From The Skeptics Handbook II
Last week a science journalist at The Guardian wrote the best summary I have ever seen of the state of the profession known as “science communication”. Only, he thought it was a spoof. Well, it is — and it’s satirically funny at the same time as being an unwittingly cutting commentary. (We laugh at the formulaic approach because we know it’s so true, and then we bang our heads on the wall…).
Science journalists who churn out mindless ritual productions are effectively being PR and marketing writers. Dangerously, though, they are dressed as “investigative” journalists. The public assumes they are checking that their stories don’t break laws of logic and reason, that they are supported by evidence, and that they are providing the whole story. Their PR is the most powerful advertising there is, it’s not just free, it’s a third party endorsement.
Ironically, the same journalists probably don’t realize how important they are. They think they’re there for a fluffy feelgood reasons: to help promote science, raise public awareness, and attract school leavers into careers in science. They don’t realize that their most important role is to protect science itself and be guardians of logic and reason in a world that isn’t so far from the stone age. Science Communicators ought to have been acting as back up auditors on science itself — as a check and balance to notify the world of systemic failures: corruption and bias in funding, manipulation in peer review, lost or withheld evidence. Journalists could have been the last official backstop against science being exploited, but instead of exposing the corruption, they covered for it.
Meanwhile the largest scam in modern science is running amok under his nose…
When the news-mag journos wonder why blogs are taking over, it’s because they left a vacuum. The bloggers came to fill it.
Science journalists could have saved the world billions of dollars of money that were wasted following a dead end. That’s money that could have been put towards finding a cure for multiply resistant superbugs, creating better long range flood and storm forecasts, or just saving the hairy nosed wombat.
Rubber-stamping-PR-writers become unwitting tools of tyrants
Imagine if parts of the government wanted to use the good name of science to justify demands for money or power. The government, having buckets of money, could pay for lots of scientists to do lots of fairly irrelevant, minor, repetitive or speculative research (modeling comes to mind). Then a steady stream of press releases would spring forth, leading to a similarly steady stream of cut n’ paste PR, dressed as “reporting”.
Some smart sharks in the government twigged that through this round-about-method with obedient “journalists” they could buy a conduit to get their favorite message repeated ad hoc, ad nauseum and ad infinitum. If the government wants a “scientific” message to back up their scare campaign and ask for more public money, the starting point is to set up an institute to “report on a problem”. Obviously, no institute thus created would ever actually declare “there’s no problem” (and “we should all go home”). It becomes a self fulfilling cycle with journos being the o-so-helpful tools to keep it running.
Swatting flies in Malaria-Lagoon
Martin Robbins writes a spoof of all his big fears of science communication: it’s predictable, nobody uses links much, and the BBC puts in too many “scare quotes”.
Journalists don’t realize that their most important role is to protect science itself and be guardians of logic and reason
Meanwhile the largest scam in modern science is running amok under his nose: scientists are losing entire global data sets that billions of dollars depends on, they’re hiding their results, dodging FOI’s, resorting to cherry picking a single tree to get the graph they want, and even fudging color scales in rank desperation, breaking basic laws of reason, spitting insults and threats at their critics, and basically cheating. Thousands of retired volunteer scientists including professors and Nobel Prize winners, are jumping up and down in protest at the death of scientific principles, honor, reason, and not to mention the craven loss of plain good manners and any hint of ethics.
Martin explained why he wrote the spoof. He contemplates whether journalists should be utterly BBC-impartial, and counters that a scientist ought to be capable of venturing an opinion.
Ultimately, though, if all you’re doing is repeating press releases, and not providing your own insight, analysis or criticism, then what exactly is the point of paying you? What are you for?
Exactly. Except the BBC definition of impartial climate coverage is to report both warmists and their critics, ah… the uberwarmists.
I say the “impartial” vs “opinionated” is a false dichotomy
The best science commentators do both and simultaneously. They’re impartial in the sense that they will report everything of consequence whether it agrees with their pet theory or not, and they’re opinionated in the sense that they help the world if they explain why this or that information could be misleading, or meaningful and they give us their reasons. (And it’s their reasoning that matters, not their opinion.) But just doing that does not make them great necessarily.
The Greats, like Nigel Calder, know the laws of logic and reason, and never hide behind the pathetic drivelling excuse of authority (ie “consensus”). They never say something is right because 97% of the employees of some branch of government-funded monopoly science says so. (Give me the evidence.) They don’t quote political reports as if they are the Word Of God.
They seek out and cultivate connections and information from the scientists doing the most cutting edge informative work, even if they are not “popular” and are not churning out fashionable results.
In short, the best journalists are on a mission to seek knowledge and pursue it wherever the evidence takes them, and they have the gift of being able to share the answers, the meaning, and the uncertainties.
(I quite enjoyed the funny side of this too I might add. It’s obvious it was written by someone who knows his stuff. And actually, I agree with a lot of what he says in his reasons.)
…
This is a news website article about a scientific paper
First I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?
In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.
In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research “challenges”.
This paragraph elaborates on the claim, adding weasel-words like “the scientists say” to shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist.
In this paragraph I will state in which journal the research will be published. I won’t provide a link because either a) the concept of adding links to web pages is alien to the editors, b) I can’t be bothered, or c) the journal inexplicably set the embargo on the press release to expire before the paper was actually published.
I will preface them with “it is believed” or “scientists think” to avoid giving the impression of passing any sort of personal judgement on even the most inane facts.
This paragraph will explain that while some scientists believe one thing to be true, other people believe another, different thing to be true.
[Note from Jo, except of course in Climate science, where there are no institutions paid to “believe a different thing”, and none of the journo’s are brave enough to interview a scientist called a “denier” lest they get called that too. The phrase bk bk bk comes to mind.]
In this paragraph I will provide balance with a quote from another scientist in the field. Since I picked their name at random from a Google search, and since the research probably hasn’t even been published yet for them to see it, their response to my e-mail will be bland and non-committal.
“The research is useful”, they will say, “and gives us new information. However, we need more research before we can say if the conclusions are correct, so I would advise caution for now.”
…Read more at The Guardian
Where are the girls?
Martin also asked where all the science blogging girls were and has assembled quite a nice list. Perhaps someone might let him know about Jennifer Marohasy, Judith Curry, Donna LaFramboise, Maggie Thauersköld Crusell’s Skeptic Blog and yours truly. I trust he’ll welcome the additions. And just in case he’s wondering, when Richard Black from the BBC asked why there weren’t many female climate bloggers I explained exactly why with: “Why don’t women want to face the global bullies? I can’t imagine”.
…
And if you’re wondering, do I call myself a science journalist? No. Call me a science commentator, even a science polemicist. People who debate whether they should “balance” a science article are missing the point.
“Opinions” be damned. Don’t aim for balance, aim for reason and evidence.
…
H/t to the commenter who gave me the link for this article… I just wish I could find that comment again so I could thank you properly. I’m grateful! 🙂
As I see it, the role of a journalist in a country with a free press is to keep that which they are free from (the government) from subverting that freedom. The role of a journalist in a country without a free press is to push the party line, truth be damned, or else pay the price of dissent. Which of these describes the role of mainstream climate journalism?
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I don’t call them journalists. They are scribes.
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I know a lot of people who went to the US military academy at West Point and cadets who mindlessly regurgetated the organization’s policy and talking points were called “tools”. Seems like a more appropriate term than “journalist” for someone who just passes on press releases.
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Ahoy co2isnotevil
I like your comment.
However here in Aus a valuable lesson could be learned by checking the employment history of all the press secretaries of all the politicians (both state & federal). I am am certain that a close inspection would find that a surprising number were former journalists in the electronic media. Further, of those, a surprising number would have been former members of a certain public QUANGO characterised as an aunt(bitter, opinionated, manipulative maiden?).
You don’t have to be Einstien to understand the old mates network has cozy relationship for mutual benifit.
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Great piece! There’s another one here, by Walter Russell Mead, Kyoto Fraud Revealed
There are tons of great quotes here. This may be my favourite:
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I think it’s also a case of lack of self-confidence or a generalized deference to “scientific authority”. Journalists seem to consider themselves unable to challenge the allegedly god-like experts. They haven’t seen how easy it is to trip the experts up sometimes. Although many journalists are scientifically illiterate, they at least have learned to double-check simple facts. Scientific experts are generally bad at that. That may counter-intuitive, but it’s my experience with experts from different scientific fields.
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Daggfinn, journo’s who use Denier don’t do it out of a lack of confidence. It takes arrogance for a B-grade biology graduate to call an eminent physicist names. I think the real problem is the lack of training in logic and reason.
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It has become clear to me that the Journalistic profession has become an entertainment medium pure and simple. Real Journalists who think and speak independently are few and far between now (and their ranks are thinning).
To me and many others, we’ve simply tuned out. The more times we have situations where Lara Bingle breaking up with her boyfriend leads the network news headlines (on more than one lame-stream channel), the more this process will accelerate.
The Journalism profession seems to be performing it’s very own brand of ritual sebuku.
These days I am seeing a lot of Journalists who have just become mouthpieces for the latest research conducted by fringe advocacy groups. These are the people who rabbit on about “Defending the science” – sorry if the science is good enough it can defend itself! It must be mind numbing existing in that fish bowl.
(for our overseas friends, Lara Bingle was a ditzy model who was engaged to a cricketer. When she broke up with her boyfriend it was front page news earlier this year (in the papers as well as the news stations) – it’s bad enough having people being famous for being famous, but when it dominates the news it really exacerbates how dumb and impotent our learned scribes have become, IMHO)
Great link Donna. Thanks.
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Similar criticism could be applied to TV news reporters. If something can’t be explained in a 10-second sound-bite and is not alarming, it is passed over. Certainly, impartial reporting and investigative journalism is in serious decline. Evidence the corresponding rise of informative, deep and broad bolgs such as this one.
BTW – take time to read some of the hilarious comments on the original Martin Robbins article http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/24/1
e.g. “OMG dis comment is from me i can bearly rite but i have info that none of U have LOL WAKJE UP SHEPLE?! its obvious ROfL!!!!”
or this: “This comment re-iterates comment four, with the slight twist that I accuse the author of conspiring to hide the truth about Global Warming.
This paragraph refers to an out-of-date and irrelevant paper paper whose misuse has been debunked a thousand times, but has a vague title that appears to back my position.”
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Most of the UK media, especially the BBC, is controlled by Common Purpose.
http://www.stopcp.com/cpmindmap.php
.
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To me it’s about the ability to apply critical thinking either something makes sense or it doesn’t you look at what is said and you apply a critique is it possibe or not, that is just the starting point you don’t just accept things on face value and that applies to life in general not just science journalists.
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Great post Jo.
I think one of the key paragraphs is this one
“When the news-mag journos wonder why blogs are taking over, it’s because they left a vacuum. The bloggers came to fill it.”
Publishers will wake up one day. ( But they maybe to late. As soon as bloogers can work a way to make some money from blogs –then times will get interesting )
Is it just coincidence that the drop in standards( perceived or real ) in all journalism came with the massive increase in media studies courses at universities ?
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Joanne: I think the contradiction between arrogance and lack of confidence (if that’s what you’re pointing out) is only apparent. For a simple, nasty and extreme parallel, it’s the same thing in principle as the concentration camp guard who would never dare question his commanding officer, but considers himself far superior to the inmates. And who cares about the inmate’s credentials, as long as he belongs to an inferior race. “Eminent” doesn’t factor into it. Returning to the climate change issue, a denier is a denier, and there is always sufficient circular logic to prove that.
You know this better than I do: What’s one eminent physicist against the thousands of brilliant scientists who wrote the IPCC report, and this denier probably received money from an oil company or went to a conference supported by one. And he’s being quoted by all the deniers, proving that he must be a denier too. And so on ad nauseam. It’s a massive belief system, and there are real incentives to believe it.
I love the way you insist on evidence. But where in the world is anyone actually taught to do that? Even Richard Feynman had to learn for himself not to trust experts, through personal experience.
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An alternate simpler explanation for what journos do – they are as thick as two short planks. They are the kids who couldn’t pass math and science at school and who barely scraped by in English. Witness the grammar and sentence construction in any newspaper nowadays. I rest my case.
The real purpose of news media is not to inform the public or protect our rights etc. It is to act as a platform for advertising. That includes the ABC who dvertise themselves to keep the money flowing in from the government.
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We need more like this:
http://canadafreepress.com/
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“When the news-mag journos wonder why blogs are taking over, it’s because they left a vacuum. The bloggers came to fill it.”
If the Australian Labor Party implement the National Broadband Network and the internet filter they’ll gain total control of all sources of information. Which is why they don’t care what it costs.
Bloggers saved us from the ETS (for now). If we don’t want them to be an endangered species resist the grab for totalitarian media control now, while it’s optional.
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Oh and then there’s the journalist that wants to forget about the decade after decade of warming and instead focus on the year 1998.
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There are very few objective journalists left in the world. Most journalists write opinion pieces. The ecojournalist is one who promotes a green agenda. Science, in the truest sense of the word, is irrelevant to them. Most of these so called “reporters” are nothing more than green party apparatchiks.
Greens believe that the end justifies the means, that environmental concerns outweigh the needs of humanity and that a benevolent green tyranny is the final solution and the ultimate answer to man’s search for meaning.
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Loved the link, some of the comments are on par with the article itself.
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Shelly (broken record argument @17),
Let’s play “Guess who said it?”:
1-“…our results suggest that the latter 20th century is anomalous in the context of at least the past millennium. The 1990s was the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, at moderately high levels of confidence.”
2-“New analyses of proxy data for the Northern Hemisphere indicate that the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years. It is also likely that, in the Northern Hemisphere, the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year (Figure 1b).”
Hint: Neither come from a skeptical journalist.
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Shelly,
You must mean the decade after decade of warming that’s been occurring since the end of the LIA. Even at the inflated hockey stick rate of 0.8C per century in a short term average, it’s just average change. The RMS average change in the 50 year average in DomeC ice cores is over 0.7C per 100 years. This means that the 50 year average changes by an average of 0.7C per century. The maximum limits recorded in the cores exceed rates of change of 2C per century in both directions and few centuries experience change less than 0.2C per century. The current change in the 50 year average, even coming out of the LIA, is less than 0.4C per century, which is weaker than the recovery often seen from other similar events.
George
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I think CO2isnotevil hit the nail on the head in the first post. This issue is not just confined to climate change, in the USA two leading journos have recently been sacked for saying the wrong things about Israel. World events are “managed” by most media to ensure it is fit for public consumption.
I watched Tim “the drought will never end” Flannery last night complain about “The Australian” new papers view on climate change as it called him and his cohorts to account. SBS is the only TV news service which actually provides something that can be called news.
Someone mentioned the rise of the blogs, they have risen because most media is controlled by government to some extent whereas the blogs are not, people know when they are being lied to and some actually care about it so they turn to blogs for info. Now governments are trying to control the blogs, here in Oz it is thinly disguised as a family filter.
The evidence for this is clear, we all know someone who belives in AGW but ask them for examples of the evidence the MSM has shown then in support of this and they will have nothing except its getting hotter, but they can tell you all the scary stories of what might happen and they all begin with IF and contain the words MIGHT, COULD, POSSIBLY and PERHAPS all key words used by a compliant media.
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Athlete quote:
Why bother with proxy data, when there is an instrumental record dating back 350 years which shows that the temperature has fluctuated over a 2°C range during that time at that location.
None of that fluctuation, nor the overall warming trend, prior to c.1945 can be attributed to human fossil fuel use.
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manalive@23,
I agree completely with you. I probably should have explained myself better. The alarmists like to accuse the skeptics of cherry-picking 1998. My point is that the alarmists were the ones that insisted on making a big deal about 1998. Quote #1 is MBH 99 and #2 is TAR(2001) of course. I should have named my game “Guess who said it, first?”
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I was very disappointed with the ABC Q&A show last night. The panel of six were Jennifer Marohasy, Greg Hunt, Mike Kelly, Tim Flannery, Bruce Guthrie and Jennifer Hewett. They were the shadow minister for climate, the government minister for climate, a climate sceptic, Tim Flannery and two journalists. Ok, so one would have thought the main topic would have been climate change, etc, with people on board like that. But, no! Most of the time was spent on other issues, viz; MILITARY JUSTICE, MEDIA BIAS & NEWS LIMITED, MEDIA BIAS – A KID’S VIEW, BIASED REPORTING OF CLIMATE CHANGE, CLIMATE ACTION, MURRAY PLAN. Climate hardly used up 5 minutes of time. Maybe the extremely cold, wet weather outside dampened enthusiasm for the subject. When Tim Flannery was pulled up about his claim he made that Perth would be a ghost town and Brisbane would be dry of water by 2010 he tried his best to wriggle out of it. He said he only said the “might” be. One silly twitter twittered that Brisbane HAD run out of water which is a lie. Brisbane has now so much water it has had to release huge amounts into the ocean and fears any more rain may flood the city itself. Perth is doing ok last I heard and so is Melbourne and Sydney.
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@ Athlete 24,
True enough.
It was the 1998 super El Niño, together with the Mann et al. ‘hockerstick’ which kicked off the whole damn circus.
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Athlete
Mother Nature doesn’t seem to be following the script too well. In the face of rising atmospheric CO2 levels, we see decadal declines in measured temperatures – sort of makes the AGW theory look a bit sick, eh? Not just 1998.
Cheers,
Speedy
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The life of “journalsts” is made much easier when they’re being told what to think by the scare factory.
Of course you should trust them because they declare themselves to be politically neutral operating as a non-partisan, non-advocacy, public service journalism organization.
And you’ll find pork in the supermarket fridge along with the other poultry.
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I like this point:
I had this very debate with Mark Day at The Australian when they were talking up going behind a pay wall because they provide a superior product.
I argued the case that they had completely missed the boat on ClimateGate and therefore trivialised themselves out of the debate, and that was just one example. where’s the media coverage on the Thompsons?
It’s probably another reason why my comments rarely get posted at The Australian anymore. Do they think they make themselves more relevant by retreating into an echo chamber behind a pay wall? Their product has to shift with the technology or it will die. They seem reluctant to admit that fact.
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Elsie in 25,
The bit when JM cornered Tim “i have shares in geothermal which is why i support it” Flannery about his predictions were quite funny. His pathetic excuse for getting it so wrong was that a La Nina coupled with a change in the Indian Di Pole has made it rain a lot, he went on to say that the trend of no rain would have continued if it wasnt for that.
To Shelly, Tim “by my book” Flannery does not have the ability to see beyond the short term trend (1970’s to now), this is due to his fixation on CO2. According to Tim “reduce YOUR standard of living whilst i maintain mine” Flannery and people like him CO2 changes everything and yet when it does not they are allowed to scramble out of thier predicament by compliant media like QandA host Tony Jones showed in full view last night. If Tony had any shred of dignity, a mere morsel of journalistic integrity, a semblance of a back bone he would have nailed Tim “give me your money” Flannery to the wall but no Tony gave him a free pass and choose attempted belittlement of JM instead.
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Newspapers are content factories. Their product is words on pages. They only need to hold the reader’s attention long enough for the reader to notice the advertising on the page. What is missing in that linked article is the fact that the fundamental requirement of every story is that it has to become boring. The ‘science of journalism’ which, includes science journalism, is to make the eye move towards advertising. Fully engaging articles can be considered as journalistic failures. From a newspaper’s point of view, anyway.
Hence we have the formula.
Unfortunatley the Beeb and Aunty are run by newspaper hacks who don’t understand analysis journalism. They apply the commercial formulas to their reporting because they don’t understand any other way of doing things. A smart government would employ people from professions where critical thinking and life curiosity is involved to run the public media organisations. Rather than ‘safe’ people who ‘know the biz’.
Like my ‘scare quotes’? 😛
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Q. What the heck are science journalists for?
A. To make environmental journalists look competent.
Cheers,
Speedy
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Several comments which were flashed on the screen at the Q&A said that the debate was over, or the science was settled. And this is the issue; there is only now the beginning of a debate with dissenting voices being grudgingly tolerated; Hunt last night on Q&A went to great lengths to say that alternative opinions had a right to be heard even though he had made up his mind. Despite this patronising tolerance part and parcel of the press coverage of AGW has been the censorship and villification of the “denialist” viewpoint; one only has to read the comments about this post to understand the mindset of the AGW supporter who doesn’t want any dissent at all:
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/29880.html
Bob Carter has written a good analysis of the effects of this censorious atmosphere:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/01/the-phenomena-of-disinvitation-and-the-brotherhood-of-silence/#more-22834
And this suppression has affected many prominent sceptic scientists:
http://www.heartland.org/full/26365/Galileo_Silenced_Again_.html
Sceptics have been threatened with jail and prosecution, government scientific organisations like the EPA, BoM and CSIRO intimidate any divergence from the accepted faith about AGW and the official reporting of parliament, Hansard, has been adjusted to remove any criticism of government policy on AGW. Wiki has been censoring scepticism for years and only recently Connelly has been taken to task; and universities and schools are mouthpieces for green propaganda and big business can see money to be made with government subsidies and handouts.
It is no wonder that the MSM, with few exceptions, is dominated by the official line. AGW is a great story; saving the world, taking the moral high ground, the rich and famous have turned their vacuous egoes to the subject; it is a news hound’s paradise regardless of whether they are green converts or not. AGW now has press legs; there is always some new crisis or event. The tide will not turn until the misery of the AGW remedies start killing and harming people. This will create a new moral imperative to satisfy the egoes of the media and the celebrities. So right now it is fair to say that AGW is being driven by the egoes of the MSM and the main supporters of AGW. Is there a chance of someone like Flannery or Hamilton or Jones admitting they were wrong. No. And there you have the main impetus for AGW.
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good news? but will this be on TV tonite?
19 Oct: ABC: Water released from near full Lake Hume
The dam is about 95 per cent full, after significant rain late last week.
The Murray-Darling Basin Authority began releasing water from the storage yesterday.
Andrew Shields from Goulburn Murray Water says the dam is expected to fill in the coming weeks..
The rain late last week boosted storage levels in other Murray River system dams.
Lake Dartmouth is now close to half full at 47.5 per cent, with inflows of up to 22,000 megalitres a day.
A total of 36,000 megalitres of water flowed into Lake Eildon over the weekend and it is now 62 per cent full.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/19/3042052.htm?site=goulburnmurray§ion=news
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crakar24: To be fair to Tony Jones, JM’s rudeness made her an easy target. Greg Hunt being deliberately misleading on a carbon price was almost too much for Tim Flannery to bear. Overall, JM and GH came out of it badly, because theirs are difficult positions to hold.
Is it my imagination, or has something changed about the font size and spacing on this web site? The font seems smaller, and the words run into one another.
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As an ink-stained wretch of many years standing, a day seldom passes that I don’t look at the business I have loved since the first day of my cadetship and lament its hell-bent urge to self-destruction. One example springs immediately to mind:
On Feb 9, 2009, two days after Victoria burned, the climate change spruiker David Karoly weighed in with his view that the Black Saturday fires here in Victoria were “unprecedented” and, of course, driven by climate change. This was duly picked up and tacked on to any number of reports and analyses. It was rubbish, absolute and total rubbish — and if Karoly deserved any attention at all, it should have been of the negative variety. The bodies were still being dragged from the ashes, confusion reigned and much of Victoria was still in flames. Yet this opportunist seized that moment to promote his meal-ticket. Shameless and shameful, that is the best that can be said of Karoly and the legion of fellow propagandists who stepped over smoking bodies to reach the lectern.
That was annoying, but the truly galling moments came in reading the reports of the journos who quoted him. Almost without exception they had been out on the road, covering the fires and they had seen first-hand what had gone wrong.
It was impossible, for example, to visit Nillumbik without learning of the years-long battle to curtail the green-dominated council’s efforts to make the district “natural” by restricting the removal of trees on private property, turning narrow roads into death traps that were flanked on both sides and covered overhead by incendiary vegetation. David Packham and Rod Incoll, two blokes who know quite a bit about fire, warned six years earlier that megadeath was inevitable if no vegetation clearing was done. All of this info was available, but the papers either concentrated on pictures of dead kids (without asking why they died in the first place) or allowed themselves to become unquestioning stenographers for creatures like Karoly.
Those of us who covered the fires also learned learned immediately that the emergency response had been a disaster in itself, that communications system on which millions had been lavished simply did not work. We allowed ourselves to be drip fed self-serving info by the Brumby Government’s vast spin machine, and then the majority of journos simply regurgitated what they had swallowed onto their front pages.
It took a Royal Commission to get to the truth. But again, know what? By the Commission’s concluding sessions the press benches were largely empty. If there wasn’t blood in the water or a dead child story in the offing, the news organisations simply could not be bothered turning up to cover what were extraordinarily illuminating explorations of, amongst other topics, preventive burning. Easier going back to Karoly and his ilk, I guess, to be told that Black Saturday was caused by smokestacks and incandescent bulbs.
Yes, it’s true — if only residents of the typical newsroom could vote, the Labour-Greens axis would hold 100% of seats. But ideology doesn’t explain why so many obvious stories about Black Saturday went unreported.
The primary explanation is also the most banal: Young, insecure, easily manipulated reporters lacked the courage and energy to write and record what they witnessed with their own eyes.
The internet is much blamed these days for killing traditional news outlets. There is truth in that, sure. But laziness, ineptitude and an abiding respect for the status quo are bigger reasons.
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Yes it is your imagination John; the same vast imagination which enables you to believe AGW or care about what flannery has to bear.
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Probably obvious, but remember that “journalists” exist because of advertisers. Demanding quality journalism is the duty of the buyer of that ad space.
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Roger @ 36,
I seem to recall senator Bob Brown being one of those despicable people who took the opportunity to try and link the fires to the Catastrafarian belief system.
Do you think the spineless ones in journalism might be that way due to their Editors’ belief system or do you think it’s more fundamental than that?
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Quite so. Yes I see your point. They bow before one “authority” even as they pour scorn over people who are equal or greater scientists with longer more eminent records. It’s just dutifully following tribal leaders.
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A few years ago I had the opportunity to spend some time with a TV news editor while he was preparing for the evening news. He explained to me that each news item had to be edited to fit precisely into the timeslots between the ad breaks. One slot was always kept in reserve for any important late breaking news. Of course if you are ready to go to air and nothing has dramatic happened you then have to fill that slot with something else. This is where these activist groups come into their own, they make sure that every news editor in the country always has sitting on their desks a selection of professional edited piece of news (or their version of the news) ready to drop straight into that spare slot. While this particular editor knew it was pure propaganda and he wasn’t happy with the situation. When the chips were down, it was less than half an hour ago to the news and that slot still wasn’t filled, he admitted he used them.
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JB in 35,
Rudeness by JM? I do not recall her being rude unless you consider showing the country just what a fake Flannery is is being rude….please explain.
To be fair to Tony, you must be joking. Tony has a long history of biased hosting it had nothing to do with rudeness or otherwise.
I thought Hunt was very well spoken i also thought his views on AGW very thoughtful and considered.
My wife was watching QandA and she asked “Who’s that arrogant prick”, i replied thats Tim Flannery dear.
Oh by the way rose colored glasses tend to make this look all blurry you might want to take them off for a while.
Cheers
Crakar
10
Roger @36
Jennifer Marohasy has an article on her site at the moment detailing her efforts to get
the truth told, in the face of ‘The Australians’ save the Murray campaign from 2001 until 2004.
You would definitely have to be highly committed to go through what she went through. I definitely think for the average journo it is far easier just to stick to the script and go with the flow.
10
crakar24@42:
JM was rude because she constantly interrupted Tim Flannery.
Hunt was deliberately deceptive. He said that the evidence was the increased electricity prices did not drive down electricity usage, so a carbon price would not work because it would not reduce electricity usage. If that was how a carbon price was supposed to work, he would be 100% correct. But he knows full well that not only doesn’t it work that way, it was never supposed to either. How it is supposed to work is by driving up the cost of electricity generated by (say) coal, until electricity generated with lower emissions (by gas for example) becomes price competitive.
He also went on to say that a carbon price would hit the poor hardest (funny how the right is so concerned about the poor). In saying this he totally ignored that there would be compensation for low income earners in any carbon price scheme. And don’t try and tell me that compensation will stop the scheme from working – it makes no difference whatsoever.
It is extremely disappointing to see someone who actually knows and understands these things deliberately misrepresenting them. I hope that after the show he told Tim Flannery that he was only spouting this stuff because, as a member of the Liberal party, he had to.
11
If QANDA wants to do themselves credit then they should only allow scientists to talk about scientific issues, economists about things economic and let the politicians stick to the politics. Tony Jones keeps crossing the lines in his show diluting sensible responses with garbage from the sidelines.
I didn’t watch the show, but just read the transcript, and it seems like JM and TF were at each others’ throats LOL. Maybe I’ll watch it tonight. Why oh why, after stating the common ground on increasing CO2, CO2 causes some warming etc… did they not allow the scientists to present the areas that are subject to intense debate? i.e. what the feedbacks are, their size and sign?
Without knowing that the modelling is absolutely useless and TF was disingenuous to suggest that these things are largely known… 90% certainty my posterior fundamental orifice!
10
What I have to love is this ridiculous Q&A… JM asked TF the following:
and TF comes back with:
Not wishing to steal Bernd’s thunder, but I am sure we can all agree that the following is the case:
Rainfall =/= inflow to catchments
That is to say, the amount of rainfall and the inflow to catchments are not equal. The much touted “drying of the SW” has more to do with land use changes than rainfall patterns and TF should know better. I am sure Bernd can defend this point far better than I 🙂
10
Bulldust@46:
WRT inflow to catchments, land use is definitely not the problem. I lived in the Perth hills for several years, and you need quite a bit of rain before the streams start to flow – up until then it just vanishes (evaporates, soaks into the ground, whatever – it just doesn’t end up in the streams). For many years in Perth we have not had “average” rainfall. Last year was considered pretty good, and the dams filled up a bit, but rainfall was below “average”. This year has been a disaster, with almost no run-off.
As Tim said, we’ve got a desal plant, with another on the way – and we drink a lot of groundwater. In some suburbs the water tastes pretty bad.
11
Binny and MadJak: Yes, I have seen and read Jen’s piece in Quadrant and agree that it is first-rate. Two other recent yarns, also in Quadrant, are well worth looking at. Both are in the July-August edition, and while only one deals with “environmental” reporting, the other explains the general mindset that establishes and allows only noxious orthodoxies to frame any particular issue.
The first to see is “The Myth of the Ancient Red Gum Forests” by David Joss. This story explains that red gum stands lining the Murray are no more natural than an ostrich farm. Red gums established themselves when settlers began tampering with water flows, which was bad news for vast acreages of reeds but just what an opportunistic species needed to stake its claim on fresh turf. Now those same red gums are the cudgel that has been used to take Barmah forest (near Echuca) away from graziers, whose cattle have been there more than a century, and have it declared it a national forest. Experience strongly suggests that a landscape much shaped by the hand of man will now become overgrown, infested with ferals and, when the next dry comes, that it will burn catastrophically and be ruined. Jull’s info and primary sources are readily available, yet I cannot recall seeing a single story in the mainstream press that framed this latest act of lunacy in anything but the most emotional and misleading terms. As I said earlier, bias is a potent factor, but the sheer, culpable laziness of your average reporter is a bigger one.
The other story in that Quadrant edition which explains everything you need to know about groputhink is “Death By Silence in the Writer’s Combat Zone”, which deals with the closed circle of writers, reviewers, literary festival organisers, publishers and dolers-out-of-grants.
The poison works at two levels, and the first of these is the most venal: I’ll invite you to my literary festival as an honoured speaker, and then you invite me to yours. It explains why you see the same tired names popping up at gabfests from Adelaide to Brisbane. You scratch my literary reputation and I’ll scratch yours.
It seems to me that environmental reporting works the same way. Consider, for example, the number of catastrophists whose careers have been enhanced by receipt of one of the UN literary/environmental awards for reporting the preferred narrative about, say, ageless red gums laid waste by the hand of grasping humanity.
But the second means of enforcing orthodoxy, one that goes well beyond mere collegial corruption, is far more sinister — the shunning and exile of anyone who dares question the majority’s nostrums. Yes, there will be overt attacks and the selection of biased reviewers (look at Plimer, for example), but for the most part the tactic is simply to ignore the heretical book or commentary and thus consign it to irrelevance. In the US, UK and Europe this also happens, but the number of outlets is greater, so the the door can never be slammed quite so tightly shut against outside ideas as is the case here in Australia, where there are few book reviewers and review publications. Your book gets a look in the Australian and The Age, and that is pretty much it.
We are all the poorer for that closed-shop mentality, our forests and our bookshelves both.
10
Hi, this may be off-topic or maybe not since we are discussing in general public announcements, or rather, announcements to the public.
Browsing last night through Norman Davies’ “Europe – A History” I came across this attention-focusing gem —
“Theorists of propaganda have defined five basic rules:
1. The rule of simplification: reducing all data to a simple confrontation between ‘Good and Bad’, ‘Friend and Foe’.
2. The rule of disfiguration: discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.
3. The rule of transfusion: manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one’s own ends.
4. The rule of unanimity: presenting one’s viewpoint as if it were the unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: drawing the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure, and by ‘psychological contagion’.
5. The rule of orchestration: endlessly repeating the same message in different variations and combinations.”
This came up in the special context of the 16th century reformation and counter-reformation struggles; but, boy, it really has traveled well hasn’t it?
10
LevelGaze:
Wow!
10
JB, I suspect you are falling into the same trap as TF and mixing up rainfall and runoff into catchments. It is very easy to see catchment inflow data and say ZOMG rainfall must be plummeting! But this is not quite the case… rainfall has decreased a little in the SW but not an awful lot:
Perth Airport historical rainfall graph:
http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/cdio/weatherData/av?p_display_type=dataGraph&p_stn_num=009021&p_nccObsCode=139&p_month=13
Dwellingup historical rainfall graph:
http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/cdio/weatherData/av?p_display_type=dataGraph&p_stn_num=009538&p_nccObsCode=139&p_month=13
Both show a slight decline over the period graphed (by eyeballing the graphs) but not a drastic decrease.
Now a few things could be at work here:
1) The rainfall is falling more sporadically than in the past so that the ground gets repeated soaks but not quite enough for runoff;
2) Rainfall has dropped just enough that the vegetation and other sinks are capturing all the rainfall leaving nothing for runoff;
3) Land use changes have resulted in decreased runoff.
4) Maybe Bernd can add more… I am no water guru by any means.
I know that water tables have dropped in the SW of WA because I have seen the borehole data first hand. But again, it is hard to attribute that strictly to decreased rainfall.
It’s a complex situation to be honest, as there are many variables that affect how much water ends up in our catchments. There are trials in the Wungong Catchment to thin out the forests so that there will be increased runoff into the Wungong dam:
http://www.watercorporation.com.au/W/wungong_index.cfm
Like I said… water is a complex issue and there are a lot of variables at play. Saying the runoff into catchments is simply a result of decreased rainfall is akin to saying all climate change is caused by changes in CO2 concentration. Who would be silly enough to say something like that? (I am thinking the answer LOL)
10
John Brookes (44):
What’s not so funny is the way the ALP has abandoned the relatively poor — has morphed, to quote Kim Beazley Senior’s immortal words from “…the cream of the working class…” to “…the dregs of the middle class…using the Labor Party as a spiritual spitoon…”.
Of course a carbon price will hit the poor badly, driving up the price of everything, but for pensioners especially, power and gas prices — already pensioners are using shopping malls as refuges from hot and cold weather.
If low income earners are to be ‘compensated’ (yeah right), where is the cut-off to be?
But where is the sense in making power consumers (whether business or private) in this country pay much more for coal derived energy, while exporting vast quantities of the stuff for use abroad (it’s our most valuable commodity export)?
Surely if you were concerned about the CO2 emissions from coal use, you would be concentrating your efforts on trying to close down Australia’s coal export industry (good luck with that).
On the rainfall trend in SW Western Australia, it has been on the decline for 100 years, starting well before anyone had heard of ‘global warming’.
10
LevelGaze: #49
You missed two:
6. The rule of diversity: presenting the same message through multiple means of communication.
7. The rule of materiality: presenting evidence in a way that suggests a material threat to the recipient in some way.
I was surprised that your reference put it in the context of the 16th Century Reformation.
The earliest reference I have seen places it in the 17th Century, well after the Reformation. Also the word then, did not have the same meaning that it does now.
“Prior to the twentieth century, the word ‘propaganda’ did not have its current negative connotation. It was originally coined, circa 1623, by Pope Gregory XV in the Latin phrase, ‘Congregatio de propaganda fide’; Congregation for propagating the faith.”
The earliest recorded use of propaganda as a single word, was in 1718, and had the meaning of “an official announcement” that was spread – propagated – widely throughout society. At that time, it still retained its informational context. It was the broadsheet of its day.
What we now know as propaganda was actually defined, codified, and applied in a scientific manner by Walter Lippman, a journalist, and Edward Bernays, a psychologist, towards the end of the 19th Century.
At the start of the 1914-18 war, the American public was generally apathetic towards what they saw as a European conflict. There had been many others before it, and the public saw no reason for America to become involved.
President Woodrow Wilson hired Lippman and Bernays to participate in the Committee on Public Information, also known as the Creel Commission (named after George Creel; the commission chairman). The Creel Commission was asked to convince the public that it would be beneficial for America to join the war on the side of Great Britain.
Lippman and Bernays did this with considerable success, turning public opinion around in just six months, and thus coming to the attention of American business.
They also came to the notice of an obscure German Army Corporal, by the name of Adolf Hitler.
Lippman and Bernays happened to have their office in a building on Madison Avenue, in New York, and it was their success that marked the start of the modern advertising industry, provided techniques to support the modern public relations industry, and made yet another New York street name famous world-wide.
10
Jennifer Marohasy really struggled in last nights show. Jo you should have stepped up and told how them all warming had stopped in 1998!!
10
All those who are awed by famous climate contrarian Richard S Courtney’s [SNIP] may be interested in this:
Richard responded rather earnestly to a post of mine at
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/10/shock-climate-models-cant-even-predict-linear-rise/comment-page-4/#comment-108219
I have demolished, almost sentence by sentence, his poorly reasoned post. [SNIP]
Please see comment #154.
Thanks
STOP BEING OFFENSIVE. [ED]
10
I agree. They were long ago living on life-support, because people who wanted news only had a very few places to go. News outlets concentrated on guarding the channel from competitors rather than producing a service that would do well in a competitive environment. Along came the Internet and unplugged the life support, now the journalists can adapt or fail.
Of course, we must never forget that they will do everything possible to own the channel once more by finding whatever means are available to shut out competitors. Don’t get complacent and think it might be impossible.
10
Rereke Whaakaro @53
Aw, don’t give me a hard time mate. This analysis/synthesis obviously came retrospectively after the instinctive practise of the black art by our shady ancestors, probably since the time of Athenian rhetoric. Blame the rise of bloody Social Science(!) faculties in the 60s for making it seem worth while cultivating. To our now expensive cost.
10
oh dear:
I shall ignore your offensive remarks at #55 because slurs from an anonymous troll are worthless.
But I draw attention to your having said at #55:
And I ask everyone to read that thread for themselves.
Please read it.
The idea that the anonymous troll “demolished” anything I said is laughable (as other subsequent posters on that thread have pointed out).
Richard
PS
Oh dear, your posts say you are at “a university” and you have access to that university’s library. But you clearly know nothing of any kind about the subjects you pontificate about and your posts demonstrate that you lack any logical ability. So it can reasonably be assumed that you are either a first year undergraduate or a janitor. Which is it?
10
I believe the problem with most journalists today is their education.
You see, they all studied their craft at university. They spent years trying to please some, often B grade academics whilst there, & are now unable to break the habit. The thing they want most in life is a pat on the head by an academic. You can almost see their tail wagging when they get one.
Gone are all the old, hard bitten journo’s who came up through the copy boy system.
Those blokes, & a few ladies who had spent years chasing their stories through the sleazy gutters of Kings Cross, or parliament house.
Those were the ones who could detect the merest whiff of bull droppings at half a mile, & had ways of getting things in the paper, without the editor seeing them on the way.
We will never see their like again, & are paying dearly for their passing.
10
when faced with anyone he can’t argue against, Richard S Courtney will call them a troll — time and time again
how you coming along with your climate sensitivity figures Richard, still think they are both unknown and yet orders of magnitude in error?
[SNIP]
[not feeling WELL? Be more polite you are a guest] ED
10
Journalists should at least be able to maintain the basic principles of news reporting. Research that challenges the existing orthodoxy or “consensus” is “man bites dog” and therefore more newsworthy than research that supports it. Instead they’re accepting the idea that their job is to maintain the orthodox position.
10
Well:
At #60 you assert:
Can’t argue against!
You cannot mean you because you have yet to present a cogent argument.
If a poster acts like a troll, only posts comments typical of a troll, and hides behind anonymity like a troll what is he/she/they if not a troll?
You, Oh Dear and Twinkler act like trolls, only post comments typical of trolls, and hide behind anonymity like trolls. So, yes, you demonstrate that you are trolls.
Trolls act in concert, and you do that in your post when you ask:
This demonstrates that you are working in concert with Twinkler and that you – like him/her/them – have reading difficulties. In the thread at
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/10/shock-climate-models-cant-even-predict-linear-rise/
at post #150 I wrote:
You obviously suffer from the same delusional tendencies and I commend that you also seek medical aid.
Richard
10
It’s truly all about spin!
And by the way, if you want to read some latest IPCC spin, read the article by Donna Laframboise at the following link:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/10/18/the-non-stop-ipcc-spin-machine/
10
Forewarned is forearmed (sometimes): President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (1961):
This is the same speech that warned against the “military-industrial complex”. One hears that phrase a lot from the Left. One hears the paragraph above much less often.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_address
10
LevelGaze: #57
Sorry, no hard time intended.
Propaganda is just a subject that I know something about (well, in terms of responding to it, at any rate).
10
Binny:
October 19th, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Listening to 2SM overnight the following story featured in every news break,
the above clip taken from: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=8108309
As you point out it was dropped in at the end of the news break. After hearing it the third time I was forced to ring, not to belittle the news reader for including the story, but to point out that these groups such as (The Climate Institute, Greenpeace and WWF), never have trouble getting news space without journalist questioning the bona-fide credentials of the story.
10
For what it’s worth — the editor of Time Magazine has admitted that he sees the role of the journalist as that of an advocate. Should we then wonder what’s going on? One of journalism’s most time honored institutions has spoken the tawdry, ugly truth for all to see.
But long before he admitted it, reading Time disclosed that fact for anyone with half a wit to their name.
10
Jo:
Oh Dear, Spatch, TWinkler and co are in good company, Yale are on their side.
We poor sole should not apply to Yale, we might just develop a complex.
10
Bob Malloy @68
One more good reason for me to be glad I had to get my degrees the hard way from a little out of the way university that catered to working adults with all classes at night or on weekends. They knew their students wouldn’t put up with any nonsense.
By the way, a well known astronaut, Ellison Onizuka — unfortunately well known because he was killed in the Challenger explosion — is also an alumnus of West Coast University.
10
I don’t think I have written on here about something that happened to me a few years back.
I had lived near creek since very young for 40 years. A development was proposed near the creek and opposed by NIMBY types. I did not care, but I had a free day when the Brisbane CC, government suits, protesters, etc, all took a walk along the creek. Now from where I lived I saw every single flood over a bridge opposite my home on high ground. One night there was a downpour that completely ruined the bridge and nearly had me worried for the first time. Huge waves of water like surf and roaring like surf rushed down the creek. I rang 000 because I and others thought we we saw a car washing away. This flood was far higher than 1974.
The news and vision of the flood was broadcast the next night on 6PM TV news.
Anyway, I mentioned this to a meteorologist guy with the group how I recorded 200mm in about 20 minutes that night. I had recorded it in my diary and told him the date. Now, it must be noted that an official weather recording data site was just 300m away as the crow flies. I know cloudbursts can be “local” but most of the water was coming from that direction. The guy asked, “What rain?”
I said, “The big rain event I just told you about.”
He produced some sheets showing me that absolutely NO rain had fallen on the data site that night.
So go tell me that official BOM sites are accurate and I’ll eat my hat.
10
I wonder if this will get any space in our ever so impartial MSM?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-18/spanish-solar-projects-on-brink-of-bankruptcy-as-subsidy-policies-founder.html
These subsidies are unsustainable. At what point will governments renege on the Feed in Tariff deal and leave those who invested in solar panels “up &@/# creek in a barbed wire canoe”?
10
Mark @71,
The solar + wind equation seems to = hot air — a new rule that can be very instructive.
S+W=HA
Has a nice ring to it.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
Where can I get some of those barbed wire canoes? I’d like to present them to a few politicians.
10
Roy.
Come to think of it, they might be a better prospect than carbon credits!
10
Hi Richard S Courtney #58
Why don’t you rebut my comment #151 at
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/10/shock-climate-models-cant-even-predict-linear-rise/comment-page-4/#comment-108219
?????
Why don’t you provide the rigorous evidence that your assertions demand??
You say:
You have apparently been an influential (and professional) figure in the climate debate since the early nineties (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Richard_S._Courtney). Given that your previous positions include the job title of “scientist”, I am astonished that you relied so heavily on sophistic argumentation (which my post #151 at the first link addressed). If you are on the “true” side of the debate, why would you need to rely on sophistic argumentation? How is it that I, with no expertise in the matter, and who has been reading into the matter on and off for about a year now as a hobby, am able to comprehensively run rings around you in an argument on AGW?
And why don’t you put your “peer-reviewed” paper on the web so it can be scrutinized? Are you hiding it? And why has your paper never ever been cited, according to Google Scholar? If your paper is about climate models, why do you display an ignorance of the technical terms “validation” and “robust”, in the context of general scientific modelling?
Instead of talking about my “lack of logical ability”, why don’t you actually demonstrate that my reasoning in the comment #151 (first link above) is logically flawed? Use examples to show it. I’d be very interested to see you rebut the significant points using sound reasoning and evidence that stands up to scrutiny. I’m confident that you can’t rebut any of the major points.
If you use sophistic argument techniques such as fallacious reasoning and intimidation, you won’t win an argument against me. You need to use sound argumentation and sound evidence to overturn my assertions.
You say:
My anonymity is no different to the anonymity of most other commenters on this site, including the anonymity of Jo Nova who doesn’t use her real surname. It’s actually irrelevant: all that matters is the ideas, assertions and the evidence to back those assertions. I prefer to remain anonymous because I don’t want trouble from those who decide to insist that I don’t post on this website.
You have the choice of posting anonymously, but if you use your real name then readers will presume that it is fine to do a background check. The reason I take exception to you so strongly is because it seems to me that your real interest in AGW is not pursuit of the truth, but to suppress the AGW theory: your clients (I believe – I could be wrong) will continue to profit for as long as the AGW theory is suppressed. I have respect for people here who are genuinely searching for the truth but take a different stance to mine, even if I may not always be polite to them.
And finally, you say that subsequent posters on that thread found it laughable that I demolished your comment.
I had a look at the subsequent posters on that thread:
One person falsely thinks that attribution is determined by statistical correlation (#153)
One person (#155) is making the irrelevant claim that models don’t perfectly match reality. The same person has advanced a theory in an earlier comment (#67) that “There is indeed a vanishingly small amount of back-radiation”. The physical implication of this is that the air in the atmosphere is at a temperature close to absolute zero and that the average temperature of earth’s surface is around -33C (compared to the real value of 13C)
One person is annoyed (#157)
One person (#159) talks politics instead of science
I’m still looking for a credible rebuttal of my comment #151.
One other thing, could you please forward a copy of your paper to [SNIP] e-mail removed by ED.
10
Spatch:
At #74 you say:
OK. Try these.
1.
You made no comment at #151 because 151 is less than 74.
2.
You have yet to make a credible comment so it is not possible to make a sensible response other than ridicule to anything you have said.
3.
Nobody has any reason to respond to personal lies and insults from an anonymous troll.
Repeat your lies and insults under your own name and with your home address and my lawyer will give you a credible rebuttal on my behalf.
Richard
10
hey Richard, you still are ignoring the studies of climate sensitivity that show it has a higher range. head in the sand tactics don’t cut it I’m afraid.
(I want you to stop baiting him,he knows already) CTS
10
please try your best to even acknowledge that there are studies that produce climate sensitivities that are higher than what you say without resorting to calling me a troll.
10
I wouldn’t paint all science journalists with the same brush, jonova. We have clear-cut examples of bloggers, calling themselves ‘media critics’, hyperventilating and causing a moral furore around good investigative science journalists and their work. I could give you three, fully substantiated, concrete examples.
10
Objectionable, offensive, liar hiding behind the alias of Spatch:
At #77 you say to me:
I have repeatedly posted the following referenced and factual information on several threads of this blog and firstly at #60 on the thread at
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/10/shock-climate-models-cant-even-predict-linear-rise/
Those are the range of values used in the climate models. All empirical results show lower values.
Why would anybody except an idiot be interested in guesses of larger values?
Now, my lawyer still needs your true name and your home address. Provide them now instead of continuing to present your lies from behind the cowardly shield of anonymity.
Please note that in this answer I did not point out the obvious fact that you are a troll, and I have repeatedly given a complete answer to your question, so I expect a complete answer to the need for your true name and your home address.
Richard
10
Hi Richard S Courtney #75
You say, regarding your failure to rebut the substantive points in my post #151 at http://joannenova.com.au/2010/10/shock-climate-models-cant-even-predict-linear-rise/comment-page-4/#comment-108219
You’re not in denial of the existence of my comment too, are you?
You say:
Please provide evidence that none of my comments are credible. Show it instead of just saying it.
You say:
No one has any reason to respond to anything, Richard. But I think your failure to rebut all the substantive points in #151 in that thread is because you actually can’t. After all you keep responding to comments I post, but not to rebut the substantive comments in #151 of that thread. If you genuinely could, I am confident you would.
Seemingly as an admission that you’ve lost an argument to an amateur on AGW theory, you say:
I find it amusing that your lawyer knows more than you about AGW theory. At least you’re honest enough to admit it. Good on you.
Tell your lawyer to post a rebutal to my comment #151 to the same webpage it’s on.
10
Hi Richard S Courtney #79
Well (#77) is asking about climate sensitivities; you are presenting forcings.
What Well wants to see is evidence to back your assertion that “The lowest assumed climate sensitivity used by a model is probably too large by about an order of magnitude,” which you said in #141 at http://joannenova.com.au/2010/10/shock-climate-models-cant-even-predict-linear-rise/comment-page-4/#comment-109408
I want to remind you that an “order of magnitude” means “about 10x”.
10
Oh Dear:
Your true name.
Your home address.
Nothing else, only those.
Cowardice and lies are no longer sufficient for you. Provide the needed information now.
Richard
10
Hi Richard S Courtney #82
You say:
Why?
Funny how your ilk try to intimidate when they’ve lost the argument. Remember I said that you’d never win an argument using sophistry? Just stick to reasoning, your threats will never work.
Why don’t you show us all what an expert you are and rebut the substantive claims I make in comment #151 at http://joannenova.com.au/2010/10/shock-climate-models-cant-even-predict-linear-rise/comment-page-4/#comment-108219
10
Oh dear, perhaps you would favour us with a brief description of the differences between climate sensitivity, forcing and feedback, in particular reference to CO2?
10
Well, (#84) the difference between climate sensitivity, forcing and feedbacks are, if nothing else units. A good discussion of how these are all related can be found on YouTube (starting at ~4 minutes
10
Anonymous cowardly liar hiding behind the alias Oh Dear:
At #83 you ask me why my lawyer needs you true name and home address?
(Snipped) CTS
Provide the needed information now!
Richard
(Richard please back off on the lawsuit threats.) CTS
10
Friends:
The cowardy liar repeats more lies at #81 where he again fulfils his employment as a paid troll by asserting:
In case any do not know, I point out that – as the cowardly liar knows – I have repeatedly stated this on this blog, firstly in the thread at
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/10/shock-climate-models-cant-even-predict-linear-rise/
Please read all my posts in that thread and you will see that I have answered the matter fully.
Indeed, I have repeatedly answered the same question on several threads.
The liar, however, maintains his income from his employers by continuing to post lies and to repeat the question. I refuse to continue posting answers to the same question on every thread.
(SNIPPED) CTS
(Please stop posting demands for personal information,for the stated intention to sue him) CTS
Richard
10
Eli Rabbet nee Halpern:
My posts at in the thread at
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/10/shock-climate-models-cant-even-predict-linear-rise/
stated both the climate sensitivities and the forcings.
The only other time you have come onto a blog to dispute with me was when you tried to dispute my correct statement that mean global temperature varies by +/-3.8 degrees within each year. You were wrong about that and thus demonstrated how little you know of the subjects you pontificate about.
Importantly, you refused to answer my emails to you asking you to confirm (a) that you are Josh Halpern and (b) that the posts about me under the alias of Eli Rabbett were written by you.
Since you have come here to mislead, will you now publicly confirm these facts, please.
Richard
(If you continue your trend of lawsuit threats or personal demands comments,I will be forced to mark your post as pending.To have JN look at it and decide what to do about it.) CTS
10
Thank you 85; the IPCC seems to have trouble seperating the time difference between forcings and feedbacks; I also see that condensation is the new missing forcing link of the AGW movable feast; and not in the way envisaged by messers Lacis and Schmidt.
10
Richard, usually you… (SNIPPED the rest) CTS
10
Richard S Courtney may well know something, but he is most ungracious.
10
CTS:
At #88 you say to me:
Please do inform Ms Nova.
People have have repeatedly made defamatory statements about me on this blog. And they have done it from behind a screen of anonymity.
The owners of this blog have not stopped their behaviour.
The laws of libel are clear.
I hold Jo Nova in the highest respect, but she is the owner of this blog. By publishing the defamations and protecting the actual presenters of those defamations, the owner of the blog becomes legally liable.
I have no intention of allowing these libels to continue.
There are several ways I could be protected.
1.
The defamers are ‘outed’ so I can seek the legal damages from them that the law allows in Court.
or
2.
The blog refuses to publish defamatory and untrue assertions about me from anonymous sources.
or
3.
I seek damages against the publisher of the anonymous libels.
You are demanding that I either accept the libels or sue Ms Nova.
I shall forward a copy of this post to Ms Nova by email.
Richard
[Richard I agree you should take this matter to Jo. There are several of us volunteer moderators and speaking for myself, I appreciate your frustration with specific personal comments you have endured. Additionally, I will moderate any posts that are impolite or personal from any of the offenders seen here and on other threads in the last weeks until Jo has responded to you.
Oh Dear, Well, TWinkler, John Brookes, and Spatch You have been warned.] ED (not CTS)
10
Now wait one minute here, the only thing that Eli wrote was a direct response to cohenite about what the difference between forcings, sensitivity and feedbacks were. There was a link to a YouTube lecture which explained the differences. There was no defamation of anyone, there was really no mention of anyone. Richard let loose on Eli in #88, and Eli simply responded that Richard was threatening everyone with a suit fairly early on (you snipped that, ok, it’s your blog). So you got some choices here, but as far as Eli can see the pretty much all the accusations are coming from sw england.
10
In reply to cohenite @ 89, that is pretty much what you expect because all of the things you refer to, forcings and climate sensitivity are equilibrium values which means that for the equilibrium values to be reached enough time has to pass. You get time dependent responses from the climate models, local, regional and global. It ain’t a bug, it’s a definition.
10
Does that include your involved with the coal industry? Or is that someone else too?
[too bad you can’t form a proper sentence]
[oh by the way you are now banned] ED
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Hi Richard S Courtney #86,
I hear a loud call from you to stop.
I want to offer my sincere apologies to you, Richard. And it’s not because you “want to sue me” – it’s a genuine apology.
I feel profoundly uncomfortable that I have pushed certain acceptable boundaries too far in this discussion with you. I’ve had a sudden realisation that I was blinded by a sort of self-righteousness, where I was bent on a merciless crusade to obliterate your comments because I felt that you were indefensible, simply because I don’t understand your values which are so different to mine. The origins of the anger driving that self-righteousness is the feeling that top quality scientists and their science have been misrepresented and thoroughly disrespected by people with various agendas, particularly by those who profit from confusion around science. It all came out after I read your “Source Watch” entry. I realised that I am no better than those who demonised the scientists, as I showed an indefensible level of disrespect towards you in some of my comments.
I have realised that Source Watch presents a one-sided point-of-view and that fundamentally I was being simple-minded in my approach. AGW is almost a side issue, I think. A deeper issue is the values we give to things, as Cohenite once pointed out in a (much more civil) discussion. Values are the crux of the issue, and I think I just ignored this as I attacked in my comments. I know that you didn’t want to get engaged in a deep discussion about aspects of AGW, and the hubris I was adding to the posts was to try to coerce you to engage. To attempt to coerce someone is just wrong-headed, and I apologise for the arrogant tone of some of the messages.
I have reconsidered my comment about “blindness” which I made when I assumed you push your views just for the money. I realise that you have fundamental beliefs that have attracted you to the positions that you hold and have held – it’s not as simplistic as just being a mouthpiece for whoever pays you. I realise now that the roles that you hold are a consequence of your values, and that you do have values (that happen to be profoundly different to mine) – so I do want to apologise for that comment.
I realise to that it was unfair to drag Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen into the debate, when she wasn’t here to defend herself. So I apologise to you for the way I disrespected your friend in some comments, and I am inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt over the comment she allegedly made.
I apologise also for insulting you about your paper and its citations. I double checked the claim I made about your paper having no citations, and it appears that Google Scholar is incorrect. Scopus shows that your paper indeed has a citation:
Yantovski, E., Kushnirov, V. The Convergence of Oil and Power on a Zero Emission Basis. Oil Gas European Magazine. Volume 26, Issue 2, Pages 2-5, June 2000
Many papers seem not to have any or very few citations so I think it was unnecessary to push that point so vigorously.
I hope you accept this is a genuine apology. It’s nothing to do with your comments about lawyers and so on – I was feeling too self-righteous to care. I have had a genuine change of heart and I now feel that my approach was wrong, and that my input should have been more fair and focused only on the most relevant points of discussion.
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There is a book that gives some insight into the world of journalism, ‘Flat Earth News’ by Nick Davies.
The basic tennant of the book is to expose the industry to outside view from an acclaimed journalist. It paints a darkened picture of profitability above poigniency. With the falling number of journalists employed by many outlets the amount of copy required for the 24 hr culture limits the capability of journalists in achieving collaborated reports.
Many stories are now obtained from a single source, normally a wire service, without being ratified or independently checked before publishing. Most journalists will have an idea that the story could be correct and if the source is normally an excepted provider, government, Royal Society, Scientific journal, Greenpeace etc, then the story will hit the air without any independent verification purely down to the fact that the reporter has another 10 stories to write besides blogs, twitter and facebook entries before his shift finishes.
A phrase coined within the novel is “churnalism” repeatedly churning out stories that have not been independently verified for their accuracy or content.
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Oh Dear:
Re your post at #95.
Please accept my sincere thanks.
Richard
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oh dear @95:
I am truly impressed — I second Richard’s thanks.
I wanted to respond to some comments you made about disrespecting scientists. I am an engineer with advanced degrees in the physical sciences and ~17 patented inventions — Richard Courtney is a scientist. We have both had (I’m assuming for Richard) many contentious disagreements with others in our fields: I once had a PhD stand up during a presentation I was giving to a large audience and say I didn’t know what I was talking about! (Probably the “high” point in my career, in this regard.) These issues are settled by facts — in this case, the device I was proposing was built and worked, the scientist made a public apology, end of story. Did this guy “disrespect” me? Sure. I did the same thing back, claiming his analysis was inadequately done — a body blow as he was an expert in the field. SOP in the scientific world (although not often as openly contentious). Eventually it is sorted out by reality.
In contrast, the discussions I have had about politics in my extremely Progressive town are qualitatively different. (Usually, I avoid this, but sometimes I cannot — when proposals are being made and acted on which would seriously impact my daughter’s education, for example.) In these discussions, there are “accepted” views and “heretical” views. If you support any of the heretical viewpoints, you are attacked — no holds barred. Facts do not matter. I have done extensive research on the outcome of various choices in public education, based on many other school district’s experiences around the country to support some of my proposals — all to no avail. As you might imagine, this works to suppress public expression of the “heretical” views. Many who might think they have some validity keep quiet to avoid trouble. It is not, I believe, particularly successful at suppressing the heretical views themselves.
We have seen this kind of shift in the climate sciences over the last 20 years — from science to religion. People who question the science are attacked personally, and every attempt is made to suppress the expression of their views. This works for a while, but has the danger of a massive backlash, as people get fed up with it.
If these scientists you refer to want respect, they need to start acting like scientists and not priests defending the “revealed” truth.
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I can hardly believe my eyes!
Finally some sanity is restored to this thread, along with an apology and the admission of a wrong motive by one of the most frequent posters. Hopefully some progress can now be made into investigating the actual workings of the climate in the real world and how that might or might not affect government policies on energy use.
As an observation on the progress of the discussion here, and elsewhere, I suggest that the dichotomy between science and belief is not as absolute as some would have us believe [pun intended]. Everywhere I see scientists using the word ‘believe’ when reporting on their interpretation of the results of their ‘scientific’ investigations. And, since ‘science’, by definition, is never absolute or even substantially complete and not open to revision, the basis of action will always remain our beliefs. Whether those beliefs are rational and based on empiric evidence or some other foundation does not, in my view, diminish this reliance upon our beliefs in any and all our actions taken.
Hence, when arguing for one action over another action, as we are all entitled to do, the appeal to empiric evidence should remain the touch-stone of ‘authority’ rather than what someone else says, since all such reported views are filtered through the speaker/writer’s belief system. It is impossible for it to be otherwise.
On the same basis, individually, when we are confronted by evidence that challenges our belief system, how we manage such perturbations will tell a lot about how rational or irrational we are, how much we are able to think independently or how dependent we are, or allow our selves to be, upon some external ‘authority’.
Any way, I add my thanks to Oh Dear for a frank admission and apology. Where now does that leave the issue of whether or not it can be proved that humans have adversely affected the climate by the use of fossil fuels?
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Hi BobC #98,
You say:
Actually, the idea that the scientists are pretending to be “priests” is the sort of misrepresentation I am talking about; that misrepresentation is bandied about the blogosphere and the media, but the assertions the scientists are making in the literature is backed by evidence, so AGW theory is not a religion.
Evidence? Crickey. Make sure you let the IPCC know about the empirical evidence you found for warming greater than 1.2 degrees. Tell Dr Glikson. Andi Pitman, Matthew England… “Misrepresentation?” lol –JN
If you actually meet an active climate scientist who supports the consensus view of AGW, you will see that they are frank about what is not known and what is supported by evidence. Your misrepresentation of climate scientists is a way for you to avoid cognitive dissonance, I suspect. The AGW theory is essentially self-consistent: it is not self-contradictory, the way the countless scientifically-useless “alternate” theories are. The AGW theory has uncertainties and there are gaps in the knowledge, but the theory is useful – those uncertainties don’t “swamp” the useful information that the theory provides.
Your comments about disrespect of scientists show that you misunderstand what I’m talking about. Someone thought your ideas were wrong so they challenged you. That’s run-of-the-mill stuff for a scientist. What I’m talking about are the insinuations of widespread fraud and scientific malpractice that have no basis in evidence. I’m talking about lawsuits against scientists for political reasons and industrial espionage and loud cashed-up lobbyists with a profiteering agenda being cheered on by the mass media. That is disrespectful; that is what I’m talking about. If AGW was constructed fraudulently, it would be wrong: it would not stand up to scientific scrutiny. There would be counterexamples and fundamental flaws would be found in the reasoning. Relativism does not apply to scientific theories: either they are valid or they’re not. It is really clearcut: it is not like ethical philosophy where the validity of some claims is more difficult to ascertain; science is not like certain strains of post-modernistic sociology that assert that many competing and contradictory beliefs are equally valid.
My disrespect of Richard was not in challenging his claims: my substantive claims are valid and have not been addressed. Where I went wrong was that my antagonism of Richard became persecutory. He didn’t want to engage and I went too far. I would not normally push things like that with other “sceptics”, but he is a professional in the climate debate and he is employed by the coal industry. I also took exception to some of the tactics I felt he was using in the argument.
Your claims that science has become “religious” needs evidence. There is none, I am afraid to say. Without compelling evidence that statement is useless and typing it is a waste of time.
You say:
In scientific argumentation, evidence matters. Most claims made by “sceptics” do not stand up to evidence and demonstrate a misunderstanding of what GW is (e.g. attribution is determined by correlation fallacies; statistical fallacies where GW conclusions are drawn from the observational record of a locality and conflating global average SAT records with localised records; fallacies where sweeping claims about causation are made from a single-time series; accusations of “fraud” or “hoax” or “conspiracy” without supporting evidence; or claims that “AGW is wrong” for political/economical reasons).
The idea of being a “heretic” rings of Galileo-ism. It is not restricted to “scepticism” about AGW – denialists of all sorts of theories often arrogantly associate themselves with Galileo. A good paper that discusses general denialism and the common sorts of claims made by denialists is
Pascal Diethelm and Martin McKee. Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond? Eur J Public Health (2009) 19(1): 2-4 doi:10.1093/eurpub/ckn139
accessible at http://eurpub.oxfordjournals.org/content/19/1/2
If you don’t have access to the full-text, see
http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2009/05/denialism_in_the_literature.php
for a discussion of the paper and some excerpts.
You’ll see that all the points about denialism in general apply to AGW “scepticism”, but they don’t apply to a genuinely scientific movement.
You say:
I suspect that the mainstream public are becoming increasingly tired of hearing that AGW is “the great hoax of our time”. Your message never changes. People are getting tired of the regular misplaced optimism at News Corp when published papers are lauded as being “revolutionary” and the “final death blow to AGW”, and that when the conclusions of those papers are shown not to follow from the evidence in the papers, News Corp is silent. The nutters in the fringes are alienating your movement in the publics’ eyes, and pushing it further to the political right. Sure sections of the public got tired of hearing about AGW all the time from the consensus point of view; but it works both ways here.
10
Oh dear:
Now you want to restart the merry-go-round with a rehash of all your shibboleths. Have you made any headway here? No, and you never will as long as you believe that you can berate people into submission. I would add that I have never heard or read about one of your “climate scientists” saying the words “I don’t know”. These clowns define the hubris and that will ultimately bring their edifice down.
If you want to go along with a bunch of fraudsters in business suits and data manipulators in white coats that’s fine by me. You will be poorer, they will be richer and laughing at you. Meanwhile, the climate will do what it was going to do anyway which is cooling for the next 20-30 years.
By the way, you never did enlighten us with your CV and list of published papers, did you? Never mind, in the meantime, go with God (Gaia?), but go!
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Hi Paul #99,
You mention that I made an
My motives were fine (apart from overreaching in trying to coerce Richard into addressing my post); but I apologised when I realised that I had become persecutory. Antagonism is fine in blogs I think, but not persecution of someone because their values are different, no matter how flawed I think those values are (and I think that some of Richard’s guiding beliefs are based on egocentric “objectivity” and are flat out wrong and indefensible; I also think that Richard uses weasel tactics when he argues, and that he strongly took offense when a “light was shined” onto some of his reasoning; and I think Richard’s motives are influenced by who he works for). My grandmother and some of her flawed beliefs come from a different age, but that doesn’t give me the right to persecute her.
You say:
Nope. It is highly unusual to hear a scientist use the word “believe” in conjunction with their claims. They say that an assertion is backed by evidence, or that they accept a theory based on the evidence, but most scientists are very careful not to use the word “believe”. This is yet another misrepresentation of scientists that is pushed in the blogosphere. The “sceptics” believe that AGW is false, other people in the public believe AGW is true. Scientists though make statements like, “there is a greater than 95% probability that the observed GW trend is caused by AGHGs based on what our models are telling us”. Scientists are not saying that the theory is certain or “true”; they say it is highly probable. People who are scientifically illiterate think that “highly probable” means “certain”.
You say:
But it is Paul. You are scientifically ignorant if you think that the AGW theory is accepted as valid just because someone said it was. “Sceptics” claim that their psuedo-theories (eg GW is caused by magnetism, sunspots, urban heat effect, the aurora, astral waves etc) are valid, but their theories are contradicted by evidence, or are not falsifiable, or are not supported by evidence, so they are scientifically rejected, despite being “spruiked”. The reason AGW theory is valid and the useless “alternate” theories are not is simply because the evidence supports it. Those who claim that the AGW theory isn’t supported by evidence almost always don’t understand it.
You say:
I agree, and I contend that almost all “sceptics” have poor faith in reason. No matter how good your reasoning about something or other that goes against their beliefs is, they refuse to believe you. To avoid cognitive dissonance, they fall back to “it’s a fraud, a conspiracy” or “you lie” without any evidence to support it. A strongly rational person will replace their beliefs when they are presented with better reasoning for an opposing assertion.
That “sceptics” keep repeating thoroughly discredited claims shows that they have poor faith in reason. Common discredited claims that “sceptics” repeat include:
– “there is a case where the climate warmed like it’s warming now, therefore the causes of both warmings must be the same” (this is wrong on two counts: evidence and logic)
– “the GW trend is caused by increasing solar intensity” (no evidence)
– “the troposphere hot spot is the unique fingerprint of AGW” (no evidence – to demonstrate uniqueness one would need to show that an increasing solar forcing would not be expected to show a “hot-spot”)
– “the global average surface air temperature is generally cooling” (no evidence)
– “models are unreliable” (no evidence – this was what Richard and I argued about before things got out of hand)
You say, in the light of my apology to Richard:
Try providing a rigorous rebutal to the substantive points I made at #151 at http://joannenova.com.au/2010/10/shock-climate-models-cant-even-predict-linear-rise/comment-page-4/#comment-108219
If you can’t, and if you are a fair-minded thinker, it is rational to be open to accepting them.
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Hi Mark #101,
You say:
Is that because you are wrong?
10
Mark #101,
You say:
Cold, hard evidence please. How was that worked out? With what theory?
10
If it makes you happy.
10
Hi Mark #101,
One more thing. You say:
You’re ignorant. What do you think uncertainties are?
10
You spoilt, spoon-fed brat! Don’t be so damned lazy, if I can find it, so can you.
And that’s the last bite you’ll get from me.
10
Hi Mark #107
I notice that you haven’t answered my questions. Is that because you can’t?
If you make a claim, the onus is on you to provide the evidence. If i say that there are fairies in the garden, I have to provide evidence, otherwise it is a useless claim.
10
Oh Dear!
The din here is deafening, but the signal is lost in the noise.
Oh dear, I will not dignify the nonsense with a reply.
Does anyone else think that this is not worth any more time? [Comments, I mean]
To put a little information into the mix, mitigating some of the noise, I suggest that Dr Roy Spencer has the tiger by the tail with his analysis of feedbacks.
He starts with this : —
and concludes with : —
So, ultimately it matters not whether you believe in the ‘greenhouse’ effect or whether you do not believe in it. It doesn’t even really matter whether you take the GCMs seriously or not. The bottom line is that sensitivity to changes in external forcing are met by strong negative feedbacks, not strong positive feedbacks as assumed by all the GCMs. Once the GCMs are constrained by real-world feedbacks the result will be that the heat will be taken out of the problem – both literally and figuratively.
All we will have at worst will be a very minor warming, with offsetting benefits of increased plant growth, increased habitats for most if not all other organisms and certainly many economic and social benefits for the whole of humanity. At best, there will be no change in global temperatures resulting from the increased atmospheric carbon dioxide but still retaining all the other direct benefits of increased CO2.
Now that just leaves all the other problems that confront mankind to be solved, but takes away the huge distraction of this Global Scaremongering, eliminates the need for the economic collapse of the West and leaves the Developing world to get on with developing without needing punitive global tax systems and massive UN bureaucracy to enforce it – something that any rational person should be glad about.
Paul
10
Oh Dear:
You say of me:
Not since 1995.
Richard
10
Oh Dear:
At #102 you assert:
Well, I do understand it.
There is no evidence that “supports” the AGW hypothesis;
none, zilch, not any.
But there is evidence that refutes it (e.g. the ‘hot spot’ is missing.
If you know of any evidence that “supports” the AGW hyothesis then please state it because I and many others (including the IPCC authors) would like to have it.
Indeed, this complete lack of any supporting evidence is why the AGW hypothesis is not a theory and is merely a hypothesis.
There is a basic principle in science;
viz. the null hypothesis applies unless a change is observed to exist.
The null hypothesis is the governing hypothesis in all science. It says that the only valid assumption is that nothing has changed unless a change is observed to have occured.
There is no evidence of any kind that the behaviour of climate variation has altered in recent decades and or centuries: all recent climate variations are known to have occured previously in the holocene. And, therefore, there is no reason to assume the cause(s) of climate variation have changed in recent decades or centuries.
So, the null hypothesis applies; i.e.
The ONLY scientific assumption is that there has been no change to the cause(s) of climate variation in recent decades and/or centuries.
Hence, it is a sureal lie to assert that the null hypothesis is “useless” as you do.
You say of me:
No!
I use pure reason, empirical data and the scientific method.
These are not “weasel tactics” and personal lies and defamations are not “light”.
Importantly, as my explanation here demonstrates, you assert the exact opposite of the truth when you say;
Claims such as
have never been credited so could not be discredited. They are without any foundation.
Richard
10
Hmm… That’s one way to describe the models.
http://www.c3headlines.com/2010/10/new-major-peer-reviewed-study-climate-models-predictions-found-to-be-shitty.html
But if the cap fits.
10
I can recommend Judith Curry’s series on “Overconfidence in IPCCs detection and attribution”. Long but brilliant.
http://judithcurry.com/2010/10/17/overconfidence-in-ipccs-detection-and-attribution-part-i/
http://judithcurry.com/2010/10/19/overconfidence-in-ipccs-detection-and-attribution-part-ii/
10
From part 1: “After digging deeply into this topic, I have finally diagnosed the cause of my recent head spinning symptoms: overexposure to circular reasoning by the IPCC.”
10
If verbosity defined virtue “oh dear” would be a saint. If Jo was to start a most loquacious contributor of the year award, “oh dear” would win hands down.
How unfortunate it is that all the words just rehash the same litany of nonsense over and over and over…
Oh dear, pick a point, a single point and debate it with Richard Courtney, cohenite, co2isnotevil (numerous others could also be named) and see if you can hold your own. As a suggestion, start by stating what you think is the evidence supporting AGW, name the sources and say why you think they support you.
Example:
1. data #1
reason it supports you
2. data #2
reason why it supports you
.
.
.
n. data #n
reason why it supports you
Don’t resort to links to other’s work. Tell us what you actually accept in your own words. You should do this because I can guarantee you that those who will point out your errors can all tell you what they accept or reject and why, in their own words. They won’t need a ton of references to back themselves up. Think about it — has Richard Courtney ever handed you a long list of links to back up what he says? No! He can tell you exactly where in the IPCC’s material they say a certain thing, just for example.
Please, try sound arguing for a change.
10
If they were acting like scientists, they wouldn’t be keeping their data and algorithms secret.
I suspect that I know a great many more climate scientists than you.
It has also been cast so as to be unfalsfiable. These are charteristics of pseudo science.
Are you referring to useful predictions of the climate? Give us some examples of AGW predictions that have been verified.
Few people (and nobody in the legal professions) share your unique belief that freely-given confessions of fraud and illegal behavior do not constitute evidence.
That’s pretty much what this website is about. You simply deny any counter evidence, no matter how irrational it makes you seem. People do that to defend their beliefs, not as a part of a logical discussion of facts. You are the one here trying to avoid cognitive dissonance.
Given your performance here, I’m not sure anyone could say what would constitute “evidence” for you. Perhaps any statement that agrees with your preconceptions would qualify?
When you have to resort to psychological arguments, rather than engaging in data-based argumentation, you have admitted you don’t have a case. Perhaps there is some insight into your own motivations there — I’m an engineer who has to make things work, psychology doesn’t work on Nature.
10
I think this applies to much of life, as well. My flight instructor once asked me why I was making a correction on landing approach. When I said I wasn’t sure, he replied; “Don’t do anything until you know something needs to be done.”
Civilization will be far better off responding to climate change (when it happens) rather than pretending to be able to predict it and responding to that. For CAGW alarmists to be taken seriously, they would have to prove that they have predictive skill. Every other argument they make (consensus, theory, etc.) other than demonstrated predictive skill is irrelevant.
10
BobC @117,
It sounds like you finished your flight training a wiser man than when you started. I know I did. These’s nothing quite as convincing as knowing your life depends on getting it right.
That’s a big problem today. The world treats wisdom as if it was a four-letter word. Yet it’s the most valuable possession you can have. When you think about it, global warming stands out not only for its utter dishonesty but also for the total lack of wisdom that permits them to lie in the first place. And a little humility couldn’t hurt either.
Were any of these people wise they would realize that staking their future on a lie would require them to keep on lying and to invent even more preposterous lies to cover up their original one. When has that ever lead to anything but a fall?
10
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10
Hi Paul #109,
You say:
That’s a great big side-step.
10
Hi Richard S Courtney #111
You say about the AGW theory:
Then why do over 97.5% of working climate scientists accept the theory?
Why do the GCMs detect a greenhouse gas attribution? Why do the GCM outputs match observational records?
You say about the AGW theory:
If you think the hot-spot is uniquely associated with greenhouse gases, please explain why you think increased solar forcing should not be expected to produce a troposphere hot-spot.
If you think there is no warming, please explain how internal climate variability accounts for the global average surface air temperature trend of about +0.13C/decade since the 1950s.
You say:
What about the projections of CMIP ensembles matching observational records?
You say:
Your null hypothesis doesn’t hold (i.e. the warming trend has natural causes). GCM simulations run with only natural forcings have <5% chance of producing the warming trend.
You say:
OK, prove it.
You say:
You must misunderstand the null hypothesis then.
You say:
Maybe I should clarify the sentence:
-AGW theory is supported by evidence. It is not contradicted by evidence
-the countless pseudotheories (such as the earth is cooling, it’s caused by satellites etc etc) don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny.
If you disagree with either of these points, then please give evidence to suppport what you are saying.
10
Hi Mark #112:
That page that you link has a sentence that must make you feel so fuzzy and warm:
particularly given that you [SNIP]
10
Oh dear @120
But not as big a side-step as yours, in your refusal to discuss any detail whatsoever, always referring us to what someone else or some other organisation says. That is an impossible tactic to deal with any other way than by ignoring it – the ancients had a fable describing such a task, ‘cleaning the Aegean stables’. Attempting to answer such limitless claims is an impossible task and one that has no other outcome but to wear me out for nothing.
Here’s the challenge to you : give one observable fact relating to the climate, then say in your own words how that fact supports the hypothesis of human-caused ‘Global Warming’. After that, and only after that, will I bother about you hereinafter.
Paul
10
oh dear @121,
You have recycled this same truckload of nonsense over and over. You end with:
No one is going to hand you evidence to support or refute what you say. That’s already happened, also over and over. It’s now time for you to tell us what evidence supports your contention that, “AGW theory is supported by evidence. It is not contradicted by evidence”.
Either put up or shut up!
10
Paul,
Good retort!
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Hi BobC #116
You say about climate scientists:
Can you tell me any scientists that release all their data and methods into the public domain as soon as it’s collected?
The data and algorithms aren’t secret. Published papers tend to have links to repositories with data and algorithms.
See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/ for data sources and various algorithms.
You yourself have linked a plot from data sources, so how did you find that if the data is secret?
You say about AGW theory:
Let’s look at some assertions it makes:
-the warming trend since the 1950s is attributed to GHGs.
-the warming trends the theory predicts are quantitative
These are falsifiable assertions.
You say:
Hansen’s 1981 climate model predicted the warming trend that followed in subsequent decades quite well.
The CMIP ensemble outputs match the observational records well.
You say:
Which freely-given information has proven that the CRU scientists were engaged in fraud?
You say:
Please provide a counterexample to the AGW theory that stands up to scrutiny.
You say:
You’ve avoided addressing my assertion. A waste of time.
In response to a paper on general denialism, you say:
You’re in denial, I see.
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Hi Paul #123:
You say:
You are slow.
The reason you can’t refute the claims is because they are scientifically rigorous.
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Hi Roy Hogue #124,
I see that you are trying awfully hard to be relevant.
You say:
I can’t find any counterexample to the AGW theory. That’s why I’m asking you experts to help me.
There has been a rapid warming trend since the 1950s. The climate models show that GHGs are responsible for the warming trend and are successfully able to replicate the trend when greenhouse forcings are included in simulations. These simulations suggest that there is a <5% chance that the warming trend has natural causes.
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oh dear,
Can you read? I asked you to give evidence that supports your contention that
I know quite well that you won’t find any evidence contradicting you because you’ll never go look for it.
So can you tell us what evidence supports you or do you always need some link to some favorite authority to do it for you?
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Oh Dear! holy cow you are right after all! You have made me see the light.
A model told me so.
I’m a changed man.
A model told me so.
Temperatures never varied before.
A model told me so.
Medival warming didn’t happen.
A model told me so.
The world is going to toast.
A model told me so.
Corals will all die.
A model told me so.
Oceans will all rise.
A model told me so.
The peoples’ rice will not produce.
A model told me so.
We must change immediately.
A model told me so.
Repent our evil carbon ways.
A model told me so.
Pay all I have to fix this mess.
A model told me so.
THEN I WOKE UP FROM MY SILLY DREAM. OH DEAR ME IT WAS ALL A SHAM.
REALITY SHOWED ME SO……….
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oh dear,
If you were relevant I would worry about this comment.
But since you’re nothing but a bunch of noise yourself I’ll not worry about it. You have spent more words than anyone I can remember and have managed to say nothing useful at all. Where you get the unmitigated gall to say the things you do to those who point out your mistakes escapes me completely. You can’t make a sound argument yourself and you tell those who can run circles around you on the science that they’re wrong simply because you say they’re wrong.
You are arrogant, a disgrace, a pain in the neck, and a joke!
Now for the last time, either put up or shut up.
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Hi Mark D #130,
You’re poor sport Mark. All you can do is cut-and-paste someone else’s poem?
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Hi Roy Hogue #129, 131.
You said:
What I said in post #128 I will repeat again:
So which part of that do you have a problem with? Why? What evidence backs up your assertions?
You say:
Perhaps there is a problem with your reading or comprehension skills?
You say:
Where you get the unmitigated gall to say the things you do to those who point out your mistakes escapes me completely.
Tell me one mistake that I keep repeating. If I have offended you with my lack of politeness, I apologise.
You say:
Why?
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Hi Richard S Courtney #110:
In response to my comment that you are employed by the coal industry, you say:
OK, I’ll retract that. I should have said that you are involved with the coal industry.
Is that better?
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You ask why? You actually have the nerve to ask why?
You have yet to present any evidence to support yourself. It’s all, “I’m the authority and if you don’t agree with me the fault must be yours.” Well my dear “oh dear”, life doesn’t work that way! Your whole time on this blog has been one long argument from authority. Your facts are wrong and you can’t sell that here. You can try your pitch for the next thousand years and it won’t fly.
I left you alone for a long time. But eventually you wear out your welcome. Like others before you, you have no interest in honest debate. Your whole tenure here has been one long attempt to shove your point of view down our throat. You willfully misinterpret what people say to you. And you can’t mask any of that with a nice polite demeanor. So I think it’s time, no, past time for you to realize that you aren’t getting anywhere and should quietly call it quits and go home.
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Hi Roy Hogue #135,
I notice that you have answered only one question in my post. OK, I promise you this: if you can give me good reasoning to support assertions that you make, then I will accept your assertions. That’s a pretty good promise, don’t you think? And from now on Roy I will try to be more civil. That doesn’t mean I’ll be agreeable though.
Also Roy, could you please repeat one argument that i make that you think is an “argument from authority”.
Do you want to try addressing the other points in that comment?
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Hi Roy Hogue #135,
You say:
I do not honestly believe that I can change anyone’s beliefs here. I’m certainly not trying to do that.
What I’m trying to do is to see if anyone can convince me of their view. I like to read both sides of the debate and if I’m not convinced I say it, and I say why. I am open to being convinced of anyone’s views, provided that they are scientifically rigorous.
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oh dear #133:
A rapid warming trend since the 1950s? Seriously? It’s official that there was no warming between 1940 and 1970.
Here are a couple of graphs from the IPCC. The black curve is temperature. Tell us where you find a rapid warming trend from the 1950s to 1970.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-9-5.html
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Hi Dagfinn #138,
Thank you for your comment.
I’ll change my assertion to “since about 1970 there has been a rapid warming trend”.
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Each day I get a couple of email in my spam filter. Each day I select them, unread, and mark them as ‘read’. I have no interest in reading them and only do that in order to avoid missing a very occasional false-positive. Oh dear, it is such a waste of time!
How do I tell that an email is spam without reading it? Well, they all have the same characteristics. Even when they try to look different they end up looking the same. The ones in Chinese characters, of course, are a little different, but they can be seen to be spam even hiding behind a foreign language [to me, that is.]
If it weren’t for the few who actually post relevant information here I would have been out of here long ago.
Paul
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Oh Dear:
Thank you for confirming that you know I am correct when I say:
Your confirmation could not be more clear.
A refutation of my statement would consists of one, single, solitary piece of evidence that “supports” the AGW hypothesis.
Is there any such evidence? No.
And you prove that you know of none by
(a) failing to provide any evidence
and
(b) changing the subject.
Your complete respose to my statement is
THAT IS A DIRECT PROOF THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW OF ANY EVIDENCE THAT “SUPPORTS” THE AGW HYPOTHESIS.
And nobody knows the proportion of working climate scientists that support the AGW hypothesis because nobody has conducted such a poll.
97.5% of all assertions from you are made up.
GCMs cannot “detect” anything in the real world. They are constructed from the information, understandings and assumptions of their constructor. So, at best, they indicate the understandings of their constructors.
(I explained this to you previously but you failed to understand it.)
And the GCMs do NOT match observational records.
They are adjusted to ‘fit’ past mean global temperature anomalies, but they are an abysmal faiure at reproducing past mean global temperatures, precipitation, and atmospheric pressure. At local scales they are a complete failure and cannot match past temperature anomalies.
So, not only have you demonstrated that you do not know of any evidence that supports the AGW hypothesis, your red-herrings are falsehoods.
Richard
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On another site I read something with which I entirely agree. : —
The main article was invoking the ‘Precautionary Principle’ and the above quote was one of the responses.
This highlights one aspect of this whole ‘Global Warming’ scam, that the focus is entirely on ‘mitigation‘, i.e. reducing the emission of carbon dioxide,
rather than on adaptation, i.e. taking whatever precautions are needed to cope with the actual changes induced by ‘climate change’ if and when they happen.
There is something totally obscene in this myopic attention to mitigation. This is because the cost of mitigation is many orders of magnitude higher than any measures of adaptation. And since the “Precautionary Principle” is invoked solely on the basis of uncertainty, there is no way of predicting the degree of warming that will take place, even on their assumptions, and the consequences of that unpredictable warming are even less predictable.
Take the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas, said to be potentially all melted by
20352350. Well, perhaps by collapsing the Western economies and transferring all manufacturing to China. India and Russia this may delay the melting by a decade or two, perhaps. Does mitigation make any sense there to anybody? Why wouldn’t it make sense to wait and see if the glaciers do in fact melt.By 2350 it is possible that the technology to desalinate seawater may have advanced sufficiently to supply the area affected by reduced melting ice. At any rate, the cost of dealing with something in 340 years will not be as catastrophic as trying to deal with it in advance by trying, vainly, to control the global climate.
Should any one really have to argue this way? Why have all our politicians lost their heads and gone looney?
Surely common sense dictates that, given a very uncertain prediction of warming, given the even greater uncertainty of secondary effects, given the extreme up-front costs of mitigation, given the uncertainty that mitigation will make a significant difference, given that the costs of adaptation will be orders of magnitude less than mitigation, and given that we may have hundreds of years in which to prepare for ‘the worst’, that governmental policy should be geared entirely towards adaptation and mitigation be entirely ignored.
That would be taking good precautions. The advocated policy is clearly unmitigated risk-taking of the highest order!
Paul
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Surely the Medieval Warm Period would be the shining counterexample. CO2 levels were low, grapes grew in England, vikings farmed in Greenland and Joanne already gave a summary of the other evidence for the MWP here:
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/fraudulent-hockey-sticks-and-hidden-data/
So if CO2 is such a significant driver of global temperature, how can it explain the MWP? The only ways AGW theory can continue to exist are either by denying the MWP completely or going down the track of believing that there was one set of rules for climate 1000 years ago and a whole new set of rules for today. Although two sets of rules might possibly exist, it’s so arbitrary and artificial to depending on that for a theory to operate. I mean, why not three sets of rules, or just invent a rule every time it seems convenient?
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Richard S Courtney @141
One of the family sayings passed down to me by my father, goes, “A man is not a fool because of what he doesn’t know, but because of what he does know as isn’t.”
Solomon wrote, “Answer not a fool according to his folly lest you be like him”, and a little later, “Answer a fool according to his folly lest he be wise in his own eyes.” Solomon was not contradicting himself when he made those seemingly contradictory statements. Like the lights showing the channel in a harbour entrance they indicate two temptations to avoid when dealing with a fool. Avoid their behaviour while leaving them no grounds for their arrogant opinions.
Paul
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Because it is very difficult to make someone understand something when his livelihood depends on not understanding.
Programming, and suitable choice of input data.
You have a GCM that matches up with the MWP and LIA?
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Here’s a web site which compares predictions by the IPCC et al, with actual measurements. Guess what?
Take a look and see for yourself!
Disclaimer : I make no assertions about this site. I’ve just started to read the headlines myself.
Paul
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The Computer Model Farce: Real-World Crisis Proves Models Are Policy Maker’s Worst Nightmare.
Read here.
Being forewarned is being forearmed. Computer models need to be scrapped as foundation of public policy before they do catastrophic harm.
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This is an example of what “oh dear” thinks is “evidence”:
Sorry oh dear; anyone who thinks that what a theory says is evidence for that theory has a cognitive problem — let’s call it Severe Logic Deficiency.
This is typical of your “arguments” — circular logic, argument from authority, argument by blatant assertion, and total denial of any counter-arguments.
The only real consequence of using BS like this here is to clog up the blog (probably your intention) and convince us you are a dumb tool. I encourage everyone else to ding all of o.d.’s posts to get them hidden — will greatly increase the SNR of the thread.
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oh dear @137
The last thing I care about is convincing you of my point of view. Others have presented the necessary references and arguments. You show absolutely no sign of being willing to change your position, your high sounding words notwithstanding.
So let’s cut the crap. I used to dislike the word troll, not wanting to apply labels to people. But the unfortunate truth is that the word fits you right down to the last keystroke you’ve made on this blog. You are a troll, just a trouble maker and time waster.
The comments between your nonsense at 137 and this reply say it for me.
My office window faces east. And as I sat here this morning the sunrise was spectacular. The clouds to the east were on fire. It was beautiful, one of the most gorgeous I’ve seen. It reminded me that this planet has been here for a long time doing whatever it wants to do and completely ignoring the foolishness of mankind. It has maintained an environment hospitable to life for millions of years in spite of catastrophe after catastrophe. No matter what has happened living things have thrived on Earth for millions of years. Humans long ago adapted to every climate on the planet, from the frozen north of Alaska to the deserts of North Africa and the rain forests of Central and South America.
Men have worked in mines where literally it was so hot that ice had to be hauled from far away and put in special chambers where the miners could take a break to cool off (Virginia City Nevada). Men have worked at and near the top of Pikes Peak, 14,400 feet above sea level doing hard manual labor to build a railroad and keep it running. The air there is so thin that they keep oxygen handy because tourists sometimes have trouble when they start to move around at the top. Just for a reference point, the FAA requires pilots of unpressurized aircraft to go on oxygen at and above 12,500 feet.
There is literally no environment where mankind has not gone and stayed.
Now comes AGW and you jackasses expect me to get all excited over what can’t be more than a couple of degrees of change that may or may not happen. And if it does, will come on slowly enough that adaptation will be no harder than it’s ever been. And you support it with doctored up data, lies and distortions of all sorts. I’ll tell you point blank that it’s just a scam designed to get control over people for personal gain and political power. This is so obvious that the Magnolia tree in my front yard can see it. But you can’t. Pitiful!
And yes, I’m getting really fed up with your nonsense. It truly is time for you to fade away gracefully and never be heard from again.
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BobC @ 148 says about Oh Dear:
Bob, Oh dear is a little bit useful because he/she spouts a lot of the same warmist crap as is heard all over.
A new reader here gets to see both that and our replies. Even though the SNR makes it a little difficult, I think that even a casual glance by an inquiring mind will demonstrate (to the new reader) that Oh Dear is failing to convince anyone of AGW.
All this hinges on he/she remaining relatively polite and us not losing our cool (I speak from experience).
Interestingly he/she recently capitulated by no small amount changing his/her claim of steep warming starting at 1950 to 1970! That is a pretty big swing maybe we are making headway. 🙂
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Oh dear,
Can you define what you consider to be a rapid warming trend? The DomeC ice core record shows an RMS change of about 0.8C per century in the 50 year running average. The maximum change in this average is over 2C per century and over the last 10K years, there’s been slightly more cooling than warming.
The ice cores also show that equivalent rate of change in shorter term averages can exceed 3C per century. The shortest term averages in the ice cores are about 20-40 years and available for the most recent 20K years or so.
All of the claims that current change is unprecedented compares changes in short term averages (4-10 years) to changes in long term averages (50 to 1000 year) extracted from ice cores. Can we at least agree that this is an invalid comparison and that changes in long term averages are always slower than than changes in short term averages? While we’re at it, can we also agree that all paleo records reconstruct variable interval long term averages which are fundamentally different from short term changes in the thermometer readings?
George
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Oh dear,
Regarding climate sensitivity. Do you understand that the following 2 systems specified by openloop gain and feedback fraction have the same closed loop behavior?
open loop gain = 1, feedback fraction = .25, closed loop gain = 1.33
open loop gain = 1.5, feedback fraction = -.083, closed loop gain = 1.33
FYI, from Bode, the gain relationship for the simple feedback system used to represent the climate is 1/Go = 1/Gc + f, where Go is the open loop gain, Gc is the closed loop gain and f is the feedback fraction where the sign indicates positive or negative feedback.
Notice that depending on whether the open loop gain is less than or greater than the closed loop gain, the same result can be produced with both positive and negative feedback?
You should know that Hansen et all 1984, Schlesinger 1985 DOE.ER-0237 (republished in part at other times) and all derivative work thereof, implicitly assume unit open loop gain when they apply Bode’s amplifier feedback analysis to the climate system, moreover; this assumption has been fundamental ever since affecting nearly the entire body of peer reviewed climate science literature including all of the IPCC reported analysis. This assumption is made without justification or even acknowledgment, which is a fundamental error, since the open loop gain is demonstrably greater than unity.
Can you see the implication of an assumed unit open loop gain? If the net gain is greater than the open loop gain, there must be net positive feedback, otherwise, there must be net negative feedback. Since the surface is warmer than it would be with unit gain, the assumption of unit open loop gain requires positive feedback. It’s important to recognize that the solution with unit open loop gain is not the only solution that appears to produce the correct answer and other solutions with different open loop gains produce equally valid results. The correct solution is the one whose open loop gain is closest to the climate systems equivalent open loop gain which is the one whose average feedback term is zero and not the one whose average open loop gain is one.
The basic error made by Hansen, Schlesinger and the rest of peer reviewed climate science, is a failure to distinguish between things that affect the open loop gain and effects arising from feedback and they naively lump everything together as feedback. The feedback has a singular purpose, which is to maintain the Earth’s energy balance. To that end, cloud variability and dynamic water vapor absorption constitute feedback effects, but static GHG absorption from CO2, O3, CH4, other trace gases, and the steady state average water vapor absorption and average cloud coverage all contribute to the open loop gain. In such a feedback system with a self generated gain bias, the correct representation has a net feedback of zero. Changes in GHG concentrations and other non H2O related absorption will affect the bias, but such changes are not further affected by feedback, as the net, steady state feedback acting on the climate system is zero.
George
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Good point.
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BobC, George and everyone.
It’s been obvious for some time that the troll(s) simply cannot or will not engage in a rational discussion. Their purpose is solely disruptive. Stand by for yet another blizzard and splattering of links to RC, SS and sundry other of their favorite sites.
Best policy? Don’t engage. It really is like that old “don’t wrestle a pig in #%=?” story.
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oh dear @126:
Any scientist funded by the government is required to release this data if asked — it’s part of the contract you sign (I’ve signed a few, myself). “ClimateGate” emails have numerous instances of scientists conspiring not to do this.
Additionally, many journals (Nature, for instance) require data and algorithms to be made available upon request. You don’t have to do much research to find many instances where climate scientists are refusing to comply. (You do have to do some research, however — winging it with blatant assertions doesn’t hack it. Why don’t you try to educate yourself, instead of just parroting talking points from AGW crowd?)
Actually, these assertions are not falsifiable predictions, but parameter fits to past data. Your ignorance of scientific method is breath taking.
Tell me what is wrong with this theory:
–the warming trend since the 1950s is attributable to the increase in postal rates.
–the warming trends this theory predicts are quantitative (do you even know the meaning of this word? You use it very strangely).
{And, one you forgot — or don’t even realize is necessary}
–the predicted warming rates match the measured ones (much better fit than GCMs give, in fact — GCMs have nearly always over-predicted temperature rises and have had to be “adjusted” a number of times).
AGW theory would be much more interesting (indeed, compelling) if it were able to postdict, say, the last 5000 years of climate history. It has zero skill in that regard, however. The part of climate history it does “explain” is better fit with a straight line.
Well, only if you use his scenario in which CO2 emissions were assumed to have been significantly reduced, and compare it to reality, where CO2 emissions have continued to rise exponentially. Even then, he over-predicts temperature rise — a linear fit is a much better predictor.
OMG! shut down the power plants! Hansen’s model almost equaled the performance of a straight-edge!
Here’s one: The climate is a chaotic system and is inherently unpredictable beyond a short horizon. The only way to prove this false is to exhibit a theory with predictive skill over reasonable time periods. A theory with skill “nearly as good” as a straight-line fit (which would have worked for numerous periods in the past — 800-1000AD, for example) doesn’t hack it.
Their leaked emails, idiot. How many times do you have to be told that? Are you suffering from memory loss? The only reason they weren’t prosecuted for conspiring to violate GB’s FOIA is the statute of limitations (6 months) had run out by the time the emails were leaked.
Instead of just denying that any fraud existed without any justification, try reading the actual emails (link). Don’t be a “Denialist”, o.d. — it just makes you look stupid.
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Well, you have a good point also.
Why don’t you and Mark D get together and settle on a recommendation, and I’ll follow it 🙂
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I realize that I’m just one opinion. But oh dear is plainly here just to be a disruption. I think that by far the best policy from now on is to ignore this one — what shall I call it when there’s no identifiable gender. Everyone’s patience is wearing thin. There is no hope for any change. Any claim that the troll is here to see if we can convince it of our position, as was argued back at me at 149, is exposed as a lie by its own words when an issue was made of Richard Courtney’s association with the coal industry — a dead giveaway of an ulterior motive. We might as well be arguing with a rock. No thank you.
Personally I’ll take the Glenn Tamblyns and John Brookes who can at least hold a conversation at an adult level. I don’t come here to wade through miles of kindergarten level logic every day. And I don’t believe you do either.
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I note with interest that what changed oh dear’s mind was official IPCC doctrine. If that had been found on WUWT for instance, would there have been any change?
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Re: post #155:
I might add that “Hansen’s model almost equaled the performance of a straight-edge” — if you allow him to cheat by using a contra-factual scenario — otherwise, it was much worse.
Not very impressive. Here is a quantitative analysis of the reliability of AGW predictions of climate. The conclusions:
“Model predictions (over multi-year periods) are much poorer than an elementary prediction based on the time average. This makes future climate predictions not credible.”
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GISS temperature chart follows Hansen’s 1981 article quite well, and if you look closely at Fig 7 in Hansen 1981 and then look at the GISS graph you can see a little slight of hand… the actual GISS data shows about 0.2 degrees of warming happened from 1970 to 1980 (i.e. before the paper was written) but in Fig 7 that jump has been removed and the “prediction” starts from around 1975 so at least part of Hansen’s “prediction” had already happened at time of publication.
Besides that, Hansen produces GISS, and there is at least reasonable evidence of tainting in the “global” temperature data (e.g. the Darwin adjustments). The whole deal is over fractions of a degree in a world where summer/winter swings of tens of degrees are normal so giving it a nudge by careful weighting of inputs would be very easy.
Let’s look at the physical predictions made by Hansen 1981 (i.e. the big stuff that is much easier to verify): he predicted the opening of the Northwest Passage to shipping — hasn’t happened (no nuclear powered ice breakers delivering shipments to Siberia don’t count as regular shipping). Hansen predicted rapid sea level rise driven by melting ice sheets, but coastal cities the world over all remain unaffected and our best efforts at measuring sea level rise show only something like a millimeter or two per year. At the current rate in maybe a thousand years it might be a few meters — Hansen predicted 70 meters!
Hansen also predicted that the North pole would be ice free in summer, and that sea ice responds rapidly to climate change. Well the IJIS satellite has been carefully watching the North pole and the change from year to year is not great, nor is there any sort of convincing trend. We are a long way away from an ice-free pole during summer. On the southern side we are seeing more sea ice.
Hansen predicted extended droughts for the USA, and Canada, indicating a permanent shift in local rainfall patterns. This has yet to happen in any way that can be clearly discerned from random fluctuations between drier years and wetter years.
Hansen concluded by predicting “the global warming projected for the next century is of almost unprecedented magnitude”. Well here we are in the next century and the effects of warming are limited to the very edge of what is barely detectable. If the effect was even half as big as Hansen predicted we would not be quibbling over this discussion, everyone would believe it.
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co2isnotevil @152:
George, I would bet that oh dear understood not one word of what you said.
oh dear: If I’m wrong, prove it by paraphrasing George’s argument.
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[SNIP Oh Dear. I started to reply to each point, then realized it was a weasel soup with mostly unsubstantiated assertions, and logical fallacies lacking in direct quotes, or references. There is no evidence discussed (as far as I read anyhow). No observations even mentioned. Just because climate models might be the only way to predict the climate doesn’t mean they CAN predict the climate. Just because those flawed models can’t get the answer ‘right’ without “CO2” is argument from ignorance. I could go on, but it’s a waste of my time. You can try commenting again, but instead of 1500 words of unsubstantiated thoughts, try for one solitary point, backed up with something. The normal rule around here is that only self-editors can post. We don’t have time to tutor or clean up thoughts of those who are disorganised or illogical. Hence if your posts need editing, or only have one valid point per 1000 words, that’s too little value for the cost. Do I make myself clear? If you want to convince us you can think and are an honest commentor (albeit an anonymous coward), quote people exactly. Reference the evidence. Be polite, and don’t waste our time by breaking rules of logic and reason. –JN]
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Blather, blather, blather…
1,487 words
65 paragraphs
137 lines
And all the way back to post 141 to find something to rehash.
All wasted. Oh dear!
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Since this appears to be circling, allow Eli to inject an observation that strongly shows how we are changing the radiative properties of the atmosphere and leads to global warming:
The stratosphere is cooling.
For explanations and links
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2006/11/stratospheric-cooling-rears-its-ugly.html
This is, as they say a smoking gun, because unlike upper trop warming, there is nothing else that can explain it.
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That we know of!
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Oh yeah can’t find the hot spot and that is no problem (still warming) but you can find the cold spot?!?!?!?
When are you going to suggest that Co2 causes ice ages?
I suppose warmists need some good news but this to me is the same old bad, maybe a smoking funeral pyre (for AGW)
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I see we have another halfwit who knows everything. I’ve heard that, nothing else can explain it, line far too many times already. All your inability to explain it means is that you don’t know how to explain it.
When you have a link to this on your site I know I’ve got someone I can write off immediately.
Have a nice day. Oh, and I happen to like Capitalist Imperialist Pigs!
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It’s funny Roy, how these types don’t mind being a Capitalist Imperialist Pig when it comes to their bloated salaries and retirement packages on the public purse.
Somehow, in their greedy little minds, that makes it all OK.
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Looks like oh dear went bye-bye.
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Could just be sleepy-bye-byes.
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Eli Rabbett:
At #163 you provide both a clear example of the ‘argument from ignorance’ fallacy and a falsehood when you write:
Firstly, the idea that “there is nothing else that can explain it” was applied to witches and crop failures. That use of the ‘argument from ignorance’ fallacy worked well, don’t you think?
Secondly, the stratospheric cooling is only part of the ‘smoking gun’ for AGW. The pattern indicative of AGW is
(a) warmer troposphere at altitude
AND
(b) cooler troposphere.
See Figure 9.1 in Chapter 9 of IPCC AR4 to observe this expected pattern.
But the warmer troposphere at altitude has not happened: this is known as the missing ‘hot spot’.
So, cooling stratosphere with no warmer troposphere at altitude is not explained by AGW.
And you link to your web site as justification for your falsehood. That figures because your web site only exists to present falsehoods that are swallowed by the gullible.
Richard
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“The AGW theory has uncertainties and there are gaps in the knowledge, but the theory is useful”
Oh dear,
‘useful’ is not good enough to raise our taxes and destroy the middle class
‘useful’ is not good enough for us to be governed by an unelected global regime
‘useful’ is not good enough to override serious dissent and to buy out scientific integrity
‘useful’ is not good enough to allow governments’ gratuitous assent to be bought
Being fervent on a micro-issue without a clear global overview, can lead to myopia. Beware.
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Mark @169,
There really were all those words, paragraphs and lines one post up from where I put that litany of excesses, now numbered 162. So “oh dear” was certainly taken down by Jo since I don’t think any of the moderators would do it without her OK.
[The last post by Oh Dear was placed in the pending approval bin by a moderator not Jo. She may review and re-post, not re-post or re-post with edits as time permits.] ED
Numbers are courtesy of Microsoft Word.
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oh dear claims:
Let me save you some trouble. Since you do not respond to (or use) logic, there is no chance that you can be convinced of anything here. The only evidence that you can accept new data is when someone pointed out that the IPCC disagreed with you.
I suggest you simply wait until the IPCC issues a retraction (or disbands) and stop bothering people who actually know how to think.
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Mark,
Ever so! Dishonesty doesn’t surprise me anymore when I see a new low in depravity. And I wonder if some of it isn’t just abysmal ignorance of reality.
I only have the power to speak my mind to a few people I can reach and I have the power to vote. So I do what I can. And both of those may hang in the balance in the next two U.S. elections.
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ED
Thanks.
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One of the latest guest posts on ‘What’s up with that?’
Nature hates straight lines
Posted on October 25, 2010 by Willis Eschenbach,
casts doubt on one of the most central of the assumptions of the IPCC models, that of the linearity of the relationship between changes in forcing and the response of temperature at the surface.
It is a good read, with no complex mathematics, simple observations and references to what anybody can observe. The astonishing thing that the author highlights is the total lack of any real-world justification for this most central assumption, when nearly everything we know would lead to the presumption that non-linearity would be a better assumption.
Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest!
Paul
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I finally got the time to start reading the Oh dear comment in moderation. (#163).
[SNIP Oh Dear. I started to reply to each point, then realized it was a weasel soup with mostly unsubstantiated assertions and logical fallacies lacking in direct quotes or references. There is no evidence discussed (as far as I read anyhow). No observations even mentioned. Just because climate models might be the only way to predict the climate doesn’t mean they CAN predict the climate. Just because those flawed models can’t get the answer ‘right’ without “CO2” is argument from ignorance. I could go on, but it’s a waste of my time. You can try commenting again, but instead of 1500 words of unsubstantiated thoughts, try for one solitary point, backed up with something. The normal rule around here is that only self-editors can post. We don’t have time to tutor or clean up thoughts of those who are disorganized or illogical. Hence if your posts need editing, or only have one valid point per 1000 words, that’s too little value for the cost. Do I make myself clear? If you want to convince us you can think and are an honest commentor (albeit an anonymous coward), quote people exactly. Reference the evidence. Be polite, and don’t waste our time by breaking rules of logic and reason. –JN]
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Hi Jo Nova (RE deletion of my comment #163):
Censoring a comment says more about the censor than the comment itself.
You’ve deleted an admittedly long, but inoffensive post, because apparently:
But Jo you never normally edit posts. You’ve sometimes deleted statements from other comments I’ve made (presumably because those statements antagonised you) but this is a different situation altogether. All I did was carefully break down Richard S courtney’s comment #142, showing in particular that his arguments were based on fallacious reasoning and mental trickery.
I wonder why Richard never responded (he saw it, after all he responded to Eli’s comment which was after mine).
Given the circumstances, I think it’s plausible that a third-party approached you personally and begged you to take that post down.
[You don’t get it. I don’t normally edit posts because I rely on people editing their own. Of course if you look you’ll find a few illogical or insulting comments from other people make it through. But when those illogical posters write long vacuous thesis, a post a hundred comments, that hit’s a tipping point. Finally I can’t ignore them, I’m forced to waste my time reading unreasoned stuff instead of writing posts for thousands to read. It’s a simple cost benefit analysis. You are wasting my time, hence, unless you show you understand the situation and prove yourself invaluable by a/ writing well organised, short, referenced comments, and b/ not dominating discussion, I have to be practical and simply say, no, sorry, you the cowardly anonymous “oh dear” doesn’t cut it, and reach the minimum bar of writing logical comments. Now I find this morning you have 13 comments in the folder. I’m sorry, I’m not even going to read them. I have real newspapers and bloggers to read, people with names and reputations. Last chance Oh Dear. Explain what argument from ignorance is, and how it applies to climate models, and promise me you won’t use it again. Then I might let you post. And as for your third party delusions approaching me? Are you kidding? You have to show me you are not going to waste my time, or tax the time of my volunteer moderators too much. — JN]
(I skimmed through those pending comments and I can say you made the right decision.They are irritating and generally a waste of time because he is not here to participate honestly.) CTS
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I’m trying to help “oh dear”.
I set the benchmark:
Explain what argument from ignorance is, and how it applies to climate models
He replied and showed that he does not know what argument from ignorance is. Oh Dear – go look it up and try again. Google the phrase in ” quotes ” so you get a better answer. As I said, we’re not here to tutor, though if oh-dear knew how ignorant he was and was polite, no doubt people here would be happy to help. But someone who doesn’t know the basics and fills up reams of conversation space with conmpletely unjustified derisory, mocking tones doesn’t meet the basic standards.
Oh Dear, You’ve had 100 chances to say something that mattered. The best way to get blocked is to waste my time.
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Oh Dear he doesn’t realize how lucky he is to have Jo Anne provide a meaningful answer at all.
Oh Dear provides an insult to Ms Nova and other people, and receives a meaningful answer in any event – THAT shows a commitment to a pursuit of the unvarnished truth.
Go to any of the global warmer websites – and even a hint of something “sceptical” will get one edited out immediately followed by some of the worst insults imaginable from the claque
If I had a web log I don’t I would make people state their correct names and prove it and state where they are from
that’s just me and my preferences, I guess, I hate this “attack under a cloak of anonymity” nonsense
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Brian G Valentine: # 182
I suspect you would get fewer well informed posts, though.
If we don’t consider the trolls, most of the people who post here give useful insights, either because they happen to be specialists in the field, or because they are well read lay-people with a closer appreciation of the likely social and economic impacts of attempting to change the climate for profit.
Others like “Paul” are either very erudite contributors, or widely read editors. Either way, they provide useful input to the conversation.
But some of the knowledgeable and well-reasoned people on this site probably hold personal views that are contrary to those held by their clients, or employers, or even other family members and friends. For the sake of social and commercial harmony, they choose to hide behind anonymity. Why not? It makes for a better mix of views.
I see this site as a masked ball, where the vast majority of participants are wearing a disguise of some description (with a few notable exceptions, such as yourself), but everybody is still civil and polite to each other.
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chooma has agreed to help a friend in the purgatory of moderation. chooma is anostic on this issue and will ensure there is no “derisory tone”.
@181. chooma respectfully disagrees:
1. the models [GCMs] don’t have projections that precisely match reality, therefore they are worthless
The premise ignores all models (indeed all models which exist) that do not reflect reality perfectly, such as Newton’s Laws of Motion, that are undoubtedly useful.
2. Our back-of-the-envelope calculations show that the GCMs are worthless
A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation oversimplifies the feedbacks, the atmosphere (usually by assuming it is a “glass slab”), and cuts out all the coupling effects (between atmosphere, ocean, ice, land). Several pages of calculations aren’t much better – the climate cannot be modeled reliably in such an oversimplified way. So the simple calculation doesn’t consider all the relevant possibilities.
3. There is no way of knowing what future temperatures are going to be, hence we cannot trust the projections of GCMs
The evidence the statement ignores is that the GCMs are validated (i.e. they are run against sections of the observational record and their projections are acceptable), and that their projections agree with new observed temperatures.
4. GCM simulations are based on the assumptions of the modellers, therefore they have assumptions which render their significant conclusions worthless due to circular reasoning
This statement ignores that useful models have conclusions that are not circular. Sure you can retrieve a fundamental assumption from a model (e.g. derive newton’s second law from newton’s second law), but most conclusions from useful models are not circular.
5. the projections of certain types of models were used to ground European airlines after a volcano, which must have been the wrong thing to do, therefore GCMs are worthless
The evidence being ignored is that there are a large number of models that have been used to make projections that everyone found acceptable.
[Chooma, thanks for the polite response, but you miss the point too. These are not examples of Argument From Ignorance, which is what I asked for. These appear to be overstated strawmen, the kind of arguments that people wish were the “best” ones or only ones skeptics make. If someone dominates threads, and posts long comments which break laws of reason, I need to know they are learning the basics of reasoning so they might be able to join the forum without wasting our time. – JN]
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Chooma,
I must take exception in your trust in models, especially the kinds of GCM’s used for long term climate predictions.
If you want to simulate Newton’s laws, you code up Newtons laws in a virtual environment and let the simulation run. The simulator will behave in the exact manner prescribed by Newton and an experiment performed in the real world and the virtual world will get the same results. However, if you model a virtual environment with a different value for the Gravitational constant, the model will behave in a logical way which is completely consistent with Newtons laws, but the results will not be reproducible by reality, This represents the state of the art in climate modeling, where we think we have most of the equations right, but there are hundreds (or thousands) of constants and initial conditions in the models whose values must be estimated.
Modeling feedback is particularly tricky with a GCM. In fact, there should be no explicit feedback in the model and it should all be implicit, letting the low level action of fluid dynamics operate in a way such that feedback emerges. The analogy here would be to simulate General Relativity in order to see Newton’s laws emerge. This is where GCM modelers arrogantly think they are modeling from, but in fact, they aren’t anywhere close to this level of understanding. Instead, they fabricate a set of presumed relationships that assume strong positive feedback and tweak the parameters around them to force the behavior to what they believe it to should be in the short term and then base long term predictions on running the model. This is what garbage in, garbage out means.
I’d like you to go back and read the abstracts of a few of Hansen’s papers (it hardly matters which ones). If you pay careful attention, you will often find words to the effect, ‘Our GCM’s which assume CAGW, predict CAGW’.
George
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Bravo Jo, for censoring “oh dear”. I’ve seen his tactics on many blogs — post reams of junk and dominate the conversation, eventually causing all serious commentors to give up and go away. Sort of a verbal “denial of service” attack.
I would say: give would-be trolls a few chances to respond with logical engagement (like our favorite trolls often do), or out the door. If you want to dominate the conversation, you have to do it with facts and logic. (Impossibly high bar for the AGW crowd, I agree.)
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PS: I couldn’t resist — a late note injected into #101:
Oh dear asserts AGW is not a religion because it’s based on evidence.
Evidence? Crickey. Make sure you let the IPCC know about the empirical evidence you found for warming greater than 1.2 degrees. Tell Dr Glikson. Andi Pitman, Matthew England… “Misrepresentation?” lol –JN
I didn’t even insist “oh dear” apologize for wasting our time, but I gather asking him to accurately describe a well known fallacy was too much.
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Hi Joanne,
Thank you for taking the necessary steps in moderating ‘oh dear’. I also found myself not wanting to contribute to the discussion when it was being constantly bombarded with repeated propaganda from elsewhere.
I think that many are taken in by the references to peer-reviewed articles and then mistakenly equating that with ‘science’. It has been shown that up to 90% of published scientific papers, in the field of medical research, are subsequently disproved or otherwise found wanting in some respect. I could be wrong, but my guess is that an equal, if not greater, proportion of scientific papers in the field of climate research are similarly flawed. Hence there is plenty of ammunition to fire at sceptics and say, “There you are, peer-reviewed science tells us so!”
Meanwhile, real scientific evidence supporting the theory is hard to come by and the pseudo-science of model runs takes the place of the lacking evidence. This adds to the conviction of the naive that there is an abundance of evidence supporting the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming.
Have you noticed how much of the discussion takes the form of a narrative? Over on ClimateAudit they keep reminding us to ‘keep your eyes on the pea’ in allusion to conjuring tricks which attempt to divert the observer’s attention while moving the pea. This is the sort of trick that is constantly being used to prevent all but the most astute from discerning the subtle differences in what is being asserted in different places.
I appreciate your clear thinking and fearless engagement in this debate. Your integrity stands you in good stead.
Paul
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I have heard previously about a series of articles that eventually became a book entitled ‘The Deniers’ and while reading a review of the book have discovered that the series is available on-line at http://www.canada.com/
So far this one stands out as the most revealing of the culture and objectives prevailing at the IPCC : —
The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science
While I believe that the proper resolution of the disputed claims should be via scientific analysis of data collected from the real world, it may be useful as an adjunct to have some insight into the nature of those propounding the alarmist message that humans are causing catastrophic global warming. The ideological and political aspects of the debate should not be ignored since it is these which will determine the practical outcome of this debate in which ‘science’ and truth have been the first casualties.
Paul
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There is another article on this topic, by the same science journalist in The Guardian: “‘Science journalists have forgotten how to be journalists’”.
The article includes quotes from an interview with the Chair of the Association of British Science Writers, Connie St Louis. St Louis says the following.
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