Bishop Hill Beta blockers
Apr 10, 2013 Climate: other If you suffer from a heart condition, you may want to take a dose of beta blockers before you watch this video of Paul Valdes, of the University of Bristol (who is, incidentally, Tamsin's boss). Or perhaps avoid it completely.
The bit on model assessment and the unknown unknowns is particularly amazing. One can't help feeling that someone should themselves get down to Bristol to explain the scientific method to the scientists down there. (One should note in Prof Valdes' defence his welcome admission that the models are tuned to achieve hindcast accuracy, although one can be equally appalled that he presents no other evidence to support the reliability of GCMs.)
The economics presented are rather extraordinary too.
Overall, I'm astonished that students would actually pay fees to listen to this stuff.
Reader Comments (63)
Also back from the pub.
Hear, hear, Ben Pile!
In vino veritas
Apr 10, 2013 at 11:00 PM | Tamsin Edwards
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Judith Curry IS brave and inspiring. You don't need to sell your soul for tenure.
I watched it to 36 minutes, where he started into societal impacts, and I presume it carries on into WG2 and WG3 territory.
I feel the health warning was unwarranted. If anything, I felt the need of a stimulant. The speaker wasn't especially dull, but the subject matter would be very familiar to anyone who has followed the debate, and in this video he presented at a very simple level, assuming nothing of his audience. At one point, for example, he asks if anyone has heard of the IPCC.
He certainly presents the warmist case, without mentioning truths that are inconvenient to it, such as the northern/southern ice cover issue. When he mentioned "unknown unknowns", the first thing that jumped into my mind was stratospheric water vapour, which might have been an interesting topic, but the whole line sort of fizzled.
The only substantive criticism I'd make of that 36 minutes on the physical basis is that feedbacks weren't referred to at all. He left the impression that the 1.5 degree to 5 degree range he mentioned was entirely due to unknowns about the basic radiative properties of CO2.
I'm left more with a sense of "how little is expected of entry level Uni these days" than anything especially wrong with the talk itself.
Julia Slingo was awarded a (proper) PhD in atmospheric physics from Bristol University in 1989. The same institution awarded her an honorary DSC in 2010, Prof Valdes delivered the oration.
I remember lecturers that were way worse than this. JK Galbraith was an elegant writer but a terrible, terrible lecturer. Joan Robinson was equally bad. In fact I have a hard time recalling an effective economics lecturers. If these folks are economics students I almost guarantee that this lecture will be less ideology laden and haranguing than many they will hear.
What disturbed me more was the quiescence of the students. They seemed to have no idea how to pose the simplest of scientific questions - given that there is no way they would not have heard some of this stuff before. Though I admit he did not invite questions. ( I watched the first 25 minutes...)
One final note, he clearly is unconflicted about the things he said but I saw not indication that he would react negatively to those who were more skeptical - so I am not surprised at Tamsin's comments. I did not see the arrogance and defensiveness of a Michael Mann.
I wonder what would have happened if the models had been tuned for hindcast ability to 1988 only. If all the post 1988 data were left out of their procedures, what the end result would have been.
If it takes until yesterday to tell us what tomorrow will bring, there is no predictive ability. The model is simply one of many that are internally consistent.
Internal consistency is not the same as representational validity. Evey geologist who has every done exploration mapping knows that there are many ways to connect information that is "pretty good" and hard to refute (you've taken the negative stuff into account already, after all!) but when it comes to drilling the next well, "sucks the big one".
I wonder what would have happened if the models had been tuned for hindcast ability to 1988 only. If all the post 1988 data were left out of their procedures, what the end result would have been.
If it takes until yesterday to tell us what tomorrow will bring, there is no predictive ability. The model is simply one of many that are internally consistent.
Internal consistency is not the same as representational validity. Evey geologist who has every done exploration mapping knows that there are many ways to connect information that is "pretty good" and hard to refute (you've taken the negative stuff into account already, after all!) but when it comes to drilling the next well, "sucks the big one".
"Judith Curry IS brave and inspiring. You don't need to sell your soul for tenure."
Apr 11, 2013 at 12:59 AM | Streetcred
Judith Curry is old school. In the US, we would say that she has "balls of iron." Once upon a time, it was taken for granted that tenured academics had proved their "balls of iron."
Today, academia is a hothouse of sorts where each academic is so dependent on the approval (non dis-approval) of peers that criticism is viewed as a threat to one's sense of self. In such a psychological environment, it is brave to offer the mildest criticism.
Apr 11, 2013 at 8:52 PM | Theo Goodwin
Thank you Theo ... I live this every day ;)
I actually watched the whole thing and I liked him. Yes, he's a believer, but he seemed pretty straightforward and a million miles away from the Michael Mann-style of climate debate. He doesn't seem the sort of person who would be using "Mike's Nature trick" or "hiding the decline".
Just a few points, positive and negative:
* At 34:25, he shows a chart with model predictions of arctic sea ice minimums and says:
But if you look at the chart, it looks as though the red was already at the bottom of the grey area by 1990 - in other words, the "predictions" were already set up for the "actual" to fail. Is this another hindcast gone wrong?
* He makes the effort to say when he thinks he's talking about political issues, not scientific. He may have missed quite a few, but at least he tried. If all climate scientists did that, the debate would be a lot more honest.
* He didn't really address any of the issues that sceptics worry about. Not surprising, because he was only outlining the basic case. I'd love to hear what he has to say on climategate, on proxy reconstructions, on the holes that Steve McIntyre and others keep poking in the statistics, on urban heat islands, on the pervasive use of the hockey stick to sell climate alarmism.
* His ending slide had links to realclimate and skepticalscience, but also to "A sceptical view point" from Richard Lindzen.
* He talked about the Stern report as if it is gospel. He would have been more convincing if he gave even a small indication that people have genuine problems with the methodology behind it. Is he even aware of the sceptical perspective on that?
* At 38:15, he is bemused by society's failure to address the issues, and then says "I should say my carbon footprint is not wonderful". That is yet another reason why sceptics are sceptical. He might not jet off to tropical conferences about fighting climate change, but we see enough people doing precisely that to question whether to gravy train is more important than the cause.
I watched and thought,
Management Consultant*
*it is not a complement, and yes I did used to be one. Creating unnecessary change via a thin veneer of expertise, appearing clever ("look the model formula book is THIS BIG, and my bike broke carrying the IPPC reports"), but all the time trying to sell an expensive solution to a change that you actually do not need. Classic Management Consultant - he should send his CV off to KPMG or PWC.
Apr 12, 2013 at 12:58 PM | Jiminy Cricket
I've still not watched the video but I do wonder if management consultant speak might come from the connection of being a director of a company like "Greenstone Carbon Management". They sound like a bunch of financiers and management consultants from their website. There is nothing wrong in principle with an academic being a director of such a company, but I'm not entirely comfortable with essentially a public employee working for a private company which very much looks like it sells lots of services to the public sector. (It does list it's private clients on their site.) From a basic look at it's accounts though it doesn't seem to be doing a great deal the last couple of years or list any employees anymore.
"* He talked about the Stern report as if it is gospel. He would have been more convincing if he gave even a small indication that people have genuine problems with the methodology behind it. Is he even aware of the sceptical perspective on that?"
Apr 12, 2013 at 12:46 PM | HK
This drives me up the wall. No intelligent professional street sweeper could take that report seriously. Maybe the professor is just not into policy.