Sunday
Apr032011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Singh's response to Nelson
Apr 3, 2011 Climate: Models Climate: Surface Simon Singh has posted his response to Fraser Nelson. It's still amazingly thin gruel for a top writer on scientific matters. Is he unaware of the existence of feedbacks? And what about the error bars on that 0.6C warming figure?
Reader Comments (35)
Simon Singh asks: "Do you agree human contribution to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is a major factor in the warming over the last century? "
Then instead of citing any evidence for this, he cites the authority of the IPCC. he then adds
Well, even WITH the manmade influence it is apparent that it is impossible for the IPCC models to accurately model the observed climate change over the last five decades: in particular, they have got the trend since 1998 spectacularly wrong. So that is not a particularly strong argument.
I think the main reason they had to rely on CO2 as a driver was simply because they considered Total Solar Irradiance to be the only possible influence the sun could have on global temperatures. All this demonstrated was a lack of understanding in how other solar factors could play a part (in particular, they do not seem to have considered cosmic rays).
Sorry, Simon: the IPCC simply did not consider enough independant variables and then fell back on the only other variablew that showed any sort of correlation (even if it meant they had to reconstruct historic temperatures in order to get any sort of historic fit at all).
I just posted this in his blog comments section (just after the Bish's simple but telling observation)...
"Mr Singh, if you really want to understand the sceptic's rationale, may I suggest that you go and research the difference between the 'greenhouse effect' - for which there is ample scientific (i.e. real-world/observational) evidence - and the so-called 'enhanced greenhouse effect' - for which there is no scientific evidence as yet, just computer model 'projections'.
Once you appreciate the difference and, more importantly, that the former has only a small impact on global climate (Cf. IPPC AR4 WG1), you may understand why so many people are reluctant to believe the current 'consensus'."
...but I'm not holdin my breath for any sensible reply.
Simon has lapsed over into "I"ve made up my mind, don't try to confuse me with the facts" mode.
Or at least in this case the notion that what he accepts as fact is nothing of the sort.
An uncritical mind posturing as a thinker. Unfortunate.
His lack of understanding of the science is simply astounding. His puerile attempt at putting forward a cogent argument is even worse than that of Al Gore - I am wondering when he is going to repeat Al's assertion that it is 1,000,000 degrees beneath us.
I shall not waste any more time reading anything he writes. I can read Noddy and Big Ears if I want something more adult.
The link to "Skeptical Science" gives it away.
Well, it looks like you fellows are giving Simon a good pasting on his own blog. Don't expect it to make a dent, though. Simon seems to like to keep it simple: The world warmed and we have to do something about it. Context and nuance, Simon; context and nuance.
The world warmed....But has the atmosphere thinned? ....Is it becoming stretched? Is it time for sacrifices?
Can we swallow the goat?
Beagle Blog Cartoons investigates...
http://fenbeagleblog.wordpress.com/
Singh something simple?
The catastrophists' argument all without exceotion boil down to "because the IPCC prediction says so.
Of what possible practical utility is a prediction of between 1.1°C and 6°C? Especially since, as far as I'm aware, the 1.1°C would include the 0.6°C rise we've already (we are assured) has occurred.
One need at the very least to see a probability attached to to the predictions. How likely do the modellers think a rise of >3.0° is? 5%? 25% 75%?
Otherwise it's all just examining sheep entrails.
.
His is not song of six pence, by any chance? Maybe more?
Is there a link to Singh's response?
Incidentally, I suspect that one reason why the final vote moved in the warmist direction last week was that some of those involved were playing a game we became familiar with back in the 1990s, when there were debates on whether Britain should joing the euro or even remain in the EU at all. In the vote taken before the debate begins, a number of supporters of one side of the motion declare themselves to be 'undecideds' or 'don;t knows'. When the final vote is taken they switch to supporting their side, thus giving the impression that their vote had been swung by the discussion. This happened too often, as in one famous BBC Panorama debate, for it to have been anything other than a deliberate ploy.. Obviously last week it didn't work..
Given our massive failure of imagination regarding areas to investigate via research, it appears that the only possible answer is the only one we really tried to research. Therefore, we have conclusively proven that the answer we are hoping for must be correct. The science is settled.
It matters not that our "projections" haven't panned out (they are not really predicitions anyway given that silly validation thingy), because we know that our answer is probably better than that derived by witches viewing entrails and witch doctors performing voodoo [not that we've done any statistical tests, but we're like the world's greatest climate scientists and really smart and we've even got doctorates and everything].
So why aren't people, like, totally convinced yet?
Singh is so unconvincing. His only citations are the IPCC - a lead author who's still studying, cherry picking knobbled articles and passing them off as "peer reviewed" and attaching a couple WWF and Greenpeace press releases - and Skeptical Science, which is, well, gibberish.
Singh cannot be so daft that he doesn't know his argument's are stuffed.
A little bird tweeting its song mindlessly.
That reminds me that jargon is derived from the late Middle English, jargoun, meaning, “warbling of birds”, “twittering”, “chattering” and, later, “gibberish”.
Given that Singh is the author of "Fermat's Last Theorem", perhaps he knows the secret to AGW but didn't have enough room in the margin to write it down.
"Singh something simple?" --Green Sand
Can we hum if we don't know the words?
I recently had an exchange of emails with Mr. Singh, I asked him a question just the one about the empirical evidence for the rise in temperature being caused by CO2. H was gracious enough to respond, telling me about the upcoming debate, and pointing me to a two year old paper referenced in Skeptical Science, which from the above seems to be his source de choix for climate science information. Just in case he doesn't understand the sceptical position:
1. We do believe that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that it's increase in the atmosphere should, all other things being equal, cause warming. One of the problems is that the historical records don't show the one to one relationship assumed by the IPCC. This needs to be understood before we dismantle the Western Industrial civilisation;
2. We do believe its warming, not sure about the 0.6C since 1950, the GATA (sorry Simon they don't measure the temperature, they measure the anamoly and the current anomoly is measured against the 1950-1970 average global temperatures. The duodecade happens to be one of the coldest in recent years, so we may be measuring a false anomoly, this stuff isn't simple). However we do dispute that the warming we're seeing is unprecedented, the studies showing global Medieval Global Warming, by genuine climate scientists outnumber hockeysticks by about ten to one. This, combined with historical information disproves that what we're seeing is unprecedented;
3. If it isn't unprecedented it could be caused by CO2 increases in the atmosphere, (although even the IPCC doesn't claim all the warming we've seen in the last 100 years is caused by CO2) then we should have established empirical evidence with forecastable observations about the relationship. We haven't, so why not? Well ecosphere is a non-linear chaotic system, which according to chaos theory can't be modelled. So far chaos theory seems to be winning in this case;
4. As for the models? What can we say, they're predicting the future, something that's the provenance of soothsayers, do you believe soothsayers? Not only that, there is general agreement, all other things being equal, that we will get a rise of 1.2C, or thereabouts for a doubling of CO2 from pre-inustrial levels. The IPCC models, which can't model either our past, or current climates without fudging, need to add an unknown, and unexperienced, positive feedback factor to get the a temperature range of 1.5C-4.5C, (where did you get the 6C?).
Read Trenberth's 7 June 2007 in Nature and you'll get an honest appraisal of the models our futures are being based on.
Crickey, Singh's getting a right royal smack about in his blog! Fair do's to him for not censoring anything but some how I very much doubt he will take much, if any, notice of anything said in his blog.
The guys mind is made up. There is simply nothing that anyone can say that will change his mind.
Mailman
I think Simon has shown willingness to synthesise the argument and focus on key points of disagreement without getting distracted by unnecessary detail.
Provided that comments don't get diverted onto other topics or get hijacked by trolls I fully expect him to modify his argument in the light of points made. Let's wait and see ...
Singh's response is very disappointing. I had imagined that his scepticism about things other than AGW was rooted in a firmly empirical epistemology, rather than in deference to the authority of experts.
Any casual student of the history of science knows that experts are often wrong and that consensus often has many non-rational causes.
matthu, I hope you are right. I tried to post something thought-provoking (it looks as though most of his traffic has come from here, by the way, which may make it rather too easy for him to ignore all the comments).
j,
To provoke thought in a warmist is like trying to provoke blood from a stone, from my observations.
Look at Zed's contributions around here. They amount to nothing more than shrill demands that we all bow down before the authority of people like Jones and Mann, demands that we discuss only what Zed thinks we should discuss, and a steadfast refusal to accept that there is no scpetic orthodoxy at all. As far as Zed is concerned there is one acceptable view and no departures from it are to be tolerated.
You cannot get people like that to think.
Simon Singh has previously admitted being a fan of an argument put forward by Greg Craven, but he also admits not so much to being swayed by the logic of the argument as by Craven's "charm, inventiveness and insight".
http://newhumanist.org.uk/2152/whats-the-worst-that-could-happen-a-rational-response-to-the-climate-change-debate-by-greg-craven
Here is the nub of the argument as put forward bty Craven:
Of course the fallacy in the above argument is what you put into the two most important boxes. In the box labelled "taking action if global warming is real", Simon Singh seems to agree that the contents should be "some damage to our economy in the short term and major benefits to humanity in the longer term" - but many would dispute this, preferring "major damage to our economy ion the short term with possibly no benefit to humanity in the longer term at all".
And of course what you put into the other important box is also open to debate.
The real scandal is that no government seems either to have done the calculations or is prepared to stand up and argue the cost benefit at all. The reason the UK is advocating a carbon tax and there is so little uproar is that we are so used to having laws mandated by Europe.
J4R, you're probably right, sadly. I suspect many busy people who write blogs may not read comments below the line very much - and if they do, they probably don't pay much attention to them. Let's be optimistic though - like many people who haunt sceptic sites, I used to be a lot more consensus-believing, and I have changed my mind. A lot of that was due to finding good analysis and information on sites such as this one. You only need to convince a few people each day to look at the matter again to enable a sea-change. I doubt we have much leverage on Zed, though.
matthu, this is just Pascal's Wager dressed up in new clothes - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager
I'm surprised that Singh should be impressed with this
Justice4Rinka
It is good to have a snarling dog around to remind you that they can bite. That is one reason why I tolerate but ignore her -- she serves a very useful purpose, one that you point out with
You cannot get people like that to think.
So it be with out little twitting bird as well.
You are right, Don Pablo. I goofed up on the number of words vs characters in a 'twit'.
But coming to think about it,... imagine of the enormous number of twits one would have to twit to fill up a >1000 word article.
Shub
We all make mistakes. I made two or three yesterday and at least one today. You do better than I :)
@ Nicholas
If Singh really is impressed by such an approach then he's remarkably dim for a genius scientist.
What Singh is so impressed by is a basic scatter diagram, in which you plot two variables against each other. The dishonesty in this case lies in trying to rig the debate by insisting there are only two variables and that the area each should occupy is the same because they're of equal likelihood.
So rather than one axis reading merely "CAGW is happening" and "CAGW isn't happening", as though those are the only two postulates possible, what's needed is a more nuanced x axis which also contemplates the possibilities that
- AGW is happening but not CAGW
- GW is happening but it's neither CA nor A nor C
- W is happening but it's not C, A, G or any combination thereof
- CC is happening and it's neither CA nor A nor C
- CC is happening and it's going to be a good thing
- CC is happening but something else will happen to mitigate it, in the same we did not run out of food as Malthus predicted.
Nobody has any way of knowing which of the above is most likely, so the more honest version of Singh's diagram is one in which all the above are featured with equal axis real estate. Alternatively, "CAGW is happening" gets one inch and all the others fall under the "CAGW is not happening" and get six inches of axis, because there are at least six ways the second proposition could be true but only one way the first can be.
You then do the same up the y axis, with the "do everything Stern says now" option as one and all the other possibilities given equal prominence. You'd then find that rather than "do everything Stern says now" being the obvious choice, as Singh seems to think, it would just be a small and insignificant area on the graph, no more prominent than any other and of no particular account.
The most patently missing bit of data even then of course is cost. The very best way to finesse such a graph would be to go into 3 dimensions by adding a z axis in which the height of the block represents known costs associated with each course of action. Since the only courses with known costs are ecolunacy and doing nothing, at this point their preferred option would assume prominence, as the tallest, most colossally expensive column on the chart.
Of course, what one should really put on the z axis is not upfront outlay, but cost-benefit. As this has never been competently done, however (because the fearmongers don't want us to know their preferred solution will not actually work), we can't do so. So, hoist with theor own petard, we just have to use simple cost.
It is no surprise that Singh would like the simple 2x2 matrix scatter graph: he wants to hide information, not reveal it. He would much rather have a debate about a graph like this
http://globotrends.pbworks.com/f/1225833792/BCG_Matrix_with_products-small_png.png
than about one like this
http://qhwiki.originlab.com/~originla/howto/images/8/8c/Tutorial_3DSurfaceMap_1.png
because, well, which one makes it easier to pretend it's all simple? Which makes it easier to hide the decline?
Re matthu
AR4 mentioned them, but like WG1 only devoted a couple of pages, if that to solar effects. More recently people have been noticing the variations in spectral composition revealed by SORCE, and hopefully that will get more mention in AR5.
Singh though is probably a lost cause. All 5 were leading questions with him saving the best till last:
"5. Do you agree best scientific predictions estimate further rise of 1.1 to 6 C over 100 yrs based on good (not perfect) models?"
So his 'best scientific predictions' give one hell of a spread considering the supposedly unprecendented 0.7C temperature increase since the end of the LIA. So much for certainty, and who would've suspected warming following the LIA, just as the paleoreconstructions have shown us happening many times in the past, generally with the CO2 increases following the warming. Singh obviously hasn't noticed the slowdown in warming, despite rising CO2 levels or the problem of the missing heat. Nothing evidential seems to suggest strong positive feedbacks based on recent performance, yet Singh seems happy to swallow this snake oil without question. Perhaps he's hoping for more work from the BBC, who have this-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-12950246
"Melting mountain glaciers are making sea levels rise faster now than at any time in the last 350 years, according to new research."
I'm more curious about how much sea level rise the crust displacement from Japan's quake, or yesterday's 7.1 off Indonesia caused, and whether they're accurately factored into the warmist's video games.
what I find interesting with comments at Singh's blog is the lack of the RST (RAPID ... them people, he must be calling them desperately for advise) to protect there own. there normally pretty quick at this, what gives? cant be he's a lost cause can it?
Simon Singh eventually decided that he could not reconcile himself to one of his own edicts (he has previously said: "I would suggest that people who take part in the climate change debate are all intelligent, honourable and reject manmade climate change, but they never possess more than two of these qualities at once.")
So after almost 7,000 hits on his blog, almost overwhelmingly skeptical of CAGW, Simon has switched off his comments.
Fortunately I managed to retrieve most of the history from Google cache.
In my opinion two decisive contributions were made at the very end. Firstly, a reference to David Evans' post http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/04/07/climate-models-go-cold/
the second was a reference to Judith Curry's comment on the following paper: Solomon, Amy, and Coauthors, 2011: Distinguishing the Roles of Natural and Anthropogenically Forced Decadal Climate Variability. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 92, 141–156. doi: 10.1175/2010BAMS2962.1
Judith's summary:
http://judithcurry.com/2011/04/07/separating-natural-and-anthropogenically-forced-decadal-climate-variability/
But the final straw that seems to have broken the camel's back was this comment from GWPF:
http://www.thegwpf.org/the-observatory/2795-inadequate-models-inadequate-conclusions.html
It has been reported that influential people have been convinced by the IPCC curve fitting argument. Now we know that it was based on inadequate science. All those who were convinced by it, and use it in arguments, should revaluate their position and await a new statement by the IPCC.
It seems Simon could not reconcile himself between appearing either dishonourable, unintelligent or having to disavow manmade climate change - so he took the only remaining option ans seems to have withdrawn from climate debate altogether.
I'm pretty gob-smacked that Singh did that, frankly. The cynic in me suspects that he'll blame it on an error in his code or a problem wtih the Posterous comment system or some such. There's a world of difference between not listening to opposing views and not even acknowledging them.
I don't know what to think of Singh now. Of course I supported him regarding the BCA debacle, as any reasoning person would. But, as I said on Singh's blog, his position on climate change is a 180 degree about-face from his position on the BCA. I said there (and previously here) that I suspected that, in good faith, on arrival on the climate scene he'd backed the climate science presuming that it was of integrity rather than conducted pseudo-scientifically.
This is something that, being war-weary sceptics, we know is not the case - most particularly regarding the hockey stick, which in addition to Andrew's book I think has been firmly put to bed, widely recognised as the "pseudo-science" it is since Judy Curry's examination in four parts of "Hide The Decline" - starts here.
But Singh's response - to turn off comments, effectively rejecting discussion and transforming his portal from blog discussion to preacher's pulpit - has taken me by surprise. At one time I was hopeful, even perhaps confident, that once Singh had exposed himself to the detail and nuance of the history of perversions of science that are, and always have been, necessary to feign impetus for climate change action, that his position would inevitably shift. Now, though, all bets are off. I feel rather dishevelled. Singh's wrong. He has to know he's wrong, surely. And yet there's no evidence that he knows or acknowledges it. Saddening.