most common complaint about RC seems to be that they do not allow doubters to fully express their doubts in the comments and don’t address those doubts to the satisfaction of the doubters. My POV is slightly different; there is a core of 3-4 commentators who come to totally dominate every thread by about the 100th comment; commentators who have become tiresomely repetitive. RC’s original posts are great. There comment threads less so.
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And then there is Science of Doom. Although I can’t vouch for the author’s profession, is nevertheless 100% science, 100% of the time. Dave Ramsey uses a term: “The Heart of a Teacher.” SoD has found that heart.
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I think we would see more climate scientists participate in the blogosphere if CA hadn’t been the one to set the tone (aggressive, combative, accusatory). I hope to see more participate over time.
Lucia,
It doesn’t matter if scientists start posting comments on WUWT, or whatever the heck it means to engage in public forums on topics that the public is talking about. That will not stop the loons from saying the greenhouse effect violates the laws of thermodynamics, that NOAA intentionally deleted cold-location stations in an effort to make the global average warmer, that a trace gas can have no effect, and so on. If members of the public are motivated to take up any idea, no matter how implausible or silly, just because it runs counter to what scientists are saying, then what is the point for scientists to further engage in online time-wasting?
Ron,
I don’t know if ‘ranking’ is a good terminology, but I get your point. RC did a recently did a retrospective on Gilbert Plass’s work, that’s maybe along the lines of what you’re talking about.
I agree; I rarely bother to look past the first 10-15 comments on RC for that reason. Same people beating the same horses. It’s a disservice to the author of the post; I might be one of the few who thinks RC would be improved with tighter moderation. This is part of why the Urs Neu guest post comment section tickled me.
Agreed entirely. Patience of a saint, that one.
I don’t know about that. It can just be a simple matter of personality and interest, or time priorities. Not everybody will want to blog. Not everybody will want to play internet whack-a-mole. What I’d like to see is more guest posts on RC, reviewing recent papers, progress, remaining obstacles. That’s the good stuff. The guest post format means you don’t have to devote much time; maybe you just put something together once every 5 years.
Re: carrot eater (Jun 17 07:32),
Who said anything about posting at WUWT. Be a little more creative. What if a blog like– say RC (though it need not be them)– actually occasionally engaged the topics brought up at these other blogs? I mean really did it– including quotes and links to discipline themselves to actually criticize what was said by maybe actually quoting, naming the person who advanced and argument and actually linking (so third parties could read the argument being countered in context to assure themselves the post is not just arguing some made up claim? While they are at it, what they were commenting on what’s said by the blogger, rather than a stray anonymous commenter?
Mind you they don’t have to do this. Maybe you are correct it would make no difference. That seems to be the reason none ever try.
Out of curiosity, why are you focused only on the group you call “the loons”?
There are plenty of people who read a variety blogs and forums who don’t know which arguments are correct. Not all arguments are of the “violates 2nd law of thermo sort”. Some are about paleo reconstructions. Some are about problems in the instrumental record of temperature measurements. Absent responses to these arguments and claims, third parties have a number of choices including: Believe the arguments and claims scientists don’t engage, dive into the literature and find their own answers, decide they don’t know the answer, or decide the answer is uncertain.
Oh, and that previous sentence is could be described as “uninteresting” because it is so obviously true, duh. But my impression is that this “uninteresting” state of affairs is not one that pleases you.
(Btw, I’m no longer seeing many claims that AGW violates the 2nd law of thermo. I find easy enough to answer when people do say it in my presence and I do answer. )
Re: Ron Broberg (Jun 17 07:28),
As far as I can see, RC addresses issues of interest to RC. But that’s not the same as engaging the specific arguments advanced in blogosphere.
It seems to me that when I point out they don’t do the latter, those who admire RC point out that they do do the former, and that’s a good thing. It may well be a good thing. But it doesn’t mean they do the latter; it also doesn’t mean I can’t point out that a gap exists in that regard.
You can consider it”criticism” to say RC doesn’t do it. But my perception is that people like to claim that someone– particularly RC actually does do a very specific thing — call it “X”– that they do not do. My response is that, well, no, they don’t actually do “X”. This is not to say they must do it. They don’t have to. If they think doing “Y” is more valuable, that’s fine. But there are consequences of no one– including RC doing “X”.
Ron
I don’t think CA’s tone has anything to do with it. Moreover, I think the tone at many pro-AGW blogs is much worse than that at CA.
Re: SteveF #46032 (Jun 16 21:23),
Yes, Keith Kloor has posted an email from Gavin Schmidt on the use of the … Lake Korttajarvi varved sediment records… in Mann08, and used that as a nucleus to propel a Judith-Curry-and-Lucia-like discussion of “How can we improve the climate science debate, and bridge the gap between mainstream climate scientists and members of the public?” (Or something like that.) His idea is to not discuss the technical details of … those records … but to focus on the larger questions instead. The Collide-a-scape post is The Main Hindrance to Dialogue (and Detente).
Time will tell if Kloor is the first one to succeed in such a venture, or if commenters drive the discussion off a cliff.
Of note to me, it is my comments at various blogs (largely The Blackboard) on … those records … that Gavin spotlights as the best example of the “pathology” that bedevils the climate science debate.
Until reading that, I was unaware that he or other major-league Consensus bloggers or scientists paid any attention whatsoever to what I write. If I’d known, there’s a couple of posts I would have completed that tell further pieces of that story. (And, I would have put them safely on my own low-traffic blog, not in the comments here. Don’t worry!)
At any rate, Gavin is participating in that thread, along with Judith Curry, Willis Eschenbach, and our own hostess. Making it interesting (unless paleoclimate reconstructions are boring, of course).
Ugh, comment eaten by WordPress. Anyway, Keith Kloor’s attempt to have a productive discussion on Lucia/Judith Curry type issues, using … those records whose name must not be said … is at Collide-a-scape, The Main Hindrance to Dialogue (and Detente).
If you think paleoclimate reconstructions are not boring, then the thread is interesting, so far.
As far as I can see, RC addresses issues of interest to RC. But that’s not the same as engaging the specific arguments advanced in blogosphere.
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RC is part of the blogosphere. They address some of the specific arguments raised in their comments. Some of the specifics are addressed by their commentators.Some go unaddressed.
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If you mean something more like “RC doesn’t address arguments raised by Watts and D’Aleo in their SPPI publication”, I gotta agree. That’s why guys like Zeke and I started blogging. It didn’t take an NAS grant to see the fallacies and flaws in that publication and the ‘skeptical’ bloggers were withholding ‘skeptical treatment’ of fellow travelers.
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I myself am not so interested in seeing scientists feel compelled to answer every question raised on the blogs. I would rather see bloggers use the medium to improve their arguments to the point they can insert them into the scientific discussion (aka “publish”). Although this is kind of a new channel for that sort of publishing, I’m pretty sure that there are bloggers capable of rising to that level. (Congratulations)
Ron is ignorant or disingenuous not to understand the degree of censorship at Real Climate. Terminology such as ‘some go unaddressed’ is revelatory.
=========================
I am sorry Lucia but I find you article to be poor and not to your usual standard. The comments that follow appear to suggest the same. And, in reply to the likes of Bugs and Bugs Bunny, Feynman never had a problem in having to explain his Physics to members of the ‘public’. He saw it as a privelege to do so as do many other members of my ‘class’, the Physicists. Climate people, for they are no more scientists my cleaner, seem to feel the need to be arrogant and rude in order to protect their information because information is power.
Ron
You can’t know what RC want to discuss because they severely censor all letters and comments.
Games that Gavin plays
Mann the Piltdown’s lifeboats’ oars.
Climate, unaddressed.
=============
In Pielke Sr’s submission to the IAC review of the IPCC, he notes that he started his blog because consensus gatekeepers would not allow alternative scientific viewpoints.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/my-comments-on-questionnaire-on-ipcc-processes-and-procedures/
You can’t know what RC want to discuss because they severely censor all letters and comments.
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False.
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My comments are rarely withheld and have never been edited. Therefore not all letters and comments are severely censored.
QED
According to Climategate emails, the RealClimate blog is just a propaganda tool used to promote AGW
RC prevents comments from being posted which disagree with the party line… so it’s no surprise that Ron Broberg’s comments make it through
What if a blog like– say RC (though it need not be them)– actually occasionally engaged the topics brought up at these other blogs?
I’m sorry, but I find this to be a ludicrous assertion, Lucia. Skeptical Science is one blog that does this on a fairly regular basis. I found an example in approximately eight seconds of searching:
Is the long-term trend in CO2 caused by warming of the oceans?
So your assertion “none ever try” is in error. Quod erat demonstrandum, as Ron Broberg might say.
As an aside, I found your remark about “quote-mining” upthread to be borderline offensive. I just asked you for examples. Blanket assertions – such as the one I’m responding to in this comment – are a sign of lazy thinking, in my opinion.
PDA (Comment#46073)
John Abraham an mechanical engineer who I think has published peer reviewed articles in climate sciens has a guest post.
Other than him, is there any reason to believe skeptical science not climate scientists? Isn’t that just another example of a blog not written by climate scientists?
PDA
I know you were just asking for examples; I think you made a good point. In fact, I agreed with you saying “Sure it would have been stronger. ” When I said I wasn’t going to hunt down the quotes, I did not mean to suggest that meant that you must accept that I am correct in “knowing”, but I still believe that the correct phrase for me to use is “I know.”
I apologize if you found this offensive, but it is true that
* I agree with you that my argument would be stronger with links and quotes,
* However, I am not going to hunt them down. My reason is that there are no good key phrases to hunt for quotes. (I believe this is called quote-mining. If that is not true, maybe you can suggest a different word.
* I still believe I know what I say is true.
Having said all that, you will note that afterwards, I provided a comment by Micheael Tobis.
Also If you visit Kloors thread, you will also find Gavin explaining that Mac’s question is moot. You may, of course, agree assessment, but that is basically Gavin telling Amac he is askign the wrong question. I’m about to go out, but if you like, when I return tomorrow I can find the quote for you.
Knowing you would like to see these links, and agreeing it would make my claim stronger, I was planning to provide the quotes and links late tomorrow. However, there is a live discussion on the thread involved, and I would like to wait for it to play out to see if further explanations change my impression of what Gavin meant.
But no, I’m not going to fire up google looking for the various and sundry conversations I know exist all over the web. I’d rather just wait and post the ones I find in live threads I am reading right now.
Lucia, this is pretty much useless. You’ll go on claiming that blogs (meaning RC, Tamino, Eli, skeptical science, etc) don’t address arguments that actually appear anywhere, when many of the rest of us think they do. So unless you give some concrete examples, this goes nowhere. Maybe this is just personal; maybe you’re just upset that other blogs don’t spend their time discussing whatever it is that you in particular want to discuss. Who knows. But the authors of all those blogs see what comes in via their comments, so they respond as they see fit. Just as Lucia writes about whatever she feels like addressing. Is their sense of what’s being discussed out there any worse than Lucia’s, just because they then don’t happen to focus on whatever it is that Lucia cares about?
In any case, I’ve said this before – I sure as heck don’t want RC to be running around, constantly addressing the entire massive volume of things coming out of the blogosphere. There’s not enough time in a day, and what’s the point. Better to just educate, debunk something now and then, and show people what resources they might have to investigate for themselves. Especially given how repetitive some of the arguments are. Other bloggers like Zeke and Ron might then pop up, and cover whatever ground happens to interest them, or what they have the ability to cover. The neat thing about the GHCN stuff is just how little specialised background you need, to do some analysis.
As for why I’m concerned with loons: because that’s where the volume is. And it goes pretty high up the ladder (Watts, d’Aleo, Goddard, etc), so it’s prominent as well. And journalists call them for comment, they are invited before Congress.. Seems like a pretty good reason to not ignore them, when we’re discussing the dynamics of the blogosphere and the masses.
Why should it fall to the practicing scientists in the field(s) to do all the blogging, debunking and basic education themselves? That’s neither necessary nor desirable. The scientists publish their work, and the guys at skeptical science compile arguments and publications that are relevant to those arguments.
Other than him, is there any reason to believe skeptical science not climate scientists? Isn’t that just another example of a blog not written by climate scientists?
I find that to be kind of a quibble: I thought the “none” in “none ever try” referred to the blogosphere as a whole. I’ll take that as a misunderstanding on my part rather than an attempt to move the goalposts.
Found a couple of examples by Barry Brook and Gavin Schmidt of posts directly responding to skeptic positions, with “quotes and links to discipline themselves to actually criticize what was said by maybe actually quoting, naming the person who advanced [an] argument and actually linking.” You may feel that their efforts fall short, but I don’t know that you can say conclusively that they “[n]ever try.”
I believe this is called quote-mining. If that is not true, maybe you can suggest a different word.
Yeah: examples. I’ve never seens the term “quote-mining” in anything other than a pejorative context. If you’re saying you meant to say “looking for quotes,” then I have no problem with that. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that you should have run right out and find quotes for my benefit.
On the interwebs, I treat “I know” statements as semantically equal to “I think,” and you’re obviously well within your rights 9especially on your own blog) to express your opinions however you derived them. To make a case persuasively, as I noted, it helps to have cites.
(for whatever reason, I can’t edit my posts: apologies for the typos above)
Ron:
“The most common complaint about RC seems to be that they do not allow doubters to fully express their doubts in the comments and don’t address those doubts to the satisfaction of the doubters. My POV is slightly different; there is a core of 3-4 commentators who come to totally dominate every thread by about the 100th comment; commentators who have become tiresomely repetitive. RC’s original posts are great. There comment threads less so.”
The complaints about RC come directly from the implementation of the comment policy described in the mails.
RC, on occassion, will use their moderation authority to block comments that make them look bad or comments that make a critic look good. They are happy to let you through when you are saying something foolish ( which I tested from different IPs using different IDs). They are happy to let you post something if they have a reasonable answer. But they dont, on occassion, let you through if you have an point that makes them look especially bad. So that’s the charge. The problem for them is once they have done this to one person, everybody can claim that they did it to them. And once they do it to you, they have made an enemy for life. But in RCs defense they are just following old school approaches to PR.
WRT the commenters at RC. It would be interesting to watch or document how conversations UNRAVEL or how conversations go down familiar paths. I used to joke that at RC all comments lead to a path discussing alternative energy.. CA I believe also goes through similar conversation evolutions.. Almost like a play with the various players making their appearences, saying their bit and exiting stage left.. and then the same people getting into the same fights, re enacting the primal scenes.. All predictably.
Kim, moshpit, TCO, boris, steve bloom, bender,… There are days I know when I feel compelled to get OUT of character, to say things I don’t mean, just to change the trajectory of the thread because we all been down this stupid road before..
So fresh meat ( i remember the day when Lucia walked into CA, bender and I were smitten. Wow, a chick who argues like a dude. must of studied aquinas or some shit like that…
.
Also, everybody can claim they were raising some difficult but relevant point, when in fact it could have just been senseless spam. Outside of Mosher’s experiments with intentionally posting drivel, everybody thinks that their comment is wonderful and valuable. There’s also a difference between posing a critical comment that’s relevant to the topic of the thread, and trying to flog your personal hobbyhorse in every single topic, no matter what the subject is.
In any case, I thought we weren’t supposed to discuss the moderation policies of other blogs at this blog..
I think it’s instructive for people to go look at the original charter of RC as gavin laid it out:
Colleagues,
No doubt some of you share our frustration with the current state of media reporting on the climate change issue. Far too often we see agenda-driven “commentary” on the Internet and in the opinion columns of newspapers crowding out careful analysis. Many of us work hard on educating the public and journalists through lectures, interviews and letters to the editor, but this is often a thankless task.
************************************
the frustration it would appear was rather concentrated on a few key individuals and a few key papers that had made there way into the MSM through the internet. Think soon and McIntyre.
the strategy is to go fight the skeptics where the skeptics live.
The scientists “normal” way of reacting, but just doing science, was seen as ineffectual. In the run up to this, the scientists had been in reactive mode. A story would break on the internet, gain traction, jump to the MSM and then the call would come from the journo. In some sense they were blindsided by the internet. In any case the decision is made to fight on the skeptics battleground. I don’t disagree with this strategy, but the tactics sucked. They sent front line forces to the internet. Mann, gavin..
That’s a mistake for a couple of reasons. First, the actual personalities were ill equipped. Second, any defeat or PERCEIVED defeat, would tar the whole field. The alternative solution of course would be to run with a proxy or mercenaries.
People who could write about science but were not scientists themselves or not top of their feild scientists. Engagement, like having gavin or mann comment on comments, was also a mistaken tactic. Once they chose to comment on comments, they were engaged in form of conversation that has some norms they might not be accustomed too. They got into a back and forth. mistake.
it would be far better to let the “public” fight it out. The fray, at slate, had a much better approach. The editor would read through the comments, select the best comments. and publish “the best of the fray” summary only very rarely would anyone on the editorial staff dip down into the fray to get it on. Good blog behavior was rewarded. Hey there’s an idea Lucia. Anthony has quote of the week, why not do a “best comment of the week”
anyway.. Continuing with Gavin..
“In order to be a little bit more pro-active, a group of us (see below)
have recently got together to build a new ‘climate blog’ website:
RealClimate.org which will be launched over the next few days at:
http://www.realclimate.org
The idea is that we working climate scientists should have a place where
we can mount a rapid response to supposedly ‘bombshell’ papers that are
doing the rounds and give more context to climate related stories or
events.
Some examples that we have already posted relate to combatting
dis-information regarding certain proxy reconstructions and supposed’refutations’ of the science used in Arctic Climate Impact Assessment.
***********
Now its also instructive to go read the first posts. Mann’s posts on peer review are VERY instructive in light of the mails behind them. And have a look at mann’s tone. Then you can understand the genesis of Climate Audit.
The point here isnt to get into a “who started the fight” My point is this.
Gavin and others right realized that they needed to fight the skeptics on the skeptics home turf. I think their tactics were flawed. I think they picked the wrong people both from a personality standpoint and PRESTIGE standpoint. I think they excercised poor judgment in the moderation protocal and in their decision to enter the fray. Direct enagement with the public on the level of comments was a mistake. A communication mistake. As much as I like hearing back from gavin on a comment it’s a mistake for him to engage me, even when I’m wrong. wrestling with the pig. But now that he HAS engaged the public, we expect it of him. we demand it. and we demand that he play by our rules. unreasonable?. doesnt really matter.
Carrot i did more experiments than just posting drivel. I think the best one was having “people” send a comment to RC that said this.
“I just read that hansen released his source code. Thank you for taking the high road.” varients of that, send from all over the world. hehe. Also, comments written by persona that used names from Fenton communications.. Those were really odd to see them blocked, as if gavin knew the names of people on Fenton’s staff, or rather who every approves comments knew.
Lucia, from my experience dealing with my customers, I know when they are not understanding what I am talking about, they start to nod their heads in agreement and their eyes go glassy. At that point I have lost them, so move to a different aspect of their problem. I am a heating geek. I do not expect most customers to be as knowledgeable as myself. But I do try to answer these customers questions in a fashion that they understand. I cannot get bored of being asked for the 1000’th time, “well if it was your house what boiler would you use?” But this of course took time and experience.
This too me is where it falls down. Most CS that engage in the public forums do not percieve us as customers, but more as students that have come to sit at their feet and be fed from their font of knowledge. Sorry, that is way too 20th century. It is time for those scientists that engage in this debate to start to realize that we, the consumer, do not like to be talked down to. (I am not talking about trolls here, they do deserve what they get.) Dr. Curry gets a lot of flak from her peers, yet they will wake up one day and realize that She realized this truth quite a bit before them. Not all people are good salesmen, so those scientists that do not want to take the general public as being equals in this debate, they should stay insulated, do their work and let the “public” CS do the selling. As in my business, I have techs who do the work, and sales people who do the sales.
The golden rule, so easy.
DeNihilist,
Sorry. You are simply not a customer, paying for the time of the scientist-blogger.
There is no reasonable expectation that scientists in any field whatsoever take every single curious person individually and spoon feed them, in the way that you describe. They shouldn’t spoon feed their own students either – the point is to get the students able to approach and solve the problems for themselves.
Anyway, it’s not terribly surprising that a person used to giving classroom lectures and the odd general public lecture would then initially adopt the same mannerisms when dealing with the public online. It’s what they do.
Anyway, I get tired of talking about talking. From Lucia, we’ve got that the scientists don’t engage closely enough on their own. From Mosher, we have who knows what, but it sort of sounds like the direct opposite. Great.
Mosher: I liked your take, and even if not all of your identified flaws in RC’s approach are valid (I’m just not sure), it does raise an interesting question for me.
RC has long embodied mainstream climate science on the internet, and given the reasons it was founded and by whom, that may have served to taint the internet debate in a problematic direction. Since Climategate there have been plenty of calls for better engagement between climate scientists and the public, but what has been the result? Judith Curry has been posting everywhere recently, but what about everybody else? von Storch, Zorita et al. started Klimatzwiebel, but that’s the only new blog I know of with input from climate scientists (though I don’t take pains to expand my blogroll). RC still represents the mainstream as far as I can tell, for good or ill.
The internet is a scary place for engagement with the public that can certainly take a lot of time and energy, but as the RC folks realized, that doesn’t mean it should be left to be “overrun” by a view they oppose. It does seem however, that with very few exceptions, climate scientists are unwilling or uninterested in exposing themselves on the blogs. So it looks to me like the asymmetry in the internet debate will persist, though I am encouraged by the moderating effect of these lukewarm bloggers I’ve come across in recent months.
As I said CE, if they deem to take time to answer me, I expect it then to be with a bit of respect. I do not expect to have all of my questions answered. I am not the customer of the scientist blogger, but I am the customer for what has been proposed by way of their research. This is the difference that so far, only a very select few CS understand.
If a theoritical Physicist discovers that future events actually do impress themselves onto present events, it costs me nothing. But the science of Climate is showing more and more that we, as humans, are going to have to change our society. This will cost all of us.
If you as a scientist, expose yourself to public scrutiny by writing a blog, then be prepared for the shit that comes with that. You cannot have your cake and eat it too.
“Why aren’t the questions the public actually has being answered by scientists or agencies? I can only speculate.”
The real value of a blog such as ‘Real Climate’ or ‘Climate Progress’ is to find out what questions aren’t being answered, what ‘lines of thought’ have strong opposition etc etc etc.
Unfortunately, the proprietors of such blogs don’t see blogs for what they mostly are, test markets.
In the world of politics and policy, what sells wins.
I think a big part of the conundrum is the “signal to noise” issue Lucia remarked on (somewhere? MT’s blog?) with comments. You have to pick through the “AL GORE IZ TEH STOOPIDZ” to get to comments where real questions are being asked, and that can be hard to do, especially in an unthreaded list.
I think there will always be some space for civil discussions (like this one), but I think it will be a small space, of value to the people who are directly engaged, but not very influential to the general discussion. Even if all the leading climate scientists and the most prominent skeptics en masse took a Judith Curry tone in their communications, I think the smashmouth style would carry the day.
It’s just my opinion, and I’ll be glad if I’m wrong.
steven mosher (Comment#46081)-Aquinas, eh? Now there was a sharply logical man. Enough so that even though she was an Atheist, Ayn Rand still considered him, Aristotle, and Herself, the only philosophers she could recommend.
I myself first heard the Argumentum ex motu, and Argumentum ex ratione causae efficientis, I thought that someone had been reading my mind. Mind you, I was like ten at the time, and I don’t necessarily subscribe to the philosophical beliefs I independently formulated while daydreaming as a child, but I knew instantly that Aquinas was “like me”-like I was back then-someone who spent his time trying to understand the world and formulating logical arguments. Not to sound arrogant, but that is the mark of a formidable intellect in my opinion.
Paul Daniel Acciavatti (Comment#46091)
“I think the smashmouth style would carry the day.
It’s just my opinion, and I’ll be glad if I’m wrong.”
I hope you are wrong, but who knows? I think it would be worth a try. The key is (I think) to simply not respond to comments that are obviously ‘smashmouth’ and contain little else. People who post such comments are rewarded whenever somebody engages them; no engagement means no reward for bad behavior.
The key is (I think) to simply not respond to comments that are obviously ’smashmouth’ and contain little else. People who post such comments are rewarded whenever somebody engages them; no engagement means no reward for bad behavior.
Steve, please take this in the spirit with which it’s intended, but I’ve seen (and occasionally offered) this advice since the USENET days. I think feeding trolls is like scratching bug bites: you can tell people that it’ll just make the problem worse, but they keep doing it.
All that being said, I certainly think it is worth a try.
Well, since I’m formulating these thoughts on the fly lemme just rap..
First strategy. When RC is founded you have a tangible threat. I won’t go pull the mails, but the situation WRT Soon and MM 2003
was out of control as far as Gavin and Mann could see. It had to be frustrating to work with journalists from the aspect of TEACHING THEM and then have the tables turned where the Journos were asking about stuff ( say on the internet) that was of dubious quality. So they understood the how the threat worked. Outside the traditional channels. the counter strategies from a PR perspective are pretty straight forward.
1. Ignore the threat
2. Delegitimize the threat— its not peer reviewed.. a dangerous
countermeasure as they found out AND as they recognized.
this is the fight on your own turf approach.
3. Meet the threat on its own turf.
4. Embrace the threat or Co-op.
I mean those are the things we do. any other strategies before we monday morning quarterback the decisions.? They actually did 2 & 3.
can you all see the danger in #2? Mann did when that strategy backfired. It was the overpeck strategy.
So, you either ignore the threat, meet on your turf, meet on their turf, or Co-op them.
PDA
I concede those are actual attempts– and in fact do things the way I suggest. I don’t even think the fell short. I don’t know if I agree with everything– but it is done the way I think it should be.
So, you are right some exist. My impression is this is very, very rare, but yes, I overstated with “none”.
Also– sorry about the editing problem feature. I undid a change I made yesterday. I hope that fixes it. If not, let me know. (I can’t verify in situ easily myself because I, as admin, am granted permission to edit everything by wordpress. Of course, I can log of, write a test comment, see if I can edit etc. But, I’m about to leave the house to take my mother to the doctors for test and won’t be back until tomorrow.)
PDA
It’s nearly inevitable that trolls derail a conversation. It only takes one person to scratch the itch. In this light, the strategy of moving certain people to their own threads (as Deltoid does) makes some sense. Or, just delete the noise.
Now, when a majority of the comments are off topic noise, that’s perhaps beyond saving.
In case anyone’s curious, just found the link to Fox Keller’s conference talk on climate science & politics/publics. It’s become part of a college radio broadcast that I can’t recommend in its entirety, but I’m pretty sure she’s been touring as a speaker with this message for a while (Evelyn Fox Keller’s a pretty big name in the history of science). The talk starts at 12:00 in part 1 (http://secure.ckut.ca/64/20100609.11.30-12.00.mp3), but I’d recommend the bit at 10:30 in program 2 (https://secure.ckut.ca//64/20100616.11.30-12.00.mp3) where she quickly discusses Climategate and the “contrarians”, and then lays out her call for scientists to communicate better with lay readers which is followed up on in the Q&A section afterward, especially at 18:40 where she insists that the training of scientists needs to change to include public outreach.
Mosher says
Yeah, RC and the CRU, they are idiots because they have no training in fighting in a pig pen, but in doing science standards the traditional way, publishing papers. You have been successfully vandalising science, and seem to take great pride in the fact. M&M tried publishing a paper, but you can’t snark, so if it’s just a trivial nitpick, it just disappears. On the internet you get to put in the grandstanding BS, then you get a hit. Or you can publish in E&E, which is run by former paid tobacco ‘skeptic’.
Soon and Baliunas caused half the board of the journal that published it to resign because it was obvious there was a scam, someone on the board had snuck through a paper that misrepresented the papers that it used as sources.
You also don’t see too many papers by astrophysicists with this on them.
LOL.
Seems like Lucia really gets upset when RC doesn’t link to whichever blogger or columnist they are replying to, when they are in mole-whacking mode. I think it’s better to always give a few links, though sometimes an argument is so pervasive that a specific link isn’t wholly necessary.
Looking over their archives, sometimes RC links back, sometimes they don’t. Taking a quick sample, it looks like they do link or cite more often than they don’t; somebody could tally it up if they really cared.
I’m suspecting that Lucia is just cross because RC has talked about short term trends here and there, but (so far as I know) not specifically linked to and discussed specifically whatever Lucia did. Well, she’ll have to settle for the attention of Annan.
bugs,
While you’re LOLing and looking under your bed for evil funding sources, you might want to ponder this:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history/
Evil oil and energy money indeed.
bugs,
“Yeah, RC and the CRU, they are idiots because they have no training in fighting in a pig pen, but in doing science standards the traditional way, publishing papers. ”
I didnt say they were idiots. However, they either did not seek advice from professionals or sought advice from the wrong professionals. As you read through the mails it almost appears as if Mann called all the shots. Now, I know nothing about fixing a linear accelerator. If you asked me to do it, I would say “no get somebody who understands it.” If you asked me to iron clothes, I might THINK I can do it. After all, I’m pretty smart. So I might watch somebody do it, maybe read a book, and then in an act of monumental hubris I might pick up an iron and destroy my nice silk shirt. Who would I blame then. The iron manufacturer? the book writer? the person I watched. They thought it was easy to run a blog. Thought it was easy to set a record straight. You’ll find a similiar attitude with Michael Tobis. It’s easy to watch a journalist and second guess them. Its easy to think that you can write just as well. After all, youre a scientist. It’s a simple question. Which strategy do you think was right and why? can you articulate your beliefs about that. Your thoughts about me are frankly boring.
carrot eater (Comment#46104) June 17th, 2010 at 3:55 pm
Seems like Lucia really gets upset when RC doesn’t link to whichever blogger or columnist they are replying to, when they are in mole-whacking mode. I think it’s better to always give a few links, though sometimes an argument is so pervasive that a specific link isn’t wholly necessary.”
That’s a strategy. flawed.
All tests, the same result;
It’s the sensitivity.
Listen to the Doc.
=============
I have a question for the scientific incrowd here. First of all: I am a layman, so bear with me if I ask dumb questions.
Here is the thing I have been thinking about. In all reconstruction efforts (hockey sticks) basically the idea is that we can more or less calibrate radial tree growths relation with temperature because we do have direct temperature reading for, say, the last half century. But, as I have been thinking, CO2 levels have been going up too. And CO2 is also a resource for growth. Photosynthesis is basically like this: CO2 +H20 + light -> organic compounds. How sure are we that the recent increase in yearly radial growth is not partly a direct result of the increase in atmospheric CO2 levels? Or is this compensated for in the reconstructions?
PS: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091204092445.htm
Lucia,
My take on this (professional meteorologist with an air quality specialization) is that the missing piece is the link between science and policy making. The difference you discuss between scientific and public discussions does not address the link between science and policy development.
My greatest disappointment in EPA is that they did not hold the CO2 endangerment finding to the same level of transparency that has been the practice in past ambient air quality standard development. In the past the data used to make the arguments has been available, was under intense scrutiny, led to independent development of data sets, and ultimately a better product. Instead, EPA said the IPCC did acceptable work and we will rely on that.
As we have seen, transparent and readily available data were not hallmarks of the IPCC work. Moreover, it appears that the scientists developing the data did not account for the fact if their analyses are to be used for major policy development that it must have a different standard than the usual scientific discussions. Given the failure of EPA to demand transparency and the rise of public discussions on the blogs, the public discussions filled the void.
In this example, the public discussion addressed reconstructions because the problem with the reconstructions is that nuance does matter. It is clear there is climatic warming. The amount of warming does matter if you want to convince society to give up whatever needs to be given up to reduce warming. I appreciate the effort of everyone who has developed an independent reconstruction because in this case I think a consensus has standing. However, given the stakes and the impact on society I strongly support the suggestion to develop an independent data set to confirm that society has to give up greenhouse gas emissions to save the planet.
In conclusion, the public discussions have filled the void left when the policy makers did not demand the same level of transparency as other pollution standard development processes. Frankly, most of the technical issues raised should have been addressed in a satisfactory policy development process. With all due respect, climate scientists entered the policy realm innocent of the degree of scrutiny to be expected when their results affect people’s ways of lives. If folks really want to change the world then transparency is of utmost importance.
Roger Caiazza, CCM
Someday we are going to rue the day when sloppiness with the handling of the public’s surface temperature data base created the need for a private one, from which the public and policymakers will be excluded.
=============
So, you are right some exist. My impression is this is very, very rare
We have very differing impressions, then, and one of us is quite mistaken. I mean, depending on the frame we choose the outcome will differ, but if the parameters are:
* specific;
* links back;
* responsive (i.e. addresses the issue rather than distorting/strawmanning); and
* comprehensive
then my impression is that such posts are not “very, very rare,” “very rare” or even “rare,” but somewhere between “frequent” and “common.” Limit it to working climate scientists only and the frequency drops, but not below the noise floor. Those responses are out there. This isn’t a question of opinion: whether your impression or mine is the correct one is something that can be confirmed.
A separate question is whether these responses are effective in educating “the public,” and in this context I’m using the term as Lucia does: those people with questions, or who have a concern that the reality are different than what mainstream science says it is. This group includes CE’s loons.
My opinion (backed by very little other than my own observation and tinted by curmudgeonliness) is that they’re not effective, or only marginally so. I believe it’s because – especially but not only in the Anglosphere – the climate “debate” is mostly a proxy for the culture war. Note how often skeptic blogs reference conservative culture issues; likewise “warmer” blogs and progressive matters. It’s not monolithic, but the correspondence is strong, and pervasive.
Any attempt at reconciliation or communication between the camps has to take cultural values into account, in my opinion.
Lucia, I hope all goes well with your mom. I’ve taken mine in to more doctors than I can count and have become a fair “skeptic” of the ability of medical science to figure out what happens to us as we age. Get second, third, fourth opinions. Best wishes.
(I’m using different computers at different points in the day, with different auto-fill setting on my screen name. Sorry for any confusion.)
PDA, I’m sorry to say that 2nd, 3rd, and 4th opinions in this day and age often involve variants of drug therapy. The reason we’ve reached this blind impasse about our health is that the gold standard for medical research has been the prospective, double-blinded, placebo controlled trial. What modality besides drug therapy can be both placebo controlled and double-blinded? Sure, it is possible to imagine one, but the search for truth in this case did not lead to a level playing field.
So, here we are.
================
I’m even sorrier to say, PDA, that I agree with your points about culture wars.
Here is the really sad irony. The only way that the wishes and dreams of the progressives can possibly come true is if the world warms enough for us to be prosperous enough to carry out the luxuries envisioned by the social planners of the left. If the globe cools, as I suspect it will, then the apocalyptic horses stampede and we will necessarily revert to time tested values and the cultures derived therefrom.
So the outcome of the culture wars will depend upon the climate, which we cannot predict.
Not yet. Wait ’til we have a private surface temperature record.
===========================
PDA.
” I believe it’s because – especially but not only in the Anglosphere – the climate “debate†is mostly a proxy for the culture war. Note how often skeptic blogs reference conservative culture issues; likewise “warmer†blogs and progressive matters. It’s not monolithic, but the correspondence is strong, and pervasive.”
largely correct. An interesting exercise is to watch the conflict in values that occur for certain people.
I’ll take Hulme as an example. It would appear that Hulme has an issue with hegemony of any kind. At the start of the IPCC the hegemony in question would be FF interests. now the hegemony is the IPCC itself. That’s a sketchy view of how I see Hulme evolving..
peeke (Comment#46121) June 18th, 2010 at 4:29 am
go to CA. search for C02 fertilization.
steven mosher (Comment#46108) June 17th, 2010 at 4:49 pm
Given that they make these claims thgrough no other means than a blog on the webspace, which are directed at no on in particular, that the responses will be made in a similar fashion. That is hardly surprising. A real political dialogue is something quiet different to one in which you are expected to web surf to find a particular piece of snark that happens to be expecting a response.
Lucia,
Good post, and on a very important topic.
First off, I think the citizen efforts towards more temp reconstructions are great. It’s a good example of how the energy of well educated and technically competent laypeople (i.e. those not professionally engaged in climate science) can be used constructively (rather then either dismissed or used unconstructively). This is also a topic of discussion at Keith’s, eg on this thread http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2010/06/13/tom-joe-unplugged/comment-page-1/#comment-7728 with Judith Curry also participating and elsewhere on the same site.
Judith Curry warns for this collective energy not to be dismissed; I think she’s right. OTOH, I’m warning that this collective energy should not be used for unconstructive purposes, which imho is often the case, and a prime reason of why scientists try to dismiss it. From that point of view, I think this a very positive development. But without having followed it in detail, you are right that there are many issues that could be explored further, and eg I’ve seen quite some interesting analyses here from Zeke, on the influence of siting issues, UHI, etc. I understand that some of these efforts are also considered for publication in the scientific literature, which is fantastic.
Lucia points out that the mainstream reconstructions and investigations of similar issues has not been resolved to the satisfaction of doubters. That seems indeed to be the case (understatement). It’s also in line with what I said, that more temp reconstructions were not deemed necessary by most scientists (note that this is not much more than a hunch or at most an educated guess).
You then discuss that many of the more technical questions are not adequately addressed by either scientists or government agencies.
I think your first answer as to why that is is quite true: There is no reward for scientists to engage in public communication. They are rewarded for doing well in their ivory towers. I would very much like to see that changed btw, and I think I’m hardly alone.
I could imagine more reasons. Some of these issues may have long been resolved to most scientists’ satisfaction, yet no one single source deals with it as a single issue, exactly because, using your example, “Explain in elaborate detail what one might know about UHIâ€, is often not seen as a proper subject for a peer reviewed article. It may be a conclusion that’s been built up over time, scattered over multiple papers. It could also be that some technical issues are not deemed germane to the major issue that is being discussed by proxy, eg “What should we do about AGW, if anything at all?â€. If the technical details, and minor flaws therein, are used as an alibi to answer this question with “nothing whatsoeverâ€, then people naturally get skeptical about the purpose of the technical discussions. See eg my reply to Steve Fitzpatrick at Keith’s: http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2010/06/13/tom-joe-unplugged/comment-page-1/#comment-7804 : He asserted that “A constructive discussion about the best public actions to address global warming depends very much on the absence of major doubts about the magnitude and certainty of that warming.†I’d say, it depends indeed on the trust in the main conclusions of climate science that have policy relevance, but *not* on the technical details that we’re talking about here. Otherwise the talk about those details start to look like a delay strategy and scientists will disengage. Of course, it’s also quite possible that individuals are a little embarrassed at minor flaws found, and would rather not engage and hope the attention for the flaw will go away. As MT said at CA: “Finally, when (and to be sure this does happen) the critics do latch onto something that could have been done better, there is tremendous motivation not to admit it and little motivation to come clean. This is because the admissions are not treated as graceful efforts to improve process, but as occasions to broadly generalize about motivations and competency, apparently with the intention of further undermining trust.†And of course there could be a myriad of other reasons.
I agree with your suggestion that “Even if these detailed discussions do not belong in brief journal articles, they could still be published as an agency report and made available at various reports servers like NASA Technical Reports Servers, or DOE’s OSTI.â€. That could be a very constructive way to still the hunger for specific detail of the technically savvy citizen-scientists and bridge the gap between the scientists and this segment of the public. Actually this is a *great* suggestion.
The points you raise, and your and other technical blogs in general, also show that the dualistic view of professional scientists on the one hand and the public on the other hand is too simplistic (esp if the public is deemed ‘ignorant’ of the science). Much as I like these blog posts (by Bob Grumbine and myself, resp, about the difference between scientific and public discussions of the science):
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/the-nature-of-blogging-having-a-beer-vs-the-nature-of-science/
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/scientific-debate-and-the-media/ ) it is clear that there is a continuum of interest, knowledge, sincerity, etc amongst the public. These citizen-scientist projects make it clear that there is no sharp divide between scientists and the technically savvy public, just as somebody can have great skill in repairing cars, while doing so in his spare time next to his job as a scientist (not me, I may add).
See also this example of how a blogger’s initiative turned into some solid science:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/04/science-story-the-making-of-a-sea-level-study/
Let me start by taking the rare opportunity to agree with Tom Fuller. This is an excellent and insightful piece. Thank you.
In response, I think the most important thing I have to bring to the table is a point I’ve been trying to make for the last couple of weeks that has stubbornly failed to jump the gap. It is this: we are outnumbered.
Even if we (and here, despite being a marginal case, I have the temerity to include myself) had some mechanism for detecting which questions were being asked by serious people with substantial backgrounds, even if we had better insights into what is common knowledge outside the field, what is commonly unknown, and what common myths abound, we would be hard pressed to answer the questions effectively.
This is because there are few of us. There are perhaps five billion people with enough interest in climate to ask questions and perhaps 50,000 with enough understanding and context to reliably answer a good fraction of them and know when they are on solid ground. Of those, perhaps 20% have an interest and capacity to communicate with the general public, and of those, perhaps 20% are willing and able to put a serious fraction of their time into it, or maybe 2000 people. On that (very crude, admittedly) estimate, people with a willingness and ability to answer questions soundly are outnumbered by a ration of a million to 4.
Additionally, we are outnumbered by those who attempt to answer questions based on a “belief in” “AGW”, a generally alarmist tendency, and some overconfidence, who often appear to be talking for us. These “allies” may or may not help with the broad public. Perhaps they do. But in addressing technically and/or scientifically sophisticated people, they do not help at all.
The appropriate transmission mechanisms form science to the public exist in an institutional sense: teachers, journalists and outreach specialists should be doing the job. In practice, all of them are shy of certain types of controversy, and climate science has been painted with just such a brush of controversy so that these natural channels are somewhat cut off. Additionally, the scientific actual competence of the practitioners of those professions is limited, and often inadequate to address the more serious questioners.
(This leaves aside other disadvantages we face in terms of ideological inclinations and cultural associations. I’m just adding another point that I think has not been noted.)
All that said I absolutely agree that questions, especially technically competent questions, should be answered. Additionally, outreach should include questions of emphasis, which relates to my criticism of your site which you quote above.
I do what I can; I hope to do more fairly soon.
I hope this note goes some way toward explaining why this has not gone well so far, and why it may be difficult or impossible to do much better with existing resources.
Re: Paul Daniel Acciavatti (PDA) (Jun 18 08:10),
Not a problem. I recognize the longer name better than the shorter one though. 🙂
As you and other readers can probably guess, I dropped out of comments yesterday afternoon.
Carrot Eater,
just wanted to thank you for helping the Deniers Recruiting effort. The more you bloviate the more reasonable people are pushed to our side!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Very rarely, it seems to me, is the key question addressed. That being: are human CO2 emmission dangerous.
This thread is a great example. How much time/effort/energy has been put into calculating a global average temperature metric that nobody/beast/thing experiences. And even if you finally get it right and you can convince yourself it means something, all you have is a measure of change (and a not very big one at that). The metric would, in no way, address the central question: Are human CO2 emmissions dangerous.
Remember, we already know that climate can change in the absence of human CO2 emmissions (repeat this three times).
I’d like to see a blog titled “Is It CO2?”. This blog would address that question only – nothing else. It would show evidence for/against the case the CO2 (not nature) is altering the climate. And not get bogged down in peripherals.
Later there might be a second blog called “and is it dangerous”. Much later a third called “and what should we do”.
This, or similar, frustrations with normal news sources are what drives blogs IMHO. Many people recognize that what passes for “climate news” are scary stories, appeals to authority, cheerleading for favored policies, and other nonsense.
looks like sea surface temps are in free fall
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps be prepared for some big falls in mean surface temps in coming months
Temperatures are in free fall where Iive right now, it’s night time. I expect they will rise again in the morning. In the long term, the trend is up.
Hah, a couple of months ago, Atmoz censored my comment and several previous ones after I reminded his wrecking crew that the El Nino was about to end. That was a great thread in which I defended Andy Revkin, but half of it’s down the memory hole.
===========================
I think one of the greatest problems the public has is that the CS are all on the same side and appear to be a small clique of friends. The IPCC increased this problem with the whole consenses theory. To the public there has always been two sides in every science debate of importance.
Because of this they have not seen any debate (or very limited) between the professionals to actually help inform them as to which side has the correct evidence.
Many layman have then tried to create a debate by taking the opposite position to the climate community to see if their science is indeed rugged. This is what I percieve most of the blogging community is trying to achieve in this struggle.
KBH (Comment#46176) June 20th, 2010 at 3:22 pm
What debates are there two sides to? Evolution? Vaccination? Gravity?
Those debates had two sides that the public could get an idea of the arguments and that the science was being properly policed by the scientists involved. Others include atomic structure, solar system structure, use of atomic weapons on the planet, breaking the sound barrier, use of GMO. The mainstream ideas are usually correct, but the arguments were typically done by two sides that hopefully had equal standing in the field.
The public has not seen any debate between the scientists involved is my point. Therefore the science has to somehow be tested for the assumptions that are being used. Are these assumptions accurate to the system that is being modelled.
Just so you know, I am not a creationist, my kids and dogs have had all their shots and I don’t float above the ground on occasion.
bugs is equating gravitation to a highly politicized debate with wing-bats abound on both sides of the debate.
The concept of “sides” is not useful. This is not a sporting competition or beauty contest. This is about the discovery of objective reality. Such a discovery contains false starts, dead ends, short cuts and long smooth cruises. There *is* no destination either.
The problem with RealClimate and the consensus bloggers is their defensiveness. I understand that when you feel under attack that circulating the wagons seems like a good idea.
This overreaction, however, produces a response that the consensus team is weak, uncertain and incompetent. Coupled with a media assault for the past 10- to 15-years that blames every single blip in the world caused by Global Warming. The consensus team was involved with selling Global Warming. Have you noticed that Andy Revkin won’t take a crap without Joe Romm’s permission?
Basically, consensus team comes off as multi-level marketers.
This is why septics have gained so much momentum.
If the consensus team cannot explain all of the science at an 8th-grade level, it is obvious that either
1) you don’t understand the material, or
2) your theory is bollocks.
Howard,
please explain a transistor at an 8th grade level, just to demonstrate how it is done.
Carrick
I don’t think bugs did any such thing; he’s simply trying to seek clarification on what on earth KBH means. I’m also unclear on what KBH means, and still am, even after additional comment.
KBH
I think you are confusing different strands here. What you’re thinking of with these issues is probably more a policy debate than one over the fundamental physics, chemistry or biology. There’s not exactly any sort of scientific controversy over whether the sound barrier exists; the controversy is whether it should be broken over land. In that sense, there is all manner of discussion over what sorts of policy response there might be to climate change – I don’t see how you can possibly miss it. The policy debate is informed by the science, and has to take into account the uncertainty in the science, but it is a whole other discussion unto itself, largely led by non-scientists and ultimately decided by non-scientists.
As for the purely scientific side of it, I think your perspective that there somehow hasn’t been ‘debate’ is simply lacking in reality. Go back and look at how the literature has developed over the decades. It’s the same as any other scientific field, in that sense. Incremental progress, ideas proposed, some refined, some rejected. The field(s) aren’t exactly how they were in 1930, 1950, or 1970, and there will always be questions for which there is not yet any ‘consensus’ answer.
That’s bizarre. Some things can be simplified such that an 8th grader can be made to understand a qualitative sketch of the idea. For the greenhouse effect, you could do this as well, though the sketch would necessarily miss a lot of detail. For any topic, deeper and more fundamental understanding would require deeper education and training. And for some things, even a simplified cartoon sketch with any value would be elusive – somebody try to do it for special relativity.
The problem that i see is that the debate’s focus is around the temperatures rising. I think almost everyone agrees that it is rising. What does this debate prove about the source or cause of the rising temperature. Absolutly nothing! The public wants to know if the rise is due to CO2 or not. The current debate that if the temperature rises then its CO2, if it falls its not CO2 is a falsehood. The temperature may continue to rise from some other unknown source. Therefore the argument never ends. My personal view is that I want to know the source and if it is something we can actually do anything about, but at this point i am not into wrecking the whole of our society to do so based primarily on a correlation.
KBH
Depending on what corner of the internet you’re hanging out on, I suppose.
This appears contradictory to your previous sentence. If almost everyone agrees it is rising, then how is the debate focused on that aspect?
As it is, I don’t think there’s much agreement on this matter when it comes to the internet chatter box, judging from comments left by random people.
KBH, I think you’re just flat-out missing huge amounts of discussion, both scholarly and among the general public. Attribution is no small part of the scientific discussion, and meanwhile in the more public debate, the sceptics are constantly bringing up their own alternative causative factors.
There is certainly debate on AGW, if you look around.
http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2010_05_01_archive.html
James is an official climate modeller, and disagrees with some of the science, and says so from time to time. He is, however, scathing about the non-debate, such as McLean and other nonsense. So I think you need to clarify just what the debate should constitute. Poor Science of Doom is trying to walk people through the science step by step, but he is just one more ship foundering on the rock of determined ignorance.
http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/06/12/venusian-mysteries/
Some people can not be convinced of anything, and will accuse everyone else of being ignorant of basic science, such as Bob Armstrong.
Science is objective, to the extent that we can make it so. The results of the discoveries of science are a completely different matter. Scientists can tell us what to do or make us do it. The IPCC did come up with suggestions, which were apparently designed to enable them to take over the planet, and have been pretty well ignored either way. However, no one else has come up with anything better. The default proposal is that the course of action for humans will be to adapt. Nature will make it’s usual response to a rapid change in climate and organise a mass extinction.
Carrot Eater
This appears contradictory to your previous sentence. If almost everyone agrees it is rising, then how is the debate focused on that aspect?
The debate is focused on how much of a temperature rise is currently happening. This is a fools errand.
Attribution is no small part of the scientific discussion, and meanwhile in the more public debate, the sceptics are constantly bringing up their own alternative causative factors.
How may I ask does the community respond to these alternative ideas? Do they research them or do they minimalize the people who have proposed them.
KBH (Comment#46189) June 20th, 2010 at 9:35 pm
There are more ‘alternative’ ideas out there with no merit than there are scientists with time to respond to them. There more persistent have been responded to. Realclimate spends a lot of time doing exactly that. Scienceofdoom is trying to work from first principles to get the basics sorted out, but I think he must be realising that there are plenty of people out there who cannot and will not accept even the most ‘hard’ evidence there is for the fundamental physics.
bugs
Presumably you meant to write “can’t”
I’ve never given much attention to WGIII, but I think you should be careful with the wording here. WGIII gives an overview of different possible responses that have been discussed in the literature it reviewed. It gave some potential pros and cons for the different responses. But I don’t think you can say it actively suggested or recommended any specific policy action.
‘Mass extinction’? Can you support this with the text of WGII?
KBH,
KBH, much of the alternative ideas come out of the sun, in some way shape or form. Since anybody’s physical understanding of the climate would account for changes in solar irradiation, solar impacts are continually researched. However, sceptic claims along the line of “the sun did it” tend not to get very far because the corresponding observations just aren’t there. The other main branch of sceptic alternatives is given as ill-described natural cycles. Natural variability is also researched, though it’s hard to work with sceptic arguments in particular because they’re often based on assertion rather than any sort of physical mechanism that is coherent in physics theory and consistent with a broad range of observations.
And perhaps one thing you’re missing is that the influence of atmospheric composition (greenhouse gases) is not fingered through simple correlation, but through a quantifiable physical mechanism. And it has certain characteristics that other causing factors wouldn’t have.
Gad, carrot, you keep flogging it. We can’t characterize the sun’s or the natural cycles input well yet because we don’t know enough about them . And your ‘certain characteristics that other causing factors wouldn’t have’ are not being demonstrated.
It’s the sensitivity, stupid, and I use ‘stupid’ as a term of art since I know you are not stupid. Now bullheaded, yep. It’s not what you know that gets you in trouble, well, you know the drill. You pretend to knowledge about the effect of CO2 that you don’t have.
==================
That’s an interesting assertion in its own right. What is the physical explanation for El Nino, and are predictions from the current theory consistent with any observations?
I don’t think I could explain it to an eighth grader!
It involves the equatorial waveguide, and a positive feedback in perturbations to the Walker circulation. It’s pretty well understood. As I understand it, predictability beyond a few months remains elusive, though.
Here’s a nontechnical summary: http://is.gd/cXbdP
I’m not sure this explanation is clear, but it may give you the more technical flavor of the beast: http://is.gd/cXaYc
This little woefully overpriced book is the best place to start for a serious study: http://is.gd/cXaQk .
hth
Michael Tobis,
Thanks for the links. It was meant as a rhetorical question for carrot eater.
Oliver
P.S.: I am not, as it happens, an eighth grader, so I’d be happy to hear your take on the “coherency” and “consistency” of the physical theory behind El Nino any time. 😉
Oliver, without context it’s hard for readers of a very short comment to know if you’re really looking for information or posing “a question for its persuasive effect without the expectation of a reply… used by the speaker to assert or deny something.”
Just FYI.
“Attribution is no small part of the scientific discussion”
Without resorting to the peer reviewed literature, where can I find a focused, coherent attribution discussion?
I don’t see one in the MSM or on blogs – not that I read every blog, but I try to peruse blogrolls periodically.
The context was given by the quoted section. The sense of irony had to be brought by the reader, however.
I clicked over to the J&J link above. It’s an example of what furstrates me and, I think, others.
I assume the point is that: if the models match the global average temperature, then that implies that CO2 is an important climate driver (maybe I misunderstand). Nowhere is there discussion of how the models differ and the only output considered is the global average temperature. Matching this metric seems (way) overly simplified, to me. Don’t we have more sophisticated metrics/observations against which we can compare model peformance? Wouldn’t a more sophisticated comparison allow us to learn meaningful things about how the models are constructed?
Anyway, if there is a blog devoted to attribution I’d be interested in reading it.
Re: Michael Tobis (Jun 20 23:30),
Please note, Oliver wrote this:
BTW:
In fact, I have very good reasons to suspect oliver understands a lot about ENSO– in fact much more about ENSO than you do.
I’d love to encourage you as a climatologist, to engage oliver in a discussion on the consistency of of ENSO with the theory about ENSO, that would be very interesting. I think we all might learn something.
oliver–
I got the irony because I have more information about who you are than others here do. When I read what you wrote, I figured you meant there is very little consistency with the theory MT linked, and, possibly, this is something you would expect a climatologist to be aware of.
oliver (Comment#46202) June 21st, 2010 at 5:20 am
Michael Tobis made a valid point, you have completely ignored it, and instead decided to play verbal games. Not so much irony as trolling.
bug–
Oh? Michael prefaced his comment with a sentence that could easily appear to be a snide dig:
He then wrote something that appears to claim ENSO is pretty well understood.
Of course, “pretty well understood” can mean anything — which might elicit a dig back.
Oliver’s responded to possible double-dig using irony, but I would definitely like MT to engage Oliver on this:
It’s just a guess, but I’m betting MT not only won’t be able to explain it to an 8th grader, but he also won’t be able to explain it to people with ph.d.s in oceanography.
Easy, Arndt did it: The climate is the continuation of the ocean by other means. Quiz in the AM.
=============
And no, Kevin, no credit for imaginative theories about missing heat. Show your work.
==================
lucia (Comment#46209) June 21st, 2010 at 6:20 am
Well, you can’t win can you? MT tries to make a point, that is on topic, it makes perfect sense to me, people choose to derail it into a trolling session.
The point being made was, it was claimed that if you can’t explain a topic of science to an eigth grader, you don’t understand the science. MT points out that there are plenty of examples of science that you won’t be able to explain to an eigth grader. Rather than conced the point, Oliver decides to derail onto who has the bigger understanding of ENSO. Perhaps he does, but it hardly addresses the point under discussion. It also probably goes without saying that MT knows more about the atmosphere than Oliver does. So what?
Oliver
I am not, as it happens, an eighth grader, so I’d be happy to hear your take on the “coherency†and “consistency†of the physical theory behind El Nino any time.
.
And you are right to ask these questions .
While the oscillations following a stress impulse applied to the sea surface are no rocket science and can be qualitatively explained to any eighth grader , they are in no way something that allows to say that “everything is pretty well understood” 😉
What follows this simple qualitative answer of the system to a stress impulse becomes MUCH more muddy later on .
The passage to reality happens with many “it suggests that …” , “it seems that …” , “the system prefers a certain frequency region …” .
.
Lucia got it best when she said :
It’s just a guess, but I’m betting MT not only won’t be able to explain it to an 8th grader, but he also won’t be able to explain it to people with ph.d.s in oceanography.
.
Actually nobody has a clue why the frequencies are what they are and even less what they’ll be .
That’s why nobody is able to make even a semi resonable mid term prediction .
And here it indeed includes PhDs as well as eight graders .
While Tobis sticks his nose it all where it ain’t so, let’s not forget carroteater and his misunderestimation of natural cycles and the sun and his overunderstanding of CO2. It’s just as plain as day what he does, so why doesn’t he see it?
I’ve begun to think ‘agnostic’ is a better term than ‘skeptic’. We know so little about this gigantic analog computer which regulates our climate.
The oceans, without Kevin’s missing heat, will cool the earth for the next two decades. If Livingstone and Penn’s Cheshire Cat sunspots presage a minimum driven cooling then we may cool for a century or so.
The chances of a social holocaust, there’s that word, from a cooling climate far outweigh the chances of one from a warming climate, at least for the near, century scale, term. I’m not talking about comparative outcomes, rather, that we are far more likely to cool than warm. Unless, of course, CO2 turns out to be a stronger greenhouse gas than it appears to be so far.
If we are wrongfooted into mitigating a warming that isn’t happening instead of adapting to a cooling that is happening then there will be Hell to pay, and the payment will be accompanied by the drumming of apocolyptic horses’ hooves.
=================
Tom, I have a clue to the frequency, but can’t interest Leif in it. The shapes of the peaks of the cosmic waves alternate solar cycles, and there are approximately three solar cycles in each phase of the putative PDO. He says its all second order stuff, though.
================
Heh, cosmic rays. Believe me, I am as ignorant as I sound.
============
Bugs
MT’s response may appear to make perfect sense to you. But here’s a question for you: Is his claim that ENSO is pretty well understood correct?
Yours is a very odd reading of the conversation point about 8th graders was being made by whom?
I’ve scanned back and Oliver didn’t make any claim about being anyone needing to explain things to 8th graders. That exchange involved Howard and MT. Oliver didn’t participate in it at all and we have no idea what his opinion is about who is correct in Howard and MT’s rather silly argument about 8th graders. Oliver isn’t required to conceed MT’s “point” about 8th graders because he wasn’t involved in that discussion at all.
What was Oliver doing? He was pretty well sticking to physics. In comment oliver (Comment#46195), Oliver merely asked Carrot a to support his claim about natural variability about ENSO.
Here’s the perfectly substantive question oliver asked:
Then MT jumped into the CarrotEater/oliver conversation– which had absolutely nothing to do with 8th graders. When MT lumbered in, he persisted in his argument with Howard, polluting the thread focused on physics with his on going arguments about 8th graders. Neither oliver or carrot were discussing this theory about explaining to 8th graders.
In the process of drawing in this extraneous non-physics arguments into the Carrot/Oliver conversation, MT then proceeds to not answer the actual question Oliver posed, which was, “What is the physical explanation for El Nino, and are predictions from the current theory consistent with any observations?”
Oliver’s response shows that he would like MT to specifically focus on “are predictions from the current theory consistent with any observations?”
I think it’s clear that Oliver, who is not an 8th grader, would be satisfied with MT giving an explanation at a level that might not be understood by an 8th grader. MT says ENSO is pretty well understood. So… does he mean he understands it pretty well? If so, is he willing and able to explain it at oliver’s level?
I, for one, would be interested in reading MT’s answer to Olivers initial question which was,
“”What is the physical explanation for El Nino, and are predictions from the current theory consistent with any observations?”
In particular, I would like to see him focus on the consistency with observations bit.
If I ever displease you, lucia, I’ll offer up a yarn.
====================
I’ll jump in with a meta-comment: how you view the MT/Oliver “conversation” is a fair template for how you view the climate “debate” as a whole. I put both those words intentionally between inverted commas because I view both as intersecting monologues rather than actual exchanges of ideas.
Oliver’s comment was, by his own admission, not in fact a request for information but a monologic argument: “nobody understands ENSO” was my reading of it. MT then made his own argument (“Howard’s ‘8th grader’ comment was really stupid”) but did also respond to Oliver’s non-question. Oliver then followed up with another Lucy-football “question” for MT, which he’ll either respond to or not.
Anyway, I’d put a month’s hosting fees on a bet that each reader’s assessment of ¿Quien Es Más Snarky? will track pretty well with that reader’s position along the warmer-skeptic continuum.
(for full disclosure, I think Dr. Tobis has a chip on his shoulder and Oliver has no real intention to do anything here but troll… but I side with MT for at least being responsive.)
I think too much is being made of Michael’s comment re 8th graders. I took that as a quip, perhaps I was wrong.
But he is right: the general phenomena associated with the ENSO are well explained.
It is true models can’t predict the frequency or amplitude very well, but that IMO is more a statement of the current limit of resolution of GCMs than a test of our understanding of the mechanisms.
I think it’s true that the models currently don’t have all of the physics implemented that is necessary to model ENSOs accurately, but that ties into the typical resolutions of the models…as you increase the resolution, the detail of the physical theory that is in your model has to commensurately increase at the same time.
So IMO not being able to predict the frequency and amplitude is a bit of a red herring…do we understand the mechanisms that control the ENSO? That is the more pertinent scientific question. You can’t slam the researchers because of the primitive state of early 21st century computer hardware. And it seems to me that whether we understand these mechanisms is testable without a detailed, accurate model of the ENSO that can reliably predict future events.
kim
I like your idea about “agnostic” vs. “skeptic.” Maybe that should get some traction.
And I need to change my viewing font; it looked like you were going to offer a yam.
Lucia, sorry about the “really stupid” 8th-grader comment that polluted this thread. I developed that attitude after reading everything I could by Feynman during my formative years.
In any event, it appears that for what is understood of ENSO, it can be explained to an 8th-grader. The defensive reaction to my comment, however, was exactly my point. The human “tells” given by MT and other consensus bloggers indicates that major portions of consensus AGW theory once you get past radiation physics are weak.
Howard–
Feynman not withstanding, many things can’t really be explained at 8th grade level even by people who understand them. Or more specifically, if the conversation includes people who have advanced degrees, if one gives an explanation about something remotely contentious to an 8th grader, the two will often quibble about the way in which the discussion treats this contentious issue.
I think this is where we get to the bit I would call the “contentious issues”.
I suspect that to some extent, someone can explain ENSO to an 8th grader. However, if we read the conversation between Carrot and Oliver, where we see this:
Here, Carrot appears to be suggesting that skeptic arguments that natural variability is not well understood are because, well, natural variability is researched and/or that skeptic notions that natural variability is not well understood is not based on physics.
(That might not be what Carrot means. But I have to admit that I actually don’t understand Carrot’s criticism of some skeptics claims that natural variability is imperfectly understood. )
Anyway, I suspect Oliver is reading Carrots post to suggest that natural variability is well understood– or at least the magnitude of natural variability is well understood. In that light, he challenges Carrot “What is the physical explanation for El Nino, and are predictions from the current theory consistent with any observations?”
In context of the criticism Carrot laid on some skeptics, I’d be interested in knowing whether ENSO is sufficiently well understood to provide a theory that explains the magnitude of global surface temperature (GMST) variations arising from El Nino. Does the theory suggest we should see 0.1C variations in GMST from the top to bottom of El Nino? 0.3C? 0.5C? 1C? And how does this compare to what we actually see?
(I’m less interested in knowing whether we can predict individual El Ninos. I don’t think that’s important to any criticism that skeptics are suggesting that either we don’t know what the internal variability of the earth linked to some verbiage that seem to suggest that we have some sort of theoretical understanding that permits s to estimate how large it might be.)
Carrick:
If ENSO was a car, would you say that it was “well explained” if the ignition and fuel systems were undefined? We can push it off a cliff, but can’t take it to the store to buy groceries: Not very useful.
Defining “well explained” and “well understood” downward is a sales, not a scientific technique. Identification of knowledge gaps and uncertainty is not “slamming researchers”.
To clarify:
Skeptics love to invoke a magical PDO. All they have is the PDO index, which is a mathematical abstraction. They have really no physical mechanism of what is actually happening in the ocean-atmosphere system in regards to this PDO index, nor any mechanism through which this would have a major role in explaining the long-term trends and patterns over the last century. Let alone strat cooling, beyond the ozone layer. Anyway, PDO people made some pretty strong statements that we should be into a strong global cooling trend by now, which is looking a little suspect. [Do I have a collection of quotes on this matter? No, but I rather wish I had collected such predictions, to strengthen this point]
I suppose Oliver’s point is that an ocean-atmosphere fluctuation need not be well understood in order to exist, which is true so far as it goes. But ENSO is a heck of a lot more developed in theory and observation than the PDO, which is something of a magic blank slate, and is really just an appeal to the unknown unknown – an appeal that somebody could make forever if he were really determined, even if the conservation of energy was pretty much successfully satisfied without invoking that unknown unknown.
I was responding to “What is the physical explanation for El Nino…?” I’m not sure what the “coherency and consistency” part of the question was about, and thought I would point out that scientists are reasonably satisfied with the dynamics.
My point was that the dynamics is pretty well understood but the predictability is so far low. The same could be said about the atmosphere, where the practical predictability of individual large scale fronts and storm events is on the order of a week, and mathematics shows clearly that this cannot be extended indefinitely (roughly, beyond a month) but the dynamics is well understood and the phenomenon can be well modeled in a statistical sense.
Is ENSO as well-modeled statistically in GCMs as large scale fronts? Admittedly, no. It’s a topic of much active research, as is to be expected, as it’s the highest frequency coupling mode of atmosphere and ocean that is easily observed.
Is that what you mean by your “coherency and consistency” part of the question?
I’m quite willing to discuss ENSO in detail if that serves some purpose, or, really, even if it doesn’t. It’s a phenomenon of some interest to me (I own the expensive little volume by Philander, for instance) and I’m quite willing to engage on it. But I don’t so far understand the second part of the question and was actually addressing the first. “Coherency and consistency” of what with what?
Yes, Lucia, and you see that in this subject – when you simplify a theory to explain it to the layman, you necessarily lose some details, sometimes physically important ones – which then leads to contention when somebody with a bit more technical background comes along.
I’ve seen this a few times, where somebody with a bit of background sees a toy cartoon of how the greenhouse effect works, and then gets all upset, without realising that the actual models are not as simple as the algebraic single slab toy atmosphere; the latter is just an educational tool.
Re: carrot eater (Jun 21 10:58),
Heh. I think I see a reference back to the notion one can strengthen everything by posting links and quotes. 🙂 I don’t expect you to hunt them down, and more over, now that you say “PDO”, I can better pinpoint what you are alluding too.
Based on my memory (not a hunt for quotes), I think there is a wide range of skeptic notions about what the transition in the PDO is supposed to do. Some may have been predicting a transition to sustained cooling; others only claim that maybe a sizeable fraction of the post 70s warming is PDO and we are going to see slower warming. Of course, it’s not just ‘skeptics’ that say the latter.
If the PDO is understood, I have to admit I haven’t seem the explanation or any comparison of the theory to data. On the other hand, I haven’t looked.
carrot,
Regarding the PDO, I believe there has been some progress.
I like to use the work of Z Liu of WIsconsin on this matter as an example of how GCMs are actually used in research. Liu observed that there was no known dynamics of the requisite time scale other than coastal Kelvin waves. He identified two coupled GCMs in which a PDO-like oscillation appeared, and suppressed coastal Kelvin waves in them. The Pacific variability on PDO time scales was greatly reduced, supporting the coastal Kelvin wave hypothesis.
I am not convinced the NAO actually exists as a dynamical phenomenon, by the way. It seems to me it could be a statistical artifact. As long as we’re asking for the physics behind things, does anybody know why there should be an NAO?
Do we have any reasonable hope that the phase of ENSO will ever be predictable over anything but the near term? Seems like your basic chaotic initial value problem to me. You aim to get the statistics about right.
That said, I guess a couple groups out there are trying to do decadal predictions, with mixed success.
carrot,
“Seems like your basic chaotic initial value problem to me.”
It’s even worse than that. ENSO is not just chaotic, it’s stochastically forced. Even if we had it nailed we’d have to predict the atmosphere over longer periods than the atmosphere’s predictability limits. So getting it right even statistically depends on one of the hardest parts of the atmosphere: convective clouds.
Conceivably higher resolution atmospheres may help. I remain a skeptic (oop, sorry, shouldn’t use that word around here) er, unconvinced on the immediate benefits of higher resolution, myself.
Re: Michael Tobis (Jun 21 11:36),
Agreed. The simplified system would already be chaotic, and, if we take a modeling point of view, the sub-system is sitting inside a larger system that is itself chaotic.
Hi Lucia,
I have been away from blogs for a few days. Did Gavin ever reply to your question (at Keith’s blog) about why he thinks the Mann (08) reconstruction with both bristlecone pines and Tiljander’s lake varves removed is substantially the same as with them both included? (I thought the two reconstructions were a lot different.)
Howard:
A much better analogy would be: Would you say a car isn’t “well explained” if we can’t predict what the driver is going to do?
Anyway, “not very useful” depends on context. The delayed oscillator theory in explains this.
I agree if you want to discuss the quasiperiodicity of the driving for the ENSO that’s not well understood, but I’ll point that 4.7 year cycle seems to be a global phenomenon (the peak shows up globally), and is not just restricted to the eastern Pacific.
The origin of well-defined frequencies for atmospheric ocean oscillations is the real interest for me, but that goes well beyond just the ENSO phenomenon itself.
Oliver or somebody else maybe could point to a definition that shows my narrow interpretation of ENSO is wrong.
Carrick
Michael Tobis:
I may be a stubborn hold-out, but I don’ think the ENSO is particularly chaotic, nor are the drivings that force it. Indeed, it seems to be a pretty well organized phenomenon with a pretty precisely defined set of frequencies associated with it.
I’m in the opposite camp here:
I am an ardent believer in…, oops, I mean I am indeed convinced increased resolution (with commensurate improvement of the fidelity of the physics modeling) is exactly what is needed here.
I think it is a bit of a cop out to start out waving the flag of chaos when you know your model lacks the resolution and fidelity to resolve these sorts of phenomena.
Simple example: We know there is a roughly 600-km correlation length on 30-days scale weather… the “rule of 10” suggests a 60-km resolution is needed to accurately capture the physics associated with this correlational scale.
What is the time scale for the Rosby and Kelvin waves? I assume much shorter than this. I suspect you need a much finer effective resolution that 60-km if you wanted to accurately describe this phenomenon.
In the end, it may not be possible to accurately model these phenomena, but I think the jury is still out on what is possible versus what is practicable in terms of numerical global climate modeling.
SteveF–
Nope. I don’t know it what way gavin thinks the difference are minimal, or in what context.
Of course the questions Gavin refuses to actually answer won’t go away. He may think he’s answered questions over and over, but as far as I can tell, the number of full and complete answers he has provided to actual questions asked by Amac or Willis is exactly zero.
Oh. But he explained why Amac’s question is moot. The theory of why Amac’s question is moot seems to involve everyone agreeing the difference in the two traces in the figure Gavin told us to examine are minimal! I think the theory that Willis did not read the papers Gavin is also supported by Gavin’s assumption that everyone who looks at the figure will find the difference in the traces minimal.
Of course, not every agrees with that the difference in the traces are minimal. So, clearly not everyone agrees Amac’s question is moot, and many certainly think willis read the paper!
Lucia (Comment#46243),
Too bad he did not answer; I would really like to hear his rational.
FWIW, I can’t be sure Amac or Willis read the paper and the SI (or the most recent SI), but I sure did, and the reconstructions look a lot different to me.
SteveF–
Short of standing over their shoulder watching someone read, we can’t know anyone read the paper. That includes gavin. But gavin’s evidence for the supposition Willis did not read the stuff he linked seems to be that Willis continues to ask Gavin certain specific questions, and gavin seems to be convinced that if Willis read the stuff Gavin linked, he would not ask those questions. But I think many who read the paper and looked at the graph Gavin told us to link would ask the questions willis asks. So where does that leave us?
Carrick:
” don’ think the ENSO is particularly chaotic, nor are the drivings that force it. Indeed, it seems to be a pretty well organized phenomenon with a pretty precisely defined set of frequencies associated with it.”
I’m confident that this is wrong. ENSO is fairly broad band on any frequency analysis I know about. e.g. Kestin et al 1998 (J Clim 11 – pp 2258 ff):
“The interannual variability of ENSO is contained in
a broad 2–10-yr periodicity band. By using time–frequency
analysis methods, which analyze changes in the
spectrum of the ENSO series, it was found that this
variability is not distributed evenly over time, but rather
that it is concentrated at different frequencies at different
times (Wang and Wang 1996; Cole et al. 1993). For
example, the period from 1930 to 1960 is dominated by
a 4–7-yr periodicity. In the earlier period (1880–1930)
and the later period (1960–90) shorter periods of 2–5
yr also occur, strengthening suggestions that the current
state of ENSO is similar in magnitude and frequency
to the conditions late last century and early this century
(Allan 1993). However, concentrated power does not appear to be fixed to either certain frequencies or to distinct frequency bands, as has been
suggested previously (Barnett 1991; Wang and Wang 1996).”
Indeed, the tendency for some coupled GCMs to get an almost perfectly periodic ENSO is a well-known criticism.
Carrick again: “What is the time scale for the Rosby and Kelvin waves? I assume much shorter than this. ”
No. But I’ll let Oliver set you straight since he is apparently expert on these matters.
MT
Well, you could consider actually answering the question he asked
His full question was
I believe you skipped the 2nd part of the question when you provided your first answer, and he asked you again. Do you know if the predictions based on the theory you pointed to are consistent with observations? And in particular, do you know if predictions of the magnitude of variability in GMST from top to bottom of ENSO is consistent with that theory? Does anyone? (I don’t know. So, I’d like to hear it. It appears Carrot has specified he was discussing the PDO– but now this thread has this side discussion of ENSO.)
“are predictions from the current theory consistent with any observations”?
Well, we’re back to the fraught word “consistent”, aren’t we? One of the points where I agree with RP Jr. is that this word is somewhat abused.
I would say “I think so” in the sense that “I am unaware of any observations that contradict the theory as developed by Cane, Zebiak, Philander, etc.”. As for “predictions”, as I understand it, simple equatorial waveguide models have predictive power greater than chance on a time scale of months. This is why ENSO predictions are issued! For a time scale longer than a year, I am unaware of any claimed success in dynamical ENSO predictions.
Paleoclimate evidence shows a number of ENSO regimes; predicting even the statistics of ENSO into the greenhouse world is, to my understanding, an open question.
Re: SteveF #46244 (Jun 21 12:40) —
Yes, I’ve read Mann08, and its SI, and both revisions of Mann08’s Fig. S8a. Also Tiljander’s 2003 paper and 2005 dissertation, among other things. I can’t prove I’ve read them, but you can see that I’ve linked to them, here.
A couple of points on the twice-corrected Fig. S8a (this PDF, not the once-corrected one).
First, My Mark I Eyeball says that the “without Tiljander” light blue trace looks “pretty similar” to the “with Tiljander” dark blue trace. Do I agree with Lucia that there are differences? You betcha.
So, what do those differences tell us about the Tiljander proxies? Beats me. Whether or not the traces are “similar enough” to be informative strikes me as a quantitative issue that would require knowledge of the uncertainty bands of both curves. And then, I suppose one would have to apply a statistical test that’s likely to be time-consuming to run, and hard to interpret.
Second, the Fig. S8a we’re discussing was never subjected to peer review, and is not a part of the paper’s SI. This tacit endorsement of blog-science by Mann08’s authors is OK with me, as long as it is remembered.
Anyway, a much more straightforward approach is to look for simple questions that can be answered simply.
“Are the Tiljander proxies calibratable to the instrumental record?” can be answered in the following ways —
* “No” (simple, and my response)
* “Yes” (simple, but nobody’s claiming this)
* “Maybe, and it doesn’t matter” (complicated, and Gavin’s answer at C-a-s)
* [silence] (the Mann08 authors’ response)
For the reasons outlined at C-a-s in (Comment #132), the difficulty with “Maybe, and it doesn’t matter” is that it leads to another round of attempting to get a simple answer to a simple question.
That being, “Is it acceptable scientific practice for Mann08’s Methods section to be silent on their highly unconventional uses of the Tiljander proxies?“
Michael–
I don’t think you are answering my question, and perhaps you don’t understand it. I’m not asking whether ENSO itself can be forecast.
Let me step back and ask these based on your question:
Does the theory of Cane, Zebiak &etc. predict how roughly how large GMST excursions will be as a result of ENSO. That is: roughly how much variability in GMST do we expect to arise as a result of ENSO?
The reason I am asking this is that my impression is the carrot/oliver discussion related to whether or not scientists had phenomenologically based theories that can really let us bound the magnitude of variability. In this context, ENSO came up as an example, and while it may be great that we can anticipate ENSO cycles themselves, that doesn’t mean we can predict the subsequent net effect on the variability in GMST– which was the main subject. (I think.)
So, long explanations that we there is a theory that predicts ENSO doesn’t quite get to the other issue which is: But can we then predict variability itself based on that theory?
This looks like a bit that is closer to what I am asking. But if so, this answer would suggest that the answer to Oliver’s question was : No. We can’t predict variability of the earth’s climate, in fact, our theory doesn’t let us predict the statistics of ENSO!
(Heck, it even looks like the answer given to an 8th grader would be “No. We can’t predict variability of GMST due to ENSO.” )
Amac
I’m comparing light blue to black. Isn’t black “with both” and light blue “wo either”. My impression is that Gavin is saying the difference between black and light blue are minimal. Dark blue is in between the light blue and black.
To me, it seems that we are in the region of “Joe (6’0″) is a little taller than Ed (5’9″) . Ed is a little taller than Dave (5’6”). So, is Joe only a little taller than Dave?
I also don’t know. But that doesn’t seem to have much to do with Gavin’s complaint at the top of that post at Keith’s blog.
Well, this matters at Keith’s because at least one Gavin support seems to think the figure is something peer reviews accepted, and so is probably something most practicing scientists would agree with.
PDA are you here? This is the evidence of a scientists telling someone their question doesn’t matter I was going to link at Keith’s blog. I knew I’d see on soon enough. We can provide the link if you like.
Also a worthwhile question.
Re: lucia (Jun 21 13:41),
To be clear, “Maybe, and it doesn’t matter” is my attempt to summarize Gavin’s longer answers, e.g. at Comment #29:
“toto” has a more elegant phrasing of that idea in Comment #63:
As far as the color schemes: it depends on exactly what information on Tiljander one is trying to extract from the figure. Willis Eschenbach pointed out that Fig S8a compared Original to With-Tiljander-Without-Treerings to Without-Tiljander-With-Treerings — but not With-Tiljander-With-Treerings to Without-Tiljander-Without-Treerings.
So Gavin says, informatively, that Without-Tiljander-Without-Treerings (light blue) was added to the twice-revised Fig. S8a in order to address this criticism.
Anyway, my Mark One Eyeball summary holds, whichever comparison one wants to make. They’re all “pretty similar” in overall shape.
Comment eaten by WordPress. What I was going to say is that “Maybe, and it doesn’t matter” is my attempt to summarize Gavin’s response at Comment #29; also see toto at Comment #63.
A distinction was being made between physical explanations (of natural variability) which are accepted as “well understood” and those which are rejected as “assertion.” My question was meant to underscore the vagueness of the distinction, which itself seemed to be a bit of an “assertion.”
ENSO was just a convenient example of natural variability which is either well understood or not well understood, depending on one’s perspective.
I believe Carrick and I went through this exercise a while ago and found just that (although we apparently differed quite widely in our interpretations).
The Wiki articles on Rossby and Kelvin waves do a decent job and provide some nice links — an 8th grader could certainly get the gist. But from a phase speed ~2 m/s for barotropic modes (and much lower for baroclinic modes) you can work out a basin-crossing timescale which is easily months to years.
Indeed. And what is Michael’s response?
Ah, back to global mean surface temperature. And here I thought we might be able to discuss some actual physical climatology…
The following is pure speculation, as I have not thought about or read about the question you pose before today. With that caveat:
I suppose it would not be hard to regress the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) to GMST. If you assumed the climate were stationary, you could get an empirical measure. I’d be surprised if that hasn’t been done by those who are so fascinated with this one scalar quantity.
Getting a good theoretical handle on why the number is what it is and under what circumstances it might change is the sort of question that someone might reasonably ask. If I had to bet I’d say nobody has an answer to that.
As I said upthread, there’s plenty of paleoclimate evidence that ENSO has different regimes under different climate states. And presumably the teleconnections change too. We don’t understand the way ENSO statistics shift in changing climates.
From this I would conclude that a strong theoretical basis for the transfer function from SOI or something like it to GMST not only isn’t known but can’t exist without a lot of other information about the system state.
I am fascinated with where you folks are heading with this. I have a suspicion that you are falling into the same trap as McLean & deFreitas did.
MT
Well, if you jump into a conversation about variability in GMST, you are kinda in it. Unless you just leave, right?
So, in otherwords… maybe we really don’t have a good theoretical basis for the variability in GMST. This would substantially contradict the gripe Carrot seemed to have back when you jumped in to the Carrot/Oliver.
(To be fair to Carrot: Carrot clarified and his concern was the whole “it’s the PDO issue.” When he points to the PDO, I get what he’s referring too since there are all sorts of PDO statements. Some might have substance; other more extreme ones don’t. Like Carrot, I’m not going to hunt down quotes of every PDO quote out there.)
Ahh well.. such is the trajectory of blog comments!
MT
Headed? Carrot wrote something that sounded like he was pretty darn close to suggesting that the variability of the earth’s climate is very well understood based on phenomeological models and that this fact was somehow not understood by skeptics yada yada. It turns out that’s not quite what Carrot meant, but that apparent claim caused Oliver to ask a question about Enso.
You jumped in, answered half the question ignoring the half that was more important in context of what Carrot seemed to claim. So, people asked you to address the second half. So with respect to the bit you jumped in on: that’s resolved in favor of the notion that we really don’t have all that great a basis to explain the earth’s climate variability using purely phenomemological models. With respect to what Carrot’s meant, that’s resolved because he clarified by saying he was specifically talking about the many “PDO” theories. Once that’s specified, what he wrote takes on a different aspect.
Why would this “go” any further than that?
oliver:
2 m/s is about 40 km/day or about 1200 km/month. That’s about a year to go 1/3 away around the Earth…clearly that’s well out side the source region for the ENSO. One to two months would probably be a realistic response time, not years.
Michael Tobis, this is what I’m referring to:
GISTEMP vs MEI.
It’s true it’s pretty smeared out over global scales, but that probably has more to do with an incoherent sum of an effect which is coherent over shorter spatial scales (MEI measures over a much smaller region of course).
A second example.. influence of ENSO on SW Australian rainfall
OK, so the rule here is “don’t comment on something you might know about without reading the whole thread”. Maybe that is a good rule.
But I just went over carrot’s contributions to this thread; I believe I had already looked at most of them. I generally agree with carrot and see nothing on this thread that I would strongly disagree with, so if my comments are to be so interpreted they have to be so interpreted over my objection.
I frankly don;t see anything to support a claim that “Carrot wrote something that sounded like he was pretty darn close to suggesting that the variability of the earth’s climate is very well understood based on phenomeological models and that this fact was somehow not understood by skeptics yada yada.”
The role of ENSO in the observational record is pretty easy to back out, the role of changes in any identifiable solar parameter is demonstrably ruled out over that time period, and the long term internal variability (PDO, NAO, and whatever other decadal scale wobble you may choose) has obviously got a small footprint. I do see carrot claiming that. I agree.
The main issues in explaining the observational record of GMST and extrapolating into the future before a major regime shift are the tradeoffs between lag time, greenhouse warming and aerosol cooling. That’s where the uncertainty lies in using the observational record to constrain future expectations, as I understand it.
Lucia (Comment#46288),
I could never suffer fools gladly as you do. You must be close to a saint; I could not do it.
Carrick, what am I looking at?
Power spectra are easy to get wrong and hard to get right. These look like the usual kind of wrongness (applying an FFT to a short series of raw data, for instance). If so, a good rough estimate of the real information in your signal is to eyeball a very broad envelope around your peaks, which does agree with the usual ENSO spectra.
Did you obtain these spectra? What time series did you (or whoever did them) start with and how did you process it?
MT–
Ok. This is going to drive Carrot nuts!
Carrot wrote this–
When reading this, the skeptic arguments about natural cycles are, evidently not based on any coherent physics theory. When I read that, I imagined carrot meant this is the situation for skeptics as opposed to someone else’s? Right?
If I read it otherwise wise, then Carrot would seem to be suggesting that neither skeptics nor mainstream climate scientists arguments about natural cycles are based any coherent physical mechanisms that is consistent with a broad range of observations. If that is so, then skeptics and climate scientists are on an equal footing, and how would it even be fair for Carrot to be lodging this criticism at skeptics specifically?
This is why it sounded to me (and I think a few others) that Carrot might be making a claim that climate scientists have better explanations for the very broad term “natural cycles” than they actually do.
In fact, Carrot clarified what he meant by naming the cycle: PDO . One that’s clarified and we go back, it’s clear he isn’t using “natural cycles” to mean any number of things it might mean. Once you substitute “PDO” for natural cycles (either actually or in your head)– it no longer sounds like he is making some sort of very broad claim about scientists understanding of whatever “natural cycles” are. He is talking about a very specific meme circulating on blogs.
Bolded text to emphasize the important part. Baroclinic modes on order of 10 cm/s phase speed would be years.
Sorry, Lucia, I messed up the quotes on the last post. The blockquoted section is my text, and the first three following sentences should be attributed to Carrick .
MIchael Tobis:
One is a zero-padded half-overlapping windowed Welch spectral periodogram (GISTemp versus MEI) comparing 1950-2010… I tested a variation of window lengths to verify the results were not sensitive to the choice of window size. I believe I used either 20 or 30 years for the period.
The MEI is from here. I presume you don’t need a link to GIStemp, which I use as my “gold standard” global temperature record for various technical reasons.
The Welch periodogram was obtained using software I wrote and maintained myself over about a 20 year period, but this has been cross-verified probably dozens of times (my software is used by a number of other research groups).
The other figure is plot of a multitaper method computation for SW Australia rainfall.. one century of data there. The MTM is the standard algorithm implemented in the MATLAB DSP library.
I obtained the SW Australia data from here. (I can dig up the exact link if you have trouble navigating to it yourself.)
I think I got that sorted!
Oliver:
Based on the simulation results, it must be the faster-traveling (baryotropic) waves that are getting “plucked” by the wind-stress forcings…They are quoting time for the waves to reach to boundaries of maybe 125 days, not years.
Lucia,
You got it. Feels good to be understood for once. This whole timewaste would have been avoided had I specifically stated upfront that I was talking about the incredible, magical, elastic PDO that (to some sceptics) can explain all things, without having any mechanism sorted out to that effect.
If you’ve got a sustained rise in temperature over 30+ years, you need some basic mechanism – either a radiative imbalance or a redistribution of thermal energy within the system, or some combination of both. You can’t just throw up your hands, call it natural cycles, and call it a day.
This is all I was trying to say.
Carrot Eater:
LOL tell me about it.
carrot eater (Comment#46310),
I think you are right. Assigning all of the recent temperature rise to natural cycles is close to crazy. OTOH, assigning all the recent temperature rise to GHG forcing is also close to crazy. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the late 1970’s to 2000 rise is too often all assigned to GHG forcing… (sigh)… you need only look at the temperature data since 1875 to see that this can be most generously described as ‘Hansen’ reasoning.
I should clarify by first correcting a mistake I made earlier. The 2.8 m/s figure is the phase speed for the first baroclinic Kelvin wave (always eastward), so estimate a Pacific crossing time of 2 months. Higher baroclinic modes will go more slowly (10-50 cm/s would be very reasonable numbers, corresponding to > 1 year time scales for crossing).
The corresponding equatorially trapped Rossby waves for the first baroclinic mode will have (westward) phase speed -c/(2n+1), n=1,2,…, so for the n=1 wave you get 0.9 m/s for a crossing time of 6 months.
If the total oscillation between the east and west ends of the basin is carried by reflected waves, then you may imagine a timescale which corresponds to round trips of these waves.
Even “natural cycles” have basic mechanisms behind them. One could very well make no assumption whatsoever about the “naturalness” or “anthropogenicness” while continuing to discuss the mechanisms.
…
That’s my whole point. My pet peeve is those sceptics who just armwave about natural cycles, without bothering to even postulate a mechanism.
oliver:
Yes, I would agree with this (assuming the waves are not heavily damped). If the simulation that MT pointed to is to be trusted, that indicates a relaxation time of about 1/2 year.
Carrick
See the Equatorial_Waves discussion on Wikipedia. The round trip propagation of a signal starts at a bit over a year.
Michael Tobis:
We’re talking about ENSO specifically here (which is bounded by Eastern Australia and Western Central and South America according to your reference)… are you saying that the simulations and the reference are wrong?
I wasn’t getting a lot of satisfaction (just an uncomfortable feeling of being hard-headed) here so I went digging.
This seems like a pretty decent reference (picked pretty much at random).
Here’s some relevant text (p 1696, 2nd column, top):
So if I’m reading this correctly, yes there are fast traveling waves, but they don’t play much of a role in setting up an oscillatory behavior.
Pretty fascinating stuff and I stand corrected.
And then there is this one:
I had assumed based on the existence of the ENSO spectral peak in global climate data that the driving responsible to it was external to the ENSO event itself. Sounds like this paper is making the same argument though of course using different reasoning.
Arg. Just noticed my first post got eaten by the blog comment eating bunny.
I had posted on this paper Oceanic Rossby Wave Dynamics and the ENSO Period in a Coupled Model
Top of page 1696, right column:
This basically suggests it’s the slowest mode that is responsible for the oscillatory behavior (to the extent it’s an internal oscillation).
The point though is Oliver’s observations about baryoclinic Rossby Waves are fully germane here. You can get a lot of waves with different wavenumbers emitted, but only those that match the condition for resonance are going to contribute to the oscillatory behavior.