The Skeptics Case

The main point of the skeptics and all you need to know about the climate debate:
The Skeptics Case

Sun Tzu’s principles for an unfair scientific fight

Judith Curry:

• Outsmart your opponent so that battles aren’t necessary
• Pick your battles carefully.
• In the course of your battle, don’t lose the moral high ground.
• Divide and conquer; don’t give your enemy cause to rally together and combine forces
• Overconfidence can be fatal to your strategy
• If the campaign is prolonged, the resources will not be equal to the strain
• If you know your enemy, you can win battles without a single loss

George Carlin on your rights

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Gleick's Integrity

Judith Curry about Gleick's integrity:

Gleick on integrity:

• A brief lesson in the integrity of science
• Climate Change and the Integrity of Science, Again
• AGU’s new task force on scientific integrity and ethics begins
• Threats to the integrity of science: congressional testimony

I even referenced his testimony in my uncertainty monster paper.

My first interaction with Gleick was he invited me to speak in an AGU session that he was organizing on the integrity of science, my presentation can be found here.

He has made it known to me via email that he has been displeased with my “behavior.” I seem to have gotten his goat to have been mentioned in the fake Heartland strategy doc (hard to believe that he didn’t write this).

The irony of it all, this coming from a scientist that has made a particular point about integrity and written many essays and even testified to congress on the subject.

And Steve Mosher makes an interesting observation:

Oh: at first they said how dare you accuse Gleick.
Now, he is a hero?

Huh. Well, no need to worry about libelling Gleick or any other person.

A tip: Please do not visit Joe Romm’s blog and use the name Peter Gleick to confess to forging a document. because, fooling people by assuming a false identity will get you hero status.

err..

Is Peter Gleick the "Heartland Insider"?

Posted in full, emphasis mine, comments in square brackets mine:

The Origin of the Heartland Documents
by Peter H. Gleick
Posted: 02/20/2012 7:45 pm

Since the release in mid-February of a series of documents related to the internal strategy of the Heartland Institute to cast doubt on climate science, there has been extensive speculation about the origin of the documents and intense discussion about what they reveal. Given the need for reliance on facts in the public climate debate, I am issuing the following statement.

At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail [I assume that "anonymous document" was the two page forgery] describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute's climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute's apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document [the two page forgery?] but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.

Given the potential impact however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else's name. [So after he got the forgery, he stole swindled the other Heartland document?]  The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication [the forgery?].

I will not comment on the substance or implications of the materials [funny, the opening sentence ("… a series of documents related to the internal strategy of the Heartland Institute to cast doubt on climate science …") seems to be exactly that]; others have and are doing so. I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed. My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts -- often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated -- to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.

Peter Gleick

Some of these claims made by Peter Gleick don't seem to be based in reality, to put it mildly.

WattsUpWithThat is obviously having a ball.

The dog that didn't bark?

Being an expert at apologizing, Gleick indeed may have received a phony letter by some paranoid internet fan. Or he concocted it. These are the only two possibilities. Given that he was named parenthetically in the fake document and placed in an exalted status in that letter, I would guess he had a hand in the authoring.

It would have to be a crazy internet fan who had access to Heartland’s private documents, since some content seems copied and pasted.

Phil Plait, unconfirmed skeptic

A wonderful list of all these idiots nice people with their cognitive dissonance, not being able to recognize that they have been duped.

I’ve decided to put in the hard yakka and document how the climate doomsday blogosphere have responded since the Heartland Institute’s statement that at least one of the documents is a forgery.

The following are the various ‘updates’ and ‘disclosures’ that try to put the best spin to the notion that the narrative in the key ‘Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy’ document is correct even though the document itself is fake.

I’ve used the list in Judith Curry’s “Heartland” post which helpfully provides a collection of views on this ‘ShrillGate’ investigation. [The comments within square brackets are (mostly) mine]

I will post only gem from this list (there are more), because it is just so beautiful:

16-Phil Plait, Breaking news: A look behind the curtain of the Heartland Institute’s climate change spin, Bad Astronomy
“[UPDATE: Heartland has confirmed that some of the documents are real, but claims the strategy document, which I quote below about teaching strategy, is faked. This claim has not yet been confirmed or refuted. DeSmogBlog has more info.]”
[Phil Plait denies that he is a member of the crazy climate doomsday cult. As of this moment, his claims that he is a skeptic has not yet been confirmed nor refuted]

There are exceptions in that list (like Christian Hunt), but they are few and far between.

Fakegate: "What would I write IF I WERE AS CRAZY AS AGW SKEPTICS?"

To start with, why does the document feel a need to provide a bio for Wojick--who works closely enough with Heartland to have a bio on their website--but not for all the climate scientists and writers that it cites in this section?

Then there's the tone. I have never heard a warming skeptic refer to themselves as "anti-climate", or to their opponents as "communicators". And believe me, I get chewed out by climate skeptics with great regularity.

And in a way I find it hard to put my finger on, the worldview just feels . . . off. There are a bunch of little things--this is the only document in which the word "warmist" appears, for example. But it's much more than that. It's too nice to opponents ("high profile", "communicator"). And it views climate skeptics as far more powerful than they (in my experience) actually feel, and opponents as combating their messages, rather than the other way around. It seems to fundamentally misunderstand the paranoia of a movement that sees itself as under siege.

The commenters who attack me on my global warming views do not see us as equals doing battle on the plains of Mordor. They think of me as having been captured by a dubious consensus that is manufactured and maintained by social pressure, the general human tendency to alarmism about complex threats, and the self-interest of a few scientists--and in truth, they can point to some instances, like the longstanding belief that humans had 48 chromosomes, which were maintained against all evidence by a very powerful social dynamic. Obviously, I disagree with their analysis, but I do understand their reasoning process--and that they have a reasoning process. I don't feel like the writer of this memo understands either. It's more like they sat down at the computer and said, "What would I write IF I WERE AS CRAZY AS AGW SKEPTICS?"

Funny, "having been captured by a dubious consensus that is manufactured and maintained by social pressure, the general human tendency to alarmism about complex threats, and the self-interest of a few scientists" is exactly what I think about large parts of the sciences, the media and ultimately the public when it comes to climate change – and I am reasonably suspicious of conspiracy bullshit theories and think I am not crazy (alas, I probably could not provide evidence for that).

Need I point out that this seems almost expressly designed as a counterweight to the ClimateGate emails which talked about keeping opposition voices out of journals and the IPCC report? Except ludicrous--even if it were true, can anyone imagine a climate skeptic saying to themselves, "Well, they've got the IPCC and the peer-reviewed jouranls, but thank God, we've got Forbes!"

That is exactly the "social pressure" the ClimateGate emails make clear.

The bottom line is that while the Times thought that "its tone and content closely matched that of other documents that the group did not dispute", to me, they aren't a close match at all. Rather, they read like, well, like someone without the imagination--or motivation--to pass an Ideological Turing Test wrote up a neat little executive summary for their ideological fellows.

Yepp, those who manufactured this "Climate Strategy" document wouldn't pass as climate skeptics. Which shows that the people talking about Heartland "Deniergate" clearly are not able to look into the criticism the "deniers" have (I'm looking at you Phil Plait).

High-Profile Fakegate

For me, this leaves the most fascinating question of all: who wrote it? We have a few clues:

1. They are on the west coast
2. They own or have access to an Epson scanner--though God knows, this could be at a Kinkos.
3. They probably themselves have a somewhat run-on writing style
4. I'm guessing they use the word "high-profile" a fair amount.
5. They are bizarrely obsessed with global warming coverage at Forbes, which suggests to me that there is a good chance that they write or comment on the website, or that they have tangled with writers at Forbes (probably Taylor) either in public or private.
6. The last paragraph is the biggest departure from the source documents, and is therefore likely to be closest to the author's own style.
7. I have a strong suspicion that they refrained from commenting on the document dump. That's what I'd do, anyway. A commenter or email correspondent who suddenly disappeared when they normally would have been reveling in this sort of story is a good candidate.
8. They seem to have it in for Andy Revkin at the New York Times. There's nothing in the other documents to indicate that Heartland thinks Revkin is amenable to being . . . turned? I'm not sure what the right word is, but the implication in the strategy memo that Heartland believes it could somehow develop a relationship with Revkin seems aimed at discrediting Revkin's work.

Unfortunately, I'd imagine that this is still a sizeable set of people, and it will be hard to identify the author. I suspect that it will be easier to do if the climate-bloggers--who may well know this person as a commenter or correspondent--get involved in trying to find out who muddied the story by perpetrating a fraud on their sites.

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Interestingly, Gleick, who would normally be preening and prancing in glee at this sort of attention to the Heartland Institute has so far been utterly silent at his Forbes blog and on his Twitter feed.

Heartland Fakegate

Unless there’s an explanation I’m missing, that seems to clinch it–why would health care donations show up in their climate strategy report? Unless of course, it was written by someone who doesn’t know anything about facts of the donation, but does know that the Kochs make great copy.

Catastrophic Sea-Level Rise?

Actually, still no apocalypse:

Go see ALL charts at the article at WattsUpWithThat.

"Markets are efficient if and only if P = NP"

Markets are efficient if and only if P = NP
Philip Maymin, NYU-Polytechnic Institute

ABSTRACT
I prove that if markets are weak-form efficient, meaning current prices fully reflect all information available in past prices, then P = NP, meaning every computational problem whose solution can be verified in polynomial time can also be solved in polynomial time. I also prove the converse by showing how we can “program” the market to solve NP-complete problems. Since P probably does not equal NP, markets are probably not efficient. Specifically, markets become increasingly inefficient as the time series lengthens or becomes more frequent. An illustration by way of partitioning the excess returns to momentum strategies based on data availability confirms this prediction.

The Aborigines always know which way they face – and they do tell you so

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is what my collaborator Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out.

To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don't use words like "left" and "right"? What will they do?

The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.

If you live on a large empty-ish continent, that you need to always know which way you are facing.

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Dear Phil Plait: On libelous smear-campaigns

In July 2010, an anonymous whistleblower(s) began what Nature called a “libelous” “trial-by-internet”.[11] The informer(s) commenced emailing the investigators, other scientists, and politicians, alerting them to instances of fraud in Bulfone-Paus’ laboratory.[12] The anonymous instigator(s) went by several pseudonyms, including Marco Berns, David Hardman, and Fernando Pessoa.[12] Blogs with information regarding the case and the alleged misinformation were posted on a website, hosted in Panama, under the name of Martin Frost.[12] Many expressed their dismay that a colleague would be subjected to such a “smear-campaign”.[11][13] However, in an editorial in the Lab-Times, the writers express, “Ultimately, we have been left to question whether the ‘Bulfone-Paus stone’ would have actually started rolling without the ‘smear campaign’. To be honest, we doubt it."[12]

Just because you (and others) say something is a smear-campaign (or some such) against you (or Michael Mann) doesn't make it so. And not every critique of you is a "case study of the tactics of climate change denial" and certainly it is not you (or your ego) who is "the target", but your limited understanding of climate science – if you don't want to take a skeptical look at the state of affairs in climate science, then stick to astronomy.

And Phil, stop GoogleAlerting yourself, it isn't good for your inflated ego – you start thinking everything that isn't praise of you must therefore be a campaign at which you are the center of.

Due diligence needed for scientific reports for policy purposes

Email 1653

Again, thanks for your continuing courtesy in this. Replication and checking are fact of life in business (where most of my experience lies), especially when you are communicating with the public. There are very formal processes for this; auditors and securities lawyers, who are among the most highly paid professionals in our society, do little more than replicate and check. If you wish to offer securities to the public, you get used to dealing with questions from them. The corresponding processes in paleoclimate studies (and probably most academic pursuits) seem very casual to me. When studies get used for policy purposes, it seems to me that there is a material change in the level of due diligence is required. This leads to a conundrum: many scholars seem quite happy to have their studies quoted in big reports (like IPCC), but then fail to make arrangements for public archiving of their results and methods and become defensive if they are asked for their data. In the offering of securities, there is an interesting stage that deals with this - if a report by an indepenedent professional (e.g. a geologist) is used in a prospectus, the independent professional has to provide a consent letter authorizing the promoters of the prospectus to refer to his report and to supply the consent letter to the securities commission. The terms of the consent letter impose disclosure requriements on him. This would deal with the situation of someone like Crowley, whose study is quoted by IPCC, but who repeatedly and persistently refuses to disclose his proxy data versions. In a prospectus situation, if the IPCC wished to use Crowley's report, Crowley would have to agree to make his data pulic if asked (which he should probably do on alternative grounds).

Rosanne D'Arrigo killed the hockey stick

Email 2013

Know anything about the "divergence problem" in tree rings? R D'arrigo talked to the NRC yesterday. I didn't get to talk to her afterward, but it looked to me that they have redrilled a bunch of the high-latitude tree rings that underlie almost all of the high-res reconstructions, and the tree rings are simply missing the post-1970s warming, with reasonably high confidence. She didn't seem too worried, but she apparently has a paper just out in JGR. It looked to me like she had pretty well killed the hockey stick in public forum--they go out and look for the most-sensitive trees at the edge of the treeline, flying over lots and lots of trees that are lesss sensitive but quite nearby, and when things get a little warmer, the most-sensitive trees aren't anymore, and so the trees miss the extreme warming of the recent times, and can't reliably be counted as catching the extreme warmth of the MWP if there was extreme warmth then. Because as far as I can tell the hockey stick really was a tree-ring record, regardless of how it was labelled as multiproxy, this looks to me to be a really big deal. And, a big deal that may bite your chapter... --Richard

"More Evidence that Universal Health Care Would be Less Expensive"

We've written quite a bit about single payer health care systems as well as other models that are a mixture of public and private spending.

We've also analyzed some of the sources of excess cost of US healthcare to other countries. What is uniformly true about universal health care systems is that they all spend less on medical care per capita than the US. …

More Evidence that Universal Health Care Would be Less Expensive – denialism blog

Phil Plait, this is for you.

Phil Plait, enjoy this short piece on YouTube.

Models the prime cause of global warming – Sun may or may not be involved in climate change

from: Phil Jones
subject: FW: Your graph regarding global temperature anomaly
to: heino.schmid

The warming from 1915 to about 1940 is generally believed to be due to a slight increase in solar output and a reduction in volcanism. The recent warming from 1975 is due to the build-up of greenhouse gases, as they begin to dominate over sulphate aerosol releases. The slight cooling from 1940 to 1975 is thought to be due to industrial development (using lots of dirty coal) increasing aerosol emissions.

From: Phil Jones
To: Ian Strangeways
Sent: 01 December 2008 13:01
…

1. Were the changes of temperature before about 1940 due mostly to natural causes? You say in one of your notes on my chapter 9 that they might in part be anthropogenic, and that I should not be categorical. I assume that the answer is 'we don't know for sure'

Yes, if anthropogenic explains much of the trend since the 1970s, then it should also explain a small part of the changes before 1940.

2. Were these natural causes mostly or entirely changes in the SOI, the PDO and the other oscillations?

No the natural factors are the Sun and volcanoes. How these factors influence the SOI, PDO and other oscillations is a factor also. The SOI, PDO and others are natural modes of variability - that the atmosphere likes. Solar changes and volcanoes may push the atmosphere towards one of these modes. Anthropogenic forcing is likely to manifest itself as changes in atmospheric modes.

3 I assume that volcanoes affect just individual years (e.g. 1991).

Volcanoes probably affect the year after and the year after that. So for Pinatubo, you'd expect to see the effects in 1992 and 1993 (for a 1991 eruption).

4. I assume that post 1975 some of the changes are still due to the SOI and PDO (especially in view of the big jumps in their indexes at that time).

Possibly, but blaming the changes on an Oscillation doesn't help that much as we've no idea why the oscillation change. See the earlier argument in Q2.

4. [sic] Is proof of CO2 involvement post 1975 derived entirely from models or is there evidence in the actual instrumental data?

Mostly from models - a la Ch 9 of the IPCC Report.

Say what? The models are mostly the evidence?

At 14:43 01/12/2008, you wrote:
Phil

Thanks, that all looks fine.

But just one surprising thing:-

You say the sun (and volcanoes) cause the changes (of the temperature anomalies), possibly by affecting the oscillations. But I was under the impression that the sun was supposed to have no influence whatsoever (in the short term anyway). Now you are saying it is a major factor. In what way does the sun act to cause the changes. It's not through its variations in the solar constant because that is very stable. So how?

Hopefully this really is the last question

Ian

And here comes the answer:

date: Mon Dec 1 15:13:50 2008
from: Phil Jones

subject: RE: Fall of temperatures around 1945
to: "Ian Strangeways"

Ian,

The Earth's atmosphere system is chaotic. Volcanoes alter circulation oscillations by cooling the surface and warming the stratosphere. The Sun does similar things through variations in cloud around the world.

The Sun's output needn't change hardly at all.

The various oscillations are know to change and have done since they were discovered. This could be internal dynamics of the climate system, but it is also likely that the major forcing factors are involved as well.

If the Sun suddenly increased its output - say by 5%, we all wouldn't get warmer. The atmospheric circulation patterns would change to attempt to still move the heat from the equator to the poles. Most regions would get warmer but some cooler.

Cheers

Phil

Does Phil Jones postulate a strong negative climate feedback through clouds? Apart from the hole "the sun influences the climate, but then again it doesn't do much change" logical inconsistency?

Contrast with:

From: Caspar Ammann
To: Michael E. Mann

The more we are able to explain why the first half of the 20th century warmed up naturally,the more confidence we get on the detection of the anthropogenic signal afterwards.

And:

The industrial revolution (at the turn of the century - 1890-1910) is often taken to be the beginning of humans influencing global warming.

CR2032

If your friends and family ask you from time to time for service for their computers (or you have older PCs running yourself), then you should stock up on some CR2032 batteries. Next time you see a "BIOS checksum error" or some such, chances are the battery on the MF motherboard is dead you just need to replace it to get the computer running again. And you may need to reset the BIOS settings though and see if the default values are OK. And set date and time.

What Illegal Abortion Looks Like

Many are linking to this story around the blogosphere and I encourage everyone to read it. In it, a Ob/Gyn describes her emergency care of a woman who arrived in her ED in hemorrhagic shock from a botched illegal abortion. Though clearly it was touch and go and there was some panicky action, our heroine thought fast and saved a life. My mother once worked in a labor and delivery ward to put herself through medschool in the days before Roe v Wade and this type of situation was common.

This is a great story because it illustrates two points. One, the war on abortion by the right wing is futile. We know abortion is more common where it is illegal and cases like these are more common. Banning abortion does not save lives. It results in more abortions, and more lives lost. Worse, in countries with strict bans even treatment of ectopic pregnancy is forbidden where there is still a beating heart detected by ultrasound. Doctors in these countries can literally go to jail for saving a woman's life, all for the sake of a non-viable embryo that will kill the mother. The hypocrisy of calling this position pro-life is demonstrated by cold hard data. More women die. More fetuses are aborted.
…

What Illegal Abortion Looks Like

Whitney Houston is dead

I never was a fan of Whitney Houston, but this song somehow got close to me:

Whitney Houston - My Love Is Your Love

She truly had a beautiful voice. 48 years is way too early to go for anybody. She will be missed.

Whitney Houston - I Wanna Dance With Somebody

Who are the "good" guys in Syria exactly?

Robert Fisk: Could there be some bad guys among the rebels too?

John McCain backed the good guys in Libya, who are now keenly torturing their opponents to death.

The same John McCain now backs the good guys in Syria – no "boots on the ground", mind you, for this is war without death for America – and it all seems OK, until I sit opposite a guy over coffee in Beirut who kind of makes the whole story a bit more complicated. We back surrounded minorities, fighting bravely for their rights against overwhelming odds – Homs, for example. We did the same when the Kosovo Liberation Army – not exactly the squeaky-clean outfit that Nato would have us believe until Slobodan Milosevic surrendered – fought against overwhelming Serbian odds in 1998.

… Stories of the brutality and cruelty of Syrian officials are true. Let's repeat that: stories, reports, images, YouTube, real recordings of these cruelties, are all true. But then there's the shocked face of my friend, neither Syrian nor a journalist, drinking coffee with me, who agrees with much of the story. Snipers, yes. "Most of the shooting victims are hit in the head or chest. If you are hit by a sniper, you are in a serious way." There has been shelling – of homes and of at least one clinic – and there are graves in gardens. But then there are the other little comments, almost forgettable but still disturbing. The habit of "Free Syrian Army" soldiers of playing Islamic music before crossing roads under sniper fire and of praying before pressing their foot on the gas. Well, nothing wrong in that, for heaven's sake.

Then the large number of FSA men who appear to be Islamist rather than Islamic – this subtle difference is initially hard to spot, says my friend. And then the boasts of "armed activists" in Homs – there now seems to be a gentle difference between activists (armed) and protesters (unarmed) – who are executing their Alawite and Christian neighbours. …

Ronin and "Maximum Risk"

I have never seen "Maximum Risk" (and I probably never will), but seen a trailer I noticed some locations that Maximum Risk and Ronin share:

• Nice, Alpes-Maritimes, France
• Paris, France
• Villefranche-sur-Mer, Alpes-Maritimes, France

The spot used in Villefranche-sur-Mer is identical, albeit at total different scene – but Villefranche-sur-Mer is a small village. I wonder if the scenes in Nice or Paris did use the same spots.

The Girl With The Black Dress And Turquoise Bike

The girl with the black dress and turquoise bike:

If you go to Governors Island with Google Street View, you'll see a girl with a black dress and turquoise bike driving in front of the Street View camera.

Huh.

I tried to google some more information, but could not find anything more: So this is all I could figure out so far ....

If you want to check it out yourself:

View Larger Map

If you know anything, leave a comment!

[Update] Thanks to a comment, I found this with many more images – but no explanation though.

Franco is still dead…

Franco is still dead…
By Scott Horton

… but his spirit seems to have inspired a courtroom drama in Madrid the past few weeks. Baltasar Garzón—the crusading investigative judge who once sought the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, probed crimes against humanity in Central America, exposed massive corruption in public-works projects in Spain, and tried to open the lid on the mass killings of the Franco era—was himself placed in the dock, accused of misuse of his judicial powers. In the end little was left to chance in the rush to destroy him, an effort that brought into alignment the many powerful figures he had offended: the now-governing conservative Partido Popular, which was richly embarrassed by the corruption disclosures of the Garzón-led Gürtel investigation; the United States government, which was angered by his pursuit of a torture investigation focusing on Guantánamo and was openly working for his removal; the heirs of the Franco era, who were whipped into a state of hysteria about the prospect of an investigation into the mass murders of that era.

Even Spain’s leftists and liberals seemed uneasy with the quixotic and sometimes politically tin-eared jurist. Only a ragtag group of human-rights advocates and bar associations from around the Hispanic world stood with Garzón, remembering how he had stood with them against the atrocity crimes of dictatorships, which the polite and the powerful preferred simply to ignore. Now Garzón stands convicted of abuse of power, in comically politicized proceedings that he is not permitted to appeal.
…

The late John Daly on Treemometers

… The tree ring is a composite of all these variables, not merely of temperature. Therefore on the 15% of the planet covered by trees, their rings do not and cannot accurately record temperature in isolation from the other environmental variables. In my article on Greening Earth Society on the Hockey Stick, I point to other evidence which contradicts Mann's theory. The Idso's have produced more of that evidence, and a new article on Greening Earth has `unearthed' even more. Mann's theory simply does not stack up. But that was not the key issue. Anyone can put up a dud theory from time to time. What is at issue is the uncritical zeal with which the industry siezed on the theory before its scientific value had been properly tested. In one go, they tossed aside dozens of studies which confirmed the existence of the MWE and LIA as global events, and all on the basis of tree rings - a proxy which has all the deficiencies I have stated above. The worst thing I can say about any paper such as his is that it is `bad science'. Legal restraint prevents me going further. But in his case, only those restraints prevent me going *much* further.
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"Jones et al. have been cleared of all wrongdoing"

Cleared my arse.

Q85 Graham Stringer: I suppose we are haggling about the word “attempt”, aren’t we?
Sir Muir Russell: Yes.

Graham Stringer: That’s the real issue.

Sir Muir Russell: I don’t want to play with semantics because the real challenge that is in behind here is that the Russell Review—we will call it that—didn’t come to a conclusion on deliberate deletion of e-mails that had been requested. The reason we didn’t do that was something that I think I made clear to Mr Boswell when this came up in question 171 in March. I said I wasn’t going to put the review into the position of making the sort of quasi-judicial prosecutorial, investigative judgments that Mr Thomas—you will remember he spoke at the beginning of that session— had spoken about. That was an ICO’s job. That was the position that we took. So, had we been going to get into this, we would have had to start asking questions under caution. We would have been doing the sort of investigative stuff, because you’re getting to the point where you’re alleging that there might have been an offence, and that really wasn’t the thing that my inquiry was set up to do, especially when there is a parallel entity called ICO that has the investigative skills, the training and the background with its personnel.

So that, in short order, was why we didn’t go down the road of saying, “And did you delete things that had been requested?”, because we felt that that would take us into an area where we would have had to operate under caution, and it wasn’t actually relevant to where we had got to on the issue that all this is about, which is what was the end product of the influence that this process had on what was said in the IPCC report. We can talk about that at some length But what I said to Mr Williams about going after the big issues is really referable to the fact that we moved in that direction rather than chasing the words in the individual e-mails.

They didn't investigate because they were afraid of the possible answer, the most likely answer IMHO.

The ICO, by the way, wasn't interested in using their "investigative skills" as well.

Q86 Graham Stringer: I find it a bit surprising, that you didn’t ask directly when a lot of the controversy had been about the request to delete e-mails. You didn’t personally ask Professor Jones—it was the 29th, not the 27th; I apologise for that—directly whether he had deleted those emails?

Sir Muir Russell: That would have been saying, “Did you commit a crime?”, and we would have had to go into a completely different area of the relationship and formal role for the inquiry. Remember, what this chain of logic is all about is a process that is leading up to what did or didn’t get admitted as evidence in an IPCC chapter. That’s the issue that matters.

Q87 Graham Stringer: Well, I think it does matter.

Sir Muir Russell: It is not that it is immaterial. We had lots to say about FOI and Professor Acton can say quite a bit about what the university has done about that.

Yes, that is the question: Did they commit a crime? And being afraid of the answer, Muir didn't ask.

Climate Travesty

In September 2010, Fred Pearce wrote sarcastically in September 2010 that Muir Russell must have been the “only person studying the affair not to have known about it”:

One of the most serious charges to emerge from “climategate” was that CRU scientists did back-door deals to include unpublished research in the last IPCC report, published in 2007. This subverted the supposedly open review process of the IPCC. And, when someone asked for the emails that would have exposed it, they hastily deleted them – a potential breach of freedom of information (FoI) law.

The Muir Russell inquiry said it found no evidence that the CRU scientists had done this. Observers were incredulous. The chronology seemed straightforward. British sceptic David Holland submitted an FoI request to the university asking for emails in which CRU scientists discussed their work for the IPCC. Two days later, Jones sent an email to colleagues asking them to delete emails relating to the behind-the-scenes work for IPCC. That email, as Montford points out, carried Holland’s FoI number as its subject line.

How did Sir Muir miss this? In a development not covered by Montford, the university has since admitted, in correspondence with blogger Steve McIntyre, that it omitted the email from its list of FoI requests sent to Sir Muir. So Sir Muir seems to have been about the only person studying the affair not to have known about it.

This is all, we may hope, cock-up rather than conspiracy. But the university did itself no favours in its own response to Sir Muir last week, when it expressed its satisfaction that he had found no evidence of such culpable deletions. Advice to UEA: when in a hole, stop digging.

Cowardly Furtiveness

The Wahl-Briffa correspondence contains many marks of furtiveness, due, in my opinion, to the fact that the AR4 document was now in its final stages and Wahl, who was not an IPCC contributing author or even reviewer, was now both editing the language of the final AR4 document and the responses to reviewers on an issue in which he was a disputant. The emails were all headed “confidential”, with the word “confidential” recurring in the emails. Briffa asked Wahl to “PLEASE REMEMBER that this is ‘for your eyes only’” and “Please do not pass these on to anyone at all”. Briffa asked reassurance from Wahl that the language that he had “borrowed (stolen)” from Wahl was “OK (and will not later be obvious) hopefully”.

Income Inequality is Bad for Society

Really Bad. (via)

Or maybe it is an underlying problem that causes all other problems, and income inequality is just another measure for this problem?

Are these winter's temperatures proof or disproof of global warming?

The answer is no.

Here’s the thing: No matter how cold the winter is, no matter how much snow falls, the global warming models will not be disproved. In technical language, they cannot be falsified by the observations.

Another way to say this is that the winter we’re seeing is consistent with what the models have been predicting. Again — does this consistency mean that the models are right and that the theories of man-made warming are true?

No.

Consistency is such a weak criterion that almost any imaginable theory of climate will produce predictions that are consistent with observations. The term is probabilistic: It means that what actually happens had to have some chance of occurring according to a model. If global warming climate models said, “It is impossible that this winter will see temperatures below X,” and temperatures did, in fact, drop below this threshold, then the models would be inconsistent with the observations. The model would be falsified.

But global warming climate models never make statements like that. They say that any temperature is possible, even if this possibility is low. Certain temperatures have probabilities as low as you like, but they are never precisely zero. (To anticipate an objection: “that number was practically zero” is logically equivalent to “she was practically a virgin.”)

Bill Briggs on Homogenizations

Step 1 is to model A as a function of B to predict the “missing” values of A, the period from year 1 – 49. The result is the (hard-to-read) dashed red line. But even somebody slapped upside the head with a hockey stick knows that these predictions are not 100% certain. There should be some kind of plus or minus bounds. The dark red shaded area are the classical 95% parametric error bounds, spit right out of the linear model. These parametric bounds are the ones (always?) found in reporting of homogenizations (technically: these are the classical predictive bounds, which I call “parametric”, because the classical method is entirely concerned with making statements about non-observable parameters; why this is so is a long story).

Problem is, like I have been saying, they are too narrow. Those black dots in the years 1 – 49 are the actual values of A. If those parametric error bounds were doing their job, then about 95% of the black dots would be inside the dark red polygon. This is not the case.

I repeat: this is not the case. I emphasize: it is never the case. Using parametric confidence bounds when you are making predictions of real observables is sending a mewling boy to do a man’s job. Incidentally, climatologists are not the only ones making this mistake: it is rampant in statistics, a probabilistic pandemic.

Make sure to read the whole series!

Are "politically incorrect" climate measurements unfit for publication?

Is that a rhetorical question? And what is a rhetorical question anyway?

Garth Paltridge writes:

LOADED DICE IN THE CLIMATE GAME

Back in March of 2008, three of us sent off a manuscript to the Journal of Climate. It was a straightforward paper reporting the trends of humidity in the middle and upper troposphere as they (the trends) appear at face value in the NCEP monthly-average reanalysis data. NCEP data on atmospheric behaviour over the last 50 years are readily available on the web and are something of a workhorse for much modern research on meteorology and climate.

The paper did two things:

(1) It pointed out that, according to the NCEP data, the zonal-average tropical and mid-latitude humidities have decreased over the last 35 years at altitudes above the 850mb pressure level – that is, in the middle and upper troposphere, roughly above the top of the convective boundary layer. NCEP humidity information derives ultimately from the international network of balloon-borne radiosondes. And one must say immediately that radiosonde humidity data have more than their fair share of problems. So does the NCEP process of using an operational weather forecasting model to integrate the actual measurements into a meteorologically coherent set of data presented on a regular grid.

(2) It made the point (not an original point, but on the other hand one that is not widely known even among the cognoscenti) that water vapour feedback in the global warming story is very largely determined by the response of water vapour in the middle and upper troposphere. Total water vapour in the atmosphere may increase as the temperature of the surface rises, but if at the same time the mid- to upper-level concentration decreases then water vapour feedback will be negative. (There are hand-waving physical arguments that might explain how a decoupling such as that could occur).

Climate models (for various obscure reasons) tend to maintain constant relative humidity at each atmospheric level, and therefore have an increasing absolute humidity at each level as the surface and atmospheric temperatures increase. This behaviour in the upper levels of the models produces a positive feedback which more than doubles the temperature rise calculated to be the consequence of increasing atmospheric CO2.

The bottom line is that, if (repeat if) one could believe the NCEP data ‘as is’, water vapour feedback over the last 35 years has been negative. And if the pattern were to continue into the future, one would expect water vapour feedback in the climate system to halve rather than double the temperature rise due to increasing CO2.

Satellite data from the HIRS instruments on the NOAA polar orbiting satellites tend (‘sort of’, only in the tropics, and only for part of the time) to support the climate model story. The ‘ifs and buts’ of satellite information about upper tropospheric humidity are of the same order as that from balloon radiosondes.

Anyway, our paper concluded by suggesting that, in view of the extreme significance of upper-level humidity to the climate change story, the international radiosonde data on upper-level humidity should not be ‘written off’ without a serious attempt at abstracting the best possible humidity signal from within the noise of instrumental and operational changes at each of the relevant radiosonde stations. After all, we are not exactly over-endowed with data on the matter. The attempt would be similar in principle to the current efforts at abstracting a believable global warming signal from the networks of surface-temperature observations.

Suffice it to say that after 3 or 4 months the paper was knocked back. This largely because of an unbelievably vitriolic, and indeed rather hysterical, review from someone who let slip that

“the only object I can see for this paper is for the authors to get something in the peer-reviewed literature which the ignorant can cite as supporting lower climate sensitivity than the standard IPCC range”.

We argued a bit with the editor about why he took notice of such a review. We are not exactly novices in the research game, and can say with reasonable authority that when faced with such an emotive review the editor should simply have ignored it and sent the paper off to someone else. The argument didn’t get far. In particular we couldn’t get a guarantee that a re-submission would not involve the same reviewer. And in any event the conditions for re-submission effectively amounted to a requirement that we first prove the models and the satellites wrong.

A couple of weeks after the knock-back, and for unrelated reasons, two of us went to a small workshop on water vapour held at LDEO in New Jersey, whereat we told the tale. The audience was split as to whether the existence of the NCEP trends in humidity should be reported in the literature. Those ‘against’ (among them a number of people from GISS) simply said that the radiosonde data were too ‘iffy’ to report the trends publicly in a political climate where there are horrible people who might make sinful use of them. Those ‘for’ simply said that scientific reportage shouldn’t be constrained by the politically correct. The matter was dropped. I found after the event that the journal editor had come (I think specifically) to hear the talk. He didn’t bother to introduce himself.

I guess the story doesn’t amount to much. Perhaps it is significant only in that it shows how naïve we were to imagine that climate scientists might welcome the challenge to examine properly and in detail even the smell of a possibility that global warming might not be as bad as it is made out to be. Silly us.

After some kerfuffle, the paper was accepted by “Theoretical and Applied Climatology” and appeared on February 26 on the journal’s web site. (One can if so inclined, and if one has personal or institutional access to the journal, find it here). We presume it will be ignored. Being paranoiac from way back, we wonder at the happy chance by which a one-page general-interest article appeared in ‘Science’ on February 20. With some self-referencing, it extolled the virtue of the latest modelling research, and of new(?) satellite observations of short-term, large amplitude, water vapour variability, which (say the authors) strongly support model predictions of long-term positive water vapour feedback. Well, maybe. It would be easy enough to argue against that conclusion. The paranoia arises because of another issue. We know that at least one of the authors is well aware of the contrary story told by the raw balloon data. But there is no mention of it in their article.

This is the abstract:

The National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis data on tropospheric humidity are examined for the period 1973 to 2007. It is accepted that radiosonde-derived humidity data must be treated with great caution, particularly at altitudes above the 500 hPa pressure level. With that caveat, the face-value 35-year trend in zonal-average annual-average specific humidity q is significantly negative at all altitudes above 850 hPa (roughly the top of the convective boundary layer) in the tropics and southern midlatitudes and at altitudes above 600 hPa in the northern midlatitudes. It is significantly positive below 850 hPa in all three zones, as might be expected in a mixed layer with rising temperatures over a moist surface. The results are qualitatively consistent with trends in NCEP atmospheric temperatures (which must also be treated with great caution) that show an increase in the stability of the convective boundary layer as the global temperature has risen over the period. The upper-level negative trends in q are inconsistent with climate-model calculations and are largely (but not completely) inconsistent with satellite data. Water vapor feedback in climate models is positive mainly because of their roughly constant relative humidity (i.e., increasing q) in the mid-to-upper troposphere as the planet warms. Negative trends in q as found in the NCEP data would imply that long-term water vapor feedback is negative—that it would reduce rather than amplify the response of the climate system to external forcing such as that from increasing atmospheric CO2. In this context, it is important to establish what (if any) aspects of the observed trends survive detailed examination of the impact of past changes of radiosonde instrumentation and protocol within the various international networks.

"bender" on the same thread:

1. Paltridge’s quote makes it quite clear that the report was suppressed – in part – because of the political implications of its publication. i.e. It wasn’t just the methodology.
2. There’s no “conspiracy” theory in play here – just the fact that there seems to be a shared concern that one single publication could rock the IPCC’s scientific foundation. The thing I don’t understand is this: if the foundation is so solid, then what is the basis for this fear? (So you see, it’s not that psychoanalysis is “fun”. It seems to be necessary.)
3. IPCC has done this to themselves by deciding at the outset not to discuss IN DETAIL greenhouse physics and the derivation (i.e. statistics) of the GHG sensitivity coefficients. An engineering quality exposition is desperately needed.

Significantly negative water vapor feedbacks?

On Feb 26, Garth Paltridge, Albert Arking and Michael Pook’s report on a re-examination of NCEP reanalysis data on upper tropospheric humidity was published online by Theoretical and Applied Climatology. Upper tropospheric humidity is a critical topic in assessing the strength of water vapor feedbacks – knowledge that is essential to understand just how much temperature increase can be expected from doubled CO2. Paltridge and Arking are both senior climate scientists with lengthy and distinguished publication records. They reported:

The National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis data on tropospheric humidity are examined for the period 1973 to 2007. It is accepted that radiosonde-derived humidity data must be treated with great caution, particularly at altitudes above the 500 hPa pressure level. With that caveat, the face-value 35-year trend in zonal-average annual-average specific humidity q is significantly negative at all altitudes above 850 hPa (roughly the top of the convective boundary layer) in the tropics and southern midlatitudes and at altitudes above 600 hPa in the northern midlatitudes. It is significantly positive below 850 hPa in all three zones, as might be expected in a mixed layer with rising temperatures over a moist surface. The results are qualitatively consistent with trends in NCEP atmospheric temperatures (which must also be treated with great caution) that show an increase in the stability of the convective boundary layer as the global temperature has risen over the period. The upper-level negative trends in q are inconsistent with climate-model calculations and are largely (but not completely) inconsistent with satellite data. Water vapor feedback in climate models is positive mainly because of their roughly constant relative humidity (i.e., increasing q) in the mid-to-upper troposphere as the planet warms. Negative trends in q as found in the NCEP data would imply that long-term water vapor feedback is negative—that it would reduce rather than amplify the response of the climate system to external forcing such as that from increasing atmospheric CO2. In this context, it is important to establish what (if any) aspects of the observed trends survive detailed examination of the impact of past changes of radiosonde instrumentation and protocol within the various international networks.

A few days earlier on Feb 20, Dessler and Sherwood published a review article in Science on upper tropospheric humidity. This was accompanied by a podcast and a blog article at Grist here. They reported:

Interestingly, it seems that just about everybody now agrees water vapor provides a robustly strong and positive feedback

They made no mention of the pending Paltridge et al results.

OK, climate scientists disagree. What else is new.

The question of origin vs. the question of validity

There’s a good example from the Climategate emails showing a completely difference response to Jones and I making the same comment to IPCC authors.

In the thread of email 609 (2005-08-01), Jones had asked AR4 chapter 6 author Tim Osborn why they hadn’t shown the Law Dome d18O series (shown in Jones et al 1998 and Jones and Mann 2004) as one of the (scarce) SH proxies in their graphic, a query reported by Osborn to his chapter 6 co-authors as follows:

Phil Jones took a look and asked why we hadn’t included the Law Dome d18O ice core series from Tas van Ommen – but perhaps you’ve already discussed such things in earlier emails?

In my review comments to the AR4 Second Draft, I asked exactly the same question.

6-1231 B 34:12 34:12
What happened to the Law Dome proxy? Why isn’t it shown?
[Stephen McIntyre (Reviewer’s comment ID #: 309-115)]

Coordinating Lead Author Overpeck (CG1- 709. 1153233036.txt) sneered that a so-called “expert” reviewer would ask such a question:

Hi Tim, Ricardo and friends – your suggestion to leave the figure unchanged makes sense to me. Of course, we need to discuss the Law Dome ambiguity clearly and BRIEFLY in the text, and also in the response to “expert” review comments (sometimes, it is hard to use that term “expert”…).

In the incident in question, they were aware that the Law Dome d18O record, one of very few well-dated SH proxies, had a warm MWP. They elected not to show Law Dome d18O in the figure, but to insert a short CYA discussion of Law Dome in the running text.

The difference in attitude to the same comment being made by Phil Jones and by me could hardly be more stark.

While I’m sure that they could with considerable probability identify comments by McKitrick and/or me, by knowing for sure, they were disposed to argue against the comments rather than consider them seriously.

It seems to me that there’s a process interaction between two unusual features of IPCC review here: (1) that the Lead Authors ultimately decide on whether or not to consider a review comment; (2) the naming of the reviewers.

Sources of reconstruction uncertainty in CRU temperature proxy reconstructions

Here is a list of all the sources of error, variability, and uncertainty and whether those sources—as far as I can see: which means I might be wrong, but willing to be corrected—are properly accounted for by the CRU crew, and its likely effects on the certainty we have in proxy reconstructions:

1. Source: The proxy relationship with temperature is assumed constant through time. Accounted: No. Effects: entirely unknown, but should boost uncertainty.
2. Source: The proxy relationship with temperature is assumed constant through space. Accounted: No. Effects: A tree ring from California might not have the same temperature relationship as one from Greece. Boosts uncertainty.
3. Source: The proxies are measured with error (the “on average” correlation mentioned above). Accounted: No. Effects: certainly boosts uncertainty.
4. Source: Groups of proxies are sometimes smoothed before input to models. Accounted: No. Effect: a potentially huge source of error; smoothing always increases “signal”, even when those signals aren’t truly there. Boost uncertainty by a lot.
5. Source: The choice of the model m(). Accounted: No. Effect: results are always stated the model is true; potentially huge source of error. Boost uncertainty by a lot.
6. Source: The choice of the model m() error term. Accounted: Yes. Effect: the one area where we can be confident of the statistics.
7. Source: The results are stated as estimates of β Accounted: No. Effects: most classical (frequentist and Bayesian) procedures state uncertainty results about parameters not about actual, physical observables. Boost uncertainty by anywhere from two to ten times.
8. Source: The computer code is complex. multi-part, and multi-authored. Accounted: No. Effects: many areas for error to creep in; code is unaudited. Obviously boost uncertainty.
9. Source: Humans with a point of view release results. Accounted: No. Effects: judging by the tone of the CRU emails, and what is as stake, certainly boost uncertainty.

There you have it: all the potential sources of uncertainty (I’ve no doubt forgotten something), only one of which is accounted for in interpreting results. Like I’ve been saying all along: too many people are too certain of too many things.

The folly of calculating an average temperature for the entire globe

Just take a look at the graph above, and tell me what the meaning behind calculating a "global average temperature" is.

By the way, this story is funny: Al Gore goes to the Antarctica and the weather is unusually cold. Dire warning about the globe warming. So this comment from WattsUpWithThat is nice:

From the sound of it you’d think that they were baking down there in Antarctica, like they’d seen all kinds of warmer than normal temperatures, penguins wearing sunhats, leopard seals changing their spots, or something warm and not all that fuzzy.

But if you look at Figure 1, you’ll see that the area right where they are is running about 15°C (27°F) colder than normal … and normal even in the summer is kinda cold to start with.

Thank goodness for the Gore effect. Just think of what rubbish those jokers would have written if it had been 27°F warmer than normal down there, or 54°F warmer than what they are actually experiencing … we’d never have heard the end of it. They would have blogged every drop of sweat running down the side of their iced drinks on the cruise ship. Glad to see that justice still can prevail.

"Do not replicate my scientific work"

I personally do NOT want anyone else developing software that overlaps MAGICC/SCENGEN. I would also be extremely annoyed if Tyndall should support work that is clearly our territory; or even if Tyndall/Hulme should encourage such work. Indeed, Mike should contact this person and point out that his behaviour is quite intolerable. At the very least it breaches the bounds of normal scientific etiquette.

WTF?

Why Steve McIntyre does what he does at ClimateAudit

Richard Betts asks:

Steve,

Thank you for your very frank feedback on the Met Office, it is always interesting to see how one’s employer is perceived.

Since you have been so direct with me, I hope I can ask you a direct question in return, prompted by Richard Drake’s remark that

IPCC acolytes seek to paint McIntyre as a gratuitous troublemaker.

Is this picture an accurate one? Are you “a gratuitous troublemaker” or are you just trying to help, albeit in a way which some find uncomfortable?

Indeed what would “success” look like for you at the end of the AR5 process? A Fifth Assessment Report which is as scientifically robust as possible, so that governments can make informed decisions on climate policy, whatever the outcome of those decisions might be, or do you (as some appear to think) have a particular objective to influence these decisions in a particular direction?

I hope these are not impertinent questions. I didn’t really intend to get into such issues, especially not in one of my first contributions to your blog since I only commented to clear up a couple of misunderstandings and answer some specific questions, but your comment and Richard Drake’s has sparked these off in my mind.

Best regards and thank you for your attention,

Richard

Steve McIntyre answers (highlights by me):

My wife and friends have never understood why I’m doing this and think that I should go back to doing business.

Mostly I do it because I’m interested in what I write about. I’m not as interested as I was a few years ago, when I woke up every day with 3 or 4 things that I was interested in writing about. There was a lot of energy in my posts a few years ago. I also found the low culture of the Climategate correspondents very distasteful and this has sapped my interest.

Answering your question would take a fairly long essay. It’s late here and I’ll try to reply some time, though I don’t know when.

I’m actually not that interested in “big” policy. I assume that politicians will do what they’re going to do. On a private basis, I tend to think that if climate is a “big” problem, the proffered solutions are probably totally inadequate and that windmills, for example, are like prescribing laetrile for cancer. But that’s not an issue that I deal with at this blog. The only policy that I’ve advocated is much better data archiving. The opposition on this point by climate scientists has been totally insane and the opposition to the [by the?] prima donnas should have been led by people worried about climate, not by “skeptics”. (As regular readers know, I am not confident enough in my knowledge of all the relevant issues to express an opinion on the “big picture”.) I realize that many readers are interested in policy, but, as an editorial policy, for the most part, I avoid discussions of policy and delete many comments that do not adhere to this policy and urge readers to take such discussions to other blogs (of which there are obvious excellent examples.)

I’ve frequently made suggestions as to how people concerned about the impact of increased CO2 could present their case more effectively. I’ve often used the term “engineering quality report” as an important element in the process. It’s not something that I’ve defined or explained and it would take considerable effort to set out specs for such a document. Most readers get wrongfooted on the phrase and talk about V-and-V or try to point to little articles that they find meritorious, but the sort of thing that I have in mind is more like the sort of document that a professional engineering firm would do for a refinery or a mine or something like that.

I thought that the IAC review should have re-examined the purpose of the IPCC reports – a point that I made to Shapiro in a telephone conversation but which wasn’t considered in their report. It is not at all obvious to me that a literature review of work in the previous 5 years is what is needed.

I obviously have a very low opinion of the standard of work in the 1000-year field. While my criticisms in this area are pointed, I try to write accurately and, when writing well, avoid editorializing as much as possible. If you are aware of any inaccuracies in anything that I’ve written, please bring it to my attention so that I can make appropriate corrections.

Some of my original engagement arose from my astonishment at outright dishonesty that I encountered early on and by the lack of self-policing of such conduct within the field. This was long before Climategate. As a matter of decorum, I’ve established blog policies that do not allow readers or myself to make accusations of dishonesty or “fraud”, but I don’t say everything that I think. I think that the handling of Climategate by the broader climate community has exacerbated what was a difficult situation. Something like the trick to hide the decline should have been disowned in some manner, rather than whitewashed. Financial managers, lawyers, accountants and other professionals are dumbfounded that the climate community is unoffended by such conduct. The various “inquiries” have unfortunately exacerbated the problem through their failure to adhere to even the most elementary principles of public inquiry. These defects are easily understood by non-academics.

There’s lots else that I can say.

Bill Briggs smacks down Phil Plait

After getting a first slap, Phil Plait, that blithering self-centered loudmouth, gets a another slap by Bill Briggs:

It is a sure sign that Sanity has packed her bags and headed for the door when otherwise sober scientists begin slinging around terms like “denier” and “denialist.” Language like this displays willful, pretended, or real ignorance of the historical context of these words. Anybody who talks like this makes himself an ass. They’s fightin’ words which start any discussion on an angry footing, their presence a certain indication we are dealing with zealotry, not science.

Let’s look again at the claim made by the scientists at the Wall Street Journal, over which many have popped their corks:

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause.

There are two claims made here. Given the observational evidence we have, both claims appear true. The first (A) is that for the last ten years it has not grown warmer. Since it has grown warmer in some places and colder in others, this is evidently a claim about some global average and not any individual station. The second claim (B) says that the IPCC forecasts have been systematically too large: it is also concerned with some global average.
…

What about the counter-claim (C) that the 2000′s where the “warmest years on record” or the like? It is trivially false. The 2000s simply were not the warmest. Four billion years ago, Earth was much hotter. “Wait! It’s obvious we weren’t talking about billions of years ago. Cheater! Denier!” Well, it isn’t obvious. What years did you have in mind as comparators? Ah, that’s the real question, isn’t it.

Did we mean just the last century? The last 1000 years? The last 10,000? What? You must supply a starting year. To make the claim (C) that it’s hotter now than before, you must tell us what you mean by before. If you say “before” means the last ten years, then claim (C) is identical with claim (A). If you say the last 200 years, then you have to do what BEST tried and incorporate the non-parameter error bars, otherwise there is no way to compare what happened a century ago with what happened last year. Obviously, the further you go back, the larger those uncertainty bars become, therefore the more difficult it becomes to claim (with any certainty) that now was hotter than then.

As I often say, over-certainty abounds in this field. People speak of models (statistical and physical) as if they were truth, as if the data that goes into them were granted some kind of special immunity from ordinary criticism. And when the critiques come, that’s when the asinine language breaks out. All sense of humor evaporates.

You would think that because both claims (A) and (B) are likely true (and claim (C) is unproved or likely false) that we have found a reason to celebrate! Perhaps our worst fears won’t be realized after all. This is good news! Wouldn’t it be great if we really did over-emphasize feedback in climate models and that whatever changes we do make to the climate are easily mitigated and not as horrific as posited?

Why so glum that things are so good?

Mock Swedish? This is an outrage!

Don't forget to turn on the subtitles for the last one.

And you are not supposed to throw things.

George Orwell on the promiscuous use of the word 'Fascism'

It would seem that, as used, the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, youth hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I don't know what else.
Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell)

How to make the text in Blogspot postings "Justified" by default

Please verify that you know what you are doing. If you break something on your blog, it is not my fault – but if it works, I will take all credit for it! :-)

To make all the text in all posting on Blogger "Justified" by default (to make text flush on left and right, and get rid of the ragged right edge), you can try the following:

1. Select Design from your Blogger Dashboard
2. Then select Template Designer 
3. Then select Advanced 
4.  Scroll down and select Add CSS 

Now you can add the following text to the box labeled "Add custom CSS":

.post-body {
text-align:justify;
}

Select "APPLY TO BLOG" and you should be done.

You can always overwrite the default behavior. If you want a paragraph with a ragged edge (or centered), just select the paragraph in the posting editor and select the appropriate text alignment icon from the toolbar.

Similarly, if you are crazy (and who am I to judge?) and want other default behavior, instead of text-align:justify; you could use text-align:center; or text-align:right; (or the default or text-align:left;) in your added CSS.

Phil Jones and "Basic Physics"

Craig Loehle:
The comment of Jones about basic physics betrays a world view, that the belief structure of the modelers is “basic physics” (and you will hear this from advocates on the blogs), which is a deductive science and firmly established and does not allow for doubt. The fact that the physics they know requires tricky boundary conditions, parameterizations for subgrip processes, unknown forcing histories which must be guessed at (e.g., aerosols), and numerical kludges is pretended away.

"How To Cheat, Or Fool Yourself, With Time Series: Climate Example"

It’s your confidence intervals which are the real convincers in the trick. Did you notice that both confidence intervals (for the first two figures) confirm the hypothesis that things are getting better and things are getting worse? Isn’t that great!

You fail logic forever

there is no way Singer can say the proxy data doesn't record the last 20 years of warming, as we don't have enough of the proxy series after about 1980.

But that means that you can not show that the proxy data actually does record the warming of the last 20 years.

Flatline Warming Trend

Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest decade on record.

I do wish people would make it clear where the differences lie. Otherwise we will get nowhere. Sceptics note that the temperature has flatlined since the turn of the millennium. Upholders say this means nothing, it's just a pause, and the long-term trend remains upward. Fine. Maybe we should talk about model falsification or something.

But take a look at that sentence again. I don't see how the long-term trend (normally assessed over 30 years) can not have been abated to some extent by a 10-year flatlining. Is the maths they use in climatology a bit different?