Most of the results reported in peer reviewed literature in medicine are mere artefacts of poor methodology, despite being done to more exacting standards than climate studies. There are calls in the medical literature for all data to be made public and for higher P values to be required. (Yes please say skeptics everywhere). Miller and Young recommend that observational studies don’t be taken at all seriously until they are replicated at least once. That would have ruled out the original HockeyStick two times over.
Even the absolute best medical papers are wrong 20% of the time, but mere observational studies (like climate research) failed 80 – 100% of the time. These studies of papers demonstrate why anyone who waves the “Peer Review” red flag is in denial of the evidence — “Peer Review” is not part of the scientific method. It’s a form of argument from authority. A fallacy of reasoning is still a fallacy, no matter how many times it is repeated. Those who claim it is essential or rigorous are not scientists, no matter what their government-given title says.
GEN, Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News, May 1, 2014, Point of View
Are Medical Articles True on Health, Disease?
Sadly, Not as Often as You Might Think
S. Stanley Young | Henry I. Miller, M.D
How many ways can a reported result fail?
Science works only when experiments are reproducible. If an experiment cannot be replicated, both the scientific enterprise and those who depend upon its results are in trouble. Driven by the realization that experiments surprisingly often do not replicate, the issue of claims in scientific papers is receiving increasing scrutiny. Given that biomedical research is one of the most important goals of the scientific enterprise, it is especially important to know how well the claims that result from clinical studies hold up.
Observational studies are mere “data mining” they say, while RCT (randomized controlled trials) are the gold standard. Neither was producing very useful results but observational studies were especially poor. By its nature, most climate studies are observational.
Observational studies could be replicated 0% of the time.
Young and Karr1 found 12 articles in prominent journals in which 52 claims coming from observational studies were tested in randomized clinical trials. Many of the RCTs were quite large, and most were run in factorial designs, e.g., vitamin D and calcium individually and together, along with a placebo group. Remarkably, none of the claims replicated in the direction claimed in the observational studies; in five instances there was actually statistical significance in the opposite direction.
Ioannidis looked at highly cited (supposedly the most important papers) and found that RCT’s were replicated 67% of the time (which is still a 37% failure rate) but observational studies only replicated one time in 6 (16%).
He remarked that this was not good enough:
Replication rates of 0.0%,1 67.9%, or 16.6%,4 are unacceptable. Clearly the standard p-value of <0.05 as a measure of statistical significance is not a reliable indicator that a result will replicate.
They discuss problems with design of experiments, data mining, and modeling, all of which apply to climate studies (and then some):
Items 4, 5, 10 and 11: Journals generally require a p-value <0.05 to merit consideration for publication, but because they do not require investigators to make datasets available, there may be an incentive to manipulate the process to get a p-value that “qualifies.” There is general agreement that fabricating data is fraud, but is it legitimate to ask hundreds of questions and/or look at thousands of models and not show how these choices affect the resulting p-values and claims?
The experimental “results” can be created through adjustments but that process is hidden from the reader — ain’t that just the way with climate models and then some?
Item 5: “Multiple modeling” provides the analyst with the flexibility to manipulate the data in order to get a p-value <0.05. For example, the analysis can be adjusted using linear models to make treatment groups more similar; with 10 covariates there are 1024 possible ways to perform this adjustment. Patient matching can be done in a number of ways. But such subtleties are largely hidden from the reader.
Statistical significance of “p <0.05” doesn’t mean much:
Even in the best randomized controlled trials (curiously run by industry), 20% of the papers are probably wrong. Presumably non-industry means “government funded” where things are twice as bad, and 40% of those were wrong.
“There have been claims that using a p-value cutoff at 0.05 is not sufficiently stringent.6 RCTs used to support drug approval require two studies with p-value <0.05 for an effective p-value ~0.0025. Industry-funded RCTs replicate with a frequency of about 78.6%, while other RCTs, typically using a single p-value <0.05, replicate 57.1% of the time.
Observational Studies – where super tiny p values still mean very little
There are so many ways an observational study can go wrong.
There appear to be systemic problems with the way that observational studies are commonly conducted. Virtually all of the problems listed in the Table can plague observational studies and, of course, any one alone or a combination of them could wreck a study. In light of multiple testing and multiple modeling, a p-value <0.05 is not nearly rigorous enough.6 Five of the six observational studies in Ioannidis4 reported p-values of 0.0001, 0.001, 0.003, 0.008, and 0.015 (the 6th study was a case series and reported no p-value). Most of these p-values are small enough that they would be considered either “strong” or even “decisive” evidence by statistics professor Valen E. Johnson,6 but in all these cases, well-designed RCTs failed to confirm the claims made in these observational studies.
The journals and the funding agencies are part of the problem
It is popular to blame investigators for these problems, but the culpability must be shared by the managers of the scientific process: funding agencies and journal editors. At a minimum, funding agencies should require that datasets used in papers be deposited so that the normal scientific peer oversight can occur. Journal editors need to reexamine their policy of being satisfied with a p-value <0.05, unadjusted for multiple testing or multiple modeling. Editors are using “quality by inspection” (p-value <0.05) rather than the more modern “quality by design.”
By essentially requiring a p-value <0.05, editors are directly responsible for publication bias, because most negative studies are not published.
REFERENCES
1 Young SS, Karr A. Deming, data and observational studies: A process out of control and needing fixing. Significance 2011;September:122–126.
2 Prinz F, SchlangeT, Asadullah K. Believe it or not: how much can we rely on published data on potential drug targets? Nature Rev. Drug Discov. 2011;10:712-713.
3 Begley CG, Ellis LM. Raise standards for preclinical cancer research. Nature 2012;483:531-533.
4 Ioannidis JPA. Contradicted and initially stronger effects in highly cited clinical research. JAMA 2005;294:218–229.
5 Madigan D, Ryan PB, Schuemie M. Does design matter? Systematic evaluation of the impact of analytical choices on effect estimates in observational studies. Therapeutic Advances in Drug Safety. 2013;4:53-62.
6 Johnson VE. Revised standards for statistical evidence. PNAS 2013;110:19313-19317.
7 Young and Miller (2014) Are Medical Articles True on Health, Disease? GEN, Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News, May 1, 2014, Point of View, (Vol. 34, No. 9)
My benchmark, my gold standard actually is the paper published in the Lancet regarding civilian deaths in Iraq. It is actually the seed of my climate skepticism as it quantified how ideology or npolitical bias can, in my opinion, completely corrupt scientific practice.
Leaving aside what one thought of the US led invasion, this paper was prepared and published, deliberately the author(s) later confirmed, in the lead up to the 2004 US presidential election and clearly had a political motive.
The study purported to show that a mean of about 100,00 civilians had been killed ( althouth the 95/8% confidence interval range was about 8,000 to over 200,000 which in itself says a lot.) It turned out that this was extrapolated from a mere 21 deaths reported in the sample interviews after 50 deaths were discarded as they came from the one location, Falluja. In other words the sampling plan was so ridiculously imnappropriate to the likely distribution of casualties it could throw up such a massive ‘outlier’. The obvious question is that were there any other dubious samples in the remnant 21. Of course the media ran with ‘more than 200,000 civilian deaths may have occurred’, ironically peddling a ‘sexed up’ spin on the paper’s ‘results’.
That this piece of politicised crap tells you everything you need to know about the scientific credit of the authors and the Lancet’s editorial and peer review processes. The politics of the circumstances do not justify what I think was little more than scientific fraud.
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And yet ‘the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser said the survey’s methods were “close to best practice” and the study design was “robust”…
‘Another expert agreed the method was “tried and tested”…the survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished, it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones.”‘
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_politics/6495753.stm
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Ursus Augustus:
‘ It is actually the seed of my climate skepticism as it quantified how ideology or npolitical bias can, in my opinion, completely corrupt scientific practice.’
–
Philip Shehan:
‘And yet ‘the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser said the survey’s methods were “close to best practice” and the study design was “robust”… ‘
–
–
These two statements appear to be entirely consistent.
150
Hmmmm…. best practice… this is a term used to determine policy and procedure based on KPI’s, which of course are indicators of productivity so is all based on economics.
10
bullocky, It is the standard practice of “skeptics” when confronted with an opinion they do not like to impune the source’s honesty and integrity.
You are always on at me to substantiate claims, while failing to do so yourself. Then you complain about the length of the substantiations and that it is all too hard for you to understand.
Kindly substantiate your baseless imputations regarding the chief scientist for the UK Ministry of Defence.
08
“standard practice….. to impugn the source”.
Ministry of Defence?
Do you not know that the first casualty of any war is truth?
00
Philip Shehan,
I was clearly referring to the 1983 report by the same authors not the later one so lets get our basic facts right before we start trawling for quotes in rebuttal.
As for the second report, the figures then estimated are, similarly to the first one, several times those of other estimates and perhaps what is really in evidence that the “tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones” gives dodgy results at best, the ‘fog of war’ and all that. In other words the techniques used in ‘conflict zones’ are fundamentally compromised due to the dangerous environment. While they may be ‘tried and tested’ and may actually be the only method practicable and safe enough for the interviewers, they are simply defective in their ability to deliver a reasonably accurate estimate. Lets face it “best practice” in a war zone can mean something a very, very long way short of best practice in peace time.
The bbc report you link to is far more nuanced that you suggest and reported MOD comments including:-
“However, the Lancet figures are much higher than statistics from other sources, which only goes to show how estimates can vary enormously according to the method of collection.
“There is considerable debate amongst the scientific community over the accuracy of the figures.”
“The study design is robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to “best practice” in this area, given the difficulties of data collection and verification in the present circumstances in Iraq.”
‘Cannot be rubbished’
One of the documents just released by the Foreign Office is an e-mail in which an official asks about the Lancet report: “Are we really sure the report is likely to be right? That is certainly what the brief implies.”
The reply from another official is: “We do not accept the figures quoted in the Lancet survey as accurate. ”
In the same e-mail the official later writes: “However, the survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished, it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones.
My thoughts then go to such circumstances also being a great opportunity to produce a sexed up study because it is so easy to salt the data and the inherent uncertainty drives up the upper CI level.
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Ursus Augustus:
What 1983 invasion of Iraq are you talking about?
The MOD comment concerns the 2003 invasion and subsequent conflict.
Certainly the Lancet article is open to dispute. Never said it wasn’t.
However, the fact that a Foreign Office official of the government that ordered the invasion says for public consumption that they do not accept the figures as accurate is hardly a slam dunk rebuttal. It’s his job to put the Blair government line. In the words of Mandy Rice Davies, “He would say that wouldn’t he.”
But you wrote:
“My benchmark, my gold standard actually is the paper published in the Lancet regarding civilian deaths in Iraq. It is actually the seed of my climate skepticism as it quantified how ideology or npolitical bias can, in my opinion, completely corrupt scientific practice.”
I reaffirm that there are legitimate criticisms that can be made of the paper. Yours is not one of them.
The fact that people in the MOD in a position to assess the methodology are prepared in internal documents to declare the survey’s methods “close to best practice”, “robust”, “cannot be rubbished” and is a “tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones” means that your gold standard for impropriety is decidedly tinny.
08
My mistake, 2003 invasion is correct.
There were two papers published in the Lancet, the first in October 2004 (immediately before the US election) and the second in October 2006. The second paper was by 4 of the 5 original authors and sampled 47 clusters of households vs 33 in the first. The clusters were chosen to be of households close by each other as expressly reported in the second paper.
The results were 98,000 deaths (8000 – 194,000) in 2003 and 654695 deaths (392,979 – 942,636) in 2006.
The MOD comment clearly concerned the second paper referring to “655,000” and being published in March 2007. Taken together, the MOD comments were clearly equivocal to say the least and quite unlike your ‘sexed up’, selectively edited extracts.
As to the method, it was so flawed that the first survey threw up the massive Falluja ‘outlier’ and it is clear that if you had a cluster located at a scene of significant violence then it is likely that you will record an ‘outlier’. That is a flaw in the methodology as far as getting an accurate result is concerned. There were too few sample sites to avoid the problem. The basic methodology of “cluster sample survey” may well be ‘tried and true’ but the selection of the number and location of clusters to avoid outliers or even deliberate seeding of data (by say targeting clusters at areas of known violence) is what is material.
Given the clear political agenda of at least the lead authors and the potential for nod and wink alignment of agendas (people in Iraq in 2004 – 2006 with an anti US agenda? Who’d a thunk it?) and say cluster selection, the papers can have no credit. Personally I think they were little more than a deliberate fraud.
10
PS
Philip, I reckon you should ry to get published in the Lancet, sport. You seem like their kind of author.
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No, its more of a journal for clinical medicine, not biomedical science.
00
On the nail and quite well understood by genuine scientists.
And it’s also time to cease obsessing over putative associations, a monumentally fashionable, and endlessly funded past time, both in climastrology and epidemiology, where relative values are preferred over absolute values, as they are inevitably catastrophic sounding, or at the very least, alarmist.
Relativism, like consensus is little more than politics and needs to cease in science. Relativism (change) should only be cited in conjunction with absolute values (before and after)
Big H/T to Sir Austin Bradford Hill who currently holds the record for rotation in his casket.
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I bet there are plenty of other issues as well. Who would want to replicate work done by others? Firstly it isn’t original, and if a contrary result is found, then will the author really want to go against a colleague in the trade? After all, this person may end up peer reviewing their work later on… especially if the new result goes against the general orthodoxy.
As an economist I can see plenty of avenues fraught with issues … it is easy to see how consensus can be both wrong and persistent. For peer review to be more effective it must be double-blind for starters. Better again if the editor cannot chose the reviewers, because the editor might introduce bias that way as well. Like any system, it works well until you bring humans into the equation. They are such illogical and emotional creatures.
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Wow … marked down within minutes… I guess an illogical human must have strolled by…
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You are correct that no scientist (or funding body) wants to waste time and resources simply replicating other people’s work.
If a scientist has reason to think there is something wrong with a result or work leading on from published results shows the intital result is suspect, then it will investigated and if found to be wrong will be challenged in the literature.
You are quite incorrect that scientists will be unwilling to challenge material already published in the literature.
I have done this more than once and you get extra brownie points for doing so.
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Pig’s bum! You get slandered and harassed from the field!
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ooo.. Philip got some brownie points..
Did you get some cookies as well ?
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Brownie points for naming “deniers”.
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No James, for correcting the value for the nuclear quadrupole coupling constants of molybdenum 95 and molybdenum 97 as one example.
I did not set out to correct this value for the sake of it.
My work in nuclear magnetic resonance spectra of these nuclei gave linewidths that seemed far to small for the published values of the quadrupole moments. Linewidths give information about the structure and motion of the molecule in which the molybdenum atom is located.
So I did a study which reduced the magnitude of the constant by about a factor of 10, which reduced the expected value of the linewidths by about 100, consistent with what I had been observing.
14
Like all scientist I hope you are ready for the day when a new method or theory arises that will ultimate show that all your work was unnecessary.
That fact should be spelled out to all scientists.
Nothing that science finds is an absolute, and everything science knows is subject to revision.
30
Yes tomomason I am indeed prepared for that day.
In fact has already occured where a later study contradicted my findings on the origin of the electric field gradient in molecules with octahedral symetry where ideally it should be zero. Or so the authors of the later study claim. I am prepared to argue the toss with those authors but my study on that was published 30 years ago when I was a PhD student and I have kind of “moved on”. (Seems a remarkable coincidence that the quadropole coupling constant for Mo(CO)6 in the solid state should be the same as that momentarily produced by solvent molecule collisions in a Mo(CO)6 solution.)
You don’t need to spell that out to me or any other scientist.
Happens all the time. The important thing is that your own study and findings, even if later superceded, was logically and methodically and carefully carried out with the understanding, information and techniques available at the time. Even better if it is aclaimed as a very clever pice of work, as mine was.
02
You obviously know what technical rigour is then Philip so I am bemused that you seem to accept what is just sloppy work without proper attention to detail so readily. Methinks you have an ideological side to you as well. That said, it is lovely to have you out here in the real world, getting some fresh air and a dose of reality. Take the skepticism you get here and have a good hard look at some of the things you think are correct.
10
“so I am bemused that you seem to accept what is just sloppy work without proper attention to detail so readily.”
Certainly has me puzzled.. His continued use of massively corrupted data sets is sure not the sign of a rational scientist.
And his inability to understand such things as “events” and “break points” and to keep putting irrelevant and meaningless lines straight through them, really makes me wonder just how much of his mind he has “lost”.
Philip.. Get outside and enjoy the world.. while your mind still can. !
10
When did “replicable” get removed from the process. Too bad it costs money to replicate. That’s how we find errors. Or is it that the goal is avoid finding errors? On this one I have to say that not doing repeated studies to verify a finding is just very, very bad science.
30
I am surprised Phillip that you have got a whole load of thumbs down for your comment. It is well spotted that a British Government Chief Scientist coming out in support of clearly rubbish science because it supported the the party line. It has happened a number of times since in the area of climate.
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This comment should be linked to 1.1.
You did make a good comment there Phillip. But given a sample of the rest, I think that was an inadvertent error on your part.
50
That’s fine if you can get it published. I have tried and failed. Not because of methodology, in fact the work was applauded by two independant referees, but because the Editor simply refused to publish. So the descent through impact factors to a lowly journal, which published the work. A couple of years later I learn at a conference that an eminent university institution in Canada is working on the same project and I asked one of the lead researchers whether they had seen my work…….
I provided them with the citation and I eventually had a pleasant email acknowledging the work and advising its inclusion in their own citations.
This problem is clearly far, far worse in climastrological studies.
70
Congratulations on your success.
Professor Rick Trebino’s experience was remarkably dissimilar.
Note that he is no friend of climate scepticism.
He wrote it up in an article called “How to publish a scientific essay in 123 easy steps.”
The .pdf version I have linked to contains his addendum and addendum to the addendum as well.
I’m delighted to hear of your experience, which indicates that the system is working the way it should. Yet Professor Trebino asserts that in fact it’s deeply flawed, and cites his own experience.
How do I decide between the two experiences as to which represents the usual situation? Professor Trebino’s description in his addendum of the structural flaw of the system and the way they should be fixed,
10
A clear explanation of why climate science should always be described as ‘climate science’.
If you want funding for research, it will rarely be given unless the conclusion is promised to be “global warming/climate change/whatever is worse than we thought” or “when global warming occurs, this will be the catastrophic consequence.”
With little or no evidence of global warming anywhere over the past 15 years, alarmists increasingly have to rely on dodgy biased models trying to forecast something impossibly chaotic and which need to have have pre-determined results of CAGW to be funded. If the peer review process was really working, the results of almost every one of those computer generated models on future climate would never see the light of day.
The bottom line is: i) it costs us almost $1.0 billion per year, ii) our future energy supplies are becoming increasingly unreliable and expensive, and iii) widespread energy poverty looms, all because the peer review policy does not work. Not surprisingly, it is all too often deservedly referred to as pal review, which is why the likes of Michael Mann are not huddling in obscurity.
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Is that right. And you proved that by writing it in a blog post, eh?
Too funny.
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Wow what an intelligent scathing comment I’m sure Jo feels like throwing it all in right now, please stop oh mighty troll!
If you want to peer review sarcasm start with the above loser.
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lol.. we have had the clown, the fool… and now we get the idiot. !!
101
And the monkey has also made an appearance.
31
Chester, you are correct and there is nothing to stop those advocating a “free market” in ideas to start a blog or a hard copy journal where everybody can publish anything they want.
The will need to be prepard put up every item however half baked from anyone who has a pet theory or point of view whatever their experience qualifications or understanding of the subject.
They will be inundated with sludge, among which there may be one or two worthwhile studies. No one will bother wading through all the dross to find something that may be worthwhile.
Serious scientists will continue to submit their work to prestigious peer reviewed journals.
Publications, online or hard copy, with no standards whatsoever as to what gets put up will lose out in the credibility stakes.
But no-one is stopping anyone from doing so. Go ahead all you publishing entrepeneurs out there.
018
“They will be inundated with sludge, ”
Like you do to this forum . 🙂
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Griss, I loved the “tried to be mandarin but turned out a lemon” comment this morning but this is not the correct reply.
GEN has been around since 1981 from a small publisher. Adelaide uni library has a subscription. Probably a good idea to ask somebody from micro biology rather than Philip whether its any good.
Do you know anyone, Jo?
51
Vic, Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News is probably very good at what it does, but it does not appear to be a journal for the publication of peer reviewed research. As it’s title suggests, it is a news magazine, similar to Chemical Engineering News, with which I am familiar.
It does not appear in a search of the science citation index:
http://science.thomsonreuters.com/cgi-bin/jrnlst/jlsearch.cgi?PC=K&Error=1
Consequently, its impact factor is a modest 0.084 (2012)
compared with 51.7 for the top ranked medical journal, The New England Journal of Medicine and 3.1 for the randomly selected Canadian Journal of cardiology.
http://www.bioxbio.com/if/html/GENET-ENG-BIOTECHN-N.html
09
What are you trying to say, its not worth parroting?
It was published by a journal that universities subscribe to. You are not wasting your time reading it and putting forward a proper rebuttal. Do it or drivel somewhere else (and read a stats book while you’re at it).
40
Vic, you wanted to know about the journal in question. I provided you with information on it from recognised sources. I said that it was probably a good publication. And still you complain.
08
A sensible rebuttal or where it was published is irrelevant.
40
Vic, I thought we were discussing the publication Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
Rebuttal of what? Where what was published?
06
The reason that Jo cited the paper.
20
“will lose out in the credibility stakes’
sort of like “Nature Climate Change”, hey.
51
Nature Climate Change has an impact factor of 14.472, the highest for environmental science journals.
010
That is not inconsistent with it being full of poor quality scholarship. In the USSR I am sure that there were leading scholarly journals in various aspects of Marxism that had a higher impact at the time, and a much stricter peer review process, than any climate journal has today. Yet, when communism fell they were in the rubbish bin of history.
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Excellent point, Kevin.
10
Philip
Impact factors are just a glorified marketing tool used by Journals. They are meaningless way to get a measure of the quality of what they publish.
70
Ross, Impact factors are a measure of how much notice people take of publications, measured by the number of times articles in the journal are cited by others. They are not compiled by the journals themselves. As for their use as a marketing tool, certainly “high impact” journals are not going to be shy about their rating.
I certainly have reservations about the uses and abuses of impact factors.
True they do not directly measure the quality of articles published, and obviously an article that was damned by a multitude would increase the impact factor. But the overwhelming majority of citations are by people who have read, taken notice of and found an article important enough to cite in papers describing their own work.
The context here was Griss’ typically facile, innacurate and substantiation free comment that Nature Climate Change had a credibility problem.
You do not head the impact factor list in a given field by having a credibility problem.
110
Philip, you don’t happen to have the imapct factor for McDonalds handy, do you? They seem to have an inordinate impact with children and bogans. I imagine if you did an online poll of that demographic there might even be a mid to high 90% concensus.
20
Nature Climate Change HAS a credibility problem
While NCC does obvious contain quite a few good articles,
….. while it continues to publish over the top alarmist junk based purely on model expectations, it has a credibility problem.
11
Psst. You cite my publications, and I’ll cite yours, OK?
But don’t tell anybody.
10
Philip Shehan
Popularity or consensus?
Science is not a beauty contest, the truth – no matter how ugly – is all that matters.
60
No tomomason, not popularity or consensus, a measure of how much notice scientists take of articles published in a journal.
At risk of repeating myself, contra Griss, a journal which finds itself being cited frequently by other scintists does not have a credibility problem.
02
Wow.. a plea argument from popularity !! seriously?????
You become more of a joke with each post you make.
41
Next you’ll be suggesting Rolling Stone magazine.. It carried some of the better (lol) climate articles.
31
Dr Brian Philip Shehan,
And, the error margin on 14.472 is?
Would your answer be according to SKS determinations or some more reputable source?
20
“No one will bother wading through all the dross to find something that may be worthwhile”
True.. most people skip your posts.:-)
42
Including the don’t likes no doubt.
010
They know from experience.. Read one..
….they are all just a parrot after that.
41
Which brings us back to the reason you and your best buds don’t bother posting on alarmist blogs.
52
Spoken like a true leftard. No wonder you cannot think straight.
20
For the snob value, no doubt. One has to be seen strutting one’s stuff, even if one has to resort to commenting on blogs to draw attention to the stuff one is strutting.
Pillock.
10
‘Is that right. And you proved that by writing it in a blog post, eh?
Too funny.’
–
A memorial to Chester the Jester!
31
Kind of off topic, sorry….
The temperature forecasting record of the IPCC
I’m not sure if there is anything new in this post. I compare the temperature forecasts from the FAR, TAR, AR4 and AR5 with the HadCRUT4 temperature record. The best and most honest IPCC forecast is the FAR from 1990 and this shows clearly that the “Low” forecast is that which lies closest to reality. Thereafter, the IPCC approach has been to obfuscate and fudge data to try and create the image of pending climatic melt down.
50
It is an old problem; should research publish when the study fails at its primary task. IMO yes they should as research is about gaining knowledge. Real science is the disinterested search for the true essence of nature, with little or no preconceived notions of outcome, and careful and rigorous thought given to method(s) employed.
As you show in your article Jo, all to often the primary urge appears to be gaining success (money and fame) at the expense of scientific probity. Even if that means manipulating the outcome statistically. Discovery of medical or scientific fraud in academia appears to hold little in the way of penalty or punishment for the wrong-doers.
Conversely business and markets are only about what is successful, and keeping investers happy. They too can end-up manipulating the outcome statistically but for more transparent reasons. Discovery of medical or scientific fraud in private industry usually carries a heavy penalty.
For a good read about p-values see Matt Briggs essay “Unsignificant Statistics: Or Die P-Value, Die Die Die” at http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=8295
60
‘Failure of Peer Review’
What does peer reviewed mean?
‘First let me clear up any misunderstanding how these papers get published and especially the process of peer review. It’s a system that has been around for over 200 years. And its purpose is to keep bad research out of the scientific literature. Referees look through submitted papers for obvious mistakes and flaws in methodology and advise the editor of the journal accordingly. Papers are excluded if the mistakes and flaws are very obvious, papers should not be excluded simply if the referee or an editor disagree with its contents or conclusions.’
As can be seen here:-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l_SEy8gt3c
So what system should be used in its place?
—-
Look everyone. Here comes BA, totally in denial of the entire post content except for picking out the keywords, here to promote his propaganda. I would swear some days he is a bot… He does answer emails though. Perhaps a bot-boy combo? – Jo
318
Actually, he’s back to try and engage us in “Dueling YouTube” videos. I’m quite surprised he realizes there are written journals out there, what with his complete love and affection for YouTube.
40
FAO Jo!
But you still ignored the question, ‘So what system should be used in its place?’ and given your background, biology is it not, I would have assumed you had an answer?
19
I’m not the one claiming its the word of God on science. You are.
I’ll settle for discussing the theory and evidence instead.
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I think that would have gone over his head.
The mark of quality is you reading it, understanding it, agreeing with it and checking the experimental results for your self. Peer-review is not a substitute for that.
50
Which is great when you are capable of it. But I’m a physicist and specialisation is now such that I know that I can’t do that in, say, solid-state physics (my own research is in another part of subject), so I am dependent on peer-reviewed journals for that.
I don’t think anybody on this particular thread is contesting that climate science has become corrupted. Whether the corruption of one part of one science is ground for heaving overboard peer review is the question. Until recently there was no alternative. With the coming of the internet, there might be, but the cards are still in the air.
10
You are dependent on peer-review for reducing your reading load. Some papers are very well known but you still assume that any flaws were spotted by others if there were any. The number of citations gives you an indication of how widely read and accepted the paper is. Pointless if no one checks because its peer-reviewed.
You do not know unless you check for yourself. It is the same with work that was supposedly debunked.
00
Maybe the whole science fraternity need to research how research is carried out and reviewed, so that improvement can be made.
Just sticking to a method – i.e. peer review, publish, refute, etc., just because “that has been around for over 200 years” is surely unscientific?
I wonder if I could get a grant for that?
40
blackadderthe4th
I have been involved in getting a paper peer reviewed ( not as an author) and I can tell you your point ” papers should not be excluded simply if the referee or an editor disagree with its contents or conclusions.” is absolutely wrong.
40
One of the principal problems in ‘climate science’ is that the the system of peer review has become utterly corrupted.
Take MM’s infamous Hockey Stick for example, the pals in peer review all said “yippee, I can support this as it will keep the climate BS – and my career – going for at least another 5 years.”
At the same time, a fierce witch hunt was launched against anyone who dared question the Hockey Stick and its absurd claims. Huge efforts were made to silence, censor and deride all those who dared to scientifically question its validity.
Even Briffa, MM’s long term partner in the Hockey Stick hoax has recently come clean and published a paper that shows the Hockey Stick for exactly what it is, namely something even the class cheat in Grade 6 would not be proud of.
And that’s why in ‘climate science’, the peer review process is utterly corrupt, as it has become dedicated to the support of the bad science demanded by the political requirements of the Establishment’s left wing.
Anyone, who is not a troll, have any problem with this statement?
52
OK, so what do you replace peer review with?
00
Open review, with all data and methods available..
Be prepared to defend your “science” against all, not just your pals.
If you are sure your work is worthwhile, then have the guts to stand behind it and let it be scrutinised.
If it stands up to that, then let it be published.
That way, a whole heap less crap will get published.
102
Open data – sure, it’s possible to post that on the internet nowadays with a link included in the published paper. Often done.
Methods – the point of the paper is to make methods explicit, so no probs there.
“Defend against allcomers not just your pals” – Peer review is single-blind, and most of the time I have had no idea who refereed my papers. (I am a physicist in an area not directly related to climate.)
“If you are sure your work is worthwhile, then have the guts to stand behind it and let it be scrutinised”
Physicists routinely do that nowadays by posting preprints on the arXiv at the same time as they submit to a specialist journal.
“If it stands up to that, then let it be published.”
Sure, but a journal editor will have to make that decision and how will he or she make it?
Please see Philip Shehan’s comment immediately below.
20
You sound like a yes-man so no wonder that you find the peer-review process easy.
People want a journal to sift through submissions for them. That is unavoidable but having a submitted paper available with objections from reviewers clearly stated will avoid people being petty to some degree.
You have obviously not kept up with the debate.We are expected to rely on a reviewer to OK a huge part of the work that we are blind to. Lots of problems there.
“Peer review is single-blind”. If the author knew the identity of the reviewer, not the other way around, that comment might have meant something.
Preprints are not what Griss referred to. Its missing data and methods.
An editor makes a judgement after many people from the field have submitted a comment with their real identities. It is the age of the internet.
10
OK wise guy, how many peer-reviewed papers have you had accepted, and in what subject? I am in double figures in physics, and I would add that I hold a minority view in my own field and have often been irritated by peer review. But the need from here is not to design a system from scratch but rather to improve the present system. Anybody who whinges without being constructive can safely be ignored. As fro not keeping up with the debate, I have some involvement with a proposed internet journal to sit atop the arXiv in a particular field of physics, and how it is to be quality-assured. How about you?
00
You do realize that continually asking “how many peer-reviewed articles do you have” is a sort of circular reasoning, implying that you are superior because you have such articles, and the articles are how you measure superiority and correctness?
So, how would you improve the process? How would you prevent a person from being blackballed by the climate change journals because they don’t have a popular or PC view. Again, some of these people were lead authors in the IPCC yet the minute they expressed doubt, they became part of the great unwashed masses who know nothing about science. That looks political and vindictive no matter how you try to dress it up. How do fix the process to eliminate the spiteful behaviour?
40
Wow! Please remind me never to annoy you – ever.
10
Thanks Sherri. Just in case Anton still cares, I didn’t make it to double digits in publishing in physical chemistry because I got on the wrong side of the most influential academic in my field. I told my story in a comment here of the grief in trying to publish when someone who can influence editors decides that you are not going to publish regardless of quality. They can get away with claiming that you neglected something even if there was a whole section with a heading dedicated to it.
20
Vic at least has my respect Sherri, because he understands peer review from the inside and has personally witnessed its weak points (as have I).
00
Quite correct Anton. To paraphrase Churchill on democracy, peer review is the worst method of evaluating manuscripts submitted for publication, except for all the others.
55
Interesting, Philip, that you use a comparison to a political system. I believe that is one of the complaints about global warming science—too politicized. Just because we have no other “better system” does not mean one should stand behind the current one.
As my saying goes:
“Any” solution is not better than no solution if its the wrong solution.
80
Then suggest an alternative.
11
Really? Did you not read anything I wrote? Do I need to type in caps or something? The lack of an alternative theory DOE NOT make use of a bad theory justified. It doesn’t make the use of a questionable theory justified. “WE DON’T KNOW” is a completely honest scientific option. Only people who don’t understand science think we have to have a theory for everything, no matter how bad that theory may be.
Let’s say the theory for illness is too much blood, so we let blood to cure you. Perfectly good theory, right? There was no alternative at the time. So your answer would have been “Of course. If you disagree, then suggest an alternative.”
51
There’s a difference between the situation in which you are starting a world scientific research system from scratch and one in which you already have peer review, as today. Suppose a new paper comes in to the editor of an academic journal. Suppose per review has just been abolished. What do you do next?
22
Get a smarter editor.
52
It is not the editor’s job to personally referee a journal; one person can only be expert at research level in such a small field that the journal would not be viable. And in any case that would still constitute peer review.
If you are going to advocate abolishing a system without which the academic profession would grind to a halt then you need to suggest an alternative, even if it’s worse. You don’t appear to be able to do even that, let alone suggest something better (which would be a real achievement). Please engage seriously with this issue rather than preferring rhetoric.
22
No, Anton, the academic FUNDING would grind to a halt. And why can’t a journal editor referee—or do the editors not know scientific method and do not understand the subject they are editing. Sure, it’s a tall order, but I really can’t see how any worse results would be achieved than the current system. We could try it and see. That’s an alternative, yet you seem to not like it. My guess is no matter what I write, you’ll reject it, but in view of the fact that others might care, I’ll try.
First, all funding has to come from a lottery of research proposals. That should cut back on “publish or parish”. Then, we have 2 individuals who are trained in the REAL science method, go through the submissions. If all scientific methods are valid, then the articles go to 3 persons who work in the same field as the author does. All of this is double-blind. Plus, even if the study found nothing, it should be published anyway. It’s important to know what does not work as well as works. (There can be a limit of 2 peryear on failed studies, if one likes.) If these 3 individuals do not find errors in the data and methodology, then the submission goes into a stack of acceptable articles. At that point, the janitor comes in and pulls the required number of articles from the stack and they are published. This accounts for proper methodology and reasonable findings. It means that skeptics will land spots in these journals. It gives all good researchers and equal chance, not just those with PC findings.
If you want to complain that skeptics research is not as good—remember, some skeptics were IPCC LEAD authors. So why are they not being published in the journals now? Because they went off the PC track and were blackballed. That’s clearly politics and not science.
72
Sheri,
Thank you for taking me seriously. The solution to Publish Or Perish is for academic job applications to be judged strictly on applicants’ best 4 or 5 papers (self-nominated), and not on quantity of papers. Let me add that I *AM* a sceptic of dangerous anthropic global warming – my area of physics is unrelated to that. (What’s yours?) I did my best above to explain why an editor, who is an academic like the rest, cannot possibly be at the research front in all of the areas covered by the journal that he or she edits, which is what is needed to decide competently what to publish and what to reject. Hence the need to subcontract opinions – aka peer review.
I leave to your opinion what it would feel like to have a good paper rejected by a janitor…
10
I did not mean the janitor was going to read the papers and chose. He will randomly pull papers, meaning you get in because your paper was good and you won the lottery, so to speak. I can’t see how there are not thousands of worthy studies that never see a journal due to limited space. How many great ideas are lost—except now these people go to the internet. Maybe there should be a system that allows publication of perfectly valid but not so exciting studies.
You asked for an alternative. We don’t know for certain that an editor would make worse choices than the current peer-review process. I hear you saying that you are skeptical and that peer-review can be annoying. Yet you don’t seem interested in improving it or abolishing it. How do you know that simply throwing it out will cause a catastrophe?
Your idea on Publish or Perish would probably help, though all those who could not publish are still out of luck. Science is kind of like being an author—you write stuff and hope it sells. I can’t see how that benefits science. It would probably be better than the current system, however.
What if on peer-review we required 4 reviewers and at least two differing view points? If it’s climate change, 2 skeptics, 2 advocates?
I’m just trying to understand how leaving the system as is won’t eventually destroy science (if it hasn’t already). I will say that physics seems to have the best processes for peer-review. I have often thought all science should be so cautious. Physics seems to often throw out a theory and ask for verification from others before publishing. It’s not a common practice in many other areas of science.
00
There are several experiments on the web. One of them is academia.edu
I think it could be better organised than it is, but any member can publish. Presumably any member can also publish another paper in rebuttal. The wheat quickly gets sorted from the chaff, because the chaff becomes obvious. It seems to be a bit like a school playground. It won’t stop people ganging up on others, but the ganging up itself becomes obvious to all. In short is gets around the back-room deals (a la Climategate), because it is all in the open.
In typing this comment, I went to the site and found an article entitled, “Out of the Norwegian Glaciers: Lendbreen- A Tunic from the Early First Millennium AD”. Not my field at all, but I am going to have a read for interest’s sake. The site is quite dangerous in that way.
00
Not my idea re Publish Or Perish Sheri, it’s been kicked around for a while. As for 4 reviewers, give us a break we don’t get paid to do peer review on the work of others and it’s time-consuming when we’ve already got our own research to do and too much admin.
“Maybe there should be a system that allows publication of perfectly valid but not so exciting studies.”
Great idea! “Dear Sir, Please consider my paper for your journal. It is really boring. Nothing innovative whatsoever. I am sure it is suitable for your journal.”
As Einstein may have said, “If we knew what we were doing then it wouldn’t be called research, would it?”
Peer review is imperfect, but what is better? Rere has mentioned other proposals that are on the Web.
00
I find it somewhat disturbing that distinquished, important research to be published in a prestigeous journal is not worth the time of 4 reviewers. Sorry, but that sounds to me like the whole thing is just a bother. Which might explain some of the problems.
I didn’t realize journals were like news rags and sold on the basis of the most exciting story. I guess it’s impossilbe for research to not be exciting, yet still be important or valuable. Again, that explains a lot about the peer review and journal processes.
Realizing that journals are horribly expensive and there’s a serious commercial aspect to all of this, it seems that journals no longer serve as a source of research data, but rather the flashiest, coolest findings (verified or not) to entertain scientists. So much for research for the sake of learning something useful. Now we want something flashy and commercial. You are right—science has definately changed and not for the better if this is the “new normal”.
00
Sheri, if every academic wrote an average of 5 papers per year and there are 4 reviewers per paper then that’s 20 papers per year that each has to review on average. Given that it takes a half day to do conscientiously, that’s a LOT of time and there is no personal motivation to do it whatsoever – we do admin because we have to, we write our own papers out of love of subject, but this is neither of those and moreover it is unpaid. Perhaps it is not very well done for that reason, but I can reasonably ask detractors of peer review to propose something better if they want get rid of it. The shared aim of all in this conversation is presumably to improve from where we are now, not to design a system from scratch. I agree wholeheartedly that climate physics today is corrupt, but that is because it has become intertangled with reasons/excuses for taxation, not because peer review is rubbish across the board. Please note that I write as someone who holds a minority view within his own field of physics and has often suffered from the peer review process as a result.
You essentially accuse me of being patronising because I’ve experienced peer review (from both sides) and you perhaps have not. I do not wish to be discourteous but personal experience brings insights denied to others.
10
PS The issue of peer review is not directly related to that of commercial publishers ripping universities off for journal subscriptions – which is deplorable – but a solution to the latter has now appeared in the form of the internet. Because the historical purpose of paper journals was (1) dissemination of information and (2) quality assurance via peer review, and because the internet is capable of rendering purpose (1) obsolete, some changes to (2) might be facilitated. The question is what changes would permit scientists who know what they are doing from reading good stuff without having to trawl through a mountain of trash to find it. All *constructive* contributions to that debate are very welcome.
00
Yes, personal experience brings insight—and bias. Where you stand to gain from the process, those who are not academics do not. Yin/Yang.
If every academic wrote and average of 5 papers per year, how many really good papers are simply tossed out due to space requirements? You’re making my point that peer-review, by the very attributes you have mentioned (as in free reviewing) is lacking.
Your hint that my contributions are not “constructive” (as in you don’t like them) leads me to believe this is going nowhere. I gave you my response, you rejected it. I suspect that nothing I suggest will be “constructive”. One wonders if that really was the point of the exchange.
00
It’s very interesting that you consider peer review part of science (or at least you appear to do so) yet you argue scientists cannot be bothered to read and peer review journal articles because they do it for free and they are busy. So what other parts of science are too bothersome to actually want to do right?
00
Its very simple Anton. Papers are submitted in a blog format like this. Registered people can review it if they wish but their comments are not anonymous and it will be kept on record for all to see. The editor can then up grade its status to published in print.
00
Bias? I’ve already said that I get the rough end of peer review disproportionately often, given that I hold a minority view in the field in which I publish. And I don’t enjoy doing it because the time is taken from my own research and it doesn’t pay anything. You are simply ducking my question: we are not designing a system from scratch, we are trying to improve the scientific process from where it is now, so what would you do if you were a journal editor, who is at the research frontier in only a small area of the subjects your journal publishes (as applies to every scientist today), and a paper is submitted outside your personal realm of expertise? Or, if you want to advocate how science should be done if you were setting it up ab initio, please do so and suggest how you would get there from here. Otherwise you are repeating criticisms that others who actually understand the details of peer review have already made, only with less understanding.
00
Okay—one more time in smaller words: I would not revamp the current system. I believe it to be broken beyond repair. Your insistance that I work within the system is prima facia evidence that you are biased to keeping the current system. Since you cannot look beyond the blinders of the peer review box, there is no point to this discussion. I outlined what I would do and you said scientists were too darn busy to be bothered with the whole process. Yet you want to keep it. That’s not logical. It’s too much but we can’t throw it out.
Even smaller words: You want your way and I won’t go along with it. Discussion over.
00
And you don’t want your own way?
You ignore the fact that I have welcomed suggestions for alternatives made by others. You, by contrast, have been intellectually sterile.
00
A lottery?
Would that be better or worse than the current methods?
Maybe I could get a grant to investigate…
10
Surely time on a super-computer modeling the peer review process is all that is requires.
10
Anton
A review of peers!
10
So where does this leave all those here who keep claiming there is a “pause” in temperatures with error margins way, way outside the 0.05 level?
113
The same place it leave those claiming it is still warming, you idiot !!!
121
Griss keeps putting up temperature data from periods starting 1997 or 1998, and ludicrously from 2000 or more recent, which have error margins you can drive a bus through, and claims there is a pause.
I keep saying of such data that you cannot tell from such data whether there is warming, cooling or a pause, IDIOT.
116
The satellite data tells us that since the 1998 ElNino finished in 2001, there is a greater probability of cooling than warming..
Get use to that fact.
Or go learn some maths.
101
No Griss, if I play your game, picking and choosing which years and data sets suit me and ignoring error margins, I can show that el nino finished in 1999 after which there has been a strong warming trend matching that of the entire satellite record:
Trend: 0.15 ±0.21 °C/decade (2σ)
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/mean:1/offset:0.24/plot/uah/from:1979/trend/offset:0.24/plot/uah/from:1999./trend/offset:0.16
114
“I can show that el nino finished in 1999 ”
Thank you.. you have just shown that you have ZERO understanding of climate systems..
and are just working as a monkey.
Well done 🙂
81
Been waiting for you to do that.. 🙂
roflmao !!!!!
81
Explain Griss, the basis of your claim that the el nino event finshed in 2001 and not 1999?
27
Do your own research for a change, bozo.
Perhaps you might learn something.
Its been explained before, but you obviously DO NOT have the capacity to understand.
I’m certainly not explaining such fundamentals for you again.
62
Come back in say 2 years, once you have figured it out !.
52
In other words Griss, you have no reason whatsoever for choosing 2001 over 1999 other than it gives you a result you like.
Could you also provide a reference on the permanent effect of el nino events on temperature.
29
I did, a couple of months ago.
fetch !!!
I’m over trying to teach you when you obviously do not want to learn.
52
You know.. I’m glad that ElNinos only have a transient effect on temperatures that doesn’t effect the trend.
It means that the possible one at the end of this year won’t get the alarmistas all excited.
Gees…… They probably won’t even mention it. 🙂 😉
71
Griss, a weak and entirely transparent response to a question asking for substantiation of your claims.
28
In response to your weak and pathetic physical understanding, its all you are worth.
You have refused to learn in the past, why should I waste my time giving you any more information.
It is time you got off your lazy butt, did some work for yourself.
42
Griss you are fooling nobody, even those who give you the thumbs up.
I am not going on some wild goose chase for a goose that does not exist.
You have in the past provided no references whatsoever for the assertion that ENSO effects give a permanent change in temperature, or that the 1997/98 ended in 2001.
These are entirely your own inventions.
15
It seems that poor little Philip is unable to do basic research.
Oh well, remain ignorant if you want to.
No-one will notice the difference.
11
A little taste for you…. open it in its own window,
There are 4 or 5 screens in sequence.
It will give you info that even YOU might understand.
Now off you go and do some research, child-mind.
11
Griss, Thank you for the graphs.
Firstly I still do not know the source of the graphs and I am more than a little suspicious when people use data restricted to a part of the globe (latitude 20 N to 80.5 N) when global temperatures are available.
Perhaps it is because he wants to use volcanic cooling in his argument, and as the volcanoes are in the Northern Hemisphere, that is where they will have the biggest effect on temperatures.
The changing graphs are difficult to examine in detail as they keep changing, so I screen captured each. Here are my observations:
(A) The temperature anomalies and the ENSO anomalies.
I thought it was your position that ENSO anomalies produced a permanent change, yet the ENSO data returns to baseline after each event, while the temperature anomaly increases.
Could that be because the increased temperature anomaly is not due to transient enso phenomena but some other factor, like say, CO2?
Indeed (C) is the same graph with linear regression fits of the two parameters, which show a small decline in the ENSO parameter, but an increase in the temperature parameter.
(B) shows that temperatures are affected by volcanic eruptions, but ENSO is not. No argument there. ENSO is caused by winds and currents.
(D) claims to show step rises in temperature after ENSO events. But they events do not in fact match.
There is no step after the 1983 el nino event. I assume that they are attempting to say this is because of the transient cooling effect of the el Chichon eruption.
But after this transient cooling has passed away, if there is a permanent step in temperatures, why does it not appear after the dust has literally settled?
There were three el Chichon eruptions from March to April 1982 lasting a total of 17.5 hrs.
If the author of this graph is trying to say that the ash remained in the air for four years depressing the temperatures until the step appeared from behind its shadow in 1986, tell him he is dreaming.
And the “step” disappears in 1992. But no, wait. Mt Pinatubo to the rescue.
This eruption occurred in June 1991, conveniently removing the permanent step from the 1983 el nino.
But apparently not the smaller one of 1992 which results in a large temperature rise even though it is occurring in the shadow of the eruption which according to the graph, lasts until the end of 1995.
But again there is no permanent temperature increase resulting from this eventnor the one at the beginning of 1996 when all is clear volcano-wise.
Yes there is a rise in temperature, very briefly, (or is this the long lost 1983 step making an appearance), then the temperature drops away with the ENSO parameter.
What is the excuse for the disappearance of this step?
No volcanoes in 1998 and the temperature rises as expected with the el nino event, but the ENSO parameter drops away shortly after.
I also note that the data stops in before 2010. Maybe the graph is that old, but if you include 2010 and subsequent data, using your approved satellite data, there is a large rise in temperature associated with an el nino event of 2010 but it is not a step and the temperature drops back, with no volcano in sight.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/mean:12/offset:0.24/to/plot/rss/from:1979/mean:12/offset:0.16/to
There are no permanent ENSO steps, up or down. Like volcanoes and solar effects, these have a transient effect on temperatures. This is why the slope of the ENSO data is flat over the 30 year period of the graph.
The parameter that does account for the rise in temperatures is the steady rising concentration of CO2.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/326/5960/1646/F8.expansion.html
01
20
Philip Shehan
Consider the AMO, 1975 it was at a low point.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/atlantic-multidecadal-oscillation-arctic-temperatures/
And as Don J. Easterbrook graphs shows that 1975 the PDO was also coming out of a cool period.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/07/20/shifting-of-the-pacific-decadal-oscillation-from-its-warm-mode-to-cool-mode-assures-global-cooling-for-the-next-three-decades/
Hardly unlikely then that the global figures over the short term look like warming if both natural cycles are beginning to warm. Add to that the sun’s output peaked shortly there after and an El Nino arrives making it all ‘look’ castrophic in the short term.
With another 50 years worth of real data and a trend may be discernible, as the climate varies on a non-human timescale.
70
Griss writes:
“The satellite data tells us that since the 1998 ElNino finished in 2001, there is a greater probability of cooling than warming..
Get use to that fact.”
The satellite data shows nothing of the sort.
Satellite data clearly shows that the el nino event was well and truly over by mid 1999, not 2001.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1995/mean:1/offset:0.24/to:2006/plot/rss/from:1995/mean:1/offset:0.16/to:2006
But this inconvenient fact does not produce the slopes in the temperature trend which Griss wants to back his claim that the data shows “probable” cooling after the el nino event, so he kicks it down the road a couple of years to produce linear trends more to his liking.
http://tinyurl.com/qxg37l9
Mind you, the error margins are so large that there is no statistical difference between the trends from 1999 and 2001, but to those who have no understanding of this, the latter date looks better if you want to claim a “probable” drop in temperature.
RSS, 1999.5, 2001:
0.02 ±0.22 °C/decade (2σ, p < 0.05)
-0.06 ±0.25 °C/decade (2σ)
UAH, 1999.5 2001:
0.13 ±0.22 °C/decade (2σ)
0.05 ±0.25 °C/decade (2σ)
Furthermore, by looking at the 5 year period centred on the top of the el nino peak (mid 1998) from the start of 1996, before the el nino event, and the end of 2001 (after the el nino event) there is clearly no temperature step associated with that event.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1995/mean:1/offset:0.24/to:2006/plot/rss/from:1995/mean:1/offset:0.16/to:2006/plot/rss/from:1996/to:2001/offset:0.16/trend/plot/uah/from:1996/to:2001/offset:0.24/trend
Griss needs push a fictional end date for the el nino event so that he can claim a "step" at the alleged end of it. Its a bit tricky when the temperatures from this warming event returned to those prior to the warming event two years before this sudden step occurs. But Heck Griss knows how to beat the data into submission and shout down anyone who questions this. What's more he then wants to claim that this el nino step persists long long after the el nino event has passed. This is utter rubbish.
Now returning to the item at the top of of the section.
Young and Miller say that a p value of < 0.05 is not rigorous enough and that the requirement for statistical significance should be narrower.
This led me to ask where this left those such as Griss who ignores the 95% statistical significance (p < 0.05) level.
Well, Griss has decided that after kicking the el nino can down the road so that one of the satellite trend slopes is negative, (and never mind the huge error margins at the p < 0.05 level)he can claim that there is "probably" cooling going on.
In other words, Griss is plumping for a statistical significance level at 50% probability (p < 0.5). Young and Miller would laugh their heads off.
01
You are wrong as the satellite data tells us that since the 1998 ElNino finished in 2001, there is a greater probability of cooling than warming..
Get use to that fact.
And no amount of hand-waving pseudoscience from you will prevent it.
00
tomomomason, I have provided evidence that the el nino event did not finish in 2001 but in 1999.
It is you who have provided nothing but a hand waving assertion.
00
“I keep saying of such data that you cannot tell from such data whether there is warming, cooling or a pause”
Then WTF do you keep rabbiting on about warming.
You truly are OCD !!!
71
Griss, which part of this sentence do you not understand?
“I keep saying of such data that you cannot tell from such data whether there is warming, cooling or a pause, IDIOT.”
110
I understand an idiot said it.
62
What’s more, while we are on the subject of messing with the data to give a result you want, Griss keeps slicing and dicing the data into sets without statistical significance to claim that there has been no warming for the entire satellite record:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/mean:12/offset:0.24/plot/uah/from:1979/trend/offset:0.24/plot/rss/from:1979/mean:12/offset:0.16/plot/rss/from:1979/trend/offset:0.16
RSS: Trend: 0.13 ±0.07 °C/decade (2σ)
UAH: Trend: 0.14 ±0.07 °C/decade (2σ)
Both complete sets of satellite data show statistically significant warming at the 95% level.
19
As I said. keep including the ElNino..
Its all you have.
51
There was probably slight warming before the Elnino , then the Elnion step, then probably cooling since.
Once YOU get a basic understanding of the FACT that there are 3 distinct phases that cannot be grouped as one, then maybe you will get it.
But I doubt you have that capability of understanding.. Monkeys and parrots don’t understand that sort of thing., they just regurgitate.
You just keep getting dumber and dumber.. heading quickly to dumbest.
42
Griss you can invent all the phases you want to give you all the statistically nonsensical slopes you like.
But again I will play your game and exclude the el nino event as you say I should. It seems the pause was actually before the el nino event!
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/mean:1/offset:0.24/plot/uah/from:1979/trend/offset:0.24/plot/uah/from:1999./trend/offset:0.16
17
Again, you show a complete lack of understanding of climate systems.
Go and do some serious research FFS !!
Monkey parrot.
42
“It seems the pause was actually before the el nino event!”
yes, it was pretty flat before the strong Elnino started in 1997,
and after the ElNino finished at the beginning of 2001, it has probably been trending downwards.
Together they yield ZERO warming in the satellite record, apart from the Elnino step
Are you now denying that the 1998 ElNino caused a step of about 0.25C? Really ???????
If so, then why are all the alarmistas going ape over the possibility of a small ElNino later this year.
Perhaps they know something about climate events that your monkey doesn’t.! Wouldn’t be difficult, because your monkey knows jack s**t !!
42
Yes Griss I am denying that a transient el nino event that occured 16 years ago (and you say ended in 2001) gave rise to a 0.25 C increase in temperature that persists to this day.
Whatever the caused of the statistically significant 0.2 C rise in temperature since 1979, it was not the long passed transient el nino event of 1997/98.
I am not interested in your ad hoc invented phases and permanent el nino effects and cherry picked dates for when the el nino effect ended or your absolute ignorance of statistical significance.
18
You truly are CLUELESS about the physical reality of climate events, aren’t you ! !!
There was a 0.25C step up at the ElNino. I did not magically disappear.
That 0.25C step from the 1998 has been gradually decaying as indicated by the gradual downward trend.
Your continued inclusion of the Elnino to prove a trend is meaningless and farcical.
With out that step.. THERE IS NO WARMING.
You KNOW that, but your baseless ego won’t let you admit it.
End of story !!!
62
But griss, I excluded the el nino event from my graph and analysis, and you are still not happy.
18
I can’t help it if you have zero understanding about the stability culmination of that ElNino event.
Your ignorance is not my problem.
I’ve tried to teach you, but you fail to comprehend, sorry.
Your refusal/inability to recognise that the satellite record consists of 2 phases, separated by an ElNino step really shows how locked in you are to just grabbing a ruler and drawing meaningless, irrelevant straight lines without any understanding of what you are actually doing.
The ONLY trend that is currently relevant and has any meaning for NOW is the trend since that culmination of the ElNino at the beginning of 2001.
And that trend is more likely negative than positive.
In its current phase, the global temperature is more likely cooling than warming.
End of story……. even if your tiny little ruler monkey cannot accept it.
43
Sorry posted the wrong graph. Here is the data with el nino removed, as demanded by Griss. The “pause” (neglecting statistical significance as Griss does) is before the el nino event, not after:
http://tinyurl.com/njvo2tz
1979 to 1996:
Trend: 0.03 ±0.20 °C/decade (2σ)
1999.3 forward:
Trend: 0.14 ±0.22 °C/decade (2σ)
for the entire satellite period, from 1979
Trend: 0.14 ±0.07 °C/decade (2σ)
16
Idiot..
Go and learn about climate events. !!
43
Why do you keep displaying such a total lack of understanding about these things….. unbelievable !!!
Do you seriously know so little about climate events.. really ?????????
You must be just joking. !
43
For the period 1979 to 1999, a slope of -0.2°C per decade is a line from 0.1 to -0.3. A positive slope of 0.2°C per decade is from -0.3 to 0.1.
Your calculation of the uncertainty is wrong. Get it right before commenting again. You do not have a valid point if the calculations are wrong.
00
Phil is not only clueless about physical reality he is a SPACER and gets paid by the column inch.
If you look through the posts he is regularly there engaging whatever comes up with “clueless” comments and assertions which are based based on “someone else’s” attempt at Climate Science.
His name is neatly spaced up and down the page: well done Phil!
KK
10
Keeps up Jo’s visitor count too. 🙂
Maybe that’s why he is here..?
I can see no other purpose.
10
Ok, oh statistical master, so for RSS we have 1.3 degrees per century, and UAH 1.4 deg C per century with CO2 expected to approximately double over that period. So where does that leave the IPCC central estimate of 3.3 degrees per doubling Phil? GEE your own calculation of what was it, ah yes 1.9 degrees F per doubling ( or about 1.1 deg C per doubling) does seem to be in the ballpark no?
What does that say about our supposedly catastrophic trajectory, when we will need to get to 1600 PPM before we see even 2.6 deg C of warming, or if we believe the IPCC 5th assessment report attribution that half that warming is natural and not CO2 – a whole 1.3 degrees sometime around the year 2600. GEE Phil, It’s SOOOOOO urgent we need to get the EPA to impoverish the citizens of the united states right away.
My estimate of course was always <1.3 C per doubling based on temp and CO2 rise since 1850, which apparently which you are now saying is correct, hey Phil? Your apology is accepted, crowd, please welcome our newest recruit to the sceptic ranks, Phil Shehan, who claims warming will only be half of the IPCC's AR4 estimate – of course remembering AR5 said the models were so bad they couldnt estimate climate sensitivity at all…
90
This is what Philip and his fellow alarmists have been reduced to: arguing about which molehill to make a mountain out of, and counting storms in teacups. None of this is catastrophic, and none of it thus far justifies the massive expenditure of public money to do nothing productive other than invest in outmoded technology to supply a boutique small percentage of global energy needs. Pathetic.
70
bobl
I have corrected you on this before. The calculated value is 2 C, not F.
1600 ppm is two doublings from the present 400 ppm.
That would be a 4 C increase.
The IPCC does not say that half the warming is natural.
According to The IPCC working group 1 chapter 10:
“It is extremely likely that human activities caused more than half of the observed increase in global
mean surface temperature from 1951–2010…
Greenhouse gases contributed a global mean surface warming likely to be between 0.5°C and 1.3°C over the period 1951–2010, with the contributions from other anthropogenic forcings likely to be between –0.6°C and 0.1°C, from natural forcings likely to be between –0.1°C and 0.1°C, and from internal variability likely to be between –0.1°C and 0.1°C. Together these assessedcontributions are consistent with the observed warming of approximately 0.6°C over this period.”
01
Pardon me. Hit the post comment instead of the preview button.
To continue.
I do not know where the projected date of a CO2 concentration of 1600 of 2600 comes from. CO2 concentrations since the begining of the industrial revolution have shown approximately exponential growth.
http://tinyurl.com/aj2us99
The future emmission rates and thus CO2 concentrations will depend on what action if any is take by industrial and industrialising nations to curb their emmissions.
The temperature rise with doubling of CO2 since 1850 is 2 C, not less than 1.3 C. (Apologies for the small size of the following figure:
http://oi46.tinypic.com/29faz45.jpg
This is the same value as I calculated for the periods from 1958 and from 1979 to the present based on Muana Loa data and the temperature rise over those periods(although of course error margins increase with shorter time periods.)
Yes the calculation of the climate sensitivity due to positive and negative feedbacks is extremely difficult, but the AR5 report did not say that the models were so bad that they could not estimate climate sensitivity at all.
From the AR5:
“Equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C (high confidence)”
The calculated value of 2 C is within this range.
Winston, I have explained more than once why I don’t use the term “catastrophic”.
I am not debating a cost benefit analysis of whether climate abatement measures are economically a “good thing”.
I am only discussing the science of climate change.
Show me where my analysis is wrong.
01
Hi Phil,
In relation to your assertion that MORE CO2 will increase the Earths temp.
Obviously being a scientist, or at least an avid reader of SkS, which in the minds of many is the same thing, could you explain how you have turned OFF the Log effect?
KK
20
ps.
Because of the Log effect, the ONLY thing which can add more heat to the atmosphere is the SUN.
KK
10
No Phil,
The temperature rise you based your calculation on was 0.9 since 1900. I was never comfortable with that number since 0.8 since 1850 is the accepted value. Upon investigating I found out that indeed you are correct, but the value is 0.9F since 1900. So the result of your calculation is also in F degrees IE 1.9 degrees F.
Therefore you can only claim 4 degrees F or about 2.5 deg C to 1600 PPM in about the year 2550 or so. I am mathematically correct here.
00
No bobl here are the calculations I made:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1958/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/from:1958/normalise/scale:0.75/offset:0.2
The temperature trend for the hadcrut4 data is 0.124 ± 0.023 °C/decade (2σ) giving a temperature increase for the entire 56 year period 0.694 ± 0.124 °C (The error margin is 19%)
The change in CO2 concentration for that period is from 315 to 400 ppm (We will neglect the small error in CO2 concentration as this data is much less noisy than the temperature data)
The equation for temperature rise with increasing CO2 is therefore
0.694 = k log(400/315) where k is the proportionality constant.
0.694 = k x 0.239
k = 0.694/239 = 2.91
The temperature rise for a doubling of CO2 concentration is therefore
2.91 x log2 =
2.01 ± 0.38 °C
Given the noisy data, the remarkable agreement with the figure from 1850 (2.04 ± 0.07 °C) should be regarded as fortuitous.
These figures fit well within the IPCC range of 1.5 – 4-5 C
The temperature trend for the UAH data from 1979 to the present is
Trend: 0.138 ±0.070 °C/decade (2σ) (With a 35 year data set the error margin has blown out to 51% from 19% for the data from 56 year data set.)
The rise in CO2 concentration for this period is 338 to 400 ppm
Repeating the calculations above for this data means that doubling of CO2 concentration gives a temperature rise of
1.80 ± 0.91 °C
Which is in experimental agreement with the earlier calculations but the error margin is very high.
You have not explained how you arrived at the year 2550 as the date you project when CO2 concentrations reach 1600 ppm
00
But, here you are , claiming 1.3 degrees per century much the same as my estimate of 1.3 degrees per doubling ( accounting for the natural logarithm ), less if doubling occurs over a century (more like 125 years). I might add that the trajectory of RSS and UAH is 1.3 or 1.4 degrees AND FALLING the longer the halt goes.
So RSS and UAH are outside the IPCC interval 1.5 – 4.5 arent they. See the problem here, you have shifted your alarmist stripes and are now arguing that the pause is not a pause by showing that the rise is outside the IPeCaC’s interval on the low side. You make my argument that climate sensitivity is 1.3 or less for me Phil. Given the august IPCC itself only attributes a majority of warming ( ie 50% ) to CO2, the anthropogenic attributed rise can be halved to 0.7 degrees per century.
You consistently distort the facts to suit yourself Phil. No real-world evidence points to high values of climate sensitivity to CO2, none at all.
10
bobl I have distorted nothing.
I have shown you the calculation based on the data.
Are you disputing the data regarding temperature or CO2 concentration from 1958 and 1979?
If so what are your figures for these values for these periods and where do they come from?
If not are you disputing the calculation?
If so where is the error?
If not what is the basis for your claim that I have distorted the fact?
00
The ONLY way you can show any significant warming in the satellite record is to include the ElNino step.
And it was not CO2 caused.
As soon as you remove that step.. THERE IS NO WARMING. !!!
42
Griss, which part of this sentence did you not understand?
“What’s more, while we are on the subject of messing with the data to give a result you want, Griss keeps slicing and dicing the data into sets without statistical significance to claim that there has been no warming for the entire satellite record.”
18
I understand your nonsense perfectly It you that lacks understanding of the reality..
.. and refuses to see what is right there in the data.
51
Which part of ‘3 distinct phases’ don’t you understand.
Very obviously …. NONE of it !!!
Your basic understanding is, as always, limited to what you can do with a simple calculator.
But that is who you are.
41
And Philip keeps running multiple events together in an irrelevant and meaningless mathematical farce.
41
# 10.2
So thus far 11 people don’t like a statement, but (or should that be because) they can’t refute it.
07
Or could it be Phil, that they have refuted you time and time again with no replies as you duck for cover when you are outmatched, and are just sick and tired of dealing with a zealot that won’t even believe his own math.
It’s ok though, when it’s your gran that dies of energy poverty maybe you’ll get why your crusade is not only unscientific, but immoral too.
10
bobl, Speak to Heywood. Far from ducking anything, he recently accused me of taking over the blog as I attempted to deal with numerous responses from those who actually wrote something adressed to me, as opposed to all the lazy, mindless tickers.
Mind you, Griss posts far more comments to me and about me than all of my posts combined, but most have the virtue of being short and requiring no reply, consisting of nothing but abuse. But “skeptics” are fine with that. He gets lots of ticks for these insights.
You are showing promise in this respect, tossing in terms like zealot and immoral.
Give me an example of where I have ducked a “refutation”.
And bobl, as for not believing my own math, I have dealt with what you no doubt consider a “refutation” of my math elsewhere. For starters, If you are going to “refute ” me, don’t write that I calculated a temperature as 1.9 F when I gave the result as 1.9 C, which does blow a sizable hole in your “refutation”, especially when I have already corrected you on precicely this error this on a previous occasion.
01
You ducked my challenge to calculate a climate sensitivity based on % energy absorbed by CO2 (85) and surface temperature above blackbody (33K)
You ducked all my climate action questions
PS I have no objection to your posts no mattter how many if you are addressing questions put to you, nor does Jo as far as I know. She does get peeved at BA4 because he doesn’t address the questions put to him, just waves his magic You Tube links around. I find your lack of reasoning skills and inability to see the implications of stuff… EG that you calculated a sensitivity of 1.9 F not 1.9 C frustrating, but I acknowledge that you do try to address many questions, not very effectively, but you do try.
00
bobl. I recall your challenge. I did not see the point in engaging in such a theoretical calculation.
I am quite willing to accept a result you came up with (in the expectation that your misunderstanding of my calculation was a one off).
I am dealing here with what the data says the empirical value for temperature rise with doubling of CO2 concentration is.
Heywood’s complaint notwithstanding, I cannot or choose not to reply to every comment I receive. In the first place time does not permit.
Your comments are well constructed and thought out so will generally get a response, unlike the mindless raspberry blowers.
I have to sign off now as I have to attend to some paid work.
01
Read my post above, your starting value of 0.9 since 1900, if you care to research is in degrees F. You have made a classic unit error. Sorry, I don’t make up the facts, I just report em.
00
bobl, I assume you posted this before my reply above.
My calculation is not based on a starting value of 0.9 since 1900, and I have made no unit error.
00
You can’t say with confidence that there ISN’T a pause either. The best you can argue is that we don’t know what is going on. It stands to reason that any expensive mitigation actions be delayed until the actual temperature data for the last ca: 17 years becomes significant.
70
Heywood. Yes I wrote that.
I also wrote that data since the beginning of the satellite record to the present shows statistically significant warming.
The fact that people hope that there has been a pause and want to take some unspecified action based on that hope does not mean that hope or action can be scientifically justified.
That is the way it is.
05
The fact is, Philip, that alarmists are the ones who wish to take “action”, and NOW, even though that “action” is inherently lacking in rigour as to cost:benefit analysis or even due diligence that more harm will not be visited upon the very thing (CO2 emissions) that “action” is supposedly being taken against.
Skeptics are the group advocating a wait and see approach to follow the observational evidence where it falls, but the problem with that is that human adjustments both of past readings and even to some extent of satellite data render those observations suspect. Alarmists need to take their collective fingers out of the honey pot, and wait till the data is in before precipitating an economic disaster based on a furphy, a lie, or a fraud.
100
Bingo!
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
60
Winston (and Heywood)
The problem with your demand that we wait until the most recent, rolling short term trend the last (15 or 17 years say) trend, regardless of which temperature data set is used, shows a statistically significant warming is that on that basis action may never ever be taken.
The evidence in the form of a statistically significant trendevidence is not “in” because for short periods the noise can be relied upon to swamp the signal, even if all the statistically significant data for longer periods showed warming.
Which is no doubt why skeptics advocate this criterion for action to be taken. It constitutes a permanent delaying tactic, no matter how far back the data may show a statistically significant warming trend.
This example is for Hadcrut data, but the essential feature, that 15 year periods can be relied upon to fail the stistical significance test is a feature f all dat sets.
If you break up data going back 60 years (did this graph in 2013) you will find that no 15 year period shows statistically significant warming, except for the unusually trend for the 1983-1998 period, and then only just:
Trend: 0.17 ±0.15 °C/decade (2σ).
http://tinyurl.com/m3np9r5
The other trend lines are all over the place, with similarly large error margins, and not statistically significant.
Over the entire 60 year period, there is however a statistically significant warming trend of
0.07 ±0.01 °C/decade (2σ)
The following discussion is specific to the Hadcrut data, but it illustrates potential further problems in the event that a 15 year data set (or anotherperiod so short that noise dominates over the signal) does pass the test.
By the 15 year criterion the evidence should have been declared “in” in 1998.
But “skeptics” would no doubt have declared at this point that is not long enough, let’s keep going.
We would be still siting on our hands 16 years later as the trend from 1983 is now
0.16 ±0.05 °C/decade (2σ)
And “skeptics” would still be saying, no, no not long enough, more time.
Alternatively “skeptics” may have declared of the period ending in 1998, “It’s not fair. We just had an strong el nino event. ‘Let’s just start again in 1999.”
Well, that’s put off doing anything for another 15 years at least.
And surprise surprise, 15 years later the trend would not be statistically significant (although in agreement with the statistically significant 60 year trend, as indeed are all the 15 year components, considering the error margins):
Trend: 0.07 ±0.13 °C/decade (2σ)
“Skeptics are the group advocating a wait and see approach to follow the observational evidence where it falls”
The statistically significant evidence has been falling on the warming side for some time now.
01
“I also wrote that data since the beginning of the satellite record to the present shows statistically significant warming.”
ONLY because of the ElNino . Even you MUST have realised that by now, because you keep having to include it.
You are so Unbelievably THINK that you still DON’T UNDERSTAND what you are doing. !!
Take the ElNino effect out and THERE IS NO WARMING.
00
Typo of course… “Unbelievably THINK” = “UNBELIEVABLY THICK“
00
No Griss, as the graph shows the el nino event ended in 1999.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1979/to:1997/plot/rss/from:1979/to:1997/trend/plot/rss/from:1999.3/offset:-.26/plot/rss/from:1999.3/trend/offset:-.26
The trend from 1979 to 1997 (common to your graph and mine is
0.07 ±0.17 °C/decade (2σ)
The trend from the end of the el inio event (1999 – look at the graph) is
0.13 ±0.07 °C/decade (2σ)
THIS is stistically significant warming and is in agreement with that of the shorter periods, including your own (incorrect) period after the el nino event.
Trend: 0.03 ±0.21 °C/decade (2σ)
or from your preferred but late end date
-0.06 ±0.25 °C/decade (2σ)
The fact is Griss that because of the large error margins, the latter two trenda are in agreement.
You need to get it into you head that the headline trend value cannot be looked at in isolation of THE ERROR MARGINS.
The trend for the entire RSS satellite period, from 1979 onwards is
0.13 ±0.07 °C/decade (2σ)
This is statistically significant warming and is in statistical agreement with that of the shorter periods, including your own (incorrect) period after the el nino event.
GO AWAY AND LEARN ABOUT ERROR MARGINS.
01
” observational studies were especially poor. By its nature, most climate studies are observational.
Observational studies could be replicated 0% of the time.”
——————————————————————–
If you reckon observational studies are bad, modelled studies are the pits. Invalid models using adjusted and often modelled data = climate “science”fiction.
And the green-left want to use the fiction that is produced to cripple all Western economies.
90
There are many sciences that are observational, that is you cannot rerun the “experiment” in a laboratory: astronomy, cosmology, geology, evolutionary biology to name a few.
113
Phil,
If you can’t rerun the experiment, don’t contaminate the data.
111
That’s true. And evolutionary biology can never be proven. Not that it matters, but the hard reality is no one can ever know the past for certain. And the same can be said for the future, which is why global warming gets rejected regularly. Also, astronomy, cosmology and geology, along with large sections of biology are naming and ordering of the world and the universe. You are correct that we cannot “experiment” on some aspects of the sciences. Many say the same thing about social sciences.
However, in climate science, there is the constant statement that this is “physics”. Physics is experimental and can be confirmed. It may take 50 years as in the search for the Higgs boson. Most of the time, it can be verified fairly quickly. Where the problem lies is in trying to predict a hugely complex system for which we may be missing components. Still, if it is just “physics”, then there does have to be reproducibility. Even quantum mechanics accurately predicts and does so repeatedly.
40
Phil,
“There are many sciences that are observational, that is you cannot rerun the “experiment” in a laboratory: astronomy, cosmology, geology, evolutionary biology to name a few.”
Q&A last night showed precisely how Global Warming and Climate Change “experiments” are run.
Five Global Warmists against one sceptic.
Climatology is a fear driven belief system validated by meekly surrendering to visions of a future apocalypse.
Fair dinkum, Phil, Christians thrived with this belief for the last 2,000 years without surrendering the will to live.
You lot are a gutless bunch of dead monkeys.
82
And none of them advocate a complete redistribution of global wealth, grinding scientific progress to a halt, and invoke mass economic suffering based on their evidence, because the limitations of their “evidence” would not allow them to take such egregious liberties with the potential well-being of their fellow human beings. Climate scientists share no such conscience, or sense of proportion.
They instead advocate their “cause celebre” without recourse to even considering the societal repercussions or the sequelae of that advocacy.
60
One item which constantly grates is the quoting of the results of “Modeling” of the effect of CO2 on Atmospheric Temperature.
The modeling obviously has not been peer reviewed by anyone with serious capacity to understand what a model real is.
This represents fraudulent behaviour on the parts of those publishing such “model data” as being accurate and relevant to the Global Warming debate.
Models can be excellent when done correctly but when used as an advertising gimmick for political purposes they are hard for people to understand and so it is hard to discredit them.
I could go on about the warmer Computer Simulations posing as models but all you have to do is look at their model;
basically uni dimensional with CO2 as the driver and EVERYTHING else confined to the Black Box and Temperature left as the dependent variable.
The black box is a dumping spot useful where any number of interacting items, not the prime item of interest, tend towards a neutral or constant bias in a situation.
Putting all those known unknowns into a black box is a very useful technique for simplifying analyses.
BUT, and there is always a but, this ONLY works where you are able to experimentally calibrate the value of the black box before going to work on the main factor under analysis.
I just haven’t seen any evidence to suggest that anybody in warmer science circles has actually done this in isolating each and every non human factor to the black box.
That’s why I am so unhappy about the honesty of these “Climate Models”.
The other important point is that we are well into the asymptotic zone with CO2 concentration which means that CO2 cannot provide much T
increase even if there was a bucketload of new CO2.
The only thing that can heat the Earth is not more CO2 but more Sun.
Failing to understand that is to fail to understand the Log effect.
And that’s IF the CO2 mechanism was important which it almost certainly is not.
The main item which should be in the Black Box for every climate model is CARBON DIOXIDE.
KK
40
KK,
Climate models factor in numerous forcings. These are not black boxes. Hansen’s original 1981 model had three parameters, CO2, solar and volcanoes and provided a reasonably good fit to the data (Fig 5).
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1981/1981_Hansen_etal_1.pdf
On this basis he predicted that the influence of CO2 on warming would become distinguishable from non anthropogenic factors and give a noticable to a rise in temperatures beginning in the 80s.
As climate research progressed and mechanisms became better understood, more factors were included and refined.
This one has 4 forcings, adding ENSO effects (Note to Griss, these effects are transient, that of the 1997/98 el nino ending in 1999.)
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/326/5960/1646/F8.expansion.html
17
Is the sciencemag abstract backcasting?
(I have read they are working on 3D models. Yes, that improves predictions, but we still have to know what factors to include. Can we actually build a model that has clouds, current, volcanoes, aerosols, etc accurately? I don’t think we’re even close to that one. If models can predict accurately, they are useful. Which is why I asked about the abstract.)
20
A quick review of the products from these model show what use they are. Very useful to the skeptics of climate science in showing that the science is broken.
Keep them going.
40
Phillip
I don’t want to be rude, but you don’t have a clue what you are talking about.
KK
🙂
ps. To anyone with the RELEVANT education and experience your failings and those of your “climate peers” on whom you rely so much are blindingly obvious.
ps2. A degree in Climate Science is NOT a relevant qualification to model the atmosphere.
Please don’t take the fact that Obama believes in climate change and that there are daily media reports on our imminent incineration because of CO2, that it is real.
The only thing that is real behind the Global Warming scam, as Christina Fig would tell you, is that the MONEY drives the whole thing.
It’s not the CO2.
It’s the MONEY dummy!
80
f(volcano). Really?
40
True Vic, volcanoes tend to be a little bit unpredictable, at least on the time scales used by warmers.
On a time scale of 10,000 years the effect of volcanoes is probably a fairly uniform, regular effect.
On the time scale so beloved of the Warmer Modellers, ie 50 years, volcanoes are totally unpredictable and must not go in the “black box”.
To suggest that anybody is “modelling” the CO2 vs Atmospheric Temp system is just impossible regardless of how big a computer you have.
A computer CANNOT model.
Most sensible qualified people would do a better job of modeling that any Warmer with just a pencil and a big sheet of paper to start looking at the FACTORS involved.
Of course Hansen et al do tend to omit a few relevant factors such as solar variation on a 100,000 year cycle.
KK
30
“Hansen’s original 1981 model had three parameters”
And Hansen’s original data had a peak at 1940 about level with the 1998 Elnino peak.
30
“(Note to Griss, these effects are transient, that of the 1997/98 el nino ending in 1999.)”
WRONG..
try again when you have learnt something.
20
Then why are all the alamistas getting all flustered at the prospect of an Elnino at the end of the year.
They are getting all flustered because they expect it to push the temps up another small step so they don’t continue to look like complete gooses.
If this year’s possible ElNino doesn’t do that, and the slight cooling trend continues, their precious climate models will have to be sent to the intensive care ward.
Coma treatment and life support will be necessary for the poor little climate models, but I suspect the prognosis is very much terminal.
20
Philip Shehan,
OH GORE BLIMEY!
I’ve just belatedly seen one of your mantras yet again:
“Note to Griss, these effects are transient, that of the 1997/98 el nino ending in 1999.”
Please put all other thoughts out of your mind and carefully concentrate; A notable full ENSO oscillation TYPICALLY starts with an El Nino followed by a “corrective/responsive” La Nina.
How many times do I have to clarify this to you only for you to ignore/evade it?
It is absurd for you to argue the expunging of El Nino (being only part of the oscillation) as per Delphic source of SKS and Tamino (AKA Grant Foster), and BTW that is without there being any credible understanding of their proportional contributions relative to the many other thingies!
00
Bob, the guy does not have a clue !!!!
CLUELESS, and shows absolutely zero ability of becoming less CLUELESS.
Inability to learn because he is so up himself. !!
01
So Bob it was a la nina event beginning in 1999 that gave the dip in temperatures in 1999? No argument with that, so why does Griss say that the el nino event persisted until 2001? What’s more, according to Griss, it provided a 0.25 C step that persists to this day. Why do the effects of the la nina event ENSO event not persist? Why does the allegedly persistent el nino event reappear after 2001 after the la nina event has gone away?
For how ENSO really works and affects temperatures without giving any persistent change, see the top panel of the 7th figure, page 10, here (my delphic source for this is NOAA):
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
00
In response to your 13.1.5.2, here are some TIPS for you to study:
1) ENSO translates to ‘El Nino Southern Oscillation’
2) Study the word ‘oscillation’ in all its variations but in broad terms it means something going up and down from a neutral position and can even relate to non-scalable, non-predictable stuff such as changing opinions. (Even an oscillograph can display irregular wave-forms!)
3) Accordingly, the ENSO, in terms of SST’s such as with the popular 3.4 index, it oscillates crudely from hot-to-cold around a ‘normal’ Y index and also temporally in the X axis.
4) Whilst it is popular to refer to El Nino as the warm phase of the oscillation and La Nina as the cold phase, this probably follows from the rather romantic etymology of South American fishermen.
5) On the other hand it is perfectly sensible to consider the El Nino oscillation (having preferenced the masculine; little boy) as having positive and negative phases despite your semantic pedantry.
6) Thank you for your NOAA link: http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf but in particular, please carefully study the graphic under the heading: ‘Oceanic Niño Index (ONI)’ and the supplementary information. (ONI = ENSO 3.4 and is a popular thingy, but there are other indices including the challenging ‘Multivariate’ that you might care to study).
7) NO THANK YOU for your various silly WFT plots including the excising of EL Nino (the positive phase) and doing a silly OLS linear trend from the bottom of the negative phase of the self same oscillation.
00
Bob
1) Yes. Your point is?
2) Yes. As above.
3) As above.
4) Whatever the origin of the terms warm and cold, are you suggesting that the effects on temperature of el nino and La nina events are not warming and cooling of global temperatures respectively?
5) I have no idea what you are talking about. I am conforming to accepted usage. La nina is the “positive pahase of ENSO, La nina the “negative” phase.
6) Yes. Your point is?
7) MY SILLY GRAPHS EXCLDING THE EL NINO SPIKE ARE PRESENTED AT GRISS”S REQUEST. THIS EXCLUSION IS HIS THOROUGHLY STUPID IDEA WHICH I AM REFUTING.
Go and read what I say about them. Eg.
Philip Shehan #10.2.6.2.1
June 13, 2014 at 3:41 pm · Reply
00
Sorry, that should have read El Nino is the “positive” phase.
00
Philip Shehan, Re: 13.1.5.2.1, by item number:
1) Step 1 }
2) Step 2 } hoped 3 simple progressions would help you understand
3) Step 3 }
4) No.
5) Hoped you would understand that the common term ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) as a phenomenon, does not describe the colder phase, it is an oscillation, (wot goes up and down from a norm), and is also referred to as a coupled system, (of warm and cold)
6) Hoped the graphic would help you see that a major El Nino is generally followed by a major la nina, (both Y and X amplitudes being a consideration).
7) Perhaps your biggest non-cognisance in your rant was that ‘the Grist’ repeatedly defined on I think three threads that the oscillation he was considering had start and end dates that clearly coincided with a full El Nino oscillation. Nevertheless, despite his many repetitions of the dates you insisted that he really meant that only the UP part of the oscillation should be considered. Echoes of SKS and Tamino eh?
8) Extending on another part of your rant in 7, you remain proud to shout your statistical expertise in recently adopting an SKS tool but failed to respond to various critiques on this and whatnot on earlier threads, for example:
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/05/that-west-antarctic-melting-couldnt-be-caused-by-volcanoes-could-it/
@ May 30, 2014 at 6:49 pm, May 31, 2014 at 10:26 am & May 30, 2014 at 12:01 pm
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/05/the-university-of-queenslands-diabolical-dilemma
@ June 2, 2014 at 5:37 pm, May 28, 2014 at 11:38 am, & May 29, 2014 at 12:12 pm
BTW, other descriptions for the counterpart of the cold phase have included el viejo (in English: the old man) and anti-El Nino.
Strangely, la nina, (in English: the girl), has a paradoxical etymology when compared with El Nino (in Caps = The Christ Child/or The Little Boy at Christmas time).
Also BTW, as another comparator, I had to smile a few years ago when physicists/climatologists quietly changed the classical non-molecular definition of HEAT in a rather puzzling way…… Ho hum.
00
Bob_FJ.
What PS has could be called brain stagnation.
He has lost the ability to actually listen and learn, and is hence stuck in his own little cycle of meaningless repetition.
He needs to step away and find something that will actually open up his mind, and break it out of its monotonous tedium….
….. or his life will become even more miserable and sad.
00
Bob I have become used to Griss’s monumental idiocy and shouting, abusive tantrums when his fantasies are contradicted.
I thought that in spite of the anonymous knee jerk ticks of approval, no-one else could buy his nonsense that the 1998 el nino ended in 2001 and led to a 0.25 C step in temperatures in the face of the clear evidence to the contrary.
I have dealt with Griss’s so called evidence at
# 10.2.1.1.11
Philip Shehan
June 12, 2014 at 2:09 am
But never mind the data, just think about it for a minute.
If el nino steps lead to a permanent o.25 C increase in temperatures, why do la nina events not lead to a permanent decrease?
If only el nino events have permanent effects, each el nino event since plate tectonics gave the current distribution of the continents and the oceans over millions of years would have added and added to global temperatures so that the current atmospheric temperature would be intolerable to life.
You people call yourself “skeptics” yet you blind yourselves to the clear evidence of the temperature record that the 1997/98 el nino event ended in 1999, not 2001:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1995/mean:1/to:2005
And by the way, where is the “step” followin6 the strong 2010 el nino event?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1995/mean:1/to
If the temperature graphs themselves are not sufficient evidence, the following table and graph shows that the strong el nino event ended in 1999.
http://ggweather.com/enso/oni.htm
1999 and 1998 were moderate la nina years.
2011 and 2011 were stong el nino years, but no step.
Are you seriously joining Griss in displaying his monumental ignorance of mathematics or his pig headed refusal to accept the importance of error margins in trend analysis?
What do the links you provide have to do with this?
And I have responded to the idiots who automatically dismiss anything that appears on SkS without providing a shred of evidence as to why results produced by the trend trend calculator algorithm is wrong.
I have frequently noted that its trends match those of WFT and the 2 sigma error margins match those based on a test sample of the temperature data as calculated by the regression program of my Hewlett packard calculator. And As I noted before, the data is not SkS’s. Both the trend calculator and WFT uses the data tables supplied by the various temperature data tables from Hadcrut, NOAA, RSS etc.
00
The Griss @ 13.1.5.2.3,
Re: Philip Shehan. I previously thought you have been a bit harsh on him but after seeing his latest astonishing lack of comprehension just above, and his marked vanity along the way, you were justified. I see that Sheri, despite her admirable lucidity finds no value in further discussion with him either.
00
Your mathematical and climate science naivety is astounding Philip. !!
I can no longer be bothered trying to educate you.
00
The Griss @ 13.1.5.2.6
To bring back some humour, do you recall the hilarious response from tom0mason @ 17.1.2.2.4 (June 10, 2014 at 4:06 pm) concerning Shehan’s daft poly-curve-fit correlation?
“Philip,
Correlate these http://www.tylervigen.com/ “
I remember Shehan’s response rather well because at the time I was struck by its daft incompleteness:
“The rise in temperature as a result of increasing greenhouse gases, including CO2, is a well established scientific phenomenon.”
I wondered if maybe he was aware of stuff like feedbacks, which some have been shown to be negative. He should at least be aware of great uncertainty. So why did he make such a naïve statement? Well, a possible explanation might be that he is a troll (making misleading statements in order to provoke a response)
You suggest that he is naïve, which seems to be so, but maybe he is smarter than we think and is a troll?
00
Bob I don’t know who you think yiu are fooling but you are not fooling me.
You have no response to the points I make and the data I present so you change the subject to an irrelevant point.
(I am of course aware of feedbacks, negative and positive.)
Hurling the epithet troll at those who dispute “skeptics” is a standard tactic by people who display not a scintilla of skepticism regarding their views and in fact react with hostility to them being challenged.
00
Philip Shehan,
My post above (13.1.5.2.1) is intended for you
00
He reminds me of a young engineer one time hand wringing and sweating over dimensional calculations in thousandths of an inch.
He didn’t seem to realise that the raw data he started with was determined with a tape measure!
Some mothers do have ’em!
10
Rod Stuart,
Or a tool-shop apprentice going to the store to get a left handed screwdriver.
00
And coming out with a left handed hammer. 🙂
00
the Griss,
What after being persuaded by the expert store keeper that it would be easier to lever-out a left hand threaded screw with a claw-hammer?
10
🙂
Maybe he will eventually figure out he has to turn the screw the other way. ?
Those negative threads can be a bummer for the weak minded. 😉
00
Fellas, see my comment to Sheri,
14.1.2.3.14
Philip Shehan
June 15, 2014 at 8:21 pm
00
Not to mention Keith that they are all scalar, that is they assume that feedbacks have no time lags and you can therefore sum them, when in the real world feedbacks takes time. ( in truth the feedback value falls out of the model, but it’s a scalar value when clearly feedbacks are complex quantities, so a scalar feedback value bears no relationship to the real world – it’s non-physical. An assumption of scalar feedbacks is simply wrong, and that makes the scalar models wrong.
Current scalar climate models are the equivalent of trying to infer the dynamic behaviour, and frequency response of an amplifier from its DC gain. Can’t be done.
10
> observational studies (like climate research) failed 80 – 100% of the time.
Notice that “like climate research” isn’t part of the paper you’re citing, which is purely about medical stuff. Adding your interpolations like that, where they can be easily misread, is misleading.
> “Peer Review” is not part of the scientific method.
But it is. “Scientific method” is defined by the method that scientists use. You may, if you wish, attempt to argue for your own, different method; but hijacking what everyone else uses and trying to redefine it won’t fly.
> It’s a form of argument from authority.
No. Its a filter to reject junk, or uninteresting, or things of low innovative value (like LB’s most recent). You hate peer review only because very few “skeptic” papers survive it; not because of the flaws in the system.
116
William, Congratulations on a totally circular argument and based on a fallacy.
Scientists are people who know what the scientific method is. If what Einstein, Newton and Darwin did was science, then Peer Review is not part of it.
171
You’re assuming the scientific method stays constant over time. It doesn’t. Things evolve and change. This upsets some people; there’s a strand of thought that would like the world to stay like it was when we were young; but the world moves on, with or without you.
> Scientists are people who know what the scientific method is.
I didn’t say that. I said ‘“Scientific method” is defined by the method that scientists use’. Attempting an ab-initio defn of “scientific method” doesn’t work; the operational defn is more useful.
115
No William, I’m assuming The Scientific Method means testing hypotheses against empirical evidence. If that has changed, it isn’t “science”.
You are confusing a common bureaucratic process in the modern practice of science with the actual method and philosophy behind the subject.
Defining science as the method that the people labeled “scientists” use is circular. Who determines the who gets the label?
PS: I wasn’t suggesting you said “Scientists are people who know what the scientific method is.” Indeed it was obvious you don’t understand that basic truth.
120
That’s a naive view. Philosophers of science would not take it seriously. But all of this dancing around what exactly is the scientific method isn’t valuable. Your fundamental objection to peer review remains the papers that are published and the ones that aren’t; not the process itself.
> circular
It is, to some extent. That’s life: sometimes things don’t work according to the lovely ab-initio theories you’d like to be true.
> that basic truth.
I don’t think it is a basic truth. Most scientists “do science” without troubling themselves greatly about what the scientific method is. See-also http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2014/01/20/peer-review/ or http://variable-variability.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/peer-review-helps-fringe-ideas-gain.html.
“The layman’s conception of the scientist as a critic, a skeptic, a man intolerant or contemptuous of conventional beliefs, is obviously incomplete. The exposure and castigation of error does not propel science forward, though it may clear a number of obstacles from its path. To prove that pigs cannot fly is not to devise a machine that does so.”
Unfortunately, a scientist’s account of his own intellectual procedures is often untrustworthy. Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be, and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare. If taunted he would probably mumble something about “Induction” and “Establishing the Laws of Nature”, but if anyone working in a laboratory professed to be trying to establish the Laws of Nature by induction, we should think he was overdue for leave.
(From “Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought” in Pluto’s Republic, 1984, OUP. http://www.liv.ac.uk/~pcknox/teaching/phil/medawar.htm)
110
That you rely on psychoanalysis as an argument says it all about your ability to reason.
No. Read my blog.
Exactly. Dear William – that’s why their models fail pathetically.
101
> Read my blog.
I’ve read some of those, indeed participated in the discussion. The PRP thingy was particularly enlightening. It doesn’t change my opinion. You’re still missing some fundamental points, the most basic of which is that peer review isn’t a guarantor of good science, merely a filter. The real test comes later, when people read and cite the work in question. If it makes it into the established literature (not just the published literature, there are uncounted thousands of published peer-reviewed papers no-one ever reads; I mean the literature that people read, teach, cite, use) then its become accepted.
> Exactly
I think you’d do well to read my quote, above, from Sir Peter Medawar. Science just isn’t what outsiders think it is. Indeed, nothing of any kind of complexity is ever what outsiders think it is.
[As Jo’s post shows, highly cited papers does not mean highly accurate: “Ioannidis looked at highly cited (supposedly the most important papers) and found that RCT’s were replicated 67% of the time (which is still a 37% failure rate) but observational studies only replicated one time in 6 (16%).
He remarked that this was not good enough:
Replication rates of 0.0%,1 67.9%, or 16.6%,4 are unacceptable. Clearly the standard p-value of <0.05 as a measure of statistical significance is not a reliable indicator that a result will replicate." – Mod]
09
William. I am pretty sure that you have reincarnated from one of those people of “the establishment” who burned all the heretics who “denied” that the earth is flat.
70
William Connolley
In answer to 14.1.1.1.1
June 10, 2014 at 4:53 am
This self reverential quote –
just shows how confused you are!
Science is not about “… the literature that people read, teach, cite, use) then its become accepted”, you dumbo. It is about truth.
The number of citations, or the amount of people taught from it, how highly regarded the author is, all of these are meaningless if the ‘science’ is wrong.
40
William censored me on his blog when I mentioned Feynman, who said exactly the same thing.
He hates him.
00
> censored me on his blog when I mentioned Feynman
You mean this one? http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2014/05/14/ha-ha-lennart-bengtsson-leaves-advisory-board-of-gwpf/#comment-42131 Doesn’t look very censored to me.
Or perhaps this one: http://stoat-spam.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/fuck-you-wc-you-are-coward.html
00
Oh, how easy for you to pull it out of censorship in pleading your innocence. The fact is you big FW that you are a pathetic coward.
You know very well that was a private message to you, which you selectively pulled out of moderation. It was in response to other comments you had put into moderation, plus your pathetic avoidance of anything which is a question. It was perfectly appropriate.
00
“Methodologist who have no personal experience of scientific research have been gravely handicapped by their failure to realize that nearly all scientific research leads nowhere — or if it does lead somewhere, then not in the direction it started off with. In retrospect, we tend to forget the errors, so that “The Scientific Method” appears very much more powerful than it really is, particularly when it is presented to the public in the terminology of breakthroughs, and to fellow scientists with the studied hypocrisy expected of a contribution to a learned journal. I reckon that for all the use it has been to science about four-fifths of my time has been wasted, and I believe this to be the common lot of people who are not merely playing follow-my-leader in research. ” http://www.criticalrationalism.net/2010/02/03/sir-peter-medawar-on-scientific-method/
So which quote should we go by—the one you like or any of the other quotes one can pull up in 5 minutes with Google? Maybe we need to actually look at the whole of what Medawar said.
Plato was a philopher, by the way.
40
William Connolley, I shall merely repeat the points you’ve made back at you. This is your “science”. No wonder it doesn’t work:
1. Peer review is an essential part of the scientific method. [source comment]
2. “peer review isn’t a guarantor of good science,” [source comment]
3. The scientific method is defined as “what scientists do”. [source comment]
4. Scientists don’t pay attention to the scientific method. [source comment]
5. The scientific method changes [source comment]
6. Discussing what the scientific method is is not valuable [source comment].
You follow up these self-contradictory and confused statements with bluster: Jo is “naive” and “Philosophers of science would not take it seriously.”
Your Sir Peter Medawar quote is a content-free gatekeeper statement designed to close off discussion from the unwashed. It adds nothing of any insight.
I take it from your silence you concede you were wrong in your pop-psychoanalysis of my “fundamental objections” to peer review. Typically, you don’t have the honesty to admit it.
The contradictions and circularity in your arguments are obvious from points 1 – 6 above. I don’t expect you to acknowledge that either.
80
1. Close, but no cigar. I said ‘“Scientific method” is defined by the method that scientists use.’ I didn’t say “essential”. Indeed, it isn’t essential: its possible to do science without it. Newton did, as you’ve pointed out before and I’ve agreed before. Had you paraphrased me as “Peer review is a part of the scientific method” I’d have been happy.
2, 3: yes, fine.
4. No, I didn’t say that either. I said “Most scientists “do science” without troubling themselves greatly about what the scientific method is”. You need to be more careful; the language usualyl used in this blog and comments in blunt and unsubtle; you’ve lost your eye for the qualifiers and complexity that the outside world uses.
5. Fine.
6. Again, no. I said “But all of this dancing around what exactly is the scientific method isn’t valuable.” I meant, the discussion taking place here. I didn’t say that it wasn’t possible to have a useful discussion on the topic (though I share Hobbes’s opinion of the schoolmen).
> I take it from your silence you concede…
Always a dangerous thing to write; wrong in this case.
> Sir Peter Medawar
Is highly respected. And if you read what he wrote out to anyone actually doing science, they would very likely agree. As I said before, you and yours have a naive and idealised view of science common to those who don’t do it.
01
Are you in denial?
1.Quote, I said: “Peer Review” is not part of the scientific method.
You said: “But it is.” My paraphrase was correct.
4. So you don’t really have a reply, just vague lines about “subtleties”.
6. So the argument here (the one you are losing) is “not useful” according to you. Tough getting beaten isn’t it?
7. I assumed from your silence you had no reply. You say I was wrong, but provide no argument. You are supporting my point. Thanks. You stated twice that I hate peer review and only because I don’t like what’s published, claiming my objections are “not the process itself”. So I linked to articles where I discuss the failings of the process, and you again, deny it. You make no effort to correct your statements, or acknowledge you were wrong. No wonder you don’t learn.
8. If Medawar is so “respected” (there’s that argument from authority fallacy) why didn’t you quote something useful of his instead of the waste-of-time gatekeeper-line? (I note again, you don’t try to defend the argument you put forward. Do you just hope I will be fooled by your fallacies? Perhaps that works on your blog. Not mine.)
I backed up my points with links to your exact quotes. I’m not surprised you are unhappy with being caught out.
My original point stands — Your arguments are circular and contradictory and your bluster baseless. You say the scientific method is “what scientists do” but when I point out the circularity and ask who determines who gets the label “scientist” — you ignore it.
30
Why should William Connolley have any credibility here or elsewhere? Wasn’t he kicked off Wiki for slanting numerous articles in favor of global warming?
——–
Howie, that’s technically an ad hom. His arguments here stand or fall on their merits. – Jo
00
> Why should William Connolley have any credibility here or elsewhere?
Credentialism. Fail.
> Wasn’t he kicked off Wiki for slanting numerous articles in favor of global warming?
No.
03
Peer-review is not a part of modern science. Its a part of academia. You doing an experiment yourself and analysing the data for yourself is science. Any shortcuts are just pragmatic or in your case, Willy, downright lazy.
Peer-review is a short cut. It saves academics time because of the number of papers submitted. It gives the paper a stamp of approval from a publishing house that it is worth reading, not that it is right nor that rejected articles are wrong. It fails because of dodgy scientists using it to manipulate their field. They succeed because people like you portray it as a stamp of divinity that is worth parroting.
10
William: “You’re assuming the scientific method stays constant over time. It doesn’t. Things evolve and change.”
Isn’t the whole premise of global warming that things should not change, or at least not at a rate we determine we don’t like?
80
I can’t tell if you’re serious or not. I’ll answer as though you were:
whether the scientific method changes or not has no relationship to whether the Earth is warming or not, and whether this is good or not. GW – I mean, the IPCC WG1 physical science basis – doesn’t have a “premise” so I find that hard to interpret. Perhaps you mean the political response, or the design of a desired response to minimise damage? That does have a premise, or at least you could put it that way, that rapid changes from a previously quasi-stable temperature are likely undesireable. But I still don’t understand why you’d link that to my comment about scientific method.
00
Your statement was “things evolve and change”. Climate is a thing. Climate evolves and changes. When science changes, you seem very pleased. When climate changes, you don’t seem to think that is desirable. Why is it okay for science to evolve and change but not the climate? Evolving is what the entire planet has been doing for billions of years. It seems to me that climate science, which has evolved and changed, it dead set against the same thing happening to the climate.
( A physical science basis can still be applied improperly. We do not know or have the ability to model all parts of the climate. We lack detailed paleological data. A “physical science basis” does not mean the science is automatically true. Especially not in complex systems. I believe there was a premise in the IPCC reports—that CO2 is the primary reason for the temperature of the planet rising.)
00
> When science changes, you seem very pleased.
Well, we all hope that science will progress, so yes its natural that one is pleased by “change”, ie scientific progress. That seems so obvious as to not need remarking on.
As to your other question, paraphrased, it is “why is it good that thing_a changes, but not good that (completely unrelated) thing_b changes?” Rephrased in that way, its clear that your question is silly.
> I believe there was a premise in the IPCC reports—that CO2 is the primary reason for the temperature of the planet rising.
Your belief is incorrect. There is no such premise. See my earlier comments about people not reading what they are criticising.
01
So if premise is not that CO2 is the primary reason for the temperature of the planet rising, then why are we having these rediculous discussions and throwing away billions of dollars on CO2 reductions? And why is there an IPCC?
20
While I agree that peer review is not part of science in the narrow sense of how research is carried out, it is now certainly the primary means by which scientists communicate the results of their research.
At the time Newton and Darwin were working, science was called Natural Philosophy, and most practitioners were gentlemen amateurs. It was a relatively small club whose practitioners knew and communicated with each other by letters and delivering papers as formal lectures at instutitions like the Royal Society. The first journals were Proceedings of these meetings.
Newton and Einstein were urged by friends to establish the priority of their discoveries at such meetings and by publishing books – Newton’s Principa and Darwin’s Origin of Species.
As science grew into a profession such cosy arrangements no longer sufficed. Manuscripts were submitted to journals, and the job of assesssing the submitted manuscripts passed on by editors to scientists with a track record in the field to examine the contents.
By the twentieth century this was the primary method of notifying other scintists of discoveries and Einstein’s papers certainly did appear in peer reviewed journals.
012
See my reply to Connolley.
You too are mixing up the philosophy of science with the bureaucratic procedures and mechanisms in common use.
No part of The Scientific Method has to involve editors or approved publishers. A theory is either true or it’s not. Whether two unpaid anonymous practitioners gave it their approval does not make it so.
It fits reality or it doesn’t.
130
Ms Nova, No I am not mixing the philosophy of science with bureaucratic mechanisms in common use.
I affirmed your statement that peer review is not part of the way that science is carried out in the primary sense.
The rest of my post is to do with the history of science, how scientists (as they came to be called somewhat late in the day)communicate their findings to each other, and why peer review became necessary in this process.
In this respect, the communication of results, it is part of the broader process of how science is carried out.
As a former boss was fond of pointing out, you can make all the brilliant scientific discoveries you like, but until you have published the results, it is a futile exercise.
01
Phil,
The net result of alarmist’s inputs to this post are nothing more than blatant attempts to justify a corrupted and contaminated peer review selection process in order to promote and establish an illegitimate climate science for your personal gain.
The conclusion of the post seems validated.
60
Nope,
Peer review is nothing more than technical proofreading, it’s a way for journals to handle proofreading of subject matter that they have limited qualification for. Peer review is therefore part of the publishing process, it is NOT part of the scientific process.
40
Well said , bobl. 🙂
20
No, it is not merely technical proof reading.
Reviewers are people with sufficient expertise in the area of the manuscript, based on their publication record in the area, who look at the paper to see whether the methodology and data are sound and that the conclusions follow from the data, and whether the results and conclusions, if correct, are of sufficient importance and relevance for them to recommend to the editor that it is worth publishing in the particular journal considering the competition for page space.
Proof reading, looking for typos etc. does not require this level of skill or knowledge.
00
Then how do you explain the fictitious articles and data that have made it into peer reviewed journals (not just the open access ones)? What about the number of retracted papers? There’s an entire web-site dedicated to this phenomena.
In reality, peer-review allows maybe three people to decide if research is worthy of publication. I keep asking how many truly remarkable studies do you think peer-review kept out because they did not like the subject matter? I don’t see this as a quality filter—it just does not seem to function as such.
10
Sheri, I have never claimed peer review (or any other process involving judgement by humans) is perfect.
Thus my paraphrasing of Churchill above.
There are certainly errors, retractions and regrettably outright fraud on the parts of some authors but these are a very small minority of papers published. The latter attract such condemnation it is usually the end of the person’s career, so such instances are very rare. Honest mistakes are entirely a different matter.
No doubt given the thousands and thousands of peer reviewed papers published every year in a multitude of journals, someone can come up with a very lengthy list of failures.
This should not include papers whch are perfectly valid at the time but are superceeded by later studies.
As I said I have both refuted and been refuted by others on this basis myself.
On one occasion I wrote to an author and pointed out an error in his calculation based on using the wrong constant.
This was an easy mistake to make as in one vesion the parameter, h, Planck’s constant, is used and in another h with a small horizontal bar through the upright of the h, which is Dirac’s constant – Planck’s constant divided by 2 pi. He had incorrectly used Dirac’s constant. Both the resulting numbers are termed the nuclear quadrupole coupling constant. If you think this is unnecessarily confusing I am entirely in agreement.
This is not the sort of detail that would be easily picked up by a reviewer. I noticed it only because I was puzzled when I saw his result was different to mine which I had calculated for another paper. It took me a while to find his mistake. (To my relief the error was his.)
He was very grateful and courteous, posted a correction in the joural and invited me to speak at two conferences in Japan, all expenses paid.
Mind you on another occasion I did get a somewhat huffy response from another Japanese scientist concerning the structure of a peptide (these are small chains of amino acids whch fold and bend into three dimensional shapes which affects their biological activity).
We had published a structure where the folding differed from his, but when I pointed out we were using different experimental conditions (eg. solvent pH, temperature), he was interested and said he looked forward to comparing notes at future meetings.
Scientist are not as precious about their results and findings as many non-scientists here seem to think.
This is part of the constant process of revision in science.
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Philip: I truly hope that much of science works as you describe. Your double checking a calculatiion is what is supposed to be done on a routine basis. It sounds as if your experience in peer reivew has been a fairly good one. Unfortunately, in climate science, it does not seem to work that way. While I’m sure some skeptical positions are incorrect, the virtual absence of these positions in what can only be called a developing science would indicate that is not the case. It is also evident in the 97% consensus argument, where science plays no part. Perhaps we are trying to throw out the baby with the bath water here. In extremely politicized science, peer-review appears to be used as a way of stopping all discussion and disagreement. If you can figure out how to take politics out of science, then the peer-review may work. I just thought it would be easier to redo or replace peer-review than extract politics from science.
(We still have the problem of fictitious articles. One of the primary arguments for peer-review is quality control. Some 120 articles repoertedly made it through peer-review and had no reality to them. These articles are then quoted by other researchers. This doesn’t look like quality control to me. And yes, my standards are high because these are supposed to be the “experts” we listen to. If experts can’t spot faked papers or horribly done studies—as in the cases of Lewendosky and Cook—why would we have any “faith” in their work?)
00
Sheri, as I have noted above, no scientist is going to waste his or her time and resources checking calculations or repeating experiments for the sake of it.
I discovered the error when I noticed it was not consistent with the results of my own work. That is how errors (and outright fraud) are discovered, or when scientist basing their own work on previous “discoveries” find that they do not hold up.
Again, given the thousands upon thousands of article published in a myriad of journals every year, it is no surprise that someone looking for errors came up with a list of (only) 120. I have no doubt that the errors in these 120 papers was discovered in the manner I describe.
You should consider the possibility that the fact that the majority of published papers finding in favour of AGW is not a fault in peer review any more than the number of papers finding that smoking is harmful.
It may simply represents the balance of evidence and the reality of the situation.
I personally have no investment, financial or otherwise in the AGW question.
Ironically, I was unpersuaded by the case for AGW, and took little note of the issue until I began reading skeptic blogs such as Andrew Bolt’s which led me to study the arguments and literature for and against.
While not a climatologist, I have enough understanding of the scientific method and data analysis to evaluate papers and scientific (and not so scintific)arguments on this.
After a time I came to the view that the preponderance of evidence was on AGW being real.
As for the politics of the issue, it is no coincidence that many skeptic blogs and think tanks are very pro free market and anti regulation. I once made a contribution to the website of the Galileo Society here in Australia and received a response complete with it’s slogan or mission statement saying that it was dedicated to free markets and against regulation.
The same is true of out Institute of Public Affairs, a free market think tank established decades ago which has taken up climate skepticism, sponsoring visits by Lord Monckton and others. I understand a similar situation applies to the Heritage foundation and similar organisations in the US.
And of course Australia we have vast fossil fuel and industries and mining magnates that lobby the conservative parties. This is not a conspiracy theory, it is a simple and obvious fact and they are perfectly entitled to spend the amounts of money they do in promoting their cause and lobbying politicians.
In fact in Australia the law requires public companies to put the interests of shareholders first, so you could say they are legally obliged to do so, but no one should be under any illusion that they are disinterested parties.
One magnate, Gina Rinehart, who was one of the leaders of the campaign against the “carbon tax” (actually an emmissions trading scheme) bought a substantial interest in a television network which then gave Andrew Bolt his own show tho promote his (and Gina’s) views.
Again, nothing illegitimate about this but when people talk about politics and self interest being introduced into climate science, they should bear these examples in mind.
Wishing to deny the evidence of AGW does not necessarily involve deliberate deceit. It is basic human psychology for people to want things to be true that are in their own interest. When our own skeptic PM says that he wants Australia to be the cheap energy capital of the world, I am sure this is too a large degree the source of his skepticism which may well be sincere. I repeat, this is basic human nature.
I would like our society to be enriched as a result of mining fossil fuels as much as anyone, but this will not prevent me from evaluating the evidence of the downside.
And that is true of most people who conclude on that basis that AGW is real.
00
Phillip, it’s no accident that skeptics are pro free market. Free markets beat government run ones every time. Skeptics are simply smart people who are right on both. It’s no accident that people who are gullible enough to believe government committee reports on climate also think big-government regulation works too.
Over the last century the free market won. Communism collapsed. The people who are smart enough to recognize that the free competitive market outperforms are also smart enough to see through the false claims made by committees that use logical errors, trash the scientific method, and cannot cite a single long term observational study to support their water vapor feedback assumptions.
Your continued stone-age reasoning with ad hominem arguments instead of rational scientific arguments supports my theory, not that I expect you to be capable of recognising that.
30
When did not repeating experiments become part of science? When I was studying science, repeatability was the hallmark of scientific experiments. Without it, we learned nothing with an experiment. If you only do it once, you have no way of knowing if it’s random chance or an actual finding. So now we just hope it’s not random chance? That doesn’t sound right at all.
I have considered the possibility that the fact that the majority of published papers finding in favor of AGW is not due to AGW, but I cannot find sufficient evidence that this is true. (I won’t address the bait of “smoking is harmful”, though I will say, nice try.)
“While not a climatologist, I have enough understanding of the scientific method and data analysis to evaluate papers and scientific (and not so scintific)arguments on this.”
And others do not? Simply because they disagree? I am well-versed in the scientific method and don’t see that climate change claims actually pan out. I have read extensively and taken a class on this. I came to the conclusion that much of what is going on is not science. How am I different from you, except I reached the opposite conclusion. My conclusion is not based on politics or “blog mentality”. I read actual research and can spend weeks researching before writing on any topic concerning AGW.
Surely you are not trying to argue that those on the climate change side are somehow altruistic and everyone else is not. Warren Buffet put up wind turbines for tax breaks. He cares nothing about the environment. Al Gore got millions selling his TV station to an oil country. There’s no evidence that any political side cares except about the money and power.
I am perfectly aware of human psychology–I am not uneducated and I am really tired of the psychoanalyzing of this. It’s got NOTHING to do with the science and it’s extremely condescending. Plus, people love to “play” at psychology when they really don’t understand it at all. Human nature is NOT the reason some people don’t believe in climate change. Maybe we analyze you as a group-think junkie who’s a liberal and hates all progress. That would not be fair, but you seem fine doing it to others. Just because some beliefs align does NOT indicate causality, even if you really, really want it to be.
Most proAGW believers are socialists and want to drive us back to the stone age no matter how many people it kills—or that’s what we can start saying if we really are going to go with this “your politics are your science” stuff. There’s a lot of evidence that socialists and communists love AGW. Doesn’t make it true, does it? So why argue the opposite?????? You’re losing my respect when you dive into this nonsense. Either go with the science or stop trying to tell me you really do understand science.
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Ms Nova,
You miss my point. This is not a debate about the superiority of any economic system or the benefits and drawbacks of regulation.
Personally I happen to believe in moderation in all things. Too much regulation is bad for the entrepeneurial spirit and inhibits economic growth and individual initiative. Insufficient regulation and you end up with the global financial crisis and third world sweatshops where children work for less than a dollar a day.
The point is that free market think tanks are primarily concerned with just that, the promotion of the free market and opposition to government regulation. That is their legitimate agenda, but it is their primary agenda, and their view of the science is moulded by that agenda. The fact that such institutons, along with fossil fuel industries and mining magnates lead the anti AGW movement is no surprise given their prime reason for existance.
Scientific institutions and scientists exist to explain how the natural world works. That they overwhelmingly support the reality of AGW is simply a reflection of their reading of the scientific evidence.
00
PS Ms Nova, Although I often find myself in disagreement with Mr Bolt, I once attended an IPA function where he was a guest speaker alongside former Labor Minister who wrote a book on the aboriginal issue (can’t remember his name right now and can’t be bothered going through my badly organised bookshelves to find it). Both the author and Mr Bolt signed my copy.
I agree with the IPA position on the racial vilification act, and being of partial aboriginal descent I was in agreement with his views on aboriginal identity and had discussions with Mr Bolt’s lawyers after offering to testify for Mr Bolt at his trial. Unfortunately I was not required to give evidence.
I did find myself in the minority (of one) in a discussion of climate change among other attendees at the dinnner table, but it was a very polite discussion.
00
Sheri , as I have noted before, repeating the experiments of others for the sake of it would be a vast waste of time money and resources that no scientist or funding body could to afford to indulge in.
The research group engaging in the study do repeat their experiments and subject the results to statistical analysis to deal with the possibility of the results being due to random chance where appropriate. That is why peer reviewers insist on a statistical analysis of data.
That is what is meant by the p < 0.05 or 95% confidence level is about. It puts the probability of the result being due to random chance at less than 5%.
One of the points rased by Young and Miller in the introductory article to this section is that the margin for error should be tightened even further, and why they would laugh themselves sick at Griss and his supporters basing arguments on data with error margins of hundreds of percent.
As I note above, if the result is faulty, subsequent related studies will eventually discover and correct errors.
Sheri, do not put words into my mouth or attribute opinions to me that I did not state or even imply.
NOWHERE did I write that people who disagree with me concerning evaluation of scientific evidence must have an inferior understanding. Part of being a scientist is to engage in debate with other scientists and competent non-scintists who have different opinions.
I was pointing out that as a scientist, I have a thorough understanding of the scientific method, what is and is not acceptable methodology and data analysis and the drawing of valid conclusions based on the result.
And at the risk of repating myself, that says nothing about the abilities of others who come to different conclusions, nor that my conclusions must be right.
This is no different to a lawyer saying he is in a position to analyse legal argument, a doctor saying he is in a position to make a diagnosis, an engineer to have an opinion on bridge design etc. etc. It is a claim of training and competence, not infallibility.
To deal briefly with your other comments, you are misunderstanding my point and pardon me if at this late hour I do not go into a detailed reeply.
Briefly, I am not saying all people who support AGW are alturistic or are not affected by prejudices that prevent them from dispassionately looking at the data. Greenie tree huggers may indeed be suffering from some distaste for industrialization. Nor am I saying that genuine skeptics are not capable of dispassionate assessment of the evidence.
(And Warren Buffet is not a scientist. His primary concern is also profit.)
Scientists’ primary concern is the understanding how the world works. That does not mean they are entirely free of prejudices but they are at least trained to be on guard against them but of course some are better at this than others.
The fantasies of some “skeptics” that every, or even most scientists and scientific bodies are on this mythical AGW gravy train and have sold their integrity for thirty pieces of silver is just that – myth invented to support a prejudice. (Like the tobacco industry, the fossil fuel companies would pay much better.)
My basic point is that free market think tanks, fossil fuel industries and mining magnates, who have no intrinsic interst in science but a strong non-scientific stake in the debate are overwhelmingly and actively anti-AGW.
That does not in itself mean they are wrong, but to be blind to the fact of human nature that people engage in wishful thinking and acting out of self interest (are you really disputing that?) and that this is not factor in this support when scientists and scientific institutions whose raison d’etre is science are overwhelmingly of the scientific opinion that AGW is real (again this does not mean they are right)…. Well, you get my drift.
00
> pro free market.
FWIW, I am too.
00
Okay, Philip, I will accept that you did not mean to imply others don’t understand, but I will note that the way you phrased your comment did lead to misunderstanding. When someone says “I understand the scientific method” that tends to be interpreted as “I know more than you”, rather than a simple statement of qualifications. It’s not really the same as saying “I’m a lawyer” etc because the scientific method does not require a degree in science to understand. It’s quite straightforward.
Where in journal papers does it say the experiment was done twice? Maybe in some parts of science, but I really have not found much in the way of this in climate science. Yes, I understand the 95% thing–two standard deviations. It only means that the finding was not due to chance if all of the input parameters are valid. This does not apply to anything Lewandosky or Cook did. There was no science in that, even from the psychology side. Those were marketing techniques, nothing more. The thing with statistical significance is how easily you can achieve this with parameters that don’t actually prove the conclusion. Statistics should work, but in reality you can get a p value for all kinds of things that are random chance. (You keep saying “no one will pay for a duplicate experiment–even if it’s part of the method, I guess. If publishing the study and waiting for some further study to correct/find errors, then these are not verified theories/hypotheses that are published. They are first run of testing.)
Yes, fossil fuel industries etc might have a strong reason to be anti-AGW. But those on the opposing side have an equally strong reason to have their viewpoints. Many scientists have been vilified for daring to question AGW. Unless this is all made up and these individuals are lying. Kids have been failed on school projects for daring to question AGW. President Obama is using AGW to shut down things he does not want, like coal plants. School lunches are to be built around AGW now. Plus, fossil fuel industries can actually profit from AGW, especially gas and oil right now. They all have renewable departments that soak up tax breaks by the billions. The idea that this is threat–look at Europe, where renewables failed and coal returned. I know of no oil companies off hand that don’t use the “fewer emissions” and “renewable” handles. Many have wind turbines in their ads. I’m not seeing a threat, just a myth.
No, I am not saying that people do not engage in wishful thinking, I am saying ALL people do and this argument applies to everyone in this discussion, if you’re going to throw it in. You are just as guilty as I. Psychology does not stop at the AGW door. If you make this argument, you claim that BOTH sides are guilty.
You keep saying “this does not mean they (the scientists) are right”, but you keep implying that these scientists are right, based basically on the argument from authority. The fact that I think they are not right is very possible if we just look at the science. No politics, no reason to not believe except I looked at the science. So where does that put me?
10
Sheri I read your first para and got no further.
I find your comments intelligent and well put, but when you claim that when someone writes that they understand X means that they are saying they know more than others I am simply not going to bother reading further.
A statement that “I am trained and qulified to understand X” means “I am trained and qualified to understand X”. PERIOD. You do not like the discussion of psychology so I will not go into why people choose to read things into statements that are simply not there.
Since you have raised the subject of levles of knowledge of others discussing things here, there are clearly people here who have little or no knowledge of science or mathematics science and feel the need to cover their ignorance by continual shouting and abuse. Griss is merely the worst offender.
My statement IS exactly the same as lawyer saying I am qualified to discuss the law without the imputation that others are not, or a doctor saying I am… Oh forget it. I am not going to bother further defending myself from this BS either.
I am thoroughly tired of chip on the shoulder skeptics looking for any excuse to personally attack those who disagree with them. I did not put you in that class and will not hold it against you but do not fall into the habits of the many idiots here.
And no that does not mean everyone putting a view contrary to mine is an idiot. But apparently I have to spell that out lest some chip on the shoulder idiot jumps to that entirely unwarranted conclusion.
00
If you cannot read anything beyond my first paragraph, I am wasting my time. I gave you an honest answer and you took it personally, as if I were attacking you. I explained what I understood. Perhaps your arguing with Griss is having a deleterious effect. Whatever the case, I seems that my honesty is not acceptable at this time. If I cannot be honest and open, then there’s little point. Perhaps some other time.
20
“there are clearly people here who have little or no knowledge of science or mathematics science and feel the need to cover their ignorance”
But you are not succeeding in covering your own ignorance, despite your continued meaningless attempts to downgrade others.
Take it, or don’t try to give it. And stop crying, FFS !! 🙂
00
Sheri,I logged on to say sorry if I got huffy but considering the amount of abuse I get from know nothings who know nothing and the restraint I show in my replies to them until I simply can no longer be bothered, I found your accusation very irritating.
And sure enough as I was scrolling down to write this, I noted the newly posted responses by Griss, Bob_FJ and Rod Stuart telling each other how smart they are and how dumb I am (and the preceding comments in that particular discussion for that matter.)
You are mentioned by one of these individuals.
13.1.5.2.4
Philip Shehan
June 15, 2014 at 2:41 am
Now tell me, who is it that bases their arguments on how little other party knows about science and mathematics, and who sticks to the points under discussion?
00
Griss, since you have provided no points of substance for me to rebut I will confine myself to a character assessment which is your usual mode of argument.
You are a clown Griss and you are fooling nobody. You and Bob had no reply to the data which clearly refuted your nonsense about when the 1998 el nino ended and the nonsense that el nino events leave a permanent marker on temperature, which would have cooked the planet long before now, while the other half of the ENSO system leaves no such permanent effect. Then there is the missing step post 2010.
Bereft of any valid counterargument,you and Bob are reduced to empty reassurances to each other that you are right and I am wrong. This may draw nods of approval from your equally moronic thumbs up/down non skeptic mates but it fools nobody else.
What’s more you are a cowardly clown who hides behind a screen name.
00
Phillip: I don’t know why you try discussing things with Griss. That seems to be your first mistake. Abuse is being heaped upon you, but sadly that is what often happens on this blog. Especially if you are trying to make a point others disagree with. Not everyone wants to discuss science here. If I don’t want abuse, I don’t answer comments from anyone who is abusive. Yes, my name is mentioned and the reason was I had decided to back off as the discussion had become uncivil. By now I have learned to just ignore those who are basically bullying and stick with those who are civil. Unless I’m just in a mood to be contrary. In your case, I try very hard to be civil because most of the time you do stick to the discussion.
00
Sheri,
This nested comment series is a tad long. Please see my #44 below
00
Shehan’s comment #12 is wrong in so many aspects I found it hard to credit his ability to pack so many misconceptions into one reasonably short sentence … but yet he managed it
The reason Billy boyo Connolley keeps turning up with specious, disingenuous half-truths is actually a back-handed compliment. It means basically that this website has reached some critical mass in readership, worrying CAGW advocates. Remember that Billy boyo aims at mass audiences, generally scientifically and numerically unsophisticated, in order to disinform and propagandise. His sojourn at Wiki demonstrated this, that’s why he was kicked out
I’m not suggesting he be kicked out here; I genuinely dislike censorship. What I am suggesting is that people understand his purpose here
170
Really ianl8888?
“There are many sciences that are observational, that is you cannot rerun the “experiment” in a laboratory: astronomy, cosmology, geology, evolutionary biology to name a few.”
Give me a for instance then.
08
The problem with much of the public ‘science’ is that it is filled with narcissistic egos all jockying to be the loudest ‘voice of authority’ when truely they are at best minor players that are bloated by the praise of there own advertizers.
No real science does not care who discovers the natural truth, real science cares only that it is truth, and not half-truth, or lies. Real science is the disinterested search for the true essence of nature, with little or no preconceived notions of outcome.
50
“There are many sciences that are observational, that is you cannot rerun the “experiment” in a laboratory or a computer”
Fixed it for you Philip, your getting closer and get a silver star for your effort. 🙂
50
Quite true, in fact you cannot run any “experiment” for those sciences. But you can make observations, and those observations can also be made by other researchers, using different equipment, or different locations, or different timeframes, etc. And all of the observations can be preserved, and analysed against each other, and against a hypothetical “norm”.
Whether or not there is “an experiment” is immaterial, as long as there are multiple independent observations of an event. In fact, an “experiment” is no more than a staged event, which is observed.
It is the observations that are important. The data, if you will. And it is the results of the observations – the data – that the Climate Science fraternity resolutely refuse to release to independent observers. The analysis and conclusions are not done independently, because the data is not made available. Why is that, do you suppose?
40
@14: “Scientific method” is defined by the method that scientists use.
I see. It follows that you think that if a scientist lies, cheats, steals, and cooks his books, that is science too. In effect, anything goes when it comes to a scientists doing science.
Do you think there anything that a scientist does that isn’t science? How can you tell the difference when it is and it isn’t science? If you can tell the difference, then you don’t use your own definition of the “Scientific Method” while insisting that is the one we should use.
70
There’s no doubt that science at every level is now taking a beating on all fronts as all those Salome like veils so carefully arranged over several decades past to present a supposedly pure science untouched by the corrupted world outside are now being stripped off to reveal an ugly, morally twisted and corrupted old hag who increasingly will stop at little to achieve it’s agenda that purports to represent large parts of science today.
The stripping off of those veils is entirely due to the internet which unlike the science journals and their ideologically hide bound editors and the “if it bleeds, it leads” news distorting and corrupting sensationalism of the MSM and the bigotry of the ideologically distorted funding agencies in increasingly left wing, socialistic promoting universities and the bureaucracy, the internet is [ still ] free and uncontrolled and can probe deep into science, politics, media, universities, education, business, economic, legal. money manipulators and etc, all of which are being dragged increasingly into the very large and increasing public spotlight through the medium of the internet.
What is becoming apparent and has been for some time is the blatancy of much of the corruption that infests large parts of science today. We see the bigotry and the demeaning and demoting of those scientists who have the guts and the principles to stand up and challenge the current science leadership regime and it’s hard line dogmas and ideologies, rarely science based.
We see the trend towards a dictatorship over the direction of science , the take over by the hard left academics of the universities of some of the formerly most respected professional science bodies in the world along the with the general malaise in science which is being revealed for all the world to see and the consequent imposition of agendas as the policies of these professional science organisations, agendas on which the membership have never voted or been allowed to vote and a vote which is resisted to the utmost by the dictatorial agenda driven present leadership of these societies.
It is again the internet which people, some scientists, some just ordinary intellectually well equipped citizens who through their blogging and sites such as Jo’s here who have been able to first find the evidence for the increasing malaise extending into some serious corruption in science and then to bring it to the attention of a huge range of ordinary citizens, citizens who when the media and the science journals and the status climbers at the top of the science bureaucracies controlled the news and information outlets of the science industry, they were very careful to keep the depths to which science was starting to sink, well hidden from while they continued to spread the good word and made sure to keep the money.
Large sections of the science establishment, particularly the climate science establishment, now fat and arrogant on it’s immense largesse from the public purse and increasingly bigoted against any challengers to it’s current ideologies and dogma, not science, is right up there with the manipulators of the money market and legal and business political manipulators in it’s corruption of the basic honesty and integrity of science, a view of the supposed honesty and integrity in science that has been carefully cultivated for public consumption while hiding the real increasingly corrupted and depraved state of large sections of science from the public’s view, while all the time of course demanding ever greater funds from the public purse.
That freedom to pursue angles of society that have been suppressed or barred by the perverted self interest of so much of science today is now creating a serious backlash for science of every type and discipline as the realisation sinks into the public’s man on the street psyche that the golden science that they have come to believe is the real science is mostly just a gigantic sham where scientists who have the same self centered selfish traits as every other income earning pursuit will try and finagle both income and status for their own exclusive benefit.
If they produce shoddy work and bad misleading and corrupted science along with invented data ,[ ozone hole ] well hey!, they’ve already been paid out of tax payer largesse by the funding bodies who couldn’t give a damn once the money leaves their hands.
Of course most of the shonky scientists know full well that nobody will ever come after them to recover the funding money when they turn out their false, misleading crap that they try to pass off as science, generally with an eye to getting the next lot of munificent funding from their complicit funders
Thanks to the medium of the internet, not the blatantly incompetent MSM when it comes to reporting science and science matters truthfully and accurately, we are becoming aware of the true state of today’s science and it aint’ pretty.
Science either sets to and soon to cleans its own Augean Stables or the people and the politicians will do it for science and that will really destroy much of what passes for science today.
As for the Internet, let us be very thankful that it is still free and open .
We can only hope and pray and work to keep it that way for far into the future and for the sake of our society and civilisation.
And for a quote that really fits climate warming science and it’s practioners like a glove;
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I have spent a couple of hours doing a search so lets take this science thing onto another level.
First up a couple of definitions from Investopedia ;
1 / Definition of ‘Purchasing Power Parity – PPP’
An economic theory that estimates the amount of adjustment needed on the exchange rate between countries in order for the exchange to be equivalent to each currency’s purchasing power.
[ / ]
In short , a dollar purchasing power doesn’t necessarily have the same dollar purchasing power in different countries so PPP is the adjustement to give the same purchasing power to every nominated dollar [ usually PPP is defined in equivalent US dollars ]
2 / Definition of ‘Gross Domestic Product – GDP’
The monetary value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country’s borders in a specific time period, though GDP is usually calculated on an annual basis. It includes all of private and public consumption, government outlays, investments and exports less imports that occur within a defined territory.
[ / ]
Every time a dollar changes hands during the year it adds one dollar to the annual GDP of the nation.
Australia GDP
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Australia was worth 1520.60 billion US dollars in 2012.[ US1.520.6 trillion ]
The GDP value of Australia represents 2.45 percent of the world economy.
__Australia is ranked 12th in the world in the size of it’s GDP.
________________
2014 GLOBAL R&D FUNDING FORECAST
Table ; page 7 [ dec 2013 ]
Gross Expenditures on research and development
Amount spent globally per year on science and research [ in PPP ] =US $1.618 trillion .
Of this global expenditure on science and research, the Americans spend US$465 billion per annum.
Page 6 has an excellent wagon wheel type graph of the position and size of science and research expenditures of most of the advanced nations.
The US$1.618 trillion spent on global science and research is greater than Australia’s GDP of US$1520.6 trillion in 2012
___________________
World health care expenditures
Yearly World Health care expenditures = US$4.7 trillion
Of this $4.7 trillion spent on Health care globally per annum approximately $160.8 billion is spent on health care research [ 2008; ]
[ quoted ]
A report launched today by the Global Forum for Health Research reveals global expenditure on health research in 2005 was US$160.3 billion- the greatest sum ever spent on health research, up from US$ 125.8 billion in 2003″>Global Forum for Health Research reveals global expenditure on health research in 2005 was US$ 160.3 billion – the greatest sum ever spent on health research, up from US$ 125.8 billion in 2003]
_______________________
For this US$1.618 trillion spent of science and research annually [ The same amount as Australia’s GDP) ] across the world we get ;
Scientific journal publishing: yearly volume and open access availability
Results. We estimate that in 2006 the total number of articles published was approximately 1,350,000. Of this number 4.6% became immediately openly available and an additional 3.5% after an embargo period of, typically, one year. Furthermore, usable copies of 11.3% could be found in subject-specific or institutional repositories or on the home pages of the authors.
&
In their answer to a UK House of Commons committee in 2004, Elsevier estimated that some 2,000 publishers in science, technology and medicine publish 1.2 million peer-reviewed papers annually (U.K. Parliament… 2004).
________________
So for the global expenditure of about Australia’s annual GDP on science and research we get some 2000 science publications which publish around 1.35 million papers per year, all no doubt very carefully peer reviewed. if we are to believe the local dogma fixated, unquestioning dictatorial accepting trolls [ / sarc ]
Now being 76 years old and from hard experience being of a somewhat skeptical nature when it comes to the total honesty of most of humanity when it comes to grabbing some filthy lucre before anybody else gets a crack at it, I would guesstimate that at least 80% of those papers are just plain garbage with lots of corrupted and even a good dose of fraudulent data as the basis of their publication, a lot of which could well be written to create an opening for the next crack at the available funding.
Of those 1.35 million papers per year, possibly another 15% might get a few references in other science papers.
The 5% remaining might well make a difference to science and to our lives.
The message here is that we could halve at least the funding of global science and research and just be far more choosy and selective in what gets funded or as I have suggested previously, like all other ventures in our capitalistic society, let the researchers borrow funds for their research on the basis of their reputations and the promises of their research, publish the results in their papers openly along with all the data, let other scientists of every discipline as well as the interested public review the papers for a period and then provide the funds to the authors of the paper according to the veracity and rating the open reviewers give the paper and the research project.
Probably a quarter of the numbers of papers now published annually would provide just as much towards civilization’s advancement as does those 1.35 million papers now, most of which are likely to just a fantastic waste of public resources, of time and of trees and electrons.
60
Added;
Global GDP in US dollars is estimated at US $69.98 trillion in 2011 [ World Bank ]
And for a totally useless bit of information or perhpaps not so useless when we look at the financial outlays versus the results from global science and research ;
At US $1.618 trillion spent each year on global science and research, each of those 1,350,000 papers published each year [ 2006 data. much higher now ] cost around US $1,200,000 of tax payers and private company money to publish.
Value for money in science research?
You be the judge!
40
Ooh, oooh, can I play.
Global GDP in US dollars is estimated at US $69.98 trillion
Ofsetting 1 degree of global warming at AR4 estimates using a mechanism as efficient as Australian Labors ETS – 400 Trillion P/A some 6-7 times global GDP…
10
ROM it would seem strange, perhaps, that it is in the West that science has been hijacked by the corrupt, the manipulative, and the greedy, whereas in the Communist bloc, in Russia and China, science has long since determined that the CAGW meme is but a giant scam.
Not so strange after all.
10
Agreed. And the scientist still has to use skill to discern which ‘positive’ results deserve closer attention. Experience strongly guides which bits of the peer reviewed literature could or should be ignored.
And even a tiny p-value does not prove that a measured effect is either large, meaningful or indicative of causation. [‘Significant, but not relevant’ is the best way I have heard it described.]
50
“The other important point is that we are well into the asymptotic zone with CO2 concentration which means that CO2 cannot provide much T
increase even if there was a bucketload of new CO2.”
Every climate scientist is or should be aware of this. That is confirmed by the “settled science” from Arrhenius to the present day. An increasing atmospheric concentration of CO2 alone can have only an insignificant and decreasing effect on global temperature. That is why the “settled science” always postulated positive feedback from the interaction of the small CO2 effect with water vapour production.
Given the last 15 years or so of stalled global temperature increases, despite a significant increase in atmospheric concentration of CO2 in that time, perhaps not only have the alarmists got the nature of the feedback wrong but also the status of the rate of change of global temperature with the increasing atmospheric concentration of CO2. Perhaps the tangent to that curve is closer to zero than anyone knows or is prepared to admit i.e. has the IPCC also rigged their published equation to suit their “catastrophic doubling scenario”?
80
No. The CO2 concentration is currently 400 ppm. We are not into the asymtotic zone.
http://knowledgedrift.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/log1-co2.jpg
06
And the correlation between temperature and CO2 concentration here gives a rise in temperture with doubling of CO2 concentration of
2.0 ± 0.4 °C
which is within the IPCC range of 1.5 to 4.5 °C
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1958/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/from:1958/normalise/scale:0.75/offset:0.2
18
That 2° is the bottom of the estimate range. Here is a linear fit of HadCRUT4 to the 24 month smoothed CO2.
Notice that it intercepts the 200 ppm at -1.5 and not -6°C. If it hadn’t gone down below 200 ppm when it was 6 degrees colder, then other factors are more important than CO2.
Either that or the first 100 extra ppm since the end of the glacial period increased the temperature by 5°C and the next increased it by 1°C so another ought to increase it by 0.2°C. Even 1000 ppm more will only increase the temperature by a third of a degree, the difference between your back and front yard.
50
Vic, what is the basis for the assumption that the temperature was -6 C when the CO2 concentration was 200 ppm?
06
That should have read temperature anomoly.
06
6 degrees cooler at the beginning of the current interglacial. CO2 levels might have dropped to 180 ppm, the lowest to not cause widespread die off of plants. Rounded up to 200 ppm for a back of envelope calculation.
30
Vic, the beginning of the last interglacial means that the ice age had just finished.
The low temperatures of the ice age (and the subsequent warming) are caused by large scale orbital changes independent of CO2 concentration. These changes are cyclical on the order of tens and hundreds of millenia.
What we are discussing here is changes in temperature over a period of 160 years when large scale orbital changes have made such little difference to temperatures they can be ignored.
They cannot be ignored over a period of 10,000 years, and extrapolating changes due to CO2 over a century and a half 10,000 yers into the past will therefore give a much higher figure than was actually the case.
11
I’ll keep it simple; just before it began to warm up again.
Did you miss the bit where plots of CO2 concentration and temperature proxies for the past few 100k years were used to prove that carbon did it? There was a paper this year trying to prove that the lag wasn’t real and CO2 concentrations could still be the reason for the temperature changes.
You really don’t get experimental uncertainties. Just because the plot is smoothish doesn’t mean that actual thermometer readings would not have shown the climate oscillating a degree or two over a century as things warmed up. We do not know that the warming last century was natural but neither do we know that it wasn’t.
00
> Did you miss the bit
I did. The std view is that CO” is an important feedback in the iceage / interglacial cycle; that other forcings are too small to account for the change. But the std view *isn’t* that CO2 originates that change; indeed, it would be odd if it did, because in that case we *know* that the cycle is paced by orbital forcing. So you’d expect to see CO2 lag the forcing somewhat; or at least, its likely. As it happens, there are enough uncertainties in the records that the lag, if there, is very hard to see (the std.”skeptic” quote that “there’s an 800 year lag” is wrong).
I recommend http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2007/03/12/yet-more-tco2-lags/ if you want to hear what the scientists involved think.
> a paper this year
http://www.clim-past.net/3/527/2007/cp-3-527-2007.pdf ? Wrong year, though. Likely the same kind of thoughts.
10
From Scientific America last year.
Still implying that CO2 caused the ice-age, even though everyone should know better.
00
But it is such a large range, Phil, any variation occurring from the planet’s norm – and just what is that anyway – would fit the envelope…
Taaah Daaah
And you produce catastrophe, fear and funding.
41
Unfortunately, Hansen and Jones et al. have made sure that pre-1979 Giss and HadCrut are basically WORTHLESS.
But I suspect you will still want to use them, because you know they have been adjusted to fit the AGW meme.
That is what a propagandist does, NOT a scientist.
51
Speaking of worthless and meaningless…
….it was you sprouting (on some back-thread) that garbage with a 3rd order poly over the HadCrut temperature fabrication, wasn’t it Philip.!
… been a while since I taught junior high, but it did bring back memories.
51
Philip,
Here are some more worthy correlations for you to casted your laser-like intellect over. I’m sure CO2 is implicated in more than one of them.
http://www.tylervigen.com/
10
What are the symptoms?
30
Whatever the symptoms, they are certainly less fatal than the cure.
31
“I’ll remove the cause, but not the symptom” Dr Frank N. Furter 1975.
Not very relevant to the topic but seeing as Philip started this trend……
30
No Yonniestone. I was responding to a statement (apparently a quote) by llew Jones:
“The other important point is that we are well into the asymptotic zone with CO2 concentration which means that CO2 cannot provide much T increase even if there was a bucketload of new CO2.”
Griss does not like Hadcrut. I assume he is not going to accuse Spencer and Christy of tampering with the temperature data:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1958/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/normalise/scale:0.5/offset:0.02/plot/uah/from:1979/trend/plot/uah/from:1999/trend
The rise in temperature with doubling of CO2 is in agreement with that calculated using the data from 1958, and also with that from 1850, but the error margins are of course larger for the shorter data set (from 1979):
1.8 ± 0.9 °C
15
roflmao.
You will try any devious little misdirection or stunt won’t you.
Really is kindergarten level propaganda garbage graphs your monkey is spewing out now.
71
Thanks Griss he almost had me buying that bridge 🙂
But seriously, as I’ve learnt over the past few years the earths climate cycles do not start and end with 1,2 or 10 decades, as to CO2 as a major driver of temperature if using a simple observation then it fails miserably, for 15+ years CO2 increases temperature stays the same, also from long term ice core samples temperature goes up CO2 follows, up to an 800 year lag.
Reading the entrails of a frozen mammoth would tell you more about climate than the IPCC brothers grim tales.
70
Same bridge he has tried to sell over and over and over …. and over again.
I has NO foundations.
I’d recommend a Dodgy Bros car over this guy’s sales pitch. 🙂
21
What misdirection Griss?
I answered the question about asymptotic behaviour of CO2, then responded to your complaint about Hadcrut and Giss data (more on that below).
02
Reality bites.. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:2001/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/from:2001/normalise/scale:0.5/offset:0.5/plot/rss/from:2001/trend
As for that last line of yours. What a load of RUBBISH !!!
uah and rss didn’t exist before 1979.
Giss and Hadcrut pre-1979 are so mal-adjusted as to have no basis in reality.
They have been specifically adjusted to CREATE the trend by massively reducing the REAL 1940ish peak.
And then you STILL don’t realise the different phases since 1979.
You truly are very IGNORANT even for a monkey !!!
32
Griss,
I know satellite data is not available prior to 1979.
That is why I used Hadrcrut data for the period from 1958.
Note that the figure for temperature rise with doubling of the CO2 concentration is the same for both the UAH and Hadcrut temperature sets, and that from 1850. Quite a coincidence. Or are you accusing Christy and Spencer of manipulating their data?
Note also that all the temperature data sets agree.
http://tinyurl.com/l5ojm6b
Pick any temperature data set you like from 1958 (including NOAA, not available on WFT) and I will redo the calculation
11
While we are on about misdirection, or rather outright misrepresentation, you have presented temperature data with an error margin of 420%.
Trend: -0.06 ±0.25 °C/decade (2σ)
Furthermore you have presented an arbitrary scaling of the CO2 data with respect to the temperature data.
My calculations of temperature rise with CO2 concentration are based on the numerical values of the respective changes, and are therefore independent of any graphical scaling
11
Here’s that pre-adjustment sea temp graph again.. which is very similar to pre-adjustment land temp graphs from several sources (which you can hunt out yourself)
You are relying TOTALLY on that short period from 1979-1997 and the massive adjustments to build your very weak case.
The reality is that it was pure COINCIDENCE, as is shown from what has happened since the ElNino effect stabilised in 2001.
LEARN FFS !!! and stop being a robot monkey !!!
41
A robot monkey with tunnel vision. !!
WAKE UP TO REALITY.. !!
21
No Griss I am relying on Spencer and Christy’s atmospheric data from 1979 to the present.
The result agrees with that using Hadcrut data from 1958. This is after your claimed unreliability of data in the 40’s and earlier.
However, since yoy have faith in NOAA data here is the NOAA atmospheric temperature data from 1958:
Trend: 0.13 ±0.02 °C/decade (2σ)
My original calculation was based on the Hadcrut 4 data:
Trend: 0.12 ±0.02 °C/decade (2σ)
So to adjust the result of my earlier calculation (2.0 ± 0.4 °C) using your approved NOAA data, simply multiply the earlier result by 0.13/0.12 to give, well the same result to two significant figures actually.
2.0 ± 0.4 °C
And I refer you to my earlier comment regarding arbitrary graphical scaling of CO2 with respect to temperature.
12
“arbitrary graphical scaling of CO2 with respect to temperature”
Which is what you do.
Find two things that trend slightly upward together over a short period, then adjust the scales so they align..
Its children’s play !, and a mathematical NONSENSE.
But its what you do, because its all you have.
01
Griss, there is no arbitrary scaling based on the data tables, calculations which give a slope if 2 C per doubling of CO2.
Again Griss these calculations are entirely independent of any graph scaling.
The graph scaling is based on these calculations, not the other way around.
All your blowhard abuse cannot hide your ignorance of mathematics, especially error margins which you completely ignore when quoting trends, no matter how many ticks of approval you get from your equally ignorant fan club.
00
Philip,
Correlate these http://www.tylervigen.com/
20
I needed a good laugh.
11
Tomomason,
There are 4 possibilities that should be considered when presented with an apparent correlation between A and B:
1. A causes B
2. B causes A
3. A and B are caused by a third parameter, C
4. The apparent correlation is coincidental.
Most of the examples given can be put down to coincidence. If you trawl through masses of data looking for correlations, as presumably the producer of these graphs have done, you will always come up with sch coincidences.
In the case of the first graph, suicides and US investment in science and technology, which is a much closer fit that the other correlations, there is a distinct possibility that A and B are a consequence of a third parameter C.
It is a fact that economic downturns result in an increase in suicides, and a drop in investment.
With regard to the correlation between CO2 concentration and temperature, this has a theoretical cause and effect relationship going back to long before temperatures and CO2 concentration began to rise appreciably after the onset of the industrial revolution.
The rise in temperature as a result of increasing greenhouse gases, including CO2, is a well established scientific phenomenon.
12
Oh yes we are, CO2 absorption bands are over 85% opaque as measured by satellites, we are very much in a saturated situation with temperature rise approaching an asymptote.
40
Medical articles often parallel Climate articles. The motivators? Greed for one and power for the other.
A large study of vitamin supplements has been discovered using that many of the “name brands” Many of these are processed at high temperatures (destroy medicinal properties), contain petroleum derived chemical solvents, such as ethyl cellulose and are coated with methylene chloride, a carcinogenic material. In addition, data is often manipulated to give a preconceived result.
The result of all of these studies using low quality laboratory produced supplements is simple: bad press on vitamins as a whole, as the authors fail to correctly distinguish the difference between low quality and high quality supplements. Big Pharma is often behind these studies. Here’s the conclusion from the latest study:
“Case Closed: Multivitamins Should Not Be Used,”
A bit like “The Science is Settled” – wouldn’t you think?
60
Yes, I agree that before any study is published, the test should be redone with different data. Suppose you are duing a study on attitudes towards AGW by different age groups.
You might hypothesize that older people are more concerned about AGW because they have children, grandchildren, and a stake in their posterity- conversely, you might belive YOUNG people are more concerned because they are more gullible or have longer life expectancies. Maybe MEN are more concerned about AGW because they control more businesses and property, and are concerned about preserving property values, or maybe WOMEN are more concerned because they bear young, have an immediate interest in their OWN posterity.
Supposing your hypotheses are worthless, rather than a 5% chance that you’ll have a positive, publishable result by dumb luck, your actually probability of publishing something will be more like
1 – (.95^4) (old, young, men, women), and about 19% of the time you’ll publish a study that’s worthless crap.
For more on this, do a web search on “Bonferroni” correction. Of course, it would be even better to rerun the test with independent data rather than use the Bonferroni correction.
20
Perhaps “Lower P-values” rather than “Higher P-Values” should be suggested.
10
I think science as a whole is losing its halo. It probably never really deserved it.
The least a scientific paper should have is truly independent peer review by reviewers who are actually paying attention. In addition, a research project on its own doesn’t count as proof of anything until it’s been replicated, ideally multiple times.
It’s surprising how often these principles have been ignored in the past, and for how many important pieces of research.
In truth, science has been extremely lucky over the past century or so. In almost every field, the intuitions of a few bright sparks have been verified by experiment in the long run, even when they initially had very little to back them up. The popular view, that scientist make it up as they go along, is perhaps not so irrational. Since the turn of the last century, some of them, the brightest, have been making it up as they go along, and getting away with it.
The trouble is, nowadays even scientists expect it to work like that. They don’t understand the first rule of this kind of science; you have to be a genius. Otherwise you fall flat on your face.
20
The goodness of otherwise of science should not be the question as ‘science’ as a subject is only the search for the truth of the natural universe. It carries no halo, and no deadly scythe.
IMO science as a subject is inert, as it is only truth, it has no lies. It answers our longing to know ‘how things are’. To give us facts.
Only human failure to correctly see or apply the truth causes the problems. This is very prevalent when humans require science to answer the ‘why nature works as it does’ does things go awry. Then, stupidly, humans try to say that science gives us reasons.
50
R.V. Jones reported that when the British deployed 2 cm radar against german U-boats, the rising losses caused consternation on the other side, and their scientists were urgently looked to for reasons. The German scientists were regarded as better than the British ones. A captured airman claimed that they had a new device fitted which picked up a signal coming from the U-boats.
Away went the german scientists. They found that their radar detection sets did indeed emit a very small signal, but surely too small to detect? Nevertheless they advised the U-boat captains that there was this possibility and they might be safer to turn the set off when enemy aeroplanes were thought to be about. Some did with deadly results. They also advised tuning the sets to narrow the signal bands being scanned for better accuracy.
In the meantime the german scientists decided that the ONLY possible reason was that the allies were using InfraRed and they spent 10 months developing a coating that didn’t reflect IR. By that time the Germans had lost the submarine war.
After the war the British established that the original german equipment would have picked up the 2cm signal well enough for a warning if it had been looked for.
Obviously those Germans needed peer review.
30
Thanks for this post Jo which has reminded me of some claims made on Australian 60 Minutes concerning melting glaciers in Patagonia. The claim aired on April 27 was that the melting of glaciers in Patagonia was irrefutable proof that human CO2 emissions were to blame. Here is a link ….
http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/stories/8834229/wild-patagonia-the-glaciers-that-hold-a-dire-warning-for-earths-future
Dr Stephan Harrison is the scientist featured in that story who has devoted his life to researching glaciers in Patagonia in the far southern end of the South American Andes in Chile. Near the end of the episode the reporter Allison Langdon asks why scientists refuse to debate skeptics. Harrison’s response is that if skeptics wish to debate the science the proper place to do so is in the peer review literature. In making this statement Dr Harrison is either ignorant or disingenuous by ignoring any problems with peer review in the field of climate science. These problems were highlighted in climategate emails so Dr Harrison should be well aware unless he has been living under a rock.
Of course high rating programs like 60 Minutes are seen by millions of people most of which will be unaware of any problems with peer review science. Very frustrating that a journalist like Langdon or her producers seemed blissfully unaware of this at the time they put this show to air. These are exactly the type of media releases that fool people into thinking Carbon Taxes or Barrack Obama’s stances are worth voting for.
50
C.W.
” The real test comes later, when people read and cite the work in question. If it makes it into the established literature (not just the published literature, there are uncounted thousands of published peer-reviewed papers no-one ever reads; I mean the literature that people read, teach, cite, use) then its become accepted.”
The “real” test of science is its truth not its popularity, or consensus. You are confused. A “peer-reviewed papers no-one ever reads” may not be popular or go with the prevailing consensus but may hold the essential truths that are later rediscovered, make no mistake this happens in all areas of science.
30
Just caught this on Sky news http://www.skynews.com.au/news/top-stories/2014/06/10/harper-and-abbott-unmoved-on-climate-change.html?cid=BP_RSS_SN-TOPSTORIES_5_HarperandAbbottunmovedonclimatechange_100614
Is this the start of open political peer review or will other governments continue to hide behind carefully selected statements on the huge white elephant in the room?
40
Yonniestone –
ain’t this the truth?
8 June: Ottawa Citizen: Canada more ‘frank’ than rest of world on climate change: Harper
OTTAWA — Prime Minister Stephen Harper says there’s not a country in the world that would take action on climate change at the expense of its own economy — no matter what it might say…
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/Canada+more+frank+than+rest+world+climate+change+Harper/9921956/story.html
btw speaking of meaningless significance in this thread –
remember i posted from ABC:
Prime Minister Tony Abbott arrives in Canada for talks with Stephen Harper to boost trade, investment
By James Glenday in Ottawa
Ahead of the talks, CLIMATE CHANGE PROTESTERS rallied outside the Canadian parliament, which is close to where Mr Abbott is staying…
well, after much searching online, the only pics i have found – of this totally-unrelated-to-Abbott small “p” protest, is here. do take a look:
7 June: Cool it for the Kids takes to the Hill
http://www.ipolitics.ca/2014/06/07/dnp_cool-it-for-the-kids/
yet AAP, ABC, SBS, Sky & even UK Daily Mail quoted spokespeople from “cool it for the kids” or “for our grandchildren” & tied it in with our PM’s visit, giving it undue coverage that it got nowhere in the canadian MSM!
20
The level of the p value is not the problem. One problem appears to not include formulating several hypothesis and then selecting the one highest p value. Publishing the data and the number and specifics of all hypotheses tests would go a long way toward solving that problem.
Arbitrarily selecting a lower value, say o.01 rather than p=0.05, ignores the primary basis of hypothesis testing and that is the understanding of Type I errors and Type II errors. A lower p value, e.g. 0.01 rather than p=0.05, decreases the probability of a Type I error but significantly increases the probability of a Type II error.
I firmly believe that before any statistical hypothesis testing experiment is designed, a qualified statistician should be consulted and then after the hypothesis is tested the competent statistician should be asked to examine the experimental design, results, and preselected p value.
30
+1!
10
Off topic but relevant to the warmist trolls spurious claims on this thread;
The geologists are now starting to take the shibboleths of the global warming faith completely apart.
[ Shibbeloths ; a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, esp. a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important ]
From P. Gosselins NoTricksZone blog.
Giant Of Geology/Glaciology Christian Schlüchter Refutes CO2…Feature Interview Throws Climate Science Into Disarray
[selected quotes ]
This post is about an interview by the online Swiss Der Bund here with Swiss geology giant Christian Schlüchter titled: “Our society is fundamentally dishonest“. In it he criticizes climate science for its extreme tunnel vision and political contamination.
&
Almost glacier-free Alps 2000 years ago
Early in the interview Schlüchter reminds us that during Roman times in the Alps “the forest line was much higher than it is today; there were hardly any glaciers. Nowhere in the detailed travel accounts from Roman times are glaciers mentioned.” He criticizes today’s climate scientists for focusing on a time period that is “indeed much too short“.
In the interview, Schlüchter recounts how he in the 1990s found a large chunk of wood near the leading edge of a glacier. The chunk of wood, he describes, looked as if it had been dragged across a cheese shredder. It was clear to Schlüchter that the specimen had to be very old. Indeed laboratory analysis revealed that it was 4000 years old. Next they found multiple wood fragments with the same age, all serving to fill in a major piece of the paleo-puzzle. His conclusion: Today where one finds the Lower Aare-Glacier in the Bernese Alps, it used to be “a wide landscape with a wildly flowing river“. It was warmer back then.
Until the 1990s, scientists thought that the Alps glaciers had been more or less consistently intact and only began retreating after the end of the Little Ice Age. Schlüchter’s findings showed that glacial retreats of the past also had been profound.
This threw climate science into chaos and it remains unreconciled today.
&
Schlüchter tells Der Bund:
I wasn’t supposed to find that chunk of wood because I didn’t belong to the close-knit circle of Holocene and climate researchers. My findings thus caught many experts off guard: Now an ‘amateur’ had found something that the Holocene and climate experts should have found.”
Schlüchter tells of other works, which also have proven to be a thorn to mainstream climate science, involving the Rhone glacier. His studies and analyses of oxygen isotopes unequivocally reveal that indeed “the rock surface had been ice-free 5800 of the last 10,000 years“.
Distinct solar imprint on climate
What’s more worrisome, Schlüchter’s findings show that cold periods can strike very rapidly. Near the edge of Mont Miné Glacier his team found huge tree trunks and discovered that they all had died in just a single year. The scientists were stunned.
The year of death could be determined to be exactly 8195 years before present. The oxygen isotopes in the Greenland ice show there was a marked cooling around 8200.”
That finding, Schlüchter states, confirmed that the sun is the main driver in climate change.
Today’s “rapid” changes are nothing new
In the interview he casts doubt on the UN projection that the Alps will be almost glacier-free by 2100, reminding us that “the system is extremely dynamic and doesn’t function linearly” and that “extreme, sudden changes have clearly been seen in the past“. History’s record is unequivocal on this.
Schlüchter also doesn’t view today’s climate warming as anything unusual, and poses a number of unanswered questions:
Why did the glaciers retreat in the middle of the 19th century, although the large CO2 increase in the atmosphere came later? Why did the earth ‘tip’ in such a short time into a warming phase? Why did glaciers again advance in 1880s, 1920s and 1980s? […] Sooner or later climate science will have to answer the question why the retreat of the glacier at the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850 was so rapid.”
– See more at: http://notrickszone.com/#sthash.15FnJTa7.dpuf
50
Off topic again!
But as quite a lot of posters here suggested this volcanic heat undermining of Antarctic Glaciers in Jo’s thread a time back this will give a considerable fillip to those who suggested that.
I wouldn’t get to excited though as it has probably been a very long standing geological phenomena that has been ongoing in fits and starts for the past few tens of millions of years.
And it is a press release which as we now all know all such climate related science press releases are highly prone to gross exaggeration and hyperbole and rarely describe the science as it actually stands particularly when from the American National Academy of Sciences .
From PHYS.ORG via Climate etc;
Researchers find major West Antarctic glacier melting from geothermal sources
[quoted ]
Thwaites Glacier, the large, rapidly changing outlet of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is not only being eroded by the ocean, it’s being melted from below by geothermal heat, researchers at the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin (UTIG) report in the current edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
&
The cause of the variable distribution of heat beneath the glacier is thought to be the movement of magma and associated volcanic activity arising from the rifting of the Earth’s crust beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
&
According to his findings, the minimum average geothermal heat flow beneath Thwaites Glacier is about 100 milliwatts per square meter, with hotspots over 200 milliwatts per square meter. For comparison, the average heat flow of the Earth’s continents is less than 65 milliwatts per square meter.
[ / ]
50
Oh dear.. really ..
Geothermal heat..
Who could possibly have thought it was that. !! 🙂
20
Yes but is it peer reviewed?
Sorry guys, couldn’t resist. 🙁
10
Jo, a number typo alert
either the 67% or the 37% cannot be correct:
“Ioannidis looked at highly cited (supposedly the most important papers) and found that RCT’s were replicated 67% of the time (which is still a 37% failure rate)….”
11
i am not a conservative & nor are many of my CAGW sceptical friends/family, yet this kind of rubbish can still be published by the MSM, by Krugman no less, in what i can only describe as an attempt to keep the left/right CAGW meme alive:
8 June: NYT: Paul Krugman: Interests, Ideology And Climate
But why is it so hard to act? Is it the power of vested interests?
I’ve been looking into that issue and have come to the somewhat surprising conclusion that it’s not mainly about the vested interests. They do, of course, exist and play an important role; funding from fossil-fuel interests has played a crucial role in sustaining the illusion that climate science is less settled than it is. But the monetary stakes aren’t nearly as big as you might think. What makes rational action on climate so hard is something else — a toxic mix of ideology and anti-intellectualism…
So why is the opposition to climate policy so intense?
Well, think about global warming from the point of view of someone who grew up taking Ayn Rand seriously, believing that the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest is always good and that government is always the problem, never the solution. Along come some scientists declaring that unrestricted pursuit of self-interest will destroy the world, and that government intervention is the only answer. It doesn’t matter how market-friendly you make the proposed intervention; this is a direct challenge to the libertarian worldview.
And the natural reaction is denial — angry denial. Read or watch any extended debate over climate policy and you’ll be struck by the venom, the sheer rage, of the denialists…
The fact that climate concerns rest on scientific consensus makes things even worse, because it plays into the anti-intellectualism that has always been a powerful force in American life, mainly on the right. It’s not really surprising that so many right-wing politicians and pundits quickly turned to conspiracy theories, to accusations that thousands of researchers around the world were colluding in a gigantic hoax whose real purpose was to justify a big-government power grab. After all, right-wingers never liked or trusted scientists in the first place…
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/opinion/krugman-interests-ideology-and-climate.html?_r=1
10
All you science guys arguing about specific points like CO2, doubling, curves, linear, increase in temperature of 0.8 degrees C over the last 150 years and on and on and on.
Although some of this stuff is interesting to someone like me who does not have a background in science, I try to learn and understand your positions.
However, the bottom line for me is that I remember when it was colder years ago, I’ve seen it get warmer in some of the years, I’ve seen and heard of many climate disasters that have occurred over the last 50-60 years and in the end I have concluded it is just weather. There will always be extremes. And yes, climate will change over 1000 years. So what!
What I am totally disgusted about, is these sherlocks who are trying to foist a climate of fear about the disasters that we will face 50 or 100 years from now on basically junk models and in the process are wasting billions upon billions of dollars chasing a non-existent ghost and in the process cannot see the damage they are doing to their fellow man (people in the so called 3rd world) who would greatly benefit from our technologies and medicines to help improve their lives (instead we waste it on green technologies that improves nothing for no-one).
These people have no moral conscience when it comes to their fellow man and the destruction they are visiting upon them.
So all you science guys, keep pounding the idiots until common sense, honesty, integrity and just plain good science returns so that it is of benefit to all of us instead of a waste.
70
10 June: Business Spectator: Tristan Edis: Harper and Abbott: Two fossils fooling no one
Both politicians are playing a bit of a game with their respective electorates, who for the most part are worried about global warming…
Also, the reality is that many state governments in the US will chose to comply with the new EPA Clean Power Plan targets through implementing emissions trading. That’s because this is the most free-market friendly way to reduce carbon emissions.
https://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2014/6/10/policy-politics/harper-and-abbott-two-fossils-fooling-no-one
message to Edis: every single Australian i speak to believes CAGW is a scam. i am serious. office-workers, tradies, farmers, shop assistants, library staff, elderly, young people (who i find care least about CAGW), & so on. every conversation i have with people, they say it’s just a money grab. simple as that. you pushing trading of carbon dioxide emissions proves their point.
btw Tristan –
12 March: Gallup: Rebecca Riffkin: Climate Change Not a Top Worry in U.S.
Americans are less worried only about race relations than they are about climate change. The majority of Americans say they worry about these two issues “only a little” or “not at all”; more than half of Americans worry about the other 13 issues at least “a fair amount.”
Thirty-one percent of Americans indicate that they worry “a great deal” about the quality of the environment this year, marking the lowest level of worry about the environment more broadly since Gallup began measuring this in 2001…
http://www.gallup.com/poll/167843/climate-change-not-top-worry.aspx
any straightforward, honest poll would find the same result.
10
much more at link:
9 June: WSJ: James Taranto: Springtime for Warmists
A Beltway commentator endorses “dictatorial” government.
Last month Rush Limbaugh remarked that the reason for “the re-establishment of climate change and global warming as a new primary impetus of the White House” is that “it offers the president opportunities to be dictatorial.”
A defender of the president might counter that “dictatorial” is overwrought…
But National Journal’s Lucia Graves takes a different approach. Instead of denying that Obama’s actions are dictatorial, she disputes Limbaugh’s implicit premise that there’s anything wrong with that. Lest you think we exaggerate, her piece is titled “Obama’s Thankfully ‘Dictatorial’ Approach to Climate Change.”
According to Graves, Limbaugh “has it precisely backward: The decision to use executive authority is the means, not the ends.”…
Yes, it has come to this. Americans are being urged to submit to “dictatorial” government because democracy is incapable of controlling the weather. “In college classes, climate change is taught as a textbook example of where democracy fails,” Graves asserts in the very first sentence of her column.
Well, that settles it. America might have been a noble experiment, but science has proven it a failure. “Science is science,” Obama tells the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman. “And there is no doubt that if we burned all the fossil fuel that’s in the ground right now that the planet’s going to get too hot and the consequences could be dire.” Friedman asked: “Do you ever want to just go off on the climate deniers in Congress? ‘Yeah, absolutely,’ the president said with a laugh.”
Hardy har har…
There are, to say the least, some problems here. Most important, appeals to scientific authority ought to fall on deaf ears unless the science is conducted honestly, which entails acknowledgment of uncertainty and respect for alternative hypotheses. In this regard, the demonization of “skeptics” should raise an alarm for anyone who takes science seriously. Skepticism is the essence of the scientific method…
Even if Lucia Graves is right that “dictatorial” government is necessary for the global warmists to prevail, the Chinese experience suggests it may not be sufficient.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/best-of-the-web-today-springtime-for-warmists-1402342775
10
I know this is off topic Jo but you need to check this post at WUWT http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/09/uh-oh-study-says-collapsing-thwaites-glacier-in-antarctica-melting-from-geothermal-heat-not-co2-heat-effects/#more-111163
20
ROM mentioned this at #28 🙂
What?? thermal heat in a volcanic area… remarkable 😉
10
And another showing that in the USA the period around 1940 WAS the hottest,
The manipulations of Hansen et al. are the ONLY REASON for the current calculated temperature being higher than around 1940.
The current values in Giss and HadCrut compared to that period around 1940 have NOTHING to do with CO2.. it all AGENDA driven fakery.
30
LOL:
9 June 2014: Public News Service: Navy Sec’y: Don’t Politicize Military Climate Policy
CHARLESTON, W.Va – Stopping the U.S. Armed Forces from planning for global warming would be a bad mistake, according to an Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives has added an amendment to the defense budget. It aims to stop current plans to deal with the security threats from climate change..
But retired Vice Adm. Dennis McGinn, now Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy, Installations & Environment, said the Navy sees serious national security issues in global warming. And he said Congressional politics should not get in the way of them doing their job…
According to McGinn, global warming is increasing the need for humanitarian missions after weather disasters, such as the recent typhoon that hit the Philippines. He also said rising seas threaten bases such as the huge installations in Hampton Roads, Va.
McGinn said disruptions in the climate will be dangerous for countries that already have brewing conflicts and weak governments. Storms or droughts will cause them to fail.
“Into that absence of power,” McGinn said, “will run all manner of bad people, paramilitaries, or terrorists, organized crime.”…
West Virginia Rep. David McKinley sponsored the amendment and did not return calls requesting comment. In a letter to other members of Congress, McKinley called the climate-change planning part of a politically motivated agenda.
http://www.publicnewsservice.org/2014-06-09/climate-change-air-quality/navy-secy-dont-politicize-military-climate-policy/a39826-1
Aug 2013: Pew Environment Initiatives Press Release: Pew Applauds Confirmation of Retired Vice Adm. Dennis McGinn as Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy, Installations, and the Environment
(The Pew Charitable Trusts issued the following statements by Phyllis Cuttino, director of the Pew project on national security, energy, and climate, and former U.S. Senator John Warner, senior adviser for the project, on the selection of retired Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn as assistant secretary of the Navy for energy, installations, and the environment.)
“The Department of Defense and the Navy have set ambitious energy goals in order to ensure mission effectiveness, improve power reliability, and reduce costs,” said Phyllis Cuttino, director of the Pew project on national security, energy, and climate. “Adm. McGinn’s unique experience and expertise will enhance these efforts to achieve a more diverse and secure energy portfolio by deploying advanced biofuels, electric vehicles, efficiency technologies, renewable power, and traditional fuels.
***We have been honored to have Adm. McGinn travel across the country with Sen. John Warner and the project to visit with thousands of Americans in town halls meetings and highlight the ongoing energy innovations undertaken by the military. We applaud his selection and look forward to working with him in this new role.” …
The Pew project on national security, energy, and climate is dedicated to highlighting the critical linkages among national security, energy independence, the economy, and climate change.
http://www.pewenvironment.org/news-room/press-releases/pew-applauds-confirmation-of-retired-vice-adm-dennis-mcginn-as-assistant-secretary-of-the-navy-for-energy-installations-and-the-environment-85899494179
10
Koch Bros = dirty, bad money…Tom Steyer = good, clean money – read it for Toobin’s reasoning?
10 June: New Yorker: Republicans United on Climate Change
Posted by Jeffrey Toobin
Remember when climate change could be a bipartisan issue? Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi did an advertisement together, boasting of their partnership on the challenge it posed. John McCain also believed that man-made climate change was an urgent problem. Now it’s virtually impossible to find any leading Republicans, including potential Presidential candidates, who will agree, without equivocation, on all of these points: that temperatures are rising, that human beings caused it, and that the nation and the world must take action to address it.
Republicans are unified in denial, and one good reason this is so is the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case. That decision revolutionized the law of campaign finance; what is less well recognized is that it transformed the climate-change debate, too…
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/06/republicans-united-on-climate-change.html
10
wish someone could send this to Mark Scott & ask him to inform all staff immediately:
9 June: Reuters: David Stamway: Chinese official plays down emission cut expectations
Any near-term regulation of China’s greenhouse gas emissions would likely allow for future emissions growth, a senior government official said on Monday, discounting any suggestion of imminent carbon cuts by the biggest-emitting nation.
Sun Cuihua, deputy director of the climate change office at the National Development and Reform Commission, said it would be a simplification to suggest China would impose an absolute cap on greenhouse gas emissions from 2016.
No decision had yet been taken on a cap and the timing of such a measure was under discussion, she said. Several options were being considered and China would choose policies in accordance with its conditions and stage of development.
“Our understanding of the word ‘cap’ is different from developed countries,” Sun told a conference…
Sun’s comments are likely to cool hopes in international climate negotiations that China could significantly change the base lines by announcing sooner-than-anticipated CO2 cuts…
(Additional reportint by Kathy Chen; Writing by Stian Reklev; Editing by Ron Popeski)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/06/09/china-climatechange-idUKL4N0OQ0WB20140609
00
Dr Brian Philip Shehan,
Putting aside various related issues that you have evaded at the following earlier threads:
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/05/that-west-antarctic-melting-couldnt-be-caused-by-volcanoes-could-it/
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/05/the-university-of-queenslands-diabolical-dilemma/
I see that you have reiterated here yet again ad nauseam your SKS mantra about error margins invalidating the widely recognised “Pause”, (despite that the pause is troublingly recognised even by God-like figures such as Kevin Trenberth and “Patchy”).
One of the issues that you have avoided was the assumption that the trend of the pause is RELIABLY definable as an OLS linear trend. (despite that OLS may not be the best linear method in this case).
Perhaps instead you could use your great statistical wisdom to do a curve fitting not with some silly polynomial stuff but for instance with LOESS.
Please enlighten us peasants.
10
Considering we had Ross McKitrick comment on the last article about the Athabasca glacier, I would have thought this article would be even more central to his speciality. He could also expound on the interesting comment above about the tradeoff between Type 1 and Type 2 errors in detecting AGW.
Which statistical method is best for detecting a gradual increase swamped by high frequency noise, or is there no such device?
10
Obamacare: watch out, here comes “predictive modeling
http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2014/06/05/obamacare-watch-out-here-comes-predictive-modeling/
00
I was not going to comment on anything else in this thread. But then I saw Brent’s comment.
Unfortunately Jo will not let the language necessary to describe the disaster Obamacare already is remain on her blog, much less what I think of predictive modeling.
This leads directly to the police showing up at your door someday to arrest you for the predicted future crime you probably won’t commit.
They already ignore the Constitution. And that enables what I just said. And they’ll do it as sure as I’m breathing as I type this.
00
Well since you ask… A few years ago Bruce McCullough and I published a report on the lack of replication work in academia, the weakness of peer review as an audit process and the widespread use of non-reproducible science in public policy formation. The paper is online at http://www.rossmckitrick.com/science-and-public-policy.html. We gave many examples from economics and physical sciences of papers that were influential but couldn’t be independently replicated, or were only discovered to be wrong far too late to undo the damage to the policymaking process. Some of the examples will be familiar to readers here, but others (like the Boston Fed study that played a nontrivial role in the events leading to the US mortgage meltdown) may be new. We outlined a proposal for a process to audit academic papers that are to be used for policymaking purposes. Might be of interest to the Aussie government…
Regarding the p<0.05 issue, there are lots of cases in which a test statistic that would be correct in one application gets used in another for which it is incorrect. A famous example in econometrics is use of ordinary t tables when the data have unit roots. Another concerns set-ups where researchers search for correlations across multiple variables or multiple specifications and then report the best one. While the test statistic might be correct, the critical values changed as a result of the search process, and if the researcher doesn't recompute them he or she will be reporting spurious inferences. Lise Tole and I discussed a Bayesian approach to this issue in a paper a couple of years ago in Climate Dynamics (http://www.rossmckitrick.com/model-testing.html) and I have another paper coming out in the near future that looks at it in detail in a time series context related to climate model testing.
The comment above regarding the tradeoff between Type I and Type II errors is correct. In econometrics, it is customary to show that your test statistic has valid "size", namely rejects a true null hypothesis only about 5% of the time, before tracing the power curve (which shows how likely it is to reject the null hypothesis as you move further away from it). You could always eliminate Type I error by adopting the strategy of never rejecting the null hypothesis. But that maximizes the Type II error rate. The challenge is to find methods that increase the power of a test to reject a false null without over-rejecting a true null. (For a non-technical summary see (http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/type-i-and-type-ii-errors-simplified.html)
30
Thanks Ross, that’s even more than I’d hoped for. I clearly have more reading to do.
Interesting that you recommend an audit process for potential policy advice, because that’s extremely similar to what I advocated back in 2011 in my autopsy of the Australian carbon tax legislation process.
10
You could have knocked me over with a feather on this one. Peer review is broken? Who would have thought it?
Do they have proof?
Where is their data?
Is this 97% certain? 😉
00
Or do I remember someone saying this already and quite a long time ago now? Let’s see, what was the name? Oh yes, now I remember. Wasn’t it Joanne Nova?
00
Sheri,
I agree with your sentiments about polite debate and have tried to practice that myself, but maybe you are new in debate with Philip Shehan and are unaware as to why long ago ‘the Griss’ (and finally me, just yesterday), became “frustrated”, (and resorted to a bit of crass humour). As a head-shaking example, see Jo’s earlier thread:
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/05/that-west-antarctic-melting-couldnt-be-caused-by-volcanoes-could-it/
Shehan typically launched in with argument against the blog whilst offering nothing analytical despite his strongly claimed expertise in a particularly relevant aspect of statistical significance.
One of his very repetitive and rather unique claims in the blogosphere has been that there is no evidence that there has been a pause in global warming because a calculation tool at the SkepticalScience blog gives large error margins on the “short” period of about 17 years. He left out of his consideration on the catastrophic claim of ice loss in Antarctica that the observation period was very much shorter than 17 years and when asked of his analysis of the expected error margins/statistical significance, he simply evaded the issue.
Did you know that Shehan has the distinction of being banned from commenting at WUWT, and Anthony Watts’ exasperation with him was extensive and very “expressive” despite his generally tolerant reputation?
Here follows another two of Jo’s threads that I’m aware of where your moniker does not appear but Shehan had heavy involvement. If you can stomach it, I recommend that you read all three:
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/05/the-university-of-queenslands-diabolical-dilemma/
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/05/abbott-needs-to-be-more-pro-science-and-cut-funding-to-models-that-dont-work/
Perhaps the most arrogantly repetative of Shehan’s denials is that ‘the Griss’ has argued the effect of the full ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) event starting at the so-called 1998 El Nino and ending with the counterpart cool phase of that oscillation. It is totally clear what ‘the Griss’ meant by virtue of the dates he repeatedly quoted, but Shehan ignores those dates and hangs-on to the recent NOAA definitions of the warm and cold phases of the oscillation to deny what Giss means.
Whoops I find I’m on some 340 words. Please let me know if you are interested in any further elaborations or examples.
00
Bob_FJ: I don’t think I’m totally new since Philip references past discussions we have had on issues, so that’s not it. I admit to not following this El Nino stuff at the point it became nothing but name calling. (As far as I know, the link Philip provided is correct on the El Nino/La Nina issue. Apparently, you disagree.)
If I recall correctly, Philip said the data for the “pause” was not statistically significant, meaning no conclusion can be drawn. On one of your links back on this blog, he quoted the IPCC position. Yet, that seemed to not be good enough.
As for your assertion that Philip was banned from Anthony Watts–Anthony once commented I was “wind energy lover” based on my blog’s title WhyNotWind, which he obviously never read. So much for being exact and making factual comments. I rarely read the blog anymore–too much ego and too little attention to detail.
Then, concerning the Marcott paper Philip references below and discusses, I wrote on my blog about the paper and noted that Marcott himself was not the one who said the data “proved” the hockey stick. Marcott said the data was not statistically robust. So if people here are attacking Philip for his comments (which I did not have time to read all the way through on WattsUpWithThat), best to mark me with a target too.
Much of time this so-called discussion deteriorates into name calling and childishness. Not to mention taunting and continual use of semantics to deride someone’s arguments. Admittedly, I refuse to engage in discussions that are based on nitpicking semantics, which may explain why I don’t show up in the discussions you linked to. I would also note that no such behaviour is allowed on my blog because it just damages the discussion of the topic. While it’s interesting to read sometimes, I often have to skip whole sections of blog comments because I don’t have time to read through the kindergarten name-calling sections and see if there’s anything useful in them. It’s find that Jo allows this, but for people actually trying to learn and discuss skepticism and climate, it can be a huge turnoff.
00
Sheri,
Whilst in agreement with your sentiments about insult, nit-picking semantics and the like, it seems you may have misunderstood some of the technicalities. For instance, please examine this graph:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/to:1998/plot/uah/from:2001/plot/uah/from:1979/to:1998/trend/plot/uah/from:2001/trend/plot/uah/from:1997.9/to:2001
It is my reconstruction of what ‘the Griss’ has repeatedly demonstrated. The light blue bit is the lagged global T effect of the complete El Nino oscillation. (initiated by the so-called 1998 super El Nino) When this is removed and then the OLS linear trends plotted, it shows flatter trends with a step change between them.
Philip on the other hand employs nit-picking semantics against ‘the Griss’‘ terminology whilst repeatedly ignoring the clarity of what he meant by virtue of the dates.
BTW, if you go to the plot series 4 table and alter the start date from 2001 to 1998 and replot, the result is much the same.
If you are interested in discussing this or the other issues, please let me know.
01
To be honest, if I had wanted to be involved in the discussion, I would have jumped in. I don’t even know where to start with discussing this. There seems to be no point, except to argue over various graphs. We could play “dueling graphs” all night and still no one would move an inch. So for now, I’m going to pass on the offer. Perhaps later a topic will arise that I can participate in.
00
Sheri,
Thank you for your consideration, and whilst it’s a tad off topic, I am concerned by your comment in part that follows: (Mods please be tolerant towards this late wandering):
After a quick look at your (two?!!) blogs, it seems that Anthony may have assumed too much from your blog title(s). I have posted articles on his site and have an established email confidence with him. I went searching for your exchange with him but could not find it.
Please provide a link so that I can check it out and advise/admonish Anthony accordingly.
00
Get it into your head that Anthony is no skeptic in the real sense of the word and has no patience with opinions that contradict his own, or even appear to do so.
Facts are not important to him when he decides to have a go at someone.
00
Email me and I will give you the information (email address is on my blog). I don’t care to go through the whole thing again. It was over a year ago and was an argument with Willis. Admittedly, from said experience I no longer read Willis E. or comment on him. There have been differing opinions on whether or not my exchange with Willis was “nice” or “naughty”, but that had nothing to do with Anthony’s failure to check facts.
00
Sheri,
That’s interesting. I too have had “difficulty” with Willis at WUWT and before that at Climate Audit. I had cause to complain to Anthony about his arrogance and controversial science, (it seems with some effect). I too, no longer read Willis, not out of revenge but from pessimism. He can be very offensive, for instance he said I’m a Gerbil (I discovered that that is a small mouse-like mammal). I think your problem with Anthony is that he is very defensive of Willis because despite his questionable behaviour he does generate high traffic. There are many other contributors that post valuable articles including many on wind energy but there are others where it may be wise to be selective in my view.
I’ve visited ‘whynotwind.wordpress.com’ and ‘whynotwind.org ‘ but am having difficulty finding your email address. Please advise a link or title whatever here where I can see what Willis and Anthony wrote. (The Mods seem to have abandoned this thread)
00
I guess at least Willis picked a relatively cute rodent to call you (I used to have gerbils for pets). There have many numerous complaints about Willis, but as you noted, Anthony seems to like him. I’m not sure I don’t read him out of “revenge”, thought that may be part of it (we like to snub those who annoy us) but mostly because there’s no way to comment on the posting unless one agrees. Seems kind of pointless.
This is the link: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/04/here-there-be-dragons/
Scroll down to the first blue box where Anthony is commenting on Reality Check. On WUWT, because I used Reality Check, I was usually percieved to be male, which is what Anthony means by “he thinks wind power is the cats meow”. Unless they have changed to meaning of that phrase, Anthony is calling me pro-wind.
00
Sheri, I think your experience on that blog as “Reality check” is a perfect example of the failings of text, be it email, SMS, or shot responses on a blog.
It is incredible that your sensible comment became such a subject of derision. Surely people would not react in that way if the communication were face to face, or even via telephone.
Apart from the well known failings of this mode in the hierarchy of communication, the politicisation of this subject, not to mention the evolution of the topic into the realm of a false theology, results in emotions running high, particularly when a lot of people carry a very large chip on their shoulder.
If only all of us possessed your discipline!
00
Sheri,
I think you have over-reacted to Anthony’s mistake because the sentiment in the thread was not about the science of biology as you intervened. The general observation was that the higher mammals do exhibit some human traits. I would add that even dogs are well known to dream and suffer separation stress etcetera. Willis’s faux pas, that you attacked, of describing a mother dolphin and calf as “mom and kid” was perfectly admissible in the context.
Putting aside your use of ‘Reality Check’ instead of your more recognisable name as used here, at the point of Anthony’s anger and mistake on gender and your blog agenda, you should have simply corrected him, and I’m sure, gentleman that he is, he would have apologised. Instead, you ploughed-on including this gem:
AND THIS:
BTW, did you view the video of a dolphin seeking the help of a scuba diver, (and getting it), to disentangle the poor thing (or number to you) from a fish hook and line?
I will not be chastising Anthony about what was your own making.
00
Rod Stuart,
I was comfortable with your views until I got to here:
Any chance you could elaborate on that please?
00
Yes Bob
There is a heirarchy of commuication, something like this:
In face to face communication, we use all of our senses. We not only HEAR the verbiage, but the tone of voice, volume,etc. We SEE the facial expressions, body language, hands. We FEEL the speaker’s sense of fear, anger, joy whatever. Yes we even use our sense of SMELL, as there is a smell to fear.
Lower down is audio with visual. A talking head can portray SOME of the communication as above, but there is something lacking.
Lower down is voice only, as with a telephone or radio. We can only use our sense of hearing, and all the remaining communication is missing.
It is amazing that so much meaning can be transmitted with the written word crafted by a brilliant author, i.e. Hemmingway.
But at the very bottom of the heirarchy is email (and even worse, SMS). Terse, abbreviated, and most of the actual communication is missing.
This is the world of the blog. Apart from the articles written by the blog owner, and our host happens to be an extraordinary authoress, the comments are easily misconstrued. (Remebering that she can use graphs and pictures, which add to the communication immensely).
In addition, it is because virtually nothing about this topic can be boiled down to a simple discussion of scientific observations and opinions. It is polarised into political camps.
On the one hand are the gullible who have been brainwashed to think that carbon dioxide is about to end their little world, on the other hand are those of use that recognise it as a centuries long march to servitude under a totalitarian regime. It is bound to stir emotions. (See what I mean?)
On top of that is the very real religious aspect to the CAGW crowd. The discussion always turns to belief, or in other words faith. It is often very awkward to have a calm reasoned discussion regarding faith. Witness the current Shiite vs Sunni violence in every corner of the globe.
And to make matters even worse, there are some, who take every single disagreement as a personal affront, and just find it impossible to contemplate that they might be wrong. Do you watch Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory”? What are the chances that one or more of Jo’s commenters have Asberger’s Syndrome? (Fairly common, but in one instance I think it is quite pronounced)
For example, I made that comment that Dr. Brian reminded me of someone in my past who madly computed the surface of a complex shape to three decimal places, while the measurement system that produced the raw data he was working with was an old greasy tape measure.
The man seemed to take this as an insult.
Now agonising over global temperature anomalies to two decimal places, when the data is for the most part obtained by instruments with an accuracy of maybe plus or minus two degrees, measured over perhaps ten percent of the global surface, seems to me to be just slightly short of ‘mad as a hatter’. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps measuring temperatures from twenty miles up is a little more accurate, but I doubt it. To get all lathered up about even more so.
So, back to Sheri and her run-in with Willis (another brilliant Asberger’s candidate I would suggest, since many brilliant folks are) the whole thing became blown out of all proportion by both of them in my opinion. And I doubt that would have happened had the initial communication been face to face.
I am terribly sorry for the length of this. I initially tried to condense what I meant but I was obviously unsuccessful.
Now I suppose I will get a blast for ‘psychoanalysing’ our favourite PhD, but that is the risk one takes in trying to express oneself I suppose. Asberger’s is much more a personality trait than a psychosis.
10
Rod Stuart,
Gee, thanks for your elaboration, with which I now feel comfortable.
Although I wonder if Asperger’s may not be the sole causative syndrome and OCD and/or BPD might also apply?
10
Bob it’s a really long bow to suggest what I did. However, there are thousands of words that have been written on this blog, WUWT, and the Bolter on which to form an opinion at least. OCD and BPD are far beyond the realm of a mere personality trait.
00
Rod Stuart,
Fine, OCD & BPD are perhaps controversial extensions and I may have been biased by having had a stepdaughter with clinically diagnosed BPD. I respect your opinion on this.
00
Rod Stuart: Thank you. I have come to understand that internet communication is a fine art and misunderstandings occur frequently. It is a challenge.
I’m not sure the exchange between Willis and I would have been better in person, based only on the reactions he has to any challenge whatsoever. Never even imply he is lying–he goes off the deep end. Yes, the exchange was out of proportion, Willis beat up a woman for holding the same viewpoint, and Anthony’s supporters always run to his rescue. Which is why I stopped reading and commenting on WUWT most of the time. There’s no point to attempting communication where disagreement becomes ugly.
Bob_FJ: As I noted, the problem with Anthony’s failure to verify before speaking is not related to my “discussion” with Willis. I noted I did not want to go through this again–I am opposed to the “making human” of animals and believe it does far more harm that good. Had Willis been writing a children’s book, while I would not have liked the way this is done, I would have been silent. Science is science–except when Willis does it. His flights of fancy end where?
I was basically 100% certain you would not chastise Anthony. While you’re not a fan of Willis, I was fully expecting this response. As for my use of “Reality Check”, that is a function of signing in through WordPress, not my choice. Had I corrected Anthony, I fully expect he would have reacted as did. As for being ordered off: “Get lost … it will do you good.” Complying. Willis attempted to say he meant lost in nature–I don’t see that in there.
Anyway, you have definitely affirmed my belief that this is not something I will ever repeat to an Anthony supporter.
Also, it affirms that skeptics are fine with errors and rudeness if their side’s doing. If a warmists had done this, you’d be asking for a headline:
Michael Mann disses woman for disagreeing with his fiction. Told her to “get out” Hang him, the rude *****! Even if the fiction was the use of human terms about animals on a skeptic Science site.
This was an experiment to see if indeed most of Anthony’s supporters reacted the same. I don’t like to draw conclusions without evidence. I think have enough evidence to know never to go here with a supporter of Anthony’s again. I almost believed your sincerity after the “called me a gerbil” part, but in actually I really knew what the outcome would be.
It’s also a pretty clear indication that people read and concentrate on the parts of the dialogue that fit their world view. This is the result:
Anthony Watts clearly judged a blog by it’s title, made a huge error in his assessment and that’s percieved as OKAY. Sorry, the scientist in me says an error of that magnitude should not be overlooked even in the skeptic world. Yet, it is. How are skeptics any different than warmists in circling the wagons and protecting their own?
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Bob_FJ: I must say I am fascinated that you defend the man who called you a gerbil. I really wonder what you did to deserve the designation. You’re a loyal friend, there.
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Okay, there may be no one here to answer, but I am going to ask the questions anyway.
Bob_FJ: How could you not find my email address? It’s all by itself off to the right. Can you not read?
Why, pray tell, is it completely acceptable for a skeptic blog writer to make up a persona for a commenter, use that persona to hurl ad hominems at the commenter and then blame the commenter for upsetting the writer of the blog? Willis told a wildlife photographer she knew nothing about nature and accused her of living in her mother’s basement (my mother is dead, so that was really, really stupid). He creates a person who has no knowledge of nature because they disagreed with him. If Michael Mann mistypes a word on twitter, skeptic bloggers make banners and skewer him. Yet your own bloggers make things up, fail to research and use ad hominems against a made-up life for a commenter. Explain to me why I should have any more respect for skeptics than warmists. Explain why I should care about warmist ad hominems when skeptics cheer their use of them against the warmists and skeptic commenters who disagree with the blog writer.
This is a continuing question I have and I have yet to get an answer. I do not understand the double-think, group think, whatever it is that says it’s okay for skeptics to use ad hominems, make up things in their head and then use the ideas as reality, and fail to check facts before posting a comment (as did Anthony). Why are skeptics immune from their rules for warmists? That’s usually called hypocrisy. But not in climate science. It’s standard procedure for many on both sides. WHY?
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Sheri, @ June 19, @ 12:21 am, 12:41 am & 2:31 am (Phew!)
Just a few quickies, just skipping through your 740 words to me:
a) Anthony has made mistakes before, for instance he once posted a time-series graph using PMA smoothing and I had him correct it to CMA smoothing. I think considering the enormous workload he handles that you should allow him some human imperfections.
b) You should have advised him of his error because he was otherwise unaware and unable to apologise (as he would) but worse, you left the impression to readers that you were at fault.
c) You wander off into alarmist versus sceptic conflict but the Willis article had no relevance to that….. It was just a nice story I think, going by the commentary, (with only a glance at the article pics).
d) You wrote: “Bob_FJ: I must say I am fascinated that you defend the man who called you a gerbil. I really wonder what you did to deserve the designation. You’re a loyal friend, there.” I’m not entirely sure what you mean but I have been in conflict with Willis since 2008, before he hopped ship to WUWT. I remain opposed to him as a generality and have very seldom looked at his articles for several years.
e) You also wrote: “Bob_FJ: How could you not find my email address? It’s all by itself off to the right. Can you not read?” I’ve freshly re-opened your WordPress site and opened both the HOME and ABOUT tabs and with great care still cannot find your email address. Yes there are Facebook and Twitter thingies to click but I don’t do that stuff. But anyway, why did you hesitate to post the link here, on site, rather than strangely prefer an email exchange?
I could make a fuller response but need to know if you are interested before perhaps expending wasted effort.
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Bob: You are correct. My email address is on the blog you link to from here, which I guess I thought you’d checked. Your statement “After a quick look at your (two?!!) blogs” lead me to believe you had checked both the wind and the “d*niers” blogs. Now I am wondering what two blogs you did check…….
My apologies. My address was on the web page but one of the graphics moved and it’s covered. I will repair that right away and my apologies for doubting you. The Facebook and Twitter buttons only connect to followers and again, WordPress put them there. I’ll see if I can slay WordPress and remove the buttons. I have no Facebook or Twitter accounts.
(I am curious why you didn’t leave a comment asking what my email address was. The comment box works exactly the same way email does—I’m notified of the comment. That is the purpose of comment sections in addition to allowing dialogue.)
I preferred an email exchange because I did not want to go through this again. In part, maybe, I was hoping I was wrong and you did care about inaccuracies and blog writers who create fictional lives for their commenters and then use that fantasy to tear apart the commenter. If I post here, it simply illustrates clearly that skeptics love ad hominem attacks as long as it’s against warmists and against commenters one disagrees with, but warmists are forbidden from using them. Another example in the blogosphere of hypocrisy on the part of skeptics.
Your counting words is very off-putting. I use the number of words needed to express my points.
You can respond fuller if you like, but you still defended Willis and blamed me for saying something that upset him. I asked what you did that made you worthy of being called a gerbil and you did not answer that question. How can I determine if your dislike of Willis based on you antagonizing him if you don’t share that incident? Seems you may have indeed caused Willis to become upset or he would not have been offended and called you a gerbil.
I did not inform Anthony becauseI had no reason to believe he would even care. I have not seen Anthony apologize for name-calling or insulting commenters he knows nothing about so there was no point.
If you want to respond, it’s up to you. However, since I at the present consider your behaviour hypocritical for defending Willis’s completely fictitious response to a person he created in his head justified and are fine with Anthony Watts failing to do research before launching an ad hominem attack at a commenter, you are probably wasting your time. When skeptics behave in the way they criticize warmists for, I really don’t care anymore about what they think. Never again will I care if you complain about the behaviour of warmists or are calling them out for name-calling since you obviously believe that name-callling and making up fictitious lives for commenters and tearing them apart using the fictitcious lives created for them is acceptable. I just don’t care in the least.
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Sheri @ 44.1.1.1.14
Just few quickies in response:
I. Apart from a brief reference to his biological etymological faux pas, I did not discuss Willis’s comments to you because you did say earlier you didn’t want to go through it all again, and I thought your real gripe was with Anthony. Nevertheless, I found Willis to be typically arrogant and unconscionable. I did not support him, and my disdain of him continues.
II. You should have corrected Anthony’s mistaken assumption so that he would be aware of it and thus apologise, (and to clear your name and to not cognitively stew over it as you demonstrably continue to do a year later);
III. At best I could say that you have also made mistaken assumptions in things I related or at worst that you accused me of lying, but you may have noticed that I did not spit the dummy. I move on;
IV. There is hurly burly in the blogosphere but whilst you gained a bad impression from two symbiotic individuals I do not understand why you got so angry about them and then tar all sceptics with bad behaviour.
V. I understand that there is some fine temperate rainforest in Montana. Are you able to get there and perhaps take the wonder of it in, (relax)?
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Sheri, I will understand if you don’t want to even read this let alone become involved. I weary of the repetition myself. But for the record, Bob’s claims require a rebuttal.
The trend lines on Bob’s graph are
1979 to 1998
Trend: 0.13 ±0.11 °C/decade (2σ)
2001 forward
Trend: 0.02 ±0.16 °C/decade (2σ)
Here is the trend for the whole period from 1979:
Trend: 0.16 ±0.04 °C/decade (2σ)
The entire period shows statistically significant warming.
The period from 1979 shows statistically significant warming.
The period from 2001 on does not show statistically significant anything, the error margins cover a range from 0.14 °C/decade cooling to 0.18 °C/decade warming.
No scientist or mathematician, or referree for a peer reviwed publication, would accept the trend from 2001 as evidence of anything.
That is enough to consign the entire argument to the rubbish bin.
But note how to make the lines look good for his argument, he has cnosen and end date that takes in the start of the 1997/98 el nino event, and does not commence the post el nino trend until 2001 when the period from the end of the el nino event in 1999 were la nina events and the temperature record had recovered from the el nino warming.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/to:1998/plot/uah/from:2001/plot/uah/from:1979/to:1998/trend/plot/uah/from:2001/trend/plot/uah/from:1997.9/to:2001/plot/uah/from:1979/trend
If we change the dates to match what is really happening with ENSO we get this:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/to:1997/plot/uah/from:1999.5/plot/uah/from:1979/to:1997/trend/plot/uah/from:1999.5/trend/plot/uah/from:1997/to:1999.5/plot/uah/from:1979/trend
Now this graph is still junk, except for the trend for the entire data period, because of the large error margins.
Griss and Bob, who are so mathematically ignorant that they think that error margins don’t matter, don’t like the look of the lines in this graph because to people like them who ignore error margins, it sinks their argument. So they fudge the dates to give equally meaningless data because the resulting trend lines, ignoring the error margins, look nicer to them.
But it changes nothing. The error margins make the plots junk, whichever dates you choose.
The very fact that moving start/finish dates by a matter of months gives such large changes in the apparent trend line is another indication that the error margins are large and render any argument based on these numbers mathematically and scientifically meaningless.
This is not opinion, it is mathematical and scientific fact.
You cannot slice and dice statistically significant data into short, non-statistically significant data in an attempt to support anything.
And dismissing the error margins because the algorithm appears on a website you don’t like without providing any yourself is not scientifically acceptable argument either.
I note Griss has wisely left the room and Bob has decided not to comment on #45.
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Philip: I understand what you’re saying. Yes, there is a huge problem with getting people to understand error margins and statistical significance. It seems if one says “no statistical significance” it’s interpreted as “you mean there was warming or you mean there was cooling”, etc when it actually means no conclusion can be reached from the data. Without going through the graphs thoroughly, based on the temperature change and error range you listed, I am inclined to agree with your analysis. I also agree that discussing significance in temperature changes in such a short period are basically meaningless if you are looking for a trend or predictive value. That’s why I did not get involved. It seems impossible to get people to understand statistical significance and error bars. Climate science unfortunately is proned to large error bars and questionable significance, in part due to the lack of ability to fully define parameters and modeling. This seems to encourage people to just assume everything climate science does is wrong. That’s not skepticism, that’s just attacking for the sake of attacking.
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Sheri @ 44.1.1.1.1
You cautiously say; “I [Sheri] am inclined to agree with [Philip’s] analysis” on error margins. However, did you know that:
He ONLY uses the SkepticalScience (SKS) website tool for determining error margins. This is claimed to be created by an anonymous person (Kevin C) based on a highly controversial paper by Foster and Rahmstorf. Not only is SKS infamous for naughty stuff, but co-author Foster is also an active alarmist under the infamous Tamino nom de blog.
1) There are several aspects of this stuff to consider:
• The raw data must also have error margins, which unfortunately can only be highly judgemental, and the greater that they are, the easier it is to gain a fit with any particular method of regression, of which there are many. It is not apparent to me if the SKS methodology includes raw data error margins and Philip has not addressed it.
• Error margins are a TOTALLY DIFFERENT calculation to regression trend in all its variants.
• The undeclared regression method used by SKS (but definitively so by WFT) seems to be confirmed by Philip as OLS (Ordinary Least Squares), but this methodology although popularly used is criticised in the literature especially when there is wide scatter in the Ordinary. (= Y axis).
• I’ve no time or interest in reverse-engineering Kevin C’s methodology, but at least one surface issue I’ve noticed is that he uses monthly data rather than annual. The effect of this is to increase the scatter in Y, (versus annual data), which is not good either in determining the regression trend or its error margins. The conflict is demonstrated by the alternative tool offered by Kevin C where Tamino et al excise bits of the temperature record to smooth it and thus reduce the error margins. Philip does not merit this alternative presumably because it would defeat his allegations with the reduced error margins.
2) More generally, Philip implied that those of us that criticise SKS are not of sound mind, but he has not offered any alternative methodology or validation of their error margins to comfort us.
3) In performing a linear regression and error margin analysis of a time series, (providing valid intervals are used), the mathematics are insensitive to the overall duration (be it years or days whatever) and all depends on the number of data points. If we take 16 years and use yearly data, there are adequate data points to make a good scatter plot and the intervals are valid. If monthly data are used there are an unnecessarily massive 192 data points but their intervals are invalid because of seasonal scatter effects. (bad for OLS)
4) There appears to be almost universal acceptance that there is a pause, plateau, or hiatus for 16 or 17 years from even extreme activists such as Kevin Trenberth and Ben Santer through to top statisticians such as Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, and yet Philip has not identified anyone from accepted mainstream that supports his/SKS view.
5) Philip has severally conflated regression trend determinations with error margin determinations
6) I’ll stop there.
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errata
I mistakenly calculated the trends above for Gisstemp data rather than UAH. This makes no fifference to the argument but the correct trends for UAH are:
1979-98
Trend: 0.04 ±0.16 °C/decade (2σ)
2001 forward
Trend: 0.05 ±0.25 °C/decade (2σ)
Trend: 0.14 ±0.07 °C/decade (2σ)
One thing that is worth noting is that the trends including the error margins for the two data sets for the long statistically significant warming period from 1979 forward are in very good agreement, while those for the short term period 1997-98 have very different headline trend values, but the large error margins mean they are in statistical agreement.
Large differences in the slope for trend values from different data sets is another sure sign you are dealing with a short period and large error margins.
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“Griss and Bob, who are so mathematically ignorant ”
Coming from you , that is the peak of irony.
GO BACK TO JUNIOR HIGH and start again.. FOOL !!!
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If you are very lucky, you may get a maths teacher that I have taught. 🙂
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And of course when pointed to the COOLING since 2001 in RSS, Philip tried to say its 0.06+/-.255…
… little realising, because of his ignorance of basic mathematics, that this means that
1. he is saying that there is a possibility it is cooling at 3.15C / century……. I bloody well hope not.!!!
and
2. he is saying that there is an approx a 70% chance of cooling., only a 30% chance that the trend is warming.
He is basically AGREEING with the probability of a cooling trend since the culmination of 1998 ElNino event.
So … thank you Philip, for backing up EVERYTHING I have said.
(the SkS trend calculator is s0000 useful if you want to guess. If you made the range wide enough, to say +/-1C, you could be almost sure you had close to 100% chance of being right. .) /sarc off.
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Bob, You are seriously competing with Griss in the complete clown stakes.
I made no contribution to the section on west antarctic volcanoes that is at the heart of your first accusation. Even after Griss told you I was not “Brian” you persist in wrongly attributiing it to me. I note that there is the usual back and forth discussion between you and Griss about me reassuring yourselves how right you are and how wrong I am.
I therefore did not “evade” any part of this discussion.
As I have pointed out, neither you nor anyone else has provided a scintilla of evidence that the Kevin C’s linear regreaaion algorithm, which gives the same results as the WFT algorithm and that of my Hewlett Packard calculator is wrong. You just don’t like it because a “warmist” quotes error margins that are not helpful to your assertions.
Sorry Mods but if people are going to bring this up (again) I am going to put the record straight (again).
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/31/quote-of-the-week-bad-eggs-in-the-marcott-et-al-omelete-recipe/#comment-1262484
My banning from Watt’s blog resulted from my persistence in referring people to the graphs published in a thesis and a journal article and which showed that there was no inconsistency in these graphs as Watts had claimed. He had considered important enough to devote that particular session and at least one other to.
This brought repeated abusive denunciations from Watt’s accolytes and eventually Watts himself as I kept repeating to the abusers ‘Go and look at the graphs, Figures 4 c.d.e.f… in the link.’
Watts eventually declared he was tired of my replies (not the continual abuse of me by his fans which caused me to reply ‘Go and look at the graphs, Figures 4 c.d.e.f… in the link’). Watts threw in the towel, effectively admitting he could not refute the argument, and instead declared that this topic, which had been the specific topic he had brought up on at least two threads, was now “minutiae” and not worth bothering about!!
He also told me to pull my head out of my rear end. What a charming man. He really knows how to argue science. I had been not “taken the hint” not to continue to contradict his viewpoint and the subject of the section which was now “minutiae”. Those abusing me and supporting his viewpoint of course received no such “hints” and could continue discussing the subject without recieving vulger instructions concerning their anatomy.
After more abuse from Watts and his fans I decided to permanently sign of from his blog in a big way and turned his abuse and that of his moderator back on him.
Watts rises in indignation. Did I not realise that when someone resorts to personal abuse they have lost the argument? Well, yes Anthony, I figured that out when your form of scientific argument turned to an instruction to remove my head from my rear end. What a colossal hypocrite.
Like you Bob and so many skeptics here and elsewhere who demand the debate continue, any time someone has the temerity to actually privied a counterargument, they get abused. And the more effective the argument the more angry the “skeptics” get at their open minded opinions being challenged and the more abusive they get, which I take as a backhanded compliment.
You were unable to respond to my refutation of Griss’s “step” and permanent el nino warming theory, so you and he just consoled each other telling yourselves that you two really smart guys had it right and iu was the idiot who had it wrong.
Now you are attempting to say that I have misrepresented Griss’s argument and that the poor slob, who keeps abusing me for allegedly not keeping up with the latest climate info, could not have been expected to know that about the “recent” NOAA data showing that 1997/98 el nino event and consequent warming were followed by a moderate 1998/99 la nina event, with temperatures returning to what they had been prior to the .97/98 el nino event, or that the subsequent warming “step” in temperatures was due to the 2002/03 moderate el nino event, not the long passed 1997/98 event.
Neither you nor Griss have managed to explain the lack of a step resulting from the 2009/10 el nino event, why it is only the warming phase of Enso (el nino) that leaves a persistent mark on the temperature record while the cooling phase (la nina) does not, and why given the regularity of el nino events going back to the formation of the Pacific basin, these accumulating steps have not boiled that ocean dry.
When you have no counterargument, like so many “skeptics” you are only left with a abuse, and reassurance from other “skeptics” that you are right.
http://ggweather.com/enso/oni.htm
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah-land/from:1995/mean:1/to
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“Bob, You are seriously competing with Griss in the complete clown stakes”
In that regard, we are but learners compared to you. !!
It seems to have been your lifetime’s work.
Culminating in where you are now.
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The Grist,
Well let’s just take Philip’s first significant claim:
Well quite apart from the fact that you (the Griss) only questioned the handlebars, that is rather hard to reconcile with this exchange between Heywood and Brian/Shehan, and there is more:
Elsewhere for example in comments on the Bolter here:
And, there is more but will that do?
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Easy Bob… my comment was aimed totally at Brian/Philip/whatever.
The first line is a quote from him,
….. and I was stating, correctly, that he is a clown, probably the master clown/fool of them all.
I was in no way aiming at you. 🙂
I apologise if you thought so.
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The Griss,
No problem, no offence thought:
I was quickly trying to show that whilst he claimed not to be ‘Brian’ (e.g. in the Antarctica volcanism thread) or ‘Dr Brian’ or ‘Philip Shehan’ or Dr Brian Philip Shehan elsewhere, the evidence is very strong that these are various handlebars for the same person. And, there is more that could be elaborated.
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🙂
Who knows.. and frankly, who cares.
He’s a waste of time and space anyway. One brain neuron !!
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Again, I am asking why it’s okay for skeptic bloggers to make up lives for their commentors and insult them on the basis of the made-up lives. Why is it okay for Willis to tell a wildlife photographer to “get out of your mother’s basement and see the world”? Is that not the eptitome of stupidity???? Yet I constantly find people saying “But you hurt poor Willis’s feelings so he can make up whatever he wants and call you all the names he wants.
PLEASE, someone explain to me what the difference between skeptics and warmists are. BOTH make up things, create heros you don’t touch and apparently find ad hominems quite acceptable as long as they are the ones hurling them. Why in the world should I care a wit about skeptics if they are exactly like warmists?
(See comment #45 for references)
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You didn’t bother to answer. I am no longer reading this blog.
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Sheri,
You encouraged me to comment above which I did briefly. See my 44.1.1.1.15 following your …..14. Wishing you well, and I have complimented you on your lucidity in your earlier comments and would be disappointed if you leave
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