Can we stop calling it “AGW science” now?
One would think so, after these startling admissions from Climategate player Phil Jones.
Let’s see: the dog ate his hockey-stick data in 1988. His record-keeping in general is “not as good as it should be.” There has been no statistically significant global warming for the last fifteen years. And perhaps in the Medieval Warm Period it was as warm on a global scale as today.
But no; AGW still stands. It’s hard to escape the notion that at this point such belief is mostly faith-based:
[The BBC’s environmental analyst] Mr Harrabin told Radio 4’s Today programme that, despite the controversies, there still appeared to be no fundamental flaws in the majority scientific view that climate change was largely man-made.
To their credit, the British press has been all over this from the start (here’s more). But it’s hardly a local story, although Jones and many others are based in Britain. It’s global. What’s up with the crickets in our MSM?
And I would still dearly love to know who leaked those original emails. That person is a world-class hero.
[ADDENDUM: More here.]
Yup…I’m shovelling 6 inches of global warming today.
Had to gloat–yeah, right, Aubrey–but I had a short discussion with a relation about the issue. She’s a greenie in an environmental organization. “I’ve got the science,” she said, about twelve hours before the CRU’s laundry got away.
Haven’t been in her neighborhood since.
I have no doubt she’s emotionally and possibly financially invested in AGW.
For the sake of family peace, if she tries the science on me, I’ll have to forego my usual, “I know I look stupid. But it’s a DISGUISE.”
That’s going to take some discipline.
There are even more damning admissions in Phil Jones interview: not only magnitude, but also RATES of warming were just the same as now in previous warming periods. With this admission no scientific reason to believe in AGW left.
And I would still dearly love to know who leaked those original emails. That person is a world-class hero.
I’d say he/she is worthy of a Nobel Prize had it not been so debased. What do Al Gore and Yasser Arafat have in common? [See what I mean?]
Neo, our MSM is afraid Gore might get angry and take back their internet service.
I think it’s Instapundit who has the latest on the African drought doomsday reports that directly involve Pachauri. And the world thought Bush was dumb for not pushing Congress on Kyoto. If this keeps up, we’ll be seeing the Miss Me Yet billboards in Europe.
ligneus, they are Obama’s role models?
I never thought the science for AGW was “settled” but I did think, and still do, that AGW is a reasonable enough hypothesis that it bears looking into.
However, it never occurred to me that the IPCC report, the data, the science and the scientific community behind AGW were all as botched and corrupt as we are now learning.
huxley,
There isn’t much that’s not “worth looking into”. Sometimes you get penicillin.
This is fraud from the get-go and it was obvious from the the get-go.
My favorite item was the MWP. AGW didn’t explain it and so it cast a very heavy burden on the warmenists to prove whatever caused the MWP isn’t causing the current warming–if we have a current warming which is a different argument.
The other question which hardly anybody asked is what catastrophic results the MWP had. Or the Roman Warm Period.
And what was so hot (sorry) about the Dark Ages Cold Period and the Little Ice Age.
If all you want to bother with is the MWP, you win. But there is so much more. An embarrassment of riches.
The latest greatest global warming entertainment video from Minnesotan’s for global warming.
“Frozen Wasteland”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u03QcymdCtg
On its face AGW was highly implausible right out of the chute. Anthropogenic contributions to CO2 partial pressure would correspond to adding 4500 people to the population of the United States (0.0015%). That back of the envelope calculation alone made AGW a tough sale for me without some damned good data. (Computer models are not data. Jurassic Park was not a documentary.)
In another analogy, who would believe that the bacteria on a baseball could change its temperature or trajectory? Yet a baseball (8 cm diameter) is 80,000 times as large as a typical bacterium (1 micron), whereas the earth (ca. 12,000 km diameter) is 6,000,000 times the size of a man (2 m). Put another way, we’d each have to be 150 meters tall to be the relative size of a bacterium on a baseball.
Throw in those considerations with knowledge of the infrared spectra of water vapor and CO2, and AGW was a very tough sale indeed.
PS: whoever leaked those emails in indeed a world-class hero. I hope, however, that his identity is never revealed, for his own sake. Seriously.
Yes, and the crickets do continue to chirp on this side of the pond. At least Drudge this morning has the link to the UK press as the prominent headline.
I guess it just proves how truly “in the tank” the US media is at the moment.
I brought up the whole issue at my college’s “sustainability teach-in” last week. I had support from a botanist who mentioned paleo data which showed periods even warmer than the MWP. However, the argument from the other side is now based on the “precautionary principle” where they are now arguing that if there’s even the slightest chance AGW is correct we still must spend billions on fighting it. I asked them how often they fly in airliners and why don’t they quit doing that… the point went over most of their heads.
This is like a company beginning to fall apart through fraud: from the outside everything looks good, but when you start digging in everything is rotten.
BTW, the Climategate e-mails are not nearly as devastating as the computer coding. If you did that in developing a company’s accounting system, you would go to jail.
Well, we’ve been through this before. The reasoning behind AGW is simple.
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.
If more CO2, more heat.
Human create more CO2, therefore a warmer planet.
Throw in some feedback paths, the warming period in the eighties and nineties, and you’ve got a reasonable enough hypothesis to research.
That’s not the same, of course, as “settled science” that justifies scaring the devil out of the world and demanding a complete re-ordering of the world energy and financial systems.
The dead giveaway that AGW was BS was that all solutions mysteriously pointed to stopping successful societies living spontaneous lives. That ain’t science. Its Marxism.
I’m with huxley. AGW is still a possible worry. There remains some evidence for it, despite the upending of important parts of the data.
But even if a possible worry, I have never been convinced it is a potential catastrophe. Even if true, slight warming is more likely to be beneficial than destructive. The antarctic ice cap is unstable anyway, and warming might increase the risk of a catastrophic event there, but we are talking about an event so unlikely that increases and decreases in risk would be impossible to quantify. For the rest, warming would be a net boon.
Paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman’s (UVA) cycle-matching suggest that if human beings had not started warming the planet 8,000 years ago with agriculture and herd animals, we would presently be in a near unsurvivable Ice Age. I have no expertise to know whether that is solid, but it is intriguing.
AVI: I’m not losing any sleep over it. Show me how it can possibly be a worry; i.e. throw some real data at me and let’s see if I can counter.
Do you have a link for the cited UVA paper? I’d be really curious to know how a few 100 thousand, or even barely a million individuals spread across the planet ended the Ice Age. Now that’s power! 😉 More likely the end of the Ice Age lead to the development of more agriculture, not the other way around.
My biggest problem with the whole AGW movent was that there was so much phony “science” telling us what “could” happen “if” that was then repeated constanstantly without the conditionals. The whole point was to fuel hysteria and to get us to accept a cap and trade system that would make oil for food look like an accountant’s model. Anyone who wanted to stop this rolling process to assess alternatives was an ignorant rube.
There are plenty of reasons for pursuing new energy sources and for saving energy. Unfortunately, the path chosen by our betters was stupid.
Much of the “science” was based on faulty info. from various weather stations that just happen to be right next to sources of heat.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/15/world-warming-say-scientists/?loomia_ow=t0:s0:a16:g2:r3:c0.038910:b30689136:z0
Well I’ve said all this before, but the global warming garbage infuriates me so thoroughly that I can’t resist giving it another go. So:
The problem with global warming is, and always has been, that IT IS NOT SCIENTIFIC. Not at all. Not even a little. People have what they deem to be good evidence on both sides of the question, and that is no problem. However, the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) fail to approach their data in anything like a scientific manner. Let me go back to the thought experiment posed by the great philosopher of science, Karl Popper: The black swan construct. As an example of the operation of scientific method, Popper suggested postulating that all swans are white. You do not test that hypothesis by going around counting white swans. It won’t matter how many white swans you count, you will have learned nothing about the truth of your postulate. What you must do is engage in an exhaustive search for a single non-white swan–say, a black swan. If you find one, you have falsified your hypothesis. To wit, science operates by ruling things out. Nothing is ever proven in science. Hypotheses are either ruled out by evidence or they are not. This is the scientific method. In order to make it useful, hypotheses must be formulated in such a way as to make a unique prediction that can be tested. This is called falsifiability. The prediction is tested for experimentally. If the prediction fails, the hypothesis is ruled out. That which has not been ruled out remains possible. This is very basic.
But this is not what the global warming guys .have ever done. First they ran around saying, “Oh look, it’s getting warm here, oh look it’s getting warm there! Global warming.” But they’ve never bothered to formulate a unique prediction that only AGW could explain. They’ve never tried to rule either their theory, or any other for that matter, out. But it’s not as if there are no other possibilities. For one, just the broadest and simplest, we’re in an inter-glacial period, so it’s not at all surprising that there should be warming. It’s not unprecedented for there to be a very warm global climate–there have been periods in the geological past with no glaciation anywhere on earth.
I think there’s an element of what’s called infantile egoism at work in people’s attempts to define it as a problem (to say no more) and declare that human activity is bound to be the cause. We’re like very young children who see themselves as the center of the world and the cause of everything around them; one of the familiar examples is that of a young child who believes his parents’ divorce to be the result of something he’s done. Decline in frog populations? Must be something humans have done, pesticide use probably. Problems with honey-bee colony collapse? Maybe cell phone usage, microwaves or the like are causing it. With global climate, it’s all that nasty CO2 we’re putting into the atmosphere. The biggest problem with that, of course, is that the most recent and best research, including that done on ice cores from Greenland and elsewhere, reveals CO2 to be a lagging, not a leading, indicator of apparent climate change.
The “global climate,” if one can in fact speak usefully of such a thing, has been cooling for a decade now, and the global warming people are giving themselves and everyone else fits trying to explain it. The best thing they’ve come up with is the notion that AGW predicts that, too. What they’ve done in their ridiculous, quasi-religious attempt to keep their theory alive, is to declare it unfalsifiable. There is no set of conditions, there are no data, that cannot be seen as confirming evidence. Why, if it weren’t for global warming, we’d have no weather at all! The problem, though, is that a theory that explains everything, and predicts everything that can possibly happen, . It has lost all scientific power and become an article of faith. I’m no physicist, but I notice that the people who are physicists often drive themselves sort of nuts trying to find a unified theory that will explain everything. Einstein searched for it throughout most of his later years; he couldn’t find it. His successors try, but the best thing they’ve been able to come up with is string theory, an untestable construct based mainly on mathematics that is seductively attractive and has achieved, I understand, a status among physicists not unlike that of global warming, sort of near-religious in tone and kind. The problem in the search for a unified theory, I think, lies in the underlying assumption that there must be such a thing. There may be, but the search for it starts out assuming that there is, and in scientific terms this appears to be assuming that for which you wish to test. You can’t DO that, guys!
I mis-typed while trying to say that a theory that explains everything, explains NOTHING. It is not testable. It is not a theory at all. It never has been. And now it never will be.
Forget it. Stick a fork in it. DONE.
physicsguy: It’s not that humans broke the planet out of the Ice Age but that we prevented the onset of the next one by deforestation and terraced agriculture.
See Study: Did early climate impact divert a new glacial age?
Judging by the usual glacial cycles, we are overdue for another ice age. Who knows? Maybe we did stop it. Good on us if we did.
When it comes to climate change, it’s the next ice age that I worry about.
Huxley,
Yeah, the basic knowledge of greenhouse gasses does suggest AGW is plausable. But when you start considering things like those Occam’s Beard brings up, and the % of airborne CO2, the natural crbon sinks, etc., it becomes less plausable.
I think they started engaging in fraud to create a compelling case with little of the uncertanty that goes along with good science.
Note that since the 50s at least, science has warned about the diet risks of fat, salt, eggs, and many cancer causation claims, etc., etc. They have made bold claims based upon questionable studies and loose correlations. The claims have often been overturned by better science, decades later. The result is that the industry of diet science is ignored by many.
I love Minnesotans for Global Warming!
And yes the person who hacked those emails is a hero. Gotta love those Russian hackers sometimes (if i remember correctly it was a russian hacker)
I work as a consulting engineer and my company has been trying to go the way towards stuff like wind and geothermal energy. i have not said anything because who am i but an underling who no one would listen to, but in my brain i have been like “DON’T DO IT” because i think the green energy bubble will burst too and it will not be pretty.
Yeah, the basic knowledge of greenhouse gasses does suggest AGW is plausable. But when you start considering things like those Occam’s Beard brings up, and the % of airborne CO2, the natural crbon sinks, etc., it becomes less plausable.
Don: I’m setting a low bar. I’m only arguing that there was some plausibility to AGW and that an open-minded person couldn’t have know that it was a fraud from the get-go.
If you want to read the extent of the manipulation of the data, read: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/surface_temp.pdf
I agree that green energy is a big trap. As many have pointed out, if it were that great an idea, it would be able to prosper independently of government subsidies. This is an interesting look at it, including some of what’s going on in Europe with it now:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/wind_energys_ghosts_1.html
Don: I’m setting a low bar. I’m only arguing that there was some plausibility to AGW and that an open-minded person couldn’t have know that it was a fraud from the get-go.
The science editor over at Reason Magazine came over to the AGW (or at least GW) side in the 2000s, after being a (mild) skeptic. This was because a lot of data seemed to be adding up on their side, and IIRC there were claims of resolving the difference between sattelite and ground temp measures, etc. This shook me up a bit at the time.
“”I think there’s an element of what’s called infantile egoism at work in people’s attempts to define it as a problem””
Betsybounds
I’ll suggest infantile egoism and liberalism may be one and the same.
A world where governments could be omniscient if right wingers cared, medical technology can save any life if they try hard enough, rich people can’t be decent folks, poor people were cheated, a white bear is more important than a white person losing his habitat, resources aren’t meant for man to use….
It really is a world view where traditional morality got traded for massive flaws in perspective of Man’s place in the cosmos.
huxley Says:
February 15th, 2010 at 6:24 pm
The fact that every proposed solution involved curtailing individual liberty and imposing government control of the economy–if not outright world government–was a big honkin’ clue for me.
Even the string theory group has divisions. Some say there are seven dimensions, some say eleven dimensions.
I know there are three, and I can kinda get my head around there being four. Rocket science isn’t my bailywick.
The atmosphere of Mars is almost all CO2. That being the case, even if it is farther from the sun than is the earth, shouldn’t it still be hot as hell all the time? As NASA has proved, it is anything but that.
AGW? Follow the money. Follow the power.
I would love to see the “facts” both sides have, written side by side.
One can watch the Science Channel for an entire weekend, and watch shows that contradict each other left and right. I’ve done it more than once just for the humor. It’s a hoot.
“I mis-typed while trying to say that a theory that explains everything, explains NOTHING. It is not testable. It is not a theory at all. It never has been. And now it never will be.”
Very true – the other end of what kills it as science is how they test their hypothesis – that is pure model. There is no experimentation, none, nada.
Compare that to what I did for a number of years – Computer Science. It is really only marginally science, we can not create a control group to compare against. We can compare two algorithms and we have our hypothesis be testable, but that’s not really a control group.
They *could* have done a similar thing but didn’t. Instead they chose the model of everything. If they can get thier model and predictions to match then they felt they had a winner. Problem is that you can *always* get your models and predictions to match and *that* creates the inability to falsify a hypothesis.
They can take any and every input and manipulate it such that they get Global Warming because it is simply knowing how to stage your algorithms to give that tendency over time.
The fact is that they have been so wrong in their major predictions (but can always either say they are “refining” thier models ot point to one someplace somewhere that said what they wanted) that any other scientific field would have lost funding, tenue, and then jobs if they had kept up with it.
The only reason they get away with it because it sounds like science – but it isn’t using math and sounding good that makes science what it is. It is the method/process used to arrive at as good an answer as you can come up with – indeed there are scientific theories that use no math at all.
What they did is no more or less science than looking at wooly-worms, hornet nests, spider webs, or the groundhog to see if winter is going to be long or harsh. It may be right, it may be wrong – in fact it may be that we have a *greater* impact than what they say. The people who truly believe in AGW should be the ones really feeling ripped off because if it *is* true they just killed the case for it for a long time to come (and it could even be worse).
Sadly the state of our science education is so low that few even in the national labs know what BetsyBounds wrote – I was lucky enough to be in a group of hardliners on the subject (and, amusingly enough that was in the Computer Science division) and got a good education on the matter.
br549 Says:
February 15th, 2010 at 7:17 pm
The atmospheres of both Venus and Mars are both almost entirely CO2. Venus’ atmosphere is dense and it is hellishly hot. Mars’ atmosphere is thin and it is brutally cold.
The real point here is that there is no evidence that either planet has ever had intelligent life and industrial civilization. So how come they have all that CO2?
The fact that every proposed solution involved curtailing individual liberty and imposing government control of the economy—if not outright world government—was a big honkin’ clue for me.
However, before AGW was a movement, it was a scientific theory.
I remember reading a climate science college textbook from the eighties. It mentioned the current warming and early global warming theory with equations that I wasn’t in the position to assess.
The text was very matter of fact that warming was shaping up and the prevailing thought was that anthropogenic GHGs were likely at cause and that scientists would have to watch it.
I have no problems with this. It’s what I want scientists to do.
Huxley, I must disagree that AGW was ever a scientific theory in any rigorous sense. It was never testable. It was never constructed in such a way that it could be ruled out. It was never much beyond an idea that seemed to account for certain data coincidences. Dressing it up with equations gave it certain trappings of science, and scientists talked about it. But to my knowledge it was never approached in anything like an actual scientific fashion (strcpy is entirely correct in his statements about models). Its predictions weren’t scientific. I remember even in its early days people were saying that it predicted cooling in some places and warming in others, but no one knew which would occur in any given place. I thought then that scientists, including Einstein as I suggested above, have been seduced by the idea of finding a theory that predicted everything that might happen. But the result would necessarily be a theory that explained nothing. In the more recent years when we’ve had observations ranging from no change to cooling, I’ve heard AGW guys say that the cooling is just masking the underlying warming. Oh sure, yeah. Now there’s an insight. I thought then that the game was up. That’s a bit like saying that our recent uncommonly wet summer in the American southeast is just masking the underlying drought: it is what it is, and if it were different it would be different, that’s all they were saying. That’s nuanced and subtle, isn’t it. But it’s not science.
The fact that every proposed solution involved curtailing individual liberty and imposing government control of the economy—if not outright world government—was a big honkin’ clue for me.
Yup. So here we had an existential crisis of dubious scientific validity, to which the only solution – and that proposed with more than a hint of hysteria -was…do exactly what Reds have been proposing for 40 years. Now there was a coinky-dink. I spent too long in Berkeley not to recognize the phenomenon when I saw it.
This comment, and my previous onesl, are not to say that AGW is impossible, but merely highly improbable, and therefore requiring pretty much bomb-proof evidence.
The Branch Carbonians were in the position of asserting that, according to their computer models (I can hardly type that without laughing), a mole on someone’s arm would into malignant melanoma, and therefore the arm should be amputated. Who would act on that prognostication without further inquiry?
Brian Swisher, thanks for the Feynman quote. He was extraordinary. I remember reading once that he was talking about models, in the event I think it was nuclear winter models, and he said in his best cut-through-the-BS fashion, “I don’t think these guys know what they’re doing.”
AGW is dead. Soon everyone will have to admit it. Then what will these wizards come up with? I’ve heard some vague rumblings in the last couple of weeks that some people are beginning to worry about a looming global health crisis.
These people never give up.
I wonder if these individuals who advocate the “precautionary principle” apply that to their personal lives. If they did, they would be paralysed by fear.
One thing I noted a while back was how much humidity affected temperatures at night in the summer. Go to some place with high humidity and it stays warm all night long in the summer. But go to a desert with no humidity, and even though the daytime temps may exceeed that of the high humidity area, at night it can get downright chilly. Its the water vapor, not Carbon dioxide that makes the difference. Same thing in reverse with clouds in the daytime. (also note lack of clouds leads to more cooling at night.)
In a graduate course I once set a problem involving interpretation of a paramagnetic resonance spectrum of an organic radical that, on its face, seemed to admit of a straightforward interpretation. Those who inspected the spectrum more closely would realize that while the first blush analysis could make sense of the hyperfine splittings (the distances between lines), the intensities of the multiplets did not conform to combinatorial statistics (i.e., those of flipping coins). Instead of the expected 1:4:6:4:1 pattern the observed intensities were 1:2:2:2:1. This is impossible to reconcile with the spectrum because, at least within the existing paradigm, proton nuclear spins can only be either parallel or antiparallel to the external magnetic field, and thus are like flipping coins, heads or tails. This spectrum was in essence asserting that you could only get HHHT and HHTH, but apparently not HTHH or THHH. Hmmm.
Students’ responses were fascinating. Most attempted to pound the round peg into the square hole, while some recognized the problem, backed up and reconsidered their initial approach.. Those who followed the data, instead of doing violence to them, realized that if one postulated that the 1:2:2:1 pattern arose from the fortuitous overlap of the outermost lines of two 1:2:1 patterns, and the entire spectrum then made perfect sense. Which assumption was more tenable: that two multiplets happened to overlap, or that for some undefined and unprecedented reason combinatorial statistics did not apply?
Now that’s scientific training, IMO. Data lead, scientists follow. Data trump any and all preconceptions. If you and the data disagree, then you are wrong. Period. You cannot ignore data that contradict your hypothesis. Would that the climastrologists had had this perspective.
Huxley, I must disagree that AGW was ever a scientific theory in any rigorous sense.
betsybounds: The word “theory” covers a lot of ground and AGW is not one but several theories or as many models as are out there.
The biggest problem facing AGW these days isn’t the CRU emails or the IPCC problems or the lost data or the thermometer die-off or whatever, but the plain fact apparent to everyone in their daily lives that the temperatures, which had been rising through the eighties and nineties, stopped rising.
If the planet were still getting perceptibly warmer, we would not be having this conversation.
At this level, AGW has been disproved. The AGW advocates strive like hell not to admit it and to squirm like crazy with the data and with tweaks to their models, but that’s the reality.
If temperatures start to rise again like in the eighties and nineties, we will have to revisit global warming.
But for now, we have Phil Jones’s marvelous admission that there has been no “statistically significant global warming since 1995.”
betsybounds Says:
February 15th, 2010 at 9:10 pm
That’s because it has nothing whatsoever to do with science, and it never did. It’s all about destroying capitalism and promoting Marxism, period.
I’ve heard mention that Time and other MSM AGW apologists are blaming the exceptional snow fall here in the D.C. area on Global Warming. Recall that we’ve been told AGW explains not only unusual warming but also unusual cooling, and has basically been attached as a cause behind every conceivable weather effect you can name, except maybe a hail of taxicabs. There’s always something odd happening somewhere, and the AGW crowd (which probably overlaps a lot with people who visit psychics or base their lives on astrology or dianetics) will always have fuel for their fire, so to speak.
It’s like proving a negative because everything that can possibly happen is considered a symptom of Global Warming (tm, U.S. Pat. Pending). How can anyone defend against this kind of intellectual fascism? There is literally nothing that will be considered proof of absence of Global Warming, and I wouldn’t count on the current failure of GW to exist to carry much weight either. After all, it may _still_ happen. Right?
This ideology will die among nominally objective people, but the same masses who constantly fall for the something-for-nothing liberal nonsense that is decried on this blog will continue to believe… there’s too much faith invested. And that goes double for people like Al Gore who has made something approaching (or exceeding) 10 figures from being a high prophet of this particular apocalyptic cult.
Truth may win in the end, but it’s currently deep in its own territory, the clock is ticking down, and the refs have been paid off.
However, it never occurred to me that the IPCC report, the data, the science and the scientific community behind AGW were all as botched and corrupt as we are now learning.
….and I failed miserably to convince you of that fact.
I knew it was nonsense from the beginning.
I wish I could view all of my posts calling “bullshit!” so I could have a warm gloaty feeling, but I don’t know how to find them all here. It would be pretty funny.
I’m an engineer. I make a living using my highly calibrated and sensitive BS detector.
Oh, and the Earf? She is cooling.
….and I failed miserably to convince you of that fact.
I knew it was nonsense from the beginning.
Gray: It’s one thing to be skeptical of something from the beginning; it’s another to know it’s nonsense.
“Now that’s scientific training, IMO. Data lead, scientists follow. Data trump any and all preconceptions. If you and the data disagree, then you are wrong. Period. You cannot ignore data that contradict your hypothesis. Would that the climastrologists had had this perspective.”
And the interesting thing is that even though I do not understand what you are doing I can still understand the *process*. It is that process that makes it science.
When I worked at the lab we regularly read and echanged papers between disciplines – we did so for different reasons. One, of course, was to make us all a big happy family and to know if you needed help on something who to go too.
But further in there is a peer review process. That is one can become so focused on what they are doing that they loose the scientific process.
As an academic weenie (otherwise known as research staff) we were all expected to be able to read an introduction to a paper and understand it. After that we were expected to be able to critique process.
It was always interesting to me to note that some people sought out the ones that just hammered everything you did and others sought out those that just sorta skimmed it and went on. Ultimately no one enforced any of this (you could choose to skip the whole thing if you wanted – and some did) so it was up to how much the individual project manager wanted his project scruitinized.
Some realized that at some point it *will* happen, others got caught up in the rush to publish, and some just felt that those criticizing them were stupid and/or didn’t understand. The last group pretty much always eventually crashed and burned – it is going through the motions of peer review but really isn’t (we had a few climatologist – amongst the cardinal sins I saw this was one of the main ones, a very insular lot for the most part).
It *will* come crashing down, even if you are 100% correct you can not show it – therefore when someone with enough clout points it out game over. AGW had enough political clout that it made it this far and it still isn’t dead yet – but it will be.
Huxley does what most do – confuses math and science. What he described is *not* remotely science, never was and never will be. It was simply the formation of a hypothesis. There hasn’t been any science go on past that stage, just lots of math (and poor math at that as we see in the leaked e-mails and code). The number of people who do not understand it (and get defensive over the whole thing to boot) is another reason why I call our schooling an “Edumacational System” – we do not educate and have not for a long time. Sadly I think he *could* understand it but there just isn’t enough space here to really do so (and I do not think he is terribly interested in knowing either).
On an even sadder note I would place the number of so called “Scientists” that worked at the lab that understood this no more than %50 so I guess I can’t really blame him either. Most confused the idea of math with science. If you could get an equation to balance then “Success – Theory proven” (even if it was *not* a theory – which Huxley also uses wrong from a scientific method point of view, AGW has never made it past the hypothesis stage).
Gray: It’s one thing to be skeptical of something from the beginning; it’s another to know it’s nonsense.
Precisely. I knew it was nonsense.
I knew it was nonsense the second I saw the famous “hockey stick” graph. Natural systems don’t behave like that: while something could force the warming, nothing could force the 4 difference sources of extrapolated data to suddenly agree more than the models agreed in any previous time.
They put “special-sauce” on the original sparse and conflicting data specifically to generate that result.
The “warming” was only a data-normalization construct, not anything actually occuring in the world.
OK, look at this:
http://tinyurl.com/yct9stp
As soon as I look at that, I think:
“Wow, your temperture data from the thermometers is screwed. It doesn’t agree with anything. You did something wrong. Lemme see the raw data and let’s try to back-out whatever nonsense you did.”
But they won’t allow us to see the raw data. The dog ate it.
The next thing I think is:
“Wait, what caused less ‘noise’ in your data starting about 1960? Why would it suddenly all start agreeing when it never did before? Oh, ‘cuz you are normalizing everything against the 1961-1990 average assuming it was good. Hey! What happened to the medieval warm period? Go back to the raw data and normalize it against another time slice. Something is wrong.”
Oh, there is no raw data. You lost it? Now you admit that the medieval warm period was “misrepresented” in this chart? Get outta my face, you are either charlatans or incompetent; maybe even incompetent charlatans….
If you are going to “cook the books”, at least make it believable to a casual observer with a scientific background.
PS: What about the Southern Hemisphere? How can you claim global effects without global data? Oh, the Australian data is a mess? It doesn’t show the warming?
OK, (sigh) where are the stations you got the temperature data from in the N hemisphere?
What do you mean you can’t correlate the recordings to individual stations anymore!? You don’t know where the stations are anymore, or where they were at the time of the reading?! F off….
Oh…. The tree ring data was from 16 trees in one part of one forest? And you extrapolated all that data from them?! Double f off. You’re an idiot.
AGW “scientists” were never doing real science and it was easy to see. All you had to do was to give it a fair look and chance, then believe the evident multiple “telltale” signs which violated the Scientific Method/Process. Even something as simple as the ipcc publishing the “results” of its “science” months before it produced the alleged science supporting the results is almost a dead giveaway, because the Scientific Method requires that you don’t have any science or results until you publish your “materials and methods”, and you can’t select just who you want to see them. I ran into that soon after I started looking at AGW back in 2000, and it was very irritating. That only makes you look more. I didn’t expect that so many scientists wouldn’t be doing real science, but there it was.
It’s also been clear for quite a while that all the ipcc’s Climate Science has amounted to is a massive Propaganda Operation, if only from its use of words like “consensus”, “‘settled”, “climate change”, “perturbations”, “unprecedented”, etc., and its PR tactics designed only to frighten people.
Now the same forces and people behind AGW are trying to get everyone to back Post Normal Science – they didn’t dare call it Post Modern – which you can see by its very name indicates another propaganda op.. The term makes no sense at best, and is designed to not make sense, at least in the normal way, so that you have to keep chasing it around to [never] find out from “them” what they really mean – like “social justice”, “sustainability”, “inclusion”, etc., which make sense only if you understand that quite literally the only thing which makes sense according to their proponents is brute force and the acquistion of power, enslaving power.
One proponent, Ravetz as he recently posted at wattsupwiththat, even calls for new, imposed systems for “conflict resolution” in the case of controversies between scientists so as to instill “humility” into scientists and turn them away from ~violent behavior. Right.
As far as I’m concerned, Gray and many anti-AGW folks have found themselves, at least for now, on the winning side of a coin flip.
Frankly I don’t know how anyone claims certainty with something as huge and complex as the earth’s climate.
In the AGW debate I’ve been more attentive to people who came to it with a somewhat open mind such as Ron Bailey of Reason, whom Don mentioned early.
Bailey started as something of a skeptic then, as studies came in and seemed to corroborate AGW plus of course the seeming tidal wave of scientists who signed off on global warming, Bailey switched sides. I don’t know where he is now.
Another person whose thoughts I’ve attended on AGW is Jerry Pournelle. He has long been clear that he favors an anti-AGW position but he granted that there were a good many bright committed knowledgeable scientists on the other side of that bet, so he let it ride, especially since the research did show the earth had been warming. Pournelle recommended that we should study longer until we were sure what was happening before trying to fix it.
Along with my own reading that all made sense to me. Now that we do know more, the earth has not been warming lately and the data and procedures of AGW scientists have been called deeply into question, I say fine too.
Based on scientific fraud, incompetence, sensationalism and malfeasance with taxpayers’ dollars, I sentence Micheal E. Mann to be kicked in the ass until dead. There are three shifts of ass-kickers standing by. We have gatorade and other sports drinks available. If you get tired and cannot deliver a suitable kick with your dominant foot, or need to take a break, call in a replacement kicker immediately.
Proceed.
As far as I’m concerned, Gray and many anti-AGW folks have found themselves, at least for now, on the winning side of a coin flip.
You still say that after what I wrote above? After what I’ve been saying here authoritatively about their nonsense for years?
“Frankly I don’t know how anyone claims certainty with something as huge and complex as the earth’s climate.”
I’m not claiming certainty on the climate. I’m claiming certainty on the nonsense the climate “scientists” cooked up. I’m staying within my field and lambasting their nonsense results.
Their admissions of bad process and shenanigans only confirms what I originally thought of their crap work.
WHAT!! AGW IS DONE, STICK A FORK IN IT??
After I sold my SUV and bought a bicycle.
After I spent 50 grand “weatherizing” my house.
After I gave all my winter clothes to Good Will.
After I sat through “An Inconvenient Truth” 5 times.
After I wrote fan mail to the Goreacle.
After I invested my 401k in wind and solar.
What’s next? I suppose you’re going to tell me that we can’t borrow our way to prosperity?
Gray, Huxley,
Isn’t part of your seeming disagreement caused by looking at two different things? Ice core and other specific data may have validity. These scientists may be doing their job. The next level is looking at all such specific data and trying to figure what it means and how it fits together. This is where things like computer modelling come in, and, ideally, it is where one should have a healthy discussion about whether all factors are being considered in the proposed theory. This is where the screw-up and fraud occurred, and it was compounded because the Goracles and the IPCC entered the picture.
I think Huxley is saying that the screw-up at level two, doesn’t necessarily invalidate all level-one data and that it is worthwhile to continue scrutinizing it and asking what it means. I think we all agree that at the political level, we should take an approach similar to Shakespeare’s with regard to lawyers. I would also like to see a celebrities walk of infamy placed somewhere in Hollywood with a special section reserved for the handful of Norwegians who contribute so much to the celebrity game.
Huxley says, “If temperatures start to rise again like in the eighties and nineties, we will have to revisit global warming.”
Well I think what you mean is that we will have to revisit Anthropogenic global warming. But in order to maintain any scientific credibility, we will have to revisit a number of other things too. For examples, we will have to revisit sunspot cycles, Milankovich cycles, cosmic ray/cosmic dust patterns, and any of several other ideas regarding climate influence. That’s the problem with the whole thing. It’s not that the earth may not be warming–or cooling–but that these wizards have never bothered to address ANY other possible explanation for climate phenomena. They’ve never tried to rule any other cause out. They’ve merely engaged in a search for white swans; ergo, if there’s warming, anthropogenic influences are the preferred cause. They look for correlation and call it causation. As I’ve said before, we’re in an interglacial period, and as anyone remotely familiar with my own field of geology will know, that implies warming without suggesting a cause. But we know human activity can be ruled out already, because of the scale and duration of the changes being considered. Anthropogenic global warming has never been a theory in the rigorous scientific sense of the term because they’ve never done the most basic task of rendering it testable with a view to ruling it out. Einstein’s special relativity theory achieved that status because he bothered to suggest several phenomena that it predicted, but that no other known theory did, so they were unique. Then scientists were able to observe for those phenomena. When they were observed, Einstein’s theory was validated–in the event, light rays from the sun were observed, during a total eclipse, to bend in the presence of a gravitational field by precisely the amount Einsten predicted. Note that it was not, and is not, regarded as proven. In science nothing is ever regarded as proven. It is simply the best remaining explanation of phenomena because it is the only one that has not been ruled out by evidence.
AGW proponents themselves have never treated their idea as a theory. They’ve treated it as a fact, and proceeded to count up the white swans that support it. Non-supporting (and incidentally unpredicted) phenomena such as a 1.5-decade-long period of cooling are treated as mere aberrations that will disappear in the fullness of time. They are not treated as evidence of anything but an annoying interruption, a distraction. There is nothing–repeat NOTHING that they will regard as disproving their idea. That’s not a theory. It’s a gloss.
Want to know why Sarah Palin is so intriguing? Consider that a high school graduate working in an auto parts store and having some horse trading experience under his belt, was more likely to see AGW as the fraud it was than 90% of PHD’ers of the last 20 years.
We’re basically in dire need to redefine what “intellectual” even means. Or we can leave it alone and all just assume they are inferiorly educated people.
“”Huxley says, “If temperatures start to rise again like in the eighties and nineties, we will have to revisit global warming.”
Seeing that the climate is always cooling or warming, i guess but for the grace of God we’d have seen warming in the last 15 years and all be good little marxist in 15 years?
Basically its like saying we had a 50/50 chance of heading down a hellacious path for mankind in this early new century.
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I think Huxley is saying that the screw-up at level two, doesn’t necessarily invalidate all level-one data and that it is worthwhile to continue scrutinizing it and asking what it means.
I think they f’ed up the ice core readings as well. I think their temperature corrections as well as their CO2 ice core”outgassing” rates are wrong based on the goofy temp vs CO2 charts I have seen.
The shenanigans, screw ups and malfeasance on the data reduction and analysis end does, in fact invalidate the initial stuff if done by the same frauds.
Besides, as I said earlier, they can’t find the raw data.
So you’d have to start from scratch…. But why? What real observations or effects are occuring in the world now that makes it imperative to study “warming” and determine whether it is happening or not.
There is no reason, no data, no effects, nothing to suggest we should spend time and money to study any “warming”. Why not study “cooling”?
# rickl Says:
February 15th, 2010 at 10:49 pm
…
That’s because it has nothing whatsoever to do with science, and it never did. It’s all about destroying capitalism and promoting Marxism, period.
I concluded in my post What’s this “Climategate” fuss all about?…
What’s at the bottom of all this?
Pure naked power.
So far, I see no reason to change that conclusion.
–
PS – For those who have yet to visit AJStrata’s The Strata Sphere, check him out.
He blogs often, at length and with great clarity, on this and is probably the best source you can hope to find.
–
Regarding the conspiracy theory that the entire hoax was perpetrated with the intention of reigning in and quashing prosperity in the developed world and transferring wealth to the under-developed world, a question to consider is whether the scientists involved were involved in its planning, or whether they were sucked in by lucrative grants, etc. and their work co-opted by the opportunistic Goracles for their own ends.
Also, in light of recent “verifiable” climate data it seems like all involved would have been better served to that end by sticking with the “cooling scare” of the 80’s.
But as betsybounds said they’ll come up with something, like a global health crisis.
How many times will the media allow them to cry wolf and still give them any credibility?
Y’know, at long last, nobody has ever even shown that The Climate (whatever that is) is even deterministic!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterministic_system_(mathematics)
Wrap your heads around that one….
“”How many times will the media allow them to cry wolf and still give them any credibility?””
The media is them! A bunch of miseducated leftist every bit as culpable as an Al Gore. Don’t forget they were the chief creators of the marketing (propoganda) plan that pushed AGW hysteria.
Gray-
Climate=the sound of one butterfly wing flapping…
My personal “green” demons!
I fell into the trap.
Bought a small car. The only thing I’ve enjoyed from the excersise.
I can’t argue the insulation I put in the house. I did that myself. Small cost, really. “Payback”. Who cares? Small $$. No big deal. Same with exterior doors needing replacement. It needed doing anyway. On my own dime.
Went out and got bids for solar PV for the house in 2007. 3 KW array. Maybe think about solar domestic HW array as well. “To do my part”. Possibly a geotherm heating system. I buy “green” electricity and my “carbon foot print” is nil. Sounded good. WTH look into it.
Only one place it made sense for the PV array. My town wouldn’t let me put the array up on the set back from the road. NYSERDA had a “grant” to pay for about 1/2 the cost. Still would have had to last 20 something years to “pay back” MY investment. Without the grant? Better than 40 years. I’m lucky to be alive that long. (The 20 years!) Project “not viable” for rebate or grant $$ because of the site set back issue. I wasn’t going to spend much of my time to argue for a “varaince” against those odds. That’s when I “knew” it wasn’t about being “green” or any of that other crap. If it made sense I would have “gone for it”. The .gov issues would have been coordinated if it was really about setting us poor slobs fee of the “energy issues”.
Bunch of GDBS.
I bought a new high powered motorcycle instead. Uses as much fuel as my compact car. Burn up all that ME oil once and for all.
Sorry to be late on the get back. Hope the applicable commenters are still on board.
Physicsguy, in addition to the supplied link by huxley, there is a book by Ruddiman – Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum. Fascinating. Reasoning and data looked good to me, but I’m only a talented amateur.
br549 – dimensions. Here’s the trick. Don’t try to visualize them. If you are measuring a baseball player according to 6 hitting statistics, you are measuring him in six dimensions (assuming there’s no overlap). That’s not quite the same thing as a physics of 11 dimensions, but it will get you started, freeing your imagination from the spatial dimensions.
Please don’t any of the physicists start explaining to him about rolled-up dimensions. You can’t start there. Start with one of those taped college courses on physics, br549.