Truth, Consensus, and IPCC

As scientists, we believe that certain propositions are demonstrably and objectively true, and that our objective is to determine which ones they are. Given that we are in the public employ, the public has some say about which matters we are paid to investigate, and we try to align our own interests with those of the public.

Before people were going around wishing climate scientists dead, we had rather interesting lives, as there was a social motivation to pursue an incredibly interesting set of questions about how the world is put together. Not every intellectual style is happy with our pursuits; evidence tends to be messy, experiments equivocal, models approximate. On the other hand, the contacts with other fields are varied, and contacts with other countries inevitable. Unfortunately, we started to come across some rather bad news.

The beliefs of the best-informed people held together. Evidence that didn't align was almost invariably found faulty, as the picture was refined. By 1979, the outlines of the present consensus had emerged among the most accomplished physical scientists, and rather quickly became the basis for further research.

As time progressed, the news became bad enough that we had to start drawing the public's attention to it. Accordingly, an international body, the IPCC, was formed to collate and represent that news to decision makers and the public. There is evidence that IPCC was deliberately constituted so as to understate risks, largely under the influence fo the Reagan administration.

The Reagan administration wanted to forestall pronouncements by self-appointed committees of scientists, fearing they would be 'alarmist.' Conservatives promoted the IPCC's clumsy structure, which consisted of representatives appointed by every government in the world and required to consult all the thousands of experts in repeated rounds of report-drafting in order to reach a consensus. Despite these impediments the IPCC has issued unequivocal statements on the urgent need to act.

The IPCC summaries of the "consensus" were intended to report the state of science, not to define it. The "consensus" was and is just the spectrum of opinion held by working scientists. Some questions often raised by the public are considered "settled" in the community, while others are not. (Nobody claims "the science is settled" as a whole. This is a straw man.) The purpose of IPCC is not to do research but to review it and report upon it.

Nobody "worked for" the IPCC. (A few WMO employees spend most time on IPCC business. Pachauri himself draws no salary from IPCC.)

The climate science was reported by the first working group, and other issues (respectively impacts, and strategies) by the second and third working groups. Was this a good idea? I was not alone in being unimpressed by the last WG 2 imapcts assessment. Two far more accomplished and prominent U of Texas scientists than myself from opposite ends of the "main hump" (one an ecologist specializing in climate impacts and one a climatologist who is also a member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists) have expressed disdain for the last WG 2 assessment to my own knowledge. A recent article in the Boulder Daily Camera takes a similar position (emphasis added):

No errors have surfaced in the first and most well-known of the reports, which said the physics of a warming atmosphere and rising seas is man-made and incontrovertible. So far, four mistakes have been discovered in the second report, which attempts to translate what global warming might mean to daily lives around the world. "A lot of stuff in there was just not very good," said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and a lead author of the first report. "A chronic problem is that on the whole area of impacts, getting into the realm of social science, it is a softer science. The facts are not as good." ... No errors have surfaced in the first and most well-known of the reports, which said the physics of a warming atmosphere and rising seas is man-made and incontrovertible. So far, four mistakes have been discovered in the second report, which attempts to translate what global warming might mean to daily lives around the world. "A lot of stuff in there was just not very good," said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and a lead author of the first report. "A chronic problem is that on the whole area of impacts, getting into the realm of social science, it is a softer science. The facts are not as good."

Stoat piles on, and is quoted in the Guardian as saying

"While some of the WG2 is fine, it is clear that some sections have been edited by people who should not have been trusted with the job.It should be done more on merit. At the very least, get someone competent to review the edit comments for their sections."

In short, there really is an objective system that physical science can be done on, and there is enough geophysics for a coherent set of positions to emerge on it. We can call this the consensus. The IPCC WG1 report attempts to report this consensus. It does not define the consensus. Conceivably IPCC WG 1 could misrepresent the consensus. Science attempts to find truth, and IPCC attempts to match science.

What of groups 2 and 3? Here one could argue that there is no consensus. There are too many aspects of the impacts question, and too many approaches to the mitigation/adaptation question. It is important for policy makers to understand the spread of professional opinion on these matters. Many people believe that the most recent working group 2 report failed to do so.

I strongly hope that the absurd hooting over the Himalaya glaciers error is not enough to hound Pachauri out of IPCC leadership. Whether he has done a good job or not, we need to defend people against the strategy of taking minor errors and missteps, and using them to destroy the careers and reputations of good, smart and decent people.

We cannot function with only politicians in charge. Somebody has to represent science, and scientists often have strong personalities of the sort politicians learn early to suppress, and while generally ethical, perhaps more of a detailed sense of the laws of nature than those of humans.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't revisit the role of IPCC and its achievements and failures. WG 2 seems to have been overrun by people with political agendas. The bad sort of committee thinking is painfully obvious to anyone who reads it. The WG 1 report in AR 4 continues to uphold the fine standards of the previous cycles. On the whole, the geosciences community deserves congratulations and respect for its efforts.

Anyway, ironically behind the paywall, Nature has some interesting ideas on the future of IPCC. I'm sympathetic to (of all people) John Christy, at least on process:

voluminous printed reports, issued every six years by government-nominated authors, cannot accommodate the rapid and chaotic development of scientific information today. An idea we pitched a few years ago that is now worth reviving was to establish a living, 'Wikipedia-IPCC'. Groups of four to eight lead authors, chosen by learned societies, would serve in rotating, overlapping three-year terms to manage sections organized by science and policy questions (similar to the Fourth Assessment Report). The authors would strike a balance between the free-for-all of true science and the need for summary statements.

Controversies would be refereed by the lead authors, but with input from all sides in the text, with links to original documents and data. The result would be more useful than occasional big books and would be a more honest representation of what our fledgling science can offer. Defining and following rules for this idea would be agonizing, but would provide greater openness.

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Image of Ragendra Pachauri by evstafiev via Wikipedia

What does openness in science mean?

Kooiti Masuda has some very interesting points in response to the question of openness in science, especially regarding data and code. Please read it first before reading my response, which follows.

1) Commercial codes used as part of scientific process

I agree with KM's point that the fact that much of the software that scientists use is closed-source and expensive will complicate matters. In any case you will find some strong objections from the commercial software community that by virtue of its use in science their code must be released or even auditable, or that competitors to their functionality should be publicly funded.

But none of this prevents any code developed in house on the public expense from being released into open source. Such codes are substantial and are crucial to much of the controversy. Nobody is suggesting that any significant bias is introduced via bugs in Matlab, so the fact that Matlab is licensed is not practically important for these purposes.

2) Complications due to institutionally expected commercialization of
academic codes

In fields far from climate, commercialization of academic codes is the norm. Institutions, for their own interests, presume that codes developed there have commercial value unless demonstrated otherwise. Publicly funded institutions act very much like corporations in this regard, except perhaps with less agility.

Should these limitations be applied only to particular fields? How can one reasonably establish boundaries between fields where publication is expressly required and others where it is discouraged?

I am actually gearing up for negotiations with my university to permit me to release a modest piece of general-purpose code I have written. The default position of the intellectual property office of the university is "no, this code belongs to the institution, and if there is potential for outside use, they should pay us for it".

As in a corporation, at least in America the case for open source must be made explicit and focused on the needs of the university of public laboratory, not of the science or the general public. Support for the contrary may end up coming from the funding agencies, the principal investigators and/or the general public. The general public, especially people working in small, closely-held businesses, has difficulty understanding the bureaucratic barriers to open source.

3) Informal coding experiments

As for the difficulties implied by informally developed code, I actually have some technical ideas that would greatly reduce these, which (ironically I am afraid) I need to keep somewhat private at present. Hopefully I can find funding for this work and release it into the public domain. Wouldn't it be bizarre to have to close the source for a tool facilitating the open sourcing of academic software?

4) Supercomputing

Another problem you do not raise is the difficulty with very large calculations, which tend to be performed on one-of-a-kind machines. Here, the efforts may not be repeatable in practice even within the given research team, as the constantly shifting experimental platforms subvert exact repeatability and require occasional adaptation of the codes just to keep up with the requirements of the machine. As the machine is unique not only as an instance, but as a configuration, supercomputing undermines reproducibility.

5) Still, Open Science is Always Better

All this said, I remain a strong supporter of publication, documentation and reproducibility in dramatically more detail than was possible in the past. There are far more difficulties than the rather vicious critics of the field acknowledge. However, defenses from within the field that openness is technically impossible or socially undesirable are very unhelpful and in my opinion very wrong.

6) Can openness backfire?

There is certainly the risk that open science will appear to facilitate misunderstanding. The widespread misuse of the web-based portal to the MODTRAN program, by people who don't understand the precise nature of the problem it solves, is very illustrative. My feeling about that is that people who get things wrong will get things wrong no matter how little or much information you give them.

In the end, the only defense of genuine science remains peer review, though the structure of peer review may also need to change in the future. But that's another topic.

Lies for Nerds, Propaganda that Matters

The lunacy has a slightly different flavor on Slashdot:

• well let me inform you, it's the Climate Research Unit..... they pretty much supply ALL the data for global warming enthusiasts world wide.
• It's technically true since what the "warmists" are doing isn't (and hasn't been for some time) science in the first place.
  Though claims for "man made warming" could actually be true, for cities and airports... Millions spent to "discover" that the Exhaust Gas Temperature being displayed on the engine monitoring panel of the average jet airliner isn't just there to decorate the cockpit!

• Regardless of what you think about climate change, you should reject this particular bad science. The isotopic ratio does not mean what is claimed.

  Here is a thought experiment for you: You have a bathtub. The drain is open, the faucet is on. You also have a drip tube putting red colored water into the tub. (This is a vaguely "to scale" stand in for the CO2 in the atmosphere. Large sinks, large sources, tiny human influence.)

  You then find that the bathtub is turning red. In fact, almost none of the red dye seems to go down the drain at all! Now consider what that means - does it mean that the drip tube is causing any level changes seen in the water? Obviously, it can't. If all else was equal, you'd expect the drip tube to be diluted by the ratio between the drip tube and the faucet.

  The only explanation is that the drip tube's dye must not be absorbed. And, in fact, this has been shown to be true. The carbon isotopes being measured have extremely different properties when is comes to atmospheric scrubbing. So the trace isotopes in the "buried" CO2 are not absorbed, and build up in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, that says nothing about the causes of the overall level change.

  I will now be modded down because I disclosed a mistake in one of the arguments commonly used in climate change debates, thus confirming the underlying issues in politicizing science. [This one was rated 5! -mt]

• They used two different measuring systems, and diddled the numbers until the graphs overlapped. They used data from measuring stations that were not properly shielded from mundane human activity (I think one was actually near a pub, in Australia?) and whose data could not be normalized using nearby measuring stations. They declined to use proper measuring stations that showed a decline in temperature. And they actively, and conciously, LIED about this.
  
  Carbon good, carbon bad, we don't know. Possibly it's not good, probably we should limit our output of it (can't hurt to be neutral), but to suppose we should spend billions of dollars on fixing a potential non-problem, trusting in what we know to be bad science, that's just fucking bullshit.

• Realclimate.org, you mean the website run by Al Gore's press secretary, whose moderators are some of the very people implicated in the hadley CRU scandal?

  Talk about drinking the fucking Kool Aid.

• Let me fix that for you:

  1) Cherry-pick the coldest year they can as the starting point (1850 -- the end of the Little Ice Age) and use that as a starting point.
  2) Pick a higher subsequent year and use that as an end point (1998 -- one of the most intense El Nino events on record). See the huge one-year spike in 1998? That's what they're picking as their ending point

• Who tells you that it is not the other way around? Warmer temperature concludes in more carbondioxide? Sorry. I am not convinced. The whole thing is just too convenient for the big guys. (!!!)
  
• OK. Your choice. Believe in it. But look it up and compare to CO2 levels 2 thousand or more years ago. They were higher than today and they were lower than today. I don't see the 3%-5% CO2 addition by humans to have such an effect. The problem here is the money involved. There is a whole economy out there living on the fear of people like yoo who just believe. Imagine Obama saying: "Lets just kill this multimillion dollar, multimillion job economy and move the f*** on." I don't see it.

This however is interesting:

• And THAT my friend, is indeed the problem. Folks see Goldman Sachs and the other leeches lining up to cash in on "carbon credits" which is the biggest load of horseshit tried to stuff down the people's throats in decades, and they are sick of it.

  If you were simply putting limits and forcing everyone to use less, like in the 70s gas crisis? That would be one thing. But when you have those pushing AGW all set up to become carbon billionaires [telegraph.co.uk] while they fly around in their lear jets telling us we need to change? Well fuck you buddy, we can smell hypocrisy a mile away and we are about knee deep in it now.

  If you want folks to get on board AGW? Get rid of the fricking leeches like GS set to cash in on everyone elses misery and assholes like the Al Gore that have quietly set themselves up to make out like fucking robber barons if they manage to get this shit passed. Otherwise expect the repubs to ride this anti AGW wave to a good decade or two of one party rule. There are enough people here sick of Nobama and his flip flops, hell I wouldn't be surprised if Caribou Barbie ended up the president.

There are some very nice ones in there, too:

• Rei
  

  Have you noticed that all of the complaints are from IPCC WGII and WGIII? Not like you know the difference, so let me explain. WGI is about the science of climate change. WGII is about impacts, while WGIII is about how to avert it.

  In all of its reports, the IPCC is explicitly [www.ipcc.ch] not limited to peer-reviewed materials. They can use, and I quote:

  "Peer reviewed and internationally available scientific technical and socio-economic literature, manuscripts made available for IPCC review and selected non peer-reviewed literature produced by other relevant institutions including industry".

  (I bolded the last part because you'll never see the deniers complaining about that, so I thought it deserved particular emphasis!). They can quote peer-reviewed material, governmental material, NGO material, and industry studies. The reason for this is because not everything on the planet is peer-reviewed. Peer-review is for science.

  WG1 is almost entirely peer-reviewed. It's about science, so that's what you do. WGII is mostly about "news". While a good chunk of what it mentions is peer reviewed, it does include a number of non-peer-reviewed reports. The same goes with WGIII (which has more of a focus on policy and industry).

  Most of the IPCC review effort, likewise, goes into WG1. WGII and WGIII review is much less emphasized. But the real key is that if you find something wrong with WGII or WGIII, you're not attacking the science of climate change, because those reports aren't about science. The science is in WGI. And if you find a non-peer-reviewed report anywhere in the IPCC, it is *not* violating its guidelines. WG1 just avoids them.

  Sadly, some of the people who know better (Watts, I'm looking at you) love to spread misconceptions about all of this.

and

• Bemopolis

  You're so right! I'll make a deal with you — if I admit that science doesn't fully understand gravity, will you go jump off a goddam cliff?
  
  Sorry — I ran out of polite the first twenty times I saw this retarded argument for doing fucking nothing

I love the "too convenient for the big guys" one, though. That just cracks me up.

One lesson here lies in the couple of pretty nasty grumbles about cap and trade. It's very clear that even if cap and trade could be done right so as to provide the carbon benefits, the mere perception that it would benefit the arbitrageurs of Wall Street is enough to make some people hate it, regardless of what the benefits could be. Obama is already seen to be in the pocket of Wall Street, when after all he had to prop up Wall Street or get blamed for a depression. (I think Bernanke was brilliant, but we don't need more of that now.) It looks to me that America needs tax-and-dividend, with some Republican support. And the world needs America to get a grip.

Without that, we'd better start looking real hard for that magic pixie dust, because 2xCO2 now looks like it's already in the bag.

Grim amusement

Look, I don't want to chase my new audience away, but look at this stuff. Where did all this craziness come from?

• The author talks about “consequences” for the leftwing politicians and activists who have been pushing this fraud on the American people.

  Don’t hold your breathe.

  Was the left ever held accountable for trying to block President Reagan’s policies which won the Cold War? Do they ever admit they are wrong?

  The left will just latch onto some other big scare/big lie and with the help of their media acolytes attempt once again to push another of their big government/big socialist plans down our throats.

• There is something truly frightening here. The fact that political agenda can so sway “scientific data” as to cause a near hysterical movement ought to give all those who value truth severe pause.

  Those against the concept of man-made global warming we demonized- my own flesh and blood brother called me a “flat-earther”. Any deviation from the mantra was ridiculed, and the idea of questioning authority was squelched.

  This I find more frightening than any carbon capping legislation that has been talked about.

  People truly are sheep.

• Can you imagine how bad off we would be as a nation, If Al Gore would have been elected President. To me he is a criminal and so are the scientists who lied about global warming to line their own pockets with so called carbon credits.

• Yet another vehicle the socialists hoped to use to get to their goal of a world wide socialist utopia has been driven into the ditch.

  It was always about redistribution of wealth and power of government over the individual. Now watch the socialist true believers glom onto another crisis as their new vehicle.

• By God’s Grace we have seen Truth overpower the Lie. Amen

• The AGW crowd is comprised of two groups. The first group (the followers) includes the uninformed, the gullible, the well intentioned but naive, the sincere but mislead, many journalists and researchers, and yes, the just plain stupid. I would think it safe to say that these people all believe that most of the recent global warming must have been or was caused by human activity – primarily CO2 emissions and that wind farms fix the problem. These people are not evil, they are just wrong. How anyone could rationally think that the IPCC fairytales prove their position is beyond hope and not worthy of debate.

  The second group (the leaders) includes primary, government funded researchers, left leaning political leaders, activist and environmentalist leadership, and, of course, the Hansens, Gores, Manns, Briffas, Pachauri, and the rest of the extremists with which we are burdened. To the surprise of those in the first group, but not at all to the rest of us, these people do not necessarily believe or, for the most part, even care if global warming is anthropogenic. And, unlike the first group, these people are not only evil and wrong but also dangerous. They are not out to save the world but to gain political power and financial control over individuals, businesses and countries.

• We continue to thaw from the last ice age. That is the only truth about global warming. It is not catastophic, it is nature. We will most certainly enter another ice age before the earth reaches its warmest climes in which strawberries grow int the arctic circle and Earth is only 3% coverede in ice. We currently sit at about 10% ice coverage. Still in the thaw stage. Science? It seems these folks have no background in historical geology. There is where the history of the terrestial climate lies. It is settled and ageed.

• The environmentalist’s plan to re-engineer the industrial economy is dead. Unfortunately trust and confidence in the leading western democracies is also dead as a consequence of empty headed support for this travesty. We can laugh at outrageous politicians and call them fools but it is an awful shame that the good names – NASA, NOAA, etc – also spent their credibility on this foolhardy venture. The scientific community has demonstrated a lack of intellectual credibility on the scale of bankers and real estate brokers!
• This entire scam has been perpatrated for the express purpose of exerting more control over the lemmings (us). The political powers in this world and particularly the UN has seen this issue as an opertuity to attemt to wrest some world control from the US and tranfer it to itself.
• The situation is dire, far worst than presented here. There is a global melt down in trust in science, unique since Galileo. We just witnessed a worldwide conference of 45,000 attendees, which promoted a redistribution of wealth due to climate change. In the run up to the conference, we were told by prominent scientists and political leaders that this was our last chance, if we do not curtail CO2, billions were doomed. The US Supreme Court, on the basis of this science, granted permission to our EPA to regulate our entire economy to curtail this molecule. However the debate is now about cover up, fraud, lying and deceit, in the basic science. Scientists now enjoy the level of esteem of street barkers. Like Catholic priests, 99% do not deserve this distrust, but it is real, due to not only criminal conduct, but high level official cover up. CO2 curtailment has the very real potential to destroy our way of life, end our society. This is dire.
• Seems to me that the most important aspect in this article is the fact that people are starting to wake up. I think more and more people are going to demand proof to these “finding” and “theories”. The real death of Global warming will come when these environmentalist have to prove what they are saying BEFORE they get any more money.

• As any con man will tell you it is easy to deceive those who want to be deceived. The greedy are the easiest of all. With AGW we have greed for money, greed for power and greed for status (saviours of the planet) and greed for votes all coming together and available to so many if they believe in AGW.

  There are also many jobs on the line: How many in the MGM have jobs like correspondent for climate change? How many government departments, politicians and officials oversee policy on climate change/global warming?

• here is exactly zero evidence that CO2 has anything whatsoever. In fact the evidence is overwhelming that there is no such thing as AGW at all. The whole theory has been debunked by real scientists.

• As we suspected, AGW was nothing but a watermelon….green on the outside and red on the inside….

  Rather a dramatic coincidence that the AGW scam is revealed just as the USA president tries to ram his socialist agenda down the throat of the American people, with the largest congressional liberal majorities in decades, just in time for gearing up a really good battle in the 2010 midterm elections and perhaps causing the American voter to question other elitist ideas on managing energy, health care, the economy, and various other nanny state regulatory schemes where “the science is settled” …

  God does indeed work in mysterious ways…

  Let us hope that there is indeed truth in the quip widely attributed to Bismarck that “God looks out after fools, drunkards, and the United States of America”

• What evidence? There is now NO evidence for global warming–period. There are no temperature records anywhere which show an increase in temperatures. All the records had been doctored, where there are actually any records. Climategate revealed that academia had no evidence, just fraudulent programs. The recent “Son of Climategate” revealed that NASA and NOAA were doctoring their temperature records as well.

  Nor is there indirect evidence of warming (c.f. the new Glaciergate and Amazongate scandals). It was all U.N. propaganda.

  The scientific causation model has been disproven–there is no positive temperature feedback. And now recent cooling has been explained by net reduction of atmospheric water vapor. The CO2 story was entirely made up and passed off as fact with no evidence whatsoever.

  There is no evidence for global warming, and there never was. Nada. Nothing. It was all a scam. Don’t you get it? There is no global warming. There is not even evidence that warming would be a threat if it were real. It was all a lie. People have got to stop giving the climate “lientists” any benefit of the doubt. Everything they say is a lie designed to yoke you to a false paradigm.

• There are indeed a number of benefits arising from anthropogenic CO2 added to our atmosphere: Plant growth has improved, the globe is greening (literally), and the deserts are blossoming as the rose (this includes that most magnificient of sand traps, the Sahara). China’s food production is up 20+% due to carbonization of the atmosphere, as is that of every other food-consuming country. And since that includes all 6+ billion people on the earth, that’s good news. Are there challenges? Yes! Can we address them adequately? Yes! Are we seeing benefits to added CO2 to the atmosphere? Yes! And do greenhouses increase CO2 levels to at least 1,000 ppm (about three times normal) and see substantial benefits? Yes! Sounds like a series of Wins to me!
• the “phenomenon of global warming” couldn’t be dead, because it has never existed. It was always a giant hoax and fraud perpetrated on humanity by people who hoped to ride the “fix” into permanent power, influence and wealth.
  Far from being simply a transfer of wealth from 1st world to the 3rd, as many have suggested it was all about transfer of wealth from productive sector of humanity (and that exists in China, India, Brazil, and I imagine upper Volta) to the freeloading, jet-setting, “cultured” elites that are running out of inherited wealth.
  The movement would permanently impoverish vast sections of US, Europe, Japan, and kept most of 3rd world, as well as China, India and such like – whatever they are categorized these days as – at the current level of poverty.

• The faked data, scientists as political actors, and advocacy turning back to drive the research results are the worst aspect of this.

  Advocacy research undermines science as well as twisting policy. This creation of “truth” is found in absurd body counts in Iraq published by epidemiologists who refuse to release details, large numbers of annual dead from lack of private health insurance reported by national health insurance advocates created by massaging “controls” for other factors, or think-tank results about how religion improves life which come from carefully selected methods.

  After all, why bother to base policy in reality when the political class can just twist our view of reality to support policy? It has to start with science and research policing themselves: the effect of a few bad apples is to ruin the whole bushel.

• What exactly still remains that justifies the “…troubling and establishes in my mind the need for intensive additional research and investigation, as well as some prudential steps that would reduce CO2 emissions by enhancing fuel use efficiency and promoting alternative energy sources…”?

  Is it the deeply flawed GISS dataset that is more and more obviously a product of Hansen et al’s failure to correct for UHI effect? IS ist the disregard for Svensmark’s more and more verified causation theory? IS it the complete non-correlation between CO2 concentration and mid-tropo / mid tropic heat buildup (the only even mildly plausible mechanism ever proposed for AGW)?

  There is nothing left except GCM’s that never had any predictive power, even backwards, and have no physical mechanisms to model that produce AGW symptoms without having them injected through table-lookups.

  Fraud is fraud… find a basis, a mechanism besides dire need to rule the lives of others and there can be a discussion. Right now Gore and PAchauri deserve that medal almost twice as much as the subsequent peace rize winner… and you shouldn’t hold you breath for a pulitzer on this piece either… or then again maybe you’re in the running. Who knows?

• whats worse here is that there will be an erosion of trust in science. these idiots at the royal academy should be at a minimum fired. I expect politicians to pull these kind of stunts, but scientists who do need discipling.
• The global warming scam is symptomatic of how the international left does business generally. It tries to rely on distortion,fabrication and intimidation because its statist snake oil is a toxic brew that the public won’t buy if accurately described.Putting it in a green package rather than the red one fools only the terminally gullible
• The real goal of the elitests behind AGW was to transfer wealth from the 1st world (primarily the US) to the 3rd world. This would serve two purposes: (1) to provide aid to struggling 3rd world economies, and (2) to reduce the wealth/power of the US which is seen by many in Europe as inherently fascist/capitalistic/racist. Thus, you hear nary a word of criticism about the failure of China, India, and Brazil to agree to any measures to restrict their CO2 emissions. The focus is ALL on the US.

• The great question is not whether this will be remembered as another pseudo-scientific hoax (it will), but rather whether all those who persecuted and attacked the “deniers” and scientific skeptics who went against the “church’s” teachings will be humbled by this, or just go on to the next feat of faith and belief and pretend that they were never a priest, inquisitor, and executioner for their AGCC religion.

  If this recent incarnation of “scientific evidence” for the necessity of slavery and ceding of liberty to elites who have all knowledge and all truth for, “the greater good” has taught us anything, it is yet more evidence that the American public, and the Western World at large, is woefully lacking in basic math and science education. Only an ignorant and uneducated public could be so easily led to believe that global cataclysm was just around the corner because of a tiny increase in a trace gas. Or, that given the size and complexity of the system, that is our atmosphere, such minute changes could cause Armageddon. Carbon dioxide accounts for .00038 of our atmosphere. By contrast, there is 2,631 times as much water vapor in the atmosphere, and it is more than 20 times as important in our planet’s atmosphere’s natural greenhouse effect (you know, the one that allows life on Earth to exist).

  If this is not taken as a stern warning that we need to do a better job of teaching science to all citizens, then we are in a great deal of trouble. Scientists should not be treated like The Great Oz, or cloistered priests who have esoteric knowledge we wouldn’t understand. Science if for everyone, and in our technological societies it is an absolute necessity or we are going to have more and more hoaxes like this one.

• Thanks goodness sanity is returning. Too bad it hasn’t reached Obama yet or the New York Times.
  I just read Climategate, The CRUtape letters, by Steven Mosher and Thomas Fuller. This is a step by step analysis of what the CRU emails reveal and the folks that write it know the skilled crew that uncovered the dodgy science, so it ties together. It is a “read it and weep” kind of expose. we were being lead down the garden path!

And so on. The winner of this batch (well, to be honest I didn't get all the way through...) is:

• Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) since the putrescent Hansen’s non air-conditioned testimony before the U.S. Congress in 1988 has always been a propaganda exercise, a tissue of junk-science lies. Cyclical rebounds from a 500-year Little Ice Age ending c. 1880 – 1890 have been deceitfully plotted as a linear trend correlated with atmospheric CO2 emissions by late-Industrial/Technological Western civilization, which for deep psychological reasons Climate Cultists’ Green Gang of Luddite sociopaths despise.

  For fundamental reasons, any “greenhouse effect” anthropogenic or otherwise is mathematically and physically impossible. First, as Edward Lorenz’s Chaos Theory showed in 1964, “complex dynamic systems” such as Earth’s atmosphere are non-random but indeterminate, non-linear in any form.

  Second, thermodynamic Conservation Laws define “entropy” as prohibiting 100% efficiency of any heat-engine in either open or closed contexts: Thermal equilibrium self-adjusts by means of cooling vs. warming processes. Warmist ignoramuses assert Perpetual Motion, equating Earth with Venus, whose geophysical dynamics bear no resemblance to our own.

  Over a generation now, this massive fraud has sabotaged world energy economies, subverted objective, rational scientific inquiry, promoted a terminally dysfunctional elite like Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri, too busy raking off ill-gotten Cap-and-Trade gains in Thieves’ Markets to proofread or even minimally review their doltish IPCC, GISS/NASA, Penn State ESSC, or Hadley CRU pronouncements. Now as Cycle 24’s “dead sun” presages a 70-year Maunder Minimum, most likely ending Earth’s 12,250-year Holocene Interglacial Epoch, Warmists’ legacy could well be mega-deaths worldwide.

I love the appeal to Ed Lorenz. Very compelling.

OK, politeness challenge! Pick one and reply, as if your aunt had said it over a holiday dinner.

The Morano Effect

My highest traffic level ever, sigh. Far less attention gets paid to the good stuff. (Hey, look over there on the right. ======>)

Most of the other spikes involved Morano in some way, too... Usually with some silly blurt of mine in an otherwise reasonable posting that can be spun into palpable evil. Some people think this means I should watch every word I ever say, like a Democratic politician. Obama is very good at it. For all the good it does him.

But there's another side to it. Maybe I should advocate the live sacrifice of puppies every few weeks just to keep the numbers up.

Lemonade, Or The Responsibilities of Blogging

Lemonade, as in when life gives you lemons, make it.

OK, I was sloppy recently. Not my first mistake in blogging. And I was insensitive too. And it somewhat blew up in my face. So what can I learn from this?

Mostly, don't do both in the same posting!

Let me consider the insensitivity part. Apparently my lack of regard for parenthood itself (a very good thing when done right, but a bad thing, sometimes a very bad thing, otherwise), never mind large families (an anachronism in my opinion) is not just moderately off topic. It is insensitive. I suppose lots of people are parents or children of large families and would be likely to take offense.

I don't like how Mrs Simac wielded her motherhood, but I didn't handle it well.

Both the topic of family size and its semiotics seem to me a legitimate topic of conversation on a sustainability blog, but it's too emotionally laden for a snarky side reference. I am thick, but I guess I see that. Apologies to anyone whose feelings I hurt. I will avoid this topic in future and recommend that anyone else taking it on take note of how it might affect certain people. A legitimate issue, but not one that should be treated lightly.

On the other hand, it got me some attention. And then I blew it with an offhand comment.

And as for "If my career had been based on investigating something and I was so certain of my data, why would I not want to defend it?", this is obviously trickery. Science is not data. We are not collecting fingerprints. We are describing what is actually happening. The data are of course a consistency check, but this isn't a question of data at all.

"Science is not data". OK. I stand by that. Data is part of science, but science is more than data. "It's not a question of data at all" is wrong and silly, though. What I should have said is that "it is a fundamental mistake about the whole issue to believe that observational data are decisive in the absence of scientific understanding". Of course, data are crucial. What I meant to say was they aren't enough.

And here is where the real point I was trying to bring up comes in. The whole core of denialism is "my graphs vs your graphs" as if the graphs themselves were the science. But they just aren't.

Which graph is important, and why, what it means, where it fits in, these are matters for expert judgment. The legitimate question is the expertise of the whole field, but that can only be addressed by people who are experts in other, related fields. Yet we see a claim on Lucia's site (#31847) claiming that the skill set of climate science is "not difficult to acquire" and less than that of "a good chef". Now, of course, that is a slippery claim, since we are comparing art and science, and possibly as insulting to the chef as to the scientist in that regard, but if we are comparing the technical skills of a chef with those of a climate scientist, the comparison is so far out of line as to be mind-boggling.

Where does this foolishness come from? It comes from some very elementary ideas of what science is. "I can read a graph of a quantity vs. time," they say, and since that is all they see, that is all they think there is to it. And our PR and journalist advisers warn us never to present an equation, never mind a theoretical deduction. What would you expect them to think if they never see anything else?

Anyway, there's much to think about in the peculiar and revealing responses to this article, which aside from its flaws made an important point, a point which we see is met with fierce and somewhat clueless resistance.

But there were some immediate and obvious lessons as well:

So the first lesson is, you never know when Morano will pounce. You have to watch everything you say, because you never know when somebody will take note of something you say violating the norms of some audience you don't understand, leap to call their attentions to it, and use it to discredit you.

The second lesson is, you never know when Morano will pounce, and you can't understand everybody on earth in advance. So just say what you say and take your lumps. There's always a side benefit of an expanded audience.

The third lesson is, don't screw up your text. Edit. Don't hit "publish" at 2:40 AM (which I did in this case). Because you may have casually said something stupid. You can correct it in the morning if the posting doesn't get more than the usual attention. But if it hits the limelight, and there's a factually stupid statement as well as a bit of inadvertent Morano bait, you don't get to edit it.

The most daunting part of all of this is that writing for the web as a hobby has consequences. You think you're chatting but actually you're doing politics. You can't just say what you think, because somebody may think ill of something else you say. You never know what chain of decisions may hinge on it. Politics is the sort of thing that turns people into politicians.

Sorry, y'all. Like most of us, I'm imperfect.

(Therefore, Not the IPCC, right? :- )

Update: Calling this article a sort-of-apology, Morano sort-of-graciously links here.

Here's my actual apology, on Kim Simac's blog, an apology which she entirely graciously accepted; don't miss that.

For a tea party lady, Kim Simac is a real charmer. Understand I'm not a supporter by any means, but this isn't the time for me to criticize. In truth, some corner of me finds her all-in-it-together team spirit endearing. I'll definitely take her over Mrs. Palin! Mrs. Simac actually seems to be the genuine article, an honest, down-to-earth goodhearted populist patriot.

The Consensus

A good time, perhaps, to remind everyone of the fact that essentially every significant scientific body on earth has agreed to the IPCC Working Group I position.

See here. And here. And the links therein.

In the end, it's the earth which decides, of course.

How to answer this one?

From Pajamas Media

Now, I am not a scientist. I am just a mother who raised 9 kids and trains horses for a living. Nothing scientific about that, but it seems to me everything should always be open for discussion. The idea that a subject like man-made climate change is a done deal just doesn’t make sense to me, yet reply after reply let me know in very certain words that there is nothing to talk about.

In addition, the shared attitude of arrogance towards me or anybody who would even consider such “propaganda” as an alternative view was surprising. Humorous at first, but then a bit hurtful. My intelligence, my character, and, just a few days ago, my faith were attacked by men, all much smarter then me, who for some reason felt they needed to smear me and our simple, small-town event.

Outrageous to me was one scientist who claimed our high school students would not be able to understand the information and especially when the opposing side was paid off and presenting lies.

All the replies seem peculiar to me. If my career had been based on investigating something and I was so certain of my data, why would I not want to defend it? Suspicious, to say the least. It’s like pleading the fifth; it usually means you are hiding or protecting something.

I wonder what these scientists are hiding.

Well, let's leave aside the business of what the 9 kids tells us about you, and how much time you've had to think about complicated grownup stuff. I'm not sure you want to go there, really. (NOTE: I seem to be in violation here of some social rule I didn't fully understand. Apparently grumbling about large families is tantamount to sacrilege in some quarters. It is this aside that has called so much attention to the present article. That wouldn't be so bad if people actually were willing to consider the actual point I was trying to make.)

And as for "If my career had been based on investigating something and I was so certain of my data, why would I not want to defend it?", this is obviously trickery. Science is not data. We are not collecting fingerprints. We are describing what is actually happening. The data are of course a consistency check, but this isn't a question of data at all. This, however was an out-and-out blunder. "Science is not data". OK. I stand by that. Data is part of science, but science is more than data. "It's not a question of data at all" is wrong and silly, though.

But neither the saccharine mom-n-apple-pie stunt nor this sleight of hand about science are the most interesting debating tricks used here.

The most alarming of all is here:

The idea that a subject like man-made climate change is a done deal just doesn’t make sense to me...

Outrageous to me was one scientist who claimed our high school students would not be able to understand the information and especially when the opposing side was paid off and presenting lies.

The question of whether scientists are hiding anything depends crucially on whether "man-made climate change is a done deal" and indeed whether "high school students would not be able to understand the information and especially when the opposing side was paid off and presenting lies". .

It is not clear how the writer would recommend addressing these matters if both of these facts are in fact true. Instead, the very idea that they could be true is greeted with mockery. There is not even an attempt at a pretense of an intellectual approach. There is just a rapid slam of the Overton window.

It's a very remarkable debating approach: you cannot hold these positions, which greatly weaken my case, because I will mock them as unreasonable, without any explanation as to why they should be unreasonable.

The peculiar fact that baseless acccusations are frequently self-referential appears here. They accuse us of evasiveness and defensiveness, yet they simply adopt a posture of refusing to consider on which side the dishonesty originates. This is just a distracting way to duck the serious questions: 1) are there professionals lying about climate science? (well, in fact this is exactly what they themselves claim, so I wonder how it can be so outlandish. We are just asking which side the liars are on!) 2) can high school students really get a clear picture of science when there are professional careers for people to lie about it?

Just who is being evasive and defensive here?

It's also an explicit know-nothing revival. A modern society cannot continue to exist for very long when people take this attitude of contempt toward expertise. No average person doubts that Colt McCoy is a better athlete than they are. Why do people refuse to acknowledge that there are smarter people than themselves? It is not just arrogance and ignorance. It's dangerous.

We are proud of our athletes in America. We used to be proud of our scientists too.

Update: Welcome, Climate Depot readers! It's been awhile! Pull up a chair, set a spell!

Here's something you might want to look at. Ask your buddy Marc Morano what, exactly, the US military's position is on climate change. There's news on that front, you know. You didn't know? Oh, a minor oversight, I'm sure. The climate change portal will be covering it in depth very soon I am sure.

Update: A couple of very useful and relevant links from the comments, from Steve Dutch and Julian Sanchez, with thanks respectively to King of the Road and Scruffy Dan.

Update: Modest backpedalling here.

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Pictured: Texas Quarterback Colt McCoy (AP), who throws a ball better than you ever will, and Texas A&M Chemistry Nobelist Dudley Heschbach, via TAMU, who is smarter than you'll ever be.

More Fullerenes

I just had a wonderful afternoon with Steve Easterbrook and his students, and am very pleased to see that this was on the same day that his excellent essay (with the concluding paragraph quoted as the quote of the weekoid at the top of the blog) appeared on Climate Progress.

Meanwhile, I find I have stepped into the tar at Tom Fuller's, and I find that a couple of bits of tar are sticking to me. Steve's points in his article are very much relevant to those issues.

First, there is the question of journalistic responsibility. Tom is, I believe, a dyed in the wool liberal, as am I myself, so some may find it peculiar how much we are at odds.

Tom's liberalism is essentially classical journalist-liberalism. That is, it accepts the contemporary Overton window and is most comfortable with positions directly in the center of that window, while being somewhat oblivious to the organized efforts to shift the window, (in practice, these days, mostly by the Murdoch press). In choosing climate science as his beat, Tom tries to wend a path between dismissing climate science entirely on the one hand, and treating it as hopelessly corrupt and empty on the other, by presuming that it is more or less half corrupt and perhaps half of it is worthless. With friends like this...

My form of liberalism is formed by Pierre Trudeau and is in line with Obama's. It is fundamentally non-ideological and pragmatic, but it favors vigorous action in line with the best available evidence. Climate science is my beat too. And here I see the efforts of Fuller and his crowd as profoundly anti-liberal, in essentially driving their opinion of science by an ideological shortcut.

It makes sense, of course, to pick a neutral position, halfway in between the extremes you have heard, on a topic on which you know little or nothing. But you should write very little about such a topic, and what you write should begin "Here is what confuses me about X". Or "I can't decide whether to trust the X camp or the not-X camp; do you think there might be a middle ground or does that make no sense at all?"

But you cannot responsibly build a career or a substantial fraction of one writing about X until you learn about it. In a recent article of Fuller's that showed up in one of my feeds, he woefully confused carbon concentration and carbon emissions. I called him on it, stating that this was the class of error that did not indicate a reporter who takes his responsibilities seriously. That is, I claim that while most non-specialists do make this mistake, a specialist should know better. Indeed correcting this common confusion should be a very important part of journalistic work in this area.

In response there has been some modest backtracking from Tom Fuller, and some sputtering of outrage from his followers.

Fuller came up with a secondary defense, asking me to critique Nicholas Stern's projection of a global population of 15 billion by 2100 as ardently as I criticize his confusion of emissions and concentrations.

This is the Sister Souljah strategy (as I recently learned from Eli). It cuts both ways. When somebody "on your side" says something "my side" finds stupid, you are challenged to either agree or disagree.

Now I find it absolutely ludicrous that I am perceived to be "on the same side" as the Stern report. I have absolutely no confidence in the methods of that report and have never said otherwise. A slight exaggeration of demographics is the least of its problems as far as I am concerned.

But there's another question.

I do conclude based on the evidence as I understand it, that it is past time that we get in gear and actually start moving off carbon. That said, many times, I disagree on various specifics (nuclear power, cap and trade, political strategy) with other people who think the same.

There is a good question as to whether I am obligated to respond to it. I think I am no more required to address it than McIntyre is to defend everything Motl or Monckton blurts out.

When I look at the prominent naysayer sites (CA, McIntyre, even Watts) they are not entirely without merit or reason, though their focus is sadly and irredeemably wrong. But they are tolerant of the most absurd lunacy. They err on the side of silence. This is probably good for building traffic.

Yet their folk will come over here and constantly play the Sister Souljah game. One AMac is obsessed with getting people to admit that Michael Mann is in a league with Bernie Madoff as a con artist. He bases this on some technical disagreement about a particular tree ring record that seems highly unlikely to shake the foundations of science. And he comes by, feigning interest, trying to get me to "denounce" Mann, about whom I know essentially nothing, either regarding himself as an individual or about his work. It turns out that AMac is expert at dragging out conversations about tree rings to exhaustion, never yielding any ground. I decided not to get into it and carefully stated agnosticism on the point. Interestingly, not another peep from AMac has appeared here. It's almost as if he is the designated Mann-tarnisher.

So we see that they are playing a different game. In the search for truth, we scientists are happy to debate any assertion we don't find plausible. So debatable points are constantly dangled.

What the McIntyre squad is proposing is ultimately far more radical than they think. They suggest we change the nature of scientific debate. I'm very sympathetic to a radical opening and democratization of science, myself. One problem is that they fail to see how extreme the proposed changes in scientific practice would be, but that's another topic. The immediate problem is that science and politics are so entangled, so that any genuine scientific controversy will get spun into a "darwinism disproved" sort of foolishness by the extremist press.

We should take a tip from the bad guys here. If someone claims to agree with us, we are under no obligation to state whether or not we agree with them. We should focus on the things we find interesting or relevant. Our job in explaining things to the public is to focus on the aspects that are most revealing of the facts, not on the aspects that can most easily be used to obfuscate.

I think a big part of the solution is to move away from yes/no questions and toward quantitative questions in public discourse. If we stick as much as possible to questions where there is a genuine middle, (what is the tolerable maximum CO2 concentration? what is the tolerable asymptotic net emissions rate?) we get back to a civilized tug of war and away from, well, actual war.

Journalists should be helping science convey these quantitative ideas to the public. The public is capable of understanding them to the same extent they understand their favorite sports league, and at present, they don't.

I myself know very little about sports. I am, consequently, not trying to set myself up as a sports reporter. Someone who knows very little about climate science should not be setting himself up as a climate science reporter.

If this is too much to ask, then scientists need to act as reporters.

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Image: Wikipedia. Apologies to the memory of old Bucky.

Find Me Another Planet

This one is so very very hosed.