Wednesday
Mar272013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill David Whitehouse on the CCC
Mar 27, 2013 Climate: Models GWPF David Whitehouse's response to the CCC blog post is pretty devastating:
If this kind of data were from a drugs trial it would have been stopped long ago, even allowing for the little understood stopping bias effect which occurs when looking for the first signs of effectiveness or harm in such trials.
Reader Comments (26)
David Whitehouse failed to mention that the CCC's claim that the model results look good for the last 60 years is irrelevant, since as the Mail graph clearly showed, most of that is hindcast.
Sound of nail being hit on the head once again.
"One expects a more objective and sober assessment of empirical facts and research."
Does one? From these people?
What in their history would lead to such an expectation?
Perhaps one might hope for a more objective etc etc, but what we expect is pretty much what we got.
38 model runs. Only 2/38 are below 2 of the 4 GATs. Only a member of a cult would defend that result.
Good Lord:
Hoskins and Smith say that the last 15 years of global annual average temperature (land and ocean), which shows no warming, is unimportant. They claim the temperature trend is rising when short-term factors such as El Nino, aerosols and solar effects are filtered out.
"Solar effects are filtered out"?
If it wasn't for the "solar effect" - we, I mean the human race wouldn't be here!
What? Professor Sir Brian Hoskins on behalf of the committee, with assistance from Dr Steve Smith, science advisor to the committee - indeed and without prompting have conclusively proved and confirmed themselves to belong to a global club of alarmist deniers on the public gravy train, deniers of reality and fabricators nonpareil of actual scientific method - these cream faced loons.
CCC - Disneyland science circus on wheels.
Well done David Whitehouse!
It is indeed remarkable that to get a new headache tablet approved would call for far more rigorous, and well-audited, analyses than whatever our MPs may have presumed took place over establishing beyond even moderate doubt that (a) rising levels of manmade emissions of CO2 are a major driver of climate change (b) that the result will be such that we are facing an immediate emergency for which a massive, unprecedented disruption of our industrial progress is called for.
What is the opposite of Nullius in Verba appropriate to the CO2 scare? On the IPCC's word, provided we can provide computer models to illustrate it? That should be printed on the letterhead of the Royal Society, of the Committee for Climate Change, and of course on any material at all from the Climate Faction in the Met Office.
If I were a preacher, I'd be working with the following text for my next sermon to help my flock get the full import of David's comments. It is from a work by a well-know bishop:
Source: pps 390 and 390, of The Hockey Stick Illusion
They have not started again. Instead they appointed a Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice to help hammer home the wrecking implications of the new faith, and defend it from doubters. David Whitehouse writes this about their recent response to the Rose article:
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WJXHY2OXGE). Cardinal Hoskins will be wondering what else he might find 'amongst his weaponry' to deal with the heretics of the GWPF such as David Whitehouse..
Perhaps Nigel Lawson could write to the CCC (and cc the letter to the Royal Society) politely suggesting that they have lost their way and that they might not be getting the right advice from their experts. Lord Lawson could suggest a meeting with the GWPF or offer to put the CCC in touch with their analysts.
He doesn't say where the graph comes from. I think It's John Christy's testimony.
What a shame there isn't an Office of Statistical Responsibility, like the Office of Budget Responsibility.
It would be lovely to send the CCC's creative use of statistics to it, and ask for an official comment/ruling. I suspect it might be highly embarrassing.
Is there a national statistics organisation? Might be interesting to see what think about such tortuous misuse of statistics.
As others also commented, that was the first thing that came to my mind. I'm afraid we have come to expect the complete opposite from "climate scientists".
> Is there a national statistics organisation?
Yes: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/index.html
Terry, as far as I can see there is no way to report someone to the ONS.
They don't have any teeth, so to speak.
Hed
I suspect that Hoskins and Smith are the scientific experts that Nurse is going to put Lawson in touch with.
The appropriate body to as about use of official statistics,which these are probably not, is the Statistics Authority headed by Andrew Dilnott.
http://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/
Climate Science™ has many unique features.
One of them is that one of the principal measures used to assess a newly-produced climate model is how close its results are to results from previous climate models.
This an instance of climate scientists confusing models with reality. It is also an instance of Climate Science Groupthink in operation.
The ONS analyses data for government. So it will provide information on consumer trends, crime rates, population etc. The analyse of temperature data for trends etc. is the type of thing that the ONS could be doing.
Last year it produced a report on the environmental impact of UK economic activity. What it should also produce is a report on the economic impact of UK environmental policy.
I think the appropriate body to test these so-called statistics is the criminal court.
It has been mooted that a case corporate manslaughter be brought against DECC (or perhaps the CCC) because of those who have died this winter from the consequences of fuel poverty.
The views of Brian Hoskins and Steve Smith might have some worth if they were not part of the problem. Beam them in as independent even-minded scientists giving their assessment and their words might be worth listening to.
As it is they are just peddling the same old same old.
Martin A
Modellers have for many years now suffered from the delusion that they are modelling something real, in fact they come to think that the model is reality and what you see out of the window is an illusion that should conform to that reality.
I guess you have had a generation of scientists now schooled by Prof.Sir Brian Hoskins and others that CO2 is a major driver of the Earth's climate and that we know enough to model that climate with a big machine.
Modellers have even suggested that the data is wrong because it doesn't fit the model and the theory.
As we have said before, what Richard Feynman would have made of this bastardisation of science we can only speculate.
Simon
Yes I don't think it beyond reality to see that a few politicians and scientists may end up in prison in years to come - like Italian Earthquake scientists did.
retireddave,
"As we have said before, what Richard Feynman would have made of this bastardisation of science we can only speculate."
Let me presume to guess,
"These guys just don't know what they are doing. They aren't scientists, they haven't found anything out".
Sceptics have to admit that rising CO2 levels do have some strange effects. They seem to have turned Sir Professor Brian Hoskins into an American, judging by his spelling (I don't know what nationality Dr Steve Smith is).
Professor Sir Brian Hoskins on behalf of the committee, with assistance from Dr Steve Smith, science advisor to the committee, state that “like all scientists we take a skeptical stance, testing each assertion against the evidence.
This is a pretty trivial point but if a British university professor doesn't even notice that he spelt skeptical the American way I wonder how thoroughly he thought about the rest of his criticisms of the newspaper article?
The Committee on Climate Change (CCC)
It is jointly sponsored by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), the Northern Ireland Executive, the Scottish Government and the Welsh Government.
How in God's name can this be remotely described as independent?
Hoskins and Smith say that the last 15 years of global annual average temperature (land and ocean), which shows no warming, is unimportant.
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US NAAO says otherwise. 15 years is sufficient to call the models into question. At least that was what they said until we went 15 years.
"The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate."
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.ca/2009/07/noaa-explains-global-temperature.html
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/15/noaas-15-year-statement-from-2008-puts-a-kibosh-on-the-current-met-office-insignificance-claims-that-global-warming-flatlined-for-16-years/
Hoskins and Smith say ,,
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How is that these so called experts, who should be presenting a balanced view, don't mention NAAO's own conclusion on climate models and 15 years? Is it possible they don't know, which if that is the case they are far from expert. Or if they did know and chose to say 15 years was unimportant in spite of NAAO then they are not providing honest service for money.
I find David Whitehouse's commentary a bit too lightweight given the many openings offered by Hoskins and Smith.
There are profound theoretical objections to the methodology employed by Foster and Rahmstorf to show that warming is continuing unabated. This paper should never have been published, and it is absurd for Hoskins to rely on it to bolster his argument. You do not need a grounding in theoretical stats to understand the simple and compelling demonstration of the conceptual error in F&R exposed in the short series of recent articles in Troy's Scratchpad. It seems that Whitehouse has not been following.
Equally the response to Hoskins's puerile attempts to defend the reliability of GCM's lacked punch in my view. There are valid ways of generating statistics for forecast skill, but Whitehouse failed to kill the bull here.
Finally, i think it is unfortunate that Whitehouse did not bite the bullet and cite the numerous recent papers supporting the contribution of multidecadal oscillations to the temperature series. And explain the implications for estimates of climate sensitivity made without accounting for such.