Buy
Books
Click images for more details
Currently discussing
-
Nov 19 - Barbie Jacket
on
Need an economic adviser? Here are 5 ideas for finding the very best one -
Nov 11 - US Design Hub
on
Launched my very own online store.
Links
A few sites I've stumbled across recently....
-
Science blogs
-
Political blogs
-
Other blogs
Subscribe
Bishop Hill
Copyright © 2006-2013, Bishop Hill All rights reserved.
Reader Comments (124)
Frank, a new page and a slightly different take on an old story ...
I was angry and I am angry about the original insult, which was completely groundless, and the way that you have refused even to countenance that you may have been mistaken. I wasn't attacking AGW, I was praising VS for his use of the AIC and explaining why that got my interest. I was the author. I knew what I thought about what I wrote. I knew the events in my work history that I was refering to better than you did, obviously (which I've taken the opportunity to explain more since). There is nothing in my words that refers to AGW and can possibly be construed as setting up a strawman argument for AGW that I could then knock down. It's nonsense. It's gibberish.
So I'm angry but I'm also amused. I was amused from the moment that, in trying to justify 'strawman' you quoted me as a prelude for some nifty sarcasm on the subject using the words of someone else. That was, frankly, hilarious. In fact it was Frankly hilarious, it was all the more hilarious because it was so obviously in the style of Frank and he'd made this elementary mistake. Although I was still angry with you this brightened my mood. And I wondered greatly what you would do next.
Well, you realised your mistake and that I suppose is something. And you said sorry ... but in this form
And you repeated word for word what you'd just said to me.
And you said nothing else. That was the thing that got me. That I admit I struggled with, at quite a deep level. I simply couldn't believe that you didn't directly address me at that point, as you'd done before. You could have made a good joke of it. You could have and should have said sorry to me, directly, for this part, whatever the merits of the original insult.
But let's be clear about my emotions at this point, given that you seem to think that anger and amusement are mutually exclusive. I was astounded, very amused and still very angry. All three. I simply couldn't believe that you would march on as if nothing had happened, apart from redirecting your sarcasm to PA. At that point you became a figure of fun for me in a way that genuinely surprised me. But sadly not just a figure of fun.
For you take yourself and your mission to discredit anything that moves that dares to question the dogmas of AGW so utterly seriously Frank. That part I hope one day will be exactly as ridiculous as the rest of you. But right now it isn't. Cap and trade is due to be extended to every industry in every part of the planet. That will involve world government and unimaginable suffering for the poor. That is the plan, all justified, however spuriously, on the back of so-called science that I find laughable, including the redefinition of anything which would normally be subject to free inquiry and scepticism - like fitting climate models to real world data. You don't just say that such fitting isn't overfitting, which would be a mighty interesting thing to talk about. You mount your high horse and imply it's a crime against logic and science even to call it fitting. But Freeman Dyson, who the history of 20th century physics suggests understands science far better than you do, uses the term fitting in exactly this context. And I and many others think that's well, entirely fitting.
And on the back of this kind of slippery semantics we are been asked to surrender our freedom into something as deceptive and dangerous as cap and trade policed by a world government.
I can't hold your responsible for everything that's been planned on the back of AGW. But I can tell you when you use a piece of empty rhetoric - in this case, just so you're completely clear, it was the phrase "This is still a strawman".
And when you mess up in the process of trying to respond and misattribute something to me then there's a test of character at that moment. It was simultaneously horrifying and hilarious the way you dived for cover at that point. Those emotions were both there. And anger. And almost a sense of pity.
Clearer now?
It needs to be clearer. This argument matters, for reasons I've already given. It needs to be conducted right, at every level. I think you should reconsider.
Hey, missed this one.
Everybody chill! :)
Here's my 'trend' post, because there seems to be some confusion as to 'what I'm saying'. I think this post is perhaps the most relevant one I made:
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/global-average-temperature-increase-giss-hadcru-and-ncdc-compared/#comment-2740
Links to all temperature related tests/simulation posts are in the second section.
Finally, since my exchange with Tamino is being mentioned, here's my reply to both his blog entries (with links to all relevant exchanges). Note that the first link contains links to monte carlo simulations (performed later), confirming claims made in this reply w.r.t. BIC lag selection in the ADF, and the PP test:
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/global-average-temperature-increase-giss-hadcru-and-ncdc-compared/#comment-1643
(Intelligent) review welcomed!
Cheers, VS
PS. For the record, different orders of integration - Temp I(1) and GHG's I(2) - prohibit *linear* dependence (i.e. regular cointegration). The variables can still be polynomially cointegrated (i.e. the level relationship can still exist, albeit in a funky form. To be fair, we would expect nothing less from our atmosphere :). This hypothesis can be statistically tested. BR do that.
Note that this is their work, not mine (they are the TSA experts, not me). I just happen to have read it, and found it very convincing. I want to see more of that stuff :)
Richard Drake,
Could have, should have, and did. Who do you think the word sorry was directed at? It was both to you and to PA. Jeezuz. I pointed that error out right after I made it, said sorry, and moved on. It has nothing to do with my original remarks.
As to the rest - you continue to ignore the context of your remarks and take me to task for failing to read your mind and reading your words instead. Your taking of grievous offence because in my opinion you set up a strawman continues to be 100% ridiculous.
You continue to tell me about your emotional state - whether you are amused, angry, full of the joys of spring or dizzy with anticipation, what the heck has it to do with me, what is the relevance to AGW and who the hell cares? Similarly I just don't care about your character assessments or what marks you give me out of 10. I'd like to humbly suggest that your opinion of your own opinion is overrated and you should consider getting over yourself. But you know, feel free to do as you please. I've said all this before and the thread is becoming groundhog day.
The only new thing you seem to have added is about Dyson using the term fitting. I haven't seen him do so, and in any case it is still not fitting in any sense relevant to AIC, so it's still not the sense in which you used it, and your use of it is still equivocation. No, that's not a crime. It's just wrong (incorrect).
Gentlemen
Do you think a pause for breath would be a good idea?
Bishop, sure. Apologies for the lengthy OT stuff but since Richard has been posting out and out abuse I feel entitled to respond (and if you will notice, I haven't actually responded in kind). I am perfectly willing to drop it as it is simply repetition by now.
How can you argue about the statistical treatment of data when the original data is not available? We have not had a single independent reconstruction of the average temperature trend that has come from the original surface temperature data. What is presented has come from the 'value added' data set, which has had a warming signal added to it by algorithms that have not been made available for independent review. As such the statistical treatment of the value added temperature set can be valid but the conclusions can still be very unscientific.
Then we have the other big problem for the warmers. One of the leading voices of the AGW cult, Phil Jones, admitted that there hasn't been a statistically significant warming trend for the past 15 years and that the 1976-1998 warming trend was not very unusual because it was of a similar rate and duration as two previous ones in the past 150 years that could not have been caused by human emissions of CO2. No appeal to authority can change the fact that the lack of statistically significant warming falsifies the AGW theory.
Thanks to VS for his commentary and the relevant links, to Bishop Hill for hosting this and to both men (sorry for any offence there VS for the gender assumption) for their concern for my level of chill factor! I am actually feeling perfectly chilled. But I'm going to return to Frank's use of the word strawman and to suggest something very obviously strange about the interaction in this case.
Let's just imagine that in a blogosphere somewhere in our universe Person A quotes something from person B and starts their reply "This is still a strawman". Now normally, if an argument ensues, it is of the form:
"That's not a strawman, that's exactly what the advocates of position P say."
"No it isn't."
"Yes it is, I cite for you the famous advocate of P X."
"But X was discredited years ago on his expulsion from Academy Z."
Etc.
This isn't how this one went. Person A said "That is still a strawman". Person B replied
"How can it be a strawman (let alone 'still' a strawman)? I wasn't attacking P or anything else, I was recommending that people take a look at the work of VS, partly because I came across this thing called the AIC in 1995 and some of us made quite a lot of money."
"It is a strawman, because you said Q. Oops, no you didn't, that was someone else. But it was a strawman, because I don't agree that VS has anything of interest to say on the subject that I am passionate about, which is the science of AGW."
At which point I admit that person B was completely flummoxed and made some strong statements about person A. I also admit that I called the original description by person A, where he said "That is still a strawman", gibberish. I still think it is gibberish.
Anyway, I draw people's attention again to the strange structure of the argument and how it might have gone if A was a rude but at least somewhat logical (or even empathetic) adversary:
Person A: That is still a strawman
Person B: It wasn't a strawman because I wasn't seeking to characterise AGW in any way at all or attacking it in any way at all. To say it's a strawman is gibberish.
Person A: Well, you obviously know what you were trying to say. It's a pity you put up irrelevant things on this thread though and I have to tell you that VS is an irrelevance on this thread and your experience of the AIC is worse, it's over, please stop talking about it, it has nothing to say of relevance here. As for overfitting, it has never happened on any climate model and it simply isn't possible for it to happen. Period.
Person B: Er, the cartoon by Josh at the head of this thread is of VS. How can he be OT?
The structure of the argument I think tells you that something odd was happening. Very odd. And I decided, back on the weekend, that I wouldn't let this go for a little while. Perhaps till Tuesday evening, I don't know. I was offended by Frank's attack but I also thought it was nonsense and I believed that he should be called out for speaking nonsense, because it doesn't help anyone, reader or writer, lurker or delurker.
Let's characterise what I was originally trying to do with reference to two fascinating incidents in the life of Freeman Dyson, whom Frank believes is wrong when he talks about climate models as being 'full of fudge factors fitted to the existing climate, so the models more or less agree with the observed data.' That's a quote from page 121 of The Deniers, Lawrence Solomon quoting Freeman Dyson directly, Frank. Maybe we should come back to that some time.
I've already told the story here of Dyson's interaction with Michael Atiyah at Princeton in 1973 and his suggestion that Atiyah might like to take an interest in Roger Penrose's work on Twistors on his return to Oxford that year. Arguably that was one of the best bits of advice offered by an older man to a younger in mathematical physics in the 20th century - and indeed for the remarkable new area of what Atiyah calls 'high-energy mathematics' flowing out of physics spearheaded by guys like Simon Donaldson and Ed Witten since the 1980s. Person A pointed person B to something really amazingly fruitful, as it turned out, in that instance. There's more from Atiyah on video about this if you're interested. It's an amazing story which I thoroughly recommend.
But Dyson hasn't always been so accurate with his unsolicited advice. As he tells very amusingly against himself, he met a frustrated young man called Francis Crick in 1945 who felt he'd lost his chance to become a great physicist because of the war. A year later he met Crick again, who'd become very excited about biology as alternative field for his abilities. At the ripe old age of 22 Dyson was adamant that nothing interesting was going to happen in biology in timescales relevant to Crick. Fortunately in that case Person A didn't take Person B's advice and DNA was duly discovered.
And, you know, I might even be wrong about VS and the value to any of us of boning up on unit roots, AIC, BIC, OLS and all the other paraphernalia in the modern toolbag of mathematical statistics as we consider the very challenging data sets and interactions in earth sciences.
I don't think it was a strawman though to offer my opinion or to tell a brief story from finance that used some of the same tools. Or at all helpful for the subsequent discussion for it to be cast in that way. I think the free flow of such thoughts and ideas might just be a good thing, from time to time. Because you never know.
Bless you Bishop! I don't think I could have stood much more, my sides are aching!
'Whoever wins, it will change their life'
'Blogging doesn't get tougher than this'
This is all becoming insufferable!! People are using "data" as a singular noun. My Lord Bishop, do put a a stop to it.
Climatechange 19th century:
http://www.archive.org/stream/comptesrendusofo00buchiala#page/n343/mode/2up
Ibrahim, you've committed the historical fallacy, implying we have something to learn from history, and the IPCC peer review fallacy, because I'm sorry, J.Y. Buchanan wasn't even on the list for AR4 WG2. We need to move on, sorry. Please learn the error of your ways before trying to engage someone of my substantial ego with your strawman pictures of glaciers from 1917.
But hey, what's this, at the start of this Fellow of the Royal Society's work?
Exactly what I needed at the end of this somewhat wearing thread. Thank you (and for the lovely photos).
(Part one of three)
Apologies to all for the length. It’s not intentional on my part. There’s a lot of ground to cover.
Gish Gallops always end up like that.
Either you quickly refute all the points (and failing because space is limited) or letting some points slide (which might convince people that the some arguments were left undiscussed because they are irrefutable).
Any scientist can do their bit.
They have been. Yet science remains hard. It's complicated.
It’s very often counter-intuitive.
That's why we have professors and courses and universities and people dedicating their entire lives to study and research.
It's not just for fun and games.
Getting an education is hard. Understanding really, really complicated subjects is really, really hard. Most people are lucky if they can reach a rudimentary grasp of just one subject.
We live in a specialized society. Plumbers do their job. Bakers do theirs.
“Internet scientists” are a dime a dozen. They are from the same breed as the dreaded back-seat driver. Such people are a waste of space and the scientific community has nothing but richly deserved contempt for such people.
As these challenges to mainstream theories have largely occurred outside of the scientific literature, many physicians and researchers have had the luxury of ignoring them as fringe beliefs and therefore inconsequential. Indeed, the Internet has served as a fertile and un-refereed medium to spread these denialist beliefs. The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis (“Reappraising AIDS”) noted, “Thanks to the ascendance of the internet, we are now able to reinvigorate our informational campaign”. The Internet is an effective tool for targeting young people, and for spreading misinformation within a group at high risk for HIV infection.
HIV Denial in the Internet Era
People know stuff all about biology. Just like they know stuff all about dentistry.
That's not because dentists aren't "doing their bit".
Will you please stop going on about the peer-reviewed literature! That's not experiment and evidence.
Scientists go on and on about peer-reviewed literature for a reason. The process of peer review is universally accepted by the scientific community. All branches of science. It's been that way for a long time now.
It's not some sneaky trick that's been imposed at the last minute by a bunch of old meanies.
Peer-review is good. Peer review is important.
All deniers and crackpots routinely find their efforts frustrated by the process of peer review. This is a good and worthy thing.
Peer review is supposed to be hard. That's the idea.
Debate, however, is super easy. There are no filters in debate. No hurdles to overcome. Every snake-oil merchant and charlatan loves to debate. It's the perfect medium for deniers.
Behold the Dunning-Kruger effect!
Why do all that hard sciency stuff that can take years of painstaking research and be rejected again and again by uncompromising reviewers until eventual acceptance?
Take the easy path to fame and success.
Get on a game show and babble merrily along. The huddled masses will adore it. Deepak Chopra, Jenny McCarthy, Dembski, and Guane Gish didn't get to where they are today by doing the hard work that science demands.
Debate. It's great. There are no quality controls at all. It’s open season on a hapless, ignorant public.
(Part Two of Three)
And before you say anything, they wrote it up and got all of that published in a peer-reviewed journal.
You don't understand the process of peer review. Creationists make the same mistake when they manage to somehow manage to slip something past the protocols.
Publishing is not an end in itself. Scientific ideas mean nothing unless they can withstand criticism and be built upon. None of the "intelligent design" publications have led to any productive work. Most have had their main ideas rebutted.
Link .
But the general public includes people who are well-educated…
…who are hopelessly outnumbered and invariably speaking outside of their field.
…and they can speak to their friends and colleagues who are less well-educated, and so the word spreads.
Yeah, there’s a good idea. NOT!
Getting science information from “friends” down at the pub who remember watching something about it on TV last week? Brilliant. Bravo. Marvelous.
That’s how real science is done. PSEUDOscience, that is.
And what those well-educated people are saying is that AGW as presented in the media is dumbed-down BS and authority-spin.
Science isn’t conducted by opinion poll. Science is a meritocracy. Listening to “well-educated” people babble uselessly about a subject that they are not qualified to give an opinion on is insane.
Ignore “well-educated” people. Relying on “McExperts” is badly flawed thinking.
It’s the WORK that counts. The hard WORK that science demands. Scientists do the heavy lifting; not the “well educated.”
Cedric :"To suggest that one individual or one research center or even an entire university is somehow “bad” and that therefore the global community is somehow “bad” is…odd."
Annoyed: Straw man. I was talking about climatology, not scientists generally.
Your shift doesn’t help you.
"To suggest that one climatologist or one research center or even an entire university department devoted to climatology research is somehow “bad” and that therefore the global community of climatologists is somehow “bad” is…odd."
Same diff’. My point remains intact.
(Part Three of Three)
But first, you'll have to show me how the IPCC claim isn't just like the HIV deniers...
You are just repeating your original “tu quoque” in another form. It’s a tactic of deflection. You are uncomfortable talking about the creationist list and the climate denier list. So you deflect. Nice trick. It won’t work on me.
The creationist list and the climate denier list are clones of each other. Two rotten peas in a pod.
Your refusal to talk about it and examine it is telling.
The rationale behind them, the methods used to create them and the propoganda value of them is completely identical in every respect.
The scientists have noticed. That’s why the scientists created the wonderful parody “Project Steve”.
Nope. No global conspiracy. Just lots of people all going along with it because they all assume that somebody else must have checked it. None of them realising that nobody has.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
HIV is the primary cause of AIDS is the strongly held consensus opinion of the scientific community, based upon over two decades of robust research. Deniers must therefore reject this consensus, either by denigrating the notion of scientific authority in general, or by arguing that the mainstream HIV community is intellectually compromised. It is therefore not surprising that much of the newer denial literature reflects a basic distrust of authority and of the institutions of science and medicine.
HIV denialism in the Internet Era
You're expecting that they would publish their conspiracies to rig the peer-review process in peer-reviewed journals?
Their what? Their…conspiracies? Wow. Didn’t you just say a minute ago that..? Never mind. It’s funny how that word just keeps on cropping up.
You make it too easy.
:)
To test for corruption, you have to go to the literature that was both accepted and rejected by peer-review and check it for errors. If the bar is set higher for sceptical than for orthodox, that's corruption.
Yet no evidence is forthcoming. People have looked already.
None of the scientific communities outside of climatology itself have raised any complaints with the science that is climatology. Indeed, they have come out publically and strongly in support of it. Same goes for medicine and biology. The deniers are always on the outside looking in. Conspiracy theory is a poor substitute for actual evidence.
That’s why you grasp at emails yet cannot fault the science itself in the process of peer-review. So you just bleat that “it’s rigged”. Denialists and crackpots everywhere do EXACTLY THE SAME THING.
It's even the motto of the Royal Society. I'm surprised you haven't heard of it.
The Royal Society? You mean THE Royal Society? The UK’s National Academy Of Science? The one that just recently celebrated their 350th anniversary? That Royal Society? I love those guys. They’re AWESOME. What do they have to say about AGW…and scientific consensus …and peer review…and debates?
Let’s find out.
The Society has worked on the issue of climate change for many years to further the understanding of this issue. These activities have been informed by decades of publicly available, peer-reviewed studies by thousands of scientists across a wide range of disciplines. Climate science, like any other scientific discipline, develops through vigorous debates between experts, but there is an overwhelming consensus regarding its fundamentals. Climate science has a firm basis in physics and is supported by a wealth of evidence from real world observations.
The Royal Society understands their own motto better than you.
I write this before Cedric's much anticipated "Part Three of Three" arrives and ask myself, "WTF is he talking about?"
Grant,
He't telling us we're all wrong, de jure, because we're not specialist climatologists.
Except that most of the issues have been found, not in the actually climatology (where most of us are not experts) but in the statistics (where some of us, thankfully not me, are and many of the climatologists are not) and in the programming (where many more of us are, and most of the climatologist definitely are not.)
Is there actually a "climatology" there, I ask myself? Is it much more than a bit of Computational Fluid Dynamics lashed on to a wee bit of Radiative Heat Transfer, and garnished with incompetent statistics and doctored observations?
Cedric
Can you make a point about the reality or otherwise of AGW, without dragging in:
. Creationism
. anti-vaxxers
. HIV deniers
. the Tobacco Lobby
. Holocaust denial
. Moon landings
. 9/11 conspiracy theories?
(From previous comments of yours. I may have missed some.)
There's a discussion happening live NOW with some statisticians from the ASA at http://www.scribblelive.com/Event/Statisticians_Comment_on_Status_of_Climate_Change_Science
(Accompanying article, in case you forgot: http://magazine.amstat.org/2010/03/climatemar10/2/)
GF, I just missed it, *dang*!
Ibrahim (12:23:34) :
Not abnormal just like 2007 was not abnormal
Re. Richard Drake:
Another one from the history books :-)
http://www.archive.org/stream/arcticice00zubo#page/n0/mode/2up
See Chapter XIII (page 444): seasonal and longterm fluctuations of ice abundance http://www.archive.org/stream/arcticice00zubo#page/n0/mode/2up
dear mr.cedric katesby:
when the H1N1 influenza pàndemic news broke, with dramatic headlines in newspapers, t.v. news, etc., i tried to comply with what the "WHO" (world health org.) avised, because, i always trust what the scientifics say.
but i also got mails from my friends, telling me that the "pandemic" was a hoax, orchestrate by pharma companys, that one was owned by donald rumsfeld (bush defense minister). i thought that my friends were all crazy. and i think that you would have equated them with creationist, climatic deniers, antivaxxers, etc. am i wrong??
well, see what the guardian now told us about the pandemic:
(link http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/28/who-public-confidence-flu-pandemic)
"WHO accused of losing public confidence over flu pandemic" and "The World Health Organisation and other public health bodies have "gambled away" public confidence by overstating the dangers of the flu pandemic, according to a draft report to the Council of Europe."
and
"Various factors have led to the suspicion that there may have been undue influence by the pharmaceutical industry, notably the possibility of conflicts of interest of experts represented in WHO advisory groups, the early stage of preparing contractual arrangements between member states and pharmaceutical companies as well as the actual profits that companies were able to realise as a result of the influenza pandemic," says the draft report, which will be finalised when all the evidence has been taken, at the end of April"
so, my "deniers" friends were not so mad after all, they had some truth in what they said!!!
you must remember too that antivaxx scared began with a peer review article in "The Lancet"!!
what you have wrote, was about an "ideal" world, forgetting that the scientifics are human beings, like you and me, that WHO is a human institution too, subjet to corruption, like you and me. and IPCC imembers are human too.
i am not a "denier" i think that a there is a warming trend, but like what the guardian article says "The neutrality of their advice could be contested," and that is what the "deniers" are doing!!
excuse me my awfull english
and if WHO has made
Could it be that Life itself has one of the greatest influence on climate on planet earth, and is totally ignored in all the models?
Maybe I've missed something but it sure seems to me that the climate on planet earth would be a whole lot different if the life suddenly vanished.
It seems quite likely that life has co-evolved to regulate the climate on earth. Previous life forms that could not regulate the climate died out due to excessive climate variation. Life forms that were able to regulate the climate thrived and replaced them.
This could have started out on a small scale. Life that was able to influe the local climate sufficient to increase its chances of survival would have a competitve advantage. This would have allowed it to eventually spread across the plant, replacing life forms that were not able regulate the climate.
An obvious example is plant life on land. It certainly affects the local climate. Could it be that on a global scale that life is regulating the climate and the effects are completely overlooked in our models.
ge0050:
And some of the life trapped carbon from the atmosphere and then became fossils, which are now happily giving the carbon back where it came from, for other life to benefit from and regulate. Maybe not a problem, at any level, but rather something to marvel at. I wouldn't be alone in seeing a genius designer at work (with great love and compassion for needy humanity to boot) in all that but perhaps best not to say more for now. For one thing, there's a bit more science to do.
Ibrahim:
Wonderful. I'm a big man for prefaces, title pages, dedications and frontispieces and again you and Captain Zubov haven't let me down:
I wonder if he was thinking of Comrade Lysenko as he penned that last phrase. Certainly there are some men known as scientists today who could also usefully take the hint.