Wednesday
Apr072010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill David Henderson in the FT
Apr 7, 2010 Climate: other David Henderson has a letter in the Financial Times:
In an area of policy where so much is at stake, and so much remains uncertain and unsettled, policies should be evolutionary and adaptive, rather than presumptive as they are now; and their evolution should be linked to a process of inquiry and review that is more thorough, balanced, open and objective than has so far been the case.
Reader Comments (27)
That is one cracker of a letter! Just imagine if 'environmental correspondents' had a tenth of his perceptiveness, writing skills, penetration, and good plain rationality!
I particularly liked this litany:
'In relation to climate change issues, the established official expert advisory process that governments have commissioned and relied on has shown itself, over many years, to be professionally not up to the mark. The situation is one of unwarranted trust. The main headings of unprofessional conduct within the process, all identified and fully documented well before the recent revelations, have been:
* Over-reliance on in-group peer review procedures that do not serve as a guarantee of quality and do not ensure due disclosure.
* Serious and continuing failures of disclosure and archiving in relation to peer-reviewed studies that the IPCC and member governments have drawn on.
* Continuing resistance to disclosure of basic information that reputable journals in other subject areas insist on as a precondition for acceptance.
* Basic errors in the handling of data, through failure to consult or involve trained statisticians. * Failure to take due account of relevant published work that documented the above lapses, while disregarding IPCC criteria for inclusion in the review process.
* Failure to take due note of comments from dissenting critics who took part in the preparation of AR4.
* Resisting the disclosure of professional exchanges within the AR4 drafting process, despite the formal instruction of governments that the IPCC’s proceedings should be "open and transparent".
* Last but far from least, failure on the part of the IPCC and its directing circle to acknowledge and remedy the above deficiencies, a failure that results from chronic and pervasive bias.'
I had dinner with David in Edinburgh two years ago and he first introduced me to Climate Audit and the rabbit hole that is Climate Science. Thanks David, it's been a lot of fun following the exploits of Mann, McIntyre et al.
Well done, David. An incisive, succinct and entirely accurate summary. I think it's also entirely proper to call the FT's own writers to task. The broader content within "Climategate" was news to most laypeople, but it was not - or SHOULD not - have been news to those who profess to make the issues of climate change their work. And if it was known to them, they're guilty of complicity. If it was unknown to them, they're guilty of complacency.
I'm hearing hermeneutical circle/spiral in Henderson's words. Isn't the scientific method very similar to the hermeneutical spiral? Long live Schleiermacher, Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricouer!!
Can someone reprint the whole letter please? The FT website is annoying me!
There is much rotten in the State of Science journalism in general.
There is complacency but there is also blackmail.
Labs, both public and private, operate a news pre-release system to journalists.
If a journalist is critical or even critical of the Lab, s/he is cut out of the pre-release loop and is therefore in future left in the dark while their competitors are writing their stories. Quick way to lose your job.
This is precisely why enviro-journos have rarely dared to question what they are told by the August Climate Change "Consensus" Institutions.
Plus the fact, of course, that if there's actually little wrong with the climate, why do we need five enviro-jounos and two enviro-editors (that's you, Guardian)?
And the five-a-day diet advice to combat cancer has just been exploded:-
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/simply-eating-your-five-a-day-will-unotu-protect-you-against-cancer-1937600.html
I blame Big Broccoli.
The whole letter:
Can I suggest that others follow up David Henderson's excellent letter with more letters to the FT? The email address is letters.editor@ft.com and the requirement for consideration for publication (apart from eloquence and relevance!) is to include your home address and contact telephone number.
I believe that letters to the serious mainstream media can have far greater impact with the public at large than blogging since visitors to sceptical blogs are already imbued with the spirit of enquiry. Readers of the letters pages on the other hand may have their previously AGW-accepting eyes opened. The newspaper editors and environment correspondents might start to get the message too.
@Roddy Campbell, its the pay wall i'm sure the FT has a pay wall. See link and comments on media mogual Murdoch :-
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/07/murdoch_google_bing_news_pay_wall/
Another flaw that I have noticed is how little actual science seems to be being done. Why did the IPCC have to rely on 10 year old hearsay for the Indian glacier story or on skiers for alpine snow levels? Aren't these relatively simple things for a scientist to be measuring? Isn't that what scientists are supposed to be doing? I heard the excuse in India was its "difficulty". But having watch "Blue Planet" and hearing the story of the photographers who spent months tracking the snow leopard, why exactly again couldn't someone do some work on the glaciers? They have had 10-15 years to do this work, but no one seems to be doing it.
"why exactly again couldn't someone do some work on the glaciers?" Because they might get cold tootsies; it's far more comfortable for Gavin Smirk and company to sit in front of their computer screens.
Do you know how hard it is to do a "little" science as you call it? Scientists do not have endless budgets or time resources in which to do things and even apparently trivial questions can hide really nasty pitfalls for the unwary. It can take between 3 and 6 months to prepare a paper to make a minimal contribution to science and up to two years to get it published via the peer review process. I think you are being somewhat harsh.
I do not know about the Himalayas, but on South American tropical glaciers from Colombia to Bolivia there is a lot of good work done by several teams of researchers, mostly from Germany, France and Switzerland. One of the latest chronologies based on moraines and other indicators shows that, yes, the glaciers are receding, but they are receding since the 17th or early 18th centuries (see for instance Jomelli, Vincent; Vincent Favier, Antoine Rabatel, Daniel Brunstein, Georg Hoffmann & Bernard Francou, 2009. Fluctuations of glaciers in the tropical Andes over the last millennium and palaeoclimatic implications: A review. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, doi:10.1016/j.palaeo.2008.10.033). There has been, yes, an acceleration in the 20th century, but not a dramatic one. Some glaciers have greatly shrunk or nearly disappeared, yes, because they are on mountains peaking at altitudes around or below the new snowline (many of those at higher altitudes are actually gaining ice because of increased precipitation --probably due to global warming?).
No we're not being too harsh.
I'm very surprised just how little direct observation and measurement goes on in "climate science".
The weather data comes from weather services - then it's either munted or lost. Or munted and then lost.
Tree ring data: the same tiny number of studies gets endlessly recycled. 12 trees. Nobody could be assed to gather any more data. Too hard. Too cold.
The whole field is at the same stage as astronomy was hundreds of years ago when it was still mixed up with astrology. There's some recognition of patterns, but no understanding. Hence no predictive power.
Another, even more recent, report on Andean glaciers:
Jomelli. Vincent, J. Argollo, Daniel Brunstein1, Vincent Favier, Georg Hoffmann, Marie-Pierre Ledru, J.E. Sicart, 2008. Multiproxy analysis of climate variability for the last millennium in the tropical Andes. In Peretz, Lawrence (editor), 2008. Climate Change Research Progress. Hauppauge, New York: Nova Science Publishers, pp.127-160.
So RT, I guess the defensive cry is: Millions on conferences and models (Mann alone has received several million in grants), but none on actual research!
As for being harsh, I am not the one demanding massive political interference in my life based upon paltry research that makes religion seem fact based.
@RT
'Do you know how hard it is to do a "little" science as you call it? Scientists do not have endless budgets or time resources in which to do things and even apparently trivial questions can hide really nasty pitfalls for the unwary. It can take between 3 and 6 months to prepare a paper to make a minimal contribution to science and up to two years to get it published via the peer review process. I think you are being somewhat harsh'
Well what else are they supposed to be doing all day? Sit around admiring icons of Michael Mann? Peer-reviewing other people's papers..'Darling you were wonderful...and you looked so fetching with the blue cummerbund at the Nobels....but perhaps we could have just a teeny bit more stick and little less hookey in your latest on sealevel rise? Organise their data? (sorry just my little jest). Of course they don't have time to do any of the bloody stuff they get socking great research grants for, And it probably takes just as much time to fiddle the figures as it would to do them honestly. They're far too busy too worry about results.
Dam and blast people that’s half a pint of Grolsch spluttered all over my screen now, don’t you realise 3 to 6 whole months to prepare a paper, they must be absolutely exhausted poor mites have the rest of the year off and have a bit of extra funding for your inconvenience.
The admonition from RT is a reminder that we should remove climate studies from the academic morass in which it is enmeshed, and return it to the scientific world.
Stop producing papers for publication, hiding declines, polishing egos, protracting peer review and the like, we'd be perfectly happy with a 20 page report and it's associated supporting data accessible on the internet.
Give my business the data and the CRU budget of the last 10 years and I promise you won't get many scientific papers but you would get a clean, fully accessible dataset with all data comparable before and after corrections. I wouldn't even have to buy extra disk drives as the data set is so small (we are more used to Terabytes than Megabytes). We've got Powerpoint files of screen images for presentations almost as big as the entire GHCN dataset!
OT to Jack Hughes --
A day or so ago you promised to do an experiment with ice, a pyrex dish and your microwave. Still waiting for the explosion or results, which ever comes out. My guess is, as long as the ice is floating and not touching anything but the water underneath, that the water level goes down. I really don't know the answer, but if less dense ice melts to water, it will "displace" less volume.
Since I value my microwave, please post results. Remember to send copy to IPCC.
If the ice was floating - like the arctic ice cap - then the sea level stays the same when the ice cap melts.
The iceberg is less dense than water. This means that the part underwater has a buoyancy and can carry the weight of the part above water.
Think of a 20-ton boat. The volume of water displaced by the boat weighs 20 tons. This means that the boat-shaped volume of water pushed out of the way when the boat was first launched weighed 20 tons.
The iceberg is a boat made entirely from ice - hull and superstructure. A 20 ton iceberg displaces 20 tons of water. When it melts it becomes the 20 tons of water. Likewise a 200 gram iceberg displaces 200 grams of water then when it melts it becomes 200 grams of water.
At room temperature this works well - but slowly. An eye-opener for anyone brain-washed by eco-propaganda but able to trust their own lying eyes more than a TV program.
My caution about doing this in a microwave is concern about practical issues like the plastic polar bears melting or sparking or the bowl getting hotter than the water, etc. And a general rule to never try anything in public for the first time. A recent science demo I went to was very flat because his untried experiments kept going wrong because of practical details.
Another way to look at this question is the annual melting / refreezing of the polar sea-ice. This has no effect on sea levels round the world.
The greenies - especially Greenpeace - deliberately muddy the issue for dramatic effect: "Look at all that ice up there - it's going to melt and come down here!"
If I was a scientist attached to these people I would feel very uncomfortable about this deliberate lie.
Dear Andrew
My apologies that your name was spelt incorrectly in today's letter to the FT. Finger trouble. My fault, not the FT's.
Kind regards
Mike Post
[BH adds: I forgive you! Nice to get a mention.]
Sorry...I was really busy polishing my Nobel prize (www.myfakeid.co.uk). Anyway, I don't think you got the point of what I was saying. You complain about science not being done but you have no idea of the effort or resources involved or of the distractions from research which scientists have to put up with. Nor do you seem to appreciate the pressure to publish brought to bear on academics. As for removing science from the academic morass - well, good luck with that one!
By way of illustration, here is a simple scientific problem which I require you to deal with. I don't even want you to do the science, just set out the research problem, the skills required to answer the problem, list the relevant literature, the nature of the experiments required and the amount of effort you estimate will be required to carry out the experimentation, include skills acquisition time. You can even cheat if you find the actual paper that was published as a result of this work.
Given a non-linear process control system (your choice) with N sensors. Assume that all the sensors fail so that none of them gives a true reading of the system's state. Produce and demonstrate an approach which will enable you to place a minimal number of additional sensors on an independent sensor network which can provide you with sufficient information to determine process state and hence control the process. This system would be used to estimate system status in real time and where sharp anomalies occur between estimated and reported status, provide an emergency takeover of the system.
You are only allowed to work for two hours a day (to simulate the distractions which exist in academia).
I would be interested how long it takes you to complete even this simple task of research project planning.
Uhm RT, several points:
1) as other writers have shown, such work IS being done. So obviously it is not that complex. The trouble was that their work doesn't support MMGW because the process started several hundred years before. And if the work can be done in the Andes, why couldn't they be done in the Alps? Why did the IPCC have to rely on hearsay for the Alps? The answer is obvious, because the science doesn't support the IPCC position because it shows that glaciers have been retreating for several hundreds of years. The IPCC wanted something more dramatic, hence the need for the hearsay stories.
2) Your challange above is a red herring. What you are basically saying is that unless it is done perfectly it shouldn't be done at all. That isn't science. Science is the accumulation of data. Data can be acquired first with simple observations, then over time with more and more precise observations. There is nothing wrong with a researching visually inspecting the glaciers, and doing certain measurements, as long as the researcher explains his methods. That would be infinitely better than mere hearsay and could develop the ability to get funding for more advancced research. That this hadn't been done in the case of the Alps is telling (or I assume it hasn't otherwise the IPCC wouldn't have gone with hearsay (that is assuming the IPCC is honest))
3) I fully understand the pressures to publish. But that is sort of like Tiger Woods complaining about his wife not trusting him. The "publish or perish" mentality is a self-inflicted problem that has had a profound negative impact on the quality of science. I can go on for days about this topic, but this isn't the proper forum.