Tuesday
Jun012010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Bob Ward on openness
Jun 1, 2010 Climate: other FOI Bob Ward has an interesting letter in the Times, prompted by the rebellion of Royal Society fellows over the Society's statements on climate change. This is the intriguing bit:
To avoid creating even further misunderstanding about the causes and consequences of climate change, the Royal Society and its Fellows should now open up their internal debate to the public, and clarify whether the criticisms made by the “sceptics” have any validity.
Openness has long been a clarion call for sceptics, so Bob's intervention is most welcome. Let's hope that his enthusiasm for transparency extends to the availability of climatologists' data and code.
Reader Comments (36)
Yes, his final paragraph seems to run counter to the preceding diatribe against sceptics. Bob Ward is an alarmist of the worst kind. Are we taxpayers funding the Grantham Institute of Alarmism?
All that Ward wants is to attack and harass the fellows that want a truthful statement.
It's just like when the Institute of Physics issued their condemnation of bad scientific practice. The attack dogs went berserk trying to identify and savage those responsible.
This is not a request for open debate - it's a witch hunt.
Having read the whole letter - which is full of the usual ad hominem arguments (as per the reference to "electrical engineer and metallurgist") - I can only understand the "enthusiasm for transparency" as, only in as far as it promotes his own agenda. By the way, the comments on the letter on the Times site are so far very interesting.
I like the disparaging comment about "so-called “sceptics”.
Richard Lindzen seems to concur here. In his talk the the Heartland conference, he suggested we stop using the term "sceptic", as it implies that you have a plausible theory to be sceptical about.
Looking at the Grantham Institute website http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/climatechange/people I see no mention of Bob Ward. Policy director is (was) Simon Buckle.
The staff, led by alarmist Hoskins (not a scientist, but a member of the Cliamte Chaneg Committee), don't strike me as cutting edge climate scientists. More like people whose career and funding depend on there being CAGW. All the PhD students depend on CAGW being a fact.
In the good old days when I was a student at IC they didn't go in for all this political and policy-driven nonsense. It was all science, maths and engineering.
An open debate? That is the last thing that people like Bob Ward want. He simply wants to indentify and then crucify people he would accuse of being deniers.
The first thing the Royal Society should do is to disassociate itself from the frothy ramblings of Bob Ward. People like Ward are part of the problem and not the solution to the woes that now beset the Royal Society with regard the public's falling confidence in climate science.
What we require from the Royal Society is a return to science, a rejection of advocacy, and a more evidence based approach, including statements of uncertainty, with regard policy.
Phillip, there are two Grantham Institutes. Bob Ward is at the LSE one, not the Imperial one.
Jonathan: Thanks for the clarification. The LSE branch seems even worse than that at IC.
Hoskins there again, and Stern. Same old bunch of alarmists. The money being wasted must be stupendous.
An electrical engineer and a metallurgist are likely to have a far better understanding of the fundamental science than a PR man
Philip Bratby "The LSE branch seems even worse than that at IC. Hoskins there again, and Stern. Same old bunch of alarmists. The money being wasted must be stupendous."
They are bankrolled by the billionaire Jeremy Grantham, who also bankrolls Greenpeace, WWF, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and a whole host of eco-alarmist and eco-fascist organizations, as well as Obama's election campaign.
These UK Grantham bodies have together had at least £24 million from him and his wife.
Follow the money.
Liam "An electrical engineer and a metallurgist are likely to have a far better understanding of the fundamental science than a PR man"
But Ward has a degree in geology, and studied in the field of paleopiezometry (study of microstructures of deformed mineral grains to determine peak differential stress history of tectonic events). So he knows better, and to abandon hard science to go into climate change advocacy and PR is reprehensible. Or is paleopiezometry as corrupted as paleoclimatology? I doubt it since geologists tend to have their feet on the ground.
I thought Bob Ward did not finish his PhD thesis on palaeopiezometry.
Since palaeopiezometry doesn't even merit a Wiki, could it be that Bob Ward is the only failed palaeopiezometrist in the world.
Should Bob Ward be on WWF's endangered species list?
Can we lay off Bob Ward and talk about openness please.
Why should the Society need to open up the internal climate change debate to the public, I thought climate change was supposed to be far to complicated a subject for the public to understand. It seems currently the Fellows are quite able to recognise when a statement issued by the Society is unreasonable or biased or untrue.
I'm all in favour of compete openness. Let's see all the evidence on which the statement that "we are more than 90% certain that humans are responsible for global warming (climate change)" is based.
What hope is there for openness or sense when the President, Martin Rees, can come on the radio and treat us all like dummies? As usual, in his Reith lecture today, Rees argues rhetorically rather than logically and scientifically. He says:
“Nevertheless, even the existing uncertain science convinces me that the threat of disruptive climate change is serious enough to justify its priority on the agenda of this country and others. This confidence may surprise anyone who has dipped into all that's been written on the subject. Any trawl of the internet reveals diverse and contradictory claims. So how do you make up your mind? I'd suggest the following analogy.
Suppose you seek medical guidance. Googling any ailment reveals a bewildering range of purported remedies. But if your own health were at stake, you wouldn't attach equal weight to everything in the blogosphere: you'd entrust your diagnosis to someone with manifest medical credentials. Likewise, we get a clearer 'steer' on climate by attaching more weight to those with a serious record in the subject.”
There is no analogy there at all. If you seek medical guidance, you presumably know you have an ailment. You are seeking to find out about an ailment that (a) has been diagnosed before, (b) has a known prognosis, and (c) has evidence of treatment and interventions. You are one of a population of billions of discrete individuals for whom a range of ‘normal’ health can be defined, and against which your deviation from ‘normal’ health can be measured, and results of treatments been recorded. The healthy, natural state, and the extent of natural deviations are well established. In the medical profession “those with a serious record in the subject” are those who can demonstrate those facts.
There is no comparison between googling a known ailment and googling about CAGW. If someone has an ailment, then it either falls into the category of something that has been seen before, for which there is a prognosis and possible treatment, or it will not. If not, then you won’t find anything on google about it because the medical profession don’t put up posts about imaginary ailments. If you have an ailment that no-one has ever seen before, you won’t find that on google either. So the only thing you will find on google are the opinions of some physicians who have seen your condition before, and know how to treat it with varying degrees of success. You can make enquiries and find cases that have presented with your condition and been treated, and then make an informed decision.
With CAGW, no-one has been able to demonstrate that the patient is even sick, and there’s no record of interventions. There is not a population of millions of other ‘earths’ with which to make any comparisons. There is no possibility of checking the outcome of various interventions.
The analogy is so vacuous and misleading that I fear that Rees is either stupid or he is dissembling, believing we are so stupid that he and the Royal Society can get away with this drivel.
What sort of 'openness' does this suggest?
SFT, Rees is just hammering the old argument to authority which is not fallacious when your authorities are correct, as his seem not to be.
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I think all honest people want complete openness Phillip but in this particular instance based on the timing of the “openness suggestion” and the probable alternative reason, I think the statement originally issued by the Society needs to be amended first then further climate change debates could be open to the public just as good old honest Bob suggests.
AGW has all the makings of a doomsday cult where non-believers and apostates are subject to group psychological abuse and physical abuse, including the odd death threat.
As a true believer all Martin Rees is doing is sermonising from above.
PS In the real world if you are not happy your doctor you seek another medical opinion.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/190403.php
I am a little confused by the following apparent contradiction:
Martin Rees added:"It is three years since the Society published a document specifically designed to help the general public get a full understanding of climate change. Nothing in recent developments has changed or weakened the underpinning science of climate change. ... It has been suggested that the Society holds the view that anyone challenging the consensus on climate change is malicious - this is ridiculous. Science is organised scepticism and the consensus must shift in light of the evidence."
Liam said: An electrical engineer and a metallurgist are likely to have a far better understanding of the fundamental science than a PR man
Or even a "climate scientist".
Plus a proper understanding of the role and limitations of computer modelling and a breadth and depth of knowlege of mathematics and statistics far beyond what seems normal among climate scientists.
matthu "Martin Rees added:"...Nothing in recent developments has changed or weakened the underpinning science of climate change...Science is organised scepticism and the consensus must shift in light of the evidence.""
You can make those statements align by suppressing evidence: no evidence -> no shift, no change, no weakening, no threat to the consensus. This is classic Rees. Take a look at his career and you will see that he has spent his life closing his mind and others' to evidence in astronomy, and interfering to stop 'inconvenient' evidence ever being published. If the 'evil' and 'inconvenient' evidence can never see the light of day, his pet theories survive for another day - or generation. In astronomy, the Western interpretation of the three monkeys "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" has long held sway. What climatology has done to the peer review process, with pressure on editors, gatekeeping reviewers etc, is nothing to what has occurred in astronomy. If you want to see where it all ends up if unchecked, take a look at astronomy, and Martin Rees in particular. But most people don't give a fig about this 'sowing to the wind' in astronomy because it doesn't hit them in their pocket or reshape global politics and economics. However, when these practices find their way into science for public policy then we all reap the whirlwind.
Al Gore reaches a Tipper point.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/us_and_canada/10209379.stm
Scientistfortruth
I was interested in your comments on Rees and astronomy. What particular theories are you referring to? Steady state v Big Bang? Halton Arp’s work on qasars and red shift? (This is not as off-topic as it may seem. If the same perversions occur in sciences where no money / political advantage is at stake, it must affect our interpretation of the motivations of warmists).
Greenhouse gas/warming. Sure, theoretically, CO2 should (straw man (A))
Dominant cause of warming over last 50 years. Why not, instead of 50 (1960), say 70 years (1940) and provide an account of the warming from 1920-40 (straw man (B)).
These Fellows, an electrical engineer and a metallurgist, are advisers to a lobby group (...)
Unlike Choo Choo Pachauri of course. Can anyone spell "Insider Carbon Trading"?
Dump the straw men arguments, ad hom's and Projection, what exactly are these thieves left with?
Perhaps Bob Ward and the Royal Society should take a hard look at this article and then try to find somewhere to hide
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/23800
- Ross,
If this is true (as it seems to be) then at first glance GS has made an interesting assumption, and one which is probably wrong.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/learning-from-a-simple-model/
In the above he's assumed that equal amounts of heat flow into space and back down to earth, but SB tells you that as the atmos is usually cooler than the earth then no net heat flows to earth and as space is usually @3K then all the atmospheric heat ends up heading in this direction, QED, factor of 2 disappears.
Until I've had chance to re-read Kittel & Kroemer I need to hold final judgement.
SDCS
I think people are getting over-excited here. I can't see a problem with Gavin's maths (which is hardly "his"; you can find a version of it in any textbook on atmospheric physics). It does need to be worked through as the result is initially surprising, but since he balances energy fluxes to get his key result it seems odd to suggest that this result breaches energy conservation. Obviously the model is wildly oversimplified and you need to be careful in deducing anything subtle from it, but as an explanation of the basic greenhouse effect it's fine.
Jonathan,
Thanks for the comments. I'm aware that this is going somewhat off topic, in which case we can flip to unthreaded, but basically I'm intrigued by the construction of the models. Happy to discuss further.
SDCS
Al Gore fails the planet.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12990-for-the-environments-sake-dont-get-divorced.html?feedId=online-news_rss20
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/us_and_canada/10209379.stm
We are all doomed.
I would say that medical analogy is a dangerous path to tread, given its long track record of intransigence and obstinacy in the face of new treatments or criticism of established ones.
SDCS, I have put a brief opening comment on Unthreaded as you suggest.
Jim Hansen takes at pot at the 'politicised' media.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/paper/gistemp2010_draft0601.pdf
Quote 1: "We (NASA) have the impression that the effect of politicization on communication of the science is aggravated by the fact that much of the media is owned by or strongly influenced by special economic interests."
That's a bit rich from someone who has spent his entire career politicising science.
Quote 2: "We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade"
Oh really!
Comparison of decadal changes - GISTEMPS (land & ocean) and UAH (satellite).
1980 to 1989
GISS: 0.05C per decade
UAH: -0.07C per decade (negative)
1990 to 1999
GISS: 0.21C per decade
UAH: 0.15C per decade
2000 to 2009
GISS: 0.11C per decade
UAH: 0.04 per decade
The so called rapid rise in GISS temps of the last decade was HALF that of the GISS temps in the previous decade.
The so called rapid rise in GISS temps of the last decade was THREE times larger than UAH temps during the same period.
Again the problems of divergence, interpretation, methodolgy and data selection loom large with Hansen's baby GISTEMP.
GISTEMP is more a product of AGW advocacy than of science.
As such James Hansen becomes a more dimished figure as each year passes.
In the interest of greater openness should we not be compiling a list of questions that we would like the revised RS statement to address e.g.
How confident are scientists that any material bias in surface measurement of global temperatures has been eliminated?
What happens to the projection of global temperatures if feedbacks are negative rather than positive?
How confident are scientists that feedbacks from clouds are positive rather than negative?
I am sure readers of this blog can come up with a far more incisive list of issues around which the RS need to clarify the level of uncertainty.
matthu, re questions for the Royal Society. Howzabout these:
' Specifically, we challenge supporters of the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused climate change to demonstrate that:
1. Variations in global climate in the last hundred years are significantly outside the natural range experienced in previous centuries;
2. Humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHG) are having a dangerous impact on global climate;
3. Computer-based models can meaningfully replicate the impact of all of the natural factors that may significantly influence climate;
4. Sea levels are rising dangerously at a rate that has accelerated with increasing human GHG emissions, thereby threatening small islands and coastal communities;
5. The incidence of malaria is increasing due to recent climate changes;
6. Human society and natural ecosystems cannot adapt to foreseeable climate change as they have done in the past;
7. Worldwide glacier retreat, and sea ice melting in Polar Regions , is unusual and related to increases in human GHG emissions;
8. Polar bears and other Arctic and Antarctic wildlife are unable to adapt to anticipated local climate change effects, independent of the causes of those changes;
9. Hurricanes, other tropical cyclones and associated extreme weather events are increasing in severity and frequency;
10. Data recorded by ground-based stations are a reliable indicator of surface temperature trends.'
Source: http://www.copenhagenclimatechallenge.org/
Not an exhaustive list, but quite a few things there to be resolved before the 'science is settled' is anything other than a rallying cry for the unscientific and unscrupulous.
Philip, I'd just like to point out that Brian Hoskins is a 'Top Scientist' who goes back to the forefront of computer modelling. Reading is a real hub of meteorology Uni/ECMWF and formerly the Met Office in Bracknell and have produced the Met Office's chief scientist and also the head of NERC.