Bunny Escapes Reader Feed

No matter how much I'd like to, I can't put any of Dr. Rabett's stuff in my reader feed.

The Google reader view invariably shows "title unknown", which is irritating enough. And poor Blogspot ends up with ugly-as-sin URLs. But those are minor irritations. The problem is with the Shared Items widget, that simply treats the title as "", which I suppose it duly underlines. This does not give my readers anything upon which to click, and hence does not drive any traffic bunnyward. And it reduces my quasi-daily recommendations to four from the usual five. Rather pointless you'll admit.

Still, the good doctor has been generous with links hither in the past, and so I take the occasion to point you to his particularly nice submission du jour, entitled (as usual) "", with the peculiar URL http://rabett.blogspot.com/2009/12/darth-data-destroyer-as-all-good.html:

As all good auditors know destroying data is a sin. They should go tell it to Harold Lewis, one of the Princeton Denial Club and Retirement Party. ...

Dr. Aaserud: Your papers — correspondence, notes, manuscripts, things of that sort — what's the status of those? That's another thing we're interested in.

Dr. Lewis: Yes. I really don't have them, you know. I've long since either lost in moving or discarded everything that I had. So I have no papers around from JASON, if that's what you mean.

Aaserud: No, generally — both JASON and generally speaking.

Lewis: There are lots of things, but they're scattered in a complicated way. Generally speaking, I throw things away after a few years, so the only things I have are the things that have accumulated over the last few years and are relevant to the things I'm actually doing these days.

Aaserud: That's another thing that the Center is strongly involved in — just saving papers for historical purposes.

Lewis: Yes, I understand. But I have enough trouble keeping up with current papers.

Aaserud: But if for any reason you wanted help or advice on what to keep and how to keep it and where to go and all that, then we'd be happpy to help on that. But for JASON in particular, you don't have anything.

Lewis: No, I don't.

There is shredding going on in Santa Barbara. Data has been destroyed. Where are the auditors when you need them?

Much more worth of note at the link.

PS: Dr R., if you want people to recommend your work, it might be a good idea to use the actual "TITLE" affordance that the blogger interface so thoughtfully provides, rather than simply bolding your title as part of the main text. A hassle I'm sure, but nowhere near as onerous as fastlane or a typical journal submission. I am sure you can handle it.

Thanks in advance.

Warning: Politicization of Politics

I missed the boat for the first round of Someone-Claiming-to-be-Sarah-Palin vs COP15; so much for an easy traffic spike. Still, I was amused by how this random person titled the putative-Palin's article.

Apparently Vathek thinks Mrs. Palin is complaining that the COP process has been politicized!

Sorta like complainin' that your water's all damp and soggy, ain't it?

Update: My mistake. Palin actually said it! Her op-ed concludes:

Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference. The president should boycott Copenhagen.

So Mrs. Palin is complaining that the COP process has been politicized!

The Missing Musser

I referred once to an interesting article in Scientific American by George Musser on the question of consensus. As if they knew nothing about the web, Scientific American has broken the link, and I can't find the article.

As evidence that it was interesting, here is what Greg Laden had to say about it.

Can anyone find this article in print or online? If you have it in print, what issue? I've made several attempts to contact Scientific American about this to no avail.

Update: OK, here it is, thanks to "ishtar". Text probably belongs either to George Musser or to Scientific American but in any case not to me. Please don't sue me. I'll take it down if you ask, but I'd much rather if this excellent piece didn't disappear altogether.

Please Stop Talking About the Global Warming Consensus
George Musser
(c) 2007 Scientific American

Last year, I started a thread on this blog to discuss doubts about global warming and humanity's role in it. I tried to catalog the misgivings in as evenhanded as way as possible and conducted a simple poll to see which broad category of doubts people found most persuasive. The top two results were:

• II. The present warming could be a natural uptick.


• VII. People who argue that human activity causes global warming cannot be trusted.

I offered a partial reply to the first of these last year. To summarize: different influences on the climate produce distinct patterns -- for example, of spatial variation in temperature -- and the observed patterns match what greenhouse gases should produce. They do not match what intrinsic climate variability or other natural causes would bring about.

But the climate debate that my colleague Dave Biello and I went to last night reminded me that the second of these concerns is still very much alive. Most of the arguments raised by the debaters and by audience members seemed to stem from the feeling that climate scientists and activists are haughty, sanctimonious, and hypocritical.

Like the climate itself, this is a very complex issue, having to do with attitudes toward intellectuals in our society and the way scientific findings can enter a meatgrinder of politics and ideology. Let me bite off just one piece: what I see as overuse of the term "scientific consensus."

When scientists use this term, they mean it to say that certain scientific questions have been settled to most people's satisfaction and that it's time to move on to other questions. But when non-scientists see this term, it sounds like a case of groupthink.

There's no doubt that the term is useful. A consensus view in any field of science represents humanity's best guess as to what's going on. The guess might well be wrong, but what else is there to go on? It's not as though there are answers in the back of the book to look at. People often say that science isn't a democracy; scientific questions aren't decided by majority rule. Well, then, what are they decided by? Experiments and observations, surely. But who runs the experiments and makes the observations? Who interprets the outcome? Who double-checks them? It is a social process.

If as a scientist I disagree with the consensus, I have to be very sure of myself to put my own judgment up against the collective wisdom. And if there's one thing scientists learn very early in their careers, it is that such supreme self-confidence is usually misplaced. Nearly all scientists have painful memories of being pounced on in an oral exam for giving a sketchy answer, or presenting a paper before hundreds of people that turned out to be dead wrong. Most experts in a field realize that the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. They learn to doubt their own judgment. If I get one answer and everyone else gets a different one, my first inclination should be that I'm wrong, not that everyone else is.

Sometimes, the individual is right and the community is wrong. It happens in times of scientific revolution, which by definition involve the overturning of a consensus view. But such revolutions are rare. We remember Einstein because he was unusual. Climate science shows no signs of being in a revolutionary phase. Evidence for anthropogenic warming is getting stronger with time. Discrepancies are diminishing rather than increasing. Technically, scientists are correct to assert that their field has reached consensus.

So the invocations of consensus are seen, by scientists, as expressions of humility. Yet the general public sees them as expressions of arrogance. To the man in the street, all the talk about scientific consensus sounds like: "Trust us, folks. Don't worry your pretty little heads about it. Just think what we tell you to think."

That rubs Americans, in particular, the wrong way. America wouldn't be America without its suspicion of establishments of every kind. Hollywood valorizes the lone outsider fighting the powers than be. I think this romantic view is a healthy part of our country's culture -- it's a safeguard against tyranny and an incentive for individuals to get involved in public life. But scientists can find themselves on the wrong side of the stick. They may see themselves as lone outsiders, but much of the rest of the country sees them as part of the machine. The British, for their part, really get off on puncturing pretentiousness -- god help you if you walk into a pub and act full of yourself, as many climate scientists do.

The term "scientific consensus" is counterproductive in other ways, too. It sounds like asking people to take things on faith, which is contrary to the whole point of science. It also lets skeptical scientists claim they are being muzzled. They can argue that they are estranged from mainstream science for what they say, when in fact the problem is how they say it -- their incomplete arguments or their unwillingness to apply the same skepticism to their own results that they apply to others'. Talking about consensus shifts the responsibility for their estrangement from them to the faceless wall of the powers that be.

So while I think there's a role for mentioning scientific consensus, it should be used very sparingly. Telling people that there is a consensus cannot substitute for explaining why there is a consensus. As much as climate scientists may be wearying of debate, they need to press onward and treat each question as though it was the first time they had ever heard it.

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A Dark Fantasy

OK, I admit, I'm doing a lot of cutting and pasting here of late; my writing time is elsewhere.

But I really think this one needs to be shared. By Ray Pierrehumbert, from Science Fiction Atmospheres[PDF], Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 86, 696-698:

Despite these examples, and a few others, ”Atmospheric Science Fiction”
remains largely unexploited territory, at least in comparison to astrophysics,
and (recently) nano- and bio- tech. ... how about this one, verging on the world
of fantasy: A cult of philosophers discovers a subtle knife which can open
windows into the deep interior of the planet, bringing to the surface potent
black fluids or solids whose energy transforms society and makes everybody
more powerful than they could ever have dreamed of previously. But just
when everybody is most hooked by the Dark Power, a lonely savant discovers
that its use releases a substance that threatens to tear asunder the very fab-
ric of the planet’s habitable climate. At first, like Dr. Thomas Stockmann
in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People he is scorned and shunned, but eventually
(unlike the case of poor Stockmann) the greatest savants and wizards of the
world come to realize that he is right. Despite this, the faction favoring
the Dark Power has the upper hand. The emperor of the most powerful
kingdom on the planet dismisses the threat of Dark Power, and even wishes
to use the subtle knife to expose more, in hitherto sacred areas of the Far
North. In the innermost council chambers, the closest counselors to the em-
peror wave about propagandistic fictionalized accounts casting doubt on the
threat of Dark Power, unable or unwilling to distinguish fabrication from
reality. Meanwhile, inexorably, the world keeps getting warmer. No, that
plot line is too improbable – and too scary. Better not go there.

SwiftHack Pushback Site

Just got this in the mail:

I wanted to make sure you saw Swifthack.com, which I launched this morning.

SwiftHack.com offers dozens of links daily to reality-based news and analysis related to the ClimateGate story. The site will serve as an informal clearinghouse for pushback against the rapidly developing SwiftHack smear campaign against climate science.

Scientists, advocates, activists, bloggers and journalists have begun the important work of educating their audiences on the true story of ClimateGate -- the latest iteration of a decades-long smear campaign against climate science).

SwiftHack.com intends to be a repository of such efforts. With talks now underway in Copenhagen, correcting the false narratives being pushed by an army of oil-funded deniers is especially critical.

I need your help to make this site successful. First and foremost, email ideas, tips, blog posts and news headlines to swifthack at gmail d0t c0m. Second, please help spread the word about the site however you can.

Thanks for all that you do.

Josh Nelson
EnviroKnow.com

Update: Most of the links were removed above because the paste bollixed them up. (Thanks Oliver!) The remaining ones are tested. I kept the Jeff Masters "ClimateGate" one because it's one you shouldn't miss if you are still focused on these events.

Tempest, Meet Teapot

Tempest:

Richard North's idea is to take the ratio of Google web hits to Google News hits; he gets 22.5 million web hits vs. 46,025 news hits for Tiger Woods (a ratio of 489), and compares some other topics (some of them a bit UK-centric):

1. Climategate: 28,400,000 – 2,930 = 9693
2. Afghanistan: 143,000,000 – 154,145 = 928
3. Obama: 202,000,000 – 252,583 = 800
4. Tiger Woods: 22,500,000 – 46,025 = 489
5. Gordon Brown: 12,300,000 – 37,021 = 332
6. Climate change: 22,200,000 – 68,419 = 324
7. Sally Bercow: 25,000 – 86 = 290
8. David Cameron: 545,000 – 4837 = 113
9. Meredith Kercher: 261,000 – 3,471 = 75
10. Chilcot Inquiry: 125,000 – 4,350 = 29

Teapot:

Via Mark Liberman, who elucidates here.

The statistic indicates a lot of interest in the subject from writers of web content, not from readers. So what is really crucially revealed about the politics of the situation is not how shocked the public is at this little bit of insider talk, but how much effort is going into encouraging the public to be shocked.

Why is this? How does such a concerted attack emerge?

In any case, it seems the best thing to do is to move on and leave it echoing long into the night in the echo chamber. We'll never be entirely free of this media event, but it's not an unreasonable response to just leave it alone. It really isn't capturing the popular imagination at all, and it doesn't deserve to either.

Is Copenhagen Irrelevant?

Is the Copenhagen COP meeting irrelevant? Australian climate professor Barry Brook thinks so.

He concludes:

So, this is the pragmatic reality check: the Copenhagen UN Climate Change Conference is worthless, and we just shouldn’t care. It could never be any other way.

The hard fact is that there’ll be no gain until we’ve felt the pain, until we really know that we have our collective ’skin in the game’. For all our intellect and wisdom, we’re still evolved, instinctive animals, and we respond best to obvious, in-our-face threats. It seems we need a new Pearl Harbor, our next Thermopylae. I seriously doubt there’ll ever be a global price on carbon (or a meaningful one in any individual country) — by the time we truly understand why this was (in hindsight) necessary, it’ll be a useless gesture, because there’ll be the imperative for much more drastic action than any ‘economic instrument’ could possibly deliver.

Yet, mine is patently not a ‘doomer’ vision. ... I don’t accept the argument that a peaking oil supply will cause our society to collapse. Yes, it will help force our hand, but it ain’t gonna be our undoing — we’re way too resilient and ingenious for that — at least when the pressure is on. If society realises that it has to build 10,000 nuclear power plants in a period of 20 years, then it’ll do it (as others have pointed out, things happened incredibly fast in the early years of nuclear power — the first 15 years saw a staggering rate of technical development). We’ll find the way to make it happen — of that I have little doubt. ...

In the meantime, it’s up to people like you and me to work hard to try to concertina the length of time between the current fallow age of procrastination, and the coming age of action.

Follow the link to find out why.

Andrew Sullivan on SwiftHack

Not really a climate blogger though he sometimes plays up Jim Manzi's stuff, and a sort of conservative-in-spirit (though gay) anti-Republican, Andrew Sullivan is one of my main sources of information. He was brilliant on the Iran pseudo-election and is consistently on the mark about what drives the US Republicans. (I am also sympathetic to his views on religion, seeking a territory between militant atheism and superstition that preserves the value in religion in a non-medieval way. YMMV.)

He thinks the EAU emails reveal a potential unconscious bias problem and makes a fairly good case for it.

Although the point

(2) The programmer applied arbitrary adjustments to the data (he says so himself) to get the desired results.

is based on a misunderstanding, the larger argument is worth considering.

I'm pretty convinced the Charney sensitivity is between 2.5 C and 3 C per doubling or close to that, largely because I'm convinced that Annan and Hargreaves aren't really easy to sway by the weight of public opinion. I'm totally convinced that there is an AGW fingerprint that is totally clear in the stratospheric cooling [corrected, h/t TB]. I don't see how it's possible that we have the big picture as badly wrong as Lindzen suggests.

On the other hand, I'm not at all convinced that the tree rings are worth a good goddamn [Update: for establishing a global mean surface temperature record, I mean; it's certainly useful information for local information], whether Mike Mann is a nice guy or not.

As for the pre-satellite instrumental record, I'm sure Phil Jones is also a very nice fellow, but again that doesn't validate the record. I don't think that the four reconstructions are really independent, so that really doesn't help all that much.

Experimenter bias is a very big deal in medical science for a reason. Climate science doesn't seem to have much room for this question in its culture, and that is a real problem. I don't think the confrontational attitude of McIntyre & co actually helps.

Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist, pointed out that paleo evidence, physical reasoning, stratospheric trends and the like don't mean much to people.

The whole business is called "global warming" and we are sort of stuck with that. People think "the theory" is about the global mean surface temperature trend. And every blip and every question about every blip calls "the theory" into question in the minds of the public. It will snow tonight in Austin. How many "global warming" jokes do you think there will be in central Texas tomorrow?

No need here to summarize all the extrinsic reasons that people don't want to believe "the theory".

COP15 was already derailed. Blaming it on Phil Jones is a profound injustice, and even blaming the hacker is scapegoating, but something like that will be convenient for both sides. On the other hand, that doesn't mean the temperature record is right.

Update: I am hearing rumors that Obama will manage to pull something off at COP15 after all. That would be interesting. So maybe it's best if we avoid casting blame too early.

Update: In a very complimentary link to this article, (Thanks!) Keith Kloor suggests that

Many of the people he admires are shrugging off “climategate” (yes, I don’t like the term either) as “a tempest in a teapot” or an “artificial” scandal. Not Tobis. He recognizes it’s much more than that, and to his credit, he’s trying to figure out how to engage it.

Unfortunately, since I hate to turn down compliments, this is not exactly what I am saying.

From the point of view of science I actually believe that it is a tempest in a teapot and an artificial scandal.

There is much to be learned from the instrumental and proxy records of the past.

Still the exact bumps and wiggles of global mean temperature aren't necessarily where we should be looking, and for all I know (and I don't claim to be an expert) might in fact be more or less indeterminate in principle.

Politically, though, it's obviously a big deal.

I should make this clear. I think the main thing that has happened, the most important aspect of the EAU email release, is that a criminal act has been perpetrated and is having a desired effect on a political process. This is a very unfortunate and destabilizing outcome, and people ought to think twice about celebrating it.

Snow in Austin

We're expecting a light snow tonight, perhaps a couple of inches up in the hills. This is not without precedent. The pattern of past snow events is peculiar and hard to characterize.

Update: Indeed we got some heavy snowfall, but it only lasted about two minutes.

However, measurable snow fell in Houston, and sure enough the denial sites are running with it.

--
Image: Austin Statesman

Best Comment on the UEA Emails

From Balloon-Juice:

One the one hand one can hardly deny that East Anglia shot itself in the groin when the story bubbled for so long without their input. But really, what did you expect would happen? We pay scientists to do science. Especially given the effort that it takes to talk intelligently about climate science*, we don’t pay them very much. I have worked on grants from NOAA, the agency that also funds climate research. The idea of our lab or our department retaining a worthwhile PR firm would certainly amuse the staff who scrambled every year to find money for cookies and coffee at our weekly seminars. The money for scientists to do anything that isn’t science just isn’t there. If you want professional PR to defend science then you have to fund it with something other than the grants that fund the science itself. Forcing researchers with a day job to act as the front line against Exxon’s army of professional denial firms, in the media, is ridiculous and sad. It’s like asking Sidney Crosby to defend Pittsburgh by way of competitive corndog eating.

A bit irritating, in that the above-quoted paragraph summarizes the main point of this blog better than this blog has ever managed. Still, credit where it's due. Balloon-juice describes the whole predicament perfectly.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think scientists should even do much PR in the usual sense.

I do think we need to make our case, diligently and calmly. Let the attention-deficient press scurry hither and yon over this or that collision between a golfer and a fire hydrant or whatever captures the popular imagination or is force fed to it in any given week. Meanwhile, though, we need mechanisms to actually explain to people what is going on. Nobody, not the press nor the institutions of science as they are currently constructed nor any independent organizations have anything remotely suitable to the task of getting the message across.