Tuesday
Aug032010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill von Storch on the inquiries
P Gosselin has a must-read post - a translation of an interview Hans von Storch gave to Handelsblatt. The take-home quote is this one, IMHO
We have to take a critical view of what happened. Nothing ought to be swept under the rug. Some of the inquests – like in Great Britain - failed at this. They blew an opportunity to re-establish trust.
Yup. Read the rest too.
Reader Comments (7)
The whitewashes are more than a missed opportunity. In themselves, they constitute serious additional evidence that the whole structure is corrupt. Not that we really need more evidence to add to the mountains that have already accumulated, but the corrupt inquiries do have that impact.
"HvS: It’s important to keep weather separated from climate. The media have certainly been focussing more on the weather. "
Same ole mame. What he is saying "Don't look at the trees, look at the forest."
Okay, so I go to my back window and see a large number of Ponderosa and Grey pine trees.
So I look at the forest instead and "OHMYGOD! I have a Pine Forest in my backyard!"
Gimme a break Herr von Storch
Weather is to climate as trees are to forests. The first make up the latter by their number.
correction "meme". Still waiting on my new glasses. :)
As long as editors and editorial boards at major journals refuse to publish articles that are contrary to AGW, then surely von Storch knows there will be no debate; i.e., the peer-review stamp prevails, just as he states. And we know peer-review in Climatology has been a joke: Schneider's comment about being Editor of Climate Change for 28 years and no-one (before McIntyre) ever requesting data and software programs says it all. (See McIntyre's recent blog on Stephen Schneider.)
In an equal vein, when governments and institutions only fund research that supports AGW, then clearly policy trumps science. I think Crichton (2003) had the right idea:
"Sooner or later, we must form an independent research institute in this country. It must be funded by industry, by government, and by private philanthropy, both individuals and trusts. The money must be pooled, so that investigators do not know who is paying them. The institute must fund more than one team to do research in a particular area, and the verification of results will be a foregone requirement: teams will know their results will be checked by other groups. In many cases, those who decide how to gather the data will not
gather it, and those who gather the data will not analyze it. If we were to address the land temperature records with such rigor, we would be well on our way to an understanding of exactly how much faith we can place in global warming, and therefore with what seriousness we must address this."
#Don Pablo de la Siera_ August 3, 2010-08-03
A forest can be defined as an area with many trees. Has science defined what “weather” is? Not WMO, IPCC and many other glossaries.
Recently HvS named as his profession “Climate statistician” (Klimastatistiker) http://klimazwiebel.blogspot.com/2010/07/in-der-presse-klimaforschung-und-die.htm. A new profession? WMO says : “in a narrow sense Climate is usually defined as the “average weather”; in a more rigorously way, Climate is the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time”.
Does ‘weather-statistician’ sounds to ordinary?
I wonder if he knows what parametric statistics is all about. Clearly, none of the others in "climate science" have the vaguest clue.
I'd also nominate the answer to the last question as quite a take home lesson:
"I don’t expect that the next IPCC report will significantly improve the chances for a comprehensive climate protection program. The last report was already so emphatic that there is no way to top it.
The concept that science tells politics what’s necessary has failed. We have to give up on the idea of making an agreement from top down for 150 countries, and that they will abide by it. Change has to come from the bottom."
Must be an excruciating one for political climate scientists and fellow travelers. It says a lot about Von Storch as a scientist that despite holding that view, he has volunteered to serve on the new working group to help in correcting the errors and misuse of grey literature.