Monday
May282012
by 
Josh
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May 28, 2012 Climate: Allen Climategate Hockey Stick Josh 
Hopefully you've watched the video, read the posts and comments here and at Climate Audit and Watts Up With That. Basically Myles Allen has been castigating journalists for getting Climategate wrong while getting it spectacularly wrong himself. Nice one Myles. Honest error or disingenuous?
Reader Comments (113)
I still think he needs that "H" on his forehead!
http://www.planetsmeg.com/cgi-bin/pagegen.pl?rimmer
Myles would say that you have got everything wrong, Josh, by focusing on the personalities rather than the issues. Everything that the climate scientists have been saying for the last 14 years is irrelevant because they now focus on something new and different.
"Honest error"? This was certainly not an "Honest error"!
An honest error is an error made without malice or forethought.
Whereas Myles Allen's utterances could be charitably said to be made without malice or forethought, an "Honest error" also implies that the speaker is aware of what the correct position is.
From Myles Allen's presentation it is abundantly clear that he has not the foggiest idea that he has made any error at all or has the slightest notion of what the truth is. This was without malice but without any intelligent thought either.
Now Myles has taken to accusing the Bish "of trawling through the YouTube video of him to find the least flattering image possible". How pathetic.
This talk could not possibly cause a less flattering image of him.
I want a mug with that cartoon on it!!!! How much will it cost me to win the caption contest?
I believe that the reason the Hockey Stick was so important was the timing. The UN created the Kyoto protocol and some countries "signed up" but not a single country ratified the protocol until right after the Hockey Stick was published.
The low carbon economy, wind farms, solar panels, electric/hybrid cars all of that *rap would not have happened without the Hockey Stick.
Can we move on?
From what I've read of the social studies recently. No matter if your intelegent, dumb, political, athiest, ect; if you don't believe in CAGW your wrong, no matter how you came to your conclusions.
If you do believe in it, your correct, no matter how you came to those conclusions.
Josh has torn it now. Shirt and tie straight into the Oxfam recycle bin.
Josh, is that the flattering or the default image.
"There is nothing more unpleasant as to be joshed in public."
Adam
+1
Were the short legs inspired by the song?
If there is such a thing as an honest error, then how about a fat error, a naked error, a beautiful error, a despicable error, a wrong error, a right error, a sexy error, a revealing error. But I will stop now.
May 28, 2012 at 10:31 PM Richard
One of the characteristics of the present age is the level of bullshit that oozes everywhere. Dr H G Frankfurt wrote an essay On Bullshit analysing its nature .
One of the key characteristics that makes bullshitting different from lying is that the liar knows what he is saying is untrue. The bullshitter says what he thinks will have the desired effect but he does not know whether it is true or not. He just goes ahead and says it anyway.
"Bwa ha ha ha. I have 35,000 PCs worldwide constantly working on alternative climategate misunderstandings...
...and soon they will give me another pea to roll around on Newsnight."
(Still in caption mode - sorry)
Academics spend all of their lives in a protected, pampered intellectual environment--they are the long-inbred lords and ladies of science (so just imagine Marie Antoinette saying the things Myles Allen says, and you will understand his plight). In the natural order, you are supposed to listen to him raptly, with respect above all for his tried and true intellectual mastery, and clap at the end. No need to get huffy, and act like little snot-nosed barbarians. You there, sit up straight; no wonder the Team doesn't like lecturing you. You act like the science is not settled, for God's sake.
'I know you've deceived me, now here's a surprise
I know that you have 'cause there's magic in my eyes
I can see for Myles and Myles and Myles and Myles and Myles
Oh yeah
If you think that I don't know about the little tricks you say
are just stock in trade for what scientists do today
And never see when you falsely rebutt and put obfuscations in my way,
then you are a now a climate scientist, my son'
Ok. Just 'cos the last line didn't scan. don't blame me. It's not easy to graft a completely different 'poetic' line onto another without someone noticing; eventually!
Hansen made a humorous yet prescient comment about climate communicators last year-
"Part of the problem, he said, was that the climate skeptic lobby employed communications professionals, whereas “scientists are just barely competent at communicating with the public and don’t have the wherewithal to do it.”
Hansen, October 2011
Ehrlich, Hansen and Gleick
said Mike found a fabulous trick
According to trees
(and a favorable breeze)
It's welcome aboard, Hockey-Stick!
'"Part of the problem, he said, was that the climate skeptic lobby employed communications professionals, whereas “scientists are just barely competent at communicating with the public and don’t have the wherewithal to do it.”
Lovely quote Chris but I find it sad that he confused his fundament with his funny-bone. Climate sceptics can't afford communications professionals unlike their well-funded friends. They do draw heavily on honesty, however, and the public seem sympathetic to this attribute.
Despite the learned contempt for Joe the plumber that academic-hubristophilliacs appear to display, it just may be that the hoi-poloi are pretty damned clever
Good picture Josh...........Myles Allen.......THE COMPLETE CLIMATE CLOWN.
The climatocracy cannot understand why their version of the philosopher's kingdom (with themselves as beneficent rulers, of course) is slipping away from them, even though they seem to have nothing but friends in the media and halls of power.
Those who assert that somehow the AGW movement has failed to communicate their position well, and that skeptics have employed professionals to explain why the believers are losing are offering an analysis of the quality used by 911 truthers.
If what climate "scientists" were trying to commnucate wasn't a complete crock of sh*t their job would be much easier.
the Prof confirms what we already knew, and what the MSM no doubt knew as well:
29 May: Australia: Lanai Vasek: Chubb: no death threats in emails
Professor Chubb admitted he never saw the threatening emails. However, he denied any of them had included death threats as was widely reported. "They were at least abusive but let me be clear . . . I didn't read the emails. I trusted the man who came to me, he was a senior member of the staff and he represented concerns of the staff to me," Professor Chubb said.
***"For the record, there were no alleged death threats except when journalists picked up the story."
Last week, the ABC issued a correction over its reports on the threats, acknowledging 11 emails sent to climate scientists at the ANU contained abuse, but no death threats.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/chubb-no-death-threats-in-emails/story-e6frg8y6-1226370442926
I used to have a boss who'd say to people, "... because I disagree with you you're making the fallacious assumption that I don't understand what you've said and you need to improve the way you communicate your ideas. I do understand what you've said, you don't have improve the way you communicate your ideas, I don't agree with you."
There are many baffling issues in this debate, not least of which is why the warmists seem to believe that the deniers are having any effect on climate policy, we're clearly not, else why would be have a climate change bill that's committed to reducing our 3 1/2 week of China's output of CO2 to 5 days of China's output with not the faintest idea of how we're going to achieve this, clearly pointless, death wish?
Why do they believe we don't believe in climate change, when they clearly believe there is an optimum climate for the earth and we now have it?
How have they persuaded themselves that despite having managed get the MSM to ignore all contrary arguments to their belief that humans are causing CAGW we have influenced publich opinion. With all due respect to the Bish and other bloggers, I suggest all of us found our way to the "denier" blogs because we were already "deniers". , ( Except of course for the various sad people who come onto blogs and try to disrupt them for their own amusement or do odd things like pretend to be a sceptic and then announce that you've been persuaded by the "hundreds of lines of independent evidence of AGW".)
RoyFOMR:
There was a young man of Japan
Whose poetry never did scan
When told this was so
He replied "Yes, I know
But I always try and get as many words into the last line as I possibly can."
@geronimo
'With all due respect to the Bish and other bloggers, I suggest all of us found our way to the "denier" blogs because we were already "deniers".
Point of order. I came because I had vaguely heard 'The Science is Settled' and, with a little free time on my hands decided that understanding the really clever experiments that the scientists must have done would be an interesting way to spend a day or two, and - after 30 years in IT - would give me a chance to revive my scientific training which had been a bit neglected in the hurly burly of trying to make a living in the commercial world.
So I arrived at climatology with much of the wide-eyed enthusiasm for science that I had as a kid watching Apollo (from a distance) and the Farnborough Air Show (up close and personal) and even doing seemingly endless organic synthesis practicals as part of my undergraduate Chemistry degree.
It was the intense disappointment I felt when I quickly discovered that there were no experiments at all,, just some dodgy statistical tricks, that the science was most definitely not settled and that the whole thing was little more than a propaganda stunt that drove me here and to other realist blogs.
And, of course, the sheer f...g arrogance and unpleasantness of many of the contributors at CiF at Real Climate and elsewhere. It does not help to advance the alarmist cause that many of them appear to be little more than fascist thugs with overinflated egos and an unfounded (but strongly held) belief in their own infallibility. They are not people I would choose to crack a beer with.
So I did not start out as a climate sceptic...exactly the opposite. But I very soon became one.
Latimer, I don't want to labour the point, but can I suggest that you came here because of your doubts?
Agree with you on Realclimate and CiF, which has all but died because of the (in my view wise) editorial policy of not allowing comments by the readers to Damian, Leo and the rest, although Gorgeous George does allow comments, and, frankly, seems on the road to conversion as he gets to grip with, what most of us deniers understood in the first instance, that is if there is a problem then there's no practical solution to it over the next 50 to 100 years. (although he's still in denial about the climate change act putting up energy costs). As an aside I'm continually surprised by the likes of Myles Allen, scientists, who don't seem to have the first clue of how difficult it is to move from conception of an idea to being able to do the engineering for the solution to be done on an industrial scale. Windfarms, solar energy, CCS! to me at least they're all pie in the sky solutions with no chance of ever solving the world's energy problems. ( You should be aware of my track record, I predicted Coronation Street wouldn't go beyond six episodes, which taught me the lesson of never believingpeople who say they can foretell the future)
May 29, 2012 at 8:35 AM Latimer Alder
Me too. Much the same. A few years back, I decided to read up on this "global warming" stuff and rapidly found myself reading about Mann's "censored" (MWP) folder when I started reading about the temperature record. At that point, it was clear something was deeply amiss.
But the thing that was more convincing to me than anything else was the depth of sheer nastiness displayed by the CAGW proponents. In a career spanning two continents, academic research and teaching, industrial research, and commercial life, I had never come across anything remotely like it.
Martin A
I think "depth of sheer nastiness " stems (in part) from their own incompetence. It is clear that the main players Hansen, Bradley, Mann, Jones, Trenbreth, Santer, Allen, etc. are not really the eminent scientists their would like to think they are. Therefore their reaction to criticism is simply an attack as they do not have the ability to argue scientifically.
@martin a
Definitely agree with the nastiness.
I imagine these guys with bovver boots, skinhead haircuts, braces and baseball bats just wanting some poor innocent sod (as I was once) to ask a difficult question like 'why are you all terrified of the Thames going up another foot in 100 years when it already goes up and down 14 feet every 6 hours'...which seemed to particularly enrage some of the more intellectually challenged at CiF.
I can - and have - dealt with West Ham's Inter-City firm or the mindless yobs from the 'Thames Estuary Galacticos' aka Southend United. And even some Man U supporters driven wild by too many prawn sandwiches and an overdose of guacamole with redcurrant and cranberry jus
But to find that their spiritual brothers inhabited and controlled the alarmist central blog at the grauinad was an unpleasant shock. Yobs!
Something gives me the impression that our host, forever tolerant and polite, has little or no patience left for the recently promoted Professor Allen.
The point made in the talk was that the revision to the surface temperature record was the only change to a published dataset that was used in the evidence for detection and attribution for human influence on climate to have resulted from the UEA e-mail affair, and that this is not the impression the general public would have got from the coverage. Virtually every article or news-item on it mentioned that CRU was the "home" of the famous surface temperature record, many reproducing the record to drive home the point, and failed to mention that the fuss was actually about tree-ring records. Very few papers use tree-ring data in detection and attribution studies: the errors and ambiguities, some of them highlighted by Steve McIntyre's work, are still simply too large.
There have been a lot of postings that I have "misunderstood climategate" -- I did not misunderstand climategate. Climategate was about long-standing disputes over the tree-ring record, not the instrumental record that scientists actually use in detection and attribution studies. Readers of Andrew Montford's book will understand that. But I don't think readers (or, perhaps, many of the authors) of mainstream coverage of the issue understood that.
Myles
Superficially, Climategate was about the tree ring record, but the important questions it raises are about the integrity of the peer review process and the IPCC. These are questions that have yet to be examined in any meaningful way by any official inquiry.
I'm unsure about the idea that Climategate has been closely linked in the media to the surface temperature records. Sarah Palin and James Inhofe certainly made that claim on the day that the story broken in the media, but a brief search suggests little to support the idea.
Perhaps Myles or other readers can point me to specific examples.
In the meantime, it's interesting that the Daily Mail got the import of Climategate correct.
Well, it was about the harry file and the suggestion that the record was shoddily produced.
It was about the efforts revealed in the mails to interdict the publication of unwelcome papers.
It was about mendacious pressures put on editors of publications.
It was about bad faith in failing to produce data and methods.
It was about fiddling the FOI process with lame excuses and false denials.
It was about Yamal.
It was about the revelation of such slack IT practices that no piece of work produced by UEA could be regarded as reliable.
It was about Mike's nature trick.
It was about shonky work being known but pushed out into the world anyway.
It was about cheating to get some work into the AR and keep other work out.
It was about frustrating McIntyre's effort to audit dodgy work.
Did I leave anything out? Probably. Including that what has happened subsequent to the gate where the scientific establishment, or at least the climate side of it, has failed completely to distance itself from this farrago of bad science.
No, Dr Allen, will you disavow these people? Or defend them, if you can? I don't see saying it doesn't matter is an honest option.
Rhoda said it nearly all, but I'll just add that it is astonishing that one who has had an Oxonian training in philosophy (Allen's first degree was in Physics and Philosophy according to his CV) can state - I imagine with a straight face - that
'Climategate was about long-standing disputes over the tree-ring record'
Were I to opine that Orwell's Animal Farm was a fairy story about pigs and horses and donkeys or that Golding's Lord of the Flies is just an adventure story, I would be rightly derided as naive, simplistic and missing the bleeding point.
Seems to me that Allen's comments on Climategate show that he is either naive and simplistic (bad for somebody with 'professor in their title) or disingenuous (still bad for somebody with 'professor' in their title. And even worse for one who brandishes his philosophy training for all to see
On the question of “what Climategate was about”, the humblest reader of the press is as much an expert as the most eminent climate scientist. Phil Jones thought it was about Yamal. Monbiot thought it was about behaviour so scientifically scandalous that Jones should resign, and his papers be withdrawn. Then he didn’t.
I just thought it was a bit weird that a guy who draws graphs for a living should be happy that someone who didn’t like his graphs was dead. Would you buy double glazing from a double glazing merchant who rejoiced over the death of a rival double glazing merchant?
Myles Allen, thanks for posting.
And thanks for answering my question - it now seems clear you were not making an honest error.
You say you understand Climategate, and I can see that you do. However in your talk you showed a temperature graph, not the more pertinent Hockey Stick graph, and very clearly said that Climategate was all about finding a very small error in the temperature record.
Here is what you said:
If I understand you correctly, you explain here that you gave this rather unique interpretation of Climategate because you think no one in the mainstream media would understand what it was really about. In effect, because you feel they might have already misunderstood you should not put them right but keep them confused? This seems a somewhat puzzling reason for what looks like misdirection on your part and is, ironically, a great example of misselling the debate.
Although the climate blogosphere can be a little rough around the edges I do think that most commenters genuinely want to engage and debate with scientists like yourself. I know I do. And if you do want to be heard I think a wee bit of listening might help. Other commentators, like Lucia over at CA, have explained the problem more fully but essentially I don't think you have understood the debate.
To me climategate was about the revelation that a small clique of scientists manipulated the data, peer review process and core principles of science in order to present a particular view to the public (which they often contradicted in private). When challenged by critics they sought to undermine the FOIA and openly encouraged the deleting of incriminating emails.
Recently Myles Allen proposed suspending democracy and putting climate scientists in charge of what he deems to be necessary energy rationing. Those same scientists?
Climategate was not about the science (that has still to be dealt with) rather it was about scientists behaving badly. As Hilary Ostrov stated in another thread -
"We have undisclosed truncation, undisclosed conflict of interest, feeble attempts to justify undisclosed data and/or methodology, peer review by "intuition", press releases that make claims not substantiated by the papers to which they refer, redefining commonly understood English words, deleting emails, journal gatekeeping and reputation-wrecking attempts etc. etc. The list is almost endless."
Yes endless and after all this time still not dealt with!!
Climategate was and is about corruption. Corruption in the promotion of apocalyptic clap trap.
Arguably climate science, since the notoriously "spun" Hansen testimony event of 1988, has been one continuous attempt by a relatively small group of activists to ensure that their world view is imposed regardless of the facts.
Professor, I have an IQ of 135, an enquiring — and usually open — mind. Please stop treating me and all the other people better qualified in physics and related disciplines than I am like idiots.That might sound like conspiracy theory but Climategate — as Rhoda and Latimer Alder (and Hilary Ostrov via ConfusedPhoton's post) above have demonstrated — provided overwhelming evidence that this was the case. The steady stream of misleading statements and deliberate obfuscation, the arrogance evident in the attitudes (notably of Jones and Mann) in their attempts to pervert the peer-review process, to block dissemination of research which called theirs into question, to conspire to remove editors who dared consider publication of such research, to undermine Freedom of Information legislation (still ongoing!) in order to conceal their own dubious methods — all these are laid bare in the Climategate emails.
The argument that "none of this undermines the science" is perfectly true. The science is what it is.
What it does undermine is the credibility of climate scientists who appear to have become nothing more than the 'military wing' of the Green Movement which is telling us what the science is and what action we need to take on the flimsiest of excuses, no empirical evidence and a total disregard for any alternative hypotheses no matter how well argued.
Thankyou, geronimo, for this:
This is stuck in moderation at CA. Don't know why.
One more thing Myles. If the hockey stick is irrelevant, why did the IPCC make it such a huge deal? Are you telling us the IPCC is incompetent? Perhaps you’d like to explain to us how one study that contradicts all previous knowledge in the field is embraced so completely without anyone bothering to check the work.
Here’s the thing, Myles. The public understands quality. The obvious bottom line from Climategate is that climate scientists don’t. The public is skeptical about the need to incur trillions in taxes, regulatory costs, and opportunity costs when the argument re: the need to do so is advanced by people whose work demonstrates they are unfamiliar with the concept of quality.
And this:
So Myles wants us to understand that the fact that the emails and the Harry Read Me file show extensive evidence of corruption and incompetence by scientists has no bearing on the quality of the science. In response, I can only say that he may not have been surprised at the corruption and incompetence, but a lot of the public was. Perhaps he should have spent the time with the journalists instructing them on how they should communicate the corruption and incompetence in climate science so that the public isn’t surprised about these revelations in the future.
"Despite the learned contempt for Joe the plumber that academic-hubristophilliacs appear to display, it just may be that the hoi-poloi are pretty damned clever"
Good one.
I find that J J Ray's Greenie Watch blog is a handy source of interesting material on climate, and today I noted he shares a concern I have over how unimpressive many who promote alarm about climate from leading positions of influence can be. He writes, in connection with the above-reference material on Climate Audit:
Steve McIntryre's blog is in my opinion the most scholarly climate site on the net. I rarely quote from it, however, because it rapidly descends (as it should) into technicalities that are well beyond the lay reader. I am quoting the article below, however, both because it should be within the comprehension of lay readers and because it reveals clearly the low intellectual calibre of Warmist "scientists". Myles Allen is head of the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford's Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Department but he is either a very poor communicator or is utterly confused.
http://antigreen.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/warmists-are-still-trying-to-hide.html#links
'it now seems clear you were not making an honest error' - ouch.
Myles should have quit when he had an excellent cartoon for his desk.
I'm still having trouble with his 35k computers churning away. If you really believed that CO2 were causing climate change, would you leave 3,500 1kw fan heaters switched on 24 hours a day, emitting 15 million tons of CO2 a year?
ZT
Another of the reasons why many of us have for years — based purely on experience of life — said "this doesn't smell right".
Air travel and cruises to the Antarctic to look at penguins and two week "conferences" in places like Rio and Bali and Cancun and Durban, and all the other things that climate experts and railway engineers can afford (and I'm damn sure I can't) are so greedy of CO2 which is going to kill us all that the little people must stop doing it and yet it is all right for climate experts and railway engineers and UN officials and "Climate Change Co-ordinators" for Oxfam and CAFOD and WWF and FoE and Greenpeace.
If it were really —I mean really — that vital then why are they doing it? When climate scientists and professors (and Al Gore) start changing their lifestyles to suit their message then I might start believing them. That would be a better form of "communication" than any other!
@ Latimer Alder
Brilliant, thanks. Totally Myles-ian AND kept me laughing all the way around Waitrose.