Monday
Jul112011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Guardian debate transcript
Jul 11, 2011 Climate: CRU Climate: McIntyre TonyN and Alex Cull have posted a full transcript of last year's Guardian debate featuring McIntyre, Keenan, Fred Pearce, Trevor Davies and Bob Watson, and all overseen by George Monbiot.
Reader Comments (24)
It's not finished yet. First 60' (out of 98') are up. Alex has Doug Keenan's contribution, which was censored from the Guardian audio. Coming soon.
.. and my commentary is up at Harmless Sky
http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=473
From the audience...
You might have missed the 'Do you often forget to do your homework' comment aimed at Bob Watson, when he said he'd only read a few emails.... It got a big laugh.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/07/16/barry-woods-on-guardian-panel/
Barry, no problem & will add that in, when I get a moment.
I don't think Trevor Davies has "got it" yet.
All bluster and misdirection.
God help us because he's in charge of research at UEA.
@don keiller
I had to go and have a shower after reading Davies's oily smarm once again.
It was bad enough at the actual meeting last year but I hadn't expected the oleaginousness to be retained just in print.
Davies is a really bad advert for academics, for UEA and for Climatology. Let's see lots more of him!
From the Ecclesiastical Uncle, an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to science with minimal qualifications and only half a mind
If I had been there and had been lucky enough to be given the microphone on account of gender and location in the venue, my question would have been to the technically based AGW deniers (I do not share the distaste about the word.) Steve McIntyre and Doug Keenan, and it would have been as follows:
'Bob Watson has told us that NASA and NOAA trmperature records, when analysed using different methodologies, both tell the same tail. Do you agree with this? Would you regard it as evidence that ought to convince us of anything? If not why not? Confidence intervals?'
Then, had there been opportunity for supplementaries (I know there weren't) I would have asked Bob Watson and Trevor Davies::
'Do you think that confidence in the NASA and NOAA findings about recent temperature changes has been overemphasized to the public? And other findings?'
(Maybe this is premature and someone asked in the bit we have not yet been privy to see.)
I deduce that it is confirmed that the UEA's way of doing climate science suffers from a deficiency of statistical expertise. (Maybe they are not unique in this.) Should not there be joint heads of department, one a climate scientist and one a statistician? Or would this cause a disjoint with the funding agency?
And what graduate and, I suppose, post-graduate training do climate scientists normally have? The work would appear to involve the unlikely combination of biology, physics and mathematical statistics. Does the average individual publishing on the technicalities of climate science have the qualifications to do so? How can any one individual be professional in all these subjects? In the event that they are not why should anybody bother about what they say? Are we not therefore condemned to decisions on the basis of blind ignorance and politics?
Ecclesiastical Uncle stated "If I had been there and had been lucky enough to be given the microphone on account of gender and location in the venue, my question would have been to the technically based AGW deniers (I do not share the distaste about the word.) Steve McIntyre and Doug Keenan, and it would have been as follows:" Actually you missed out one category. By common consensus there are three categories, these being "Warmists" (CAGW) believing in runaway warming, sceptics (like Dr Roy Spencer & Professor Lindzen) believing that AGW may have some influence like a 1C increase for doubling of CO2 +/- and then the outright deniers who believe that CO2 has no influence on global temperatures at all. As I understand it, some warmists and some socalled sceptics agree that a doubling of CO2 may lead to a 1C increase of global temperatures as a forcing. The disagreement is over the feedback. Positive or negative. That is the controversy amongst those in the middle between the two extremes of CAGW and denial. Actually, maybe it is fair to say that the CAGW people believe in strong positive feedback, whereas moderate AGW supporters believe in weak positive feedback and the sceptics in negative feedback keeping the system in balance. As said, the deniers don't think there is a CO2 forcing so the feedback argument is irrelevant.
And i can't think of anyone that would fit into that denier category....
Don Keiller, Latimer Alder
Doing the transcript (it was me, not TonyN) I thought Trevor Davies was just doing his pathetic best to defend his motley CRU, trying to keep a straight bat while all around him were trying to keep a straight face.
The one who surprised me was Bob Watson. NASA, White House, chair of IPCC, DEFRA - he’s got the fattest CV of anyone in the climate business, yet he can’t put together a coherent sentence, and gave - Milliband-like - the same answer to every question, sometimes omitting pronouns, sometimes conjunctions, in a hail of bullet points. Yet several who were present thought he did a reasonable job.
There’s a big difference between the spoken word in a theatrical setting like a debate, and the written evidence. That’s why Alex and I do this rather thankless job, to show up the verbal incoherence behind the scientific. Look after the syntax, and the statistics will look after themselves, as we arts graduates say.
@Ecclesiastical Uncle (6:20 PM)
Yes.
No.
I gave a partial answer to that in my opening statement; a full answer is in my article “How scientific is climate science?”, published by The Wall Street Journal in April.
It was not known hot to calculate confidence intervals, at the time of the debate; what appears to be a valid way to calculate them was given by Koutsoyiannis [PhysA, 2011], and I had a guest blog post about that.
Little wonder the Guardian tried to censor Doug Keenan's comments from the "official" transcript. Thank you for releasing the full transcript, and thank you Doug Keenan - you are like the man in Tienanmen Square standing in front of the tanks of whitewash.
Seems as if Steve McIntyre didn't get to talk as much as the others...
kramer: “Seems as if Steve McIntyre didn't get to talk as much as the others...”
He was fed off-topic questions by Chairman Monbiot and a member of the audience, which rather threw him off-balance. He made the mistake of giving a detailed rundown of the whitewashes, instead of waffling like Watson and Davies, (and Pearce, who waffled a bit for CRU, and a bit against). The audience made it plain they didn’t want details when the world was about to end.
Steve was left out of the five minute video which the Guardian put up, while, in the interest of fairness, Doug Keenan was left out of the audio.
Just to thank Geoff, who has done the vast majority of the work for this transcript, and also Doug, for the parts redacted from the Guardian's recording. Barry, re the "homework" comment, I've now added it but with a qualifier "it has been reported", as for the life of me I can't hear it in the various different audio records (although I seem to remember it happening, as well.)
Great job, like Hansard. How the hell the latter manages to post up the daily parliamentary debates by 6 am the following day is probably the one and only facet of our parliamentary circus act that I admire.
From the Ecclesiastical Uncle, an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate with minimal qualifications and only half a mind
John Peter 7 July 6.58PM Yes Yes. My focus was a classification of those on the platform at the debate.
Douglas J Keenan 7 July 7.26PM Sir, Thank you very much. Bureaucrats need one word answers and articles written for the public and your answer provides both. Let us hope that some active bureaucrats will be peeking in here and that policy making will be improved accordingly.
But what have the warmists (or, I suppose, the journalists) to say about my supplementary?
On Doug’s and Steve’s contributions:
It’s important to know that in the original lineup, Doug Keenan was to have been the only sceptic present. Steve McIntyre was only added when readers here and at Climate Audit put up his air fare, and the Guardian found itself with an offer it couldn’t refuse. Panellist (and Guardian freelance journalist) Fred Pearce had covered Keenan’s accusations against Jones and Wang, and knew he could be expected to say something which the Guardian lawyers would eliminate from the record. The Guardian debate was a fix - despicable journalism - though not as technically sophisticated as that practised by Murdoch.
I see the defenders of the faith are stilll promoting the current peer review process as the best way to ensure checks and balances, even though numerous panels, including the NAS and Oxburg teams, pointed out the deficiencies in the statistical analysis of data. As I've said previously, it's like arguing that an Annual Report compiled by the Guild of Village Idiots can only be reviewed by other village idiots.
Dear geoffchambers,
Thank you for your great job. But I still have a request (maybe too much), that is, is it possible to add time tag to the transcript? I think your recording is authentic and not abridged.
Da huang:
Xièxiè ni! We’ll put in some time tags when we finish the transcription, as soon as possible. I note that at
http://dahuang.dhxy.info/climatepolitics.pdf
you have what looks (to my beginner’s Chinese) like a very favourable mention of “The Hockeystick Illusion”.
新出版的Hockey Stick Illusion描述了这个过程,内容翔实,
可读性强。本文只勾勒一个梗概,对这个问题感兴趣或对细
节有疑问的读者,可以直接去阅读该书。
Perhaps you could translate it for us at
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/unthreaded/
All done! Thanks Geoff for the last segment, and I've now updated the site, so it's complete (just in time for the anniversary, how cool is that.) I've also put in some time markers at every 15 minutes - please let me know if you want more frequent ones, e.g., every 5 mins or 10 mins, etc. The timings relate to the publicly available Guardian recording, which has some parts deleted, of course, so they will not match an entire and unabridged recording of the event.
Dear geoffchambers,
Thank you for your attention of my article published last year in China. Because the general public of China are quite unaware of details around AGW debates, I feel obliged to introduce to them what is really happening in this complex scientific/political process, especially the contributions by the brave and indefatigable heroes in the blogosphere such as Steve McIntyre. Instead of writing in length by myself, I think Mr. Montford's HSI had organized the story so well that I only need to cite him.
My article has drawn good attention from the academics and critics in China, which is encouraging, but one problem remains, that is, too few books in opposition to the mainstream view (AGW of course) have been translated into Chinese so that general readers could get access, including HSI. I have been trying to make some contribution on this front, but it is really difficult. Anyway, I will continue the efforts, and I have a new article in preparation on the Chinese station record and UHI problem, which is astonishingly absent from the Chinese public, even after it was debated publicly in UK last year. So the transcript of the Guardian debate is valuable, because people here usually only would like to pay attention to some "big events" and tend to ignore the lonely fights behind the scenes. Again thank you for hard work!
@ dahuang (Jul 14 at 3:51 PM)
You might find a letter that I sent to the UK HoC Science and Technology Committee to be useful. A copy of the letter is at
http://www.informath.org/apprise/a5610/b101201.htm
It includes links to more.