Bloody Bastards – The Full Story

No way Steve McIntyre would leave that without proper comment:

Karoly and Gergis vs Journal of Climate
– Steve McIntyre, climateaudit.org

On June 10, a few days after the Gergis-Karoly-Neukom error had been identified, I speculated that they would try to re-submit the same results, glossing over the fact that they had changed the methodology from that described in the accepted article. My cynical prediction was that a community unoffended by Gleick or upside-down Mann would not cavil at such conduct.

The emails show that Karoly and Gergis did precisely as predicted, but Journal of Climate editors Chiang and Broccoli didn’t bite. Most surprising perhaps was that Karoly’s initial reaction was agreement with the Climate Audit criticism of ex post correlation screening. However, when Karoly realized that the reconstruction fell apart using the methodology of the accepted article, he was very quick to propose that they abandon the stated methodology and gloss over the changes. In today’s post, I’ll walk through the chronology.
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Non-Barking Dogs

Lucia's The Blackboard has an guest post by "Paul_K" on "Pinatubo Climate Sensitivity and Two Dogs that didn’t bark in the night":

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Summary of Conclusions

Allowing for uncertainties in the temperature and flux datasets, the response from Pinatubo is compatible with a 2xCO2 climate sensitivity of between 0.9 and 1.7oC, with a ML value around 1.4 oC. Outside this range from 0.9 to 1.7oC, it is not possible to obtain simultaneous matches to temperature and energy balance data within a temperature excursion range of 0.5 to 0.7oC. (Note that the actual measured temperature excursion was somewhere between 0.4 and 0.5 deg C. My allowed range here already incorporates maximum correction for ENSO. For comparison, Soden’s estimate for ENSO corrected temperature excursion reaches a maximum of 0.65oC. A reduction in the allowed temperature excursion would reduce the upper bound on my estimated range of climate sensitivity.)

The DK2005 estimate is unequivocally too low because of underestimation of ocean heat transfer and a deficient model.

The Wigley2006 central estimate of 3.03oC is impossibly high because of overestimation of ocean heat transfer; it can only match temperature data if the flux information is ignored.

I suspect cynically that these results explain why quantification of the sensitivity is notably absent from the Soden2002 paper, and the flux data are notably absent from Wigley2005.

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Doomsday Cults

Wikipedia: Psychological impact of failed predictions

Social scientists have found that while some group members will leave after the date for a doomsday prediction by the leader has passed uneventfully, others actually feel their belief and commitment to the group strengthened. Often when a group's doomsday prophesies or predictions fail to come true, the group leader will simply set a new date for impending doom, or predict a different type of catastrophe on a different date. Niederhoffer and Kenner attribute this motivation of the charismatic leader to maintain a consistent belief structure as due to a desire to save sunk cost: "When you have gone far out on a limb and so many people have followed you, and there is much "sunk cost," as economists would say, it is difficult to admit you have been wrong."

And:

Wikipedia on: When Prophecy Fails
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Premise of study
Festinger and his colleagues saw this as a case that would lead to the arousal of dissonance when the prophecy failed. Altering the belief would be difficult, as Keech and her group were committed at considerable expense to maintain it. Another option would be to enlist social support for their belief. As Festinger wrote, "If more and more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must after all be correct.
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Conditions
Festinger stated that five conditions must be present if someone is to become a more fervent believer after a failure or disconfirmation:

• A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he behaves.
• The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual's commitment to the belief.
• The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
• Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.
• The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence that has been specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, the belief may be maintained and the believers may attempt to proselytize or persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.

It seems the man-made apocalypse named "Sandy" has – considering the hype – passed rather uneventful in the US (unless of cause if you live on Cuba or some place else in the Caribbean, in which case the US Media or "Climate Progressives" do not give a fuck about your loss of life).

It'll be interesting to see whether the apocalypse will postponed – as in: "You were lucky this time, BUT THE NEXT MAN-MADE FRANKENSTORM WILL GET YOU FOR SURE!!11!!1!ONE!!ELEVEN!".

Or maybe the results of Sandy will be simply spruced up and fluffed up as much as possible.

[Update] OK, I'll admit it, I was wrong, I underestimated the initial reports from this storm. Yes, it was an unusually large storm, and yes it hit the USA hard. But a single freak storm does not make global warming, as neither does a single snow disaster make global cooling. And it was a single freak storm, because if you look at the past years and storms making land-fall in the US (yes, please look up the past huricane seasons here and here), only Katrina stands out, and only because the levies (protecting low laying lands) built by the US corps of engineers were shite and broke – with properly maintained levies, Katrina would have been forgotten now.

Bloody Bastards

David Karoly, 7th June 2012 to Gergis and Neukom:

“The same argument applies for the Australasian proxy selection. If the selection is done on the proxies without detrending ie the full proxy records over the 20th century, then records with strong trends will be selected and that will effectively force a hockey stick result. Then Stephen McIntyre criticism is valid. I think that it is really important to use detrended proxy data for the selection, and then choose proxies that exceed a threshold for correlations over the calibration period for either interannual variability or decadal variability for detrended data. I would be happy for the proxy selection to be based on decadal correlations, rather than interannual correlations, but it needs to be with detrended data, in my opinion. The criticism that the selection process forces a hockey stick result will be valid if the trend is not excluded in the proxy selection step.”

Raphael Neukom, same day to Karoly:

“I agree, we don’t have enough strong proxy data with significant correlations after detrending to get a reasonable reconstruction.”

-Now, from Part 2a Journal Correspondence file, On June 14, Gergis back to editors:

Over recent days we have been in discussion with colleagues here in Australia and internationally about the use of detrended or non detrended data for proxy selection as both methods are published in the literature.
People have argued that detrending proxy records when reconstructing temperature is in fact undesirable (see two papers attached provided courtesy of Professor Michael Mann) .
While anthropogenic trends may inflate correlation coefficients, this can be dealt with by allowing for autocorrelation when assessing significance. If any linear trends ARE removed when validating individual proxies, then the validation exercise will essentially only confirm the ability of the proxies to reconstruct interannual variations. However, in an exercise of this nature we are also intrinsically interested in reconstructing longer-term trends. It therefore appears to be preferable to retain trends in the data, so that we are also assessing the ability of the proxies to reconstruct this information.

Hockeysticks - How To Create One, Part 765

This is getting ridiculous.

Anarchist Fodder For Thought

Dmitry Orlov's second part of "In Praise of Anarchy":

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Kropotkin's third, and perhaps most significant observation addresses a common misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. You see, when most people say “Darwinian” it turns out that they actually mean to say “Hobbesian.” Kropotkin pointed out that the term “survival of the fittest” has been misinterpreted to mean that animals compete against other animals of their own species, whereas that just happens to be the shortest path to extinction. This misinterpretation of facts directly observable from nature has led to the faulty Hobbsian justification of the economic appetite as something natural and evolved, and therefore inevitable, giving rise to the conjectured laws of the marketplace, which in turn favor nonempathic, exclusionary, brutal, possessive individualists. The result has been to enshrine mental illness—primitive, pathological, degenerate narcissism—as the ultimate evolutionary adaptation and the basis of the laws of economics. Thus, an entire edifice of economic theory has been erected atop a foundation of delusion borne of a misunderstanding of the patterns present in nature.
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Richard Seymour on Chavez:

Richard Seymour on Chavez:

I think we on the international left have struggled to really comprehend what is going on in Venezuela. It's not a question of us being particularly dim, or not me anyway (you can look after yourselves): it just defies all our expectations. Who would have thought that a politician elected on a 'Third Way' ticket with a degree of ruling class support would turn into the mortal enemy of US imperialism and the Venezuelan ruling class? Who could have anticipated that an agenda of constitutional change, none of it terribly radical on the surface, would become a kind of political manifesto, a programme of action in the hands of mobilised masses aiming to make good its promise of equality, participatory democracy and human rights, to realise them in the fullest sense? Who would have expected that the ruling class would be so brittle that they would lash out in an ill-judged coup, thus losing a tremendously important political battle, causing a crisis in the state and proving to the Chavez government that had to be a 'class struggle' government to a degree, mobilising its popular support against the elite? Now, importantly, who would have thought the radical left government would still be in power, still going strong, still not hitting a brick wall in terms of delivering reforms?