Josh Science by Lucia, cartoon by Josh - 173
Jun 12, 2012 Climate: McIntyre Josh Lucia Posted by Josh
Yesterday Lucia sent me an email about the recent Gergis et al 'on hold' paper with the subject title "Do you understand the math enough to do a cartoon?".
My response was, of course, to nervously read the email to gauge just how embarrassing my assured 'fail' would be.
Luckily Lucia is a genius at words as well as numbers and after a few emails back and forth she had explained the problem sufficiently well and suggested a possible cartoon solution. So this is truly a joint cartoon with all the clever bits by Lucia and some drawing by me.
;)
She even wrote a haiku.
Screening fallacy:
If you sieve for hockeysticks
that’s just what you’ll get.
If you want to understand more, head over to The Blackboard or Climate Audit, there's lots to read.
Reader Comments (25)
WOW! What a team :-) Absolutely awesome!
Should be sent to schools the world over.
Anyway...whoever NEEDS understand more, it's already member or supporte of The Team and won't understand it anyway.
Poor Gergis, she'll never know, had somebody sent her the famed US Postal Charges data parading them as "dendro", those would've been included in the paper with no question asked.
A dataset rejected by Gergis, Antarctic Law Dome O18 data, shows the MWP: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/12/the-longest-most-high-resolution-most-inconvenient-paleoclimate-data-that-hasnt-been-published/#more-65583
'The longest, most high resolution, most inconvenient paleoclimate data that hasn’t been published' Gergis is apparently one of many activists who penetrated science to distort it to support their political views.
Bit OT - but a classic example of mass "meeja" warming hysteria today.
The Sun, Mail, Telegraph and Express have all recycled those cliched 5 yr old pics of polar bears playing on ice floes.
The commercial photographer who dusts off the pix every few years and flogs 'em around the picture editors to earn his crust is, of course, seriously consulted in his other role of ursine mind-reader and therapist - to explain how unhappy and concerned the bears are about the state of the planet..... "bears seem baffled".
Leo Hickman, on Twitter, appears to have no idea how the real "meeja" works and is puzzled.
Surely you could get get a cartoon out of this Josh?
http://tinyurl.com/c4yckn6
It's a bit unfortunate that we tend to use 'screen' more as a descriptor for an opaque panel or frame like a room divider, rather than a sieve or riddle, as they do in the US, which instantly identifies with 'screening fallacy'.
I'm gutted for you honestly Josh, if you where on the gravy train side I'd expect at least the EU to give you a large grant along the lines of 'Enhancing the understanding of the citizens of the EU of the spatial heat flow of the planet Earth'.
Sorry all I can give, like I do to all your art work, is two thumbs up.
It's a pity the team and their fauning acolytes won't get it. Just a bit too smart for them.
Climate science is obviously mature for its own Sokal Affair...
Josh, you are being way too modest.
Another fine cartoon. Do we ever get a response from the likes of Richard Betts or Rob Wilson? Do they stick their heads in the sand and say it is not their field of expertise?
Phillip Bratby
This is how Rob Wilson responded on twitter:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B6HhS6DJYVasWDYwcC1LNXg4bXM
Oh no...not THAT Rob Wilson!!!
Pity the plankton!
The latest deletion news, in addition to the Gergis blog being deleted, the press release announcing the results being deleted, and the paper itself being deleted, is that the raw data that was archived on the NOAA ftp site has also been deleted. Noted in this comment by Sue at CA.
Of course, copies of the data now exist elsewhere, making the data deletion rather absurd.
You and Lucia came up with the clearest explanation of the "data selection on dependent variable".
Simple. Elegant. Easy to understand.
Q, omnologos
Just to clarify, Mathematical Ecologist Robert Wilson @wilsonrobertj on Twitter is not the geologist / palaeoclimatologist Rob Wilson who has posted here on Bishop Hill.
Phillip Bratby
I usually do enjoy Josh's satire, and I think this one is a nice illustration of Steve McIntyre's concern. With the Gergis paper now being "on hold", I'm going to reserve judgement until they've come back with a definitive statement. I know David Karoly and am confident he'll help ensure that a good job is done. The fact that he has corresponded directly with Steve is a good sign that David is playing a straight bat.
Cheers
Richard
Jun 13, 2012 at 2:49 PM | Richard Betts
"...The fact that he has corresponded directly with Steve is a good sign that David is playing a straight bat."
As opposed to a crooked hockey stick perhaps?
Re: Jun 13, 2012 at 2:49 PM | Richard Betts
"I know David Karoly and am confident he'll help ensure that a good job is done. The fact that he has corresponded directly with Steve is a good sign that David is playing a straight bat."
You mean this David Karoly that gave such a disgraceful critique of Bob Carter's book
http://theconversation.edu.au/bob-carters-climate-counter-consensus-is-an-alternate-reality-1553
Anyone who has read the book will be aware of the gross distortions that Karoly employs,
But then wasn't it you who tried to accuse Steve McIntrye of being a 'gratuitous troublemaker'
(see comments in this post!) Richard Betts feb 1st 2012.
http://climateaudit.org/2012/01/31/geoffrey-boulton-and-ipcc-secrecy/
It seems that in the world of climate 'science' black is white and white is black!!!
As opposed to a blinder well played.
Great cartoon!
An idea: make the grid in the sieve have a few hockey stick shape holes. You could also make 1 of the 5 or so data shapes a hockey stick shape...that way only the hockey sticks can make it through the sieve...all the reset to the bin!
Anyway, love the graphic :)
James
A term for the state of the Gergis et al paper - once published and now disappeared without a retraction - has puzzled commenters. Reflecting its living dead status, perhaps it should be described as a "zombie" paper.
A worthy successor to Caspar and the Jesus Paper.
Steve's current post on the Law Dome ice core temperature proxy, (discarded from the Gergis selection) its clear quality and significance, its embarassingly clear demonstation of the MWP, the politically incorrect innuendo explaining the 'inexplicable' slow lane research and publication progress and general reticence in publicising the series, is huge in importance, IMO.
Its also well explained on WUWT.
Paul Dennis also engaging well in the comments.
@Marion
I think that's an unfair characterisation of Richard's post on there (although I'm not sure if anyone would admit to being a gratuitous troublemaker anyway)
Karoly's engagement is an improvement, but the way I see it, the error was so egregious he simply had nowhere to go.
I'm also beginning to find the references to the success of open review on blogs and the sudden buy in to that process extraordinarily irritating.
No-one can pretend that what Jean S and Steve M. did at Climate Audit was sparked by a spirit of openness and cooperation from the paper's authors. Quite the reverse; Gergis openly taunted with a childish and disrespectful response to a polite request.
Jean S. looked at the crumbs that were unavoidably dropped from the plate and determined almost immediately that they'd used salt and not sugar in the recipe.
But the ingredients have still been kept a secret, and the cooking instructions are vague and impenetrable.
I'm not anywhere near inclined to give them the credit Richard seems to; they've done the minimum required to save face.
Re: Jun 14, 2012 at 12:28 AM | mrsean2k
"I think that's an unfair characterisation of Richard's post on there "
Then we'll have to disagree on that one, mrsean2k. Although the question was cleverly phased it was put nonetheless, ascerbic and totally unwarranted!
As for Richard Betts claim
""I know David Karoly and am confident he'll help ensure that a good job is done. "
it does rather depend on what he considers to be a 'good job' !
As I've said David Karoly's critique of Bob Carter's book "Climate: The Counter Consensus" was nothing short of disgraceful. To my mind his misrepresentation of his colleague's book should come under academic misconduct.
This for example -
"Lets fall through a rabbit hole and enter a different world: the “Carter reality”. In that world, it is OK to select any evidence that supports your ideas and ignore all other evidence....
In the Carter reality, “there has been no net warming between 1958 and 2005.“ Of course, in the real world, there is no basis for this statement from scientific analysis of observational data. The decade of the 2000s was warmer than the 1990s, which was warmer than the 1980s, which was warmer than the 1970s, which was warmer than the 1960s.
So where does Carter’s statement come from? In the Carter reality, he finds a hot year early in the period and a cold year much later, and says there’s been no warming. This would be like saying that winter is not colder than summer because a very hot day in winter might happen to have much the same temperature as a very cold day in summer, ignoring all the other days."
http://theconversation.edu.au/bob-carters-climate-counter-consensus-is-an-alternate-reality-1553
This sort of thing is lapped up by the non-critical AGW supporters, who pay undeserved homage to 'voices from authority' but it takes us sceptics to pursue the actual reality -
The term "no net warming between 1958 and 2005" comes from a Weather Balloon graph on p.61 of Carter's book entitled "Lower atmosphere mean global temperature radiosonde record HadAT2 (from Thorne et al., 2005) .
The caption reads -
"Fig. 11a Estimated lower atmosphere global temperature recors since 1958, based on measurements from weather balloon. Note the presence of (i) cooling from 1958 to 1977; (ii) warming, mostly as a step in 1977, frin 1977-205; and (iii) no net warming between 1958 and 2005. Over the same time period there has been an 18% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Black dots denote times at which the temperature falls upon the zero anomaly line, ie. no net change has occurred between them."
And Carter makes it quite clear in the text that the temperature records from weather balloons "whilst highly accurate, are available only since 1958 (nearly two climate data points"
P. 59 Climate the Counter Consensus by Bob Carter.
Yet Karoly tries to pass this off as
"So where does Carter’s statement come from? In the Carter reality, he finds a hot year early in the period and a cold year much later, and says there’s been no warming. This would be like saying that winter is not colder than summer because a very hot day in winter might happen to have much the same temperature as a very cold day in summer, ignoring all the other days"
It's quite apparent to me which author provides the greater accuracy so it's interesting that Richard Betts is confident that Karoly will "help ensure that a good job is done" !!!
And I completely agree with you when you say
"I'm not anywhere near inclined to give them the credit Richard seems to; they've done the minimum required to save face."
How ironic for Karoly to write: Lets fall through a rabbit hole and enter a different world: the “Carter reality”. In that world, it is OK to select any evidence that supports your ideas and ignore all other evidence....
I suggest instead we call it the Karoly-Gergis Reality, as that's exactly what the authors of the disappearing paper have done.
Re: Jun 14, 2012 at 11:30 AM | omnologos
Quite!! :-)