Sunday
Dec052010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Dellers on Durkin on Cox
Dec 5, 2010 BBC Climate: other James Delingpole introduces Martin Durkin's reponse to Prof Brian Cox's RTS lecture.
Cox equates scientific truth with the consensus view of the scientific establishment. His justification for doing so is the revered practice known as ‘peer review’. Cox tells us, ‘a peer-reviewed consensus is by definition impartial’. Now this is an extraordinarily stupid thing for anyone to say, let alone someone like Cox who likes to pretend he’s clever.
Reader Comments (100)
It's a funny coincidence, but at lunchtime we were listening to a tape recording of a Brian Cox tribute to Richard Feynman, broadcast in September. It would appear that nothing that Feynman said about uncertainty, evidence and scepticism got through Cox' skull. I commend everybody to listen to it:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00b6djp
that is a CRACKER!
If anyone thinks peer review is by definition impartial, drag them to a bible study! ;)
Democracy was devised as a best way to govern. Is Science now in the business of governing? Oh! How clever! We must draw up a constitution for Science. I propose one similar to the American Constitution. I just wonder if God will listen to us now, or will we still have to listen to Him and His stupid rules? Do we need to first have a Revolution? Do we need to make Him sign a Bigger and Better Magna Carte? I always wanted to fly on my own, without fear of killing myself in the process --you know that "Gravity" thing? I want to fly! Let's put it in the New Constitution. OK?
Cox delivers a fine lecture on phlogiston.
I tweeted Cox with the following:
"just watched lecture. Very sad you've been assimilated by BBC. Such contradictions. Remember Capernicus and consensus"
which I thought said it quite well. He replied with:
"Unmitigated drivel. Watch it again"
So that told me then...
Off subject I know but I'm a little confused. I've been perusing the Thames barrier website and it says this:
"The current system of flood defences
The existing defences – already of a higher standard than anywhere else in the country - provide an even greater degree of protection to London and the estuary communities than originally anticipated (Engineers planned for 8 mm/yr sea-level rise, whereas sea-levels are currently rising by 6 mm/yr)".
Things are looking really serious now. We don't have long to go before Armagedon strikes.
Source:
http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/homeandleisure/floods/104697.aspx
Not since Schindler's List can I remember a late TV programme stopping me sleeping properly as did Brian Cox. Perhaps this is because until Wednesday I had greatly admired his childlike enthusism. I now see it as a terrifying new weapon of mass disinformation. I had always assumed he was probably well disposed to the IPCC view of things as it seems to drive all research but did not realise he was a fully paid up "team member".
He started well showing Feynman's approach to science and seemed even to be labouring the point that consensus has no place in the scientific method. I decided to watch on but was shocked as his rational begining morphed into a traditional warmist rant with its appeal to the authority of pal-review and the sugestion that the BBC should only report on climate change science that has the warmist seal of approval. When he started praising Iain Stewart and rubbishing Martin Durkin, I should have switched off.
ZT says...
Cox delivers a fine lecture on phlogiston.
ZT, You leave me gasping for breath.
Is Cox still in the dark ages of scientific advances I wonder?
Maybe he can also change lead into gold.
Peter Walsh
I presume Cox has either not had a chat with some of his colleagues at CERN or else he doesn’t believe them. Pierre Gosselin reports on Nir Shaviv from the Berlin conference.
http://notrickszone.com/2010/12/05/conference-recap-and-my-big-disappointment/
It seems they’re on the verge of releasing their results on the reationship between solar activity, cosmic rays and cloud formation.
Harmless Sky covering the Cox lecture as well
Peer-review is a workflow step in the publishing industry - nothing more.
Dr Richard Horton editor of the Lancet on peer review:
Agree with David Holland. I made the same point on this blog on a another post.
Very disappointing effort from Brian, previously an eloquent, personable standard bearer for popular science.
Perhaps Dr Cox believes that the world is flat, or the Earth is the center of the universe, both once "consensus" positions. And that Galileo should have been burnt at the stake along with Copernicus?
Or maybe just given a little box mounting a ref button marked with "no pressure" written on it.
The man is a twit.
he seems to be the Diane Abbott for science at the BBC.
I wonder where a news channel gets the right to nurture characters of their liking and then continuously display them to "ask questions and opinions" ?
Don Pablo.
You are so eloquent.
Twit indeed.
Cox reminds me of Prince Chuck.
Both singing from the same hymn sheet.
Peter Walsh
"even bronzed, honey-tonsilled dreamboats can be wrong, sometimes"
Sorry, O/T @ Paul
This Environment Agency figure of 6mm/year is puzzling in the light of this (my italics):
http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/research/library/publications/41075.aspx
BTW I'm assuming your intent was this: ;-) re this:
"BTW I'm assuming your intent was this: ;-) re this:
Things are looking really serious now. We don't have long to go before Armagedon strikes."
Oh God yes an attempt to delve into the mindset of the warmist tendency rather like getting in touch with my feminine side which never works Bishop. Those figures you gave on sea level rise tally well with what I was taught at junior school forty-five years ago when we learned that the south of England was rising because of the bounce effect following that dang glacier thousands of years ago. Even then they knew the real reason. You might find this interesting too:
http://www.cefas.co.uk/our-science/observing-and-modelling/monitoring-programmes/sea-temperature-and-salinity-trends/presentation-of-results/station-18-dover.aspx
It also gives temperatures at points dotted all over the UK if you look on the right hand side of this page. Sorry about the long urls Bishop.
http://www.cefas.co.uk/our-science/observing-and-modelling/monitoring-programmes/sea-temperature-and-salinity-trends/presentation-of-results.aspx
Note the gap in monitoring during WW2.
Correction, "south of England sea levels were rising".
Tiny CO2
Many thanks for that link. Especially the summary of Nir Shaviv's presentation. If so its a blockbuster, and also so logical - Occam's razor.
Paul
Thanks for the links. I'm not the Bishop though; just a congregant.
BBD (still O/T, I know) -
While your quote from the Environment Agency -- "sea level at Dover has risen by 682mm in the last 40 years – between 1968 to 2008. There has been an average increase of 2mm per year" -- is accurate, the figure of 682mm requires a [sic]. The rise is 82 mm if I read the graph rightly. They've got the average correct though.
In any case, as you say, it does make one wonder what evidence was used to support the statement that "sea-levels are currently rising by 6 mm/yr."
I found this statement elsewhere on their site: "The Thames Estuary is particularly vulnerable to flooding for a number of reasons. The South-eastern corner of the British Isles is slowly tilting downwards and sea levels are rising. As a result, the high tide in central London is rising at a possible rate of 75cm per century." From this phrasing, perhaps the 6 mm/yr is an estimate of high-tide rate, which might well be a better metric (compared to average sea level rate) for their purpose of tidal flood risk. Although I'm at a bit of a loss to understand why the figures should diverge so widely.
We’ve done an entire transcript of the Cox speech in the comments on the Harmless Sky post mentioned by Jack Hughes at
http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=359
tedious work, but necessary in order to focus comments, I think.
"Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review...But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong."
Lately, peer review has become far more pitiful than pivotal.
Dave Holland says: “...his childlike enthusiasm. I now see it as a terrifying new weapon of mass disinformation”.
Absolutely. As is the fact that it only exists as a video, so only gets discussed in generalities. Tony Newbery of Harmless Sky asked the BBC for a transcript last Friday but got no answer.
The written word exists so that we can confront and analyse ideas, instead of feelings. The move away from the written word is demagoguery, leading directly to the Splattergate “big red button” method of confrontation. Let’s look at what he says, and argue with it.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science
Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors—to a striking extent—still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science.
http://tinyurl.com/2628m2v
Most Science Studies Appear to Be Tainted By Sloppy Analysis
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118972683557627104.html
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
http://tinyurl.com/c94hl6
Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science
http://tinyurl.com/yf28w9g
I loved Brian Cox's 'Wonders of the Solar System' and was amazed when, after quite a few episodes AGW had yet to be mentioned. But he got to it in the end delivering the usual inappropriate homilies when he started talking about Venus:
http://theskinner.blogspot.com/2010/03/wonders-of-solar-system.html
I quite appreciate that Mark Durkin's piece was a guest-post at James Delingpole's, and that it was very much in line with the Delingpole house style.
Personally, though, I was very disappointed by Mr. Durkin's response. I would have hoped for something much calmer, and more thoughtful. One which didn't contain any crowd-pleasing references to Nazis, for example.
And whilst being in complete sympathy with the views expressed above here at chez Bish, I thought Mr. Durkin's extended ad hominem attack against Dr. Brian Cox was totally unnecessary, and counter productive. His response would have been far more effective if he had just played the damned ball, and not the man. Is that so difficult to do?
Peer review gave us the Jones et al 1990 on urbanisation, the Hockey Stick, and Steig's Antarctic warming. All these flawed papers, and more, were waved thru the much vaunted peer review process and have remained in-situ without a murmour of protest from the scientific establishment.
The consensus is simply a house of cards erected by those who owe their careers, their livelihoods to a badly flawed hypothesis, namely CAGW. It will take a new generation of scientists to blow this bad science away, and Brian Cox is not one of them.
The BBC knew exactly what it was doing when they puffed Cox. In the past they've tried 'authoritative' figures like Sir David King to make people cower under the might of science, then they've used the likes of Cox to bring some street cred to mop up the remaining resistance.
I remember seeing a discussion on Newsnight with Sir David King and Brian Cox, which is the first time I'd seen Cox. King is a pretty bad exemplar of science, but on this occasion he made a great deal more sense than Cox, so that by comparison Cox appeared to be a complete waster, including in the way he presented himself lolling over the studio furniture in scruffy clothes. But then, maybe he appears like one of us.
The BBC have surely bent over backwards to puff Cox in the belief that such a winsome character would create enough of a following and goodwill as eventually to be able to inject poisonous propaganda without anyone really noticing.
From Durkin's response (regarding "peer review"):
O/T but ... No doubt it will surprise very few readers here to learn that this partiality problem extends to the IPCC reports. In fact, the actual prevalence of this partiality problem is considerably worse than I had thought!
Consider the following:
In AR4's WG 1, there were 3,302 (give or take 1 or 2) citations of 1,708 references throughout the 11 chapters which were authored (or co-authored) by a person who also happened to be a Coordinating Lead Author, Lead Author, Contributing Author or Review Editor of the chapter in which the work was cited.
For details (and many more fascinating facts about AR4), please see:
FAR_OUT (Fourth Assessment Report - Objectively Uniformly Tagged) Version 1 - 2010 Dec 5, which contains annotated (i.e. "tagged") versions of all 44 Chapters of Working Groups 1, 2 & 3.
Well this by Cox just about says it all for me: "And so I make no apology for returning to Cosmos, the greatest television science series ever made, to end this lecture. We’re about to see the final scene from the final episode of Cosmos, in which Sagan describes what our discoveries about the universe, our place within it and our origins, out there amongst the stars, actually mean for us."
However powerful and entertaining 'Cosmos' might have been as a genre, it was sheer nonsense from a scientific standpoint. Sagan was utterly inept on the philosophy and history of science and metaphysics, and he brought a huge amount of prejudice and presupposition to bear on his presentation. Worse, he quoted from sources that were completely discredited - those who had an axe to grind and who had deliberately lied about the facts to suit their agenda, even quoting from historical novels as if they were fact - the same kind of error as if someone quoted from Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code to establish a point in theology. This is simply myth-making - conflating facts with ideas and fictions about origins that happen to fit your own worldview.
That 'Cosmos' had such a formative influence on Cox in his youth, and that in the intervening years since he has been unable to discern truth from fiction tells me a great deal about his powers of reasoning and his mental equipment. Cox is clearly a man who can be captivated by ideas, and is able to enthuse about them, and stimulate others. There are lots of people lacking discrimination who are easily led, just like him. Blind leaders of the blind.
Nir Shaviv's presentation, if the precis given at Tiny CO2's link is accurate, seems likely to produce a re-run of the dinosaur extinction fiasco.
No palaeontologist has ever been able to explain, from looking down into the ground, why the dinosaurs died out so abruptly 65 million years ago. Then an astronomer, looking instead up at the sky, impertinently came up with a plausible theory based on astronomy (an asteroid impact).
A lot of spurious objections were raised by some palaeontologists, who claimed to have issues with the science and the evidence. Their real issue was that people from another scientific discipline had had the bloody gall to make discoveries in theirs. Worse still, they'd only gone and answered the $64,000 question of dinosaur research. The final insult was that the dino-hunters had nothing - no knowledge, theory, or data - equal to refuting the new theory. Compared to astronomers, palaeontologists weren't clever enough and they didn't know enough
This is exactly what we have seen from the climate lobby when parvenus such as McIntyre come along. I hope Mr. Shaviv is ready for some vicious reactions to anything he publishes that debunks CAGW.
Cox is doing what's necessary to earn a living in celebrity science, he'll be fully aware of what happened to David Bellamy & the scorn heaped on fellow physicist Harold Lewis after he 'came out'.
I was turned off by a recent TV programme where Cox threw in a 'global warming' reference where it really wasn't relevant, it was obvious that he's fully paid up member of the BBC's indoctrination team. No honesty from this guy.
I agree that the science may have been a bit dodgy, but the combination of Sagan's delivery, the great pictures and Vangelis's inspiring music made Cosmos a stunning and very memorable piece of Art. 30 years on I can still remember bits of it almost verbatim.
I'm not surprised that Brian Cox, who would have been at the highly impressionable age of 12 when it was first shown, was deeply moved.
Feynman... fine man
Cox...
@ LA
30 years on I can still remember bits of it almost verbatim.
I still laugh at "our cousins, the trees".
@J4R
'Our cousins, the trees'
Not that old chestnut? That's not a branch of the subject I've investigated, but there's probably a kernel of truth in there somewhere. I'll be pining for it if it we don't find it before Alder is Elderly,
"he seems to be the Diane Abbott for science at the BBC"
Ouch!
Anyone relying on scientific consensus might reflect that until a few weeks ago, phosphorus was considered an essential element for life. 99.9% of scientists would have agreed, and they would all have been wrong...
Link
James P "Anyone relying on scientific consensus might reflect that until a few weeks ago, phosphorus was considered an essential element for life. 99.9% of scientists would have agreed, and they would all have been wrong..."
Not necessarily. NASA has an agenda (it wants billions of Federal funds), as did Sagan with his SETI, and this perverts science and clear thinking. As far as this hype is concerned there may well be some backtracking in months to come. It would have been far more convincing if they had actually checked the genome of this bacterium to see whether it has arsenic substituted for phosphorus. It seems that they haven't one this basic step. Oops!
The bacterium did NOT have arsenic in its systems when it was discovered. What researchers have done is to culture it and withdraw phosphorus, and introduce more arsenic. Most bacteria died, but this particular one didn't, and there seemed to be some uptake of arsenic. So, this organism was able to tolerate arsenic - well, what do you know! It was discovered in an arsenic-rich lake, for goodness sake!
Since only a tiny amount of phosphorus is actually needed to build DNA (since DNA makes up a tiny amount of cellular mass), the question must be whether there was sufficient residual phosphorus in the original specimens to serve for several succeeding generations - easy to test: will it eventually run out after very many generations? Or, is there sufficient phosphorus as a contaminant in the culture to build DNA? Someone really ought to have analysed the DNA before rushing out this half-baked result.
Serves me right for believing NASA, I guess! Whom *can* one trust these days?
Actually, the BBC are very clever by having Cox as the 'new face' of their (CAWG) (science) programs: he looks so sweet that thousands of teenie girlies will adore him and propagate what he said because he looks lush ...
Thinking, especially for oneself, never mind being critical, can be abandoned. After all, whp's question what a pop-scientist god says whom all your friends adore ...
Re ScientistForTruth
Nobel cause corruption at it's finest. Research costs money, so researchers follow the money and most populist causes rather than more obscure areas of research where immediate paybacks are less obvious. NASA seems to be looking inwards rather than outwards as it was originally intended. Space exploration's seen as a waste of money. Geo-engineering's seen as kook science and a waste of climate research money when it could be an enabler to lunar or martian colonisation and terraforming. Which could help ease resource constraints, if shipping costs can be addressed. All long term stuff but could be good for humanity long term. Instead we seem happy to throw money at technology dead-ends because of sharp lobbying. Sad, but SF writers who predicted a Chinese future are probably right.
As for SETI, I always thought that interestng, but odd. Look how quickly we're shifting from radio comms to fibre, or more efficient radio comms. Probability of catching alien RF emissions seems to rely on a fairly narrow window of opportunity to detect, if they follow similar technical evolution.
Cox is a celebrity scientist with the celebrity taking precedence. His entire celebrity, most of his influence, and perhaps a good chunk of his income all rely on him staying with the "in" crowd.
An even worse example is Phil Plait (the Bad Astronomer). He used to have a fun site where he mocked bad science in movies but now he's first and foremost a media personality. Right now 2/7 of the posts on the front page of his blog are political related and sometimes the entire page is. He probably spends about a third of his time plugging political agendas (most of which I actually agree with) and media appearances by himself or fellow celebrity scientists.
I've just taken the opportunity to rewatch TGGWS, and I'm at a loss. Which bit of it is "factually bollocks"?
Peer review conducted in proper spirit by knowledgeable experts in a field serves three main purposes: First, to ensure that a hypothesis is not just bumpf (perpetual motion fanatics, psychics, advocates such as J.B. Rhine, Trofim Lysenko, Immanuel Velikovsky need not apply); second, to put empirical results in current context plus long-term perspective; third and most important, to replicate experimental results, if possible from different angles-- the sine qua non of scientific endeavor, without which no conclusion has any credibility.
The fact that AGW catastrophists over decades have acted in bad faith, under false pretenses of disinterested objectivity, does not invalidate this critical last phase of scientific method ["science" is a philosophy of the natural world, an empirical-experimental discipline, lastly a social construct akin to Athenian Greeks' debates in the Agora]. As hyper-politicized propagandists, radical Luddite sociopaths at odds with libertarian Enlightenment peace-and-prosperity, Warmists represent literally the antithesis of Science.
Now as Earth enters on a probable 70-year "dead sun" Maunder Minimum similar to that of 1645 - 1715, death-eating Thanatists' sabotage of global coal, oil, nuclear energy economies will quite possibly result in mega-deaths worldwide. That is in fact their goal: They hate humanity and all its works; like murderous jihadi terrorists, they "love death more life"; in short, like all 10:10 types these Statist ideologues value only power, and they want you dead.