text:
Rocket man
Megan McArdle at the Atlantic believes that some of the data analysis and modeling problems now being found in the AGW thesis are due to confirmation bias in which researchers' observations are anchored on what had previously been reported. She looks at the devastating exposition on Watts Up With That? and asks "Climategate: Was the Data Faked?" But she's not willing to concede the existence of a conspiracy, which she believes would have required too many conspirators. Instead, she posits the existence of an unconscious bias and quotes Richard Feynman on how error crept in Millikan's electron experiment to illustrate her point:
Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of–this history–because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong–and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that.
Confirmation bias "is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, leading to statistical errors." A similar, but subtly different kind of problem affected the Space Shuttle program. Let's call it 'incentive bias'. NASA grossly underestimated the probability of a launch failure and set it at 1:100,000 because that's what it was bureaucratically believed to be. What it bureaucratically had to be. Richard Feynman, who was asked to look into the causes of the disaster knew this number could not possibly be right. But he also knew how powerful an influence a bureaucratic bias could be. There was a consensus on how safe the vehicle was on launch among rocket scientists. But there was only one problem: it had to be wrong.
The first thing Feynman found while talking to people at NASA, was a startling disconnect between engineers and management. Management claimed the probability of a launch failure was 1 in 100,000, but he knew this couldn't be. He was, after all a mathematical genius. Feynman estimated the probability of failure to be more like 1 in 100, and to test his theory, he asked a bunch of NASA engineers to write down on a piece of paper what they thought it was. The result: Most engineers estimated the probability of failure to be very close to his original estimate.
He was not only disturbed by management's illusion of safety, but by how they used these unrealistic estimates to convince a member of the public, teacher Christa McAuliffe, to join the crew, only to be killed along with the six others.
Feynman dug deeper, where he discovered a history of corner-cutting and bad science on the part of management. Management not only misunderstood the science, but he was tipped off by engineers at Morton Thiokol that they ignored it, most importantly when warned about a possible problem with an o-ring.
Feynman discovered that on the space shuttle's solid fuel rocked boosters, an o-ring is used to prevent hot gas from escaping and damaging other parts. Concerns were raised by engineers that the o-ring may not properly expand with the rest of the hot booster parts, keeping its seal, when outside temperatures fall between 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Because temperatures had never been that low, and there had never been a launch failure, management ignored the engineers. The temperature on launch day was below 32 degrees.
Feynman had his answer, he just had to prove it.
The perfect opportunity arrived when he was requested to testify before Congress on his findings. With television cameras rolling, Feynman innocently questioned a NASA manager about the o-ring temperature issue. As the manager insisted that the o-rings would function properly even in extreme cold, Feynman took an o-ring sample he had obtained out of a cup of ice water in front of him. He then took the clamp off the o-ring which was being used to squish it flat. The o-ring remained flat, proving that in fact, resilliancy was lost with a temperature drop.
In his own report Feynman described the terrible and corrupting influence of incentives and expectation upon science and engineering. Even literal rocket science was not exempt from human pressure. Feynman ended his discussion of the Challenger disaster with an observation that eerily speaks to the subject of "consensus" in scientific matters. Consensus doesn't matter. Only science and engineering does. "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
"If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering often cannot be done fast enough to keep up with the expectations of originally conservative certification criteria designed to guarantee a very safe vehicle. In these situations, subtly, and often with apparently logical arguments, the criteria are altered so that flights may still be certified in time. They therefore fly in a relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a percent (it is difficult to be more accurate).
Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers.
In any event this has had very unfortunate consequences, the most serious of which is to encourage ordinary citizens to fly in such a dangerous machine, as if it had attained the safety of an ordinary airliner. The astronauts, like test pilots, should know their risks, and we honor them for their courage. Who can doubt that McAuliffe was equally a person of great courage, who was closer to an awareness of the true risk than NASA management would have us believe?
Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be realistic in making contracts, in estimating costs, and the difficulty of the projects. Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
Nature cannot be fooled, but man is capable of a great deal of self deception and politicians especially so. One commenter on Megan McArdle's site unwittingly reiterated Feynman's thesis. He argued that once the AGW money train began the danger of confirmation bias would rise almost unchecked. Like NASA's Challenger a launch schedule for carbon amelioration had been publicly announced by the politicians, the activists and the UN. McCardle's commenter wrote eloquently of the terrible pressure to assume that it had to be and the horrible cost of standing in the way.
With respect, you're setting up a strawman. None of the scientists who have "come out" as climate skeptics allege a massive conspiracy by scientists, any more than there is a massive liberal conspiracy in Hollywood. What you have is a self-emergent, self-organizing bias. I hope I can illustrate it briefly.
I work in academic science (check my IP address if you wish). Scientists are, in general, uncompromising idealists for objective, physical truth. But occasionally, politics encroaches. Most of my work is funded by DoE, DoD, ONR, and a few big companies. We get the grants, because we are simply the best in the field. But we don't work in isolation. We work as part of a department, which has equipment, lab space, and maintenance staff, IT, et cetera. We have a system for the strict partition of unclassified/classified research through collaboration with government labs. The department had set a research policy and infrastructure goal to attract defense funding, and it worked.
The same is true in climate science. Universities and departments have set policies to attract climate science funding. Climate science centers don't spontaneously spring into existence – they were created, in increasingly rapid numbers, to partake in the funding bonanza that is AGW. This by itself is not political – currently, universities are scrambling to set up "clean energy" and "sustainable technology" centers. Before it was bio-tech and nanotechnology. But because AGW-funding is politically motivated, departments have adroitly set their research goals to match the political goals of their funding sources. Just look at the mission statements of these climate research institutes – they don't seek to investigate the scientific validity or soundness of AGW-theory, they assume that it is true, and seek to research the implications or consequences of it.
This filters through every level. Having created such a department, they must fill it with faculty that will carry out their mission statement. The department will hire professors who already believe in AGW and conduct research based on that premise. Those professors will hire students that will conduct their research without much fuss about AGW. And honestly, if you know anything about my generation, we will do or say whatever it is we think we're supposed to do or say. There is no conspiracy, just a slightly cozy, unthinking myopia. Don't rock the boat.
The former editor of the New Scientist, Nigel Calder, said it best – if you want funding to study the feeding habits of squirrels, you won't get it. If you wants to study the effects of climate change on the feeding habits of squirrels, you will. And so in these subtle ways, there is a gravitational pull towards the AGW monolith.
I think it the most damning evidence for this soft tyranny is in the work of climate scientists whose scientific integrity has led them to publish results that clearly contradict basic assumptions in AGW modeling. Yet, in their papers, they are very careful to skirt around the issue, keeping their heads down, describing their results in a way obfuscates the contradiction. They will describe their results as an individual case, with no greater implications, and issue reassuring boilerplate statements about how AGW is true anyways.
For the field as a whole, it's not a conspiracy. It's the unfortunate consequence of having a field totally dominated by politically-motivated, strings-attached money. In the case of the CRU email group, well, the emails speak for themselves. Call it whatever you want.
The kind of PR momentum behind AGW argues for greater, not less scrutiny because in addition to the inherent uncertainties of scientific inquiry must be added one more: confirmation bias. Greenpeace sees what it has to see. Otherwise a lot of people in NGOs will be unemployed. That's not to say that AGW doesn't exist, but it does argue for a careful double-checking. Has the data been faked? Better find out for sure. Those who argue that the world must embark on a multi-trillion dollar program to climate engineer the planet should ask themselves this. How much more confident are they in the AGW models produced at the University of East Anglia than they were in NASA's risk analysis? How sure are they that actions taken according to the carbon model will not result in environmental catastrophe rather than amelioration, assuming arguendo that the catastrophe actually impends? How do they know this whole frigging contraption won't blow up on launch? Is it one in a hundred, one in a hundred thousand? How much resolution has been lost in the adjustments and corrections that have been applied to the data? Does anyone even know? And if they don't know, doesn't the precautionary principle demand that we look — and look carefully — before we leap?
In the past it was not the job of public policy to act on a bet or a maybe. To justify government intervention in economic activity, personal lifestyles, the right to travel; to have the effrontery to prescribe how many children a population is allowed; how many sheets of toilet paper it can use; what it may purchase and how much it could be taxed, a clear and compelling case formerly had to be put forward. Absent a compelling public interest you were obliged to leave people alone. Without a sound foundation in "reality" it really is dangerous to regulate the world. Honest. Maybe the media had a consensus; but perhaps Megan McArdle is beginning to have her doubts.
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163 Comments, 163 Threads
1. Josh
Very nice post, wretchard, shows the traditions and commonality of bad science!
But you see, it's really no good demanding perfection, as Patrick McGoohan would say, you won't get it. You do the best you can, and yes, you might apply the precautionary principle in a reasonable manner, and start some projects to move you in the necessary direction – and keep up the research. But this crap out of East Anglia is NOT THE BEST YOU CAN DO, and goes far beyond "confirmation bias", it violates morals and ethics and the scientific method we're supposed to learn as fourteen year olds in standard California educational curriculum.
The morons on ABC News (finally!) covered the East Anglia CRU stuff this evening, presenting various voices saying it's really not important, which is the impression they left. Sorry, Charlie, fake the data, and we toss out the rest of the "science" as utterly worthless, and if no apology is forthcoming, we toss out the "scientists" as utterly worthless.
And it's barely newsworthy when this happens. It's about as rare as dog poop on your lawn, as squirrels digging up the garden, as a pit in pitted olives.
Still, I will NOT whitewash the CRU thing as confirmation bias, which is sort of halfway understandable, if not respectable.
What then, you ask? It's "scientists" not doing science, but grantsmanship, politics, second-rate minds just making a living. The banality of science. Do you know, that half the practicing scientists are below average in skills? I have an elegant proof that is just too long to include in the margin of this message.
And even so, you ask, why do they choose *this* direction for thier mediocrity? I dunno, I suppose I could speculate psychobabble about that, but it's the same reason why non-scientists seem to love hearing it. Gloom, doom, disaster, something to believe in even if it's horrible, tasty conspiracies, groups to join, scapegoats to abuse. Nothing very objective in the list, just, y'know, humans at work and play.December 10, 2009 - 12:08 am Link to this Comment
2. Beverly
Hmmm. Confirmation bias notwithstanding, the language and the tone of the leaked emails make it clear that these scientists, at least, were quite deliberately fudging their data and suppressing contradictory results.
(Feynman rocks.)December 10, 2009 - 12:13 am Link to this Comment
3. exhelodrvr
Seems to me that the default position for something of this magnitude is that a conspiracy DOES exist, because too many people have too much to gain. And the burden should be on the AGW supporters to prove their case, NOT on the doubters to disprove AGW.December 10, 2009 - 12:24 am Link to this Comment
4. Nomenklatura
When I'm inclined to draw a line through the data I find the relevant points are the repeated occasions on which the truth, when revealed, keeps turning out to be worse even than the skeptics had imagined.
That is the AGW trend which now seems mostly likely to continue.December 10, 2009 - 12:52 am Link to this Comment
5. toad
The time has passed for AGW to be passed off as a simple "bias" toward finding confirming data. What the greater number of voters now believe is that it was a money and power grubbing plot and any excuse offered will be regarded as just a continuance of the "plot."
Right now life is hard and getting harder and the tolerance for a perceived coup on the Constitution is growing thinner by the minute.
Once people accept the idea of a conspiracy by the right, how hard is it for them to believe in a bigger more evidential conspiracy by the left?December 10, 2009 - 1:01 am Link to this Comment
6. j willie
Confirmation bias my ass! Josh got it right – Climategate has revealed an intentionally deceptive, psuedo-scientific research process underlying the biggest economic and political scam in history, all of which violate morals, ethics and the scientific method.
It's also hard to take Megan McCardle seriously when she starts a post with this:
I am thoroughly unimpressed with the belief that global warming scientists have been engaging in some kind of massive conspiracy to conceal the truth. First, because we seem to be able to observe things like polar ice sheets melting, which point to warming.
Like seeing polar ice sheets melting is in and of itself proof of anything…and it goes downhill from there. Having read several of her posts on the subject, and her responses to comments, she strikes me as either a head in the sand warmist, or, one who is too afraid of her NYC/DC peer group reaction to admit that she no longer believes.December 10, 2009 - 1:04 am Link to this Comment
7. Tee
interesting parallel there…McArdle can no more afford to be a skeptic than any climate scientist or university professor. Personally I think it's the new meme shaping up: everyone tried to be the voice of reason, but was bullied into silent acceptance of AGW.December 10, 2009 - 2:25 am Link to this Comment
8. wretchard
Personally I think it's the new meme shaping up: everyone tried to be the voice of reason, but was bullied into silent acceptance of AGW.
You prove the minimum and if the minimum is bad enough you don't have to bother to establish the maximum. What's true about AGW is it isn't proved. They can't predict the temperatures ten years forward and bet on the numbers. So what McArdle and some of the smarter people in the media have realized is that they are on safe ground asserting that prudence ought at least to be observed. They are taking the safe position which makes sense from a pundit's perspective.
While that falls short of many people's real suspicions (see comments above), it is enough. It's a huge victory for the skeptics; acknowlegement that the burden of proof is on the other side. From a memetic point of a view, skpeticism is an assertion with a big design margin. We don't have to prove Michael Mann to be what we suspect him to be. It's enough to show that he hasn't done the numbers convincingly. No sale is a devastating message. It is functionally equivalent to any of the more extreme forms of rejection. No sale means no sale.
Now Mann can prove us all wrong. This is the beauty of the scientific method. He can call out the future temperatures and, like Babe Ruth, tell the audience exactly where the ball will go. Well let's see if he can do it. By the looks of things he can't do do diddly. But if he was willing to tax us and risk countless Third World lives on his theory, then we're entitled to ask: 'Hey Michael, put your model where your mouth is: what are the temps are going to be in 2012 based on the carbon model. Show us the coefficient'. No can do? Well then, no can tax.December 10, 2009 - 2:41 am Link to this Comment
9. Walt
Snow when seen from inside home
Glistens white and lovely
Until you put on boots and cap
And then it becomes shovely
The AGW stuff's like that
It looks good from a distance
But when you get up close to it
You sure do find resistance
To everything the science guys
Who really should know better
Are doing to their science just
To get that grant fund letter
Is there a big conspiracy
Or just a mission bias
Do they believe in what they say
Or are they just big liahs
Break down the word conspiracy
And feast your eyes upon
The last part that says piracy
The first part that says conDecember 10, 2009 - 3:18 am Link to this Comment
10. blogstrop
It is already evident that Copenhagen is one big "Sorry" exercise dumped on the developed nations, with the reparations to the undeveloped (kleptocracy or not) already being tabulated. Money will change hands, but carbon will be carbon. It happens.
11. toad
8: Wretchard: Ohhhh, a good one. "Put up or shut up."
If they can't shut up or put up fairly soon they'll need to read,
"How to sprint for your car when being chased by a mob" by Dan Rostenkowski.
12. no mo uro
Conspiracies do not need to exist for bad things to happen in what appears to be a concerted effort.
Our host Wretchard has written about this phenomenon, in other areas, in his "Ichneumon Wasp" article and others. Much as leftists living in the West and radical Islam seem to be working synergistically towards the same goal of taking out Western civ, without actually sitting down together and conspiring, so too have scientists – all with the goal of maintaining public sector funding for their lifestyles in perpetuity – synergistically worked with politicians (who see this issue as a means of gaining and extending power and money). The term that applies is "confluence of purpose". It is not required for furtive men in dark rooms to sit around plotting in order for these events to occur. There may be pockets of true conspiracy, yes, the most recent East Anglia thing being the most egregious example. But it seems for the most part to be a confluence of purpose.December 10, 2009 - 4:26 am Link to this Comment
13. Bruce
There is an appropriate metaphorical moment in the last two lines of dialogue in "Terminator" (the first).
Some "androids" are dreaming less of electric sheep than of the cash and lifeblood they can suck out of the rest of us.December 10, 2009 - 5:27 am Link to this Comment
14. jts9164
Absolutely enthralled by our president's nobel prize acceptance until he mentioned climate change at which point i turned off my tv. Curious how many others did just that. I react the same way to many comments on this site but i tend to complete reading thru all of them… LOLDecember 10, 2009 - 6:20 am Link to this Comment
15. Talnik
Confirmation bias is endemic to our systems and often done deliberately. In order to obtain grant money, scientists need to support the theories of their paymasters.
Think of the U.S. housing crisis: lenders determined what value a house needed to be in order for a loan to be approved. Appraisers had to verify that value or lose those lenders as clients. Good appraisers went hungry, mediocre appraisers were corrupted, the public suffered.
Same bias, different actors.December 10, 2009 - 7:14 am Link to this Comment
16. dan
"Confirmation bias" is an excuse for conspiracy. I'm tired of the "it can't be a conspiracy because then we'd be crazy" reflex. OF COURSE IT'S A CONSPIRACY. Stop being such pussies and just accept it, damn.December 10, 2009 - 7:21 am Link to this Comment
17. Harry W. MacDougald
There is certainly confirmation bias.
However, there is also the deconstructionism of natural science, also known as "post-normal science," the subject of an outstanding Belmont Club post on the subject from 2007.
A leading avatar of post-normal science, i.e, the deliberate politicization of "facts" and "truth," in the natural sciences, is Mike Hulme. He is quoted at length in the above-referenced post.
What if anything does Mike Hulme have to do with Climategate?
He is a senior climate researcher at — The University of East Anglia — and a senior IPCC researcher and author.
Let us in this context reconsider the linked post at Watts Up With That about the nearly 2.5 C upward "homogenization" of raw temperature data at Darwin, Australia.
That particular fraud is almost certainly not an isolated instance, and the days ahead are likely to bring many more examples of flagrant and unjustifiable manipulation of raw temperature records to fake up a totally fraudulent case of global warming.
It has already been shown by the same author of that WUWT post that the CRU temperature stations include some of the largest cities in the world, even as they claim to have adjusted the urban heat island signal out of their analysis.
But not to worry – it's post-normal science in the service of the greater political good.December 10, 2009 - 7:44 am Link to this Comment
18. Go65
There's a rebuttal to Eschenbach's piece over here:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/willis_eschenbach_caught_lying.php#c2136694December 10, 2009 - 7:45 am Link to this Comment
19. 49erDweet
17. Harry W. MacDougald: Thanks for that link! Now I understand. "Extended Peer Community" is the elimination from the review process of those who disagree with you and "Extended Fact" is the homogenization of raw data to a point where it proves your pre-conceived notions. How utterly "post-scientific". They obviously deserve more tax money.December 10, 2009 - 7:57 am Link to this Comment
20. Tarnsman
No conspiracy?? The destruction of the raw data is the most damning evidence I can think of showing that in fact it was. If the science is settled, as one Nobel Peace Prize winner puts it, then one would think that they (the AGW crowd) would be trotting out the unlying data to their models/theories for all to see. BUT if the data doesn't support those very same model/theories then what does one do? Suppress it, hide it, destroy it. Which is what happened. Conspiracy? You betcha! Question is how far does it go? Just like the Tiger Woods scandal this is a story that just won't go quietly away as much as the AGW crowd hopes it will.
BTW, see Sarah Palin's smackdown on Al Gore?
"The response to my op-ed by global warming alarmists has been interesting. Former Vice President Al Gore has called me a "denier" and informs us that climate change is "a principle in physics. It's like gravity. It exists."
Perhaps he's right. Climate change is like gravity – a naturally occurring phenomenon that existed long before, and will exist long after, any governmental attempts to affect it.
However, he's wrong in calling me a "denier." As I noted in my op-ed above and in my original Facebook post on Climategate, I have never denied the existence of climate change. I just don't think we can primarily blame man's activities for the earth's cyclical weather changes.
Former Vice President Gore also claimed today that the scientific community has worked on this issue for 20 years, and therefore it is settled science. Well, the Climategate scandal involves the leading experts in this field, and if Climategate is proof of the larger method used over the past 20 years, then Vice President Gore seriously needs to consider that their findings are flawed, falsified, or inconclusive.
Vice President Gore, the Climategate scandal exists. You might even say that it's sort of like gravity: you simply can't deny it."
- Sarah Palin
Ouch! That's going to leave a mark.December 10, 2009 - 7:58 am Link to this Comment
21. Neo
I once attended a seminar given by a guy who was a expert in radio communications. During a break, he told us a story about how he had developed a burst transmitter design for an agency within the "intelligence community". In the process, he described how not only did this intelligence agency have guys designing radio transmitters that could be hidden, they had another set of guys, a "counter group," who's job it was to detect hidden radio transmitters. These two groups would go after each other in an attempt to come up with the best possible transmitters and the best possible methods of detection.
In climate science, we have a bunch of "hair of the dog" academics who live off the government dole while they concoct amateurish schemes to prove something that it seems has been predetermined to be true, no matter the actual empiric data, reminiscent of the now defunct "Tobacco Institute." The only group of folks trying to test their schemes are underfunded or doing work on their own time, pro-bono.
This process is obviously corrupt. It was never meant to provide the truth. If it was, the government research community would also have a fully funded "counter group" to try to prove that "Anthropogenic Global Warming" doesn't exist, has little impact or at least can be easily mitigated and therefore save billions, if not trillions, of dollars/Euros/pounds on trying to prevent a non sequitur.
The fact that there is no "counter group" immediately brings into question the purpose of the activity and whether it is meant to be part of that "waste, fraud and abuse" that so often infiltrates all vestiges of government. Afterall, who in their right mind starts with the most expensive possible plan and seems to make no attempt to mitigate costs. Meanwhile, the profiteers seem to be lining up in front of various government agencies.
The fact that this is an international activity makes one wonder if the UN has any real function except to give heads of state a chance to go shopping in New York City from time to time and travel to useless conferences where they can dine well and come up with new ideas on how to fleece their citizens at home.December 10, 2009 - 8:15 am Link to this Comment
For the Apollo program NASA did an assessment of the risks and the results were so disturbing they covered up the analysis completely.
Several years ago there was a discussion at the USAF program office for EELV. The issue was what probability of failure to use for the rockets, a number needed to calculate the predicted launch hazards. After some time the program manager spoke up, "I don't know why we need to discuss this. The contract says that the booster will be 98% reliable so that is what we should use."
A few years later there was an extended discussion on what probability of failure to use for the last Titan IVB rocket the USAF had. The problem was that the number originally used was wrong; I found the error and the new number I calculated was much higher. The result was Air Force could not get it's head around the fact that they had done all sorts of improvements in the rocket to improve its reliability and that the probability of failure was now higher than it had been.
So, it is not just a case of groupthink but also that people are not willing to admit that they have screwed up, or even could screw up.
My analyses show that space launch failures come in waves. The only explanation for this is that people forget how intrinsically difficult the job is, succumb to cost, schedule and bureaucratic pressures, and then a are jerked back to reality by a large "boom" and falling pieces of flaming debris.
The fact that computers don't blow up and models don't dig holes in the ground when they crash merely results in the period between failure waves being longer.December 10, 2009 - 8:19 am Link to this Comment
23. Annoy Mouse
"Feynman rocks" – More like Congas.December 10, 2009 - 8:28 am Link to this Comment
24. wws
Go65 – that blog is a congregational site for the AGW fanatics – be warned. His supposed "proof" that Eschenbach is "lying" depends on him ignoring the UHI (urban heat island) effect at Darwin airport. This isn't meant to be a long discussion of that rebuttal, but unless he's going to go through the math the way Eshenbach did it's not a convincing "takedown", just more preaching to a shrinking but ever more fanatical choir.December 10, 2009 - 8:32 am Link to this Comment
25. Josh
Now Mann can prove us all wrong. This is the beauty of the scientific method. He can call out the future temperatures and, like Babe Ruth, tell the audience exactly where the ball will go. Well let's see if he can do it.
Actually, no, he can't. Nobody can.
In philosophy of science, there is always a tension between even the best science and Humean skepticism that denies anything is ever proven. Will the sun rise in the east tomorrow? Well, it always has, according to certain rules, so the odds are pretty good, but *certain*?
Science is perhaps at its best when it can accurately "predict" the past. Of course, that is description, analysis, not prediction. And then when it does make predictions and these are confirmed, then we're pretty pleased with it, and may come to *use* the predictions and trust it as much as we trust anything.
But if you PROVE that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, well, the strength of the proof still must be confirmed by events.
Sooooo after this pedantic little rant, so what? Well, after sufficient brush fires in Malibu, residents start taking precautions. Doesn't take any rocket science to drive the action. And, you see, that's why the great unwashed can buy into this global warming thing, I guess, because we *have* seen some warming, we *have* seen some CO2 increases, so now they are ready to act on PAST events – and are not even looking at the "science". But that same Humean skepticism tells us, "Hey, wait, maybe the past evidence is only of something that's *over*", just as some Malibu resident is always able to argue with himself, "so, um, maybe I *don't* have to reroof with tile instead of wood shakes, maybe there won't be more brush fires, …".
OK, have I confused everyone sufficiently? Good! Then you are on the road to becoming a scientist. But I should really have composed this offline to make my points a little better. Bottom line is I got uncomfortable by the suggestion AGW could ever be really "proved", not the way Algore talks about things, that kind of proof just does not occur in (good) science.December 10, 2009 - 8:43 am Link to this Comment
26. joe buzz
IMHO, "the existence of an unconscious bias" that facilitates significant "error creep" at several locations by numerous researchers grant money sources aside would lead some to suspect conspiracy conscious our otherwise. But then again my bias is skepticism.December 10, 2009 - 8:47 am Link to this Comment
27. exhelodrvr
"The fact that computers don't blow up and models don't dig holes in the ground when they crash merely results in the period between failure waves being longer."
And when the failures eventually, inevitably do occur, the crash is often much worse.December 10, 2009 - 8:48 am Link to this Comment
28. Josh
RWE @ 22: Good going. Communications system failures tend to be bursty, too, fractal models provide good prediction. Your story is interesting, that human systems errors would be bursty. Hmm.December 10, 2009 - 8:51 am Link to this Comment
29. Enscout
Josh @ #1: "Sorry, Charlie, fake the data, and we toss out the rest of the "science" as utterly worthless, and if no apology is forthcoming, we toss out the "scientists" as utterly worthless."
You're being too lenient with these perps. This wasn't some innocent mistake by naive adolescents. These people maliciously cooked the books. "They played on our fears" – and tried to game the leftist ideology of our time.
They should be charged accordingly, discredited and shunned by the community. It is criminal fraud.December 10, 2009 - 8:56 am Link to this Comment
30. joe buzz
Realizing that I left out a comma or two and forgot to add an observation regarding Mann's statement on Ms. Brown's show the other night, I searched in vain for the edit function….
Mann claimed that somewhere in the 60′s trees stopped being reliable thermometers. What is his definition of "reliable"? How can that be? Trees are what they are. I doubt that the most high scientist created them to be thermometers.December 10, 2009 - 8:57 am Link to this Comment
31. Rurik
It very like the mode of "thought" underlying Socialist Realism. We cannot see the truth because of our imperfect perception, so we must present the real truth, not as we find it, but as we know it is, and as we one day will find it in the idealized world of our theories. Just like the "scientists" who had to put explosives under the GM Truck to illustrate theh exploding gas tank phenomenon. you need to keep in mind the difference between ordinary, mundane truth and higher truth This is the same wasy a scientist can justify his belief in Socialist. The theory's beyond question, and one day we'll be smart enough to get the proof right. Paging Doctor Lysenko! Under Scientific Socialism you get Socialist Scientism.December 10, 2009 - 8:58 am Link to this Comment
32. Annoy Mouse
Al Gore fought a bitter election against the conservative party and their proponents. He took his fight to the courts with every expectation of winning there. The courts have been edging leftward for the past four decades and their judicial activism has encroached on liberty unopposed. When Al Gore lost in the court to GW Bush he punched back with AGW to thwart the perceived aims of the conservative movement. When Katrina happened the liberals let the notion that it was conservatives fault, possibly even caused by the administration. They didn't believe this themselves but the little dirty people whom they'd adopt and control would believe anything they were told. So when 911 happened, the left was jealous that such a wonderful catastrophe could befall a conservative. It gave the administration a carte blanche to restructure the government and redefine its relationship to the people. To grow it bigger than ever and to justify action not on what is true but on what might happen. A preemptive war ensued. The same 25% that believed the "conservative" government that caused Katrina were the same that believed the government caused 911. This ratio incidentally is about 90% African Americans (approximately 12% of the population), 5% felons, and the remaining 10% hardcore leftists and unhinged Rosy O'Donnell, homosexual types, who hate conservative men in general. By and large, the guilt ridden populace did not believe these outrageous accusations but felt that it would be best to mollify the shrill radical voices by knowingly electing an anti-America, belch-fire, leftist radical of color as an act of Christian sacrifice. Now that the shoe is on the other foot the leftists were delighted when they inherited the financial crisis. They would rewire the world in their image. It only reinforced the emergencies that they had already had invented, the AGW theory, and the H1N1 virus. The government is on the home stretch to make an America safe for tyranny based on anthropogenic global hysteria.December 10, 2009 - 9:07 am Link to this Comment
33. Tom Holsinger
So why shouldn't the politicians who provide the government funding for research cut out the middlemen, and select recipients of research funding based on which of them contributes to the politicians, as opposed to scientific merit?December 10, 2009 - 9:08 am Link to this Comment
Tom Holsinger #34:
They do that. They even do that when they are told to do something else or not told to do anything at all. It is called "Budget earmarks." And I have some stories I could tell you about that.December 10, 2009 - 9:12 am Link to this Comment
35. robotech master
To 18. Go65
The debate on that site is pretty amusing. You have the cultists claiming and implying things that the piece doesn't say… and then they turn around and say the "high-quality" data needs to be heavily adjusted…
Its funny how all this "high-quality" data needs massive adjustments all the time for it to be "correct".December 10, 2009 - 9:24 am Link to this Comment
36. Kinuachdrach
We don't need to invoke conspiracy. The Alleged Anthropogenic Global Warming scam is simply human beings following incentives. As someone once said — Want more of something? Then subsidze it!
The incentives for bad science are exactly those that President Eisenhower warned about so presciently in his farewell speech almost half a century ago.
Was there a conspiracy to cover up President Clinton's philandering? Or was it simply sympathetic reporters responding to the incentive to stay in the group. When the facts of Clinton's serial abuse of women and lying under oath became undeniable, the meme switched to 'everyone does it'. That's what we can expect now. It is only a matter of time till some 'science' reporter remembers that Mendel fudged the original data on genetic inheritance in flowers.December 10, 2009 - 9:38 am Link to this Comment
37. Lynne
I just spent a couple of weeks comparing the behavior of the East Anglia crowd to the guys who developed the first atomic models at the turn of the last century. The contrast in attitudes and assumptions is fairly stark.
I'm left wondering what Niels Bohr, Ernest Rutherford, and J.J. Thomson would make of all of this.December 10, 2009 - 9:39 am Link to this Comment
38. cfbleachers
Sorry, wretchard…Megan has a point, but it doesn't extend where she wishes it to extend.
It does NOT take active participation to make a conspiracy of everyone…it takes a)active participants and b)participants engaged in passive acquiescence.
The Hollywood "conspiracy" raised by the commenter to Megan cited above, in a perfect case in point. So are the vast majority of humanities departments in academia.
Having tried numerous fraud cases brought against "deep pocket" defendants (the usual "enemies" of the left…(corporate America, police, military…capitalists and security/defense types), I can testify to how these conspiracies come to be.
First, you start with a "mission" with missionary zeal at its core. The "mission" is to take down the "enemy". (or to advance a "cause" which has the same net effect, only often indirectly…as opposed to a face on assault)
The "active participants" are engaged in a no-holds-barred attempt to destroy the object of their disaffection…by any means necessary.
Confirmation bias on the part of the "experts" is a FRACTION of the motivation of the participants. (Bernie Goldberg tried to whitewash away some of the mens rea in his books as well, outlining liberal bias in the media and in "news" reporting).
It does not fly. Take the "thin blue line" for instance. In police departments that I have defended there indeed existed an unwritten code that you did not rat out another fellow officer. The conspiracy of silence was real and it was effective. Internal affairs, if they weren't in on the "silence" and the "lack of evidence gathering", they certainly were often completely ineffective in getting around the silence.
In some neighborhoods, a crime committed often found detectives completely unable to crack the conspiracy of silence surrounding what people knew to be the truth, but were NEVER going to come forward and testify or "rat out" the perps…they would protect them.
To suggest that the emails attached to the Global Warming science fraud required ACTIVE participation by everyone involved, or else there is NO conspiracy…is a faulty syllogism.
There IS a conspiracy in the media, there IS a conspiracy in Hollywood, there IS a conspiracy academia, there IS a conspiracy in the Global Warming scientific community, there IS a conspiracy in the Nobel peace prize committee.
No logical syllogism will hold that does NOT contain a conspiracy in each of those institutions.
As long as one recognizes the thin red line that permeates each of them, and also understands that there are three "investors" in these conspiracies. 1)The active participants that hide evidence, distort facts, cheat, lie, steal…commit every act in furtherance, by any means necessary. 2)Those who know, suspect, or have reason to believe this is going on, but who "SIDE WITH" the perpetrators and stay silent to the crimes…won't "rat out their neighborhood". 3)The useful idiots who simply want to be associated with the "movement and the message" and are willfully and woefully ignorant, but that won't stop them from opining on anything and everything.
To suggest that there is no conspiracy in these institutions is myopic and wishful thinking, perhaps. In any event, it misses what it takes to conduct a mass conspiracy. The New Big Lie is so preposterous …it "couldn't be true". It is, wretchard…sadly, it is.
39. Annoy Mouse
Josh – "Will the sun rise in the east tomorrow? Well, it always has, according to certain rules, so the odds are pretty good, but *certain*? "
Whoa, not so fast. Many centuries of observation and theory led towards Newton whose theories explain and predict the orbits of our solar system. His proofs are open for all to see and his experiments are repeatable. Given the assumptions that these bodies will continue unabated, and no other external factors, shall, per his theories, remain in motion. It is CERTAIN.
40. Paul from Boston
It's remarkable how institutional imperatives can obscure the truth.
NASA wanted a manned space program to follow Apollo and the space shuttle was it. The Air Force didn't want any part of it because their estimate, before the first shuttle was launched, was a failure rate of 1 in 100 based on their experience with exploding rockets. Rockets do that, they blow up on the launch pad or fail shortly afterward and no one can really predict when it will happen. But even they couldn't resist the pressure and built a shuttle launch facility at Vandenburg for several billion dollars, and promptly shut it down.
The CRU problems and refusal to address them have a long history. A scientist in Australia, Warwick Hughes, and an amateur in Tasmania, John Daly, were questioning Phil Jones temperature reconstructions 20 years ago. Neither one could figure out how he got so much warming. They claimed that he was retaining sites contaminated with urban heat, eliminating unbiased rural sites, and truncating data to make the temperature look like it was warming. Jones stiffed them both using his "academic authority." The article by Eschenbach is nothing new nor surprising, though it documents another aspect of the problem quite well.
Groupthink and hysteria in science are nothing new. Freud was the god of psychology for almost 60 years until shown wrong, eugenics lasted a long time too. More recently peptic ulcers were due to "stress" and stomach acid. This despite successful treatment with penicillin in the early years after WWII. It took forty years before the medical establishment would accept that they were caused by bacteria. The doctors who showed this were locked out of medical journals and conferences for over a decade before they finally prevailed.December 10, 2009 - 9:48 am Link to this Comment
41. Annoy Mouse
Science doesn't say nothing can be proved. it says that nothing that can not be proved is science.December 10, 2009 - 9:50 am Link to this Comment
42. David W. Lincoln
I am reasonable, therefore anyone who agrees with me is reasonable, and anyone who disagrees with me is unreasonable. This is what is being peddled by the politicized, and frankly it is as
fallacious as, some pillows have feathers, birds
have feathers, therefore some pillows are birds.
This has more to do with, when a man judges himself by himself, he finds himself to be good,
than with standards which never change.December 10, 2009 - 9:52 am Link to this Comment
43. Josh
AM @ 41: Of course I'm being pedantic, making an issue out of some very theoretic stuff. You could get very rich betting the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, if you could just find fools enough to make the bet with you!
About this skepticism, it's not that the universe doesn't have its rules, it's that human knowledge is fallible. There is a lot of debate within science about whether some things are certain, whether mathematical and/or scientific facts are platonistically "real" or just formalist estimates or "best guesses". Yes, some of those "guesses" are pretty solid.
But I still say, I am less certain that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, than Algore seems to be about global warming.
None have ever caught him yet
For Tom he is the master,
His songs are stronger songs
And his feet are faster.December 10, 2009 - 10:01 am Link to this Comment
44. Thomas_L......
This is one of the best of many fine articles on the phenomenon of Climategate. Many people just can't believe that so many "climate" scientists could be wrong or how it could possibly happen.
I suggest people rent and watch the DVD of Dark Matter and substitute "climate" science for the astrophysics of the film.December 10, 2009 - 10:09 am Link to this Comment
45. Jack
It is all very well to talk about 'confirmation bias', but the CRU data dump does not indicate that is occurring.
-refusing to release your data is not confirmation bias.
-preventing alternate views from being published in the peer reviewed journal, and then using a lack of peer review as a reason to denigrate those views is not confirmation bias.
-refusing to release your methodology and your computer codes is not confirmation bias.
-refusing to address the points made by your critics and, instead, make ad hominum attacks, make accusations about motive, anything but actually address the issue, is not confirmation bias.
The CRU scientists have done everything necessary for a good con to work, except some one has now spilled the beans.December 10, 2009 - 10:14 am Link to this Comment
46. Sherab Zangpo
Sorry for being so boring Folks, but I must repeat it: the totalitarians are not engaged in any "cultural" debate, THEY ARE ENGAGED IN A WAR AGAINST FREEDOM, CAPITALISM, AND THE WEST.
They will not renounce the propaganda tool of the "global warming" because it is the most powerful trick they have ever invented to pull down the system of Freedom.
Don't cultivate any illusion.
It is war, it is not "cultural debate".
We must outnumber them, we must reconquer the schools, the universities, and reduce their media to the nothing they are.
(P.S. That's why my blog is completely dedicated to the Sacred Knowledge, we need to restart from the foundation if we want to defend Freedom: the subversives have built a WHOLE SOCIETY of "fools " – in the sense of the Bible…"the fool says in his heart that God is not")December 10, 2009 - 10:17 am Link to this Comment
47. Annoy Mouse
Josh – AL Gore is certain of his position because he is married to it and has placed his bets on it. He stands to gain all if he can convince of a majority in government of his odious vision and stands to lose if not. It should be interesting to see how his portfolio shifts in the near future. Somehow I don't think Al is going broke any time soon.
As far as this questioning reality that you allude to, I think this only exists in the science of the impossibly big or the science of the impossibly small. Or, I should say improbably because in the world of quantum mechanics, probability is all we have. I think it is wrong to apply such mysteries to the mundane of what is a pretty deterministic world that we live in. The probability of any given event can not be added arithmetically because these events interact with one another in ways that change the underlying probability. I think that even the great mathematical genius of Feynman knew this when he postulated that the probability was closer to 1 percent rather than .001. Probability does well to bind nominal behavior but does not offer solace when the bullet in a blue sky finds its mark.December 10, 2009 - 10:20 am Link to this Comment
48. CallyR
It's not only past research being tampered with. In 1254108338.txt, Tom Wigley says he is working on a paper now for EPRI and is choosing arbitrary changes to the temperature record in order to explain the 1940s warming blip.
http://www.climate-gate.org/email.php?eid=1016December 10, 2009 - 10:21 am Link to this Comment
49. Don Rodrigo
The Space Shuttle example brings up another, perhaps related, issue of deliberately skewing figures to promote a program or agenda: NASA's insistence early on the the Shuttle system would result in huge savings in alunch costs. As a result of this 'sales pitch,' NASA created a near monopoly on American launch payloads until the Challenger disaster. The launch cost claims were a total fraud based on the simplistic notion that the Shuttle was 'resusable,' and assuming weekly launches (a logistical and economical impossibility).
We see echoes of this in ALL the gigantic Congressional and Administration initiatives happening right now.December 10, 2009 - 10:30 am Link to this Comment
50. sol
Here is a great article
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data/December 10, 2009 - 10:32 am Link to this Comment
51. Ed in Kanata
Some enlightenment on the motivation of the climate change community can be gleaned from Richard Lindzen's video on You Tube where he quotes extracts from Mike Hulme's (the Head of the CRU) new book "Why we Disagree about Climate Change". These are:
"The idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identities can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change but to ask what climate change can do for us.
Because the idea of climate change is so plastic it can be deployed across many of our psychological, ethical and spiritual needs.
We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilize them in support of our projects.
These myths transcend the scientific categories of true and false".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sHg3ZztDAwDecember 10, 2009 - 10:37 am Link to this Comment
52. steveaz
McArdle, quoting Feynman, wrote:
"Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of–this history–because it's apparent that people did things like this:"
[Bold mine.]
It sounds to me like she's making psychological excuses for what is outright fraud. "Silly Rabbit!" she's saying. "Trix is for kids!" Fraud, it's just something people do.
Can this be her way of expressing denial? Could she be so crude? Nah.
If Megan was to sit up straight and take a General's overview of the battlefield, that is, if she was able to stare past the fusillade of manufactured AGW "frightery," honestly inspect her own personal patronage constraints and deliberately ignore the disproportionate magnitude of partisan media
frontsbrands (just count the Time Warner syndicate's "fronts" and most state universities' "climatology" and humanities departments – these are "media" too) arranged in coordinated, synchronized choral phalanxes evangelizing AGW, and then if she was to ponder for a moment the corruptibility of the multi-billion dollar grants-awards process, if after all that, she still fails to "see the conspiracy," then I'll have to doubt either her sincerity or her intelligence.
Where I see ten or fifteen or twenty-two cooperating super-campuses, some corporate, some governmental, some non-governmental, each acting rationally and predictably in perfect accord with its stated anti-[write in any proxy for republican, capitalist America] "mission statement," Megan sees mud. Where I see composites of miscible, concentric and sub-secting cells – some camouflaged, some not – but all coordinated in offensive phalanxes actively generating an unelected, supernational taxing authority at a UN confab, Megan sees only an "inherited" simian psychological frailty called "confirmation bias" endemic to the practice of science. Where some see a deliberate epidemic, Dr. McArdle sees only the natural common cold.
Take two aspirins and call her in the morning. Is she in-pay, or blase, or simply stupid?
I think this might spring innocently from her having skewed priorities and a short attention span: given that so many of the same campuses implicated in ClimateGate also proliferated Baath Party and Democrat(ic) party talking points through much of the nineties and the 'oughts, perhaps she is distracted by the flurry of earth-shaking implications, and simply hasn't thought the topic "interesting" enough to delve into.
I dunno.
PS: is it ok to end a sentence with a preposition?December 10, 2009 - 10:41 am Link to this Comment
53. joe buzz
The Dog ate my Data blog feature a nice Flashing gif of raw v. adjusted Brisbane temp anomalyDecember 10, 2009 - 10:44 am Link to this Comment
54. peterike
The same group think happened when AIDS first hit the scene. Remember how we were told, ad nauseum, that it was "just a matter of time" before AIDS would break out in the heterosexual community in a big and devastating way. Worse than the Black Death it would be!
A few scientists dissented from the "settled" view. They were, naturally, pilloried, called every name in the book and marginalized (in those pre-internet days, without the MSM on board, you became a non-person very quickly). The only way you could even hear an alternative to the AIDS narrative was by reading magazines like National Review and The American Spectator. Journals which, naturally, had long been dismissed as crack-pot, homophobic right-wing nonsense.
Needless to say, AIDS never did "break out" into the main population. And if you took an hour or so looking at the science, even as an amateur, it was pretty plain that the chants of doom were false.
But funding went from zero to billions in an eye blink (and was, no matter how high it went, decried as paltry and mean and hateful in its scarcity), and oh boy it was good times for medical researchers. Not to mention journalists, activists, pols on the make, "community organizers" and the whole list of rent seeking vermin that scurry around in our world today.
But it was all a crock from the word "go." If you weren't gay or swapping needles, you had close to nothing to worry about. When AIDS rates in Africa weren't growing to meet expectations, they changed the definition of what AIDS meant from actually being tested for a virus to anyone with a cluster of certain symptoms, symptoms which happen to be pandemic in Africa thanks to pitiful public health. The result? A glorious boom in AIDS cases! A funding explosion and hey cool, we get to meet Bono!
It was not just a scam. It was scams within scams within scams. It took twenty years to peter out, but finally it did. Who the hell talks about AIDS anymore? I guess all those quilts really did solve the problem.
55. Jamie Irons
I'll bet you already know this, but Babe Ruth's called shot may (or may not!) be a myth.
The evidence is at least as ambiguous as that for "climate change"!
Jamie Irons
56. Insufficiently Sensitive
Personally I think it's the new meme shaping up: everyone tried to be the voice of reason, but was bullied into silent acceptance of AGW.
That is EXACTLY the operation of Political Correctness. A social stampede, devoid of reason or reality – personally gaining social rewards at the expense of candor and honesty.
A reminder to the rest of us that the truth may hurt us and everyone else, but long-range, honesty is the best policy.December 10, 2009 - 10:52 am Link to this Comment
57. Josh
Annoy Mouse @ 49: There are different opinions even within philosophy of science, I prefer one which is instrumentalist, which comes across as skeptical. It's not really a matter of stochastic versus deterministic, I was using "probably" in conventional terms, not statistical. What a scientist can say is, "I have a theory, with these equations, that predict where and when the sun will rise tomorrow, and I am as certain as can be, due to evidence and logic, that it will be good tomorrow." Perhaps this can be looked at as a form of modesty.
Please note I am NOT saying that all theories are equally good, and I am not even saying that the layman should doubt basic science as taught in school. Nor am I claiming that many practicing scientists will quibble the way I am here – they don't.
I guess I'm saying, even in science, the best idea is, "Trust, but verify". These CRU emails just emphasize what we've known for years, verification was impossible because these yutzes wouldn't release the raw data, and had indeed faked the data they did present. Shows that the CRU stuff is just trash, and anyone who persists in citing it is an idiot.December 10, 2009 - 11:07 am Link to this Comment
58. Uncle Jefe
None of this matters to al gore and the 'true believers' that continue to enrich him. They will bankrupt the rest of us with taxes and restrictions on business, and kill capitalism, in spite (true spite) of the facts.
The 'health and science editors' of the SF Bay Area news stations continue to take babs boxer's lead in damning the hackers of CRU and all 'deniers', whilst praising the work at hand in Copenhagen with a tone of shock that anyone could not see the 'truth' of their religion.December 10, 2009 - 11:17 am Link to this Comment
59. gs
Now Mann can prove us all wrong…He can call out the future temperatures and, like Babe Ruth, tell the audience exactly where the ball will go. Well let's see if he can do it.
Mann is a climatologist, not a weather forecaster.
The difference between climate and weather bears emphasizing.
If a meteorological event is consistent with my views about AGW, it is climate.
If not, it is weather.
Joking aside, without any particular expertise, I assume that the dynamics of a complex system like the atmosphere occurs over a(n incompletely understood) coupled hierarchy of time scales.December 10, 2009 - 11:21 am Link to this Comment
60. hdgreene
I hope I got this straight: when it comes to the billions spent on the Iraq war, it is "Bush Lied, Thousands Died." But when it comes to the trillions slated to mitigate AGW, with millions of jobs lost, it is "Conformation Bias." And won't GWB look good for obstructing the Kyoto Accords and saving the American economy? For riding tall like a brave cowboy, turning back the stampeding alarmists herd. What a great President!
I'd like to add my own theory to the ones outlined above, because I am not sure Conformation Bias explains where all this horse putty came from originally. It seems to be less of a group data massage than a "scientific" circle jerk.
The "scientists" involved suffered from "Sensitive at fourteen Syndrome." It can strike at any age, but basically it involves an intelligent person of limited intellectual maturity becoming attracted to an issue and identifying with it in a personal way — often while still in high school. The issue becomes a form of self love and, of course, love is blind (and self love especially so). The cause needs to be appropriately grand, historic, and "big scale" to be worthy of this love and devotion. In the past it was often World Socialism (or fascism on a more tribal level).
Environmentalism certainly qualifies and produces much dubious science: spotted owls that need a huge "primal forest" to nest (though it turns out a K-mart sign will do); Cancer causing Ozone holes that are permanently opened because of the activities of man (until they suddenly close); convenient typos and math errors that tell us things are even worse than we thought last year (that a glacier will melt in 35 years if warming persists — oops, make that 350). The mistakes, of course, are never acknowledged by the movement (and will often continue to be cited).
Basically, the issue gets walled off from the criticism of others or critical thinking by the "activist scientist." Criticism of the love object causes pain. But naturally, the person wants to be near the love object. So they choose a career that will further the cause they so closely identify with — while acquiring the necessary credentials to move into a favorable position to affect the outcomes. Combine this with tenure and Civil Service protections, and an astute group of activist can out last and outflank less committed colleagues, recruit the similarly committed and take over an institution — turning both the institution and the cause into a form of group idol worship.
When challenged in their "core beliefs" the group will behave like petulant children armed with RPGs — and are not above shooting off their institutional rockets in defense of their "loved one."
I think something like this happened at both the CRU (along with allied "Climatologists") and at the EPA, where the institutions have so grossly aligned with an outside political movement, and become parasitic in relation to the larger society. For the EPA to push forward with stringent CO2 regulation in the midst of Climategate displays its parasitic nature. It is quite willing to increase its own power and privilege at the expense of the American workers on the basis of dubious science — and lovingly believe it is for their own good (the worker's) rather than for their own good (The EPA's).December 10, 2009 - 11:46 am Link to this Comment
61. silence do good
From Phil Jones To: Michael Mann (Pennsylvania State University). July 8, 2004
"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
That's not "confirmation bias." It's "conspiratorial intent."December 10, 2009 - 12:01 pm Link to this Comment
62. Thomas_L......
hdgreene: Well stated!
63. Bohica
Wretchard – Great point on Confirmation Bias. almost a passive force in the 'debate' until a strong challenge is raised. Then the heavy artillery comes out. I'll give the AGW crowd the benefit of the doubt re a conspiracy in the scientific world but not in the apparatus that is funding it. It's still lead by the same strain of human that screamed about the population explosion in the seventies and the coming famine. It has morphed a few times over the years but it is still a concerted effort to bring about the chantge it wants by whatever means necessary. And using the weakness of grant-addicted scientists to do so is simply another means justified by the end.
64. Fat Man
The data wasn't faked. Figures don't lie. Liars figure.
The data was analyzed. And the analysis was sold by thuggery. That is what the CRU-tape e-mails reveal.
At this point, I think we need to go back to square one. The UK Met Office has conceded the point and announced that it will do so. Link.
But we need to go further than that. It is not clear that the mean temperature of the air taken at weather stations is the correct measure of the "warmth" of the globe. "Unresolved issues with the assessment of multidecadal global land surface temperature trends" by Pielke, et. al.
Nor is it clear that the raw temperature data is sufficiently good to prove what AGW believers want it to prove. Even in the 21st Century, few U.S. weather stations are Class 1 or 2 (Error <1°C).
Even after that there are questions such as climate sensitivity to CO2 increases, the existence of positive feedbacks, the consequences of warming, and the best ways to deal with them.December 10, 2009 - 12:04 pm Link to this Comment
65. truepeers
Confirmation bias or conspiracy?
Has anyone mentioned that it is both?
Another word for "confirmation bias" is religion, as many have mentioned re AGW – in other words shared faith in a hypothesis about the meaning or purpose of history that gets thousands or millions of people working together in a common purpose. In so many ways – not just in "adjusting" data – today millions are doing things to "confirm" their bias, like taking photos of polar bears on floating ice, or talking up hurricanes, or riding a bike.
It's surely true that all the millions of warmists aren't working together on a discrete conspiracy. However, that doesn't stop small power-hungry groups within from being corrupted and quite consciously fudging the data and banning skeptics. In religious terms, that would be an act of bad faith, a sign that one is the unable to trust and believe in true humility and hence unable to act in ways that maintain the overall integrity of the religion.
As I argue in my latest post, religion is a necessary human phenomenon and we can only look forward to a future in which more and more scientific hypotheses come under the wing of religious movements. Hopefully this will not lead us to think like leftists and label every aspect of our religious Other as a conspiracy. Conspiracy theory can't explain how the positive forces in human history work – i.e. how we deal with the variants of the prisoner's dilemma that regularly face humanity and teach us that we can find non-zero-sum, albeit temporary (nothing lasts forever) "solutions", with trust. Conspiracy theory only explains how some people game the system, getting theirs while the getting is good, not how we ever came to have good faith in the system in the first place. The latter is the true question of human self-interest.December 10, 2009 - 12:29 pm Link to this Comment
66. Mr. Forgues
I really like the way Mr. Fernandez uses the anti-scientific 'precautionary principle' against the very people who use it as argument.
If applied consistently the so-called principle would bring the entire human experience to end, paralyzed by the possibility that something, anything, can go wrong. If you don't need to support your theory with evidence, or if there is no possible way to falsify it, you can say anything at all and consensus naturally becomes the center of a perfectly circular proof.December 10, 2009 - 12:38 pm Link to this Comment
67. Ruthie
If OJ can walk free due to testimony impeachment (M. Furman), then we can certainly run (don't walk) from these commies disguised as scientists.December 10, 2009 - 12:51 pm Link to this Comment
68. D. Ch.
When reading people debating whether or not a conspiracy occurred, I can't help reflecting that politics almost always leads to strange group effects. Why, for instance, does almost everyone on both sides of the climate debate buy into the assumption that global warming would be bad? The examples of past warming episodes — medieval warm period, warm climate during the height of the Roman empire, Vikings first colonizing then leaving Greenland — suggest as strongly as any historical evidence ever suggests anything that warm periods in the earth's climate are good for man and human civilizations. The predicted effects of AGW — tropics the same, poles warmer — suggests good effects from global warming. We could start with more arable land for growing food and move on to more inhabitable territory in newly ice-free areas of Greenland and Antarctica. There would probably be more mineral resources available for exploitation as the glaciers retreat. Ignoring this point — the probable benefits of global warming — is another example of group think that everyone commenting here so far has participated in, without any consciousness of being part of a conspiracy …
By the way, if you could show beyond a reasonable doubt that global warming was bad for us, then it would have to be fixed **whether or not** man had caused it. In fact the reasons it was occurring would be sort of beside the point unless it suggested a quick way to fix it — and last I looked CRU-type climate scientists were saying that decreasing the industrial output of CO2 is a very slow and "iffy" way of reducing global warming. That AGW alarmists are pushing this sort of fix shows that they are not really worried about global warming, but rather more concerned about retaining their positions of influence (who do you think would be in charge of checking up that CO2 output was decreasing as intended?) Personally, if I were really worried about global warming, I would start thinking about developing the technology to build lots of orbiting sunshades to deflect incoming solar radiation — it's sure to work. If instead another ice age starts to look probable (we're more or less due for the next one to start according to some experts), you could make the orbiting sunshades reflective and divert toward the earth sunshine that would otherwise miss the planet, which is also sure to work. If you're serious about assuming responsibility for the earth's climate, this sort of sure-to-work technology that you should be thinking about.December 10, 2009 - 12:57 pm Link to this Comment
69. Geeze Louise
"There's nothing you can do about it."
Ask anybody and that's the answer you always receive.
Rustle your feathers in anger over this, that, whatever, and what happens?
Pick your debacle from the last ten years alone and cite one instance where objection and outrage changed anything.
The leviathan moves on.
The smack-down of the AGW mirage – another wealth transfer disguised as a tut-tut tale of morality – and what is the result? Third world leaders are Getting It faster than anyone in this country, let alone Europe.
What comes out of Washington? A smart white glove snap-back from the EPA warning of the dangers of "command and control" enforcement versus market incentives. Well that smarts.
"There's nothing you can do about it."
Except move to a Third World country.December 10, 2009 - 1:03 pm Link to this Comment
70. Anjika
I enjoyed reading your comments. You seem like an eminently sensible scientist to me. I agree that the CRU-tape letters can't just be caused by confirmation bias. Hiding or destroying data and wanting to redefine what peer-reviewed literature is are inexcusable and deliberate.
Still the right (or wrong) incentives plus confirmation bias is perhaps more powerful a combination than most of us like to admit. (You agree, Josh?)
Many scientists (I know from meeting them) think there's something morally wrong with Western, free, capitalist culture. It has nothing to do with them being scientific, it's just that they were raised to believe that greed and shallowness are a consequence of freedom and free markets, rather than a problem inherent in the human heart under any system. Therefore, they have an emotional incentive to "prove" scientifically that a free, prosperous way of life is bad. When you add this emotional incentive to the incentive of centralized funding, you get a powerful brew.
If they're good scientists, they don't let this belief influence the science they do (I mean they keep the influence to the minimum humanly possible). But as soon as they're out of their realm of expertise, they tend to agree with the opinions of other scientists whose world-view they find the most emotionally satisfying. This is why, I think, it doesn't take a concerted conspiracy *throughout* the scientific community to get many scientists to become true believers in AGW.
I have two friends, one an astronomer, and one an entomologists, who are AGW true-believers and activists. (I think I could add a cosmologist to this list, though the cosmologist has a more skeptical temperament than the other two, and so may be more open to doubt.) If you have a conversation with each friend about stars or bugs (that is, in their area of expertise), each is reasonable and skeptical. But as soon as you begin talking about Earth's climate, they turn into, well, I shouldn't call my friends "raving space loons", but it's like suddenly they're different people. Suddenly they're not scientists. They're not conspiring with anyone. They're not bad scientists (in their respective fields). They've just succumbed to emotional incentives (perhaps financial ones, too — I haven't asked if their grants are in any way related to "climate change") and confirmation bias.
We who have doubts about the AGW "consensus" may do ourselves a practical disservice if we make the conspiracy element of AGW believers any bigger than it has to be. My uncle Izzy is always accusing the rest of the family of conspiring against him, the result of which is that for our own peace-of-mind, we've had to stop listening to him and sometimes we even "conspire against" him just to avoid the unpleasantness of involving him in family decisions. It's possible for accusations of conspiracy to breed actual conspiracy. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, and all that.
As my friends and I (mostly science nerds) have grown up, my friends have started becoming more and more skeptical of the good that government science funding, in all its centralized glory, can actually do. They're realizing more and more that not everyone who calls himself a passionate advocate of science can be trusted with science. (This should be obvious, but science geeks have a reputation for emotional naivety for a good reason.) Even though most of them still buy into AGW (none study climate themselves, BTW, they just trust the "experts"), they may still change their minds, so long as they're not accused of being part of a conspiracy that none of them has deliberately participated in.
I see that while I was busy scribbling my comment, others have said something similar to what I said (only shorter, because I don't speak up much, but when I do, I have a hard time shutting myself up). Sorry for writing too much!December 10, 2009 - 1:04 pm Link to this Comment
71. Mike Chandler
Thank goodness for some sanity in this world! Other disciplines may be added to the once-believed trusted scientific ones, such as business and finance. Once there were experts in both, but obviously no longer. I have also never seen a proforma that performed as anticipated-they are are always overly optimistic, ALWAYS! Thanks for the article.December 10, 2009 - 1:06 pm Link to this Comment
72. Boiled Cabbage
Confirmation bias or conspiracy.
In the late 70s I was involved with the Uk punk music scene – we we all 19 then – and it developed, for a while,a sort of neo-Maoist meme in which if you didnt, 100%, sign up to the complete 'working class' ethos you were a non-person, unsexy, an outcast. Girls would not go out with you.
F Forward 30 years, the Uk Met Office, at the heart of the beast, WILL NOT EMPLOY anyone who does not believe in AGW.
In Copenhagen, its NGOs like Oxfam, Action Aid and several others who are leading the game in their calls for 'Climate Justice'. They are the sexiest right now. The vanguard.
The thing is, it will take more than rational science to stop this juggernaut. The 'hockey stick' graph was rubbished last year, yet did not stop the movement. What will?December 10, 2009 - 1:10 pm Link to this Comment
73. RagnarD
Josh @ 1:
Do you know, that half the practicing scientists are below average in skills?
That made me LOL! It surely did.
Did you know that half of the population is below average? [/snark off]
Feynman had a rep at Lost Almost of being a "safe-cracker". He described how he did it in his memoir. The scientists had tumbler lock filing cabinets for "security". They left them open during the day in violation of policy. He could go into an office to talk an issue of physics and mess with the combo lock. By feel he could get the first two numbers that could not be done when the cabinet was closed, the third was just elimination by feel when needing to open it. A simple trick of understanding the system that you are working with. He used it to illustrate that most people do not understand those systems, even supposedly brilliant scientists. And that those same brilliant people are really pretty unobservant, especially when talking about their own narrow world.
His lectures in physics are inspirational.
wretchard @ 8:
What's true about AGW is it isn't proved. They can't predict the temperatures ten years forward and bet on the numbers.
Hell, they cannot accurately predict temps 10 days in the future within decent stat limits. (O/T aside – my "hobby" is non-linear dynamics = chaos theory. IOW, the climate system is so damn complex that ALL of the world supercomputers hooked together cannot model it!) {Listening to "Hard To Handle" by the Black Crowes from Feak'N Roll – Songwriters: Redding, Otis;Jones, Allen;Bell, Alvertis}
Action speaks louder than words
And I'm a man of great experience
I know you've got another man
But I can love you better than him
Take my hand don't be afraid
I'm gonna prove every word I say
I'm advertising love for free
So you can place your ad with meDecember 10, 2009 - 1:15 pm Link to this Comment
74. SamA
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." If you say you've invented perpetual motion, you had better be prepared to present a working model and let all sorts of folks poke at it to see how it works. Otherwise, we will simply ignore you.
We need to establish in our culture a similar principle: "Extraordinarily expensive claims require extraordinary proof." If you want people to spend trillions of dollars to mitigate a threat, you had better be prepared to present all the data and methods you used to discern this threat, and let all sorts of people poke at them to see whether they hold up. Otherwise, we will simply ignore you.December 10, 2009 - 1:19 pm Link to this Comment
75. Jamie Irons
A phenomenon analogous to confirmation bias can occur in criminal trials, at least if in reality they are like those portrayed in John Mortimer's wonderful "Rumpole of the Bailey" stories.
In the episode "Rumpole and the Old Boy Net," for example, a couple who are on friendly terms with a lot of government poo-bahs have, over many years, provided the latter with the "services" of pleasant young ladies. It turns out that the couple are brought up on charges of blackmail: checks made out to them from one of the pooh-bahs are discovered in evidence…
Sure looks bad for them! But the twisted mind of Horace Rumpole has another explanation for the facts (in this case, they are indeed actual facts, not manipulated and adjusted "temperatures").
The prosecution adduces evidence to support its (confirmation) bias toward conviction. The twelve honest citizens and true have to decide whether that bias is justified — with his usual wit, and ability to quote from memory the Oxford Book of English Verse (Quiller-Couch Edition), Rumpole succeeds in persuading them that, in this case at least, it is not justified.
Jamie IronsDecember 10, 2009 - 1:23 pm Link to this Comment
76. Jamie Irons
You wrote, correctly, that [Feynman's] Lectures in Physics are inspirational…
Couldn't agree more; I still dip into them on occasion.
But don't try to learn elementary physics from them. That can only be done by a mind of Feynman's caliber!
Jamie IronsDecember 10, 2009 - 1:31 pm Link to this Comment
77. Jamie Irons
I should have added, in my comment #80:
If the glove don't fit, you must acquit!
Jamie IronsDecember 10, 2009 - 1:34 pm Link to this Comment
78. Geeze Louise
At what point does confirmation bias become a full-blown Kuhnian paradigm?
It looks like the paradigm may have shifted prematurely.December 10, 2009 - 1:43 pm Link to this Comment
79. PaulD
Go65 wrote:
"There's a rebuttal to Eschenbach's piece over here:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/willis_eschenbach_caught_lying.php#c2136694 "
Read Eschenbach's piece at wattsupwiththat.com and then read this rebuttal. Judge for yourself whether its a "rebuttal" or a "hatchet job".December 10, 2009 - 1:44 pm Link to this Comment
80. maverick muse
Prior to the email scandal, Lord Monckton and every researcher of empirical science consistently provided records critical of the AGW dogmas that coerced the massive fraud of this green scientism.
Ace of Spades HQ, "Problem one: Both GISS and CRU get their raw data from the GHCN. So, right out of the box, these 'independent' measurements which supposedly confirm each other are not looking very independent at all."
It required a conspiracy to consistently be awarded research funding for projects missing factual foundation, AND to permeate the global village with this fraud, from the opportunistic elitists to the working grunt slaves. Behold the conspiracy cock from on high come home to roost, crowing cap 'n tax enslavement government owning your income along with EugeniCare, government owning your DNA body and mind.
When the world's elite gather in mass
And party themselves on their ass
It's truly a crime
And all on your dime
While chains for our slavery they cast
They couldn't do math, it's too tuff
So they just went and made this shit up
And now they're exposed
Their agenda is hosed
But is it now wounded enough?
You must resist loudly with verve
And not let them rattle your nerve
The ball's in our court
But it's a blood sport
Our freedoms we'll fight to preserve
Posted by Beto Ochoa at December 10, 2009 07:45 AMDecember 10, 2009 - 1:55 pm Link to this Comment
81. SpeakEasy
This is EXACTLY the type of editorial that deserves the widest dissemination possible to the public at large. The comparison to the space shuttle program is one that will resonate with the average man and woman on the street, and appropriate in its conclusion. I will be sending a link to everyone on my personal email list (many of them are readers of BC but just to ensure they don't miss it) and ask them to do likewise. Okay, I also hate chain email but this is too important.December 10, 2009 - 2:00 pm Link to this Comment
82. truepeers
This post has me thinking of a Feynman story i was told a while ago. Some young gun comes to Caltech to give a lecture and, given the topic, he was nervous about how Feynman would respond. Feynman comes in late and stands by the door. After a while he apparently loses interest and leaves.
Afterward, Feynman has to apologize. At first he thought the lecturer was just wrong, his numbers couldn't be right. But when he returned to his office he sat down and did the math and discovered the lecturer was right. Still, the young man was intimidated. This guy Feynman had done in a matter of minutes what it had taken him countless hours to figure out.
Genius intimidates, even when it's wrong, which is perhaps another reason why large groups of scientists are prone to confirmation bias.December 10, 2009 - 2:07 pm Link to this Comment
83. Pat
extremely good article. And it does seem that we are prepared to take on trust the assertions, unbacked by published data or calculationsm (or at least voluntarily published ones) that we must fundamentally alter our entire civilisation, whereas we would not buy a house based on the estate agents assertions. And of course estate agents are mostly honest because they are always checked- how honest would a bunch of guys stay if no-one ever checked on what they were doing?December 10, 2009 - 2:09 pm Link to this Comment
84. Josh
Still the right (or wrong) incentives plus confirmation bias is perhaps more powerful a combination than most of us like to admit. (You agree, Josh?)
Well, sure. I guess it comes down to, science is hard. Part of what makes a nerd a nerd, is insensitivity to things like confirmation bias, a nerd gets totally lost in objectivity. It's hard to live like that. And, if you try for objectivity, and get a result way off the textbook, what are the odds that you haven't just screwed up? Again, I refer to the cold fusion follies of a few years back. I suppose the scientists involved were well-intentioned. They *failed* to apply something like "confirmation bias" and endup up fools!
Similarly, scientists are (in)famous for being good at some narrow slice of science, and utter fools for real life. There's no great reason why an entomologist should know any more than average about climate … it might be a little harder to excuse the astronomer, but maybe he/she's not professionally into, y'know, planets! Sure, any scientist should understand process and numbers better than average – but regarding AGW, HAVE THEY ACTUALLY LOOKED? Probably not. Too busy. And they may be predisposed to grant professional courtesy to any claims by other "scientists".
I'm not one, btw, just a layman, officially, but dabbling in philosophy of science (and other stuff), involved reading a lot of history of science, have done a little computer work for clinical this and molecular that, read up on this that and the other disease and drugs on my own, family, and friends behalf. Brother has been a practicing researcher, helped educate me on the grants and publications systems, and I've done a lot of SOTA work in computing over the years, even helped sell bushwa I knew would never work, or did what it took to make it work anyway. First thing is, you have to learn to see the game, to play the game, and to separate the game from the players, the trash talk from the results. Cannot really be shocked, shocked, to find out what's really happening in the back rooms.December 10, 2009 - 2:33 pm Link to this Comment
85. John
Oh if only the world still had Feynman. He would have destroyed these clowns. The world desparately needs another one like him.December 10, 2009 - 2:34 pm Link to this Comment
86. Eggplant
RWE 22 said:
"For the Apollo program NASA did an assessment of the risks and the results were so disturbing they covered up the analysis completely."
Management of the Apollo Program was dictated by Kennedy's Speech requiring an American on the Moon before 1970. All other considerations such as cost and risk were secondary.
NASA did wild things for the Apollo Program and got away with it. For example, the first launch of the Saturn-V (AS-501) was an "all-up" test flight, i.e. they did a test flight of all three stages along with the service and command modules in one test flight. This was simply crazy. If the first stage had blown up then the untested upper stages would have been destroyed as well. A rational initial test plan would have required the first stage to launch carrying only a boiler plate upper stage as ballast. After the first stage was proven reliable then a second stage would have been added in a follow-on test. An incremental process would have followed until the entire stack was tested. This was precisely the plan that von Braun advocated but he was overruled. It so happens that NASA got lucky and AS-501 was successful. The manager who made the call was declared a brilliant leader and NASA proceeded to send Niel Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Moon. However if someone had left a socket wrench in a fuel tank, history would have taken a different path.
RWE also said:
"The fact that computers don't blow up and models don't dig holes in the ground when they crash merely results in the period between failure waves being longer."
Legacy and computer modeling are killing the Space Program. NASA contrary to past history is now ridiculously risk adverse. People are terrified of doing anything that is not based upon a legacy. For example, the Orion space capsule currently under design is nothing but a scaled up version of the Apollo command module (even uses the same heat shield material, Avcoat 5025-039). This is crazy because the stated mission for the Orion capsule was to be an interplanetary space exploration vehicle. The Apollo command module was designed for lunar return (maximum return entry speed about 10.5 km/sec). Interplanetary return requires entry speeds of over 12 km/sec that are well beyond the Apollo command modules upper limit. NASA should have come up with a new design but chose not to because of cost and legacy considerations. The same mindset holds with computer modeling. Computer modeling works great for interpolation, e.g. if the model is flight test validated for 7.5 km/sec and 10.5 km/sec then it's safe to use it for 9 km/sec. However computer models are often used for extrapolation, e.g. a model is used for 12 km/sec due to cost constraints even though it is only trustworthy up to 10.5 km/sec. I should add in passing that this is the real scientific scandal behind AGW, i.e. they used computer models for extrapolation knowing full well that this violated the first rule in computer modeling.
87. John
And in answer to a question above, McArdle is not stupid but she is also not an independent thinker. She has spent her entire life around a group of people where a certain set of beliefs are considered acceptable. AGW is one of the most important of those beliefs. To her credit, she is slowly coming around. But, she is neither independent enough or forceful enough to do it very fast.
88. Eggplant
Geeze Louise 83 asked:
"At what point does confirmation bias become a full-blown Kuhnian paradigm?
It looks like the paradigm may have shifted prematurely."
I found the Wikipedia article about Kuhnian paradigm shifts to be enlightening. Refer to:
Key concept: "The Blind Men and the Elephant". At what point does new empirical evidence become the basis for a Kuhnian paradigm shift?December 10, 2009 - 2:54 pm Link to this Comment
89. peterike
You know, it's one thing about intellectuals, they prove that you can be absolutely brilliant and have no idea what's going on.
– Woody Allen, "Annie Hall"December 10, 2009 - 2:59 pm Link to this Comment
90. whitehall
I don't need no stinking science to know that AGW has been a scam.
Any scam or confidence game uses certain plays or tactics to achieve its goal. Usually, they rely on the greed, hopes, and fears of the marks to suspend disbelief. Other major clues are inconsistency of purposes and reliance on fallacious arguments.
Over the years the AGW crowd has shown numerous "tells" of their game. Here's a short list from memory:
1) IPCC 2001 – the summary for decision makers differs considerably from the technical section
2) appeals to authority – "Why? Because we scientists told you so!"
3) clear suppression of dissent – your article will "never see light of day"
4) suppression of evidence – delayed FOIA responses, hiding or "losing" raw data
5) preposterous claims – they can predict temperatures 100 years from now but not 10 days???
6) failure of back-prediction – models couldn't work from a historical date up to today
7) outright rejection of one obvious remedy – more nuclear power
As to the last, if someone claims they have a serious, potentially lethal infection but refuses antibotics, should I believe in their assertion?
I could go on and on…
If I sit down to play poker with a man and he wins several hands, taking my money as a result, then I catch him cheating, does he get to keep the "winnings?" Should I EVER sit down with him again with a deck of cards?
That said, let me amplify on posts by CFBleacher (#40) and SteveAZ (#54).
There is a subset of researchers who have legitimate support for AGW. There are real questions to be resolved. Alvin Weinberg of Oak Ridge raised some serious questions in the 70′s, offering nuclear power as a preventative. I' don't know how big this group is but I don't think them influential nor can I believe they are free of confirmational bias. I've argued within the nuclear power community to NOT make claims justifying new nukes based on AGW. I've long predicted the scandals and don't want nuclear to be tainted.
There is another subset, as "heads down" scientists who would just rather find something else to work on or speak about. Cowardness in the citizenry is a great defect in free societies.
Then there are the penumbra crowd, the "wannabees", who hope to get in on the gravy and attention by mimicking the in-crowd.
Then there is the in-crowd themselves, the one at the center who clearly have been using every tool at hand to push their assertions and run over the opposition. They act out of ideology, belief, and powerseeking.
As Mr. BoiledCabbage (#77) women have their powers that are often captured by the in-crowd. I think Mr. Whisky is infamous for repeatedly pointing this out.December 10, 2009 - 3:03 pm Link to this Comment
91. Voltimand
No techie here: I'm a liberal arts (retired) prof and I can only write what I see.
A suggestion to the interested: take a look at the textbook/anthologies used in (non-scientific) courses on such items as "peace studies" and other politically-articulated courses of "study" such as women's studies, all of which have an "enviromentalist" component.
I mention the gender thingy because academic feminists have invented something called "eco-feminism." You can guess what they have concluded: all the evils of the environment are invented and carried out by heterosexual males, and that is because heterosexual males are predatory rapists who rape nature just as they rape women.
The ideological environmentalists have a similar set of animosities, except that for them the marxist, anti-capitalist, and ultimately–this is my point–anti-human being bias predominates.
In this connection I cite two textbook anthologies of essays:
ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS: WHAT REALLY MATTERS WHAT REALLY WORKS Ed. David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott
ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS: AN ANTHOLOGY Ed. Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III
My point? The science may not work when the scientists say that it does and it turns out they are wrong. Meanwhile, there's a lot of animosity-minded people out there who want it to work because they see that they can do a lot of damage to the people they hate by getting the law enforcement coercion of the federal government on their side.
So it just isn't scientists' vulnerability to mission creep that is involved, although W's initiating comment and those that follow are the most devastating comments on the "science" behind the global warming enterprise that I've seen yet.
There's a lot of people out there who want the science "to be right" because it will give them the go ahead to start beating up on all the people they hate. Who are the people they hate? How long do you want to listen to me? I spent a quarter of a century in academe being insulted to my face on a regular basis by these people because I'm heterosexual, and male, and white.
I have a sneaking respect for Hitler's SS: they came to get you and they said they were coming to to get you and kill you and they came and they killed you. That's what I call truth in advertising.
The global warming cabal, OTOH, are fundamentally cowards: they need a bureaucracy with a lot of science behind it to do their dirty work. But–this is addressed to all you techies out there–don't underestimate the animosities that drive the people who have sold their souls to global warming. Their mission will die hard.
92. buckets
Thomas Friedman has an op-ed out arguing for the application of the Precautionary Principle with regards to AGW. Friedman makes a decent point that sensible application of the Principle demands cap and trade, carbon reduction, New-Age Luddite movement in order to forestall the SKY IS FALLING result predicted by the CRU crowd.
Interesting to see how the opposing camps would employ the Principle. Also – I don't intend to compliment Friedman, I mean to damn with faint praise.
I also love Feynman! Reading his work was truly inspiring even for a non-physicist. As devoted to scientific truth as he was, I can't help but think if he was alive today he would have been caught up in the crusade to save the world from CO2. A free thinker, but very liberal…
93. Eggplant
Whitehall said:
"7) outright rejection of one obvious remedy – more nuclear power
As to the last, if someone claims they have a serious, potentially lethal infection but refuses antibotics, should I believe in their assertion?"
For me that was the obvious clue that AGW was a leftist Trojan Horse.
Moonbats don't like nuclear power.
IMHO, scaling back on fossil fuel consumption is a ***Good Idea*** because of Peak Oil. If we scale back on fossil fuels for the wrong reason, (i.e. AGW) then I can live with that provided the alternative energy sources are economically rational, e.g. nuclear power. Unfortunately the political motivation behind AGW isn't sincere or rational. It is obvious that many of the people behind AGW see this as a means towards some sort of socialist utopia. The fact that this would knock us back to the 18th century with most of the world's population dying from starvation is apparently irrelevant.December 10, 2009 - 3:25 pm Link to this Comment
94. Don Rodrigo
What constitutes "climate change?" in the mind of the believers?
The WAPO ran a front-page article yesterday (Dec 9, '09), with the headline:
"A lingering pool of disbelief : Despite a decade of record drought, Australian farmers refuse to buy into climate change"
I can't access it without subscription (when the hell did that happen with the Post?), but the headline sums it up. Somehow, a very prolonged drought or other long-term weather anomaly constitutes "climate change." If it can't be measured in at least generations or centuries, it's not climate change. The semantic massaging of the language by post-modern liberalism corrupts the whole process.December 10, 2009 - 3:27 pm Link to this Comment
95. "progressivewatch"
Good article. Really,really good thread.
Walt,…The last part that says piracy
The first part that says con.
That's simpler,plainer and better.December 10, 2009 - 4:06 pm Link to this Comment
96. Tcobb
Thomas Friedman has an op-ed out arguing for the application of the Precautionary Principle with regards to AGW. Friedman makes a decent point that sensible application of the Principle demands cap and trade, carbon reduction, New-Age Luddite movement in order to forestall the SKY IS FALLING result predicted by the CRU crowd.
The "Precautionary Principle" isn't a principle its merely a rhetorical tactic, a new logical fallacy of the day. The same people who are proponents of it in regard to AGW simply can't comprehend applying that same principle to social or economic engineering.
Its one of those Double Standard Elephants that crop up in the rooms of the Progressives. They're such good pets.December 10, 2009 - 4:07 pm Link to this Comment
97. Carol
State all the theories that you want.
I believe this was all done with monetary payoffs of some kind, period. It was started, kept going and will continue in some form..for money and power. There will be people out here that believe any and all they are fed.
There is no excuse for any of the climate business that has happened. There has to be a point here that you do pay attention, you do question, you do have a niggling in the back of your head that something is wrong and you .
There is more involved here than "merely science".
Truth is of no consequence. Ethics? hidden..
It seems that the loudest voice has been running things, despite the actual facts.December 10, 2009 - 4:14 pm Link to this Comment
98. Whitehall
Carol at 102
There are some tidbits of scientific evidence of the possibility that high CO2 levels could affect the climate. The basic physics are well known so at what concentration would CO2 begin to make significant changes to the climate? That question has NOT been answered and may never be. Climatology is vastly different from physics and has nowhere near the predictive power.
Plus, the field seems to draw a line around their subject that is too tight. The issue of heliomagnetism affecting cosmic ray flux to our atmosphere is beyond most of the IPCC experts' range.
So yes, criminality exists but like so many leftist initiatives, they've taken something with a germ of truth and layered on levels of fabrication to a political end.December 10, 2009 - 4:30 pm Link to this Comment
Buckets #97 and Eggplant #98:
I think the worst aspect of the AGW Big Plan being foisted off on us is that all of corrective actions depend on Big Government control of individual lifestyles, massive tax increases, and vesting enormous power in shadowy international organizations and schemes. It all looks like the arguments for drug legalization done in reverse: rather than "We can't control it so we have to remove the incentive to commit crimes" AGW argues "We can control it so we don't need incentives and we will make not complying with it a crime."
Now, I am not for drug legalization because I do not wish to deal with the results.
BUT it sure seems strange to me that incentives and alternatives for individual and corporate actions just are not there. Like nuclear power that does not take 23 years to license a plant. Like Cash For Planting Trees instead of for clunkers. Like research into developing trees that absorb more CO2. Like advanced battery research. Like space solar power. Y'all can probably think of a hundred more.
Now, maybe it is a case of "If all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail." If all you have or all you can see is Big Government then every problem looks like Control.
Or maybe it is something more sinister.
Anyway, I think that if Dr. Feynman was around he would be pushing for corrective actions people can take that are individually preferable to the status quo, not the schemes we see now. And he certainly would not be for throwing data away.December 10, 2009 - 4:38 pm Link to this Comment
100. Voltimand
97. buckets:
101. Tcobb
I saw the Friedman gambit on the subject of gambits this morning also. Apples and oranges:
Al-Quaeda is a one-act play: give them a chance they'll do the same thing every time: kill someone.
OTOH, Global warming is likewise treated by Friedman as a one-option possibility, which is a giveaway about how the people who think about this business think about it: all-or-nothing, one and only one result is possible.
But that's not so, and of course that's the problem with predictions about so many different climate moves in so many different parts of the globe over so many different time frames.December 10, 2009 - 4:41 pm Link to this Comment
101. jd
In as much as the true fact is that the sun does not rise in the east, per se`, but in fact the earth revolves in a manner such that the sun appears to rise over the eastern horizon. I will state categorically that there is no way that the sun will do other than to "rise in the east", on a once daily cycle, without the entire population of the earth being forewarned of any other occurrence.
I will also state that it is quite conclusive that NOTHING humans have done, or will do in the next 100 years, will be the cause of such an occurrence!
So, Yes, barring an catastrophic event involving momentum and the complete flattening of every city on earth, the sun will with certainty rise in the east!
That out of the way, I will go on to state that I am pleased that the e-mails were released, because I'm hopeful their existence will buy us some time for the current cooling phase to kick in and be irrefutable before they can start in once again.
I say with absolute certainty that had the Kyoto Protocols been enacted they would not be "hiding the decline" but in fact taking credit for it and announcing that not only should we be grateful to them, but that "there is MORE to do."
Conspiracy + Group Think = Global Warming / Climate Change.
Never forget, Climate Change is what you call Global Warming when your Global Warming Conference is snowed out.
jdDecember 10, 2009 - 4:52 pm Link to this Comment
102. wretchard
Never forget, Climate Change is what you call Global Warming when your Global Warming Conference is snowed out.
That is so brutally cruel it is almost a truth unto itself.December 10, 2009 - 5:04 pm Link to this Comment
103. roger rainey
brilliant expositionDecember 10, 2009 - 5:11 pm Link to this Comment
104. Sam W
Eggplant, #91.
You have confused the Saturn I and the Saturn V. Each of the stages was extensively operated in the static test mode. Hours of operating time was accumulated for each stage. The leap of faith was the compression of the UN- manned test flights from 17 to 2, enabling the achievement of a moon landing before the end of the decade. At the time I noticed that this decision engendered an attitude that proved they were bold engineers. No one noticed that the hardware was not changed by it. The people who were readjusting their hatbands had little or nothing to do with the creation of that hardware.December 10, 2009 - 5:20 pm Link to this Comment
It has been my wish for many years that critical thinking be a required class in our public schools. We live in a world where reasoning is largely taught by its absence, as in TV advertising and politics. Learning to recognize the pitfalls on the road to truth is at least as essential as sex ed.December 10, 2009 - 5:45 pm Link to this Comment
106. Josh
jd @ 106: I say with absolute certainty that had the Kyoto Protocols been enacted they would not be "hiding the decline" but in fact taking credit for it and announcing that not only should we be grateful to them, but that "there is MORE to do."
Too true.
And when in twenty years we're all shivering in the new ice age, some will blame it on Obama and those (other) dorks in Copenhagen – and that won't be right, either. Funny how wrong begets wrong.
on the other topic, do you know about Russell's Teapot?
you can say stuff that is wrong, or you can say stuff that is right, but neither one constitutes a proof.December 10, 2009 - 5:46 pm Link to this Comment
107. Bunyip
Slightly off topic, but only just, is the fact that one of the participants in Copenhagen is a fellow described on the news as "the climate change partner for Clayton Utz".
Now Clayton Utz, as some may recall, was Big Tobacco's law firm In Australia, the one that conveniently purged all the files that might have helped a lung cancer victim's case.
Now the legal vultures have sensed another set of deep pockets. If you own shares in BHP or any other extractive or smoke-emitting industry, be warned: Believe in climate change at your peril, because your portfolio is going to suffer. First the pols, then the scientists, and then the lawyers. It is a brigands' parade, and the marching band is playing at maximum volume.
Climate-changer partner indeed!December 10, 2009 - 6:05 pm Link to this Comment
108. what da ya mean, its too hot?
Socialist/Marxist economic theory and AGW really do have more than their proponent's lack of scruples in common. They have the denial of the true believer's in common too.
Criminality is involved in intentionally accepting funds for research that was fraudulently falsified and extrapolated using demonstrably false data. If a summit achieves a treaty based on garbage, the treaty is garbage. I do not think it is wise to ask us to pick up such garbage.
Confirmation bias? Naw its Contort-notional bias? where the contortions of reality are bent to the notion of some One or other.
Like fools gold . So long as the greedy believe hard enough and long enough any 'deal' is a bargain is worth the sweat of digging in sterile worthless dirt.
109. JohnBoy
I am not a scientist and can't add to the scientific debate. But, after some intensive reading, I am frustrated that some basic facts seem elusive.
Here are some questions that I haven't found good answers to:
1) How reliable is the proxy data (tree rings, ice cores, etc) which is used to estimate temperature data pre 1850? Due to urban heat islands, etc is satellite data the only reliable true source?
2) What exactly is the correlation between carbon and warming? Could it be weaker than the "consensus supposes? If carbon goes from 0.2% of the atmosphere to 0.4% of the atmosphere, is this really a disaster? If the earth warms 1 degree celsius, is this a net positive or a net negative?
3) Given that the source data has been destroyed, can this data be reconstructed? Was East Anglia the only source for this data?
4) How has the warming that has occurred since the end of the little ice age compared to other periods of warming? Has it been more rapid that what occurred during the medieval age (when they farmed in Greenland)?
The shame of the fixation on global warming is that I agree with enviros on the need to move beyond coal to fire power plants. And for America, we need to move off of coal and imported oil for both security and economic reasons, not to mention the environmental benefits.
110. Charlie
Whitehall @ 103
Actually, the mechanism for CO2 is well understood and does not support global warming precisely because it is such an efficient greenhouse gas. Carbon dioxide traps heat, more precisely, photons excited to frequencies in the infrared range. In the case of CO2, photons in three narrow bandwidths are captured. Water vapor, a more broadly-acting gas, overlaps all but a small portion of CO2′s range and behaves similarly.
The sum of this activity is that 99%+ of the heat that can be trapped by CO2 is trapped and within 100 meters of the earth's surface, as measured by satellite sensors. With no more photons in the relevant ranges left to be trapped, increases in CO2 concentration beyond our present 389 ppm cannot increase heat retention. Indeed, there have been three approximately decadal stretches since atmospheric CO2 began to be measured in the mid-1800s when concentrations of 420-430+ ppm were maintained without associated warming.
When I was an academic science editor in the 70s with climate as one of my fields of interest, the consensus model then was that we were leaving a 60-year stretch of the "most ideal" weather in the entire Holocene and would be slowly entering a "more normal" pattern of more variability, that is, hotter and colder summers, hotter and colder winters, just what we've seen.
Now, we have much better instruments since that time but the same (if not worse) scientists, who, in my day included a fair share of blatantly red-diaper babies, one-worlders, grant-grubbers and other agenda-driven ivory-tower types phobic about the real world. Capitalizing on a model of moving from an ideal to normal as a catastrophe demanding we all submit to the UN–I wouldn't put it past a good number of them for a minute.December 10, 2009 - 6:09 pm Link to this Comment
111. kochevnik
36@robotech master
>Its funny how all this "high-quality" data needs
>massive adjustments all the time for it to be
You can't directly compare temperatures in the Sahara and Antarctic. Sorry to rain on your parade.December 10, 2009 - 6:23 pm Link to this Comment
112. Ytzik
Very good post.
@ 6 and others:
The author is not saying CRU are a church full of saints who never did anything morally wrong. The author is saying that there exist similar precedent when the problem start with a scientist (Millikan) or with a group of scientist (like CRU) getting wrong results (In the case of Millikan he had an error, in the case of CRU they faked the data). But the problem is blown out of proportions by the following researchers by different motives: They assumed Millikan was right, or they assume AGW is correct, and just start working with a wrong assumption.
This is how the problem grows. In addition, the money flowing the fear of some scientist about their jobs, politically motivated researchers, etc. But the origin of the above mentioned cases is totally different: Millikan had a wrong viscosity of the air. The CRU staff faked the data.
Millikan: innocent. CRU: guilty.December 10, 2009 - 6:24 pm Link to this Comment
113. what da ya mean, its too hot?
The tree ring datum most often applied to the hockey stick graph, used samples from the same ancient forest. That could not support the variation of temperature or the amount of water available. Also, the data gathered, as indicated in the emails, was "enhanced" by an agreed to formula to account for years where the rings n the trees did not conform to the data they were seeking.
As for the ability to tell with any accuracy the temperature of a region based on the width of a tree's rings, I doubt very much such evidence can exist based on the variation in nutrients in the soil, choking plants at the base and competition for sunlight. As a forest grows the surrounding vegetation and amount of respiration changes as well and the the effects of aging on the life of the trees.
I am not sure if isotop's recovered from the tree rings are any more accurate in determining temperature. However, the warmer the weather not only the easier it is for stuff to grow, but decay and decomposition of matter in the soil is more rapid too.
In this case, the scientists obviously found it difficult to tell the difference between shit and sun shin(ola) in explaining the variation of the ring sizes. I believe isotop analysis is deemed too expensive for use on such a large scale.December 10, 2009 - 6:46 pm Link to this Comment
114. Eggplant
Sam W 109 responded to my #91 comment:
"You have confused the Saturn I and the Saturn V. Each of the stages was extensively operated in the static test mode. Hours of operating time was accumulated for each stage."
No, there was no confusion. AS-501 was the first flight test of the Saturn-V and it flew with three functional stages including the service and command modules (google: AS-501). Yes, it is true that there were extensive ground tests for all stages but ground tests are not real substitutes for actual flight tests. Doing an "all-up" flight test with AS-501 was very bold bordering on reckless. Fortunately in that instance, NASA management got lucky. The next test flight of the Saturn-V was AS-502 and that was a partial failure (the second stage malfunctioned due to pogo oscillations resulting in premature engine shutdowns). The command module was put in a junk orbit that degraded the atmospheric entry test. AS-503 (commonly known as Apollo-8) was the first manned test of the Saturn-V. Apollo-8 resulted in three Americans orbiting the Moon during Christmas of 1968. Those were very brave astronauts given that they went to the Moon on board a spacecraft whose twin had malfunctioned in a previous flight test.December 10, 2009 - 7:02 pm Link to this Comment
115. Capitalista Bastardo
Gosh, what a thread!!!!
jd @ 106 AWESOME!
I think a large part the problem has been "conformation" bias. Go along, get along, reap the rewards. "Men of science." But how do they look at themselves in the mirror? Frauds.December 10, 2009 - 7:16 pm Link to this Comment
116. Robinsolana
Sounds like a case of all the above to me.
Fraud at CRU. You bet. And probably many other places.
Data drift in politically correct direction. You bet. See individual station data before and after 'correction'.
Political money corrupting science to perpetuate careers. That too.
And then on top of that the whold Global Warming scam.December 10, 2009 - 7:23 pm Link to this Comment
117. ehunter
Its not going to be BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD..for the "scientists"
at CRU. Criminal charges are going to be filed. And rightly so.
This wasnt a matter of honest mistakes, or unconscious bias..but
of deliberate forgeries for the sake of financial gain. And yes
people died as a result. Agricultural projects were crushed poverty was increased, billions of dollars wasted and people died so that
a few obsessive compulsives could entertain their manias.December 10, 2009 - 7:46 pm Link to this Comment
118. tRex
re no. 22: "The only explanation for this is that people forget how intrinsically difficult the job is, succumb to cost, schedule and bureaucratic pressures……"
Typically, a new crop of managers. Been there, seen it happen.December 10, 2009 - 7:52 pm Link to this Comment
119. David W. Lincoln
When it comes to research, is it safe to say that Professor Lindzen, and Professor Plimer have more in common with Sir Isaac Newton than Antonio Gramsci, and that the climate change alarmists have more in common with Antonio Gramsci than with Sir Isaac Newton.
After all, shouldn't Plato and Aristotle be complimentary, so that a larger paradigm is the result, instead of the two being in conflict, and we wind up with a smaller pattern.December 10, 2009 - 7:58 pm Link to this Comment
120. Lifeofthemind
Sorry I missed a couple of good threads. Here is an OT that can cure your low blood pressure.
From Fox, University of Minnesota Under Fire for Task Force's Discrimination Based Teacher Education Plan.
There it is folks the complete explanation for every folly delusion waste and failure, in a nice bundle.
Minnesota is ensuring that their teachers can dispel "The Myth of Meritocracy in the United States."
To be blogged under the title "The Whole Ball of Wax."December 10, 2009 - 8:03 pm Link to this Comment
121. Promethea
#63 hdgreene . . .
I just checked the Wikipedia article on Spotted Owls to see what happened to them since the big hooha, and discovered that the feds are now thinking about killing Barred Owls to save Northern Spotted Owls.
Things that make one go "hmmmm"! ? ! . . .December 10, 2009 - 8:18 pm Link to this Comment
122. Papa Ray
Every time I come here (for years) I'm amazed at the intellect and perception of the commentors and of course Wretchard.
But I also have in the back of my mind all these years that these great gifts all of you have from hard work, study and the grace of God are not being used enough for the "little people" like me and my family and our Republic.
Unfair, bad judgment on too little info, most likely all three but still there.
I have made do with a high school education and months traveling into years of technical schools in the U.S. and other parts of the world for Big Blue. I was one of those you called when your Large IBM system was down and thousands of your customers satisfaction and money was on the line and your Corporation's reputation was right there with it.
Our motto was (and still is as far as I know) IBM means Customer Satisfaction". What I'm saying is that I'm a doer, a fixer, not much good for anything else, never was.
I've tried to educate myself which is one reasons I frequent Blogs like this one. I self educated myself about many things, including Islam which until a couple of years ago I thought was the main enemy of freedom and the West.
I was wrong.
Deep within the financial and dark crevasses of society powerful men were plotting the overthrow of everything I love about America and other freedom loving Nations.
I had no idea, just as millions upon millions of other people didn't.
When Obama hit the stage I knew in my heart and in my soul that something was terribly wrong. I read and read and came up with absolutely nothing concrete about him or his life. EXCEPT who his mother, dad and grandmother, friends and acquaintances were. Almost nothing else.
Then I knew my fears were not unfounded. I knew that there were powerful forces that had groomed him and were determined to get him into the most powerful position a man can have at this time on this planet.
This AGW started years and years ago and has been coopted by these backers the U.N. and greedy men. It is just one example that has finally seen the light of truth.
Now we see what has happened in the last year, and we see how the UN and socialist groups from all over the world have gathered around Obama and his tribe of evil despicable backers. We don't know who they are but we know they are out there managing, directing and plotting their next step and with the willing help of the U.N.
You think Obama is going to be JUST the President of the United States? You think that statement is just pushing a "conspiracy"?
Think again.
Also, it appears so far that we can not stop them. Not even slow them down. That puts real fear in me as far as what is to come not only for my family but for this Republic. And the world.
We are not going to stand by much longer. If our votes and our anger at our worthless representatives can not be fixed the way our laws and Founder's intended. People like me will do what our Founders told us we most likely would have to do.
And if we must- We will.
Mark my words most of the elections in the future under Obama will be fraudulent. And any investigations will be rigged and find nothing.
Papa Ray
P.S. If Wretchard wishes to delete this comment, it is fine by me. I would not want to further incriminate him and his blog, as the forces I speak of are certainly keeping tally of it's enemies.December 10, 2009 - 8:20 pm Link to this Comment
123. peterike
Tree ring data always struck me as laughable evidence. Are we to assume the only variant for tree growth is "warmth"?
What if there's a cool, wet Spring followed by a hot dry Summer and warm dry Fall. And the next year a hot, dry Spring followed by a cool wet Summer and cool Fall. Then a hot dry Spring and a hot wet Summer and… you get the idea. Which of these dozens of possible weather permutations results in the most tree growth?
Is a generally cool but bright and cloudless year more conducive to tree growth than a warmer, cloudier year? That would be an inverse relation then between "warmth" and "growth." And doesn't all of this vary with the type of tree, as they have different needs for sunlight, water, nutrients, etc.?
It's like if I told you this month my car averaged 25 miles per gallon and last month it was only 22 miles per gallon. Having no other information, tell me why my MPG got better. Tire pressure changes? Difference in driving styles? More city, less highway, or vice versa? Did I change a dirty air filter? Get a tune up?
You simply can't know the cause based on the one data point you do know. It's all speculation.December 10, 2009 - 8:24 pm Link to this Comment
124. Promethea
#73 D Che: . . .
For me the big tell, now that the figures proving AGW have been shown to be a fraud, is that NONE of the people who should be happy that AGW doesn't exist are not showing their happiness.
They should be running out in the street yelling "Yay, we're saved. The earth is NOT warming. There is NO catastrophe. Let's celebrate."
But no, they're sad and saying mean things about the person who revealed the fraud. Sad because we're not all going to be broiled or parboiled. Why aren't they happy?
Cuz there is no money in no AGW.December 10, 2009 - 8:30 pm Link to this Comment
125. erc rodson
Re: Charlie @ 115.
Could you post a link to that? I don't know enough electrochemistry to tell if it is likely, but I can think of parallel phenomena.
For example, adding more salt to a saturated solution doesn't raise the salinity: the excess just settles out. Similarly, you can only dissolve a certain amount of sugar in your coffee: the excess forms sludge on the bottom. And, adding more heat to a beaker of H2O that is already at 212 degrees won't raise the temperature of the liquid unless you also increase the pressure.
So, if true, the driving force is not the CO2, but the number of incident photons, i.e. the Sun's output, which other folks have claimed all along. (I don't think the Earth's radiated internal heat is the right wave lengths to be trapped by greenhouse gasses?)December 10, 2009 - 9:21 pm Link to this Comment
126. CorditeSmoke
Just as an exercise, I wonder, what would conflict resolution managers do to de-conflict the climategate scandal that is blazing?
A move to use their own values against them, if you will.December 10, 2009 - 9:48 pm Link to this Comment
127. Annie
129, thanks for that post
If you guys think this whole thing is about "science", you are in for a rude awakening.
"new world order" marches on…Copenhagen is a smoke screen. Even though all the climate change thing is a farce, Obama, Gore,Copenhagen bubble people , carry on like nothing is wrong, like we don't matter.December 10, 2009 - 9:51 pm Link to this Comment
128. Promethea
#98 Eggplant . . .
You said: "It is obvious that many of the people behind AGW see this as a means towards some sort of socialist utopia. The fact that this would knock us back to the 18th century with most of the world's population dying from starvation is apparently irrelevant."
Coincidently, I've been rereading the Oxford History of the French Revolution. I wonder why?
Anyway, interested parties should read this book, at least the early parts, to see (1) what 18th-century poverty looks like, (2) what a "black swan event" looks like, and (3) what Americans who think the federal government has gone TOO FAR should do to stop this drift to totalitarianism.
THINK, people! What should we do? For now, I say that we should ridicule the AGW-socialist-utopians whenever we can. Make them embarrassed. That's my Step Number One of our "Take Back Our Country" revolution. When we need to go to Step Number Two, I'll tell you what I think it should be. For now, ridicule will work.
One square of toilet paper anyone? I always laugh when I see the name Sheryl Crow. This woman tells us everything we need to know about the ultimate goals of the AGW believers. Don't underestimate their craziness.
I know quite a few of them, including scientists with PhDs. They are ignorant and uninformed. They think that the "little people" should submit to their superior wisdom. Make fun of them whenever you can. They WILL retreat. I guarantee it. Just be clever and soft-spoken. Most of the AGW believers and socialist utopians don't have a clue about how the world of humans actually works.
These are the same people who think Islam is a "Religion of Peace." Not too smart.December 10, 2009 - 10:23 pm Link to this Comment
129. elder
All this goes to show that Science cannot be divorced from the scientist. Scientists are people. They are subject to the same temptations and biases as other people. They are not above it. As we enter a post-modern culture where truth is not absolute but relative, science becomes relative. In the past, we held that truth was objective, and could be discerned. But now we believe that all truth is relative. I submit that the same problem exists with the issue of evolution, which is not science, but scientism a la AGW. It is even more fiercely defended because, as Thomas Huxley once said, the goal is not science, but to be free of God and any moral restraint on one's habits. With AGW, the truth is not the goal, but the goal is to extend political control into every area of life. It is the hard left that is totalitarian, and many more million will ultimately die from their totalitarianism than will ever die from the effects of AGW. Will we wake up in time?December 11, 2009 - 12:46 am Link to this Comment
130. Hector
In post 37, Kinuachdrach writes "The incentives for bad science are exactly those that President Eisenhower warned about so presciently in his farewell speech almost half a century ago."
Here it is:
"Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."December 11, 2009 - 1:50 am Link to this Comment
131. Richard
Well just read the email from FactCheck AGW is real leaked email and documents change nothing! Stopping this AGW movement may not be possible.
http://factcheck.org/2009/12/climategate/December 11, 2009 - 4:27 am Link to this Comment
132. Mongoose
Factcheck is a Soros agitprop outlet. It is telling that they lead the charge.
But here is the thing: No matter what proof is found, no matter what evidence is shown, this was never about science or rational debate. Never.
That was just the angle to justify the scam.
We have departed from science here and returned to a Mideval, Academic sophistry and casuistry.
Of course, that is al the left has always had.
This is about global communism and crippling America. Period.
They may yet flip this. This begs the question: If we the American people, and indeed the people of the West, are so stupid to believe such an idiotic thing as "Climate Change", and allow ourselves to be stripped of our liberty, prosperity–stripped even of their civilization–are we really worth saving?
They might as well tell us that the sky s turning paisley, we are just not smart enough to see it.
It is just madness. Moon howling, lunatic madness.
And just spittle drooling stupidity.
It shows a civilization that is in deep decline.December 11, 2009 - 4:57 am Link to this Comment
133. Neo
Given the "denial" by "climate scientists" over the temperature of the last decade, it seems pretty obvious that the "time is running out" meme is meant for politicians who will miss out on a chance to "solve" the "climate problem" if they don't act now to get some of the credit for the temperature turnaround.
Reminds me of the story of "Stone Soup."December 11, 2009 - 6:22 am Link to this Comment
134. Richard
The AGW draft policy has been released. The proposed transfer of wealth. Based on this approach the US should send UK and the EU a bill for all the $$$ we spent reducing our pollution from the time we were a developing country and there was AGW. Silly idea I know!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/homepage/cutajar1.pdfDecember 11, 2009 - 6:25 am Link to this Comment
135. Doug
– Dr. SanityDecember 11, 2009 - 7:38 am Link to this Comment
136. Doug
96. Voltimand:
Excellent!December 11, 2009 - 7:45 am Link to this Comment
137. Doug
"Meanwhile, there's a lot of animosity-minded people out there who want it to work because they see that they can do a lot of damage to the people they hate by getting the law enforcement coercion of the federal government on their side."
Many do not understand this, since they do not relate to individuals that are truly
Believe me,
They exist.December 11, 2009 - 7:56 am Link to this Comment
138. Doug
"I was there, right in the middle of all the events of Challenger. As a lowly flight surgeon (who also had a biomedical engineering degree) I watched and listened to the debate in launch control over the effects of the weather.
Like many others in that room I was a bit skeptical about the decision to launch, especially since we could see icicles on the SRB and we had all driven to the Cape that early morning in temperatures below 20 degrees. Most of us knew that the o-rings had not been tested at temperatures below freezing (as confirmation of this, hours after the explosion of the orbiter, there were many discussions about the o-rings and the temperature issue as being the most likely cause; so I know it was a subject on many people's minds.
Most of us had heard about the Morton Thiokol engineers' reluctance to ok a "go" for launch; though unless you were in upper management, you were not aware of the details of this.)
What I remember most of all was my own sense of trust:
trust that the mission managers knew what they were doing; and a calm acceptance of their decision to launch. My own thoughts at the time are still very clear to me: this was NASA , after all. The people here were the "best and brightest" (of course I included myself in this) and our scientific credentials would insure that we would never ignore objective reality.
Though I was young and foolish, I clearly understood that wishing and wanting something to be true did not make it so. I had faith that the system was relatively immune to psychosis (i.e., being out of touch with reality).
Needless to say, it was an extremely painful lesson that nature taught us that day, and I have never forgotten it."
– Dr. SanityDecember 11, 2009 - 8:09 am Link to this Comment
139. Doug
"We are what we are and what we are is an illusion.
We love how it feels
Putting on heels causing confusion.
We face life though it's sometimes sweet and sometimes bitter;
Face life, with a little guts and lots of glitter.
Look under our frocks: Girdles and jocks,
Proving we are what we are!
We are what we are – Half a brassiere, half a suspender.
Half real and half fluff,
You'll find it tough guessing our gender.
So Just [WHISTLE] ("Hey, Taxi!")
If we please you that's the way to show us.
Just [WHISTLE] (Wolf-call)
'Cause you'll love us once you get to know us.
Look under our glitz: Muscles and tits,
Proving we are what we are.
We face life though it's sometimes sweet and sometimes bitter,
Face life, with a little guts and lots of glitter.
Look under our frocks: Girdles and jocks,
Proving we are what we are!
"December 11, 2009 - 8:19 am Link to this Comment
140. no hyphen american
Maybe nature cannot be fooled, but the American public can be fooled. They seem to do it quite well. Then cry when things blow up in their face.
Copenhagen treaty is about having control over others and their money, not the weather.
So forget the tree rings, the polar bears and watch your goverment as it rolls over you and your needs and wants. They're not interested in you (just your money), and you chose them.
Big mistake.
-This treaty is not about the weather..it's about domination, over you.
Welcome to the new world order.December 11, 2009 - 8:31 am Link to this Comment
141. Doug
Sarah Palin took the govt to court about declaring Polar Bears an endangered species.
…citing that their population is rapidly increasing, not an indicator of eminent demise.December 11, 2009 - 8:41 am Link to this Comment
142. geoffgo
Very nice summation. One bullet you may wish to top your list of tells with regards inconsistency of purpose.
Yes the ole switcheroo. Let's recall this same group of charlatans' initial claims were all about onrushing icecaps; predicting almost the same catastrophic results. Most people die by _____, XX years out. Notwithstanding none of us escapes alive and scores of millions will starve – perish naturally aforethen. And, we might rather work on stuff we can at least influence.
Another bullet might describe the relationship that has developed between the crooks and the nation. Grant money based on allegiance. Command influence from NASA, NOIA, EPA, Congress, WH, etc. Graft writ large. Says with enough money, one can invent a better illusion to sucker more marks. Magicians' union gone bad with infinite funds.
Back in the day, witchdoctors worldwide used changes in the weather like seasons, to scare the sh*t out of their awed tribesmen. In numerous societies, they went so far as to convince the tribal leadership that human sacrifice was the "only" answer to stop the inclemency or earth-shaking or elipses, or,,,. Always starting with the culling of neighboring tribes.
Climategate: All the eco-players know the score – pols, bureaucrats, NGOs, grantmakers (duped or complicit), publications, peer-reviewers, VCs, green-driven businesses, scientists, activists and US Ambassadors. Taxpayers not so much.
Your Honor, on behalf of US, we present our opening arguments. All during the times of war from Viet Nam to today, these 4,488 indicted co-conspirators diverted monies from those efforts in favor of self-enrichment in what has become the biggest theft in history. Not just money; but also US progress. It's clearly seditious activity by a cabal of trusted public servants and their 39,566 unindicted co-conspiring associates. To demonstrate the scope and scale of the damage and human cost caused by this theft, the prosecution will show that the funds extorted and expended by this 40 year fraud could have aided all those suffering from inclement weather and most other natural disasters around the globe, for the last 20 years. Millions of lives lost, like with DDT.
However and whatever, we need to eradicate this scam and all its participants (plus put the fear of ____ into the rest of the scientists living off the US dole) to get The Greening of America under control. Good scientists need to step up and deliver the "questions that need to be asked" in each of their fields. An army of skeptics, working in concert. Inflict frugality.
Can't wait til WUWT (along with the remaining scientists with a conscience) take this opportunity to expose the frauds of solar and wind and ethanol as viable alternative energy sources. 3 card monte by fiat.December 11, 2009 - 9:22 am Link to this Comment
143. buckets
Bunyip @ 112 – "Now the legal vultures have sensed another set of deep pockets. If you own shares in BHP or any other extractive or smoke-emitting industry, be warned: Believe in climate change at your peril, because your portfolio is going to suffer."
Unfortunately, you are correct. While it annoys me to hear offhand slurs directed at "those damn lawyers," well, this one is true. One case I heard a few friends discussing involved an Eskimo village suing Big Oil for global warming – damaging their ancestral lands, ruining hunting grounds, etc. As crazy as it sounds, my friends seemed to indicate that the federal judge had granted "class certification," meaning that the villagers (or rather their lawyers) had made some preliminary showings and could proceed with litigation.
Again, I detest the disparaging of the legal profession as a whole, but God help us if the mass tort lawyers are able to pile on with lawsuits like this. The world really is going crazy.December 11, 2009 - 10:37 am Link to this Comment
144. All Hyphen Louise
nha@149: the American public can be fooled
Someone wrote upthread that this country needs another Feynman. Genius isn't going to lead us out this wilderness.
What is required – if "sustainability" is the issue – is a viable Middle Class – not unlike the one that was just squeezed out of $14T in markets that were driven by both political parties in relentless pursuit of trend lines defined by nothing more than hubris and wishful thinking. Humans do what they do. The disappointment has been the across-the-board failure of regulatory structures – every last single one caved.
The Middle Class is rapidly becoming the hyphen between rich and poor.December 11, 2009 - 10:48 am Link to this Comment
145. Neo
Look no further .. Eisenhower was right …
Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite. It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system — ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.
Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961December 11, 2009 - 10:53 am Link to this Comment
One thing to keep in mind is that the Rocket Scientists didn't screw up with the O-rings. It was the managers. I don't know the details of NASAs management, whether they have any real technical background or not, but my experience working in technical fields, both in management and in workerbee positions, is that over time, the management of a technical organization tends to get less and less competent about the basic activities of the company. "Engineers don't make good managers" is something that gets bantied about, generally I think, by people who don't make good engineers. Most of them don't make good managers either, but it's easier to fake it as a manager than as an engineer, especially if you have good engineers working for you keeping things moving. You can't really just pick a fuel-air ratio out of your exit ramp and expect it to achieve liftoff – you kind of need to know how to do the equations and what the variables mean. But you can pick a schedule date or project budget out of your seat cushion and the industrious engineers working for you might just make it happen.
In an earlier thread, I mentioned the reason we have so many wrongheaded idiots running the country is that while the rest of us have been busy trying to be productive (being good engineers), the idiots have been busy beavering their way into management positions. These people don't konw how the work actually gets done – no talent for that. But they are very good at networking among themselves and at spooling out a narrative that sets themselves up to take credit for the engineer's success, and equally important, avoid blame for any failures. They do a lot of powerpoint presentations and worry about whether someone is on board or not.
The CRU folks are the same. They're not real scientists. They're not doing real science. They're engaged in politics.
How can this work? How can the frauds get away with it? Well, they don't always. But when they do, it's because the ultimate decision makers (the CEO, Board and senior managmement for a company, the American voting public for the US government) don't understand the engineering anymore either. Over time, enough MBAs, accountants and sales people make their way into the top ranks, and then the non-technical engineering managers start getting promoted into senior ranks too. The founder retires, and then nobody is left who knows BS when they see it.
Or in the case of the voting public, the general education level plummets, and the few remaining educated folks are too busy trying to keep everything running to pay attention.
If you find yourself in a company like that, you can quit. If you find yourself in a country like that, you better organize and fight back.December 11, 2009 - 11:04 am Link to this Comment
147. RagnarD
81. Jamie Irons @ 81:
But don't try to learn elementary physics from them. That can only be done by a mind of Feynman's caliber!
True, that can only be done IFF you have a great teachers(s). They should, however, be required readings for the serious student. Same as "Fractal Geometry of Nature" by Benoit Mandelbrot should be for certain disciplines in mathematics. (The book is not a tract in the science but it is a good layman's tome.)
Eggplant & RWE: re: Risk analysis. Too much of it can also cause paralysis by analysis. Which is the death of any groundbreaking undertakings, like spaceflight or interstellar exploration. The guys at Virgin Atlantic and Scaled Composites will be hailed as visionary at some point in the future (hopefully). The trick is remaining rational and applying the right tools to the right problems.
Listening to:
The Black Crowes – "Remedy"
Can I have some remedy?
Remedy for me please.
Cause if I had some remedy
I'd take enough to please me.
Papa Ray @ 129:
You think Obama is going to be JUST the President of the United States? You think that statement is just pushing a "conspiracy"?
I think that HE thinks he will be the leader of the world one day if and when the world recognizes his genius. However, that being said, I think he will be remembered as a grease spot in the long road that is man's history on the planet. The reactions will be along the line of:
"Remember Baraq Obama?"
"Eyew! No need to be gross!"
Mongoose @ 141:
It is just madness. Moon howling, lunatic madness.
And just spittle drooling stupidity.
It shows a civilization that is in deep decline.
Precisely. It may be time for some of us to figuratively repair to the Abbeys like the Irish monks did way back when. Preserve what we can for the days when the barbarians have spent their energy once more. Or more apropos, repair to the Colorado hills as did the characters in "Atlas Shrugged". Until the 'looters' have stolen all they can and there is nothing left. Then we can return to the world and help bring light back.
Listening to:
The Black Crowes – "A Conspiracy":
Did you ever hear
The one about last year
It was all a lie
Ain't it funny how the time flies
What we gonna do baby
What is left for us to prove
I've never stolen nothing, not a thing
Tried to stay away form this year's
Big thing
Ain't as easy as it seems
To find a mutual dream
Can you tell me wrong from right
Do you know when to freeze or take flight
Can you tell me more or less
I got to know-confess
Don't neglect me
Come be my conspiracy
Don't neglect me
Come be my conspiracy
Now you got a question about your answer
Say try your Adam's apple
You talk it try it bite it right
So now you want to fight? ok
Let's step outside
I got tradition in addition
My definition it don't hold me back
Well what you think about that
What you don't understand
This is a very old land
Can you tell me wrong from right
Do you know when to freeze or take flight
Can you tell me more or less
I got to know-confess
Apropos, this jumped up on the sidebar:
The Ugly Beast Returns by Jonah Goldberg
One of the simultaneously heartening and dismaying aspects of the Obama era is how it demonstrates that bad ideas never, ever, ever, die. They can go into remission, to be sure, but the the bacillus lives on. Via Drudge, I just read this hideous call for a planetary one-child policy.
Of course that policy just asks us to be complicit in our own demise. Why? Generational replacement rates of birth (across the large demographic of a nation) are 2.17 children per woman. (That is the mean, BTW.) China has an issue these days, not enough girls to go around. The confluence of a social norm and gov't policy have and are wreaking havoc.December 11, 2009 - 11:15 am Link to this Comment
148. ScenarioA
Wretchard, congratulations on yet another deeply insightful essay, beautifully put together. Your pursuit of this theme over the past several days is the best available anywhere.
In my view we can summarize the lessons learned as follows:
(1) In our open system, (a) there will always be games being played and (b) the pressures to maintain momentum for ongoing efforts will always appear to be overwhelming.
(2) Such checks and balances as exist come from individual decision makers at every level in the system.
(3) So what really matters is the desire and ability of these decision makers to get beyond the myths generated by the games and (bureaucratic, budget, political) momentum and then to have the integrity to make decisions consistent with reality in face of great pressures to do otherwise.
(4) Where science is involved, decision makers have a tool they can either use or abuse, depending on their own abilities and integrity.
Some years ago, a decision maker went outside his formal system to ask me to look into the safety of the space shuttle because he was faced with a decision to approve its use in a particular mission. Everyone (without exception as I recall) in his formal chain was strongly in favor of approval, but he wanted an independent perspective.
After noting, as Feynman did, that the chief engineer at NASA had signed off on the estimate of one accident per 100,000 launches, I found by my own independent analysis that the realistic expectation for the shuttle was/is a failure in somewhat less than a hundred launches. I found no technical way to bridge the gap between NASA's estimate of one expected accident in 10^5 launches and my own of one in slightly less than 10^2.
When this decision maker announced that he would be using my analysis as the basis for his approval, I enjoyed a flood of advocates armed with a broad range of arguments both technical and non-technical, so that I got a full feeling for the pressures that are brought to bear. None of the arguments, however, changed the numbers.
For an example of how people involved in an enterprise buy into the mythology of the enterprise, I recall the reaction of the chief scientist for one of the major aerospace companies to my numbers. I remember the exact words because they startled me at the time. He agreed with my analysis and then he said: "I used to think the astronauts were very brave, but after Challenger, I discovered that they were merely uninformed."
There were consequences to the decision not to approve that mission, of course. Some immediate, some long term. Among the long term, the shuttle lost one of its main reasons for being.
The numbers which portray reality need not be complicated. To my mind, the numbers which prove the lie in the AGW hockey stick model are the population figures for the Viking farming/herding settlements on Greenland, which were large enough to justify their own bishop and which prospered for 400 years prior to the onset of the little ice age (1350 AD).December 11, 2009 - 11:48 am Link to this Comment
149. joe buzz
I would love to see some witty pseudo scientist write a serious paper about how much AGW we will need to thwart the devastating impact of the next ice age. BTW, my anti magnetic pole shift recycled refrigerator magnets are not selling too well. I need a new marketing department.December 11, 2009 - 11:59 am Link to this Comment
150. maz2
"This means that there will be no reality check until the entire mental bubble is punctured through a painful crash with actual reality."
"The Cult of Reason – The Dark Side of the Enlightenment"
147. Doug
"I had faith that the system was relatively immune to psychosis (i.e., being out of touch with reality).
Needless to say, it was an extremely painful lesson that nature taught us that day, and I have never forgotten it."
– Dr. Sanity"December 11, 2009 - 12:54 pm Link to this Comment
151. joe buzz
a must see presentation done by a kid and his dad:
Awesome Analysis of Urban Biases on Surface Temperature Records
152. tomw
The link coyoteblog points to is a youtube of a science project to compare for UHI, given a few parameters. Simple can be smart … no?
153. Richard Aubrey
To think that Earth's future and the future of its peoples are to be ruled by a single tree on the Yamal peninsula is just too much.
Turns out that one of the perps, questioning how they were going to get this over on the rest of us, wanted to know how to differentiate temperature from a reindeer taking a crap next to the tree. Seems nutrient loads are a variable for which it is impossible to correct.December 11, 2009 - 1:26 pm Link to this Comment
154. Tee
oh, I see now.
Obama is supposed to earn his Nobel at Copenhagen.December 11, 2009 - 2:02 pm Link to this Comment
155. Papa Ray
I was reading over at the Earth Institute blog "State of the Planet", this piece that says [in part]
"If the East Anglia scientists and their correspondents had never existed, there would still be plenty of evidence from other scientists suggesting a significant role for human-induced increases in atmospheric CO2 and temperature over the past century. Nevertheless, everyone involved needs to embrace the idea that all scientists are skeptics; that all scientific theories are open to doubt; and in particular that future projections of climate change are subject to considerable uncertainty. Furthermore, the economic and environmental impacts of warming are also uncertain, as are the costs of CO2 mitigation. When scientists hide these uncertainties, or simply don't discuss them, they lose credibility. Climate scientists are clearly unable to "save the world" alone. But they are stewards of key data that are essential to shape wise policy. Their credibility is much more important than their political opinions.
Does this mean that no political action should be taken until scientific uncertainties are resolved? Of course not. Regardless of divisive tactics among negotiators or malfeasance among some scientists, atmospheric CO2 concentration continues to rise, more rapidly and to higher values than recorded in gas trapped in glacial ice over the past 500,000 years. This is mainly due to use of fossil fuels, and it is pushing us further and further into uncharted territory. Though there are many other factors that influence global climate, there is no doubt that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. And, in addition to the threat of climate change, there are ample reasons to conserve energy and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. The longer we delay, the higher will be the cost of limiting CO2 in the atmosphere. The cost may be high now, but it will only get higher in the future.
I did notice that all of the comments were in opposition to the article. I couldn't resist leaving this comment:
"When I was a kid I read a story about an Indian Medicine Man and his tribe. The Medicine Man had the good life was respected and well cared for because it was thought that he protected them from all the bad things like sickness, bad weather and that his medicine helped the hunters find game and the women to find other edibles and for them to all have good health. If the Medicine Man told them to do something or his medicine wouldn't work, they did it. Or if he told them to not do something they didn't do it.
Complete control or the Medicine Man withdrew his services and if anything bad happened he blamed it on the intervention of evil spirits or even would blame one of the tribe and have that person either killed or banished.
The memory of that story keeps popping up in the back of my mind whenever I read about AGW and the politicians and scientists who are "true believers"."
It is "awaiting moderation". I will be interested if they allow it.December 11, 2009 - 2:41 pm Link to this Comment
Regarding CO2 causing runaway warming, let's look at the period from the end of the Carboniferous, through the Permian, and into the Triassic periods.
300 Million years ago, at the end of the Carboniferous era, global temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations had both fallen dramatically, to just about the same levels they would be throughout most of the Ice Ages (slightly lower than today). Midway through the Permian, CO2 levels began to rise, and then global temperature. CO2 spiked to over 2000 ppm (about 5 times the 385 ppm of today), and temperature rapidly rose by over 20 degrees F (to just over 70 F, compared to a 56 F average today) . But then both leveled off, with the temperature remaining essentially 15 degrees F warmer than it is today for almost the entire Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods (nearly 200 million years). There was one large dip in temperature at the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary with temperature briefly dropping 10-15 degrees F before returning back to 70 F. Oddly, CO2 levels rose significantly prior to this dip, peaking at almost 2500 ppm (over six times today's level) just as the temperature began to drop. CO2 levels then began a long, gradual decline, dropping off to modern levels of between 200 and 400 ppm over the next 160 million years. Temperature itself remained constant until some 30 million years ago, when it began the long, steady plung to Ice Age Levels.
The spike in CO2 levels at the end of the Permian is significant because it is the only historical record we have of CO2 levels increasing just prior to a spike in global temperature. Compared to that, there are three other major spikes in CO2 levels that immediately precede or coincide with significant global temperature drops (and one minor CO2 spike that immediately precedes the plunge to Ice Age temp). So, this is the only example we have of the CO2-Temperature relationship behaving anything like what the AGW theories claim.
And what happened? Global temperature rose significantly, then leveled off and remained relatively stable at about 70 F for millions of years. After a geologically brief massive temperature drop, it rose again and stabilized once more at 70 F for millions more years. For almost the entire Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, the average global temperature was 70 F, 15 degrees warmer than today. Far from being a biological catastrophe, this was one of the most ecologically diverse and vibrant periods of Earth's history. This was the time of the Dinosaurs, when the Earth's biosphere could support multiple species of truly massive proportions and prodigious appetites. During this period, CO2 levels fluctuated while global temperature was relatively stable. On average, the CO2 concentration was about five times what it is today, and about 60% higher than what the extreme end of the AGW theory predict fossil fuel use might raise it to (around 900 ppm).
The truth of the global temperature and carbon record is that whatever theoretical linkage there might be between CO2 and Temperature, dramatic increasing in CO2 levels do not cause a runaway Greenhouse Effect that would turn the planet into a hellhole like Venus. There are all sorts of theories that "predict" runaway self-reinforcing events, but these just don't happen on Earth. Why not? Now that is an interesting question, but one the Climate Change "scientists" aren't asking. Instead, they're taking one of the busted theories and running with it as far as they can.
Papa Ray regarding Medicine Men, I recall they had it pretty rough if the tribe decided they were fakes.December 11, 2009 - 3:21 pm Link to this Comment
157. Papa Ray
"There are all sorts of theories that "predict" runaway self-reinforcing events, but these just don't happen on Earth. Why not? Now that is an interesting question, but one the Climate Change "scientists" aren't asking…"
I can tell you why they don't happen and it didn't come from me but my Mother. She told me that "Mother Nature takes care of herself and will take care of us".
She was a farm girl and could grow a garden in the middle of rocks, raise chickens, rabbits, pigs and kill, dress, smoke and cook them. She would stand out in the rain with me and explain what she called the "Circle of Life" and how Mother Nature worked.
She was not a scientist but a doer, a wonderful nurturer and on top of all that-
a fine woman and Mama.
JMH Your right, that is what happened to this particular Medicine Man in the story, he was banished, naked in the desert to die.
In this case, too bad we have become civilized.
Papa RayDecember 11, 2009 - 3:33 pm Link to this Comment
158. Papa Ray
Forget AGW, this woman (and I use that term very loosly) tells us in part:
"The "inconvenient truth" overhanging the UN's Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.
A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days…"
Read more of her plan to save the planet, if you can stomach it.
Papa RayDecember 11, 2009 - 5:21 pm Link to this Comment
159. oMan
I don't buy the "runaway" argument. First, it requires mysterious forces: CO2 levels alone cannot produce the temperature increase that the AGW camp wants us to worry about. They admit this. So they point to the feedback that they say will come from CO2 increase, presumably causing water vapor to act as a greenhouse gas and boil us all. Why would water vapor suddenly acquire those properties? Water vapor's behavior –under all sorts of physical and chemical regimes– is pretty well characterized. And we all see everyday what it does: the sun heats things up, the air absorbs more moisture, the hot wet air tends to rise, expand and cool, and lo, we get rain and snow. Every single time. That is a natural and compelling case of *negative* feedback, where the heat (obedient to the laws of thermodynamics) wants to head for someplace cooler, and the air and water "transport" it. Why would a modest (and precedented) increase in a trace gas, possessing only a tiny fraction of the thermal mass of the water vapor in the atmosphere, suddenly dictate changes in the water vapor cycle? That have never been seen before? That defy the laws of physics?
Second: if they want to posit mysterious processes, fine. But the burden of proof is on them. Unless they can supply a plausible explanation and connect the dots for a cause-and-effect demonstration, they lose. In particular, they need to show that "but for" their process, the current model of the climate is inadequate. Last time I looked, my model of the climate is working just fine. It just doesn't happen to produce the runaway catastrophes they want to sell me. Epic fail.
Sorry for all the question marks, but they are what skeptics use.December 11, 2009 - 5:25 pm Link to this Comment
160. Doug
Funny that nature is filled with self-correcting systems, yet we are instructed to believe that the World is perched on a knife's edge, always on the verge of falling into the abyss
"When your cat is trying to tell you to give her food, how does she do it? She has no word for food or milk. What she does is to make movements and sounds that are characteristically those that a kitten makes to a mother cat. If we were to translate the cat's message into words, it would not be correct to say that she is crying 'Milk!' Rather, she is saying something ike 'Mama!' Or, perhaps still more correctly, we should say that she is asserting 'Dependency! Dependency!' The cat talks in terms of patterns and contingencies of relationship, and from this talk it is up to you to take a deductive step, guessing that it is milk that the cat wants."
[-- "Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication," 1966]December 11, 2009 - 6:45 pm Link to this Comment
161. RagnarD
Doug – Funny that you mention that cat. I have a dog that smacks her lips, that is makes the motions with her mouth to signal she wants a treat or dinner. She also can look from you to the treat jar and back while doing the same smacking behavior. This is not taught but her own way. Smart beast. When treats are being handed out, literally stomps her front feet in anticipation. We are the masters because we control the food. (The breed is rare = Petit Basset Griffon Vendeen or PBGV's are French scent hounds)
The AGW Lords wish to treat us as we treat the captive dog and dole out the goodies on their schedule.December 11, 2009 - 11:01 pm Link to this Comment
162. Doug
Somebody's gotta support the Greenies!
A green, sustainable future that doesn't work Washington Examiner
Byron York visits ArcosantiDecember 12, 2009 - 2:41 am Link to this Comment
163. Mongoose
No, the cat is saying, "well now you obtuse human, it is t;me for me to have some milk. get the lead out!" Whoever think that a cat is saying "dependency" has never had one. They are just as likely to go next door and get their drink if one's response is not quick enough.
Seriously.December 12, 2009 - 3:47 am Link to this Comment
Comments are closed.