Wednesday
May232012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Myles Allen on Climategate
May 23, 2012 Climate: Allen Paul Matthews points us to this video of Myles Allen speaking at the Communicate 2011 conference in Bristol last year.
The segment on Climategate has to be seen to be believed.
And they wonder why nobody believes them.
Reader Comments (77)
Actually, as everyone on here is well aware, we are but shills for BigOil.
And the fact that I'm still waiting for my cheque doesn't alter that.
But, between ourselves (just whisper) I really do think that the Boardroom of our BigOil Inc. has some quite dodgy characters. Some greenie apologists, but as rapacious as the next plutocrat. Blood dripping from tooth and claw. All that.
But, if I can let the sarcasm slip a little, I have to admit, that were we to lose the pathetic shambles that passes for "democracy" here in the UK for some kind of technocratic autocracy, I'd much rather think that the Board of Shell (say) was running the Country than that jaunty prat Myles Allen and his "Professional Psyuntists".
At least Shell can point out that they have successfully produced a very large quantity of a very useful product (and made a huge profit whilst doing so.)
Whereas young Myles only looks so chipper because my taxes keep him in a nice ivory tower and the only things he produces are rather rancid porkie pies.
I once had a pair of shoes made on a last. But they didn't.
======================
Myles' take on climategate is quite staggering. Is he really a professor at Oxford? I knew that standards had declined at British universities, but assumed this was primarily due to the students, not the staff. He is at best seriously misinformed about the important issues uncovered in the climategate emails. I wonder if he spends any time editing wikipedia?
What gets me about the bizarre interview on Newsnight, is not his unfortunate inability to roll some sixes (although that was amusing), but that he tried to use the loaded dice analogy in the first place, as if typical Newsnight viewers were children who couldn't understand the argument he was trying to get across (more CO2 = more extreme weather events) without having a little dice (loaded or not) to visualise. From the Newsnight interview and the more recent presentation, it is difficult to disagree with Pointman's assertion that Myles is an arrogant prat. His take on climategate also makes him one of the top ten AGW gullible fools.
AGW is boots that can be worn; the Catastrophes were legchains.
==================
Ah yes, the new elite forging ahead having dispensed with all that tedious democracy nonsense - what could possibly go wrong.
I'm still more than a little confused about his "two hundredths of a degree in the 1870's" interpretation of climategate. Anyone?
- Eisenhower's farewell address
Know your enemy.
Myles Allen is Professor of Geosystem Science in the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford and Head of the Climate Dynamics Group in the University's Department of Physics. His research focuses on how human and natural influences on climate contribute to observed climate change and risks of extreme weather and in quantifying their implications for long-range climate forecasts.
He has served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as Lead Author on Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes for the 3rd Assessment in 2001 and as Review Editor on Global Climate Projections for the 4th Assessment in 2007.
He is also a top mate and confidant of Phil Jones- as shown by the "Climategate" emails.
No surprise then that he sees no "issues" here.
He also gets lots of grants on the back of his ludicrous long-range climate forecasts.
So he is hardly an "honest broker" in this debate!
BEWARE of prats selling 0.02C degrees certainty about Climategate.
It seems Allen is part of the "Environmental Change Institute" at Oxford. He rather reminds me of certain nefarious characters in Ayn Rand's dystopian novel Atlas Shrugged - a plodding, weak-willed scientist and willful director for the evil State Science Institute.
In a review of Roger A. Peilke, Jr's book, An Honest Broker, a philosopher notes that "the politicization of climate science has created a bias against adaptation [policies]." And further, on Climategate:
The reviewer cites this to illustrate Pielke's naivete towards scientists armed with power, such as Allen clearly wishes he possessed: "YOU [science communicators] are to blame for this fine mess," he indicates. Narcissists never find the source within themselves and their misappropriated hubris. The blame always lies elsewhere.
Myles, like those with Rand's State Science Institute, makes a another excellent example of one.
Prominent behind Myles was the address of Climateprediction.net, Myles’s pet project to use his fans’ computer time to run climate model simulations. They’ve got 35,000 participants, so his activists are a magnitude or two more numerous than activists at BH. Yet he was saying they’ve lost, and must give up on the idea of public support, and that the communicators he was addressing were wasting their time.
If Orson can quote Ayn Rand, I can quote Brecht - “If the public won’t vote for you, change the public”.
Yes. I got to 15 seconds before the Prat Principle kicked in. The gunslinger, hands on hips thingy, is a new and valuable long range prat spotting "tell".
Pointman
ptw
"have their afternoon with Clare Short"
I wish you hadn't put that image in my mind...
If I nuderstand his argument it goes something like:
"Climategate is a big nothing because we simply ignored all the serious problems it raised and just moved along"".
Here's a rough transcription of the climategate section:
What is it with these impossible ignoramuses? Do they not realize that when better crematoria are made, their carcasses will be the first to fire 'em up?
L. Carrol
It is too tempting to dismiss this no more than yet another example of holier-than-thou de-haut-en-bas bollocks from first to last, smug, patronising and ignorant (though it is, of course). It is much more disturbing than that. It is a prime example of the we-know-best lunacy– necessarily spiced with a sickening dose of look-how-reasonable-we-are-in-our-matey-way-as we-make-our-sinister-arguments – whose logical end-point, as Justice4Rinka (hugs and kisses, by the way) so admirably points out, is the enslavement and impoverishment of entire peoples in the interests of a tiny elite.
Take out the matey stuff and the token references to democracy and you might as well be dealing with a Mespotamian high priest in c.3000 BC asserting the urgent need for greater oppression.
(For what it is worth, I am absolutely certain that David Cameron, to take just one example, has never been subjected to any other view, official or unofficial, on global warming than this sort of glib, snake-oil, smirking tosh. But that's another matter.)
So he complained that scientists are misdescribing the science making their statements easy targets for skeptics. In the same lecture he bizarrely claims that the climate gate issue was completely settled by a tiny change to 1800s temperatures thus setting himself up for ridicule from skeptics. How deliciously ironic.
His closing comments on the professionals taking matters into their own hands is rather scary.
I suspect he and others like him will only realize that the game's over when the funds stop coming.
How is it possible to believe this clown is acting in good faith? I just don't see it.
(Snip. Please calm down and moderate your language. BH]
Agouts (May 24, 2012 at 5:47 PM) said:
Surely Clarkson must have vented at one of the many Christmas parties that mob attend?
Having told the communicators they’re wasting their time, Myles is doing his own communicating at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/may/25/will-i-am-helicopter-carbon-footprint
Isn't it fairly obvious that Dr Allen is going to be dishonest with the facts of climategate, and pretty much everything associated with climate science? The man's future, income and livelihood all depend on keeping this gravy train on the rails and running smoothly. He's banked his entire scientific credibility on it. Of course, all of this means he is suffering from chronic confirmation bias whenever he's involved in research, as he has to keep the 'scare' going or his future disappears. Science funded by the public is really a big problem. As it creates this very problem. Oh for the gentleman scientists of the 19th century. True intellectual giants who sought truth and truth alone.
[snip - manners, please]
He spent the whole video blaming other people.
I see to remember the stages of a project go something like:
1.Enthusiasm,
2.Disillusionment,
3.Panic and hysteria,
4.Search for the guilty,
5.Punishment of the innocent, and
6.Praise and honor for the nonparticipants.
We are now well into stage 4. So who are the innocent scapegoats they are going to sacrifice on the altar of global warming zealotry? If you ask me, he seemed to be asking for volunteers from the green NGO communicators in the audience to line up to be slaughtered on his altar to save the project.
Skiphil found this piece by Myles (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/07/al-gore-science-climate-weather) in which he writes in October 2011
'This illustrates an important point: human influence on climate is making some events more likely, and some less likely, and it is a challenging scientific question to work out which are which. Randy Dole and co-workers found no evidence for human influence increasing the risk of the 2010 Russian heatwave, the jury is still out on the Pakistani floods, and has broken up in disarray over hurricane Katrina. So when Gore says: "the environment in which all storms are formed has changed," he isn't actually lying, but he is begging to be misunderstood.
Now if the probability of such events has changed, then I would say that is to say that the environment has changed. I may have misconstrued him, but I thought that in the video, Myles was claiming an increased probability of such as the Russian heatwave. The main difference between him and Gore on this seems to be quite a fine one.
There may be a hint of vanity involved, since he says of one his own projects:
'but it is frustrating when Gore claims to know the answer before we have even asked the question.
Let me try to sum up what I’ve got out of the past few days, in case anyone is still following this thread. I suggested in the Communicate2011 talk that the 0.02K revision to the HadCRUT temperature record was the only change to any published dataset used in the detection and attribution of human influence on climate to have resulted from the UEA e-mail affair, and that this was not generally appreciated by the public. I was using this as an example of how things have gone wrong in communicating climate science: this was not a talk about “climategate” per se.
On whether the “only change” statement was strictly correct, Steve McIntyre has pointed out that the e-mails raised new questions with the treatment of paleoclimate records, Judith Curry has observed that these records are needed to check our estimates of internal climate variability and Ross McKitrick has argued that some of the e-mails showed an improper dismissal of his paper on the correspondence between patterns of warming in the instrumental record and patterns of economic development. Many other points have been raised, but I would like to address these three.
I accept Steve’s point that paleoclimate reconstructions continue to evolve and fresh sources of uncertainty continue to emerge, although my impression is that they were evolving anyway before release of the e-mails and would have continued to do so regardless. This continued uncertainty is a key factor making it difficult for scientists like myself, outside the dendroclimatology community, to make use of tree-ring based data. In trying to cope with multiple blog threads simultaneously, I probably went too far in disparaging tree-ring data, for which I apologize to any dendroclimatologists who might be reading these threads. I do believe efforts to reconstruct pre-instrumental climate represent an interesting and worthwhile challenge: my point was simply that many people seem to think it is the main point of climate research, which it is not.
In response to Judith Curry’s point about the need for proxy reconstructions to test model-simulated internal variability, again, this is a question of “it would be nice if only we were able to do so.” In my personal view, the uncertainties and potential biases in the spectrum of variability that must arise from the process of stitching together multiple tree-ring records (many of which have to be individually detrended), and the fact that we know GCM-simulated variability is deficient on the small scales that the trees are responding to, make it difficult to use proxy records to falsify GCM-simulated large-scale variability. If a GCM disagrees with a paleo-record, do we reject the GCM’s internal variability, the forcing data used to drive the GCM, or the paleo-record itself? We do have observations of variability on sub-century timescales through the instrumental record and new products like the 20th century reanalyses: I think, in the short term at least, these potentially provide more information on internal variability than the millennial reconstructions.
Since the key question for attribution is the origins of the surface warming over the past 30 years, that being the only period for which we have direct observations of forcing, it is the spectrum of internal variability on 20-100 year timescales that is essential. Variability on longer timescales is less important for attribution of causes for the current warming trend. I stress this statement applies to surface temperature. Sea level responds on different timescales, making attribution correspondingly harder.
In response to Ross McKitrick’s point (apologies for being slow on this one), I suspect what Phil Jones was referring to in the “no need to calculate a p-value” remark (although you should really ask him) was the danger of over-interpreting chance covariation. The only p-values that mean anything are those that derive from physically-based hypotheses. It is all too easy to find a high p-value from a chance correlation (sunspots and number of Republicans in the US Senate is the classic example). I wasn’t involved at all in that IPCC chapter, but I would be inclined to agree with their assessment that what you were seeing in that paper was an example of such an acausal covariation, for which the p-value of a pattern-correlation is indeed meaningless.
Then there is the much more general point, raised by Lucia, Rhoda and many others, that my talk was misleading, because “climategate” was not about the data at all, but rather about scientific process and the probity of climate scientists. As Mike Hulme observed, “climategate” meant different things to different people: for me, the implications for the instrumental record were all-important, which is why I was castigating the British press for paying far less attention to the fact that the instrumental record got an almost (in deference to Ross) completely clean bill of health than it paid to the initial allegations. There was an interesting side-thread on why the HadCRUT got dragged into this in the first place, to which I don’t have much to add apart from reassuring everyone that I don’t blame the bloggers for this confusion.
Many people have asserted that the main impact of “climategate” is that we can no longer say “trust me, I’m a climate scientist” until we all come out and condemn CRU, Muir-Russell, Oxburgh, etc. “Trust me, I’m a climate scientist” is not a phrase I have ever used, and I hope I never will. I teach a 12-lecture course to our 3rd year physics students (open to the public if anyone is interested) that starts from the premise “Don’t trust climate scientists” – the point being that, as physicists, they should be able to understand the problem for themselves, and not be expected to take the IPCC’s word for it.
The only basis of trust in science is the reproducibility of results. This is why availability of data and model source code is so important: I have always supported open data, although I have also consistently said that I don’t think Freedom of Information requests are the right way to enforce it. Journal editors can and should enforce a simple “disclose or retract” policy if a result is challenged, and almost all of them do: if any don’t, then the solution is to name and shame them, not set up a parallel enforcement system. I also think it is always better to reproduce results from equations (and, where possible, independent models and observations) rather than “auditing” computer code.
Finally, on the “bad for democracy” remark that upset a lot of people. I don’t want to suppress discussion of the Medieval Warm Period, but everything has an opportunity cost. Time spent arguing over paleoclimate research is time not spent on, for example, the merits of the two degree “goal” agreed in Copenhagen and Cancun, with remarkably little scientific justification. Yet whether we aim to limit anthropogenic warming to two, three or four degrees has far bigger implications for climate policy than the existence or otherwise of the Medieval Warm Period. Why is this not a hot topic in the blogosphere?
Ironically, this whole discussion started from a throw-away post by Paul Matthews in a discussion of a lecture I recently gave on whether it would be possible to frame an effective climate mitigation policy that did not extend the reach of the State in the way that cap-and-trade, carbon rationing or geo-engineering clearly will. Paul has apologized, which is much appreciated, but the damage may be done, Paul. If the European Commission decide to impose carbon rationing in 2020 after another record-breaking warm decade, because we spent this past week discussing Myles Allen’s interpretation of climategate (not to mention his, admittedly poor, choice of shirts) rather than coming up with a less intrusive policy alternative, your grandchildren shall know the reason why.
Apologies for cross-posting on various threads.
Think that mankind can control climate change?
There is only one message from history that humanity needs to understand:-
Either adapt to change or die.