Thursday
Dec262013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill No challenge
Dec 26, 2013 BBC Climate: Sceptics Even in the season of goodwill to all men, the mispresentation of the climate debate continues apace. This morning we had Professor Steve Jones interviewed yet again on the subject of BBC coverage of science, with the great man once again given the opportunity to portray the climate debate as being between "science" and "deniers".
Once again I wonder whether the BBC has ever interviewed a denier, in the sense of someone who disputes the existence of the greenhouse effect. Once again I wonder why the BBC feels that we need to have this false representation of the debate put forward. And once again I wonder at the failure of the BBC's interviewers to challenge it.
The audio is below.
Reader Comments (310)
It's also a courtesy to readers. Otherwise you are saying "here, you can copy and past this. I can't be bothered to take the time to make it clickable for you".
@Dec 28, 2013 at 11:02 AM | Martin A
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If you use Chrome, you can highlight the link, right click on it and go there. No formal "linkification" needed.
Bob Carter springs to mind, I find he was interviewed as recently as October2013. Then there's Melanie Phillips a favourite of the BBC especially Question Time, she disputes all aspects of the science behind AGW.
Dec 28, 2013 at 1:00 PM | Hengist
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Melanie Phillips is invited to QT simply for the audience to boo and jeer her.
EM
A persistent change in system behaviour is more likely to be climate related.
Unless you specify what conditions would disprove AGW this statement means nothing, you have been asked for this information several times and it is never answered.
Mailman, Mike Jackson.
You cannot have your cake and eat it. You cannot wait 120 years for better data while simultaneously saying that a short term change invalidates a trend. No doubt you find it a very convenient schizophrenia.
Breath of fresh air
To replace a paradigm, you come up with a theory that demonstrably explains the data better than the existing paradigm.
For example, plate tectonics was foreshadowed by Wegener's continental jigsaw. It did not become accepted until the postwar magnetometer studies of sea floor spreading demonstrated a mechanism for moving continents.
The way to do the same for AGW is not denial a la Mike Jackson. Telling the scientists all the accumulated data is wrong will not work. Finding a theory which demonstrably explains the existing data better than AGW would be the way to go.
If you could get all the sceptics singing from the same hymn sheet it would also help. At present you have a cacophany of voices from lukewarmers like Bishop Hill to sky dragon slayers like Alec M. Find a convincing alternative paradigm and get all your people behind it.
EM
What are you prattling about?
The whole of climate science since 1990 has been based on short-termism.
The one thing that has characterised the whole charade has been the insistence on using a 30-year base and less than 100-year-old reliable data to establish a trend in a chaotic system that has been around for millennia.
We have (moderately reliable) information — I won't call it data — about climate variations in the past and based on that there is nothing in the last 30 years to justify the over-confident assertions (not to mention excuses — of the "the dog ate my warming" variety mainly) that the last 30 years of warming (now over) is anything out of the ordinary.
The only honest words that I am now waiting to hear from the climate science community is, "We don't know!" And they won't know until we've been through another couple of cycles and — just as, if not more, important — they have opened up their tiny little self-satisfied minds to the possibility that they might have got it wrong or at least there might be some things that they haven't yet bothered to think about.
All we have from them at the moment is arrogance and a sort if intellectual constipation.
And I will add (having just seen your last post) that it is their hypothesis that "this time it's different; it has to be CO2" for which the the null hypothesis is "not it isn't and no it doesn't". The onus is on them to make the case which they do not do by shouting "denier" and "shill" at those who disagree with them and refusing to engage.
Breath of fresh air
A good starting point would be the Rsquared correlation of 0.82 between CO2 concentration and average global temperatures over the last century. If you can find a parameter with a higher Rsquared than CO2 it might be the beginning of the paradigm you seek.
EM, all I am seeking is a straight answer to a straight question. Yet again you are incapable of providing one.
@Entropic
Don't these folks just sound like the disinterested philosophers of Plato's Republic!
But what are we to make of stuck-in-the-ice academic Chris Turney's balance and disinterestedness?
Entro - I suggest taking a look at the 2013 paper I pointed to. Its survey of published work shows that regular vitamin C can indeed reduce the duration of colds and the probability of catching one. Whether or not Pauling's precise results were reproduced, to say he was completely wrong is erroneous.
Dec 29, 2013 at 9:53 PM | Unregistered Commentersplitpin
I took a look and it looked a genuine assessment to me. Vitamin C for preventing and treating the common cold, Editorial Group: Cochrane Acute Respiratory Infections Group Published Online: 31 JAN 2013
EM - so is it correct that vitamin C can in fact hasten cold recovery and reduce the probability of catching colds in some circumstances?
If so, would you retract your statement* that Pauling was "completely wrong" about vitamin C?
* Dec 29, 2013 at 4:22 PM
Spelling.... When I enter stuff on BH (using Firefox) misspelled words are underlined with a wiggly red line.
Mike Jackson
If you want me to take you seriously, stop venting bile.
The AGW paradigm has 40 years of published scientific papers validating it. That is my evidence.
This is not metaphysics, where unfalsifiable statements like "God exists" require the onus of proof to be on the proposer.
This is science, which requires both sides to make their case. The case for AGW has been made in the literature, with considerable supporting evidence. It is now up to you and yours to falsify it by providing even better evidence.
I suggested one possible starting point to Breath of fresh air. Go to it.
Breath of fresh air
I recently listed 30 parameters which would be expected to change as AGW affects climate. Those for which we have data are changing as AGW would predict.
There is no magic bullet which would falsify AGW instantly. You need to find a paradigm which explains the whole jigsaw of interacting variables better than AGW.
Martin A
The vitamin C ensemble paper was equivocal. It suggested that it helped protect extreme athletes and might shorten an infection, but it also included a number of negative results. The best you could probably say of the overall case for Vitamin C as a cold cure would be " Not proven".
RM
Bishop Hill writes reports for GWPF and appears on the media to present his views. Would you complain about the fees he receives?
A climate scientist founding a company to research climate change mitigation sounds like a man putting his money where his mouth is.
EM,
Why can't we have our cake and eat you? You seem to be doing alright with your cake! :)
Activism - ok if you support Mann Made Global Warming (tm)
Funding - not a problem if it's the hundreds of billions of dollars being literally pee'd against the wind BUT unleash the hounds if sceptics receive a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the funding catastrophiliacs receive.
Weather - it's weather if it's unusually cold but proof positive of catastrophic Mann Made Global Warming (tm) if it gets a bit hot for a few days.
Fracking - it's not economical because private business MIGHT loose money whereas renewable energy from windmills, mirrors and ground unicorn horn goes unchallenged as a raging success!
Quite literally you are a walking, talking, all singing and dancing contradiction EM. Please don't stop because you are a great advertisement for why greenies are on the back foot :)
Mailman
Oh, one more for the list aye EM;
Fracking evil because private business might loose money.
Scientist using, most likely, tax payer subsidy to develop a solution for a non-existent problem with the risk of losing money (but most likely not jeopardising any of his own money), something to be applauded.
Regards
Mailman
Mailman
I prefer discussing science to trading insults. Since the tone of this thread is going sour I'll leave you to it.
@Entropic
You appear to have ignored your own words that I quoted. In those words you implied that your climate scientists were disinterested and impartially open to the "test of nature". You wheeled in Feynmann. I showed you the kind of activist that passes for scientist in the world of climate science. It is no response to cite the good Bishop as being in the pay of one side. (And of course, unlike Turney, his activism does not come bundled with a stipend. Arguably that makes the sustainability of his livelihood more dependent on his not being found out by Nature).
Do you you still assert your depiction of disinterested, impartial climate scientists? Or do you accept that to a large extent they are campaigners and activists?
Sorry EM, I am disappointed. I had previously had the impression that if you made an error you corrected it rather than deny that it was an error notwithstanding clear evidence.
At Dec 29, 2013 at 4:22 PM you said "Linus Pauling did brilliant work on proteins,while getting Vitamin
D(C) as a cold cure completely wrong". (my emphasis)splitpin's paper says
31 studies giving an overall positive result are "inconclusive"? To me, that is immensely stronger evidence that any evidence I have ever seen that human-released CO2 causes detectable global warming. Yet you happily continue to defend the latter while maintaining 'The best you could probably say of the overall case for Vitamin C as a cold cure would be "Not proven"'.
Would you concede that there is some inconsistency in your views?
Would you also concede that you are shifting your position, going from an outright Pauling being "completely wrong" to merely Pauling's theory being "not proven"?
One tends to get bilious in the face of such a refusal by a group of allegedly intelligent and objective researchers with all their peer-reviewed papers (and we know that 'peer review' has become just another two-word substitute for "shut the **** up; we know best") to open their minds to alternative possibilities.
I have been waiting for 20 years for some empirical evidence that the warming from ~1975 to ~2000 was anything other than natural. I am still waiting. The ball is still in their court and the temperature pause combined with the relentless increase in CO2 is rapidly becoming another nail in their coffin.
Though I am sure that it is possible to create some sort of correlation between the two if you are desperate enough?
EM,
Hard to argue in the face of your own double standards eh.
As one of my drill instructors from several decades ago used to delight in saying to me "my heart bleeds purple pee for you" :)
Regards
Mailman
What, you mean you are convinced by data like this? No wonder you seem to find it impossible to accept a null hypothesis that includes any natural variation or additional factors.
It is easy to find better looking correlations that could be equally right, or wrong. For example. For the record, I don't regard myself as beholden to either. There are others. I'll wait until I see some decent predictions where the people making the predictions are vindicated, and they didn't change the predictions as they went along. In the mean time "don't know" seems the best answer to me.
Could you also give us the algorithm for your earlier statement that
?Repeat after me: "Correlation is not causation". Now write it out 100 times.
There is nothing to indicate that the change in average global temperature is outside the realms of natural variability* therefore the NULL hypothesis still applies.
* I am not saying CO2 has no effect. I am not saying CO2 has a little effect. I am not saying CO2 has a large effect.
Ah, I do like a good piling on every now and then. To say EM has been ripped a new one is an understatement.
Interesting how Chandra stayed out of this thread too. Perhaps he isn't quite as stupid as it's postings make her out to be? :)
Regards
Mailman
mailman
Got all the bases covered there, I see.Bullshit.
It's not lying, because to lie you have to know what is the truth. Bullshitting is saying what you wish to be believed without being bothered whether it is true or not - generally in the expectation that what you are saying won't be checked up on.
EM passed the test with his "Pauling was completely wrong that vitamin D cures colds". Surprising - but telling perhaps - that a biology (?) teacher would not even remember what vitamin it was.
He then passed again at advanced level when a recent survey of published investigations showed that Pauling was in fact right. A primary guideline of the craft is not to admit error but to change tack.
Terry S
It is possible to argue that the effect that CO2 has is part of the "natural variation".
I also nurse (very close to my chest!) the hypothesis that while CO2 may have a marginal warming effect up to concentrations of ~350 ppm that effect becomes markedly less as the concentration approaches 400ppm resulting in a stasis or possible cooling effect.
Observations (which seem to me every bit as valid as EM's R^2 correlation) would appear to bear this out and would explain the apparently miraculous disappearance of heat either into the deep ocean (without troubling the Argo buoys on its way down) or into various remote parts of the planet where there are no sensors (like more than 10 miles from the nearest motorway/ four-star hotel/airport!).
Breath of fresh air
http://notrickszone.com/2013/12/03/german-scientists-show-climate-driven-by-natural-cycles-global-temperature-to-drop-to-1870-levels-by-2100/
This paper was reported on notrickszone. It is the sort of thing you are looking for. It uses 60 year and 200 year cycles to producce a similar graph to the temperature record. It may be curve fitting, or it may have real value. What it does have is definate predictions in the conclusion.
"Its next minimum will be 2035. The temperature can expected to be then similar to the last AMO/PDO minimum of 1940. Due to the de Vries cycle, the global temperature will drop until 2100 to a value corresponding to the “little ice age” of 1870."
. I checked the GISS data. Current temperatures average around 14.6C. The paper forecasts a drop to 14.05C by 2035 and a further drop to 13.8C by 2100. AGW would forecast approximately 15C for 2035 and 16C for 2100.
Tuck this away for future reference. If its prediction comes true you've found your magic bullet.
Still fixated on needing an alternative theory before the current fav is dropped. But as I will be in my dotage by then but hopefully not a mumbling dribbling wreak I think that at least you seem to agree that a failed prediction negates a theory. So here is a AGW prediction with a shorter timespan and one for give food for thought if there is a true scientific sceptic portion of your brain if it exists.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2009/record-levels
Looking further ahead, our experimental decadal forecast confirms previous indications that about half the years 2010-2019 will be warmer than the warmest year observed so far - 1998.
As for the notrickzone I am just as sceptical of this old new one, correlation is not causation and they do not even say what the causation is. All a positive prediction on this theory will give is that we do not know enough to know the true cause/causes or climate variability other than the temp can now possibly be predicted.
Breath of fresh air
2010 was warmer than 1998.
One down, four to go.
Unless, of course, your preferred metric is GISTEMP but then only a blinkered warmist would use Hansen's datasets these days.
The paper that Gosselin refers to is no more than another contribution to the debate. Shame that the warmists still seem not to understand that there is a debate. Also from their point of view fatal because sooner or later they will find themselves by-passed. And that is not a judgment on the science but on their insistence that no-one but them can possibly be right.
There's an interesting contribution on WUWT from someone who used to be an IT security officer at NSF. He said that any suggestion of skepticism was "unwelcome" because they were "doing such good work" and "helping humanity face this crisis". It's the sort of certainty normally associated with mental health problems or fanatical cultists and is the reason why I find myself banging my head in the wall occasionally. There is absolutely no way into that mindset and, I repeat, science has nothing to do with it.
Happy New Year!
Check the data at the end of this link.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/monitoring/climate/surface-temperature
HadCRUT 3 shows 1998 as warmest. NCDC and HadCRUT4 show 1998 as third warmest. GISS puts it 5th.
The sceptic dataset at Berkeley, from a quick visual inspection of their graph, puts 1998 4th.
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/regions/global-land
EM
Muller was never a sceptic. Where did you get the idea he was? Because he said so?
While we're all busy trying to convince each other that year X was/was not warmer/colder than year Y perhaps it's worth remembering that even Hansen said that global temperature is not a useful metric if only because there is no such thing.
Was the quoted (read 'alleged') temperature of any of these hottest years outwith the margin of error? I suspect the answer is no in which case we're back to a combination of "I don't know" and "Let's shout a bit louder to keep the funds flowing."
Mike Jackson, your Woodfortrees link doesn't work for me. But seeing as Entropic Man seems to have forgotten about the existence of satellites*, that are put up by NASA, here is a link showing their evidence that contradicts his claim.
*I'm sure it was just an oversight, and he wouldn't wilfully be that deceitful.
BEST's temperature record, being land-only, is not relevant to the Met Office's prediction. Nor are the satellite datasets from RSS and UAH, nor GISS and NCDC, as the prediction was clearly for the HadCRUT dataset. [HadCRUT3 at the time, but it would be fair to extrapolate the prediction to its successor HadCRUT4.]
In HadCRUT4, 2010 is a tad warmer than 1998; for HadCRUT3, the positions are reversed. As 2013 will come below 1998 in both datasets, that makes the record to date 0 (or 1) for 4. So I agree with Entropic Man that it's too soon to call this one.
michaelhart
Not sure why it didn't work before but it's http://tinyurl.com/oq5lf7z
Same as yours but I included HadCrut3 and GISTEMP from 1975 as well. The only one that shows 2010 warmer than 1998 is GISTEMP.
(I'm wondering what a "sceptic dataset" is and why UAH isn't one.)
Yet the sceptics are so keen to prioritise global temperature over all the other parameters now interesting the scientists :-)
I assure you, this sceptic, and plenty of others, had certainly thought about them long before. The climate alarmists seem to be re-discovering them now that they are acknowledging that their temperature predictions are wrong. I wonder why?
The problem is, these metrics are even harder to measure than temperature. Of course, that is potentially quite useful to someone who is running-scared of the data. They are seeking safety in uncertainty. They need to careful, intellectually, or they might discover the null hypothesis.
EM, the forecast is a Met Office forecast from their 'our experimental decadal forecast', so the Hadcrut is the one to use, so you want to use V4 as it gives you 2010 against the 5, so as there are only 6 years left 2014 to 2019 inclusive, 4 need to be above 1998 (assuming 1998 is not reduced by any more retrospective 'adjustments' ).
PS 2014 is not going to count as higher than 1998 according to the 19 Dec press release from MO, so its 4 from 5 you need. If we get to end 2016 with no above 1998 year then the forecast is mince as 4 into 3 does not fit.
EM
I have never believed the temperature data sets.
For a start, as has been pointed out (usually by sceptics) you cannot get an accurate measure of the global temperature unless you take a constant running reading of every point (literally) on earth.
The claims that are made are based on readings which even today are unreliable as Watts pointed out years ago.
The number and location of stations has been tinkered with so many times that there is no consistency in the results which are then "adjusted" in an attempt to overcome this problem.
Since Jones is of the opinion that UHI is around 0.5C when my own observations are that the difference between Edinburgh and its hinterland can be as much as 5C there is a further reason to doubt the figures.
And there are other considerations.
And I'm sorry, but it is not the sceptics that are mucking about with the results so that in 1999 1934 was the warmest year on record (according to Hansen) and by the following year it had dropped to second place behind 1998 and it is not the sceptics that are creating headlines with their monthly "warmist XX on record", usually by about 0.01 C.
If they were talking about 0.5C they might be worth listening to but as I have said before I can get a variation of more than 0.2C by moving the sensor from one side of the window ledge to the other.
All of which poses the question which has been asked before, "is there any such thing as global warming anyway?"
BEST found about one-third of stations showing a downward trend and the artificial interpolation for the Arctic (thanks again, Prof Hansen) has had the effect of creating figures with no justification or at least no plausible justification that has ever been advised to the general public.
And what are these "other parameters" of which you speak and since the entire house of cards is built on the catastrophic effects of a rise in temperature of 1.2 or 2 or 3 or 5 or in one case 10 degrees what other parameter is relevant.
If all of a sudden temperature increase is not important why are we all here?
Breath of Fresh Air (7:19 PM) -
"PS 2014 is not going to count as higher than 1998 according to the 19 Dec press release from MO..."
Not so. In that press release, it was given that 2013 to date was below 1998, but their estimate for 2014 is 0.57 °C +/- 0.14 °C; in other words, they believe that 2014 is more likely than not to be the warmest year ever. [As they predicted for 2013.] Incidentally, in this prediction they seem to have moved to an average of the three land/sea-based averages HadCRUT4, GISS, NCDC. Whereas the 2009 prediction was for HadCRUT3.
It's hardly surprising EM has swivelled his "attack" once again to this time using a "discredited" data set.
Actually this was probably one if the very first things I read about "back in the day" when I first discovered watts up and bishop hill as Anthony had a good write up about African temps be smoothed over vast distances (up to several thousand miles to cover areas no temp data was available in). The other article was The Jesus paper on this site.
Besides I wish the catastrophiliacs would stop being all catastrophiliacky about a .2 degree rise in temps since the industrial revolution started!
Regards
Mailman
Breath of fresh air
Backtracking a bit, "Correalation is not causation"
It is a good place to start. When you observe a trend and seek the cause, measure everything that might be related.
Those which do not correaleate are unIikely to be causes and can be eliminated. You then work through the correlations looking for mechanisms by which they might interact.
When you find the mechanism, that is when correlation becomes causation.
"Those which do not correaleate are unIikely to be causes and can be eliminated."...sorta like Co2 causing catastrophic Mann Made Global Warming (tm) can be eliminated seeing as pretty much every soothsayers stab at the dark...sorry I mean scientific prognostication has been proven wrong, wrong and wrong time after time???
Mailman
Afraid not, mailman. As Nature suggested to AlecM, read the literature.
Oh that's right cause all that nasty Mann Made (tm) heat is being sucked up by the deep ocean!
You are right...it's worse than we thought! Quick, someone raise a tax somewhere!
Mailman
Mailman
Breath of fresh air is looking for alternatives to CO2. I'm suggesting ways he might approach the problem. What are you doing?
Mailman, if all the missing heat was really being sucked up by the oceans, then we might see some significant change in the rate of seal level rise. But we don't. It's just plodding on, as it has been for a couple of centuries, dull as ditch-water.
EM
I can't work out why we need to find an alternative to CO2.
I know that the inventors of global warming say they can't get their models to work without it but I submit that that is simply because they never tried, CO2 being what they always wanted to cast as the devil in this scam.
You might say that is a bit cynical but:
1. If CO2 has the properties the alarmists claim for it why did we not pass their "tipping points" several tens of thousands of years ago when CO2 levels were considerably higher than they are now?
2. Several other possible substances or circumstances have been suggested to them as alternative candidates. To my knowledge they have dismissed these out of hand. (Svensmark's cosmic ray theory is a good example and whether it is a viable theory or not is irrelevant; the modellers refused to entertain it.)
3.The drivers of the global warming scare were not scientists (or only incidentally) but environmental activists — Gore, Hansen, Tickell, Strong, Suzuki, Grantham (a good opportunity to make money), Wirth, Ehrlich (he of the 'reverse Cassandra' syndrome, never been right yet), KIng, Oppenheimer, Watson (Greenpeace) — none of whom I would trust with my future or my grandchildren's future.
At the risk of repeating myself, they have proposed a hypothesis which is effectively not disprovable because they have constructed it to be that way. They have still not provided anything in the way of convincing evidence that the behaviour of the planet in the last 30 years has been in any way out of the ordinary and until they do the onus rests on them not on us.